Asian Walkabout

In many cultures, if you want to be a monk, it’s a lifelong commitment. You shave your head, retreat into a monastic order, and nurture your vows until the day you die.

Not so in Laos. Every Buddhist Lao male (read: most men in Laos) are expected to become novice monks between the time they graduate school (18-20 years old) and take on a career or marriage. For some, this means as little as a week in robes. Others spend up to two years in the order. As one novice, speaking from his own experience, put it,
“That’s a really long time.”

In fact, just outside of Luang Prabang, there’s a Vipassana center where monks learn to meditate. It’s not that they’ve been doing this all their lives. They learn from Square One and, after a ten-day intensive, might meditate for another few months, then leave the order.

In the meantime, hundreds of them populate the resplendent World Heritage Site that is Luang Prabang. Home to no less than 22 wats, or temples, the city is a visual paradise. French colonial architecture makes for chic hotels, cafes, and shops, while ancient Theravada Buddhist wats shine mysteriously through scented frangipani trees. Novices clad in sunset orange robes populate wats, streets, even cell phone stores.

We spent four days in Luang Prabang after a long commute from Thailand via something aptly dubbed the Slow Boat.
It’s a long, houseboat-style vessel packed to the gills with two-person school benches. Tourists cram on butt-numbing seats for two straight days, reading books, zoning out to scenery, or getting plowed on the half-liter bottles of Beerlao sold by ambitious village kids.

The benefit of the slow boat was that we got a scenic view of Laos, the most laid-back country in Southeast Asia, from the vantage point of the epic Mekong River. The river’s source is Tibet, but its bounty is here in Southeast Asia, where Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cambodian fisherman reap and export the river’s incredible bounty. It’s giant catfish season, so they cast bamboo nets all along the sides of the river. Meanwhile, naked little kids played in the water and fishermen waited out the heat of the day in makeshift shelters.

Luang Prabang was one of the most beautiful places we’ve seen, fully earning its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Today, together with friends Jarrod and Jess, we “did” Chiang Mai. That is to say, we toured an orchid farm, saw elephants play soccer, rode a bamboo raft, rode the back of an elephant, rode an oxcart, and explored the zoo-like crafts village belonging to Burmese hill tribes called the Longnecks and Big Ears.

I won’t go into detail about why they’re named that way.

The day was busy and hot, complete with Irish children exercising their natural gift of gab in the backseat of our van. The orchid farm, with its rare Phalaenopsis orchids, was beautiful. The trained elephants were astounding, and the elephant ride was bone-rattling. The bamboo raft was soothing. The hill tribe village was a human exhibit.
However, the oxcart ride—the most diminutive of the day’s tourist calisthenics—was epic.

It was supposed to be a slow-paced ride from one ox-cart station to another ox-cart station a quarter mile up the road. Each station consisted of a raised platform where roughly four ox-cart drivers languished in the shade. The idea was to get on one platform, then stop at the next to enjoy the view and take pictures. At that point, you get back into the cart and enjoy your liesurely ride back.

The tour guide touted it as a fun way to see the countryside. In our case, it was a textbook example of the hazards of mixing booze and livestock.

We’d just finished looking at paintings done by the elephants (one of which featured a pair of copulating pachyderms drawn in childlike scrawl) when our tour guide, a small, nervous man with a three-inch comb-over, summoned us to our ox cart. It was a wooden wagon with four steel-rimmed wheels, padded vinyl benches, and a blue sun umbrella protruding from the middle. Two humped oxen chewed cud up front.

After we crammed onto the benches, our driver, slight, beaming, homemade Thai tattoos scrawled on his forearms, leapt onto the platform behind the oxen. He bellowed “Oy!” and the oxen started clop-clopping down the driveway. It was uncomfortable at first. The oxcart didn’t come with shocks. We had to grab the umbrella pole with every rut. Someone said something about how the olden days must have sucked.

Once we hit the paved road, the oxen accelerated to a steady gallop. Our guide must have reckoned they’d go straight from there, because he placed his end of their rope on our cart and sat there yelling “Oy!” instead of driving them with the rope.

We swerved a couple times before bumping and crashing our way into the road’s shallow gutter. At one point, we came so close to a six-foot drop that the back wheel hovered off the ground. It was scary, but we figured that smooth wasn’t the oxen’s forte.

The first sign of trouble came when we caught up with the loud Irish family’s oxcart, formerly half a mile away. We promptly started tailgating it. After our guide emitted a particularly long and gutarral “Oyyyy!”, our oxen bolted onto a dirt road to the left, clamored up a short hill, then came to a dead stop.

No amount of Oy! from the guide could get them to start again. They had simply finished walking. One of them peed. Our guide took out his thin bamboo stick and start whipping one ox’s hindquarters, to no avail. He tried the other. Same result, without the urine.

