Category: Personal

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Into Pai

Pai, Thailand

I have been in Pai for all of an evening, and I like it. It’s busy but mellow, hippie but not too hippie. It’s like the best parts of the Chiang Mai Sunday Walking Street came and sat in the mountains to chill. And unlike Chiang Mai, it doesn’t give me the willies.

And the setting is spectacular, up in the green mountains of Northern Thailand. It’s cool here now, 71 degrees and going lower, which makes it pleasant to sit out on the deck in front of my B500 wooden shack. I came into town without a booked room, looked at a few places, and decided to go with this one because it had a pool and good Wi-Fi and I was hot and tired, and because it’s far enough from the main part of town to be quiet but close enough that I can walk there in a few minutes.

Getting here

The road up here is notorious, and it is curvy, and the van drivers do take it fast, but I never felt in any great danger, and the Dramamine/sea bands/ginger gum combo seems to have worked. I’ve been on worse roads in Nepal and maybe even Mexico. Once again, Thailand has turned out to be less daunting than I thought it might be. I need to remember that all the warnings about Thailand come from people who have traveled in Thailand. There are travelers here for whom this is the sum total of their experience in Asia, or in the developing world, and they think that the hawkers and the tuk-tuk drivers are overwhelming, and they have no fucking idea because they haven’t been to India.

After I arrived, I got hit with the loneliness again, but I’m working on letting that just be a feeling that passes. I went out for a walk and said hi to a guy on the street who was taking pictures of the same silly English as me, and he turned out to be British and good enough company for dinner and drinks and maybe some activities tomorrow. There are zillions of activities to choose from, and zillions of places to book them: day tours around the area, one- and two-day rafting and trekking trips, cooking classes, archery. We might just rent scooters and check out the local waterfalls and hill temple.

In any case, I feel much better about being in Thailand now that I’m here, and I think the next few days will be a lot of fun.

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Alone and Uncertain

Chiang Mai, Thailand

I have been trying and failing to find the thoughtful thing to say, so never mind. I will simply fill you in on where I’ve been, where I’m going, and what it has been like so far.

Little towns up the middle

After Ayutthaya, which a friend drove me to from Bangkok, I moved on to Lopburi, a small city known for its troop of monkeys who dominate a temple near the train station and wreak havoc over a small part of the town. I took the train, strapping on the full pack for the first time, though I could probably just have easily rolled it (it has wheels). Riding the train in Thailand is easy: stationmasters tell you which train to get on, and conductors tell you where to get off. I made friends with some Chinese exchange students during the ride.

In Lopburi, I learned what it is like to have a monkey on your back, and it’s not good. The monkeys were rather terrifying, and I made friends with a Belgian couple at the temple who were doing the same thing as me: trying to take pictures while avoiding actual monkey contact. We ended up inside the temple, which has cage doors to keep the monkeys out, when a sudden downpour trapped us. We then wandered the town in the rain and went back to the only really social guesthouse in town, NooM, where I was staying. There I met a Ukrainian-American who’d been teaching in Korea for four years, and his Chinese girlfriend, and also an English guy covered in tattoos who is about my age, made a pilgrimage to Seattle when he was 17, and actually knows the band Hater.

Daniel, the Englishman, turned out to be good company, though he’s a bit of a loner and sorting out some personal tragedies. He’d been in Dharamsala for the past several months, so we shared a lot of India horror stories. We spent the day together in Lopburi, and then took the same train (different cars) up to Phitsanulok, which is where you transfer if you’re going to Sukhothai, a major site for Thai ruins. Despite going from train to tuk-tuk to bus to tuk-tuk again, the whole process was fairly smooth. No one seemed interested in ripping us off, and people were helpful in getting us to where we needed to be.

