We were facing the last teaching cycle of our Peace Corps experience and had come to terms with a return to the States after this final year.  Still, we weren’t sure how this last year would turn out.  Would it be good because we were fairly experienced, or if it would be bad because we were burned out?  Once we were actually back in the classroom, we realized that it was a little of both.  On the positive side, both of us had a handful of students who over three years had progressed from not knowing a word of English to being fluent in conversation and adept at writing letters, and that was a true source of pride and satisfaction.  My smartest kid was Suriya.  I lost touch with him, but I felt he could have been a college professor or the CEO of a multinational conglomerate – all in English.  Day to day in the classroom, I think both of us relaxed a little and didn’t beat our brains out over preparing as much supplemental material as we had.  That may have left us with a little extra energy, because we maintained a busy pace of travel and exploration in our spare time. 

       As noted, Chiang Rai was blessed with easy access to mountains and hill tribes and during our last year we headed into the jungle frequently, although we never got into the wildest terrain of our province, which was the Doi Vieng Pha mountain range which forms the border between Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai provinces.  The tallest peaks there approach six thousand feet.  Twenty years earlier Gordon Young had hunted that area and described it as an uninhabited, Edenic wilderness teeming with tiger, elephant and gaur.  During our time, unfortunately, Thai and hilltribe populations were growing rapidly and making heavy inroads into those pristine wildlands.  Trees were being cut down and crops were being planted in the swidden – or slash-and-burn – agricultural method.  Throughout the country, game populations were intensively hunted and under this relentless pressure were retreating into pockets that would eventually be protected as national parks.  Both the Sumatran and Javan species of rhinoceros had been locally extinct for almost a hundred years.  This would leave Thailand with extensive “empty forests”, a term used by biologist Alan Rabinowitz to describe woodlands in which the trees are still standing but animals – large and small – have been permanently hunted out.

       While that sad process of habitat loss was taking place in the background, Royse and I just wanted to go hiking for fun.  Were we contributing to this problem just by walking in the woods?  Perhaps.  It’s easy to assign blame in retrospect, but back then we hardly thought about the issue.  Nevertheless, Nick Handy had become our bush-whacking soul mate in town and when he suggested a weekend attack on a waterfall with a stay in a Yao village, we both said, “Oh, heck yes!”.  On Saturday May 27, we were joined by two other Christian teacher volunteers, Dave Dyson and Mack Stewart, bringing our waterfall party to five.  This was a rainy season excursion so it was a muddy process assembling at the hamlet of Ban Huaie Khome on the main highway a few miles north of town.  We got the phuu yai ban [village leader] there to assign one of his kids to take us up to the waterfall.  It was a delight to be out walking in the hills and valleys again and trying out our new packs stuffed with our new sleeping bags and foam pads.  Those packs may not have been the last word in ergonomic design, but they were cheap and they worked.  It took us two and a half hours to get to the falls and along the way we passed through a Yao village and made arrangements to stay at one of the houses for the night when we returned.  The Khun Kon falls were very impressive and tumbled from a considerable height with a thunderous roar.  We took a cold swim in the large pool and let the cascade beat on our heads.  After a while, we scrambled up to a smaller second falls and took another dip.  I brushed up against some weapons-grade nettles and my arm was itching and inflamed for hours.  The descent back to the village was slippery and we tripped and fell like a pack of fools.  We were sweaty and hot as we approached the Yao village, but came upon a section of stream with a large pool where an elephant was getting a bath and a rub down from his handler.  There was room for us, and, with a grunt of relief, we threw our packs on the ground and took a refreshing bath carefully upstream from the pachyderm so as to avoid any elephantine poops that could ambush us downstream.  Our host for the night was a Yao widow who lived with her two daughters.  She and her family were gracious and dignified in the hill tribe manner, cooked us a good dinner and looked after our every need.  When she sat back occasionally to rest, she had a sad look in her eyes.  At one point, without being prompted, she stated the obvious, “Mai mi phuu chai” [I don’t have a man].  There was quiet resignation in her voice.  We slept well that night and paid her well in the morning: ten baht and a fancy bar of soap.  We got back home late in the afternoon, exhausted, with another week of school facing us.  We probably would have felt more rested on Monday if we had stayed home for the weekend and goofed off, but tio-ing and trekking were in our blood.

       In one use of the word “tio”, the phrase”pai tio phuu ying” meant to patronize hookers.  There may have been laws on the books in Thailand against prostitution, but they were only loosely enforced, and the world’s oldest profession was widely tolerated.  Chiang Rai’s version of a red light district was a sad collection of shacks on a dirt road near the north end of the airport.  The young women there would sit barefooted on the front steps eating noodles and slicing mangos as they waited for customers.  With their stocky bodies and broad feet, they looked like poor country girls who had been taken away from planting rice and ensnared to work in the trade.  The boys in my class frequently made jokes about going to the airport and, since none of them ever actually flew anywhere, they would all laugh at the double meaning of their extremely clever comments.

       In June, Gary Paarlberg found a house that he liked better than his current residence and asked us if we wanted to have his old place on Srikerd Road near the corner with Pahohnyohtin Road.  Why, of course.  We felt like two hobos who had just hit the lottery.  It was a modern rental property in the front yard of a government official’s fancy home.  We said goodbye to our little patched-up Damrong bungalow and moved into a fully-screened, two story house that had a first floor with a running-water kitchen, dining room and bathroom.  Ajaan Pratin at Damrong was happy to see us move because it freed up a house for other teachers.  Upstairs there was a bedroom and a living room with a fireplace.  We would have a few extra blocks of bicycling to reach our schools and the market but, regardless, this was a welcome step up in overall comfort.  If we had been observant Buddhists (or even respectful farang), we might have considered bringing in a group of monks to conduct a ceremony blessing our new house, which is what Larry Rose did when he moved to a new place near our neighborhood.  We attended the ceremony and, I must say, it was a very impressive experience – the shaved-headed monks in their yellow robes holding string in their hands, the incense sticks placed in brass bowls, the droning chants filling the perfumed air.  Most importantly for me, there was lots of free food afterwards.  In our turn, we blessed Larry for a pleasant time.

       The post-Peace Corps phase of our lives was now approaching and we tried to plan.  The challenge was to translate whatever skills we had – or could convince someone else we had – into marketable commodities for the American job market.  My attention was drawn to the US Foreign Service, the branch of the State Department which staffs consular and diplomatic services around the world.  These were tough jobs to get.  The first step was a written exam.  Several of the volunteers in Chiang Rai were interested and took the written test which was administered in Chiang Mai.  I was one of those who passed.  The next stage was to schedule an oral exam in Washington after we got back to the States.  I failed that exam and eventually went into community relations work in Cleveland.

       I loved teak wood and wanted to get some back to the States.  Like tigers and elephants, teak was a protected commodity in Thailand and its plantation and harvesting was regulated, at least on paper.  I did my due diligence to see if there was some way to get some lumber shipped home through formal channels but came up with nothing.  One day, in discussing my needs and frustrations with Bob Turnbull, he suggested  – consistent with his anti-establishment views – that I should order some “midnight teak” and said he could connect me with individuals who conducted this clandestine trade.  So I turned a blind eye to the nation’s deforestation and, after I had designed the component parts for a three foot by five foot dining room table and two large shipping trunks, I had a carpenter cut my illegal teak boards to the required sizes.  At the end of our stay, I shipped the crated table parts and the trunks back to the US via Thailand’s government shipping company, called “Raw Saw Paw”.  The trunks, which could be disassembled later into planks, were stuffed with our backpacks, souvenirs and personal items.  We knew they would be opened – and rifled – by customs inspectors as they left Thailand, so we purchased cheap, eye-catching stuff – costume jewelry, purses – to put in the top layer for the customs officials to steal.  And that is exactly what happened.  It was sort of like paying a tax or making a ritual sacrifice.  The things lower down in the trunks that were important to us arrived safely.

       The attentive reader will recall that Somsak and Galiya were married on June 27, 1971.  As they entered upon their wedded journey, it didn’t take them long to hit full stride in the practice of connubial bliss and within a few months, Galiya was pregnant.  In early June of 1972 they welcomed a girl whose nickname was Nok Noi [little bird] and she was a real cutie.

