The first portion of our Thailand 30 training program took place on the Hilo campus of the University of Hawaii on the Big Island.  We were the thirtieth program to train for Thailand and, with our limited perspective, we thought that was a huge number since we had been only the second Libya class.  The Thai programs would go on to number in the hundreds.  The candidate volunteers in our group were housed in tropical veranda-style dormitories on campus. Ours was called Hale Oahu, pronounced “hah-lay”.  It was a little cramped but was surrounded by swaying palm trees and singing birds, and warm breezes carried the scent of flower gardens to us, so it was easily tolerated.  The food was great and I especially remember the huge platters of fruit – pineapples, mangoes, papayas.  The training regimen was similar in structure to that for Libya but seemed more manageable, perhaps because this was the second time around for us.  The roster of trainees included quite a few volunteers from the Libya program, so it was a bit like old home week as we saw a lot of familiar faces  One very pleasant relaxation was hiking up the Wailuku river that flowed into Hilo and swimming in a pool beneath a lovely cascade called Rainbow Falls.  The cold water in the hot weather was delightful.  Local teenagers would also come there to swim and relax and I thought that was very Polynesian.  My final impression of Hawaii was that it was even nicer than all the good things I had heard about it. 

On February 15, we hitchhiked across the island to Hapuna Beach State Park, which is on the north shore.  Our ride took us across vast plantations of sugar cane which covered the land everywhere in an unvarying blanket of green.  This was the face of industrial agriculture.  The local man who drove us said he was tired of looking at it.  By contrast, the Hapuna coast is nature untamed.  It catches the same powerful surf as the Banzai Pipeline on Oahu.  I heedlessly swam out from shore into the crashing breakers.  Not surprisingly, a large wave caught me and drove me deep underwater, forcing air out of my lungs and disorienting me.  Just as I struggled towards the surface for a breath, another wave came smashing down and pushed me under again.  I wasn’t familiar with surfing terminology at the time but this was a two-wave hold-down which, depending on the circumstances and severity, can lead variously to discomfort, or panic, or death.  Somehow I managed to get a few breaths and swim back to the beach.  It was a close call and I was very thankful that fate spared me to finish training, because, jeez, I hadn’t even seen Thailand yet.

I remember the very first words from the lips of our Thai instructor on our very first day of language class.  She said “tueng”” and “toong” in a rising tone without us knowing the meaning (“arrive” and “bag”).  This was to start the process of familiarizing our ears to the five tones in the Thai language.  Her name was Patira and she would go on to marry a volunteer named Dave Kalis and wind up living – rather unhappily – in the Cleveland area.  For some reason, Royse and I were asked to be chaperones at a junior high YMCA dance, which was easy work and I don’t recall having to break up any inappropriate behavior.  I remember one training couple in particular, Charlie and Julie Weber, who were fun to be around and exceptionally proficient at Thai.  The story circulated that Julie was a Habsburg princess.  The Thai language staff were very impressed with that piece of news, since royalty is a big thing for them.  One pulled me aside and whispered confidentially, “Mr. Peter, is it true that Mrs. Julie is a princess?”.  The other language star that I remember was Susie Miller.  She soaked up Thai like a sponge and would go on to read, write and speak Thai like a native.

Our first impressions of Thai people were overwhelmingly positive.  Royse thought the men were handsome.  I thought the women were beautiful.  They were unfailingly polite, gracious and cheerful.  Frequent bathing and fastidious personal hygiene are ingrained in the culture so that the women especially always smelled “hawn” [fragrant], like flower gardens, in contrast to Westerners who have a baseline “raeng” [strong] body odor.  The many Thai women who marry Western men must indeed show a great deal of cultural tolerance as they live their lives with odoriferous partners.
We had a great weekend outing to the vast, steep-walled Waipio valley north along the coast from Hilo and had the place virtually to ourselves.  We relaxed in a small cabin and cooked fish that I caught in the freshwater Wailoa stream flowing across the valley floor.  The luxuriantly green, rain-softened landscape made us feel like we were living in a Hiroshige print.  Our ride to this piece of paradise was provided by one of the training staff who was broke like us but still wanted a car, so he paid $75 for a 1949 Hudson, which, with prayer and careful use, ran until the end of training.  The trainees would throw impromptu parties for themselves.  This would involve finding an empty room, a record player and some beer.  It wasn’t fancy but loud and fun worked just as well.  Creedence Clearwater was making it big and we danced to Proud Mary and Born on the Bayou.

In mid- March we flew to Thailand for the second half of the training program.  I remember the flight over as a grueling ordeal of sleepless jet lag.  There was a stopover in Guam for fuel.  We griped but, really, we had it much easier than trans-Pacific travelers just twenty five years before.  In the late 1940s, for example, before jet travel became routine, missionaries departing California for a remote post in northern Thailand could expect a trip of several months, first by steamer, then by train, oxcart and horseback to their assigned village.  Now that took faith.  The Thai 30 training and preparation continued at Bangsaen, a little village southeast of Bangkok on the Gulf of Thailand.  The weather was hot and humid, but daily life in a beach village in Thailand is delightful and this was a relaxing counterpoint to the built-in stresses and demands of training.  You had sea breezes and the sound of surf.  Food vendors were everywhere with delicious, exotic items.  It was easy to see why a zillion American expatriates lived in Thailand.  The only dark cloud I recall was an incident involving Susie Miller and another trainee named Tom Hudson.  They were walking back to the Teacher Training College one evening after dinner and were robbed at gunpoint.  Tom was sufficiently traumatized that he resigned from the program the next day and flew home.  Susie had a strong commitment to living in Thailand and she persevered.  During this time I got a letter from Dad saying Mom had undergone a radical mastectomy for breast cancer.  That was a real shock, but I was encouraged by the doctors’ opinion that they got the malignancy early.

The second half of training accelerated our introduction to the complex fabric of Thai society.  India and China have both had major influences in the evolution of Thai culture.  Theravada Buddhism arose in India and spread to Southeast Asia.  Its sacred Pali language makes up about half the Thai vocabulary.  The Thai language is tonal like Chinese and Vietnamese and the country has a large Chinese population.  Many national holidays mark events in the Buddhist calendar.  The Thais celebrate their own New Year in mid-April with the Songkran festival.  Traditionally it is a time marked by merit-making and family reunions.  Water is poured over Buddhist statues and over the young and elderly to symbolically wash away sins and bad luck.  This has evolved over time into wild water fights, especially in the big cities.  During our Bangsaen training, we went up to Bangkok for a weekend and that trip was an eye-opening introduction not only to Thai holiday excitement but to the dangers of the road.  As we rode a bus up the crowded high-speed coastal road, a car passed us like a bullet on a blind curve and disappeared ahead, weaving in and out of traffic.  I thought the obvious: this guy’s going to crash.  Sure enough, a minute later, we came upon the catastrophic wreck I had expected.  The car had hit an oncoming vehicle head-on.  Drivers and front-seat passengers, unbelted and airbag-less, had gone through the windshields and were mostly dead.  A semi-conscious passenger in the back seat looked out in a daze.  Our bus just kept on going.  And this kind of fun continued once we got to Bangkok.  We were on a city bus at the height of the Songkran frenzy.  As usual, the bus was jammed full.  I was standing several feet behind the driver and holding onto the ceiling grab bar.  An enthusiastic festival-goer stepped off the curb and heaved a very large water balloon at the windshield of the bus.  Instead of bursting harmlessly in a shower of wet fun, it shattered the window like a bomb, sending the non-safety plate glass flying in lethal shards everywhere.  The driver’s face was badly lacerated.  Somehow I was untouched but other passengers near me were cut up and were dripping blood.  In the screaming and chaos, as they helped the bleeding driver out of the bus, I yelled one of the few Thai words I knew, “Rong phayaban!!  Rong phayaban!!” [Hospital!!  Hospital!!].  No one really listened to me but they did bundle the poor guy into a taxi for a trip to get emergency care.  When we weren’t nearly getting killed in traffic, though, Bangkok was a dense, vibrant and exciting place.  In its noisy, throbbing markets you could find almost anything.  The Pratunam district had bespoke tailors for all types of clothing, guys and gals alike.  Over the years I ordered many shirts and slacks made there for a few bucks apiece.  They were always ready in twenty four hours.  I have a vague memory of getting a seersucker suit made by a Chinese tailor who was so short he had to stand on a stool to measure my shoulders.

During our years in Thailand, we regularly read in the English-language Bangkok Post about traffic accidents.  This grisly drumbeat of highway disasters often involved bus accidents, which made great newspaper copy because of the number of victims involved.  Very frequently the story of a bus mishap would end with the statement that the bus driver had fled the scene of the accident. This punch line was repeated so often that a running joke developed that somewhere in Laos there was a village populated exclusively by fugitive Thai bus drivers.  In truth, the Bangkok Post was more than just reports of slaughter on the tarmac.  Unlike smartypants Susie Miller who learned to read and write Thai fluently, we relied on the Post as a window – in English – on events happening in Thailand.  There would regularly be articles reporting that all vice and crime had finally been stamped out in the country.  We saw an article that the first PhD had been awarded by a Thai university, a doctorate given to a young woman for studies in biology.  Over the years I clipped out interesting pieces and assembled them into a scrapbook – a snapshot of a special and hokey kind of journalism.

Even though most of Thailand experiences some kind of dry season, the baseline impression you get is one of extreme verdant growth.  If there’s an open patch of soil, vegetation will claim it, and if you don’t commit to very active pruning and clipping, plants will invade your home and yard, cover your windows and come through your walls.  Thais certainly tried to keep their homes looking nice but they weren’t committed to neatly trimmed edges like you’d find in a formal French garden, and many properties had kind of a shaggy green look.   By far, a town’s best kept buildings were its Buddhist temples.  You could tell that a collective neighborhood effort had gone into making them sparkle and shine like jewels.  By comparison the commercial districts in many towns, although lively, had a tatty, unkempt look back in the 1970s.  Their appearance was hurt even more, at least to our western eyes, by the atrocious mismanagement of electrical power lines that snaked down a main drag in a horrifying spaghetti tangle of improvised wiring.  Back then, it was the temples – gleaming immaculate in gold and white – that had cornered the market on civic pride.