Finally, after one particularly loud crack of the ox glutes, the beasts launched back onto the road. Our guide nearly fell from the impact. Summoning the dexterity and grace of a burning 1982 Winnebago, our oxen cantered their way up the correct hill, catching up with the Irish family once again. This time, they came so close that they started pushing on the cart ahead with their horns.

We were not only fast, but powerful. So powerful, in fact, that we passed the Irish people, then pulled over on the side of the road to take pictures. Our guide twirled off the oxcart, then borrowed my camera to take some souvenir shots. He took his time, laying down on his back for one shot, then climbing a ledge for another. His artistic license was in full force.

The Irish family passed us once again.

At this point, our driver decided he’d had enough. He put Jess and Jarrod behind the reigns, then started walking behind us. The oxen launched into another sprint. Our driver caught up with us just in time to leap back onto the cart.

We swerved and tumbled to the next ox-cart station, roughly 1/100 of a mile ahead. Jess and Jarrod climbed back into their seats. Our oxen embarked on their independent streak once again.

Our driver tried to grab their rope, but failed. As he once again attempted to get onto the platform, he lost his balance and fell. The oxcart kept rolling. It ran over his ankle with a solid metal thump, 300 pounds of steel-covered wood on one Thai ankle.

As a testament to the raw force of his inebriation, our driver simply got up and walked away.

A different driver took over after that. We discovered that a rhythmic butt-slapping and regular Oys! actually kept the oxen going in a slow, linear manner. For the first time, we saw the verdant rice paddies and sleepy palm-roofed huts around us. We noted that oxen don’t naturally seek out ruts or swerve dangerously close to precipices.
We dismounted at the ox-cart station in stitches. There’s nothing funnier than livestock and a drunk guy—at least to Denver folk like us.

We were also happy to be alive.

Spend a Night at The Beach! The ad proclaims. Its avant-garde black design displays happy couples on a blue-water island paradise. Its contents sound sweet, like a lover’s promise, and so good that they must be true. Each phrase is constructed like a delectable sweet, luring the brain into purchase mode, sentence by sentence:

Sign: “Sleep Under the Stars at Maya Bay!”
Brain: That’s the very same bay where the 2000 movie The Beach, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was shot! It’s going to be a pristine, secluded expat paradise!
Sign: “Snorkel and Kayak at a National Park!”
Brain: Remembers reading in a tourist brochure that the reef around Maya Bay is a protected area promising reef sharks and ten different kinds of coral. Sends pleasure signals to rest of body.
Sign: “Catch Crab and Squid! Beach BBQ!”
Brain: Um…yum? Hello?
Sign: “Drink Bucket!”
Brain: Pictures ice-cold bottles of Singha sweating happily amidst crisp ice cubes. Sends thirsty signal to stomach while simultaneously alerting consumer reflexes to open wallet. Now.

We can’t resist. We sign up for the camping trip to Phi Phi Lay, plus an extra snorkeling boat ride before that.
Ko Phi Phi, which consists of two gorgeous tropical islands, is renowned as a secluded vacation spot. Finger-thin Phi Phi Don is packed with bungalows, bars, boat rentals, convenience stores, and Thai massage parlors. Most tourists are under the age of 25, tanned a color that defies their Caucasian ethnicity, and equipped with a ubiquitous can of Chang beer. P. P. Lay, on the other hand, is the remote island paradise the tourist sign was talking about.

A typical day on Ko Phi Phi Don involves gallons of cold beverages, minimal clothing, and proximity to a lukewarm water source in which to cool off. On the beach, life proceeds like an Animal Planet episode meets Girls Gone Wild. An awkward-looking American guy discovers a bare-breasted Swedish woman and flirts with her for hours in waist-deep water. An adolescent does a naked underwater handstand, waving his accouterments towards an unwilling audience.

Though the scene is riveting, we look forward to some nature time on P.P. Lay. We board our long tail boat from one of P.P. Don’s twin bays and roar off for our magical camping trip to Maya Bay, leaving the bikini enclave behind. The longtail boat, a thick-hulled motorized canoe named for the long, propellor-tipped tail that steers it around, rumbles into a deep blue Andaman Ocean, speckled with freshly painted yachts and bevies of other longtails.

Minutes later (the open ocean is a rarity in island-littered Krabi), Phi Phi Lay greets us in the form of a yawning limestone wall. At 5,000 feet in height, jumping off this cliff would be suicidal, though our guide Lay claims it’s common for people to launch themselves off with parachutes. The cliff is so sheer that even plants can’t grow in its crevasses.

The base of the island is a limestone overhang, making the landmass appear slightly narrower at the root. Above its water-darkened base, the limestone, much of it sheer, rises up to a jungle-tipped horizon. The occasional cave makes a jagged mouth in the gray rock faces. It’s Thai geography at its most dramatic.

