We didn’t mind that Chiang Rai lacked the excitement and culture of bigger cities and that it really wasn’t much more than a large market town. In those days, the rice fields were still close enough to the center of town that you could encounter an occasional stray water buffalo wandering down the street, minus the little dek [kid] with a stick who should have been tending it. That was OK. It was where we lived. Our first night back in town, we had dinner at the Silana restaurant, one of the nicer places, but still a study in cracked plastic and bad lighting. An epileptic fan on the wall struggled to deliver a breeze. A large framed picture showed King Bhumipon and Walt Disney holding a Mickey Mouse flag.
Settling back into our little green house really felt like coming home. It was a place where we were comfortable, surrounded by familiar sights and sounds. But, of course, we were government employees, not tourists, and the rent had to be paid, literally and figuratively, and that meant a return to the classroom and another long cycle of work. As we plunged into our second year of teaching in Chiang Rai, we knew what to expect on the first day of school and were somewhat more relaxed, but that was not to say it was any easier. Learning English was a real challenge for some students, and as their attention wandered and they became frustrated, that caused discipline problems for me. We always struggled with inadequate teaching materials and there was an ongoing drama – in my English department at least – to write, type and crank out substitute content, and I seem to remember always being elected the repairman who would get his hands and his nice teaching clothes covered with grime trying to clear a jammed Gestetner mimeograph machine, or winding up as the designated grunt who would bicycle into town for reams of paper and tubes of ink.
It was nice that we already had an established community of friends, even though we occasionally got on each other’s nerves. That support network might change over time as volunteers rotated in and out, or as Thai teachers moved between Ministry of Education postings, but they were the indispensable social cushion in our daily lives – the antidote to loneliness and isolation, and we probably didn’t show our appreciation to our compatriots as much as we should have.
To give us perspective on our situation and to help us value the support we had, there was always the story of the first Peace Corps volunteer in Mae Hong Son. Her tale stood as an example of how isolated some of the first teaching assignments in Thailand really were. In the early 1960s, there was one dirt track into that far northwestern province, whose culture was Shan, not Thai. It followed the military road which had been cut by the Japanese during World War II. Vehicles could get through in dry weather, but rains had made the way impassable at the start of the school year. So while the highway experts in Bangkok were still working on plans for an all-weather road from Chiang Mai, a young American woman climbed aboard an elephant with her suitcase and teaching materials and began the mountainous, five day jungle trek to her assigned school – a hundred miles from the outside world. Safe to say the mail was slow getting to her, but, while she waited, she had the experience of a lifetime. Ten years later, when we were on the scene, Mae Hong Son had acquired that all-weather gravel road as well as an airport. Despite these improvements, however, that little town in its mist-shrouded valley still felt like a very distant place – a world far removed from the mainstream of Thai life.
A new volunteer in town for the school year was Nick Handy from Seattle, who arrived to teach at the Christian school Chiang Rai Wittayakhom. He would spend one year there before transferring to the school at Ban Farm Sampantakit. There he had the Turnbulls as neighbors and lived in the house vacated by Frank Younkin and his family when they returned to the States. We both liked Nick very much. In addition, he loved camping and was a hard-core, trail-pounding hiker, so the three of us were a natural team. He was with us on all our most memorable outings. We went backpacking in the Cascades with him after we had all returned home.
Samakkee school maintained its connection with Canada, even though Ajaan Bunjong with his Canadian Masters Degree had moved on to another position. We got another Canadian CUSO volunteer after we bid farewell to Randy Weekes. We greeted Karina Rosenberg, who was fresh out of university, tall, red-headed and eager to plunge into the classroom and pass on her native language. Thais love to throw parties, and since the school staff had given Randy his liang sohng [farewell dinner], they gave Karina a liang rahp [welcome dinner]. They did not cut the modest new girl a break. To her everlasting mortification, they made her stand up at the microphone and sing, and then ramwong around the room. Royse and I were old hands at this by now and felt totally relaxed when they called us up. After the formal party, a female Samakkee teacher named Jintana took Karina to Chiang Rai’s one and only nightclub – a seedy place packed with Chiang Rai’s least eligible bachelors and reeking of alcohol. To Karina’s relief, at least this time, she was not called upon to provide the entertainment. Onstage a stripper gave a singularly vulgar performance. The crowning touch for the young Canadian was some bad diarrhea the next day from all the food and drink.
The party fever spilled over into the community development sector. Dick and Kathy Placke were returning home to Indiana after two years of pigs and chickens and they got the farewell works not only from the local farang gang but also from their provincial Thai department as well, in the form of a rather swish evening lawn party, featuring fluorescent lights, northeastern-style lahp [chopped intestines], and lots of alcohol and dancing late into the night.