By mid-May we had completed – and survived – training.  Those surviving trainees received assignments throughout the country in a wide variety of settings, from the urban stink of Bangkok to remote villages with dirt roads.  One brave fellow with a bad stammer who simply could not pronounce words beginning with “s” found to his dismay that he had been assigned to teach in the town of Sakon Nakhon.  Volunteers assigned to schools in the extreme south were truly in the steaming tropical jungle.  One such teacher in Nakhon Si Thammarat came home to find an enormous cobra casually exploring the edge of her living room floor.  Her clever solution was to hold a brick against the wall with her finger and let it go when the snake was underneath, stunning the intruder and giving her time to drag it outdoors with strict orders not to return.  Those southern provinces were predominantly Muslim and, in the 1970s, there was just the beginning of an anti-Thai insurgency which continues to this day.  Through some fortunate workings of that site assignment process, Royse and I were destined for Chiang Rai, the most northerly province and generally regarded as one of the best assignments two volunteers could hope for.  To my mind, it was hands down the most exotic location in the country.  The beautifully forested geography was perfect for our backpacking plans and gave the best access to the numerous hill tribes that live primarily in the mountains that rise to the west in successive ranges.  Although most of those tribes lived in established villages which were only occasionally moved, in those days there was still one tribe of hunter-gatherers – the Mrabri or “Spirits of the Yellow Leaves” – who drifted like ghosts through the pockets of forest along the Thai-Lao border.  The town of Chiang Rai was set in a large alluvial rice-farming valley surrounded by a backdrop of lush green limestone hills.  Nature had decorated the central valley with occasional small hills, which often had gleaming gold-spired temples at the summit approached by stairways guarded by elaborately sculpted naga [serpents].  A free bonus for excitement was the active communist insurgency in the province, which could make the place dangerous, and in fact those commie rebs made a priority of assassinating local officials.  It was also at the exact heart of the Golden Triangle opium growing region, which added some intrigue and spice, since any truck you saw rolling down the highway might well have bricks of heroin hidden in its cargo bed.  In ancient times King Mengrai ruled the Lanna kingdom from Chiang Rai, so there was that rich layer of local history.  As I rode my bike around town, I noticed that there were still small sections of the town’s ancient fortified walls – all overgrown and deteriorated, but enough to evoke brief glimpses of past ages when this part of Southeast Asia was a scene of warring kingdoms – Burmese, Thai and Khmer.  In the North, they spoke their own distinct dialect which we knew as “kham muang” [“city word”].  It was easy to cross the mostly uncontrolled borders of Laos and Burma, although technically we weren’t supposed to enter those countries.  One time, on a whim, we took a boat across the Mekong to a Loatian hamlet where an American aid worker lived.  No customs, no passports, no border control, no nothing.  He was gone so we just took the boat back home.  I can claim that I was in Burma because I walked more than halfway across the bridge over the Ruak river at the Mae Sai border.  The village of Tachilek, in Burma’s Shan States, is at the other end of the bridge and the government of Burma back then could not really claim to control it, regardless of what the map says.  The real power in that area was held by warlord Khun Sa, the biggest opium kingpin in Southeast Asia.  He and his private militia ran the show in that neighborhood.
It wasn’t until many years after our service in Thailand had been completed and I had done some reading about Southeast Asian cultures that I came to realize the complex relationship between northern Lanna culture and the nation’s dominant central Thai society.  It hasn’t always been a comfortable relationship.  For centuries northern Thailand – especially Chiang mai and Chiang Rai – had periodically been either fully independent or subjugated as vassal states of Burma or China, with the occasional invasion from the kingdom of Ayutthaya to the south.  As ancient Siam became the modern state of Thailand (which would include the northern regions), there was a natural push to stabilize its borders and to centralize governmental authority in Bangkok through uniformity in its laws, civil administration and armed forces.  This trend, of course, had the effect of weakening and diluting the indigenous northern culture.  Interestingly, there never seems to have arisen in the north any political resistance to this extension of power from the south nor any significant political movement for regional autonomy or independence.  As Royse and I settled into our assignments in Chiang Rai and got busy with books, pencils and chalkboards, we were never really fully appreciative of the uniqueness and richness of the Lanna culture and its place in the overall mosaic of the country’s ethnicity.  For instance, we only learned later that the phaa sin – the elegant long womens skirt – originated in the north.  The Thais themselves consider northerners – with their white skin – to be a handsomer people than those in the central or southern parts of the country where there is a greater admixture with Austroasiatic ethnic groups.  Susie Miller’s boyfriend-then-husband Wattana had an interesting story to tell about his own fair complexion.  It seems that in the early nineteenth century his ancestors had been brought to Chiang Mai as slaves from northern Laos, a land of particularly light-skinned people.  After King Chulalongkorn abolished slavery, they stayed on in northern Thailand as free citizens.  The apex of their rise in society was perhaps Wattana Wattanapun himself – a prominent and respected artist with an international reputation.
Thailand’s central location in Southeast Asia puts numerous must-see travel destinations within easy reach, and almost as soon as we got there, my fevered mind was planning school break excursions.  Top on the list was trekking in Nepal, an activity that we learned about – as if by osmosis or telepathy-  as soon as we got in-country.  After I told Royse that she couldn’t say no, we started lobbying Susie Miller to join us.  She was already a good friend and was game for it, so the plan was set to fly to Kathmandu in the spring of 1971.

Where before we had been ustadh in Libya, we were now to be ajaan [teachers] in Chiang Rai’s public schools.  A warm welcome to our new home was provided by headmistress Ajaan Pratin of the Damrong Girls School where we would be living and where Royse would be teaching.  My assignment was Samakkee Whittayakhom, the large government boys school in town.  Pratin and her husband picked us up at the airport and showed us around town.  He worked for the Thai tobacco monopoly and liked to listen to Hank Williams.  They picked Thai names for us which approximated the sound of our own names as closely as possible.  Royse was Rahsee and I was Prateep.  We were assigned a little two room wooden house on the east side of the Damrong campus.  Our front door looked out on the school’s grassy quadrangle where the students would assemble every morning.  Along the north side of our little abode there was an alley that led out to Wisetwiang Street and that was the route I took to Samakkee school each school day.  Our little bungalow had peeling green paint and no screens, and was surrounded by coconut palms, tiger lilies, and a general riot of vegetation.  The house’s electrical wiring was antediluvian and dangerous, with exposed wires that were strung between ceramic insulators.  The fuse box had a hand-operated breaker switch and required manual replacement of a fuse wire when it blew.  The kitchen consisted of two tables, one of which supported a screened food cabinet whose legs stood in bowls of kerosene to deter ants.  There was no sink or running water.  We had a two burner gas stove with an oven which ran off propane tanks that cost 65 Baht [$3.25] to swap out.  The bathroom was a small detached building in the back – a nightmare to reach in the middle of the night with a full bladder.  Nevertheless, we were happy and it quickly felt like home.  There were endless opportunities for repairs and improvements and, during our two years there, we put in a lot of upgrades: screens, paneling, curtains, art on the walls, mats on the floor and a hallway to the bathroom.  It got to be a fairly attractive place.  Since it was government housing on a school campus, we weren’t in a real neighborhood, but we did have company from other teachers who lived at the school.  One of them was Ajaan Nuchanat, an older woman who never married.  She liked to visit and learned to cook some American dishes from Royse.  We bought bicycles and became fully mobile around town, although we were literally in the slow lane since every other volunteer had a motorcycle.  In Chiang Rai, and in Thailand generally, scooters and motorcycles outnumbered private cars by perhaps one hundred to one, and the nicer your ride the higher your status.  I remember one young Thai man in particular who had burly movie star good looks and must also have had a good-paying job, since he could afford a massive Honda CB 750 Four, which made him, transportation-wise, an apex predator.  A deep, throaty exhaust rumble always preceded him as he cruised around town on that shiny black, four cylinder beast, looking for opportunities to show himself and his equipment off to the girls.  There was a man who was convinced that size really mattered.

The Thai school year has three terms that start in mid-May, mid-August and mid-November.  The hot season vacation runs from mid-February to mid-May.  As we started teaching our first term, we were both struck by the apparent differences between the Libyan classroom and the Thai classroom.  Thai students are much better behaved and respectful of authority.  This deference to those of higher rank naturally offers benefits to teachers, but, in my opinion, posed some issues for their society at large, such as the abuse of authority.  In the short term, of course, we had no complaints because initially it made the classes easier to control.  We were both to have discipline problems, especially with slower students who got discouraged and lost motivation.  I had more trouble than Royse, and my explanation – or maybe it was my excuse – was that boys are naturally harder to control than girls.  A big challenge was coming up with good lesson plans while having to use the mediocre textbooks provided by the government, although quite a few of our students were so breathtakingly smart that they learned English no matter how you taught it.  The enrollments at both our schools were substantial.  Each school had well over a thousand students and it was an impressive sight to see the student body gather in the morning in front of the school – if it wasn’t raining – for the national anthem and announcements before classes.
There were a number of other volunteers in Chiang Rai, plus an assortment of other farang [foreigners], resident as well as transitory.  At Samakkee Wittayakhom school, there was Randy Weekes, a Canadian CUSO volunteer.  The Peace Corps volunteers in town included Gary Paarlberg, Dick and Kathy Plakey (all pigs and chickens) and Larry Rose (rural public works – dams and bridges).  Larry had been a senior mathematical analyst at Lockheed before ditching the straight life.  He would live for weeks at a time in remote villages where the Thai government ruled during the day but the insurgents, swinging AK-47s, would hold sway at night.  He resented central Thai authority and would only speak the local kham muang dialect when meeting with visiting officials.  Gene Hottinger was initially a Peace Corps volunteer but stayed on in Chiang Rai with a missionary group and taught at a Christian school.  Beyond that there was a mix of missionaries, nuns, aid workers, Laos-based US Green Berets, itinerant hippies and CIA agents.

The Plakeys were old hands at operating in the boondocks and early on in our stay they commandeered someone’s station wagon and took us out to visit our first hill tribe village.  It was an Akha settlement that had road access, so it provided drive-up ethnic color, so to speak.  The Akha had a non-politically-correct reputation as a primitive tribe.  They were considered dirty and their houses were built on the ground with earth floors, but to us that was all part of their exotic appeal.  They grew opium as their cash crop and kept some chickens and dogs.  This particular Akha village had become relatively modern and allowed photography.  Its women were proficient at making large quantities of decorative crafts to sell to visitors and at mission stores in Thai towns.  Like all Akha villages, they had a spirit gate to invite the good and repel the bad.  In this particular village, that gate also had a cargo cult function and there was a carved wooden airplane as a solicitation of worldly goods.

That trip to see the Akha set us on our path towards future backcountry explorations of the region.  There were other hilltribes to see.  There were the remnants of Chiang Kai-Shek’s army to locate.  I was fascinated by the fact that part of Chiang Rai province – about a fifty mile stretch – borders the Mekong river.  That great artery of Asia arises in the cold uplands of the Tibetan plateau where it is known as the Lancang before changing its name when it reaches Southeast Asia.  We made a number of trips to that section of the border, and the Mekong always seemed vast, silent and powerful.  At some points it was almost half a mile wide.  Mystery seemed to drift in the air above it and real monsters lurked in its depths.  The Mekong stingray, one of the largest ray species in the world, could reach 6 feet in width and weigh 1,300 lbs.  There were giant catfish over 600 lbs.  It served almost as an inland ocean and was a busy shipping route in its lower reaches.  The Thai Navy maintained an active riverine force along its portion of the border to combat the heavy traffic in narcotics and contraband.

Generally speaking, as the human world advances, Nature retreats.  This was certainly the case in northern Thailand.  The human population was growing rapidly, and forests and animal populations were steadily decreasing.  Where there had once been 100,000 tigers throughout Asia, now there are fewer than 4,000.  We found hilltribe cultures exotic and fascinating but we failed to understand the damage their hunting and their slash-and-burn agriculture were doing to the environment.  The tribes themselves were generally blind to the harm they were causing, since they were merely living the way their ancestors had lived.  The Thai government saw the loss of forest and identified hill tribes as one of the primary causes, but their periodic attempts to relocate hill tribes to the lowlands met with mixed results.  During our three years in Thailand, issues of balance and sustainability seldom occurred to us, so, in a real sense, we were part of the problem.
Each foreigner who lived in town had been brought there by a job assignment.  They hadn’t been preselected for their compatibility with one another, and so like any random collection of strangers, we mostly got along well, but sometimes we didn’t.  Married couples tended to be self-sufficient social units.  Single volunteers, on the other hand, could get lonely and would actively seek out chances to socialize, and it was awkward when you had work to do and the single volunteer had come over just before dinner for a gab session and, hopefully, a meal.  The worst were the world travelers, or WTs as we called them.  They were essentially penniless hippies on the move who would show up unannounced in the middle of the week, hoping to be housed, fed and entertained while you were struggling to put together a lesson plan for your rowdiest class the next day. They were on permanent vacation but you weren’t.  Sometimes we were fine with their company.  Sometimes they were an annoying pain in the butt.