       The horrifying racket of an ice-crushing machine early in the morning reminded us that we were now living in a real neighborhood on Tanon Sri Kerd and not secluded on a quiet school campus.  The ice noise came from the man next door who sold frozen treats.  He would start the day by reducing a large block of solid ice to the needed buckets of slush.  He wasn’t the only source of noise.  Kids zoomed up and down the street on their bicycles, shouting and laughing at each other.  A wandering lottery vendor shouted that we needed to take a chance and buy a ticket.  A dissonant and scary note came one night when an angry drunk staggered down the street, shooting his gun in the air.  He was really mad about something and kept repeating “tamruat mai gio!” [the cops don’t care!].  So, for a moment there,  it was Benghazi redux as we lay on the floor away from windows while the lead was flying.  At other, calmer times, we could hear the soft sounds of chanting and ceremony from Wat Sri Kerd right across the street from our house.  We weren’t seeking meditative silence anymore, so it was nice to be surrounded by the hum of community.  Near our house, a woman – without making much noise – sold cakes of khaow tan [puffed rice] made with a local variety that had a brown color and a wonderful nutty taste.  I bought them by the dozen and every morning crumbled a few into a bowl, added milk and sliced bananas and had a great breakfast.  That lady was my cereal factory.

       Our new neighborhood had an interesting time service.  At one nearby street corner, a heavy iron rod hung from a chain and every evening a person – whom we never actually saw – would hit the rod the number of times that corresponded to the military clock.  For example, at 6:00 PM (1800 military) we would hear three groups of five rapid beats followed by three slow beats.  I’m sure that person consulted a wristwatch to get the timing right, and since watches and clocks were very common, I think that service was actually a holdover from an earlier era when Thais lived in caves and needed a reminder when it was time to hunt a dinosaur for dinner.

       One of our nicest gastronomic adventures in our new house was making yogurt.  It was a seat-of-your-pants, improvised process.  We bought powdered milk in the market, added water and heated the mixture over our gas stove in a large pan, guessing at when the temperature was right to turn the heat off.  Then we would open up a tired-looking little jar of yogurt we had purchased from Choom’s store.  Several tablespoons of that stuff – plus a prayer to the acidophilus gods – would serve as a starter.  We would simply cover the pan and leave it at room temperature overnight and hope for the best.  Sometimes it didn’t take, but when it did, the result was an unrefined yogurt with a powerful, sharp taste that was wonderful when tamed with a little fruit or cinnamon sugar.

       Our third year digs didn’t require any major renovation work as we had done at Damrong, but I had been inspired by the ofuro soaking tubs we had used in Japan and came up with my own version.  I sat on the kitchen floor one day and traced a line around myself in an effort to determine the size and shape of a tub I would order to be made out of heavy galvanized tin sheets.  I designed an ugly but functional box about two feet wide, three feet long and three feet high.  The long sides tapered towards the feet, giving it a slight wedge shape.  I made an elaborate, three-dimensional cardboard model with dimensions carefully marked and took it to tin smith’s shop.  I could tell this was his first ofuro but he said he could do it.  It took him a while but the result was perfect.  To get it home, I flagged down a sawm law driver and to his surprise the paying passenger was not a human but a monstrous tin box headed for the farang house.  When I poured in two buckets of boiling water followed by two of cold water, the temperature was piping hot but perfect.  After you took a cold bath, getting into that Tin Lizzy to soak was pure heaven.

       The landlord and his wife were pleasant, sociable people, and they liked us because the Peace Corps reliably paid them our rent.  He was a karatchagan [government official] and she was a teacher at a primary school just a block away.  One could tell he had an important but low stress job shuffling papers in an office.  He would come home from work looking relaxed with his tan government uniform still crisp and unwrinkled.  We could sympathize with his spouse, however, because she spent all day on her feet trying to inculcate knowledge into a roomful of squirming, talkative children.  She looked really worn out when she came home.  One weekend, however, after recovering from school, she and Royse put on their fanciest northern Thai outfits, placed flowers behind their ears and, striking regal poses, let me take their picture.  Their two kids were models of good behavior, at least when they were around us.  The daughter was named Atchara and her younger brother was nicknamed Gop [frog].

       There was a young woman who lived with the landlord’s family and functioned as their maid and as ours.  The landlord offered her services to us when we moved in and, although we felt it was an unnecessary luxury, we accepted.  Her name was Waewtaa Phuengphut but everyone called her Kaek (the guest).  I never figured out her history but it seems she came from a small village in the Phrae district.  She was extremely shy, didn’t like to have her picture taken and wouldn’t make eye contact.  She reminded me of a dog that had been beaten and gave me the impression that there were some very unhappy stories in her past.  She may have been a distant relation to the landlord, but it wasn’t appropriate for me to ask and I never found out for sure.  At least she was safe living on Tanon Sri Kerd.  She was an acquaintance of one of my students, a boy named Preecha, who also came from Phrae.  One weekend, four of us – Royse and I with Kaek and Preecha – organized a weekend bus excursion to Phrae.  The two locals showed us around their town, which was quite small, quite rustic and quite without electricity.  We spent the night with Preecha’s family in a house built with massive teak logs and planks, cut from forests in a bygone era when the supply of trees must have seemed limitless.  I had forgotten my flashlight and when I awoke in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, the darkness was so utterly complete and my disorientation so full that I spent forever feeling my way – inch by inch, like a blind man – through the house towards a toilet I never did find.

       We also had a laundry service and once a week a lovely woman with a serene smile would arrive on her bicycle to pick up and drop off a load of clothing.  She washed items by hand and hung them out to dry.  In the wettest part of the rainy season, things often came back damp but we didn’t mind.  We could hear her wheels crunching on the gravel as she coasted down our driveway.  She would always announce herself with “suhk phaa jaow” [wash clothes please] in her soft kham mueang accent.

       In July, Samakkee organized a Saturday school field trip to Chiang Saen.  Royse wisely stayed home to rest, but I went along with the group of students – many of them from my English classes – packed into two borrowed Army trucks.  I must commend Ajaan Prasert, the teacher who organized and directed this venture.  He knew his history, knew how to lead by example and was committed to sharing his knowledge with his kids.  We rumbled north on the main highway and a few miles beyond Mae Chan turned off on a dirt road and headed east.  Along the way, one of my favorite students, a bright and comical lad named Pongsak Sae Seu entertained his classmates with his imitation of the effort and strain needed to take a bite out of a tennis shoe.  From a hill top, Prasert pointed to a valley off to the southeast to show us the site of Yonoke, one of the first great cities ruled by King Mengrai.  Legend holds that it was destroyed by floods and earthquakes in fulfillment of a curse.  Evidently it was forbidden to eat any white eels caught in the Kok river.  However, when a fisherman brought such an eel to the city, everyone, except a widow, ate a piece and subsequently perished.  Maybe the surviving widow became the phuu yai ban thereafter.    Nick Handy told me that he had been down into the Yonoke valley and was able to see outlines of old city walls.  He also reported that in the valley there was a small Vietnamese village.  This didn’t make sense to me.  Why would a group of Vietnamese villagers pull up stakes, move across Laos and settle in northern Thailand?  Today lagoons and marshes occupy parts of the valley floor.  To me, this part of the trip, with its focus on local history that is preserved orally, was the most interesting.  The remainder of our time was spent around Chiang Saen and touring a large number of crumbling ruins that, at the time, were deteriorating faster than the Thai government could preserve them.

       Another time Royse joined me in a school field trip to the ruins of ancient Sukothai, whose foundation as a kingdom in the thirteenth century is regarded as the beginning of the Thai nation, although that nationhood did not develop in a straight line.  The history of Southeast Asia generally, and Thailand in particular, is a tale of near-constant strife amongst numerous city states and small kingdoms.  As Siam gradually consolidated into the Prahtet Thai [Thai nation] that we recognize today, King Mongkut in the late nineteenth century made Sukothai central to the narrative of the Thai people.  On that trip, I recall the sleeping accommodations were crowded and uncomfortable but we got to watch some well-organized and lively games between visiting Samakkee athletes and Sukothai school teams in basketball, volleyball and takraw [rattan kick ball].