Sukhothai was a delight. I stayed in a gorgeous hotel (Daniel did a cheaper guesthouse), and the ruins were spectacular, and we spent the day riding around them on bikes. It was no surprise that the site was well maintained and impressive. What was surprising were our interactions with the locals. In front of Wat Si Chum, we stopped for drink coconuts. What could have been a spot of tourist hassle was anything but. The old woman with the gold teeth who sold us the coconuts, at a fair price, was thrilled to speak to us and kept asking if we understood her English, which I mostly did. She ushered us to a shaded platform to sit on, and then cut our coconuts open and scooped out the meat for us. Then I mosied over to a display of paintings and other art by a local artist, an effeminate guy who said he did his art “with a friend,” a ladyboy who later showed up on a motorcycle. I bought a painting at the reasonable price of B400, a half Buddha painted on cloth.

Later, after a long ride around the national park section of the area, all forest and crumbling wats, we headed to a pack of mostly identical little eateries near the park entrance. We picked one more or less at random, and it turned out to be a winner: the cute mom waitress was flirty and funny, and her mother or mother-in-law was hilarious, coming over to box and arm wrestle with me. And the iced coffee and noodles were great, and so was the hot coffee Daniel had. What could have been boring, shitty in-the-park food was great and fun. And then later, outside the park, we ate at the place next to Daniel’s guesthouse, and I had the local style of noodles, with palm sugar, and some fried pumpkin, and that too was delicious.

There was also the charm of bumping into the same little set of fellow travelers. On the bus we found a French girl we’d met the night before (I saw her again in Chiang Mai), and then found the Belgian couple at Daniel’s guesthouse, and later I spotted the Dutch software engineer who’d come and chatted with us back in Lopburi.

Chiang Mai surprise

I had the thought that I was already finding Thailand charming, and I hadn’t yet been to any of the bits of it people really love: the beaches, the islands, Chiang Mai, Pai. I had high hopes for Chiang Mai, where I would meet an old friend from Google. Instead, it has turned out to be the first place in Thailand I don’t much like.

That needs to be qualified a bit. It’s still pleasant, with lots of beautiful temples and good food and no major hassles. But there’s something about the expat culture here — a colonial vibe, perhaps, and maybe too many white men who’ve come searching for a place that they can live their lives without the rigors of feminism — that rubs me the wrong way. And something too about the sheer scale of the tourism here, the way that the old city is dominated by backpackers and other travelers. There were plenty of us in Bangkok too, but Bangkok is too big to be about us. Here the farang come and settle and buy property and own bars, and there’s something off. It’s hard to put my finger on it.

Loneliness and uncertainty

I have also come face to face with loneliness here. Daniel went his way, and I was on my own in a biggish city. I spent some time with my old Google friend, and with the French girl and her little French group, and I made a two-hour friendship with a Canadian woman and had a random dinner with some Japanese women I met while waiting for a table at a restaurant. But I’ve come to realize that once I’m on my own again, I get nervous. I get weird. I get depressed.

I have also come up against my fear of discomfort and uncertainty. I worry about picking the right hotel, booking ahead, making the right plans.

I don’t want to overstate any of this. I am on an extended vacation in a beautiful place. The other day I was feeling lousy, but then I went out to walk around, and I watched a monk giving hammer dulcimer lessons to kids, and then I passed a barbecue in the park and some random guy insisted on giving me a hunk of fried chicken. It was delicious. Thailand is like that.

But part of what I’m doing here is getting to know myself. And if you want to bring out your neuroses, spending some time alone on the road will usually do the trick. For me, it’s fear of discomfort and fear of loneliness.

For the loneliness, I’ve started meditating again. The feeling comes in an intense blast, but it usually passes. The meditation helps with recognizing that it will pass, not getting caught up in it.

I am also going to Pai — and for the fear of discomfort and uncertainty, I’m going without any hotel booked. I will get there and I will look around. And I will be OK.

I think.

I am also hoping that Pai will be a good place to meet people and get into some activities, like rafting or trekking. I am hoping that it will not be a tourist nightmare.

(And there’s that fear again.)