Larry Rose, one of the other community development stalwarts, was staying on for another year, and one weekend we visited his work site in a remote hamlet called Ban Mae Tam Tai, far out in flat rice farming country east of Chiang Rai town. One of Larry’s responsibilities was locating and surveying appropriate sites where small irrigation dams could be built. Designing the dam and overseeing construction were the next steps. There was also a complex social component to this process, since he had to work with individual farmers, village elders, and multiple levels of Thai officialdom. At Mae Tam Tai, we could see what he had accomplished with the help of his full-time assistant Naret. The dam was nearing completion, and after a tour of inspection we took a dip with the local kids in the delightful swimming hole that had been created upstream from his project. It was complete with a tree that overhung the water and allowed the dek to leap off a branch in daredevil plunges. As the sun set and dusk gathered, we walked beside the rice paddies and enjoyed the peace and solitude of the countryside, and the sounds of a day’s end in a small village. That evening we had chicken and sticky rice at the home of Buan, the phuu yai ban [village leader] and stayed the night as guests in his home. In the morning we took a bus back to Chiang Rai to prepare for another week of school.
Royse and Karina started taking classical Thai dance lessons given at Chiang Rai Wittayakhom school on Saturday mornings. This type of dance is highly stylized and requires quite a bit of subtlety and control, and Thai girls start at a very young age to master it. The learning challenges for a Western woman in her twenties are quite considerable. Royse had an extensive background in dance so she picked it up easily. Karina lacked such experience but she gave it her best effort and did well. The Thais are not above finding some humor in watching foreigners mess things up. Susie Miller related the story of a female Volunteer in another province who had worked very hard – with limited success – to learn Thai classical dance and had volunteered to perform in public at a festival. The day before she was due on stage, a loudspeaker truck drove through town blaring the urgent announcement, “Come see the foreign girl dance! She’s got really white skin!” A crowd of men came to watch the pale lady struggle through her routine. It was painful, but it was self-inflicted pain.
June 9, 1971, marked the 25th anniversary of King Bhumipon’s ascension to the throne. This was quite a blast in Bangkok, and for the entire country it meant ceremonies, parades, and no school. In Chiang Rai, we sat in Mengrai Hall at the old salaklang [provincial headquarters] from 9:00 AM to 10:30 and listened to eleven decrepit monks chant sacred scriptures. Then, on a signal from Bangkok, a gong sounded and everyone stood and listened to the national anthem. There was also a public service component connected to the day, and around noon Royse and I biked north three miles to Ban Du where several thousand students were clearing ground for a teacher training college which was to be built there. So it was a big day for the King.
One day a couple of my students demonstrated a high degree of cleverness and ingenuity when it came to preparing for a spelling quiz. On the day of the quiz, they wrote on the blackboard the list of words they were to be tested on and then erased them lightly so that they could still read them. When I caught them, I blew my stack and was in no mood to give them points for being clever. I was so angry I told them that I didn’t like Thai kids anymore and wanted to go back to America. They were a little bit upset but not very much. I was definitely in a dysfunctional relationship with that particular class.
The Turnbulls frequently invited Royse and me and other volunteers out to their farm to spend the weekend. They enjoyed our company because their kids mostly went to school in Bangkok or the States, and we in turn liked them as stand-in parents. It was a peaceful, bucolic environment and hard to resist. Their rambling teakwood farmhouse lacked air conditioning, of course, but its big screened windows admitted whatever breeze there was, and a deck looked out on the Kok river as it wandered slowly through mazy channels on its unhurried journey down to the Mekong. Bob, like most missionaries, was a multi-talented Renaissance man and was always involved in some project on which he would allow me to provide fumbling help: grafting tomato plants, building a dike, building a bridge, repairing equipment. The devil never found any idle hands at their place. Dotty loved to cook and we always had long, leisurely dinners followed often by slides and home movies in the living room. On one occasion Royse contributed an excellent mock-apple pie made with mangoes. In the morning, Dotty would rustle up pancakes, bacon and eggs and real fresh-brewed coffee for breakfast. This, naturally, gave us prolonged fits of state-side nostalgia.
Our first observation of a Thai life milestone had been the funeral of the Chiang Rai governor after the Reds nailed him, so it was nice when the next milestone that came up for us was a wedding. Somsak and Galiya were two teachers at Samakkee, and we had all been witness to the blossoming of their romance, so it was a delight to all when they announced their engagement and set a date for the wedding. The ceremony was held in Mengrai Hall, and the couple kneeled at an altar with their arms placed on a small padded table and their hands held together in prayer. Somsak was the handsome groom in a new suit. Galiya was the radiant bride in a traditional northern-style silk dress and wore flowers in her hair. Their heads were joined by a cotton string which symbolized their union for life. Well-wishers formed a line and used a seashell to pour lustral water on their hands. The reception that followed lasted three hours and provided an excess of food and Singha beer. It was an effort to teach the next day, and, in my fuzzy brain, I was sure that I had missed that sermon by the Lord Buddha concerning moderation when drinking Thai beer.