       Hudson’s Guide to Chiang Mai and the North of Thailand was a somewhat overly-ambitious little book published by one Roy Hudson, an Englishman who had settled in Chiang Mai after the War, married a Thai woman and set out to assemble information about the North into a guide book he could sell to tourists.  It enjoyed a modest reputation and visitors could be seen from time to time actually reading it.  Somehow Mr. Hudson and I got in touch and he asked me to write a chapter on Chiang Rai.  I agreed and set about the task with a burst of compulsive energy.  I counted bicycle wheel revolutions to make an accurate map of the center of town.  I reported on local mining operations that endangered the lives of workers.  I interviewed the naay amphoe [amphoe administrator] for any inside information he could give me on the workings of local government.  I noted the location of important businesses.  The bulging file I created was duly mailed off to Chiang Mai.  I was secretly hoping that the guidebook might be renamed after me.  Instead, an unappreciative Mr. Hudson wrote back to tell me that most of my information was inaccurate and that only a fraction would be incorporated into his latest revised edition.  Geez, what an ingrate.  That was the end of my volunteer journalism career.

       A relationship had been simmering and developing for some time between Nick Handy and a young woman named Paula Casey.  Nick was in Chiang Rai and Paula was in Seattle, so there were some long distance components to be managed in this budding love affair.  Letters were exchanged, of course, but on at least one occasion, their communication required a phone call and Nick had to go to the salaklang chungwat [town hall] to speak with Paula directly on one of the province’s few phone lines at the time, while a roomful of government officials eavesdropped for fun.  Paula came to visit him in Chiang Rai, and her presence not only made communication much easier but afforded some opportunities for social activities.  Nick and Paula invited us to join them for a weekend hike to a Christian retreat house in the Doi Khun Tan mountains that run as a massif between Chiang Mai and Lampang.  To get there, we formed a convoy of sahmlaw loaded with four farang and their backpacks and rolled to the Chiang Rai bus station where we clambered aboard the one headed south to Lampang, about three and a half hours away.  The rural Thai countryside was always enchanting with its vignettes of daily life that appeared as you rolled by.  Men guided kwai [water buffalo] as they pulled plows in the fields or hauled carts down narrow lanes.  Little children were often perched on their backs as assistants.  Women stood on the front porches of their bamboo huts hanging laundry or preparing food.  These bucolic scenes reminded me of the old Thai saying, “nay nahm mi plaa, nay nah mi khaw” [there are fish in the water and there’s rice in the fields].  After we passed Phayao Lake, the road reached the end of the flatlands and rice paddies and started to climb a range of low hills to reach Lampang on the other side.  Where the road crested at the pass, there was a cluster of spirit house shrines which both travelers and locals kept filled with little offerings of food and drink to propitiate the spirits that lived there.  In the absence of good driving habits in the country, this was one was to seek a safe journey.  On this trip, the gods were tolerant and we reached Lampang without incident.  From there we boarded the train for a short leg north and got off at the Doi Khun Tan station.  This was a tiny, remote spot and, since there was no one around to provide directions, it was fortunate that Nick knew the way to the trailhead where we would start our hike.  This was the rainy season and we were taking a chance with the weather.  As we adjusted our packs and got underway, a soft rain was falling, but we had good waterproof gear.  The precipitation was quite tolerable and provided nice atmospherics.  The woods we hiked through was fairly thick and had some massive old growth trees but were silent, an example of hunted-out empty forests.  We didn’t see anyone else on the trail all the way to our destination, a large wooden cabin with several bedrooms, a kitchen and a screened porch.  We had it all to ourselves and it was a wonderfully tranquil place to relax.  The weather was just cool enough to let us disappear into the warmth of our new sleeping bags.  That night we all slept deeply and well.  After a leisurely breakfast the next morning, we lounged around on the porch for a while, enjoying our solitude, before heading back down the trail to return home.

       Those shrines and spirit houses which are seen everywhere in Thailand are charming reminders of the animist beliefs that survive from an ancient time that predates the arrival of Buddhism.  I felt that this belief in the spirit world was particularly strong in Asia.  I recall Royse and I sitting around a fireplace one cold evening in Chiang Mai and trading stories with a chance collection of travelers.  One of them had spent time in Burma – where belief in belu, or shape-shifters, is strong – and he recounted a story of a villager there who had been attacked by a bear.  The man was mauled but had fought back and wounded the bear in the chest with his shotgun.  The bear fled into the jungle, leaving a trail of blood behind.  The next morning villagers followed the blood spoor into the forest.  It eventually led them to the door of an isolated hut.  When they entered, they found not a bear but a man lying on a bed, dead from a gunshot wound to the chest.
Royse and I attended several seances.  The first was during Julie Gilmore’s August 1971 teacher training seminar in Uttaradit.  During some evening slack time, both Thais and farang watched a maw pii [witch doctor] summon two giants and two servants from the spirit world by means of four eggs tilted on end.  I don’t recall any giants appearing but it was fascinating to watch.  Another séance we witnessed was at the teacher training seminar in Phuket.  A group of Thai teachers used a Ouija board with overturned walnut shells to contain and manipulate spirits once they had been called.  For some reason, I started to lift up one of the shells and everyone shrieked in horror, fearful that I had released a demon.  What is it with these teacher training seminars and their spooks?

       There is a belief in Thailand that when a person dies a traumatic death, their spirit is restless and may temporarily inhabit the body of a living animal.  One of my students recounted a story of a human spirit that had somehow taken possession of a water snake.  Royse and I ourselves had a startling experience that made us wonder if all this might be true.  In our neighborhood on Tanon Sri Kerd, there was a young girl named Dik who lived with her family and worked as a civil servant in the provincial office.  One day, she and a friend took a long lunch break and headed up to Mae Chan on their motor scooter.  They were hit by a truck.  Her friend was killed instantly and Dik suffered massive pelvic fractures and internal injuries.  She was taken to Overbrook hospital where they were unable to stabilize her.  She lingered for several hours with her distraught family at the bedside.  Just before she died, she looked at her mother and said, “Mae, hiew nam”  [Mother, I’m thirsty].

       The funeral services for Dik were held at Wat Sri Kerd, across the street from our house.  We went to the temple on the second evening to pay our respects as monks chanted funerary rites.  Later we sat on a bench by our front door in the dark.  Friends and neighbors would stop briefly to chat with us before walking across the street to the temple.  There was a quiet and respectful silence in the neighborhood.  At one point I looked up and, to my surprise, saw a chicken walking down the middle of the road in the dark.  There were plenty of chickens in the area, but this sight was unusual because chickens are diurnal animals and when the sun goes down they head for their roost.  Nevertheless, here was poultry walking down the street at night when it should have been at home.  As I watched, it turned off the street and walked down our driveway and came straight towards us.  It stopped right at our feet and appeared to be looking first at me and then at Royse.  Suddenly, it took a step foward and jumped up into my lap.  It stayed there and kept looking at me.  This is unusual behavior for a chicken.  Royse and I exchanged glances, made the same intuitive leap, and said, “That’s Dik’s ghost.”  I wasn’t sure what to do but I gently picked it up.  It didn’t struggle or move as I carried it back towards the road and put it on the ground.  Later in the evening, I was at the kitchen sink at the back of the house looking out the window when the same chicken jumped up onto the ledge outside the window and again looked at me.  I was never scared or upset during this whole experience, but here was an animal or an entity of some kind with an issue and I didn’t know how to help.  So I walked around to the back of the house and picked the chicken off the ledge.  This time I set it down in some bushes and told it, “I’m sorry but there’s nothing I can do for you.”  I left it there and never saw it again.