See you soon!

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Days Off

Ayutthaya, Thailand

Today I took the day off from traveling. I ate breakfast at the hotel, called friends and family, spent a few hours catching up with people I care about and just talking through my experiences so far. I went and saw exactly zero tourist sights.

When you’re traveling for long stretches, it’s important to remember that you get days off — time to rest, relax, do not much of anything. I’m sunburned, my legs are a bit sore from lots of cycling, I’m a little bit losing my voice. I’ve been running pretty full-tilt since I got to Asia, and it felt good to take a day just to relax as I might at home.

In the afternoon I went down to the pool, chatted for a while with a German guy (named Stefan, inevitably) and an English couple with a two-year-old, and then I befriended a French Swiss guy who met up with me for dinner. We watched a tremendous thunderstorm together, then went out for a walk around the block, found the local department store, and bought ourselves cycling shirts for 99 baht. Then we sat out at a cafe and listened to some aging Thai rockers bang out classic rock covers — “Sultans of Swing,” “Hotel California,” “Cocaine” — with middling competence while we drank fruit shakes. It was nice. It was easy. I didn’t really have to try very hard.

Traveling for months can get lonely, but I am starting to adjust to the reality of what travel is like now, rather than hanging on to old ideas from my distant past. First of all, I’m just a lot more mature than I was when I traveled in India years ago — more comfortable with myself alone, and also more comfortable talking to strangers. Second, technology has put my friends and family much closer than they were, and I am starting to make use of it.

I had a good day off. Tomorrow I’m headed to my next destination, Lopburi, city of monkeys!

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Not India

Ayutthaya, Thailand

An important fact about Thailand is that it is not India.

My first travel abroad was to India, and it’s the only place (well, plus Nepal) where I’ve done extended backpacking. I now realize that the Indian experience is where a lot of my travel apprehension is coming from.

Here’s an example. I’ve spent two days riding a rented bike all over Ayutthaya, one of the most famous and popular tourist spots in the country. Not once has a beggar approached me, and the most aggressive selling I’ve encountered came from a woman who waved some postcards at me. When I tried to buy a hat in front of the temple, the woman selling it quoted the price as a reasonable B200, and I sort of weakly attempted to haggle before paying full price. The prices for entry to monuments are clearly marked, and that’s what you pay.

None of this is true in India, or at least it wasn’t when I was there. If Ayutthaya were in India, each monument would have an army of aggressive beggars out front — children, cripples, old women — and an army of tuk-tuk drivers chasing after you, and a bunch of guides who keep trying to follow you around and get you to pay for their services. The entry price would be marked as, say, 200 rupees, and the guy would insist that the sign is out of date and you need to pay 500. And buying a hat? It would have gone like this:

Merchant: How much you like?

Me: No, just tell me a price.

Merchant: Anything you want.

Me: OK, thirty rupees?

Merchant: What! How can you say that! No, no! What talking about, thirty rupees?

Me: So how much then?

Merchant: You say good price.

Eventually the guy would either name an absurd price, or I’d just give up and walk away, feeling like we’d just had some kind of uncomfortable argument. The walking away might or might not bring the price down to something reasonable. There would be little chance that I could just buy a hat at a fair price without a whole psychodrama and a high risk of failure.

Thailand just isn’t like India that way. It’s not assaultive or confrontational. In fact, Thais seem to shy away from confrontation. They are polite. They don’t honk their horns, an oddity in Asia. They let me merge with traffic pretty easily on a bicycle. They take no for an answer. When I asked about a bus to Lopburi at my hotel, the manager said I should just take the train — there wasn’t even a thought about making the extra dollar by booking me on something I didn’t need.