King Rama VI studied in England and became enamored of scouting during his stay and brought the movement back to Thailand. He established a national scouting program for boys and girls in 1911, and when the King is the Chief Scout, everyone participates. Once a week all the Samakkee students would show up in their tan shirts and shorts and bushranger hats, parade around town and do their paramilitary thing. I remember all the Samkkee scouts attending a big anti-communist rally in which speakers denounced the Marxist running dogs and their hooligan lackeys. I got caught up – involuntarily – in the scouting excitement. I had joined a group of teachers rehearsing songs to be recorded at the local radio station in honor of National Scouting Day. Through some bad planning, the singers rushed out to the radio station at the last moment. I remember the details like a crime scene. It was late at night. There was a torrential downpour. You couldn’t see a thing. We had three cars. One car had no headlights. I was in that car. My friends solved the highway safety issue by putting the lightless car in the middle of the convoy. It was a clever solution but still made my skin crawl with anxiety. To my surprise, however, I was alive the next morning and wondered what my next scouting adventure would be.
There was an active American Field Service program in Chiang Rai, and Royse and I and other volunteers were involved to varying degrees. Americans in the community would conduct interviews and assessments of the Thai youth who were interested in spending their junior year of high school in the United States living with an American family. Eventually candidates would have to pass a written exam to advance in the selection process. Former volunteer Gene Hottinger was active with the AFS application of a boy named Chaiyut, who came from the rural town of Chiang Kham but lived in Chiang Rai town with Gene to finish high school. Chaiyut was a gifted individual in many ways: very bright, athletic, confident and socially adept. He was a natural for AFS and eventually went to San Antonio, Texas as an exchange student. Royse oversaw the AFS application process of a young girl from Damrong school who lived a few miles out of town. Part of Royse’s responsibility was to interview this candidate and her family in their home and assess their domestic situation. So one weekend, we rode our bikes out into the country to meet her parents, who were rice farmers and lived in a small wooden house on stilts with a corrugated metal roof. After meeting her mother and father, we sat on the bamboo slat floor in their house and talked about the outside world her daughter wanted to see. Her parents had little if any education but showed remarkable calm and open-mindedness about their child’s big dreams, and we thought to ourselves that here was an extraordinarily brave young girl who had a life-changing experience ahead of her if her application was approved.
Like the Thais with whom we worked, we went on frequent weekend tio [pleasure outings] to various destinations in the north, usually by bus. These were short, inexpensive mini-adventures which added a wonderful depth and texture to our overall experience of living in Thailand. One Saturday morning, a gang of us – Royse and I, Gene and Chaiyut, and Gary Paarlberg – headed to the bus station and took off to stay with Chaiyut and his family in Chiang Kham. Rain clouds alternated with sunshine as we rode through an enchanting landscape quilted with rice fields and dotted with thatched huts. Chiang Kham town was seeing hard times from the local communist insurgency, as indicated by the heavy presence of the Thai army and the numerous foreign security advisors posted there. A big fire had gutted the market four years previously. At the time of our visit, however, things were quiet. We met Chaiyut’s family, took a shower there and then spent some time with the Callaways, a missionary couple who worked with the Hmong and Yao hill tribes who lived east of town. They helped these tribes sell their embroidery and crafts in overseas markets to provide an alternate source of income to growing opium poppies. Chiang Kham’s electricity happened to be working that evening so after dinner, to the shrieking delight and astonishment of all, I showed slides of Gene, from many years ago, as a young and innocent volunteer teacher. We slept that night upstairs under a tin roof which made an incredible, hammering noise during a four-hour torrential downpour. That cacophony, plus the village cats fighting and spitting under the house, gave us fitful sleep and troubled dreams. The bus taking us back to Chiang Rai town on Sunday morning stopped at one point to pick up a Hmong family. The husband, wife and children were all strikingly handsome and dressed in their best, brightly-colored traditional costumes. They carried themselves with a quiet, erect dignity as they climbed on the bus and took their seats. The underdressed farang, and the Thais in their homespun blue cottons, looked drab by comparison.
On Monday, July 5, I was in my normal place at the front of the classroom trying to drag a broken down truck full of students towards the garage of learning. Midway through this painful process, a man and a woman appeared in the doorway. She looked like a well-dressed hippie chick, perhaps a seeker of truth on a spiritual quest through Asia. He had long, unkempt hair and a full beard, perhaps the former lead guitarist from a now-defunct rock band. However, when I looked closer, I recognized them as Dean and Stephanie Bliss, old Libya II freaks who had been posted in Sebha and, having gotten the Qadaffi boot, had moved on to an assignment in Kabul, Afghanistan. I must have given them our address but, honestly, I wasn’t expecting them. Royse joined us and we all had lunch at our favorite noodle shop next to the haw naligah [clock tower]. It served an incomparable kuay dio beht [duck soup] alive with cilantro and chunks of congealed blood. Afghanistan was a Muslim country and, as the Blisses described it, had a very tough tribal culture. It sounded like quite a difficult assignment but they said they were managing. We thought to ourselves that we were blessed to be in Thailand. Nonetheless, they were a breath of fresh air to us, with interesting ideas and unique perspectives, and they invited us to visit them in Kabul. We spent a long, pleasant evening shooting the breeze, and I rigged a mosquito net so they could sleep on the living room floor. The next day we took them to a gaeng [curry] shop for lunch, delivered them to the airport, and they were on their way.