In Thailand, our communications with the outside world were somewhat better than what we had in Libya, but not much.   BBC remained our listening choice on short-wave radio.  The postal service was mostly reliable and there was even a telegraph office.  The military had its own radio communications network, and there was actually a civilian radio station in the province which made for exceptionally boring listening.  In addition to Thai popular music, it featured a lot of religious programming in which monks would drone on endlessly about the Middle Path.  Businesses purchased air time for their products and I remember one announcer breathlessly promoting nam ponlamai dubin hapi [Double Happy Fruit Juice].  The lone television station in Chiang Mai somehow delivered a faint black and white signal over the mountains to the few television sets in Chiang Rai.  There were only one or two telephones in town and they were reserved for official use or for civilian emergencies.  There was only one merchant in town who had a photocopy machine and it was considered a modern cutting-edge wonder.  I once had a duplicate of a letter made and remember standing there in awe as the store owner worked his slow, clunky machine to produce an expensive, dim copy which was still wet and smelled of chemicals.  The sources of news in print were limited.  We obtained copies of the Bangkok Post only sporadically, but the spotty and sometimes amateurish quality of its journalism provided much amusement and, over three years, I collected a stack of news clippings which became a delightful, one-of-a-kind scrap book.  Nearly everyone subscribed to Time magazine, so we all discussed current affairs with opinions based on the same set of facts.  In a specialized area of print, Thai restaurant owners exhibited a cavalier disregard for correct spelling when it came to writing the English portions of their menus and, when their numerous mistakes and typos were gathered by Peace Corps volunteers into an anthology of errors, the result was so howlingly funny that it left us in tears.  For example, If you knew that a restaurant served an excellent fried carp, you would still swallow hard and think twice when the menu said that your entrée would be “fried crap” instead.

The Peace Corps made a considerable effort to keep its volunteers healthy.  We had a staff physician based in Bangkok who was in charge of preventive health measures, and we regularly went to the capital to offer stool samples and receive shots and pills in return.  The logic behind this was that health care outside Krung Thep was not optimal, and this was quite true.  In Chiang Rai, there was Overbrook Hospital, a long-established missionary facility that could provide very basic surgical interventions and modest medical management of the most common illnesses, but the treatment of complex trauma or advanced disease states was beyond anything in the province.  No real emergency rooms, and, of course, no EMS.  A student I taught named Bundit had a deformed leg that he could barely walk on, but for the three years I knew him, nothing was done for its gradually worsening condition.  I had the frightening experience of seeing a girl in the front row of my class have a grand mal seizure.  Nobody, including me, knew what to do.  I just stood there frozen as she went rigid in her chair with drool coming out of her mouth.  She had mostly recovered when her mother arrived at the school and rushed into the classroom to rub Tiger Balm on her forehead.  That was the only treatment she got, and I heard a teacher say under her breath, “mai mii prayoht” [that’s useless].  There were a few private clinics, and when I cut deep into the back of my hand with a saw, that’s where I went.  I paid cash for a few stitches and in no time I was ready to go back and hurt myself again.

The Thai government had an active public health program and sprayed aggressively to control malaria.  Royse and I needed all the protection we could get since our frequent backpacking trips into the bush put us overnight in unscreened thatch huts swarming with mosquitos and fleas.  This was risky behavior, but somehow, during our time in the north, we managed to dodge malaria and dengue fever and a host of other diseases that could have laid us low.
Bangkok was really the only place to find advanced medical care and to have any significant dental work done.  Both Royse and I had wisdom teeth extracted at Dr. Som’s Dental Clinic, a real state-of-the-art operation.  I still gave them a run for their money with one extraction.  It must have been nicely impacted because they pulled and yanked and twisted forever.  The worn-out dentist paused at one point and muttered “mun mai awk” [the damn thing won’t come out].  I did eventually cough it up.

We also had utilities in Chiang Rai that were much better than Libya.  There was 24 hour electricity, except for the two or three times a week when the power went out.  Still, after Qaminis, it seemed like a luxury.  We had running water to a spigot in the back of the house and to the outside toilet.  The city’s dilapidated waterworks took water out of the Kok river and pumped it up to a little reservoir on top of a small hill where it was treated with a drop of chlorine and a Buddhist prayer against germs.  From there, through a leaking, Rube Goldberg system of pipes, it went down to the residents, most of whom drank it without treating it.  There was even a municipal sewer system, although I suspected it dumped everyone’s poo straight into the Kok – hopefully downstream from the drinking water intake, and after the mandatory germ prayer, of course.

War and politics conspired to make the entire region seem like a place with a lot of secrets. People would smile and nod but not tell you the whole story.  This was usually because there was some serious mischief afoot and it wasn’t healthy to discuss it openly.  It was rather as if Humphrey Bogart’s Casablanca had been transported to the Orient and I had a permanent table at Rick’s Cafe with a chance to meet the different characters who drifted in and out.  One visitor was a soft-spoken journalist named Albert McCoy who was researching a book on the heroin business in the Golden Triangle and the CIA’s involvement in it.  The basic storyline of his book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, was that the CIA was heavily involved in heroin trafficking through its Air America operations and used the profits to fund anti-communist operations.  This kind of investigation required talking to a rogue’s gallery of unsavory individuals, asking questions people didn’t want to answer and, generally, lifting up rocks to see what was blinking underneath.  He struck me as a brave person taking substantial risks as he dealt with a controversial topic – the sort of enterprise that, if you weren’t extremely careful, could earn you a bullet in the back of the head.  For reasons that I can no longer recall, he gave me his pair of Vietnam-issue combat boots.  They had seen heavy duty but fit perfectly and they became my backpacking footwear.
Christian missionaries have had a presence in Thailand for hundreds of years and the success of their work owes a great deal to the tolerance shown by Buddhist Thai governments.  Chiang Rai’s most famous missionary was a Canadian physician named William A. Briggs, who arrived in town in 1900.  He founded Overbrook Hospital but, in the Renaissance Man tradition, was also proficient in city planning, architecture and military strategy.  During our time in the northern provinces, the missionaries we knew seemed to focus on particular subsets of the population, including hill tribe groups.  Rupert Nelson worked with the Lahu, Ben Dickerson with the Karen.  Although there was one American woman who had spent most of her mission career translating the Bible and Christian hymns into one obscure hill tribe language, in general the missionary strategy was to spread the Good Word by doing practical good works, especially agricultural and economic development.  They were invariably pleasant, down-to-earth people, and we never met any fire-breathing, Bible-thumping types.

We became good friends with missionaries Bob and Dotty Turnbull, who lived about five miles northeast of Chiang Rai and did agricultural and community development work.  They lived in a small Christian settlement called Ban Farm Sampantakit close to the north bank of the Kok river.  This village was created to serve as a haven and refuge for individuals with leprosy (Hansen’s disease).  Like us, they had had a previous life in the Arab world (Egypt) and could still speak arabic.  Their three kids – Janet, Carol and Lee – were in their teens and early twenties and mostly commuted to Bangkok or the States for school, although I remember that for one school year Janet stayed at home and took old-fashioned, through-the-mail correspondence courses.  If she had a question for her teacher, she’d have to wait weeks or months for an answer.  Many times we rode our bikes or took a minibus to visit them and enjoy Dotty’s cooking, which was often accompanied by an extraordinarily fragrant local sticky rice which was not even available in Chiang Rai town.  Their gracious hospitality always included an invitation to attend Sunday church services and we joined them happily, although it was more as observers than as true believers.  One weekend they hosted a collection of local farang for an  “encounter group” –  a social fad that was popular in the early 1970s in which people stand in a circle and take turns sharing their deep personal feelings about themselves and about the others in attendance.  At the time, we all thought that was pretty avante garde stuff.  Today it seems a little dated and corny.  In the practical world, however, Bob was the ultimate handyman who could fix anything.  He would run equipment off an auxiliary power shaft from his Land Rover.  I once watched him drill a well in five minutes using a pipe and a garden hose – a task made easier by a water table which was at about eighteen inches.  Years later when we were all back in the States, we visited them in Akron.

Another missionary who made an impression on me was a fellow named Frank Younkin, who lived in the same settlement as the Turnbulls.  He was soft-spoken, somewhat reserved, and took a while to get to know.  You got the sense that he had lived a rather quiet and uneventful life until he got his call to mission work.  However, one day as we were talking about nothing in particular, he mentioned how much he appreciated being able to eat a meal and not feel hungry afterwards.  In his present situation in Thailand, as with all of us, food was available in overwhelming quantities, but there was a reason that he felt this way.  It turned out that he had fought in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II, where he and his comrades were surrounded by the Germans at Bastogne and had endured savage combat for days in foxholes in the snows of December with no sleep and no food, until they were relieved by Patton’s army.  I was filled with awe and respect for this modest man who, without complaint and ready to give his life, had served his country on an empty stomach.
We never became authorities on Thai history, although we read a number of books which gave us excellent insights into Siam’s rich and varied culture.  Tracks of an Intruder by Gordon Young, with it’s accounts of hunting and living with northern hilltribes, particularly the Lahu, became a sacred text for me, a book which I re-read countless times, riveted by his stories of pursuing big game in the 1950s throughout the then-vast wilderness areas of northern Thailand.  Young was already a legend in Southeast Asia when we arrived in Chiang Rai.  He had been born in Banna, a remote Lahu village in Yunnan, China where his parents were missionaries.  His first language was Lahu and at an early age he learned to hunt and survive in the jungle alone or with a few Lahu companions.  Both he and his father had a deep and extraordinary knowledge of the region and its people and both worked for the CIA at various times.  He wrote The Hill Tribes of Northern Thailand, a landmark ethnological study which to this day is a standard reference work.  His autobiography, Journey from Banna, is a gripping, page-turning account of politics and survival in Asia.  Another special book was Consul in Paradise by W. A. R. Wood.  He arrived in Siam in 1896 as a British Student Interpreter, carrying a passport issued by Queen Victoria.  He married a Thai woman and spent his entire diplomatic career in Thailand.  He retired to Chiang Mai and wrote colorful and richly detailed accounts of his many adventures.  He was posted for a time to Chiang Rai, which in that era was roadless and very isolated.  He recalled once meeting an aged man who had served in the Siamese army in the mid-nineteenth century and had fought mounted on elephant back.  Mr. Wood was a living link to the past and died just weeks before we arrived in Thailand.  Hunting for other titles as we browsed English-language bookstores in Chiang Mai and Bangkok, we were surprised to find important reference works and literary classics available at exceptionally low prices.  The complete Encyclopedia Britannica for five dollars.  Webster’s Dictionary was four dollars, and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall had declined to three bucks.  We initially thought that Thais and other Asians must be such voracious readers that publishing houses could afford to sell in bulk with small margins.  Eventually, as we scrutinized the poor printing quality of these works and learned more about business practice in Asia – namely that there are virtually no copyright laws or other protection for intellectual property – we realized that we were looking at pirated copies cranked out by hole-in-the-wall printing operations in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The farang community of volunteers spent a lot of their free time socializing and partying with each other and with Thai friends.  There was a very good Thai beer – Singha – which came from a brewery founded by Germans. The local whiskey – Mekong – was pure rot gut and tasted worse than its river name.  Occasionally we had a strong Chinese liquor called Wu Chia Pi, allegedly infused with traditional medicines, and which is still produced to this day.  Since we lived in Dope Central, there were unfortunately a few farang among us who became hooked on opium and would waste their time, money and lives in local dens.  Royse and I tried the local marijuana only once, supplied by Randy Weekes, who, with a suspiciously innocent look, said it seemed stale and not very strong.  Well, he was wrong.  It was evidently the renowned Korat Krippler and that’s exactly what it did to us.  It may have had something stronger in it because it laid both of us out, stoned and immobile, for about two days.  Fortunately we had the weekend off before going back to the classroom.  When I reported this adventure to my parents, their personal drug guru Bob Stickle suggested that the mary jane we smoked might have been laced with strychnine.  It wasn’t until many years later, while reading My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel, that I learned strychnine can be used as a short-term stimulant when a burst of energy is needed.
During those first two years that we lived at Damrong School, a lot of visitors showed up on our doorstep, drawn not so much by our charming personalities as by the prospect of free food and lodging in a great Southeast Asian beauty spot.  We were usually glad to have them.  My parents even showed up, coming for a visit during school vacation in 1971.