I mentioned to my UN friend that I hadn’t yet worked out, in my few days in Bangkok, what drives Thai people, what motivates them. She said what drives them is sanook, a Thai word meaning something like fun or the good life. There’s maybe a Southern European quality to Thais that contrasts with the Northern European qualities of the more driven Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese, those cultures that absorbed Confucianism as an ethos. I think in the long run that I prefer life among the Confucians — I like the energy and ambition — but it’s comfortable here, and easy. It might be less so in some of the other countries of the region, or in other parts of Thailand. We will see. But so far, Thais have been kind and friendly and easygoing, and it’s a welcome relief from what I was braced to expect.

Scattered observations

If we assume that my trip to Southeast Asia will last 200 days — a big if — then already I’m about 6% done. I have been to two places, Bangkok and Ayutthaya. At my current rate, I would see maybe 40 places in all of my travel. Is that a lot? Not enough? I’ll probably pick up the pace a bit at times, but also probably wash out and stay for a while in other spots.

In Thailand, there’s a belief that when you build a house, you disturb the spirits that were living on the land, so you have to build a spirit house and each day give flower garlands and food to the spirits who live there. The spirit house shouldn’t fall within the shadow of the main house. You see these spirit houses everywhere, including one with a cross and a Virgin Mary statue at the ruins of the old Portuguese cathedral in Ayutthaya.

The Thai word for five is “hah,” similar to the Korean “o”. When Thais want to show that they’re laughing in a chat or a Facebook comment, they write “555.”

Thais drink root beer, or at least they sell the stuff here. A&W. I hear they have it in Indonesia too. If you order a soda in a cafe, you order by color, not flavor: red, orange, green. No one seems to know what green is.

Thais eat with a fork and spoon: fork in the left hand, used roughly how we might use a butter knife, spoon in the right hand as the eating utensil. Chopsticks come with noodles.

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Convergences

Ayutthaya, Thailand

I’ve arrived at Tony’s Place Bed and Breakfast in Ayutthaya, charming guesthouse in a sprawling house full of teakwood touches and Thai decor. I suppose it might have been trickier to get here had not one of my new Thai friends messaged me this morning to ask if I needed a ride to Victory Monument, where the vans for Ayutthaya depart, and then decided as we were driving that we might as well go all the way to Ayutthaya together and have dinner. I’d originally booked just two nights here, but it took me all of an hour to decide to add two more. Already I feel worlds away from the jittery madness of Bangkok and Sukhumvit. This feels like a vacation.

UN connections

In other news, I had lunch today with Heike Alefsen, Senior Regional Human Rights Adviser, United Nations Development Group Asia-Pacific Secretariat, whom I met at the Halloween party at my hotel in Bangkok. It turns out Heike once worked under Kang Kyung-wha, an extraordinary woman who stood out as one of the most impressive and formidable of the many excellent diplomats I worked with at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations. I love these kinds of surprising convergences! Lunch was a delight, and I learned a great deal about Thailand and the region.

(We ate at a fancy buffet in Sukhumvit called Crave. There was dragonfruit.)

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A Week in Bangkok

Bangkok, Thailand

Bangkok is overwhelming.

Bangkok is like every Asian megacity I’ve ever been to, thrown into a blender that goes to eleven: tuk-tuks, touts, heat, shopping malls, temples, food stalls, traffic, backpacker districts, vast outdoor markets, crumbling old buildings. Hedonism, chaos, hustle.

I’m not going to attempt to explain Bangkok to you. Not on my sixth day. If you’ve been here, you have your own impression of the place, and if you haven’t, you still probably know that it’s full of temples and sex. The Internet is full of very good descriptions of both.

Instead, I’ll update you on how I’m doing and where I’m headed.

A week in Bangkok

I’ve been in Asia for pretty much exactly six days now, which isn’t long enough for that first phase of jet lag and emotional fragility to have passed. In that very short time, I’ve gone on several dates, attended a Halloween party full of expats and a language-exchange Meetup full of travelers, visited an impossible number of temples, gotten sunburned and dehydrated, eaten street food in Chinatown, gotten a massage (the real kind), and occasionally slept a little. I’ve been fortunate to connect as well with some locals.