In mid-July, we got to meet the kind of travelers that we couldn’t afford to be. Somehow Gene had made the acquaintance of a Turkish couple who were taking a tour of Asia, and invited us over for dinner with them. He was an architect and she was an executive with Air France, so they were wealthy and it must have been an exciting slumming experience for them to hang out with low-income volunteer types. They talked about hotels we could never afford to stay at. They even had the thrill of being stranded in savage Chiang Rai for an extra 24 hours because of monsoon weather.
The first term of the school year came to a close, and at Damrong it was celebrated with a big variety show, featuring song, dance and some brilliant skits. We could look forward to about two weeks of free time. We went to a number of dinners on the local social circuit and I recall a cluster of conversations dealing with all the secrets that Chiang Rai province keeps. If we are to believe all the whispered stories, Ban Huay Xai across the Mekong in Laos is a large heroin-processing center. Air America flies the heroin to Saigon. The two Kuomintang camps in Mae Chan and Fang (numbering about ten thousand men) make secret forays into China and generate income by selling guns to the Burmese rebels. They also carry opium by pack train down to Lampang. The Burmese Shan State rebels have a headquarters in Mae Chan from which they send medical and military supplies into Burma. Such naughty behavior. Don’t they know they’re supposed to play nice and cooperate? That night I had the following dream: Royse and I had guerilla connections in some unnamed country. My father and I threw smoking pieces of nylon screen into a courtyard and shot it out with bad guys. Royse and I then escaped in a USOM station wagon.
Gene finally decided to return home and the community held a large liang sohng to mark this watershed event. It was different from the normal Thai event in that it was dry (a Christian-driven decision). Otherwise it was well-planned and carefully organized. The Vice-Governor and the Ajaan Yai [headmaster] from Gene’s school both gave speeches. The evening’s entertainment was provided by a wonderful troupe of little girls who performed northern Thai dances.
After a four-day teacher training seminar with volunteer Julie Gilmore in Uttaradit, we took the train to Chiang Mai with the plan of returning to Chiang Rai by boat down the Mae Kok. From Chiang Mai town, we took a bus north through rainy, misty countryside to the town of Fang, which was small, quiet and had a feeling of remoteness. It was about twenty five miles south of Ban Tah Tawn, the little river hamlet where we would catch a boat. We checked into a ramshackle two-dollar-a-night hotel and then walked across town to the police station to ask about departure times for the boats. Nobody knew anything, so, as we often did, we winged it. After a day’s delay, we finally caught a boat, and I recognized among the passengers a Samakkee dek and a Wa tribesman named Moses whom I had met once at a Chiang Rai lumberyard. The Wa have a colorful history as headhunters and insurgents who have fought the Burmese government for an independent homeland. He described living with the Wa army in high mountain fastnesses and dressed in furs against the cold – not a mental scene you would normally conjure up for Southeast Asia. He was very open about the fact that the Wa in Thailand engaged in opium trafficking to support their armed insurgency. He was particularly glum this day because the Thai government had recently made a huge drug bust in Lampang – a shipment of heroin in which he and his compatriots had made a very large investment. As Moses brooded over his bad fortune, our trip down the Kok was swift with the river swollen to its highest level in years. We passed through heavily wooded gorges and stopped at tiny villages along the way. When our cool, breezy boat ride was over, we had a hot and sweaty hike from the river to our house.
Royse and I spent a fair amount of time and energy reading about Buddhism and seeking insights that might help us in our lives. We read a bunch of books, including Through an Eastern Window, by Jack Huber. We did a lot of considering. We both considered taking lessons in meditation. I considered entering the priesthood for three months, but ditched that plan after considering the problem of being away from Royse for three months. I considered following an important Buddhist precept and not killing the thousands of ants that daily swarmed through our kitchen and across the food we were eating, but they were just too irritating. We ended up just trying to show consideration for each other and those around us. For me that’s the Golden Rule and that’s good enough, all things considered.
In 1971, Buddhist monks marked awk pansa [leaving pansa] on October 5. This was the end of their rainy season retreat, and in Chiang Rai thousands of townsfolk assembled at dawn to feed hundreds of monks as they descended from a hilltop monastery. Royse and I got up extra early, did our exercises and biked off to photograph this solemn and impressive event. In late October, Jack and Shawn Berkey took some time off from their teaching in Khon Kaen to take a bus to Chiang Rai and it was very nice to see them. They visited for several days and the first night they slept on the living room floor. That made Shawn very nervous because of the rats and, sure enough, about 1:00 AM there was a big bang and we got a good-sized dude in the trap. Shawn was terrified. I threw it over the garden wall and went back to bed. The next night we switched and let them sleep in our bed. Jack was focused on the notion of becoming an antiquities dealer and trading in ancient Thai pottery, so he left Shawn with us and took a bus to Wiang Pa Pao on the mountain road to Chiang Mai where he thought he might be able to acquire maw din gaow [old earthen pots]. I’m pretty sure that venture never panned out.