       Some time after our encounter with the spirit chicken, we heard a story about Spirit Cave.  This tale was spun not by a witch doctor but by a real flesh-and-blood archeologist named Chester “Chet” Gorman, who had earned his doctorate at the University of Hawaii and worked in Southeast Asia.  We met him at Jon Keeton’s house, at one of the many spontaneous gatherings of travelers and strangers who would assemble in his house for dinner and long drifting conversations.  At this particular soiree, after talk had roamed from international politics to Akha fertility rituals, Dr. Gorman began describing his field work and led us back 12,000 years to the Spirit Cave dig site, located on a wooded slope in Pang Mapha, the most remote and northerly district in Mae Hong Son province.  He was conducting his second excavation in the cave to study traces of the early Neolithic Hoabinhian hunter-gatherer culture.  His trowel and brush had slowly and carefully revealed a concentration of seeds and other plant remains suggesting an unexpected and surprisingly sophisticated level of horticulture.  He used his findings at Spirit Cave and at other nearby sites to write specialized historical maps for the National Geographic Society.

       So thanks to Dr. Gorman and others, Mae Hong Son province took up permanent residence in our imaginations.  We could picture those Neolithic tribes moving like shadows through dense, primeval jungles, sheltering in caves for protection from the monsoons and from predators.  It held a kind of magnetic attraction for us.  It was remote, it had a culture that was Shan instead of Thai, and, hey, it had to be visited.  During our school break at the end of the year’s first quarter, we put on our bus-riding game face and hit the road.  Getting to Chiang Mai was by now a routine process, but going from there to Mae Hong Son held the promise of some adventure.  It was the rainy season and we would be travelling on rural, gravel roads.  Our roht [bus] left the Chiang Mai terminal on the roundabout route necessitated by the region’s difficult terrain.  We headed south on a long detour via Mae Sariang to reach a pass across the mountain range that separated Chiang Mai from Mae Hong Son.  It was rainy and misty the whole trip.  Rest stops involved peeing in the bushes and getting tea and snacks from vendors in thatched huts alongside the road.  Up in the twisting turns that took the road towards the mountain pass, our bus got into trouble.  Its wheels slipped into a deep and muddy rut and got irredeemably stuck in the mire.  No one was injured and no one panicked.  Passenger cars could still get by us and one of them headed off towards Mae Hong Son to get help.  During the long wait, we hiked up and down the road, did some bird watching and ate our snacks.  The driver and his crew played a game of takraw [rattan kick ball] and the driver displayed more skill there than he had at the wheel.  After about three hours, a large government road grader showed up, hooked a chain to the bus and pulled it out of the muck.  We got into Mae Hong Son late in the day and checked into the first flea-bag hotel we came to.  When you’re in a remote provincial town with almost no attractions, no tourism and little traffic, you find your fun where you can.  One thing that drew our interest was a new temple, Wat Chong Kham, whose construction was nearly finished.  It was built in a unique local Shan style with elaborate cut-tin decorations on its spires.  Inside we watched teams of  monks as they finished the central floor by applying stain and varnish from large buckets with long-handled brushes.  Another activity was a hike up a hill to Wat Pa Ban Mai.  It afforded a terrific view out across the valley and was well worth the climb.  We noticed with surprise that this temple and its hill were perched exactly at the end of the airport runway, so that any aircraft taking off in the direction of the temple would need to make a steep climb-out to avoid hitting a cluster of monks.  Perhaps the pilots preferred this direction, however, since every time they avoided hitting the wat, they earned merit.  We had a vested interest in this issue because we had decided to fly out rather than face the muddy bus trail back to Chiang Mai.  I can’t remember in which direction we finally took off, but we both felt very meritorious by the time we got home.

       Thais consider the month or two between the end of the rainy season and the arrival of cool weather as the most romantic time of year.  Royse and I were past the courtship stage, so while nervous young men sang songs and composed poems for their girlfriends, we simply enjoyed the increasingly clear skies and the lower humidity.  This was also the time of year for Samakee’s sport’s week and, after last year’s big self-esteem boost with my discus win, I was training hard to compete in several events this time: discus, shot put and the 400 meter run.  I even had a proper track suit and spiked track shoes.   My training regimen was an interesting study in what you can schedule into your daily routine if it’s a priority.  Instead of getting up at 6:30 AM and doing a few minutes of the Royal Canadian exercises, I would leap out of bed at 5:00 AM and bicycle off to the school where I would work out by myself on the 400 meter oval.  Wind sprints alternated with heaving the shot put and discus.  In the runup to sports week, I put on a few pounds of muscle and was in really good shape.  On the big day, I made sure Royse was there with a camera to record my historic wins in the shot, the 400 and the discus.  I even ran on a winning 4 x 400 meter relay.  What a shameless showoff.  There was also the hope that the students would show me a little more respect in the classroom.

       As the weather turned cooler in December and Christmas approached, some devout Christian soul in town recruited me to sing in a holiday chorus which was preparing a presentation of Handel’s Messiah.  It struck me as a little presumptuous for a collection of no-talents goofs from an Asian Podunk like Chiang Rai to tackle one of the world’s greatest musical masterpieces, but that’s what we did.  Many evenings of rehearsals led up to a Christmas eve performance at one of the churches in town.  The quality was definitely mediocre but we gave it our all.  Our landlord’s kids even attended and sat there in bemused stupefaction at this strange farang spectacle.  The little boy, Gop, had seemed more impressed with the cheesy decorations and the small plastic Christmas tree we had installed in our house the week before.  He would regularly peer through our screen door in awe and say, “muan boht!” [just like a church!].

       After our first trip to Mae Hong Son, that province continued to beckon to us.  A plan gradually evolved for a backpacking trip to return us there in grand fashion.  After Christmas 1972, Nick Handy and Dave Dyson teamed up with us for that epic trek, which would start near Chiang Mai. Our planned path was a hike straight west to Mae Hong Son over a roadless mountain range that was little travelled.  Ben and Doris Dickerson, Chiang Mai area missionaries among the Karen, helped us with preparations and graciously hosted us in their lovely teak-timbered home for several days as we got ready.  We were in quite a state of anticipation as we bought provisions and equipment in Chiang Mai.  I was so keyed up that both my knees started to hurt from just thinking about the hike.  As I was limping through the market, I saw an Indian vendor squatting on the ground with his selection of traditional medicines.  He looked vaguely like a sadhu (holy man) and I asked him what he had for my knees.  He sold me a small glass vial containing a precious and ancient cure.  It looked like soybean oil and chopped up basil leaves.  Anyhow, I rubbed it on my knees and the pain was gone immediately.  On the day of departure, we climbed into the open bed of Ben’s old Dodge Power Wagon.  With us bouncing around in the back like loose packages, he drove north to a turnoff at Mae Rim, then west into the hills to a road head at a Christian Karen village.  Ben introduced us to the village elders there and we settled in for the night to the sound of dogs barking and the thump of foot-powered rice pounders operated by young girls.

       I had learned a few lessons from our Mae Suay trek and this time around didn’t plan on using topographical maps for navigation.  Ben’s advice was the same as Rupert Nelson’s – just trust your guides.  Gordon Young, the old Asia hand, also provided some guidance for us.  At the time he was working for a US agency combating heroin trafficking in the region and was stationed at Ban Huay Xai in Laos, just across the Mekong from the Thai town of Chiang Khong.  He would have been an unequalled trekking companion with his knowledge of the jungle and local languages but I had to settle for an exchange of letters with him.  I had written to him asking about trail conditions and general risks for the walk from Mae Rim to Mae Hong Son.  In his response, he made some general recommendations for safety and reminded me that banditry was always a hazard out in the bush.  A recent example was a missionary named Weiss who had recently been murdered on a Chiang Rai trail while visiting a remote hamlet.

       At departure the next morning, we were provided with two Karen guides (both reformed opium addicts) who allegedly knew the route to Mae Hong Son.  The general plan was to stay in Christian Karen villages along the way.  Dave Dyson was a real cheapskate and we had a big argument about how much to pay our guides.  I finally won after steadfastly insisting that we pay their way out, pay their way back and give them a tip.  Dyson was all in a huff and said, “so you think you’re “pii yai” [elder brother] or something?”  I guess maybe I was, or at least I acted like I was.  Once on the trail we settled into our daily grind but could still admire the beauty around us, especially the wild orchids.