I have a mild cold.

I’ve seen enough of Bangkok to recognize that it is vast and complex, with different sides. Around Sukhumvit is a major tourist district, also popular with expats, with lots of slick restaurants, rooftop bars, posh new malls, hotels, and sprawling areas for Arabs, Koreans, Japanese. There are tuk-tuks and touts everywhere, and the whole thing is more or less a red light district, where if you’re a white male foreigner you will inevitably have clumps of women or ladyboys calling to you to have a massage.

I’ve also been to the old part of the city and toured the vast temple complexes, seen streets lined with shops selling giant gold Buddhas — where do they all go? — ridden the express boats on the river and the SANSAB boats along the canals. The canals, in particular, give Bangkok a unique flavor, both as a means of transport that gets you around the impossible traffic, and as the backdrop for fascinating alleyways that are essentially an extension of people’s homes, especially across the river in the Thonburi district.

Moving on up

So Bangkok has been alternately exhausting, exhilarating, frustrating, lonely, social. I’ve been all over the place, basically — geographically and emotionally. I’m hoping things can settle into more of a flow as I move along.

Today I’m moving on to my next destination, Ayutthaya. I’ll go after I have lunch with a woman I met who works for the UN monitoring human rights in the region.

I’m nervous about the actual travel part of travel — more so than I need to be, I know. A Thai friend has offered to drive me to the Victory Monument, where you can pick up minivans to Ayutthaya, and I have a room booked on the other end, and all of my stuff is in my bag, so what’s the problem? I don’t know. I’m just nervous.

Part of it is the ongoing lack of sleep that will pass in a few more days. Part of it is the travel jitters I always get when I go into something unfamiliar. But I feel like I need a vacation from my vacation already. Bangkok is the kind of city where I push myself too hard to do everything, to keep going, to see what’s around the next corner. I’m hoping Ayutthaya will be a mellower place where I can spend a day or two doing nothing and not worrying about it. I need to remember, too, that I’m going to be at this for quite a while. I need to pace myself. Six months is a long time, and I’m only six days in.

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Cold Storage

Seattle, Washington

It’s a chill, wet day in Seattle, and I’m having none of it.

I came here to visit my dear friend Amber, who this morning departed for a trip to Paris that came up at the last minute, along with her husband and toddler. Had I known her travel dates, I would’ve planned to leave Seattle a bit sooner. But I didn’t so here I am, sitting in an Airbnb, listening to music on the phone and Bluetooth speaker I bought specifically for the purpose of listening to music while I travel, and feeling a bit chilly but otherwise fine.

So this is travel.

Pre-travel anxiety

The whole Paris thing put me in the midst of a whirlwind of travel anxiety, because international travel with a toddler is anxiety-inducing enough, and Amber has a pretty intense fear of flying — which, to her credit, she hasn’t allowed to rob her of a trip to Paris. Still, it has meant that my own head’s been in a bit of a whirl, as if I needed my own travel panic just to keep up. I settled on one of my perennial fears, which is that there will be something wrong with the hotel I’ve booked, and spent a good deal of time booking and unbooking rooms in Bangkok before settling on what I hope is an OK place.

I am also experienced enough to know that the antidote to these sorts of panics is asking for help. I posted to a Facebook group for backpackers in Southeast Asia and learned that yes, you can book one night at the hostel or lodge of your choice and then extend when you get there, that this works except when it doesn’t, and that there’s always a room somewhere unless it’s a major holiday. In other words, I’ll be fine.

Sleepy in Seattle

In  the meantime, I’m still in Seattle, and I’m going to take a nap. Because this is my life now, and some days I get to just nap.

Then tonight I’ll see an old girlfriend, and tomorrow a colleague from Google. Maybe I’ll head off to see A Sound Garden, the sculpture after which my once-favorite band named themselves. Or maybe not. I will get a cup of coffee. I will eat — Seattle has great food, and I’ve already had excellent Ethiopian, Sichuan, dim sum, and Vietnamese.