When the Thai version of winter arrived in November and December and the nighttime temperatures in Chiang Rai dropped into the low fifties, we froze our tails off, since our baseline was living with high humidity in the nineties. Now, according to the Thai national weather archives, the only snow the country has ever officially recorded fell, in fact, in Chiang Rai on January 7, 1955 with an air temperature of 35 degrees. No one in Chicago or Fairbanks would sympathize with us, but I attacked our fifty degree problem as best I could. The house had no heating system, of course. To reduce cold drafts, I pasted newspaper over the screened breezeway around the top of the walls in both rooms. I also made a charcoal heater, taking care to provide ventilation so as to avoid another Libyan near-death experience. I bought two large woks and mounted them on aluminum columns – one inverted over the other – with a screen collar to separate them. The whole unit was secured to a wooden base. It sort of looked like a glowing UFO. I got it done in one day and it worked perfectly. That night we put down multiple layers of soft reed mats and had sex on the living room floor right next to our new heater. It was great. Totally naked, but warm despite the cold.
On November 18, Field Marshall Thanom Kittikachorn, the head of Thailand’s ruling military junta, staged a bloodless coup against his own government to consolidate power. He dissolved parliament and the cabinet, and, with his cronies, re-seized power as the Revolutionary Party. For us, after surviving Colonel Qadaffi’s antics, it was deja vu all over again. The underlying motive for the coup was to counter the growing communist movement in the country and in the region. Thanom’s gang held power during our remaining time in Thailand, but, in the years after we left, as Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia fell to communist insurgencies, there was a long period of political violence and instability. Probably a scary time for the volunteers who followed us.
During the winter school break, I built a hallway extension that would connect our bedroom with the outside bathroom, so that, among other benefits, we wouldn’t have to go out the front door in the middle of the night and walk around the back just to pee. It was a fairly complicated project since there was a low walkway around the house that had to be bridged. After cutting a narrow doorway through the back of our bedroom wall, I had to put in a raised floor that would extend to the level of the bathroom. Then we needed walls, a roof, a hall window with anti-theft bars, and screening. Larry Rose cut sections of steel re-bars to make the secure window. Royse and I hosted a construction party for our friends and fed them a nice dinner after we had made them work. Essentially we had created another room for our house which provided ample new closet and storage space. We almost felt middle class. The last step was getting rid of the hundreds of mosquitos that had been trapped in our new addition. I lathered my hands up with shampoo till they were dripping with suds and then stood in the hall swinging my arms and catching the little buggers in mid-flight. A very effective technique.
As I was enjoying Chiang Rai’s provincial track and field championships from the stands as a spectator, one of the teachers, for some unknown reason, asked me to throw the javelin, an event in which I had never competed. I declined but agreed to throw the discus the next day. So on Saturday, November 27, I became the Chiang Rai provincial champion in discus. I’ve never had such a big boost in self-esteem on such a small investment. They held the kwang chuk [discus throw] in mid-afternoon and I competed in my T-shirt and corduroy pants. Everybody else had a track suit on. I won because nobody else could throw the discus. I lofted it an unremarkable 32.9 meters [107 feet]. It was an Olympic-size discus and felt pretty heavy. Then I stood up on the victory podium and received my award – a little hand towel – from a school official. It was an incredible ego trip. The Sam
akkee cheering section gave me a big hurrah. I saw Dotty Turnbull laughing in disbelief. That was the rebirth of my long-dormant athletic career.
On December 1, Royse, Nick Handy and I began a long-planned trek up the Mae Suaie valley north to the Kok. Rupert Nelson did his mission work with the Lahu in that area and provided invaluable advice and support. I had obtained topographic maps of our route and was compulsively studying watersheds and contour lines. Rupert convinced me that a local guide was better than a paper map, and so on a Wednesday morning we boarded a bus in Chiang Rai loaded with a gang of laughing and singing Lahu kids and headed southwest to Mae Suaie. Once there, after some milling around and hesitation, we got hooked up with a Lahu guide and hit the trail north. It was a long, tough four hours up a ridge that followed the east side of the Mae Suaie valley. We passed through an Akha village and were greeted by elders whose smiles displayed teeth blackened by years of chewing betel nut. The use of areca catechu was gradually disappearing among Thais but remained quite common in older hilltribe populations. We descended to the Mae Suaie river, crossed it, and headed up to a Lahu village called Tung Praw Sawng. This was our destination for the first stage of our expected four day, fifty-mile trek. It was a traditional community whose older women still went bare-breasted. The family that hosted us was a handsome and proud group. After a bath in a cold river, we were fed a good dinner and spent the evening engaged in friendly bargaining for a guide the next day.