       Although our collective level of woodcraft and trail smarts wasn’t great, we knew this was cobra habitat and should not plunge hands and feet carelessly into thick brush.  A more insidious threat was from leeches, which are strongly attracted to inattentive white hikers.  They would drop out of trees or come loping along the ground to sneak under your clothing and attach themselves to some sensitive part of your anatomy.  Then, without your permission, they would gorge themselves on your red blood cells.  The hills of the north are a Babel of languages and since our guides didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Karen, we somehow got along in Thai.  A medical kit which I had obsessively assembled with supplies mooched off the Peace Corps office in Bangkok quickly seemed too heavy to justify itself, so that got dumped.  I figured if I got sick or injured, I would rely on local folk medicine.  That first day we could sense we were getting into more remote country – fewer villages, denser forest, steeper ground.  The direct east-to-west route we were taking was seldom travelled by farang or locals for the simple reason that it was so steep and impractical.  I fancied that that made us real explorers.  At one tiny hamlet we passed I gave out plastic balloons to the kids so they would have a reminder of their encounter with the intrepid white man.  One hut had a log-hauling elephant tethered to a post.  That night we arrived in a small Karen village and were welcomed into the headman’s house for the night.  As we sat around the hearth, the chief reached up into the blackened rafters and pulled down what was clearly a prized possession – the encrusted smoke-cured leg of a pig.  I already knew that domestic sus scrofa in Thailand mostly eat garbage and feces so I watched in horror as he carved off a piece and offered it to me on his knife.  “Chin moo?” [slice of pork?].  I was sure this was instant death but it was unthinkable to show bad manners and refuse it, so I steeled myself and took a bite.  To my surprise, it tasted delicious and, as an added bonus, I was alive the next morning.  The next chapter in this porcine adventure came late that night when I went out to the bushes to take a dump.  In the middle of my business, I heard a crashing noise in the brush behind me and could literally feel the hot breath of one of the village boars on my bottom as it charged me to eat the deposit I was making.  Since I had just eaten that slice of poop-fed pork, it seemed that the great circle of life was complete.

       The next morning there was a wonderful and emotional scene as we got ready to leave.  The entire village assembled in front of their huts and sang hymns for us as we walked down the trail into the trees.   For that second day and the third day we travelled through largely undisturbed jungle.  The terrain was steep and mountainous, the vegetation was dense with towering trees.  We fell off logs trying to cross streams, and I spooked what I thought was a gaur but was probably a banteng (red cattle).  Although wild game populations in the area were steadily declining, this was country that still had a few tigers.

       In one particularly difficult section of trail, we saw an old Karen woman coming towards us through the brush, smoking a pipe and wearing a long phaa sin-style cotton skirt.  She smiled at us, stopped in a small clearing about twenty feet away, assumed a wide stance and then copiously urinated straight down on the ground without getting a drop on her clothing or her legs. As I stood there dumbfounded at this extraordinary display of skill, she gave us a courteous nod and went on her way.

       The second night we stopped at an utterly isolated place called Ban Nam Hai Jai [breathing water village].  There was a bubbling thermal spring nearby which everyone went to see except me because I was too tired.  One young man in the village had been to Chiang Mai and sported a nice purple shirt and a wrist watch.  This tiny village had been wrested with great effort from the surrounding forest, which still crowded resentfully up against the huts as if waiting for a chance to reclaim its land.  That night we sat around the fire with our guides and learned that they really didn’t know the route ahead.  So we just proceeded with educated guesswork the next morning – our third and final day.  Our packs were heavy and our feet were sore.  The villagers had generously given us large packages of steamed rice wrapped in leaves but they were quite heavy and only added to our burden.  Late in the day, exhausted and limping, we stumbled out of the woods onto the road about ten miles south of Mae Hong Son.  Trading on our pathetic appearance, we flagged down a truck to get into town.  I remember wanting some real Thai food and ordering a gigantic plate of paak boong fai daeng [stir-fried morning glory].  It was fun to see Mae Hong Son again but we were too tired for any serious sightseeing.  There was no way we were fit to hike back  to our starting point, so we hopped a bus which, in four hours,  returned us to Chiang Mai over a distance that had taken us three days to walk.

       We had told our landlord that we were planning to deun tang [walk by trail] to Mae Hong Son, and when we returned, he was eager for a report and asked “hen seua mai?” [Did you see a tiger?].  I had to disappoint him and reply, mistakenly, “mai hen seua tae hen uwah krating” [We didn’t see a tiger but we saw a gaur].

       The clear skies and the cool weather kept us on the trail, and circumstances conspired to lead us back to Wa Wi.  We were in regular touch with a gentleman named Saul Rossien, who served as an educational specialist on the staff of the Peace Corps Bangkok office.  He had previously worked as director of adult education for the state of New Jersey, but somehow wound up in Thailand with his family and a new job.  By our third year, we had something of a reputation as backcountry specialists – really a gross misperception on everyone’s part – and Saul foolishly asked us if we would take his twelve year old son David on a hike, provided of course that we brought him back alive.  We had been considering a return to Wa Wi with Nick and we decided that we could easily include David.  So, as events transpired, Saul put David on a plane by himself and flew the youngster to Chiang Rai.  As we took him into our custody, we could easily have messed with his head and played up the dangers of our outing.  “Well, David, what do you mean you didn’t bring your M16?”  “Is your life insurance paid up?”  “Your father must really want to get rid of you.”  But, no, we played it straight.  He was already plenty excited and apprehensive.  On the morning of departure, the four of us trudged down to the river and met up with the boat we had reserved for our private use.  Once we were settled, the captain put the long propeller tail of the Rotax engine in the water and started off upstream with the ear-splitting whine and spray of water that we had come to love.  The breeze was in our faces, the banks rolled by, and it was a wonderful ride.  We got off at Mae Salak, where the trail began, and we made arrangements for the boatman to pick us up the next afternoon.  As we prepared our packs on the bank, I noticed that David had brought an actual, real horseshoe with him as a good luck charm and amulet to ward off misfortune.  The darn thing looked pretty heavy.  We showed unusual restraint and refrained from kidding him.  As we ascended the trail away from the river, we were heading south, the opposite way we had come the previous year.  There was the same Christian chapel and there were the same fruit orchards.  It was lovely, tame countryside.

       We had learned a lot about Ban Wa Wi and the regional economy since our first visit there a year ago.  Wa Wi was one of several villages in northern Thailand populated by remnants of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) army who had fled China in defeat after World War II but didn’t make it to Taiwan with the Generalissimo himself.  The village’s reputation as a drug processing center and haven for shady entrepreneurs was widespread and, to me at least, gave it a certain raffish “Terry and the Pirates” appeal.  Ban Wa Wi’s economy was almost entirely opium, and, since we were literally at the center of the Golden Triangle, it was fairly common to hike through fields where opium poppies were openly grown.  The hilltribe villagers would be busy at harvest time scoring the opium blossom’s bulb with a curved, sharp-tined fork to allow the opiate-bearing resin to ooze out and dry for collection.  This was an important cash crop for them, even though it was illegal by Thai law.  They would look up from their work as we hiked past and just give us a courteous nod.  It was not unusual to see large donkey pack trains on northern mountain trails and it was a safe bet that at least some of them were transporting dope, although I never remember seeing any armed escorts as so vividly described in “Tracks of an Intruder” by Gordon Young during his scary encounters in the 1950s with Chinese drug gangs on the move through the back country of the north.  There were no roads to Wa Wi, so all the village’s commerce – legal and illegal – was conducted along a network of trails.  Although opium usually went on two legs, the bulk of routine cargo to Wa Wi went by quadruped.

       When we got to the village, we went to Gaew Ehm Aht’s house to say hello.  He was off on business so we visited a while with the wife and the daughter.  Since Gaew was away, their etiquette did not permit them to invite us to stay the night.  We hoped to find someone who would host us, counting on hill tribe hospitality to prevail.  So we hunted around for the nicest house we could find and asked the owner if he could take us in.  Well, the homeowner was a Chinese man who possibly practiced an unlawful profession and clearly had not received the hospitality memo.  He was surprised and affronted by our nervy request and only reluctantly allowed us to sleep on an outdoor porch.  He never spoke to us.  Once we had settled into our unfriendly motel, we considered what to do for dinner.  The problem was solved when the owner of one house declared it a restaurant when he saw the opportunity to overcharge some farang for a meal of badly cooked chicken.  After dinner, we took a stroll in the dark and could see sealed-off bamboo sheds with people inside stoking fires under large vats. We didn’t think they were steaming rice, but likely processing opium instead.