After passing Viking Cave, a limestone cave where people collect swallows' nests to eat, we drop into the ocean near a place called Bamboo Island for a snorkel. Here, a dreamlike alien world of electric blue-throated coral, head-shaped brain coral, and giant clams greets us. In a reef crevasse, a steely gray moray eel, sleeps with its eyes open, looking wrinkled and forboding. We don’t realize it is a species known to chomp humans for getting too close. Another animal sticks its tiger-patterned legs out from the bottom of a coral tree. It has no discernable head. It could be an octopus, a plant, or a fish. Down in this acid-trip world, where plants and animals coalesce into a rich underwater garden, it may be all three.

After a spectacular snorkel, we arrive at Maya Bay, our home for the night. It’s pristine, but not untouched. Eight longtail boats bob in their moors, while their contents, a Venice Beach-sized gaggle of bikini life, trolls the bone-white sand.

Our poster had been lying through its little cardboard teeth. A more apt advertisement would have involved bucketfuls of Jim and Coke (as in, drink your Jim and Coke from this bucket), hanging out and having a beach party with 20 of your new best friends, and watching iridescent sea plankton spark on salty water at 2 am while collapsing into awe-struck giggles.

Sometime in the night, a small, chilly monsoon spills out of the sky. Most people crawl inside of their tents and pass out at that point. Our tent door is broken, so we spend the next hour manually holding it shut and sopping up the puddles forming on the ground. Luckily, the rain stops, and we manage to stay dry for the rest of the night.

The next morning, the scene conspicuously lacks kayaks and snorkels, but is heavy on hungover kids drinking Nescafe from plastic cups. Our guides tell us to hang out and wait for a couple hours. Then, we pile onto a boat, which deposits us unceremoniously at Phi Phi Don.

In sum, it was a Fourth of July college party on a most pristine setting. Not bad if you’re looking to vary your drinking environment. Also not reflective of the oh-so-perfect tourist poster.
Thaironic.

Well, it was a good run.
Four months in India was definitely an experience we won't soon forget.

Albeit, both of us were more than ready to be moving on.
India's intensity has a way of wearing a westerner thin. I know Thailand is only a few clicks closer to home, but it feels so much more hospitable and developed compared to India. Life is easier (and cleaner) and we're incredibly excited to be exploring some other parts of Asia...

A short man with well-muscled arms walks through piles of dirt and ash. The sun on his head is fierce. He pulls in hot, dry breaths through nostrils seared by years of working with fire.

He finds respite by ducking into an alleyway barely wide enough for a pregnant heifer. At the intersection of this alley and a worn stone walkway is the wood shop. The man stops in front of this ancient garage, a square-shaped hole where wood particles make stardust over piles of cords.

A shirtless shop assistant, his ribs begging for attention through thin skin, piles a six-piece cord on top of the man’s head. The logs are pale and nubby, not unlike the bones they will soon incinerate.

Below the shop, giant woodpiles as high as two men make a brown relief on ashen soil. Funeral workers, sweat dampening their checkered turbans, add and pull rhythmically from the pile. The wood clack-clacks like bones. Even the colors here, the India vermilions and canary golds, are muted by ash and dust.

This is Varanasi’s Manikarnika Burning Ghat, ancient, man-powered, and open 24 hours a day. Funeral workers chop wood and move bodies with unsmiling instinct, somber but uninvolved. They follow an age-old instruction manual as they complete the funeral ritual, dousing oiled, colorfully shrouded bodies in Ganga water, piling up logs just so, and burning the bodies from the middle outwards. When the body collapses in the middle, workers push the rest into the pyre with a pole.

We can smell the fires from our hotel room.

But Varanasi is not all death. On either side of the Burning Ghat, a long line of bathing ghats host a hive of activity.
Boys—young, fresh, full of mischief—swim out to our tourist boat. Fat men with furry backs and slick potbellies sidestroke like seals. Women take a holy plunge in delicate silk saris. Priests offer prayers, still as reeds on a mellow morning, eyes staring at the God inside. Freshly laundered saris in butterfly-wing colors make crisp squares on ancient steps.

Deeper inside the maze of the dark, ancient Old City, flocks of pilgrims make colorful rivers of alleyways. Red-faced monkeys scavenge from rooftops and panes. Bells and drums clamor for attention amidst throaty generators, monotone chanting, rumbling mopeds, and distressed cows.

Varanasi’s assault doesn’t end with sounds. Imagine endless dark alleyways smeared with cow dung, sandalwood burning in tiny shops, holy men squatting beneath moldy umbrellas. Clouds of flies, horned calluses on bare feet, heaps of marigolds, Kali’s skull-rimmed face, fires burning at intersections, hidden temples, clouds of bliss, endless chanting. Kids peering out of Alice-in-Wonderland doors and playing cricket in secret courtyards.

During the sweltering nights, men crowd the alleyways, high off bhang or booze or otherwise languishing in low lazy clusters. The temples stay lit, and aarti offerings surf the river’s current, beelining towards fulfillment.

We spent three days exploring this potent, paralyzing, mythical city. And it still, at times, feels like 567 B.C.
Next, we’re taking the train to Kolkata, from which we will fly to distant, exalted (and pressure-cooker hot) Thailand…