The next morning, we resumed our effort to obtain a guide all the way to the Kok, but it became apparent that nobody wanted to take us that far. We wound up getting guides who would walk us north for ten or fifteen miles to earn some easy money and then hand us off to someone else. The cultural insight for us was that we had to give up control and trust to the folks who knew this neighborhood. So on the second day, with a series of helpers, we made another twelve miles along winding trails in narrow valleys to the hamlet of Ban Huai Khrai. Along the way, there was one sight that made a lasting impression on me. We came upon a single house in the middle of nowhere occupied by a young northern Thai couple. You knew immediately by the style of the hut and by their indigo cottons that they were not hilltribe but rice-farming valley folk. But what they were doing there, so hopelessly alone in hilly country, we couldn’t figure out. They must have been trying to farm somehow but we didn’t see any evidence of cultivated fields. They looked rather forlorn. In Huai Khrai, we hoped to stay with missionaries to whom Rupert had referred us. They were gone, alas, but the villagers opened the missionary house for us anyway, so we had a place to stay. After paying for dinner at someone’s house, we started enquiries about a guide for the next stretch.
We had planned for an early start on our third day but the guide we had arranged for never showed, and after some negotiations we finally started out at 9:30 with an old woman carrying a basket of cloth and her son lugging some chickens. They were way ahead of us for a while but the old lady pooped out after a few hours and we helped her carry some of her stuff. Coming around a ridge, we caught sight of our destination for the day, Ban Wa Wi, a large village with over a hundred houses, a tea factory and a brand new wat, all sitting gem-like in a little valley. This place had a mysterious and checkered history, and we were to learn much more about it over time. Walking into the town, we saw a girl whom we’d met with her father a while back on a boat trip down from Fang. What luck to pass her house as she was standing right in the doorway! She immediately invited us to stay with her family for the night. We washed up in a charming public bath the villagers had made by diverting a stream so that it emptied out of half a dozen bamboo pipes. Feeling greatly refreshed and smelling good enough for polite company, we headed back to their house. They fed us dinner and we had an absolutely delightful evening socializing with the family. The Pakistani wife was a great hostess. After dinner, the house swarmed with little kids eating treats. Their house was small so Royse and the daughter shared a bed, while Nick and I slept on the floor. An unforgettable time.
The father was named Gaew Ehm Aht, a Moslem Chinese trader. We think he came to Thailand with the Kuomintang army when it fled China after the war. He never dealt in pork, but one of his enterprises was to buy a cow from Thais in the valley, lead it up the trail to Wa Wi, where he would then slaughter it and sell the meat.
On day four, our string of good breaks continued with Gaew’s announcement that he was heading north to Mae Salak on the Kok and that we could come with him. We left early with beautiful clear weather and vistas of mist-shrouded valleys, but the end of the four hour walk was tiring and our feet were sore from repeated wet stream crossings. We planned to head upstream to Ban Tah Tawn and the Fang road but our boat had a two hour breakdown along the way and we arrived late, freezing in the dark, and, after a miserable wait, finally got a ride to Fang where we went to the house of Mr. and Mrs. Collins, American missionaries, bringing the number of guests to ten.
The fifth and final day of our trip was a boat ride back down the Kok to Chiang Rai. It was filled entirely with farang of various nationalities and, after picking up a few extra white folks, we had a total of thirteen. A number of embassies would have been in sudden distress if that boat had disappeared beneath the waves with no survivors. However, it seemed our collective karma was in good order, and the ride down was very pleasant. There was room and food for all and, blessedly, no breakdowns. One of our fellow voyagers was an Englishman named James Lemmon, a twenty-six year old telephone technician from Essex who was travelling around the world. A bit talkative but pleasant. After the boat docked in Chiang Rai, he came back to our house with us and, to help him on his way, we had Larry’s assistant Naret write out an explanation of hitchhiking in Thai, so that James could hopefully use it to obtain free rides. So we sent him off with best wishes and that evening went to see the Crimson Charm, a confusing and mediocre sword flick.
As the third and final quarter of the school year approached, with the accompanying stresses and strains of the classroom, we were still determined to tio our brains out. So our next outing was an overnight trip to Chiang Saen and Chiang Khong on the Mekong. Nick Handy, ever the pioneering, good times traveler, had already taken this bus junket forty miles to the northeast and gave it high marks. We planned to head first to Sop Ruak, the little town which lay at the exact heart of the opium world’s Golden Triangle, where the Ruak river and the Mekong meet and the borders of Thailand, Burma and Laos come together. After that we would see Chiang Saen town and then Chiang Khong, both downstream on the Mekong. So on Thursday, December 9, we trotted off to the Chiang Rai bus station and headed to the northeast. We had the name of a friend of Nick who could put us up for the night in the tiny village of Nam Keung near Chiang Saen. It was a peaceful and quiet bus trip until four young world travelers got on.
They were also headed to Chiang Saen and we worried that they might try to sponge off our free lodging. Sop Ruak didn’t have much to see, but Chiang Saen had extensive ruins from the time in the fourteenth century when it was the capital of the Lanna kingdom. The Thai Department of Antiquities has made much progress over the years in preserving the cultural heritage of Chiang Saen but, when we visited, the temple walls and the monumental statuary were tilting and crumbling in the slow grip of vines and banyan trees and had become part of a romantic but forlorn landscape of a vanished kingdom. Our contact in Nam Keung wasn’t home so the whole ad hoc collection of farang continued on to Chiang Khong, which had absolutely nothing to recommend it, altthough we did have a nice Chinese dinner, complemented by some French wine from Ban Huay Xai across the Mekong in Laos. We stayed in the town’s nicest hotel, although it was still pretty scuzzy, trafficked mostly by groups of working girls sitting around on the front steps looking for business.