       The next day when we got back to Mae Salak, the boatman was there as arranged but he looked like he had something on his mind and something to say.  He pointed to a dignified and well-dressed woman standing nearby and said that she needed a ride downstream.  It turned out she was the wife of some local KMT official and she needed to travel in our boat to a village halfway to Chiang Rai, even though we had already paid the boatman for the private use of his vessel.  She was quietly using her relatively high social status to get her way, and she and the boatman clearly expected us to agree to her request.  In the end, she paid us for a seat on our private barge and we all travelled happily downstream, enjoying the river scenes as they passed by.  Clouds of steam rose from a hot spring in a back eddy on the south bank.  Rotting bamboo sticks from an abandoned fish trap quivered nervously in the current.  At the KMT lady’s destination, there was a celebration going on and we watched groups of kids having a merry time spinning home-made wooden tops.  Finally, we were able to return David and his horseshoe alive and unharmed to the embrace of his family.  Royse and I both gave high marks to this young man for being a strong hiker and a good trail companion.  Nowadays much of the country around Wa Wi is still beautiful, but after nearly half a century of progress, there is a paved road and electric power all the way from Mae Suaie to the Kok river.  You can use Google Street View to see the 7-Eleven convenience store in Wa Wi, as well as the several boutique tourist resorts along the way.  It’s hard not to get sentimental about that lost Shangri-La.

       As the last term of the school year wrapped up and as the hot season approached, our stay in Thailand came to an end.  We had to make decisions on what to keep and what to leave behind.  One item I treasured was a large piece of Yao embroidery and I employed the services of a seamstress who lived nearby.  She used her gifted hands to transform that fabric into an exceptionally handsome vest which I wore with pride on many occasions.  We stuffed our teak wood trunks and shipped them off.  Handouts and giveaways made us look like a relief agency.  Larry Rose got our Tin Lizzy.  The landlord found someone to replace us.  Our schools threw us a lovely and sentimental liang sohng at Damrong school.  The words “Till we meet again” were hung on the wall.  We ate, we drank, we joked and we remembered.  They made each of us get up and give a speech.  Ajaan Suwatana had helped me prepare my remarks and I remember saying, “yang mai nae wah anakote ja ben yangrai”[I’m not sure what the future will bring] and that was certainly true.  Then we danced a good part of the night away, ramwong-ing with our Thai friends for the last time.  At the airport, as we took our last flight from Chiang Rai, tears were shed by those leaving and those staying behind.

       But just as our picture-perfect, happy-ending finale came to a close, something unexpected happened.  After a few days in Bangkok, I started feeling extremely tired.  It was an effort to walk.  It was an effort to do anything.  The Peace Corps doctor listened to my complaints, asked a few questions, and then made me stand by a window where he could look at my eyes in natural light.  They must have looked jaundiced because he said, “I think you have hepatitis”.  And he was right.  I might have picked up the hepatitis A virus through oral-fecal contamination at our farewell dinner as a going-away present, but I didn’t take it personally.  Anyway, guess who got admitted to the Bangkok Hospital of Tropical Medicine?  I was there several weeks in a private suite – $15 per day – that allowed Royse to stay with me.  The treatment was simply rest and an ultra low fat diet.  Hepatitis A makes your poop look pale since no bile reaches the GI tract and I was under orders to regularly deliver a specimen turd for assessment.  It was pretty boring and I slept a lot.  One source of cheer was listening to music on the US Armed Forces radio station.  Johnny Nash’s “I can see Clearly Now” was in heavy rotation and really lifted my spirits.  When they decided I was stable, they discharged me and sent us down the coast to Hua Hin with orders to continue resting, so we just lounged around there by the shore under the palm trees for another two weeks.

       My guess is that some government official finally picked up the phone and called the Peace Corps office in Bangkok and said, “Would you please get those two good-for-nothing white breads out of the country?”.  Eventually, we were done with Hua Hin, the doctor was done with us, and we left Bangkok for Bali, although, as the reader will discover, it would not be our final departure from Thailand.  Now we were headed for Indonesia and we slid down the Malay peninsula on trains, buses and cars.  We had a nice stop in Penang, Malaysia and enjoyed its rich colonial heritage.  Heading south from there, we somehow got hooked up with a Peace Corps couple in the town of Ipoh who put us up for the night.  I remember them for their comfy lifestyle.  They could afford to have an entire family work for them as servants.  That servant family in turn could afford to hire help.  Now that’s trickle-down economics.

       From Ipoh, for some unknown reason, we hired a private car to drive us to Kuala Lumpur.  That experience is burned into my memory because it was a hot day and the driver kept nodding off at the wheel.  Royse and the other passengers were fast asleep, so I had to keep up a constant stream of lively chatter to prevent this guy from going to sleep, flying off the road and turning us all into several hundred pounds of carnage burger.  Miraculously, we made it alive to Singapore and that’s a darn good thing because I was really looking forward to seeing this famous city-state, about which I had heard and read so much.

       The name “Singapore” means “The City of Lions” and beginning in the thirteenth century it was a trading center and the seat of various Malay kingdoms which lasted until Westerners arrived on the scene to screw over the locals.  The Portuguese burned the city to the ground in 1613 and it slumbered in obscurity until the early nineteenth century.  In 1819 the British statesman Sir Stamford “Bingley” Raffles founded a trading post on the island in the names of the Honorable East India Company and King George III, ushering in the modern era of Singapore’s history.  It became part of the British Empire and grew into a prosperous commercial hub, located as it was at the nexus of important shipping routes.  The population is a polyglot mix of Chinese, Malay and Indian and has a history of remarkable racial harmony.  The intense entrepreneurial spirit in the city suggests that people are preoccupied with business and don’t have time to fight with their neighbors.  When we showed up, it had been independent since 1959 and the crusty, Oxford-educated president-for-life Lee Kuan Yew was possessed of great plans to push economic growth and, as time allowed, to deal with Singapore’s reputation as one of the world’s great fleshpots.  By 1973 he was already making headway on the business front, although on the latter issue of the sin industry, he really had his hands full.  He had to face the underlying relaxed Southeast Asian mores and the swarms of pleasure-seeking sailors, soldiers and tourists who crowded into its waterfront and entertainment districts, hormones raging and hot for a good time.  Singapore was easily one of the wildest party towns in the world, and, advised in advance by the traveller’s grapevine, we headed straight for the city’s crossdressing neighborhood.  In those perfumed tropical nights, shoals of transvestites – all drop-dead gorgeous – flowed up and down Bugis street arm in arm, flirting with each other and blowing kisses to the passersby.  They made the regular prostitutes look drab by comparison.  Australian sailors – when they weren’t patronizing the women (or men?) of the night – would climb onto the roof of a public toilet, drop their pants to the cheers of hundreds of drunken onlookers, place a rolled newspaper between their butt cheeks, set it aflame, and then do “The Dance of the Flaming Arseholes”.