Our daily routines during a school week were, for the most part, pleasantly manageable.  Royse would get up at about 6:00 AM and pedal off to the market where she could get nearly all the day’s shopping done before heading off to school.  This was a real delight to her after being denied freedom to shop in Libya, and our new relaxed environment made her so happy that she took the adventurous plunge of getting her ears pierced.  Classes started at about 8:30 AM and we taught about four hours per day with the remainder of the time being spent making lesson plans and grading papers.  This work regularly spilled over into evenings and weekends.  Most days, after school work was finished, I found some time for tasks around the house.  As mentioned, our little place was completely unscreened when we took possession of it and simply swarmed with insects day and night.  We were provided with a single mosquito net for the bed and that was considered to be sufficient.  Well, we both wanted to lower our risk of malaria, so I got busy installing screens on our one door, on the windows and on the breezeway around the top of the walls.  What I had no control over were the insects that congregated at night around the light on our front porch.  One in particular was a large, noisy and slow-flying beast which could be heard in the evening from far away as it labored through the air towards our house, like a shot-up Sopwith Camel with the engine smoking.  It would crash into the outside wall with a resounding whack and fall on its back, all four hundred legs flailing skyward.  One dove at my head multiple times and I got so mad that I smashed it with a hammer, sending a wad of guts spurting several feet out its back end.

For us, shopping in any Thai market was an endless pleasure.  The food stalls were jammed with an abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables, many of which we had never seen before.  We devoured mamuang [mango], lumyai [longan] and mongut [mangosteen] when they were in season.  Only the durian, with its charnel house odor, kept us at bay.  The great slabs of pork on offer were a Muslim’s nightmare.  In addition to local pond-raised Tilapia, we could regularly find red snapper and shrimp which had been caught in the gulf of Thailand and, after being packed in ice, made the long, health-code-violating journey up to Chiang Rai in groaning, overloaded trucks that not only belched exhaust but dripped water.  The Thais are very practical about food sources, and, as a rule, if it had protein, it might well get cooked and served.  I remember eating crickets, whole baby birds and grasshoppers.  I once saw a scorpion on a stick but passed on that culinary opportunity.  Indian merchants specialized in fabric and they all shuddered when Royse arrived with her bargaining game face on to buy material at a price not one baht higher than what locals paid.  When shopping, we would sometimes talk together in Arabic if we saw something funny or had a criticism to voice and didn’t want to risk having our English or Thai understood.  The Chinese-owned Hamkee hardware store in town took care of most of my handyman needs and sold old-school woodworking tools which, even though they were brand-new, looked like they belonged to the past.  One time I bicycled up with a burnt-out fluorescent bulb to show the owner what I needed to replace.  By the time I stepped into the store, he had the new bulb in his hand.

In June we had wan wai kru [respect for teachers day] at our schools.  This involves elaborate ceremonies in which students get dressed up in traditional costumes and present gifts of flowers to the teachers as a way of honoring the institution of teaching.  It’s certainly a pretty sight, but, to the cynical among us, it’s just an example of formalized subservience.  The first term of the school ended in about August and involved a lot of preparation and administration of tests, all rather tedious.  I started writing my own lessons – essentially my own textbook – for the coming term.  Wasn’t sure how that would go.
We had been warned in training that, once in a while, Thais may do something that seems very un-Thai.  For example, the following paragraph, copied from the English note book of one of my Maw Saw III (tenth grade) students:

“I like Red China very much, because I will be rich.  I don’t work hard and when I work hard, they will give me a lot of money.  If I don’t work, they will give some too.  I love Mao Tse-Tung and soon he will teach me some subjects.  So I will be a communist and I will kill Thai people, and I will be the President of Thailand.”

Note for the record that the kid who wrote this was Thai, not Chinese.  Since I had taught him English, I naturally thought it was quite well written, albeit rather looney and lacking tight logic.

Thais are perhaps the most sociable people in the world and at my school the teachers’ lounge was always a beehive of activity as tests were graded, a mango was sliced and passed around, and the latest gossip and complaints were exchanged.  Most of the English teachers at Samakkee were female and, as a male farang co-worker in their department, I was considered a useful and interesting resource.  ” Mr. Peter, does one say ‘lie down” or ‘lay down’?”   “Mr. Peter, can I say ‘the man owns two gooses’?”  I was always happy to help.  After all, English was my native tongue.  One day, Ajaan Amphaa, who was sweet, proper and very married, was thumbing through a pulp romance novel – in English – and paused, confused.  “Mr. Peter, what does it mean ‘Let’s ball’?”  I thought to myself, hmm, I could say I don’t know, but the temptation to have a little fun with her and her friends was overwhelming.  “Well”, I said, looking very serious and thoughtful, “let me see if I can explain.”  Amphaa asked, “Is it about sports?”  I shook my head and replied, “No, it’s not really about sports.  It has something to do with men and women.”  Some of the teachers in the room stopped what they were doing and looked at me.  “Yes, it’s about men and women and their favorite activity”.  One of the teachers, to judge from the look in her eyes, had already made a leap of intuition as I said, “‘Let’s ball’ is a slang expression for ‘let’s have sex'”.  Amphaa closed the offending book and feigned disinterest amidst some giggles from her co-workers.  She now had a whole new way to shock her husband.

During the break between academic terms, we left Chiang Rai for a holiday road trip to Thailand’s northeast region- the pahk isaan.  It was basically a bus-riding endurance test down to Bangkok, then northeast to Kon Kaen and Udon and back.  We had planned to visit with Jack and Sean Berkey in Khon Kaen but they weren’t home, though we stayed at their house anyway.  For some reason we took a side trip to Udorn to see the US air force base.  What I remember was the complete lack of security at the base, which was odd since it was the height of the war in Vietnam and we were at an airfield that regularly flew combat missions.  We walked right into an aircraft hangar, inspected a few F-4 Phantoms, didn’t see a single person, then went to the PX and had some excellent ice cream.  Back on the streets of Udorn, I was confronted by a mentally unbalanced man who cocked his fist as if to punch me.  I humbled myself in front of him with a wai [respectful bow] gesture and he relented.  Make love, not war.

The monsoon rains visited our part of the world from about June through October and they certainly got our attention.  A lot of the time it just rained or drizzled and we could go for weeks without seeing the sun.  Sometimes, however, it really, really rained.  Never, ever, had we experienced such precipitation.  At its most intense, we could stand on our porch, out of harm’s way, and watch a constant, thundering sheet of water come down, so dense as it fell that you couldn’t see more than ten feet.  It was so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think.  Although I had an umbrella and a poncho while riding my bike to school, I don’t know how I ever arrived with a dry book.  I once tried to teach a class during a terrific thunderstorm.  The rain was blowing in horizontally, but when the kids closed the windows, the room was pitch black and stuffy, since the windows didn’t have glass and there was no ventilation or lighting.  With the constant high humidity, mold grew everywhere – on walls, on the ceiling, on magazines, inside my camera, on film, on food, probably in my brain.  If the road wasn’t paved, it was dangerous to travel. Backpacking up a mountain trail in the rainy season was a very dicey proposition and we actually did brave a few hilltribe hikes during the monsoon, although we always took a chance.  Generally the seasons dictated our travel planning.  When the sun did come out, it was a special occasion and things seemed fresh and new.  One morning after a rainy night, I was taking out the trash and bent down to look at a large weed with cup-shaped leaves.  The oily surface of the leaves had trapped rainwater and shaped it into quivering, marble-sized drops.  They were as big as my thumb, shimmering and tensed up like globs of liquid quartz.  A beautiful, short-lived sight.
As the second term got underway, I had the students use the textbook I had written and mimeographed.  I thought it was well done but it lacked the visual appeal and quality printing that comes with a commercial textbook.  At least I tried.  On the social front, my parents were planning to visit us the following year – in the spring of 1971.  They reported that my brother was still unemployed.  Clevelander and college friend Rick Taft planned to take a semester off from Yale law school – with credit, he hoped – to study penology in India and, perhaps, visit us in Chiang Rai.  News reports – both local and international – were pretty lively.  Airplane hijackings in the middle east and civil war in Jordan.  The governor of Chiang Rai and two officials were mowed down in an ambush near Chiang Saen, as they went unarmed to meet a group of “surrendering” communists.  The funeral was a big deal, a somber and formal scene at a large Buddhist temple in town with blinking Christmas tree lights draped on the casket.

My head was filled with a long list of home improvement projects to attack.  Fix the dangerous wiring in our house.  Put up paneling.  Install a kitchen counter with a sink and running water.  Build a dark room.  Build a loom.  Make a chest out of teak wood.  Some of these tasks were actually accomplished, but many were not.  Royse and I started doing the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises. They were fun, and we felt slightly fitter and somewhat more Canadian.  Royse could do forty pushups, which was very impressive.  An issue that we discussed periodically is what to do when we returned to the States.  She wasn’t certain and I truly had no clue.  I daydreamed about being a carpenter but common sense said no.

From what we saw in everyday working life around us in Thailand, we certainly didn’t want to become day laborers.  Female laborers made 8 Baht ($0.40) per day, men made 10 ($0.50).  Samlaw [bicycle rickshaw] drivers typically made barely enough to pay off the daily rent on their vehicles, with a little left over for food.  I heard a rumor that even when the drivers donated blood for a little extra cash, the vehicle owners demanded a cut of that.  Labor unions were illegal, so that just added to the inequities of the economic system.  No wonder some were driven to revolution.

When we got tired of worrying about social injustice, there were always the delightful low-brow Chinese sword fighting movies to distract us, and the best “sword flicks” were made by the Shaw brothers, Run Run and Runme, from their Hong Kong studios.  During our time in Chiang Rai we saw a ton of them, including “The Merciful Sword”, “Lady of Steel”, “Heads for Sale”, and “Sword Mates”.  They all had formulaic plots of deception and revenge, and the same loud histrionics, magic and moral simplicity.  The good guys were fantastic swordsmen and absolutely slaughtered the bad guys and their henchmen.  “Sword Mates” was better than “Heads for Sale” and featured characters like Cold-Faced Tiger and Iron Claws.  Iron Claws was so fast that he fought bare-handed, catching blades in mid-air and breaking them.  One of these films – I can’t remember which – had a great scene in which a wandering swordsman was seated in the corner of a thatched-roof country tavern quietly enjoying his tea.  His peaceful interlude was interrupted, however, by a confrontation with bad guys and, as his anger grew and his face reddened, you expected him to run the villains through with his sword. Instead, inexplicably, he closed his eyes and shot straight up like a rocket, exploding through the roof of the tavern in a shower of bamboo splinters.  Now that was a classic move, probably filmed using wire work in that pre-digital age.

