Ex-pats like these make me feel like I owe Thailand a big apology

One afternoon in Loei, in an internet café amidst the drone of young Thai computer gamers' simulated machine guns, I was focused on a website when my concentration was interrupted by the smell of smoked cigarettes and liquor. The smell was familiar but distinctly not Thai. It was not the smell of liquor was not the lao kao or Sang Som whiskey, but something else. I looked around me to find the odor and of course, it was a falang.

Next to me was an old bald American hunched in his chair, leaning closely to his monitor and audibly swearing as he furiously clicked at a frozen website. When his fat index finger was tired he reached into his pocket and produced a small bottle of Bacardi and doused the already strong mixed drink in a large plastic cup.

His phone rang. He answered with a loud hello meant to show his disapproval and annoyance with the noise from the Thai kids. It was his wife. He spoke in a shameful mix of Thai and English. “Mai hungry. You gin mahk mahk. Me done, me tell you.” It was not a romantic picture of a love blossoming in spite of a language barrier, but the obvious laziness of a bothered drunk husband, uninterested in his subordinate wife. The few Thai words he barked loudly from his scratchy throat amounted to less than the basic vernacular or a first time Thai vacationer. He had obviously been in Thailand long enough to find a wife and move to the middle of nowhere, but I suppose knowing the local language would put him in position to communicate and thus listen to his wife.

Presumably his daugther, a young girl with pigtails and a bright smile skipped into the shop holding two oddly colored drinks in clear plastic cups. She sipped at her green drink while she offered him the purple drink proudly, with bright eyes. Papa falang was not impressed. Annoyed by the disturbance, he didn’t even try to use words this time. He looked at her and shook his head. He prodded at the purple drink with his finger then shook his hand no. He pointed the same fat finger down in his strong Bacardi mix showing her he already had a beverage. With that the girl’s smile was lost and she walked out of the café to sit alone on a bench with the two drinks.

Mr. Grumpy continued to work as his computer between gulps of liquor, hunting and pecking for his keys. He scowled at the monitor. I could smell the alcohol on his breath. His unhappiness obvious, I can't help but wonder, why is he here?

PHUKRADUNG

It is impossible to spell “Phukadung” with the limited vowels in the Roman alphabet, so for a westerner to pronounce the name of the national park correctly –or at least more similarly to Thai- it helps to know the origin of the name. The tallest mountain in the area, the top of Phukadung is actually a plateau slopping down to the east. As the story goes, on any “wan pra” or Buddhist holiday, the bells being rung at all of the local Wats can be heard from the peak. Phu (pronounced poo) is the Thai word for mountain. “KRA-DUNG” is the sound of a holy bell. Pronouncing the name like the sound of a bell, instead of reading it English, is more like the actual Thai pronunciation.

In the distance, just under the sunlight breaking through the clouds, you can see the right side of a Phukadung. Only reachable by foot, Taraneh and I had to spend a night in the town below before hiking up the 1,288 M mountain early the next morning.

For all of Phukradung’s natural beauty, it is an oddly touristy national park. All along the hike up the mountain are different rest areas with restaurants offering simple rice dishes, fresh fruit and cold water. At the steepest sections of the hike, steel or rock stairways have been built, meaning you can hike the whole way without getting your hands dirty.

On our way to the top, Taraneh and I took a minute to rest and saw an elderly woman hike past us, cruising along with a walking stick in her right hand, and using a fan to cool her self with the left. Taraneh with asthma and my weak self being out of shape, we decided to befriend Grandma (that’s the nickname we gave her) and keep pace with her. She told me she was hiking up to her restaurant on the top, that she had been making the hike once a week for as long as she could remember.

Not much further down the trail our party grew again. A group of college kids from Bangkok had come to make the hike. Perhaps because of our good company or our slow but consistent pace, they stuck with us and like that, we went from two to ten.

Like our friends from Bangkok, larger groups scaling the mountain can hire others to carry up their packs for them. The rate was 30 Baht a kilogram. For this cheap price, a man or woman would strap your belongings to a bamboo pole and walk it up the mountain on their shoulders. These poor guys earned every Baht of their wage, slowly working their way up the nine kilometer hike one sure-footed step at a time.


When we reached the top in just over three hours our new acquaintances were good friends. Still over three kilometers from camp, we baked in the sun unshaded by the few tall trees.



Despite Phukradung’s touristy bits, it has conserved its natural beauty. The rainy season is the ideal time to go, when the fields are in bloom with thousands of flowers, the cool air giving distant views of the countryside, and the rainfall feeding several impressive waterfalls. Sadly, it is the cool season and we saw few flowers and all but one waterfall was dry. There were several advantages however. One, there were fewer tourists in the cool season, and two, without the rain, there were no leeches. Other than that, the animal life remained similar year round. We were kept away from different trails without guides because of wild elephants, and large deer, unafraid of humans, frequently walked around the campground.


After setting up our tent and having dinner at Grandma’s restaurant, we caught sunset at a cliff several kilometers away. We found a spot on a rock overhang and stared off into the countryside. Ice being a rare and expensive commodity, we drank warm beers as the sun fell below distant mountains. The alcohol going straight to my head, the sky was a living watercolor painting. The heat cast a haze over the sky, that made apparitions of the mountains in the distance, visible one minute then gone the next. In the valleys we saw only a carpet of treetops, spotted with the occasional shimmer of sunlight reflecting off a pond. When the sun fell out of our sight, we walked back under the last of the days light.

