Chiang Mai
The night before I was due to leave Pokhara there was a tremendous thunderstorm. At times it was frighteningly loud and lightning lit up the rain-drenched skies. It persisted for several hours until dawn. I had heard the best tip for flying safely was to avoid bad weather so I postponed my journey for twenty four hours. It was disruptive but Bimal, my travel agent, was able to make all the arrangements and I stayed an extra day by the lake.
I had found a cheap ticket from Kathmandu to Bangkok online while my friendly travel agent had organised the flight to Kathmandu and a hotel for the night. It was the Hotel Karma Boutique in Thamel and it was nice. There were cafes nearby and, after a short walk, the mayhem of Thamel proper. There I found the same desperadoes trying to sell sarangis, looking as poor and dismayed as ever, the tiny shops which appeared to be always deserted in the middle of the throng, the popular restaurants playing blues on the stereo, bikes and cars and pedestrians jostling for space with hundreds of dogs on the muddy roads, a prominent police presence in the centre in crisp, bright uniforms to protect the tourists, the numerous Tibetan stores with paintings, bronze religious artefacts and Buddhas and the tourists from various places around the world struggling through it all. It’s difficult to paint a word picture of it but if I could it would be a verbal expression of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s nightmare tapestries.
Kathmandu’s congested traffic did not delay us too much on the morning of the flight. Somehow there was always a way through it. After a few hours I was on my way to Bangkok, a rival with Mumbai for the busiest, most polluted, steamiest teeming metropolis in the world. As usual I was misled and betrayed by the smiling tourist assistants who guided me to a concrete monstrosity of a hotel where, after paying the exorbitant rent, I was immediately ripped off by the customary Thai trick: the hundred and thousand baht notes are nearly identical so if you pay with a thousand they give you change for a hundred and there’s no way you can prove anything. If you pushed it too far something might happen to you so you don’t have much choice, you have to wear it and be more careful in future.
Subsequently I was on the next flight to Chiang Mai since the hotel was unable to assist me with a train ticket and I couldn’t move on fast enough. I filmed the descent on my mobile through pastures and villages, mountains and jungle until we reached the still rustic outskirts of ancient Siam’s second biggest city.
A small robot wandered around the arrivals hall cleaning the floor and avoiding contact with obstacles. With a silly smile painted on its plastic face, it made some kind of sound but was not capable of intelligent conversation. I was hustled into a taxi whose driver was intoxicated and impatient. He could not figure out the map on his phone and became increasingly annoyed. When we finally arrived I congratulated him and he laughed with stained teeth in the avaricious manner of a petty criminal. My apartment was apparently in a distant, little known corner of the chiang. It was semi rural and as soon as I arrived I had a cappaccino and my guitar out of its case. The owner was out somewhere and the flat wasn’t ready. I would have to wait but I did so happily.
I asked my host if he could arrange some ganja for me. It was legal then in Thailand and quality stuff could be found for a moderate price. Within half an hour the ubiquitous darkly dressed, slim helmeted figure arrived on a motorcycle with a few small bags of ‘organic’ dope. I bought them all. In the ensuing trance-like state I began working on this book again after a long hiatus.
My accomodation was like a hippie pad in Mullumbimby, NSW. There was an open front verandah and a sunroom inside it, a sealed bedroom and a kitchen out the back which seemed vulnerable to snakes, rats, cats and spiders but it was well-equipped and I felt comfortable there. I wrote in the sunroom every day in between visits to local temples and other sights. It was hot but an electric fan was adequate to keep me cool and I had air-conditiong in the bedroom for my afternoon nap. An excellent local vegetarian restaurant fed me for a couple of months and I never got tired of the many options available.
After a while I started buying ganja from a store in town and I started getting a little too out of it. There were stories going around that much of the ganja on sale had been artificially boosted somehow and I could readily believe it. I spilled my coffee a couple of times. I was immersed in my writings and didn’t care too much. When I am creative I am happy and the book was unfolding nicely, so I didn’t worry too much.
The temples were magnificent and opulent. Extravagant displays of devotion, tradition and wealth with gold-plating everywhere, they are known as ‘Wats’ in Thailand. All Buddhist, that I saw, and splendid. Donation boxes were prominently placed and it wasn’t long before I started reading of notorious monks who had made off with millions of baht, glamorous girlfriends and fast cars. It was becoming a problem. Mendicants were were being marched through the courts. The honey-pot, as ever, was distracting good men from their studies and the populace were shaking their heads with wry amusement. Who knows what Gautama would have said?
This didn’t detract from the beauty of the elaborately decorated wats or the devotion of the honest supplicants who paid their respects as they passed.
In Vietnam the monks were haughty and unapproachable and it was so here too. South East Asia has a fiercer, more defiant spirituality with bravery and activism combined with ancient animistic ideas.
I was in danger of becoming a medical tourist as I had a minor operation to remove a cyst from my neck. The doctor in the small regional hospital was aged and humble. Professional and helpful, he guided me through a painless, straightforward procedure. I asked him for a contact to sand off my rhinophymic nose and he gave me the location of a female doctor he recommended. I attempted to see her but I found a very different scene in her hospital, the major one in the city. There were hordes of people lined up in massive queues in a cavernous place which was noisy and confusing and I wasted twenty minutes in the wrong queue before I gave up. It felt a bit industrial but no doubt it got the job done for millions of people.
Chiang Mai, like most cities I know of, had become vastly more populous in the last twenty five years. There were lots of cars now, shiny new ones and they moved sedately through the city which seemed to have a forty kilometre and hour speed limit. The traffic was courteous and orderly. It was noticeable that there were few dents or signs of accidents in their flimsy exteriors. At such slow speeds there little that could go wrong.
My host took me to a jazz club to hear a local band and it reinforced my opinion that there wasn’t much happening in the Thai music scene. I also played at a nearby cafe to a young proprietor who was unimpressed. He was diffident, with a look of slight bewilderment and resignation. He moved busily around his little cafe which remained empty of customers as he organised his new business premises. There were so many cafes and shops around, as in Nepal, which seemed to survive on a pittance, or less. Places which might have the occasional busy evening nevertheless remained open all day in the hope of a little extra custom through the day.
On another occasion he took me to a tobacconist where I stocked up on a few things and bought a packet of good cigars, one of which I gave to him. He also invited me to taste the kind of local cuisine he enjoyed but I was shocked. It was difficult to chew and intensely hot. He laughed at my reaction but it was not unexpected. He had a thing about two songs; ‘Vincent’ by Don McLean and ‘My Way’ whose lyrics by Paul Anka used an existing French tune. He had a severe stoop and was in constant pain from an old back injury but he managed and ran a thriving establishment.
After checking out and photographing a series of grand temples I started thinking of Laos. A small city, or a large town – the second biggest in the country – called Luang Prabang was only an hour’s flight away. Laos also had a no-visa entry system. You just had to turn up, fill out some forms, get your passport stamped and you were in for a month which could be extended, at a reasonable price, for another month before you had to move on.
I started to feel a bit lonely. A travelling companion would have been nice but there was none. My host’s sister came up from Bangkok and offerred to take me to a night bazaar. Although marred by a sudden shower of rain it was a pleasant evening surrounded by tourists and locals jostling between a variety of stalls with a golden temple in the background. Our barista turned up in a van after a couple of hours and we returned home with a few modest items. She later bought me a beautiful silk scarf with pictures of elephants on it as a parting gift. Such kindnesses cheered my ancient heart.
The flight to Luang Prabang was a about a hundred dollars, with a luggage allowance. I booked online and turned up at the airport with my mobile phone freshly charged and no other evidence of a ticket. Inside the airport I said goobye to Thailand, until the next time.
Travels to Nepal 