When we went to a sword flick, we always sat in the hong siang nai fim – a small room which provided the original Chinese soundtrack.  That way we could hear the Chinese dialogue and read the English subtitles.  We did this because in the main seating area you heard a dubbed Thai commentary with it’s own music, jokes and sound effects, which was very distracting.  The original film was quite silly enough.

In October, we were invited over to the home of Royse’s headmistress for dinner.  Ajaan Pratin and her husband put on a lovely spread and we got dressed up in our finest for the occasion.  We were still working on our Thai, so most of the conversation was in English.  Her husband had a cheerful, expansive personality and spoke a kind of bowling alley English, while she was the model Thai spouse – demure, restrained and polite to extremes.  He chatted at length about his recent three month, twenty-two country world tour of tobacco companies.  It didn’t seem to me that his presence was really required in those far-flung locales, since the Thais don’t have any trouble growing tobacco, but I’m sure there was clear and urgent justification for all of the government’s time and money that he and his civil service companions spent on their trip, and that they were immune to all the temptations for drinking and whoring that are normally found on such junkets.  Anyway, dinner was great and we were effusively thankful.

October saw the Sports Week competition amongst the various schools in Chiang Rai town.  During seven days of blistering hot temperatures, the young athletes competed in basketball, soccer, volleyball, ping pong and takraw [wicker kick ball].  Generally, Thai kids were more relaxed about athletics than their western counterparts, although they certainly got their share of pre-game butterflies.  Since the jai yen [cool heart] mindset is more or less the norm in Thai culture, the occasional flashes of temper or tears at defeat stood out conspicuously.

King Bhumipol of Thailand flew to Chiang Rai on November 3 on a Buddhist merit-making trip.  At the airport, everyone had to come down from the terminal building’s second story so that no one’s head would be higher than his.  As I was standing in the crowd catching a brief glimpse of His Highness, there was an unusual surge of onlookers around me.  Just enthusiastic subjects of the King, I thought.  A moment later, I realized that in the brief press, my pocket had been picked and my wallet was missing.  Two moments later, I found my wallet on the ground, cash gone.  That was my introduction to the popular Thai sport of petty theft.  At least I didn’t get a knife in the ribs.

On a separate occasion, Royse had her own close brush with royalty.  Queen Sirikit was visiting Chiang Rai and it seemed as if the whole town had come out to the airport to see Her Highness.  Royse went with teachers from her school and formed up with her friends in a line along the path the Queen would take when she got off the plane.  I was standing back in the throng – with my hand on my wallet this time – but could clearly see the Queen as she slowly moved down the line of teachers, smiling and nodding.  Royse stood out because she was taller and had light brown hair, and when the Queen noticed this young farang woman, she stopped in front of her and looked her right in the eye with an expression of interest in her face.  Although I’m sure Sirikit wanted to become new best friends with Royse right then and there, royal duties forced her reluctantly to move on.

Also in November, Rick Taft was able to visit us for a week on his way to study the corrections system in India.  At my suggestion, we visited the Chiang Rai jail so that he would have some small frame of reference on how Asian prisons work.  Our town’s lockup was a very relaxed affair.  Although it did have high walls, there was no barbed wire and they admitted us with minimal screening.  Inside, as the warden took us on an impromptu tour, it looked more like a social club than a prison.  Some inmates were engaged in handicrafts, but mostly they sat around in groups chatting and smoking.  We saw one holding hands with a guard.  Another adventure for the Taft man was a trip to a little Chinese grocery store run by a fellow named Choom.  He sold Chinese groceries, including yogurt which we would use as starter when we eventually cultured our own.  Rick met Choom’s daughter, Mali, who had been an AFS student, and developed an instant crush on her.  His courtship lasted about 36 hours before he had to move on to India.  I have an isolated memory of Royse and I being in Bangkok with him either at the start or at the end of his visit.  I saved his life.  We were standing on a curb preparing to cross one of Bangkok’s impossibly dangerous streets.  Rick’s mind wasn’t adjusted to the fact that Thais drive on the left.  He lunged into the street, looking carefully the wrong way, without seeing the bus closing on him at high speed from the right.  At the last second I was able to pull him back and prevent him from becoming a smear on the pavement.

Although his cross-cultural love life was cut short, he did get to witness the beautiful festival of Loy Kratong [floating baskets], which takes place on the evening of the full moon of the twelfth month in the traditional Thai lunar calendar.  Thais decorate their baskets with flowers and incense sticks, and place candles on them which represent the light of Buddha.  The kratongs floating away on rivers and canals symbolize the release of past transgressions and negative thoughts.  Rick walked in the nighttime procession with us as we joined a crowd headed to the river singing the festival song.  The dozens of kratongs with their points of light floating on the water made an enchanting scene.  I was reminded that fireworks were also a lively part of the festivities when a big one exploded in my ear, leaving me momentarily deaf.

The headmaster at Samakkee Whittayakhom was Ajaan Bunjong.  He had earned his masters degree in Canada, spoke good English and, though rather somber and unsmiling, ran the school fairly and well.  On Wednesday, December 9, he arranged for a group of monks to come to the school and conduct a ceremony that would drive out evil spirits – presumably that did not include Peace Corps volunteers – and infuse the institution with positive energy.  Their chants in Pali consumed a great part of the day and afterwards the faculty was invited to Ajaan Bunjong’s house for dinner.  When it comes to Thai food, I am a slow but remorseless eater, and hopefully that day I flattered the host and hostess as I worked my way through plate after plate of northern specialties, long after the other teachers had moved on to post-prandial cigarettes and booze.

The Peace Corps offices in Bangkok and Chiang Mai had good lending libraries and we were never short of books.  I plowed my way through an eclectic mix of titles.  After I finished Baroness von Ruisdael’s account of General Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, I moved on to Jess Stern’s Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet.  During the Peace Corps years, I was also in the middle of my twenty-year cycle of reading The Lord of the Rings over and over.  I had started in college and finally finished in the 1980s after having gone through the trilogy about forty times.  I had refused all offers of counseling for my behavior because, hey, it was a really good book.

Thais love celebrations of nearly any kind and they made a surprisingly big deal about Christmas.  Merchants would decorate their stores with tinsel and ornaments.  At Samakkee, someone dreamed up the idea of putting on a play with me starring as Santa Claus.  I ducked and dodged and somehow escaped that obligation by the skin of my teeth.  There were lots of activities planned in Chiang Rai for Christmas Eve, and we assembled an impromptu bicycle choir and pedaled around to various farang homes and did dreadful renditions of favorite carols.  Volunteers gathered at Larry Rose’s house for real eggnog as the opener for an excellent ham and rice dinner.  Then, at 9:00 PM, with dread in our hearts, we pedaled our bikes over to Ajaan Pratin’s house for her husband’s Tobacco Monopoly Christmas gala, a swank torch-lit lawn party attended by a few white folks but mostly by Thais dressed in arctic storm coats and woolen jackets.  The temperature was 68 degrees.  The husband looked drunk.  He forced a short Thai speech from me saying how much fun we were having.  As we eventually tried to leave, he pushed a half glass of Haig & Haig Pinch at me.  In a spontaneous move completely out of character, I took it from his hand and downed it in a gulp.  I wasn’t sure if he had really offered it or not.

Christmas morning was fun.  Students stopped by to give us flowers.  In our little gift exchange, I got two lovely hand-made shirts from Royse and she received from me some old-fashioned fabric she had admired.  Later in the day we flew to Chiang Mai for scheduled encephalitis shots.  On such trips volunteers from outlying sites usually stayed with regional director Jon Keeton in his large house.  It saved money and gave everyone a chance to socialize.  To wake everyone up for breakfast, he would play the Staple Singers on his fancy tape deck and let their joyous sound get us moving.  We saw Susie Miller and continued our discussions with her about a possible trekking vacation in Nepal.  Dr. Howard Emery gave us our inoculations, which we knew would be effective since they made us feel so miserable.  As a bonus, we got to fly back to Chiang Mai again over New Years for our second shot.  We had become conditioned to frequent injections for every imaginable disease.  Dr. Emery had an interest in cryptozoology and I remember that while we were in Thailand, he went on an expedition to the Arun Valley in Nepal in search of the Yeti.  I myself caught the bigfoot bug many years later.

As I noted previously, school-parent communication had been non-existent in Libya.  I was surprised and pleased that in December, at the beginning of the third term, our schools held three-day-long open houses for parents.  Large numbers of visitors from the community flooded into the school to meet instructors, peek into classrooms (conveniently empty of students) and look at exhibits about higher education.  The teachers loved it because they didn’t have to teach for three days.

1971 was well underway when the last term of the school year ended in mid-February.  Teachers and students had worked hard and were looking forward to the hot season break.  Temperatures reach their maximum in April and nobody wants to be in a classroom at that time.  The Thai “winter” in December and January is a wonderful time of year, with dry, sunny weather and moderate heat.  I made gradual progress on my domestic construction projects.  We needed some kind of kitchen, so a corner of the living room was selected and we put in a counter with a stainless steel sink.  I tapped into a water line in the back of the house and ran a PVC pipe through the wall so that a faucet was positioned over the sink, which drained via an elbow trap through the floor straight onto the ground in the crawlspace under the house.  A rather low-rent solution but the only one I could come up with.

Our salaries – pretty much unchanged from the $125 per month per person we got in Libya – were the same as those of our Thai co-workers.  That came to 2500 baht monthly at the prevailing exchange rates, which was plenty for our needs and gave us a little to save.  Once established in a regular expense routine, we engaged in some highly grownup and responsible financial planning – albeit on a tiny scale – when we decided to place part of our paychecks in fak pracham [long term savings] at the Thai Farmers Bank in town.  With deposits from various sources, we hoped to earn 1050 baht per year, or a little over fifty dollars.  It seemed like a lot to us.  We heard stories of one very enterprising volunteer who secretly started a small construction business.  He built houses and resold them at a nice profit.  That was surely grounds for instant dismissal from the program, but I don’t think he got caught.

In the spectrum of wealth amongst Chiang Rai’s foreign residents, the volunteer teachers were at the bottom of the food chain.  At the top were the Americans who worked for US government agencies.  They got full federal salaries plus supplemental hardship pay, so they just raked in the money.  Not counting hill tribe expert Gordon Young, who roamed all over Southeast Asia on various US government payrolls, we only knew of one such individual in town, a Desmond O’Riordan, who came to live in Chiang Rai during our first year.  An employee of USOM (United States Operations Missions), he worked at the salaklang [provincial office] with local officials supervising highway construction throughout the province.  He had previously worked in Vietnam.  His Vietnamese wife had a masters degree from Columbia and spoke perfect English .  With his substantial salary, they rented an enormous and beautifully furnished house on the road to the airport.  A real bonus for all of us poor white relations was that they loved to entertain, so, after they got settled into their new residence, they threw an honest-to-goodness sit-down dinner party for all the farang.  As I recall, only proletarian Larry Rose, with his rigid anti-establishment views, failed to attend.  The food was an intoxicating mix of Thai and Vietnamese dishes.  I remember eating an entire plate of deep-fried baby birds, although I had to avoid eye contact with them as they disappeared into my mouth.  One missionary couple had brought along their cute, and very bratty, seven year old daughter who had spoken both English and Thai from birth and attended the local elementary school.  During the dinner party she had a disagreement with a little Thai kid and I saw her lean over and hiss at him “bawk mae, mae tii!” [I’ll tell your mom and she’ll hit you!].  Desmond said that from time to time CIA agents would interview him about events in Chiang Rai.  This was not so much a transfer of classified information as a general discussion that helped the agent stay current.  There was also probably an unspoken understanding that one government employee is expected to help another.