       The winner was the swab who could hold his newspaper the longest as it burned down.  Royse and I – dumbstruck witnesses to a cultural scene that would eventually be swept away – watched this panorama of debauchery from the safety of cafe seats, clutching two beer bottles for protection.  In the early 70s, authorities did not appear quite ready to crack down on the bawdy stuff and seemed instead to concentrate their energies on fining people for wearing long hair and spitting in public.  I must hasten to point out that we always felt quite safe in Singapore and took great pleasure in wandering through the nighttime crowds, following one enticing aroma after another, to sample the wild variety of street food on offer at the hundreds of hawker carts.  Among my favorites were barbequed stingray, fish head curry and nasi lemak (fragrant rice cooked in coconut milk and pandan leaf, garnished with sambal chili and peanuts).  This particular tranche of the urban dining scene was destined to change, however, and, shortly after our visit, the government, with its growing determination to make things neat and orderly, moved all the reluctant hawkers to central locations where they could be carefully inspected and monitored.  The food, of course, was still great, but some of the charm and ambience was lost.  The morning after our night on the town, while the party animals were still asleep, we left our room at the YMCA and strolled over to see how the monied class was doing at the landmark Raffles Hotel, named, of course, after Bingley himself.  If Bugis Street is Singapore’s lower intestine, then the Raffles is its stately and dignified crown.  This remarkable watering hole has a history as fascinating as the city itself.  The site it occupies began as a modest beach house for private use in the 1830s, although, over time, development and relentless landfill would devour the beach and move the waterfront almost half a mile away.  It opened in 1887 and the majestic colonial-style main building was completed in 1899 – the first hotel in Singapore to have both electric lights and electric ceiling fans.  It became a favored haunt for writers, artists and the wealthy travelling elite.  Somerset Maugham spent many an evening at the famous long bar, where, in 1915, bartender Ngiam Tong Boon invented the Singapore Sling cocktail.  In 1902 a tiger, which either swam across from the mainland or escaped from a local circus, was shot underneath the bar.  As soon as I make my first zillion, that’s where I’m going to stay.  For me, another must-see destination in town was the Tiger Balm Gardens, a public park built by the wealthy Chinese family that manufactures Tiger Balm ointment (which I had used liberally on my sore joints as I trained for the Chiang Rai track and field day).  It was not really a tranquil, zen-like environment where you could quietly contemplate nature since the numerous displays were tacky and grotesque dioramas of scenes from Chinese history and mythology.  It was a perfect storm of larger-than-life vulgarity and I particularly remember the statue of one unfortunate fellow with a grimace on his face, a shower of blood on his shoulders, and a very long knife which entered his left ear and came out his right.  It was rather emblematic of the Chinese Cultural Revolution which was underway at the time.

       After our time in that remarkable flesh stew, we took a ferry to Java and stumbled and hopscotched our way to the far eastern tip of that island and took another ferry to Bali, the only Hindu island in all of Muslim Indonesia.  The back story is that when Islam moved across the region centuries ago, the Hindu aristocracy took its court and all its dancers and artists and consolidated on Bali, where they were somehow able to resist conversion to the new faith.  In the process, they managed to preserve their culture, which included a tradition of extraordinary artistic creativity.  We spent a week there, but could easily have lingered longer.

       Even in the 1970s there were lots of tourists in Bali, but we were fine with that because the place was so very special.  The men were handsome, the women were beautiful, and flowers were everywhere in a riot of color.  Hindu temples and steeply terraced rice paddies formed enchanting landscapes.  In Denpasar, we stayed at the Two Brothers Inn, a delightful little guest house on Jalan Imam Bonjol.  It would be our base for various sorties around the city and across the island.  Once we stepped through the carved wooden doorway into its gardens, the honk and sputter of motor scooters in the street simply faded away and we were surrounded by the cool shade of tall trees and the scent of frangipani blossoms.  Of course we were still in Asia and I very quickly felt the presence of the spirit world.  In the courtyard of the inn – which was also a family residence – there was a large shrine dedicated to ancestors and local deities.  It was made of dark wood and had a rather somber and formidable appearance, unlike the brightly painted spirit houses in Thailand.  I could see the shrine from where I lay in bed, but I didn’t pay it much attention until, after I had gone to bed, I started to feel something like a tingling or a pressure on my face coming through the window.  I was unable to compose myself for sleep, and the pressure, which I now knew was coming from that shrine, gradually increased.  I had been in Asia long enough that this manifestation of spiritual energy didn’t surprise me, and I tried closing the shutters.  That did the trick.  These weren’t spirits that could penetrate wood.

       One evening in a neighborhood near our inn, we got to watch a presentation of wayang kulit, the traditional Indonesian shadow puppet theatre in which the puppet master – the dalang – sits behind a cloth screen with an oil lamp and projects the shadows of flat leather puppets onto the cloth for the viewers on the other side.  The stories he tells are taken from Hindu mythology, especially the Ramayana and the Mahabharata .  The elaborately hinged and painted characters are attached to sticks and held up to the screen by the master, who also provides a narrative and sound effects.  A two-person gamelan orchestra beat out a rapid and percussive musical setting.  Except for the two of us, the audience was entirely neighborhood children, sitting on the ground and watching with rapt attention as the highly stylized characters leapt and charged one another through their shadowy world under the puppeteer’s practiced hand.  Some of the kids found the dalang’s work more interesting than the actual story and they would sit “backstage” with the master and watch him create his magic.  Another local entertainment was cockfighting, and one afternoon, after paying a small admission fee, we crowded into a pavilion and looked down into a small ring where the owners of two fighting roosters were preparing their combatants for a match.  Since chickens are not smart enough to give informed consent, they just gazed about nervously while long razor-sharp blades were tied firmly to their ankles.  The men then banged the birds’ heads together to excite them and make them aggressive enough to fight.  This process worked because the two cocks really went at each other in a flurry of beating wings and flashing steel.  There was heavy betting and wads of money changed hands amidst shouts and cries.  If one or both of the birds tired of the action, they were thrown back into the ring and made to fight to the death.  Soon they were both covered in blood and steadily weakening.  If a rooster collapsed on the ground, the owner would put his lips to the bloody head and give artificial respiration.  Eventually, one man had the winnings and the other had the makings of a chicken curry for dinner.  Royse and I found this show rather entertaining and gave little thought to the wanton animal cruelty involved.  We were like two spectators in the Roman coliseum, watching and cheering as Christians were torn apart by lions.

       Balinese architecture reaches its highest expression in the elaborately carved stonework of the island’s many temple complexes, or pura, the greatest of which is the Mother Temple at Besakih.  We figured out the local bus routes and made that one of our first stops.  Besakih is a large collection of multiple temples located  high on the slopes of the sacred mountain Gunung Agung.  Its six levels are approached up flights of stairs through a large candi bentar [split gateway].  The visual focal point of most Balinese temples is the pagoda-like Meru tower, a tall structure with narrowing, multi-tiered thatched roofs.  The island’s temples are almost continuously animated by processions of villagers, carrying elaborate flower arrangements and celebrating festivals for particular deities.  At one temple out in the countryside, we got to witness a cremation ceremony.  It began with a large crowd who went through the carefully ordered steps of the mourning ritual.  The pyre was lit and the flames began to consume the body.  It took a long time and I remember that, after everyone else had departed, one man was stuck with the job of completing the cremation process by keeping the fire stoked and using a pole to rotate the now-much-reduced body in the flames, it’s short, blackened limbs still protruding in the air and pointing skyward.  Not a very dignified ending.

       I have some opinions.  I think that the Japanese have the world’s most highly evolved visual aesthetic and that the Balinese can make a similar claim for their dance.  Their many types of dance are mostly derived from Indian classical forms, but the Balinese have put their own magical stamp on them.  We saw quite a few presentations, including the kejak, and the barong, but the one that seized my attention and lingers in my memory was the legong.  Performed exclusively by young girls who begin their rigorous training at age five, the legong is a court dance which may have arisen from ceremonies in which dancers are possessed by beneficent spirits.  We got to see future legong dancers in training at the open-sided veranda in our neighborhood where meetings and ceremonies are held.  The instructor – an older woman who was undoubtedly a dancer in her youth – had a class of about fifteen little girls who were just starting to learn the enormous vocabulary of Balinese classical dance.  She would move from child to child, adjusting posture, the tilt of the head and hand position.  The performances we saw, although presented for tourists, were holy and serious business for the dancers and were electrifying to watch.  As they tell their stories and the gamelan orchestra creates a charged musical atmosphere, the dancers – eyes askew and fingers quivering – move in a rigid, angular style that absolutely crackles with tension and energy.  When the performance was finished, the dancers looked tired, and, as the tourists were drifting away, I saw them sacrifice a chicken – not for the visitors but for themselves and their gods.

       We took a bus across the island to Singaraja on the north shore.  We passed through rising terrain that was once forested enough to shelter the Bali tiger, until hunting and loss of habitat drove it to extinction in the 1950s.  Up in the highlands of Bali’s mountainous spine, we visited the Ulun Danu temple on Beratan lake.  This place had quite a different feeling from the lowlands around Denpasar.  Here it was cool and rainy and silent, devoid of tourists.  The lake was dark and brooding.  We stepped into the temple complex and saw a group of men sitting together on low stone walls.  As I got out my camera to take pictures, I got some very unfriendly looks and it was clear we were not welcome.  We retreated to the nearby village and the bus station, leaving the men and the temple spirits to their own business.

