taa blu, nee boh nee taa!

"Hello, thank you, and many lucks and good healths upon you!"

(That's the Karin language, the tribe we visited, and they don't bother with any of that folded hands bowing Thai business. The language is actually as different from Thai as German is from Japanese!)

So, yes, we are back in Chiang Mai and we have done many first things, seen many first things and consumed many first things, but we made it and are back and it was everything promised and more. I don't know where to begin.

First maybe I'll explain our trek-mates. First actually, in case it's unclear, trekking is the British word for hiking, so it's the standard word here, though a lot of places take you trekking and there's not much trekking involved. Tee, our guide, told us some companies just drive you to a fake village and feed you opium. We took a Chinese remedy alright, but it wasn't dope, and we didn't smoke it. We snorted it! Kind of.

I've gone too far past my first first. I'll begin again. Our comrades:

Jacob: A 28-year-old vegetarian ex-google-programmer, and it showed! He was a regular pocketbook of information, and his google phone retained service well into the wilderness. An avid trekker, biker and journeyman, he quit his job a year ago and is doing the world with his girlfriend in tow. She stayed in Chiang Mai. He had a beard like Spanish conquistador plus the king of the monkeys. Tee called him Papa Monkey.

Sergev: A 36-year-old Croatia-born Italian, who studied aesthetics and film in Milan, and had his thesis on the philosophical world-view set forth in Monty Python's Flying Circus published into a book upon graduating. Now a working director and writer for television, he was given the opportunity to direct his first feature length Italian film at the age of 21, but got nervous when they told him he'd be in charge of a 70-person crew. He had no experience trekking, had only flip-flops so he had to buy awful bright white loafers at the market as we left town, which thoroughly blistered his tender hooves, and plus he was the oldest and a little bit fat.

*Sidebar: Sergev was fascinating and had a million things to tell us about. If only he could have kept talking as he struggled miles behind us up the swampy slopes. At a stopping point on the ride back to town, though, he told us over a beer about an incredible article he had read about the isolated tribal mountain people of Montenegro, and the author's interview with an old woman living alone in the hills with only the wild wolves and her three cows for company, hours away from the nearest tiny village.

She lived and acted like a man, though she was clearly a biological woman. Apparently in Montenegro it used to be that if a family did not produce any sons, the youngest daughter was raised as a boy instead, dressed as a boy from the earliest age, allowed to drink and smoke with the men, given a boy's name. The practice has since fallen out of use, especially as most of the tribal people moved out of the villages and down from the mountains. And so this old woman the author interviewed was probably one of the last living examples of the Montenegrin girl-men.

He asked her all variety of questions, and her answers were always unbelievable but exactly what they had to be. He asked her if she'd ever seen the sea, and she said No, what use do I have for the sea, nothing can grow on the sea. (She fed herself by farming.) He asked her about her cows, and she talked about them as if they were family, human beings. This one is jealous of that one, and Oh look now she's angry at me, Those two always sleep near each other because the other is often rude in the mornings.

He asked her if she knew that men had landed on the moon. She said, No, it's not true. Impossible. If a wolf cannot jump as high as this wall, no man can go as high as the moon. All the while scowling and pulling deeply on her short fat cigarrette.

Everything about her dress and manner was masculine, and he wanted to know how she negotiated that with being actually physically a woman, so he cautiously asked her about menstruation. She became perfectly still and silent, a blank scowling wall.

He then asked her what she thought about at night in bed. She replied that each night before falling asleep she would think about three things. First, about her father. Second, about her cows. Last, about her great-great-grandfather who, when visiting a foreign Sultan, refused to remove his little Montenegrin cap. (Montenegrins are a very proud people.) After each of these three things had passed through her mind, then she could asleep.

Only as the interview was coming to a close did she admit on her own that she had lately been feeling a little bit sad. She was getting older, and had begun to worry about about not knowing how to read or write, worried because she was the only native person left living up in those mountains. Everyone else was gone. Spinning in a circle she pointed at all the many peaks and spoke their long, beautiful names, but she could not record them and save them, and when she died they would be lost forever. With her death, so much would be lost forever.


The story felt especially fitting after the experience we'd just had in the Karin village, after trekking through the unblighted junle, rainforest, evergreen or deciduous forest depending on the altitude, after slipping up and down the rain-smoothed paths on the hill-side rice paddies, after sleeping in the squat but lovely bamboo huts, after spending a day with people who had nothing to occupy their lives and minds but work, rice whisky and each other, the whole experience and story and Thailand in general all seemed to culminate and reverberate and marinate into one of the Buddha's key concepts: impermanence.

The mountain tribes in Thailand use slash-and-burn farming on the steep slopes to grow their rice. It's much different than the mid-country typical flat-bottomed swampy version, and at first hearing the term slash-and-burn I was a litte concerned. Kyle still isn't convinced, but it's the way they've done it forever! And they cycle the fields by five years, to re-establish good soil fertility, and they keep scattered large trees up and down the hills to prevent erosion, and we saw areas that had only laid fallow a year or two, totally overgrown with tangled thicket higher than my head. Everything those people build and do could be undone and erased in a short matter of years.

Our guide as I said was named Tee, and was most distinguished by his somehow perfectly trustworthy and familiar face, his sarcasm and his two little front teeth, with a centimeter between each and another before the molars kicked in on either side. He grew up in a different Karin village than the one we visited, which was called Ton Kyew, but most of the customs and culture were the same.

We were accompanied on our trek by Tee's best Karin friend Yao, whose house we ended up also sleeping in, with his wife and two young sons (5 and 6), and who also ended up being Ton Kyew's resident shaman, the holy man. Man and wife choose each other in Karin culture, no arranged mess, and operate very much as an equal team, sharing the farm and housework evenly, tending the children, fixing the roof, making dinner, all according to who's busy and who's not at any given moment. Each family gets a plot of the community's rice fields according to its size, plants it particular heirloom rice variety, harvests and stores it all once a year, then gets ready to do it all again. One family may grow sticky rice, another brown and another white. They simply trade each other if they want something different one day.

I'm becoming very sleepy. Last night wasn't the greatest sleep on the wooden board, and there's too much to say. I'll have to keep going tomorrow.




*Teaser: Maggots roasting on an open fire.




One more thing to leave you with, a meditation exercise on impermanence. It's supposed to be repulsive at first, and then liberating.

You think about your dead body rotting!

But you've got to through all the stages, worms a creeping, loose skin a peeling, bones held together just by tendons, tendons falling away, loose disjointed skeleton, bones bleached by the sun, bones scattered in an untidy pile, bones pulverized into dust, and finally dust on a quiet, cool breeze...

... and actually finally maybe dust getting into someone's eye, or falling into a shaker and peppering someone's morning scramble.

Doesn't that feel good?

Buddha's love,
Kandy-Boots