In February there was a flurry of Thai Air Force activity at the Chiang Rai airport and various highly unreliable reports reached us through the local grapevine about what was going on.  It was alleged that a squadron of T-28 light attack aircraft were flying bombing missions against communist positions in Chiang Rai’s Thoeng district.  What I could see from the seat of my bicycle on the road near the airport seemed to confirm this.  The tiny single-engine propeller planes would take off in groups day after day, whining like a swarm of angry wasps, and head off on their missions to the east-southeast through the clear winter skies.  If they were carrying live munitions and really dropping them on insurgent targets, I’m sure the communists were deeply offended because they consider Thoeng a “liberated” area.
I had another interesting plane-spotting experience which was very different from watching T-28s.  One day I was being my normal unproductive self, when I was mysteriously prompted to look up into the sky.  It was as if an unseen hand was placed under my chin and gently lifted my head upward.  There was not a cloud anywhere in that sweep of winter blue, and I saw something at the very edge of sight – a tiny and barely visible profile of a slender aircraft with long Albatross-like wings, heading north and leaving a faint silver thread behind it. I could only guess at its altitude.  35,000 feet?  50,000?  We were in a regional war zone crawling with spooks, so although it might have been a passenger plane, perhaps I was looking at a U2 on a reconnaissance mission, not yet at its cruising altitude of 70,000 feet.

People continued to drop in on us, some of whom were those itinerant world travelers.  One such individual was a Canadian named Kim who showed up on our doorstep in February and needed a place to crash for the night.  Compared to him, we looked like wealthy middle-class professionals, so we couldn’t really say no.  He had just completed a tough overland backpacking trek from Fang in northern Chiang Mai.  After he showered, he smelled better and was pleasant company – a happy, perceptive person who emitted good vibes.

Not to be outdone by our Canadian guest, on February 21, Royse and I did our first real warm-up for our anticipated trekking vacation in Nepal, an obligatory hip destination which we learned about through the same osmotic word-of-mouth process that had informed us of Mykonos and Agia Galini in Greece.  We hoofed it in the hot sun from our house to Wat Doi Phrabat, which overlooks the airport, a distance of about six miles round trip.  At the top we met some Thais who had sensibly driven up, and all they could say was “deun geng jing jing!” [really good walkers!].  We drank some rain water and bought some oranges before heading back.  That training session left us with sore legs and headaches and had us wondering how we’d hold up in Nepal.

I celebrated my twenty sixth birthday by sleeping late, drowsing to the morning sounds of doors opening, dogs barking and neighbors calling out to one another.  Royse was off doing something constructive so I decided to explore side streets I’d never seen in the neighborhood.  I walked slowly with no particular plan and encountered a series of enchanting scenes, ordinary but also new and unexpected.  There was smoke rising through the thatched roof of a noodle shop and drifting in a curtain across the road.  Hidden corners of yards behind buildings were little landscapes bright with flowers and spirit houses, easily missed if you’re zipping by on a bicycle.  I stood by the bank of the Mae Kok and watched its brown water slip silently by.  Later on in the day I got a birthday card and presents from Royse.  In the evening, the volunteer gang came over for watermelon, cake and coffee.  Larry Rose gave me two concrete septic tank collars as a present.  Someone else gave me a rubber duck.

It had been a very busy school year.  We taught between two to four tiring hours per day but spent about three times that on preparation – making lesson plans, writing and mimeographing tests, grading tests.  Nearly every evening and nearly every weekend we were at it.  We still had time to relax, but teaching was certainly not a 9 to 5 job.

We were very happy when school let out and quickly got into travel and vacation mode.  On March 8, we flew to Chiang Mai and from the airport got a ride to the train station for an overnight trip to Bangkok in a second class sleeper car.  This was our first rail trip and it was quite enjoyable, watching first the northern hills then the central plains slide by.  Upon arrival in Bangkok the next morning, we got the usual welcome of heat, humidity and pollution.  We were in town for a scheduled medical checkup and an explosive bowel purge, which required us to swallow a crystal solution and then poop into cottage cheese cartons.  Can’t remember what the purge was all about.  Maybe they were after worms.  We stayed with Charlie and Julie Weber who lived at the Ban Somdet Teacher Training college.  Once our intestines had slowed down, we darted over to the Nepalese embassy and got our visas.

The Webers told us of their plans to fly to Nan province and invited us to join them.  Volunteer Peter Foley was being ordained there as a Buddhist monk in an act of pious respect for a Thai friend who had died in a motorcycle accident.  We agreed to go, thinking it might be an interesting experience.  So on March 12, with the Webers and others, we boarded a Thai Airways DC-3 at Don Muang airport and flew off in that sturdy piece of aviation history for a short flight north.  As our plane slowed and banked to line up on the Nan airport, I saw that the runway had a nice green color – my first landing on a grass strip.  The DC-3’s fat tires handled the bumps nicely.  When it had come to a rest tilted back on its tail wheel and the passengers had disembarked, I admired the graceful curve of that famous wing and noticed that the trailing edge ailerons were covered in weight-saving fabric – heat-shrunk Dacron protected with butyrate dope.  I ran my fingers over that textured cloth surface and thought of the DC-3’s wood-and-cotton ancestors that had flown during the Great War.  Once in town, we went to the house of the deceased’s family and had lunch with all the old women in white who had come to mourn and arrange flowers for the casket.  Our travelling party from Bangkok included Andy Andrews, one of the Peace Corps program directors, and it was probably through his wide network of influential contacts that all of us visiting farang had gotten an invitation from the Prince of Nan to stay at his house.  The ordination ceremony at the wat was long and drawn out.  Peter looked strange with his newly-shaved head.  Monks had to prompt him with the words of his vows since he hadn’t had adequate time to study the Pali text.  Finally he was dressed up in his yellow robes and that was the last we saw of him.  We would have liked to see some of the countryside in Nan province but the governor there wouldn’t let foreigners outside the capital because of insurgent activity.  After Royse did some hard bargaining for several lovely phaa sin, we climbed into another DC-3 and flew to Chiang Mai with the Webers.

My parents arrived in Chiang Mai on March 15.  It was strange and wonderful to see them after a whole year of exchanging letters.  They looked a bit older and slower, but still quite happy and wide-eyed.  Our rented car and driver took us to the Rincome Hotel where we would be staying as guests of my folks.  It was going to be a busy few days in Chiang Mai and would include buying army surplus trekking gear for Nepal as well as showing my folks the sights around town.  After we had all settled into our nice hotel rooms and showered and napped, we headed out into the cool evening in our nice clothes for a Lanna-style northern dinner.  Guests sat on the floor and ate from elaborately carved khan toke [round pedestal trays].  We pigged out on coconut curry soup, fish, spicy salad and lots of sticky rice.  Afterwards, relaxing with market cigars and ginger chewies, we watched a performance of northern Thai dances and felt like real tourists,
The next day we got off to a nice slow start with breakfast in the hotel dining room.  After inspecting a few wat, we had our driver take us to the Bo Sang umbrella village, about five miles east of the Chiang Mai old city.  I bought a nice lacquered umbrella, which I still have to this day.  The visit was marred by an accident when a young girl ran out into the street in front of our car.  Our driver didn’t see her and we hit her very hard.  The obvious thing to do was to get her to medical care immediately.  There was no EMS in those days, so we put her in our car and drove her straight to McCormick Hospital, the closest facility.  She was gasping and coughing blood when we got her there. Someone had driven the girl’s mother to the hospital and I remember her rushing in after us with an anguished look on her face.  This whole episode made it clear why it wasn’t smart for farang to be driving rental cars in those days.

On March 17, we flew to Chiang Rai and spent a few days showing my parents our little world.  It wasn’t much in those days and had almost no tourism infrastructure.  Hardly a place they would choose to see on their own.  We checked them into the Sukniran Hotel, the nicest in town, but it was still a dump with no air conditioning.  They got a chance to inspect our tiny home and express thanks to the Lord that they didn’t have to live there.  We took them out to meet the Turnbulls.  My mother had the bizarre notion that she was being taken to a village of savages where she might wind up as the main course for dinner.  She survived, and Dad was so impressed with Bob and Dottie’s operation that he later donated $500 so they could refurbish an old truck.  I took Dad to a couple of lumber yards in Chiang Rai and he was fascinated by the many tropical hardwoods on offer.  That evening, back in town, dinner at the allegedly high-tone Silana restaurant was underwhelming.  After another day of sightseeing around town and in Mae Chan, we flew to Bangkok.

Once in Krung Thep, back in the capital’s pollution and humidity, we prepared for departure to Nepal but found time for some touristic activities.  One of the places my parents most enjoyed seeing was the Jim Thompson House – “The House on the Klong”.  They had heard in advance about Thompson, the wealthy businessman who had moved to Bangkok in 1948 and revitalized the Thai silk industry before mysteriously disappearing in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia in 1967.  He built the house in 1959 as a residence – actually a complex of six traditional Thai-style houses – and as a museum for his extensive collection of Southeast Asian art.  My folks really enjoyed it, and the visit led Dad to reminisce about his port call in Bangkok in the 1930s on his trip around the world.  I’m not sure he spent much time away from his steamer but he recalled that he and other crew members would throw coins into the water and little Thai kids at dockside would dive quick as cormorants to snatch them.

Finally, after my folks packed their fancy luggage and Royse and I grabbed our cheap bags, it was off to Oz, to Kathmandu, the capital of the world’s only Hindu kingdom.  Our whole gang – Mom and Dad, Royse and I, Susie Miller and Randy Weekes -flew away on a shiny, modern Thai Airways jet.  Landing at our destination felt like arriving in a different century and in a very different culture.  (In the early twentieth century, when the Kathmandu valley was only connected to the outside world by footpaths, the king decided that he wanted the royal family to have some cars, so at the taxpayers expense he had motor vehicles disassembled in India and carried in pieces over the mountains and put back together for the modern motoring pleasure of the ruling elite.)  A friend who had made the same trip said that jet aircraft landing there seemed totally out of place, like a spaceship – a self-contained ecosystem – visiting an alien planet.  We more or less knew what to expect, but it was still a surprise.  Standing on the airport tarmac, I craned my neck and looked up at what I took to be a lovely bank of clouds before realizing they were Himalayan peaks.  Below the snowy summits, down where people lived, Nepal was very friendly but poor and dirty – filled with things that were new to my eyes.  Sacred cows roamed everywhere untended and would lay down in traffic lanes to relax.  There were open fields right in the center of Kathmandu designated for public defecation where men would squat and dogs would immediately eat their poop.  We now believed the general warning we got from the Peace Corps doctor in Bangkok who said that we should assume everything in Asia was covered in a thin layer of feces.  Beggars held out their hands for money, for baksheesh.  Drivers, vendors, waiters, bellhops – everyone – clamored for your business.  There was clearly a disparity in the distribution of income. The wealthy elite, centered around the king and the royal family, were mostly out of sight in guarded compounds.  Overall, though, as an exotic locale and as a threat to your health, Nepal certainly delivered the goods.

One of our first activities was to get photos for our trekking permits.  We found a street photographer who took our mugshots with an ancient box camera and then disappeared under a heavy cloth to develop the pictures in trays of chemicals.  My parents checked into the upscale Shanker Hotel, while we four volunteers found more modest accommodations.  There was a restaurant in town called the Yak & Yeti, run by an expat Russian and former ballet dancer named Boris Lisanevich.  We dined there one evening in hopes of discovering what a bigfoot burger tasted like.  We accompanied my folks when they went off to see an acquaintance of theirs, Mary Slusser, who was doing academic research for several months in Kathmandu and was happy to spend an evening with some Americans.  Mary’s sister, Dorothy Payer, a good friend of theirs from Cleveland, was curator of Oriental textiles at the Cleveland Museum of Art.  Mary related funny stories of the everyday challenges of living in Nepal.  One of her complaints was having to trade her dollars for Nepali rupees at the unfavorable official exchange rate, which drove up her cost of living considerably.  Her mood was not improved when Royse and I told her that we took our dollars into the seedy bazaars and, huddling in the mud with shady-looking money dealers, exchanged them at the black market rate for about three times what she was getting.  Where she saw unfairness, we saw social justice.
There was a brisk hippie tourism industry in Nepal for the simple reason that marijuana was legal and easily purchased in numerous government-monopoly outlets.  Bob Seger was probably stoned in “Kathmandu” when he wrote the song.  We met an American film crew who were in the country making a documentary about all the ready weed.  I was having breakfast with the cameraman – who looked like a regular user himself – when he reached into his pack and pulled out a large aluminum 16 mm film canister.  “This is my stash”, he said with a sly grin.  I thought, wow, he’s going to sprinkle a couple tablespoons of ganja on his oatmeal.  To my disappointment, it turned out to be instant coffee.

Nepal was about eighty-five percent Hindu and that population was mostly lowland and city dwelling.  The Buddhists generally lived up in the valleys or in refugee camps.  One day, in the course of wandering Kathmandu’s streets, we saw a young girl, wearing heavily stylized makeup, peering out of a second story window.  She was a Kumari Devi, or living goddess.  These Hindu children were chosen from a high caste by signs and horoscopes to serve as divine entities until they reach puberty.  The kid we saw looked bored and probably wanted to be out playing with her friends – if she was allowed to have friends .  Nepal is the birthplace of Buddhism and there has always been a Buddhist presence there.  We visited one ancient temple in the capital and made a circuit of its dark interior courtyard, turning rows of creaking prayer wheels clockwise with our hands.  About a mile northwest of downtown is the sacred Swayambhunath Mahachaitya, a Buddhist religious complex containing a large and famous stupa painted with Buddha’s eyes   There was a Tibetan Buddhist refugee community in Nepal which had grown considerably over the past two decades as tens of thousands of Tibetans followed the Dalai Lama into exile and emigrated south to Nepal and India after the Chinese invasion.  We visited a large refugee camp outside Kathmandu where there was a thriving craft industry in rugs, clothing and jewelry.  I photographed a very old woman religiously spinning a hand-held prayer wheel.

We still needed backpacks and, in the process of scrounging the markets, we had an unlikely encounter with two former Nepal volunteers who, after their Peace Corps gig, had stayed on as subsistence entrepreneurs.  They were making their living – barely – by renting backpacking equipment.  It was old, terrible stuff but it was cheap, so we rented two exceptionally uncomfortable packs, as well as two sleeping bags which were really just woolen blankets sewn together.  They would keep you nice and warm if the temperature was already 70 degrees.  With our sloppy and inadequate preparations complete, we said farewell to my folks, who were heading back to the States to escape the thin layer of poo.  Susie had purchased a new pair of sneakers for the hike and Dad told her, “Don’t get any yeti dung on those nice new shoes!”  She never forgot that remark.

Our trekking plan was to hike out of Pokhara for a week-long outing up the Kali Gandaki river valley, which would take us north between the mighty peaks of Dhauligiri and Annapurna.  We daydreamed about repeating the brilliant caper allegedly executed recently by another volunteer who headed up the Kali Gandaki and just kept on going.  He reportedly was able to sneak past the border guards and military checkpoints and enter Tibet incognito for a few days.  This was the kind of unlikely tale that we fed on.  At that time, there was no road from Kathmandu to Pokhara, so another rickety DC-3 flew us west to our starting point.  We had made no advance plans at all for a guide or porters, but that problem was solved the instant we stepped off the plane.  We were set upon by an enterprising and confident twelve-year-old Tibetan refugee named Dorje Dumdal.  He grabbed my sleeve and announced, “I am your guide”.  Conveniently and unsurprisingly, he had two uncles who would be our porters.  So the die was cast.  Our commander and expedition leader was a brassy young kid who knew every village and tea shop along our route.  We were eager to start so we headed over to a police post for our required trekking permits and a chance to put those mugshots to use.  We requested, and paid for, permits for the upper Kali Gandaki valley which would allow us to get as far north as Jomsom.  Beyond that, the valley was a closed military zone near the Chinese border and was off limits to hiking riffraff like us.  From Pokhara, we expected to head west for several days before turning north up the great river gorge between some of the highest peaks in the world – Dhaulagiri to the west and Annapurna to the east.

Thus, the same day we flew in from Kathmandu, March 25, we hit the trail – a group of seven counting our local fixers – and headed for the village of Suikhet, our destination for the night and about eight miles from the Pokhara airport.  We gave all our heavy stuff to the porters who lugged it in uncomfortable-looking wicker baskets with tump lines across their foreheads.  This section of trail was basically lowland hiking with only a few modest hills and ridges, following well-worn dirt paths that teemed with donkey pack trains and people on the move.  One of the nice touches we noticed about these pedestrian highways – where much freight is carried on human backs – is that at intervals, usually near large shady trees, there would be long stone platforms about three feet high at the edge of the trail.  These platforms were exactly at fanny level, so that a traveler could ease both posterior and cargo onto the shelf for a convenient rest.  Energy levels were high and we set a very fast initial pace.  Susie Miller had a short stride and told us to slow down because at the rate we were going she was almost running.  Suikhet was a small collection of mud brick houses, innocent of any refinements.  Dorje knew the protocol and asked around till he found a house that would take us.  We paid the homeowner for meals and floor space to sleep on – in this case a storage room.  Trekking tourism was already modestly established in the early seventies and provided welcome income for the locals.  One of the porter uncles was wearing shoes with no socks, to the severe detriment of his feet, and Susie lent him a pair with the understanding that he would return them.

We gave very little thought to any risks we might face.  Although there wasn’t much danger from insurgents or robbers, we were heading into an area that had no electricity, no roads, no cars, no airports, and, as far as we knew, no radio communication.  We put little faith in the urban legend that the US embassy kept a helicopter ready to rescue its citizens.  If one of us had broken a leg up the Kali Gandaki valley, it would have taken at least a week to get out to medical care.  Young people often assume they’re bullet-proof and, thankfully, for this trip at least, we were.

The next day was more flat land travel, the primary exception being a modest ridge which took us up to a charming hillside settlement called Naudanda.  It had lovely views to the south across fertile valleys.  We got there about noon and the smell of wood smoke and the spiced aroma of cooking food reminded us that we were famished.  Lunch was great plates of rice and dal [lentils] which we devoured as we sat on stone benches in the bright sun.  Back on the trail, if we only needed a drink to perk us up, Dorje would call from house to house, “Chaa bayt sahl?” [do you sell tea?], and a vendor would sell us a foaming glass of sweet milk tea.  Since leaving Pokhara, we would periodically come to police stations where the officer on duty would carefully inspect our trekking permits before returning them to us with a smile.  We stayed in Birethanti that night and that was the end of easy going for a while.

After Birethanti, the trail got progressively tougher and in the afternoon we literally hit the wall as we started a very steep climb up to the shoulder of a ridge which, the next day, would drop us into the Kali Gandaki valley.  We planned to spend the night at the summit of the ridge in a place called Ghorepani – about 9000 feet altitude – which had a well-known viewpoint nearby called Poon Hill.  All four of us North Americans were young and fit but it was a brutal ascent .  The air got progressively thinner and we just never seemed to reach the top.  Our frequent pauses – collapsed on the ground, struggling for breath – got to be an embarrassment as Dorje and his uncles would wait patiently for us to stumble up to where they had taken a nice five minute break.  And they were carrying our gear.  Late in the day, as we approached Ghorepani, we passed through an area of thick forest whose immense trees rose skyward and closed above our heads in a shadowy cathedral of green.  Unbeknownst to us, this was one of the last wooded areas in the region and would soon fall to the axe.  Though we meant no disrespect to this beautiful setting, several us scurried into the bushes to take our first dump in several days, with cries of awk laew! [it came out!].  The crystal clear air of the woods carried our offensive scent further than we expected.

The village of Ghorepani at that time was perhaps a dozen stone houses built near a spring.  We slept on hay in a barn.  There was a funeral in the village that evening and it got very cold.  I lay sleepless in the pitch dark, shivering in my sleeping bag, listening to the eerie mourning chants that drifted over the houses.
March 28 was a hard and glorious day.  After we rolled our stiff bodies out of the straw and stuffed our blistered feet into our boots, the challenge was a 1500 foot ascent to the Poon Hill viewpoint.  For the past two days, Dorje had been excitedly promising a “good see”, a “very good see”.  So when common sense said we should be heading down to the Kali Gandaki gorge, instead we made an excruciating side trip upwards.  By Everest standards we weren’t high, but at 10,500 feet I was getting very little oxygen into my lungs.  Breathing was labored and painful.  My feet felt like lead weights. Three steps, pause.  Two steps, pause.  The reward finally came when we reached the top of Poon Hill and beheld one of the great mountain panoramas in the world under a shining sky of cloudless blue.  In a vast arc sweeping seventy miles from west to east, we saw the sheer, vertical southeast face of Dhaulagiri drop three miles into the seemingly bottomless Kali Gandaki river gorge. To the right, the Annapurnas filled the horizon as gale-force winds blew streamers of snow off their summits.  The mountains above their snow lines were incandescently white under the brilliant morning sun.  We all knew how lucky we were since clear weather in this area is pretty much a roll of the dice.   We all looked at Dorji, who was smiling proudly.  “You were right”, we said.  “This is a very good see.”

The rest of the day was a true pleasure since it was all downhill under sunny skies with soaring peaks in view.  Susie contributed her considerable musical talents and soon had us all singing English rounds and folk songs.  Even Dorji mastered most of “There are suitors at my door.”  We were all feeling elated, and a little “sahib’s knee” from the descent was a small price to pay for a truly unforgettable experience.

By late afternoon, the mountain tops were out of view and we had descended thousands of feet into the cold shadows of the canyon bottomlands. We stayed in Tatopani on the far bank of the Kali Gandaki. To reach it, we crossed the river on a large steel cable suspension bridge designed for human and animal traffic in this roadless region. It was quite a triumph of engineering considering its remote location. The effort required to haul the needed steel and concrete into the site was difficult to imagine. There was a hot spring there and the feeling was completely different from villages up in the hills. With the constant roaring of the river, the deep shade, and the steep canyon walls, we had a sense of being closed in and overwhelmed.
A lot of mountaineering expeditions had made their way up and down the Kali Gandaki over the years. French alpinist Maurice Herzog led a renowned 1950 team that, after an aborted attempt on Dhaulagiri, made the first ascent of an 8000 meter peak by summiting Annapurna. Herzog paid a ghastly price for his achievement. He lost his gloves near the summit and suffered severe frostbite to his hands and feet during an exposed overnight bivouac. In a nightmare retreat down to India through Nepal’s lowland Terai, the team doctor performed repeated amputations on his gangrenous toes and fingers. His wounds were filled with maggots, which retreated at the approach of the surgeon’s tweezers, and were only extracted with great difficulty. His saga made our little stroll seem quite insignificant by comparison.

That evening Dorji conjured up some unusual entertainment for us. The Tatopani village school was putting on a show for parents and we were invited. After dinner, in the dark, we stumbled along stoney paths to a small hut. The tiny space inside was lit only by a few candles. The parents were seated on the ground on one side and the students on the other. Under the gentle guidance of the teacher, the kids took turns standing up to recite poems and sing songs. You could tell the parents were very proud of their children. It was very touching to see a spirit of community surviving in such modest and unpromising circumstances.

We knew that Jomsom would be at least two days up the Kali Gandaki, so after a full day’s rest in Tatopani, we got an early start and had covered about eight miles when we got to the police post at Dana. The officer took our trekking permits with a smile and looked at them. Then he stopped smiling and looked at them some more. Then he called a co-worker over. Then Dorji joined them to find out what was going on. After a conversation marked by much gesticulating, we were informed of the fact that our permits were, in fact, only good for the Trisuli lakes area, wherever that was. As disbelief and frustration swelled in my breast, I maintained the appearance of a calm and reasonable person and asked them how this could have happened. They all shrugged their shoulders. Obviously we had been given the wrong permits and, somehow, the police stations we passed along the way had cheerfully waved us on ahead after carefully inspecting our incorrect documents. My guess was that those previous officers couldn’t read, but the one in Dana could.

The upshot was that we were forced to turn around and head back to Pokhara. We held an impromptu conference about the trail back and everyone agreed that one visit to Ghorapani was enough. We agreed to Dorji’s recommendation to take a longer but easier route and swing to the south around the Poon Hill ridge.

It took us five days of easy walking, with stops in Beni, Baglung, Kushma and Naudanda. Along the way an American woman attached herself to our party. She was very careful to point out that she was on a spiritual journey and that her guide was a Sherpa, although Dorji could tell that the guy was local and certainly not a Sherpa. During our overnight stays, she had the disagreeable habit of taking off her clothes in front of guests and hosts and displaying her unattractive nakedness.

The trails were generally level and the hiking was quite enjoyable. Troops of langur monkeys swung through the trees overhead and scolded us. Along the banks of streams we saw sheets of homemade paper stretched on individual frames and placed in the sun to dry.
One time, when the others were ahead of us on the trail, Dorji and I saw a startling sight. In a corner of a farm’s animal pen, amongst the straw and the dung, we saw a man dressed in rags crouching in the mud. He was clearly very sick and had a look of hopelessness and death in his eyes. I had the feeling that he had been put there to die. Dorji’s face registered alarm and disgust. Smallpox was still a scourge in Asia at that time. Perhaps that was the explanation.

Once back in Pokhara, we enjoyed the simple pleasures of taking a hot shower and eating in restaurants. Dorji and his uncles got paid and we were genuinely sad to part company with them. The pair of socks that Susie had loaned now smelled so bad that she let Uncle keep them. Since we were off the relative isolation of the trail, vendors showed up again, drawn to us like a specialized insect which can sense the body heat of tourists. One fellow offered up some Tibetan Buddhist wood-block prints. They were relatively new, probably made for foreigners like us, but they were quite nice and I bought them. On another occasion, only dimly realizing that I was promoting the plunder of Nepal’s cultural patrimony, I acquired four tsakli, Tibetan Buddhist miniature paintings – one from the eighteenth century. They were charming, inexpensive and irresistible. It was easy to understand how Lord Elgin felt when he hauled those Parthenon marbles off to London.

As we flew to Kathmandu for several days of rest and organizing, we were facing the return to Thailand and the beginning of our second year of teaching. We handed our trekking gear back to the subsistence entrepreneurs and checked into cheap accommodations. It was very nice having a few days which involved sleeping late and little or no walking. Finally, on April 8, we climbed aboard that shiny Thai Airways spaceship and flew out of Nepal’s parallel universe, returning to the reality of Bangkok’s heat, humidity and congestion. We were back to the food we loved and could eat all day long, but we had forgotten the busy pace, the great shiny stores, the rock and roll music. Our first evening in town we went to see Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces. Thailand had come to feel like home, which meant a sense of place but also work, and there was always a classroom looming in the near future. We stayed at the Petburi Hotel – a regular watering hole for volunteers transiting through Krung Thep. It was also heavily trafficked by GIs on leave from Viet Nam who got hourly rates there for themselves and their Thai hookers. However, they had a swimming pool, which was a major plus. We got to spend some time with volunteer Dorothy Foster after her return from a vacation in Bali. She was in her mid-sixties when she signed up for Thailand – a very brave person who won the affection and respect of nearly every American and Thai she met. She taught in Chiang Mai and was great friends with Susie Miller.

The Peace Corps bosses and the Ministry of Education knew that volunteers didn’t have to start teaching again until mid-May, and they had conspired to put us to work for the intervening four weeks. The assignment, however, was not without its benefits. We were being sent to a teacher training college on Phuket Island in the south of Thailand on the Andaman Sea. Although we’d be working in hot rooms without air conditioning to help somnolent young Thai teachers improve their English, it would be paradise. Phuket in its pre-tourist days was a lovely tropical locale with many wonderful and undeveloped beaches. We hadn’t seen that part of the country, so we were game. Part of this experience would be the adventure of getting there. The first stage was an overnight train trip down the Malay peninsula to the major rail junction of Thung Song. Somehow we wangled first class tickets with a private compartment, which was extremely sabaay [enjoyable]. I stayed up most of the night reading Herzog’s Annapurna. When we awoke, it was a pleasure watching the sun come up, and seeing the rice paddies, water buffalos and village life roll by to the steady clackety clack of the rails. Once off the train, we took an overpriced samlaw [bicycle rickshaw] several blocks to the bus terminal and boarded a bus for the last leg to Phuket. The ride was extremely unpleasant. After our cocky, show-off driver got to the hilly, curving roads in the open countryside, he started playing a tail-gating game with the bus in front of him. We were seated in the very back row, and the swaying and pitching at high speed was so extreme that we were literally lifted out of our seats. It was terrifying for everyone, but the Thai passengers just sat there like fatalistic dummies. Well, the angst-ridden farang had reached their limit. I staggered up to the front and shouted at the driver to stop. Royse and I got off with our bags and were left standing by the roadside in the middle of nowhere. It took several more bus rides, a lot more money, and the rest of the day to finally reach the Education Center in Phuket. Then shortly after we had settled into our dorm and unpacked our bags, we discovered that our passports had been stolen. As sweat trickled down our hot, unwashed faces, we paused to reflect on the day. It was fair to say that the day had shown Thailand at its worst. But, in the short-term, there was no escape.

The next morning, Monday, April 12, was much better. I had showered and gotten a good night’s sleep and at 7:00 AM was relaxing in a lawn chair at the education center, listening to the birds singing, and enjoying the sounds from Phuket’s harbor down the hill as the day began. Royse had been dealing with amoebic dysentery for five days and headed off to the Seventh Day Adventist hospital for some medication. We would be here for almost four weeks, and even the prospect of teaching didn’t sound so bad. After a collection of phuu yais [officials] had given introductory speeches, the staff – a mix of Thai and farang – administered written and oral exams to the nervous local teachers whose English we would be upgrading. Every day we had eight twenty-minute language classes plus a phonetics class, and we taught sitting down, which was a blessing. My first group of students included Chantra, Poonsiri, Premjai and Nonglak. It was hot and they were sleepy, but it was our mutual task to get their English uplifted over the next four weeks. And, collectively, try we did. One strategy was to liven up the learning with special events. We had an evening of farang games – sack races, pin-the-tail-on-the-water buffalo, apple-bobbing, followed by hamburgers. We did English-only skits and put on an English market day, in which I ran Mr. Peter’s Medicine Store and sold Hanuman Hair Grower and Poo Ying Hair Curler. Royse ran a beauty salon and Susie Miller ran an ice cream shop. Quite lame but quite fun.

The visiting teaching staff stayed in cheaply-built dormitories attached to the teacher training college. Our rooms were tiny, poorly-ventilated and were separated from adjoining rooms by thin plywood walls which provided absolutely no acoustic privacy. In the room next to our’s was one of the senior Thai staff members for the program, whom we shall call Boonsohng. He was arrogant by nature, exploited the privileges of rank whenever he could, and had commandeered the program’s Land Rover for his private use. He would neglect his teaching duties when he felt like it and – no surprise – often snuck his newly-acquired girlfriend-of-the-month into his bedroom for amorous workouts. Royse and I, in the next room, could hear everything through those paper-thin walls and tried not to laugh as they kept scolding each other to be quiet. How can you possibly have sex and not make at least some noise? In spite of the long odds against them, they kept trying to be ree-ehp roi [proper] and have fun at the same time.
There certainly could have been worse settings for the work at hand. We were on a tropical island with a dozen gorgeous beaches, and in the evening, from hills overlooking the sea, we had views of blazing, romantic sunsets. The mix of Thai, Malay and Indian cuisines was an endless adventure for the palate. The markets offered an avalanche of inexpensive fruit and seafood. Old Phuket Town had a quaint, colonial feel with narrow-fronted, painted buildings done in the Sino-Portuguese architectural style. The teaching staff for the program loved to party, so free time was usually spent hanging out with friends on the beach, in restaurants and in bars. Our suffering was clear for all to see.

During our stay on Phuket, we made the acquaintance of the Nelsons, an American couple living on the island (not to be confused with Mr. and Mrs. Rupert Nelson, who were missionaries working with the Lahu in Chiang Rai). The journal I kept is silent on why they were living here in the south. Mission work? Economic development? Heat-loving retirees? Regardless, they were gracious hosts to us transient volunteers. They had an extremely nice house with shady verandas, a swimming pool and a bar. Royse and I were frequently found in our swim suits lounging poolside in their deck chairs. Whatever their work was, the Nelsons did it in style.

One delightful episode was meeting Phuket’s Chao Lay [Moken sea gypsies] – an Austronesian nomadic people who spend most of the year living on their boats, harvesting the ocean and moving along the coast between Burma and Thailand. We visited them one evening at Koh Siray beach and watched their annual boat festival. They were having a merry time drinking, playing drums and paying absolutely no attention to the small cluster of farang watching them. They launched a small ceremonial float made of bamboo and decorated with flowers, string and candles. They were propitiating their spirits and calling to their ancestors to bring them a year of good luck. I remember thinking to myself what a National Geographic moment that was.

Sunday May 9 was our last day in Phuket. Our teaching seminar had wrapped up the previous Friday, we had said sentimental farewells to our students, and were now busy making preparations to catch an overnight bus that evening to return to Bangkok. We had an early breakfast in the market and bumped into a young Swedish world traveler – quiet, gentle, long-haired – who hung around with us for part of the day. He wanted to get away from tourists (although that’s what he himself was) and we appealed to him as working locals. I don’t remember Phuket as having many tourists at all in those days. If he could only have looked fifty years into the future, he would have recoiled in horror at the locust-like swarms of visitors that smother Thailand. The bus trip was a perfect vignette of bad Thai travel. The owner oversold the seats by fifty per cent and also sold standing room, doubling his income and quadrupling the misery of the passengers. This was for an eighteen hour trip. We were lucky to have a seat at all and arrived in Bangkok utterly exhausted.

The times we spent in Chiang Mai and Bangkok were frequently filled by administrative issues to be addressed. Schedule a dentist appointment. Get a smallpox vaccination. Don’t swim until the vaccination is healed. Pick up bus money and train money. Buy train tickets. Visit the Longman’s textbook showroom and load up with material for the coming school year. All that really cut into our dining and loafing time. We enjoyed a very nice first class train overnight to Chiang Mai, dropping off Susie Miller at Lamphun on the way. From the train station we took a small roht song taew [two bench taxi] to the airport and flew back to Chiang Rai to confront our destiny of year two in the classroom.