The last quarter got underway with a lurch and, as always, I was charged up, full of energy and determined, this time, to get my lesson plans and classroom discipline in perfect order. And, as always, it worked…for about three days. Then things lapsed into my baseline state of stress and disorganization and all I could do was try to cope. One day some unintended amusement came my way: Ajaan Srisimon, one of the English teachers, told me that she had a dream about me the previous night. In the dream, I gave her a snake, and when she threw it into a small cave, it sprang to life. She said this with a straight face and I could tell she really wasn’t sure what it meant. I wasn’t about to go into a long discussion about how people can dream in symbols.
As Christmas approached, Royse hit her stride as the holiday pastry maestro. She baked trays of wonderful almond cookies, Viennese crescents and linzerschnitten – filling the house with an aroma that made us think we were in Bavaria. As she mixed dough for traditional Christmas cookies, I was ordered to create cookie cutter forms. Making the real item out of tin wasn’t feasible, so I made some shapes out of scotch tape-reinforced cardboard. After she had rolled the dough out on a home-made galvanized tin bread board, the cookie forms actually worked fairly well. It was a homey and fun time and reminded us of the farm house back home that we didn’t have. Garry Paarlberg invited us over to see his Christmas tree, and we wound up decorating it while he supervised and served us drinks. I smoked a pipe-full of tobacco – the first time in a long time. A picture of Stanley Kubrick on the wall and music by Cat Stevens made us homesick.
There was a string of Christmas parties and activities around town and we were in the thick of it. Desmond O’Riordan threw a bash. The new-and-not-yet-assassinated governor attended as well as a gang of local Thai administrative biggies. My job at the party was to pass around appetizers and not get too drunk. The next day Nick invited me over to Chiang Rai Whittayakhom to see the elaborate holiday displays set up in the classrooms. On Christmas eve, we skipped the church service and organized ourselves into a caroling party. We roamed the town on bicycles inflicting ourselves musically on a long list of hapless victims. If someone wasn’t home, we sang anyway and didn’t get to bed until 4:00 AM. On Christmas Day, we exchanged presents. Royse gave me a sweater and some other clothes. I gave her a shirt and a bottle of Kikkoman’s soy sauce. My parents had sent us The Last Whole Earth Catalogue, which I viewed at the time as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Later that day, the holiday festivities reached their zenith with an epic culinary pig-out at Larry’s house, all financed, organized and attended by the usual farang suspects. The last item on the social calendar was a Christmas costume party at CVK. As part of our secret preparation, Royse and I each borrowed school uniforms from a student. I shaved off my moustache. We showed up at the party dressed as nakrien [students]. I wore shorts and Royse had on a little skirt and we both groveled and acted obsequious. It was a hilariously stupid thing to do and I would say we were the hit of the party. During the holiday break, there had been the Winter Fair on the athletic field in front of Samakkee. It featured games, food stalls, student choral groups, and some cheesy strip tease acts – all stuff we had come to expect.
We welcomed in 1972 quietly. Nick came over New Year’s Eve and we drank some Wu Chia Pi. We had applied for a third year extension and had been waiting on pins and needles for a response from Jon Keeton, the regional boss in Chiang Mai. There had been Peace Corps budget cuts and our extra year was by no means assured. The drama was finally resolved on January 7 when we got a letter from Jon saying that we had been approved. Our relief was immense because we really weren’t ready emotionally to face a return to the States.
Since Royse had considerably better social skills than me, it was nice to stand on the sidelines and observe the numerous activities she was involved in. Besides her AFS work and classical dance studies, she organized some of her ninth grade girls into a theatre troupe. She directed this little gang in a production of the play “Florence Nightingale”, which they took on a mini-tour around Chiang Rai town and presented at different schools. One weekend she got involved in a merit-making activity. I helped her collect tiny plastic bags and candle-seal portions of rice into them. The next morning she got all dressed up in an elegant phaa sin and, with a silver bowl filled with rice in hand, headed off with a group of friends to the temple. My extracurricular activities, apart from home repair, involved paying for Thai lessons from Suwatana, a sweet and conscientious Samakkee teacher. We’d sit down in the school library or the teachers’ lounge and she’d try gently to force vocabulary and pronunciation into my thick skull. For fun, she’d teach me a few words of kham muang, the northern dialect. It was very different from the standard Thai taught in school. For example, if you were to say, in standard Thai, hah aray kow may ruu [don’t know what I’m looking for], in kham muang it would be saw ayawng kaw baw hoo. Nonetheless, locals loved it when you tried to speak their dialect.