Before the sun had risen again, we woke early the next day to walk even further to the opposite side of the plateau for the sunrise. Unknown to us before the trip, that morning was a lunar eclipse and as we walked in the morning’s darkness we were watched the earth’s shadow slowly creep across the moon’s surface. In the stillness of the AM, we heard only the wind blowing across the plateau but we didn’t feel the breeze until we reached the edge. The moon no longer visible we, along with dozens of others, shivered in the darkness looking at our watches.

Slowly the trees became dark shadows against orange streaks appearing across the sky. As the orange warmed to red and shades of blue and the whites of clouds became visible, cameras began to flash. They didn’t stop, capturing snaps of every minute, every hue, every shade, until the sun had fully appeared and everyone turned off their cameras and left.

That day we set out on a hike with our college friends, a local Phukadung fanatic (he had climbed it 6 times already) and a professor who said he had climbed it so many times he had lost count. The professor led us around like a tour guide, telling us about the two-needle and three-needle pines, the rock orchid, the lichen that only grew in pristine, unpolluted areas, snapping group pictures at every major stop.

Along the hike we stopped to pray at a large Buddha image adorned with dozens of bells of different shapes and sizes. Further along we came to a pond famous for being the swimming hole of fairies of Thai lore. For lunch we found a dense forest bordering a small river and ate rice dishes Grandma made for us out of plastic bags. Eventually we reached the opposite cliff and hiked along it the rest of the way, stopping to rest where there were good views or plenty of shade.



The round trip was just over 20 kilometers. The half-way point of our trek was this cliff, a famous spot amongst Thais but little known to foreign tourists. Protected only by this warning and feeling the gusts of wind along the edge, I felt dizzy anywhere near the rock. Taraneh on the other hand walked right out to the edge and sat down as if it were impossible to slip and plummet to a horrible death below. I worked up the guts to this other ledge, a spot where wussies like me can still pose for a cool photograph.



After two straight days of hiking, we were spent. When the sun went down, we fell asleep. The next morning we slept in before gathering our things and hiking back down the hill.

How do you eat birthday cake?

My students never asked me this question and I never thought about teaching it, but oddly enough, Thais have no idea how to eat a birthday cake.

Twin students of mine, Ing and Iw, threw their own 17th birthday party at a local Korean barbeque restaurant on one of my last days in Buakhao. Lara and I were guests of honor and we brought cake and candles to show the students what western b-days are like.

Thais don’t normally celebrate birthdays at all. They rarely give gifts to the birthday boy or girl, almost never eat cake and most don't have even a small party. But Ing and Iw are hip to falang culture and they took advantage or the opportunity to have some fun. They invited their closest friends who happen to be my best students.

After dinner we brought out the cake and candles and explained the tradition of having a candle per year, singing “Happy Birthday”, then making a wish and blowing out the candles. The 17 candles took up all the room on the cake and the girls lit the outside candles first making it nearly impossible to light the inner candles without burning their fingers. This was only the first of their newbie birthday mistakes.

Then we sang “Happy Birthday” without the refrain “happy birthday, dear _____” which Thais replace with saying happy birthday twice, just for simplicity. Ing and Iw were excited when they blew out all of the candles and thus granting their wish. But then they quickly blurted out their wishes to their friends (to get good grades) and blew it. I had forgot to tell them about the superstition attached to the wish-making, that if you tell anyone your wish, it won’t come true. They were dissapointed, but as all Thais do when they're dissapointed, they laughed.

With a knife from the kitchen, the girls began to cut their cake together, each with a hand on the handle of the knife. Lara and I looked at eachother. Then the kids started singing, “Dah, dah, da-dah” – the wedding song. Lara and I looked at each other again, both realizing that yes, they had mixed up the traditions. Then Ing and Iw fed each other pieces of the cake, each threatening to shove the cake in the other’s face. Lara and I laughed.

Wedding cake rituals aside, they cut out two pieces of cake, handed them to Lara and I on plates, and then passed out spoons to everyone else. Like the begining of a race, the entire group of girls quickly swiped at the cake (minus two slices) in a mad spoon free for all. First went all of the icing, leaving just a strange, deformed mound of cake but in less than half a minute only small crumbs were left.

Among the traditions I won’t be bringing home with me:

At first I resisted, but now I can’t drink my beer without ice. It’s just too hot and the beer tastes so good when it’s (literally) ice cold. It’s the way everyone drinks beer around here and now that I know -or choose- to order ice with my beer I always get a nodding smile of approval from Thai waiters. And no, it doesn’t get watered down, not unless you’re nursing it. And we locals have a theory that the ice means we’re drinking “responsibly” since we’re consuming so much water as well. True or not, I just can’t drink my large bottles of Leo unless I’ve got a bucket of ice to help keep 'em cold.

However, the one thing I still haven’t conformed to doing is drinking my cans of beer with a straw. Ice in my beer is one thing, drinking it out of a straw is another.

Buakhao School, Ampher Kuchinarai, Jangwat Kalasin

During my last days of school I brought my camera around with me and took some pictures of my students. I gave them my blog address and promised I would post some of these pics up for them. So here, as promised to them, and so everyone else can see my beautiful students, are those pics: