Chiang Mai

The train to Chiang Mai was an all-night party. It was exactly unlike the Chinese train in that our car was filled with foreigners and the Thai crew were partying with us on the way up. We sat next to an exceedingly cheerful bald Amsterdamian in his late thirties who was to trek through the jungles with his father. His father, a good man with a mustache curled at both ends, gave me a small pouch of quality Dutch tobacco. He had been to the Indonesian jungles eight times and is exactly what you'd expect an 18th century colonial safari sojourner to look like.

We arrived at around ten in the morning and tuk-tuk'ed to the Banana Guest House. It's the first time I've never had to pay up front for a room. Even my lunch was put on a tab. We spent the first part of the morning wandering around looking at Buddhist temples. We struck gold with Wat Chedi Luang, a 700 year old temple half ruined 500 hundred years ago by an earthquake. A sign to side read "Monk Chat," so we spent the next hour with a 21 year old monk talking about infinity, faith, science, and Buddhist rituals. I bought a book from him, exchanged email addresses [he also had a cell phone {to call his mother}], and I intend to keep the conversation alive.

I upped adventure up a notch after that. I rented a motorcycle for roughly $3. I've never ridden a motorcycle before, or even ridden on for that matter. I thought it was a moped. It was not. I spent the next hour struggling to keep on the left side of the road, shift gears, and figure out where the hell I was. Luckily the core of Chiang Mai is walled in making it truly difficult to get lost. My legs are still shaking from that little party. I'm not sure if I have the testicular fortitude to continue learning this particular craft. It feels as dangerous as it is. I've never wanted a seat belt more.

Don't know where we're going now. There's a lot of "trekking" near here... to village tribes, to elephant riding through the jungles, to white water rafting, downhill mountain biking, even cross-border visa runs to Myanmar and Laos. My gut is telling me to take the three hour bus ride through the mountains to Pai, a hippie hide-out on the Burmese border.

It's an object of curiousity what exactly all these hippies are doing here. We're not talking young dread-locked experimentalists you'd catch a String Cheese Incident show. We're talking mid to late twenties, sometimes older, guys and gals with dreads and very free flowing clothes. They're dressed more native than the Thai's. Sometimes I feel like I'm back at a Rainbow Gathering.

It's also of curiosity my reaction towards them. In America I have a bit of admiration for the legimate counter-culturalist. But these guys are in Asia. My new neck of the woods. I place where I try my best everyday to adopt to cultural norms. I'm not so appreciate of white counter-culture here, but that could change if I knew how the Thai's felt about it. I think there's a strong chance that this is, indeed, not China and the Thai's really are as non-judgemental as they appear. This is the land of the "girl-boys", the only thing a Chinese person can tell you about Thailand.