       From Bali, we turned on our heels and headed back across Indonesia’s archipelago and back up the Malay peninsula, with a plan to fly home from Bangkok via India.  When we were briefly back in Thailand, I was astonished to find that, after only three weeks, I was already losing my ability to speak Thai.  My command of that tongue had been much more tenuous than I thought and I felt mortified.  That was certainly an indication that it was time to move on.  Back in those days, all transportation arrangements were done on paper and, in our case, one stage at a time.  In Bangkok, we bought tickets to New Delhi where we would stay to make some side trips.  Staying at YMCAs in various countries was always like being in a dysfunctional relationship.  It was cheap but you sacrificed comfort.  In New Delhi, the monsoon and its cooling rains were late, so it was 120 degrees, humid and windless.  Nothing was air conditioned.  We were lucky to have a fan in our bedroom that worked intermittently.  From our window, we could see a tennis court where every morning at 6:00 AM, a dedicated mixed doubles foursome would show up and bravely whack the ball while the temperature was a relatively cool 95 degrees.  In restaurants, sweat dripped off our noses into our food.  The bus trip to Agra to see the Taj Mahal – entirely worth the effort – gave us some hot air in the window.  We ate at a restaurant that bravely advertised itself as “thoroughly air cooled”.  That meant that it had a fan.  We went out for an evening of what, in Delhi, passed for avant garde theatre.  In a small, hot room, seated with other curious onlookers, we watched a single actress put on a one-person interpretation of the Ramayana.  At a minimum, she got credit for being brave enough to take on one of the world’s great epics in a rather brief show.  On the downside, she didn’t wear a costume, nor were there any props and music.  She worked her lack of magic on a bare stage and left everything to the imaginations of the audience.  She would stand to the left and, as Rama, would look across to the imaginary, abducted wife and cry out, “Sita!”.   Then she would scamper over to the right and, as Sita, would look back helplessly at her handsome prince and yell, “Oh Rama!”, as she was carried off by an imaginary Ravana. Overall, it was a boldly conceived but underwhelmingly executed coup de teatre.  Perhaps we should have only imagined buying tickets instead of actually spending money for them.

       We got out of New Delhi’s heat by buying first-class bus tickets north to Kashmir and travelling up into the mountains on roads that routinely made newspaper headlines when a truck or a bus – even with specially trained and licensed drivers – went through a guard rail and plunged thousands of feet down a canyon.  Our number didn’t come up, however, and we made it to Srinagar, the capital of India’s Jammu and Kashmir territory.  This area is predominantly Muslim, and India and Pakistan have been fighting over it since independence from Britain in 1947.  Nonetheless, the vale of Kashmir was beautiful and we stayed on a houseboat anchored in Dal Lake, sharing these idyllic accommodations for a few days with a lively couple from New Zealand.  All day long people tried to sell us things.  Vendors would paddle up in their little shikara and show us their goods.  Gold, lacquerware, silver, papier mache, fabric – the choices were endless.  One man, whose hunting associates had clearly been out in the hills creating empty forests, arrived in a boat loaded entirely with furs.  I took a picture of Royse modeling an elegant fox coat, but, to the salesman’s disappointment, there was no purchase since it was well beyond our budget.
We fell under the spell of a smooth-talking carpet salesman who invested an enormous amount of time and energy being friendly, serving us tea, and showing us mountains of hand-knotted rugs made by happy, unexploited children and colored – allegedly – with all-natural dyes.

       This effusive hospitality made us feel guilty and thus made us easy marks for a sale.  In the end, we acquired a very nice Kirman and even agreed to let the man ship it to us.  This was a classic set-up for screwing the tourist by not actually sending the item after the visitor had returned home.  We discussed this risk with the salesman.  Hands were thrown up in horror and shocked denial.  Allah forbid!  We were emphatically assured that any Kashmiri merchant who would dare to commit such a dastardly act would quickly be out of the rug business and would drive a taxi for the rest of his life.  This assuaged our concern only a little, but as proof that miracles do happen in life, we paid this stranger a lot of money, let him ship that lovely rug and….we actually received it.

       In another episode of retail combat, we purchased a beautiful, hand-embroidered antique tablecloth.  Royse and I bargained so long and so hard that, after a price was agreed on, the shop owner slumped back in his chair, exhausted and spent.  I had been the more offensive of the two of us in these negotiations.  He turned his weary eyes on me.  “Sir”, he said weakly, “you are a Jew”.  That was a proud moment for me.  On our last day, we got a pay-back farewell from the youth of Kashmir.  As we took a last walk through the old town, kids started throwing stones at us.  I didn’t have any ready ammunition to retaliate but was able to stop them in their tracks – at least once – by raising my hand to heaven and shouting at them in Arabic, “May Allah disembowel you all!!”.

       We decided not to brave the mountain roads back down, so we flew from Srinagar to New Delhi.  All I remember about the flight is that, as we sat on the tarmac loading passengers, the air vents didn’t work and all the passengers were being asphyxiated as the carbon dioxide levels rose.  Finally, re-oxygenated and transported back to the Gangetic plain, we found ourselves wandering through Delhi’s bazaars, negotiating with merchants who dealt in airline tickets.  They worked as speculators and would buy up a block of seats and resell them individually to gullible travelers like us.  So we bought what we hoped were two valid tickets to London but wouldn’t find out for sure until we got to the airport.  On departure day at the airline counter, a stern woman with a dot on her forehead looked at our paperwork and frowned as if criminal mischief was clearly evident.  She looked accusingly at me and at Royse, paused in thought, but finally stamped our tickets and handed us our boarding passes.  While this prolonged drama was unfolding, two men behind us were in a stew of impatience and frustration.  One of them cut in front of us and told the counter lady that the man with him was none other than the illustrious Frank Fasi, mayor of Honolulu and could they please have some preferential treatment because of their immense collective social status.  Our friend with the dot on her forehead (the Brahmin elitist) gave them (the untouchable pariah dogs) a withering look and said she would take care of them shortly.  Eventually we were allowed to board a beautiful Air India 747 which got us to London in fine style, with a brief stopover in Kuwait which featured a touchdown so smooth you couldn’t feel the moment when the wheels touched the runway.  In London,  it was back to the embrace of shady ticket dealers as we addressed our need to reach New York City.  We handed a lot of money to a stranger and thought we had made arrangements to fly us in a straight-forward manner from London to the Big Apple, but the reality turned out to be a surreal and Byzantine adventure which was a very appropriate finale to our Peace Corps days.  We and some other confused travelers were given a complex set of instructions.  On the morning of our big travel day, we all assembled at a street corner in London where we were herded onto buses and driven out into the English countryside to a small airport.  Stepping off the bus, we saw a propeller cargo plane with a bulbous body and no markings, which through subsequent research I tentatively identified as an ATL Carvair.  We were told to get on.  That plane took off and flew us, not west as we wanted to go, but east across the Channel to Ostend, Belgium, where it landed at yet another small airport and we were told to get off.  As we stood dazed on the tarmac, I saw another plane, which at least I recognized – a DC-8, a four-engine, trans-Atlantic jet airliner.  The name on the plane was Pomair, a name not known to any of us.  It turned out to be a small start-up discount airline which would shortly go out of business.  We were told to get on.  The plane took off and we all hoped it was headed west across the Pond.  In fact, it was flying in the right direction, but the next problem to develop was that the plane did not have permission to land in New York.  The pilot began calling up and down the eastern seaboard, looking for an airport which would allow the aircraft to land.  While those radio conversations were taking place, passengers amused themselves by comparing one another’s tickets, which all showed different prices and different destinations.  Finally, the first officer got on the intercom and told us that the airport in Portland had agreed to receive our vagabond craft while the crew continued negotiations to proceed onward to New York.  As the plane landed in Maine, Royse and I held a quick conference.  We were back in the States.  We could get our baggage off the plane.  We were close to DeWitt and Patty.  We didn’t need to continue on to New York.  We said, “Let’s get off here”.  And so we did, and our Peace Corps journey of five years came to an end.