Perhaps — hopefully — I’ll also run into my Airbnb host, Laura. She’s a lovely social worker from Mexico, in her sixties, who runs a charming little makeshift hostel here. My fellow guest is a Japanese guy who’s in Seattle learning to brew beer so he can go home to Yokohama and start his own brewery. One of my best experiences so far was the evening the three of us spent eating toast, avocado, and sheep cheese together and telling stories. This is also travel, and it reminded me of those joyous moments of coming together with strangers on the road. I look forward to more of that.

And then, very late tomorrow night, I will emerge again from this brief interlude in cold storage, get on a plane — I’m riding on the upper deck of a 747, a new experience — and emerge, some 21 hours later, in Bangkok.

Where my hotel will be just fine.

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Phoenix, AZ

Phoenix has been very chill.

After months of not very chill — all that leaving New York (twice), punctuated by a whirlwind five weeks of intensity in Asia and capped by a couple of weeks of near-constant Jewish holidays in the company of a seven-month-old who has just learned how to climb up high enough to fall on his head — it has been a pleasure to be somewhere relaxed and easy.

Picking a direction home

I feel like I’ve been here a very long time, though it’s been just three weeks. I suppose it’s the first place that has felt like home in quite a while — maybe since June, when my girlfriend left New York, and New York began to feel like ex-home, a place I was closing up and shutting down.

I have made a conscious decision to think of Phoenix as home, of this house I own, this house where my parents are retired and where my stuff lives in boxes in the shed out back, as home. Someday Korea will be home, but it isn’t yet. I didn’t want to go off backpacking in Southeast Asia with no direction home, no sense of a place in mind that I can think of as the safe retreat if ever I need it. I don’t expect to need it, but it’s good to know where home is, even if you never plan to actually live there.

And I like Phoenix. As a place to live, it’s not bad. The weather is great — not just the warm and sunny you think of, but the crazy storms with the constant lightning and horizontal rain that come sweeping through and last twenty minutes. The storms here are about the best anywhere, and everything is dry again an hour later.

Phoenix days

So what have I been up to?

Sleeping late. Getting up, making coffee, going out for Mexican food for lunch. Treading water in the pool for exercise in the afternoon. Writing. I’ve finished a draft of my Vietnam book, and no, you can’t read it.

I’ve spent some time with my sister too, going to an Arizona State football game and a Phoenix Suns basketball game and a Make-A-Wish walk and the Phoenix Art Museum (“Art is our middle name” say the T-shirts) and a hike up north.

Beyond that, there’s been a lot of logistical stuff of the kind you do before you leave the country for a long while: getting an Arizona driver license and an international driving permit, buying travel insurance, getting a trust and a will and setting up durable power of attorney and making multiple visits to the notary at the UPS store, organizing boxes of my stuff in the shed out back, going to Target too many times and spending too much money on a year’s supply of drugs and toiletries. I have enough Imodium that I could stop pooping for a year, though that seems like maybe not the best idea, because that’s the number of pills that come in a Costco bottle of Imodium.

Like I said, chill. I’ve enjoyed the time with my parents, the relaxed flow of their retired life. It has been easy. I will miss it.

Back on the road

In another couple of days I’ll be on my way again. I’m nervous about hitting the road once more, a jittery feeling I’ve channeled into fussing over all the things I’ve packed and wondering how my bag is already this overstuffed when I haven’t gone anywhere or bought anything yet. (To be fair, it weighs only 32 pounds, not counting the stuff that’ll go in my carry-on. At some point I should probably make the inevitable blog post about what I’ve taken with me as gear.)

But the nerves will pass, I’m sure, once I’m in the thick of things. Next up is Seattle for a week (October 22-27) to visit one of my very best friends in the world, and then I’ll be on to Bangkok, arriving on October 29.

The adventure resumes!