As our second year of teaching was winding down in February, we were planning our home leave which was to run through April and May. We hoped to visit the Blisses in Kabul, Afghanistan. We had a lot of friends and family located in New England and would try to see most or all of them. Just as school was about to wrap up, the teachers at Samakkee got an unforgettable treat provided by the school’s unequalled administrative excellence. It was announced that we would have two more weeks of classes. Evidently the school hadn’t accumulated the requisite number of annual teaching days. My problem was that I had long ago run out of material to teach, so I just went through the motions.
February 15 was Trut Chin [Chinese New Year] – the year of the rat – and lots of boys of Chinese descent were permitted to skip school. The problem was that about 150 Thai kids also failed to show. Halfway through the day, the headmaster mustered the students for a head count to identify the missing Thai truants. The following morning after assembly, the school held a mass execution, so to speak, as those 150 Thai kids faced thick rattan canes and got their asses browned in public. The other 900 students absolutely loved it and really cut loose with the traditional Thai group laugh which starts with long, hearty laughter and ends with a collective whoop. By contrast, the sight of this corporal punishment made Ajaan Waewtah sick, since she felt the students should have been warned. That set a somber and dysfunctional tone for the remaining days of school which were devoted to administering final exams.
The BBC gave us daily updates on world events, and in February that included Richard Nixon’s ground-breaking diplomatic initiative to China. While we dined on these radio reports, we also made one of our periodic efforts at spiritual and personal self-improvement. We had decided that undergoing a twenty-four hour water-only fast would be a good way to cleanse ourselves of our numerous faults. After dinner on February 27, we were just licking the last bits of food off our plates and wondering how we could survive the next day without eating, when two Samakkee teachers, Ajaan Amphaa and her husband Tanoo, stopped by and proposed the most incongruous notion that we had ever heard from two out-of-shape Thais. They planned to start at midnight – midnight! – on a Buddhist merit-making trip that would involve driving north to Mae Chan and then making an overnight climb west to the monastery on top of nearby Doi Tung. This trek would mark Macha Bucha, one of the most important days in the Buddhist calendar, and there would be large crowds of fellow pilgrims stumbling upwards in the dark with us. So, out of sheer shock, we agreed. Our planned fast was unceremoniously cancelled and we immediately sat down to a small meal before we assembled snacks and water for the outing. We slept for two hours before Tanoo picked us up at 12:15 AM in his little Ford Cortina. Six of us somehow jammed ourselves into that compact vehicle: Amphaa and Tanoo, Royse and I and two other teachers – Srisimon and her girlfriend Wacharin. The thirty mile stretch of highway from Chiang Rai town to the turnoff past Mae Chan was dark, empty and spooky, with hardly another car. But from the turnoff to the base of the mountain, we started seeing more and more people, and at the trailhead, there was a real crowd. We couldn’t make merit by taking the auto road up, so we all hoofed it. Royse and I each carried a yaam [hilltribe bag] containing food and our canteens. I carried a bwana-style bush knife, just in case I was attacked by one of my students. We walked under a full moon and also had light from brush fires set by the monks from Wat Doi Tung. The entire five hour trek made for a rather surreal experience. Hundreds of otherwise sensible people – who should have been in bed – were wandering up a burning mountain through drifting clouds of smoke, losing their friends, losing the trail and tripping over rocks. Our legs were in good shape, so, for us, the climb was tiring but manageable. By contrast, our poor Thai companions – who are all couch potatoes at baseline – were in agony for the last two hours. The sun rose shortly after we arrived at the top and we were able to appreciate the large temple complex and the spectacular dawn views of distant mountain ranges. Close at hand, food stalls and souvenir stands had sprung up to service the throng of visitors. I purchased two hand-made paper pennants depicting the twelve animals of the Thai zodiac. Having accumulated tons of merit and eaten some food, we all collapsed on the ground and slept for a few hours. No one was in the mood to hike back down, so we loitered around waiting for a mini-bus and killed time by picking handfuls of opium poppies from a nearby Akha field. After a lurching and terrifying ride down the mountain, we finally got home at 4:00 PM. We konked out for the rest of the day, totally exhausted, vowing never again to go trekking in the middle of the night.
When school lets out for the students, it continues for the teachers. For about a month they are required to come to school to grade final exams and post results for the end of the school year. The pace is pretty relaxed, however, and the stress levels are low. Here’s how I remember the teacher’s room on a typical day: a bunch of tables are shoved together. Somebody is roasting squid over a grill. On one side I sit with Gatalie, Gobgaew, Amphaa, Penewan and Jitra. On the other side are Srisimon, Nopamat, Suwatana, Karina and Monwiphaa (the French teacher). Besides books and papers and the squid, there is a radio, children, dogs, boyfriends and an endless stream of amusing and distracting chatter. It was socially convivial but hardly an efficient work environment.
As our Thai had improved over time, we became gradually more comfortable in social situations, and we were pleased and flattered – and not nervous – when Somsak and Galiya, the newlyweds, invited us over for dinner. Galiya had prepared some of her northern specialties and we brought our own contributions. As the food disappeared with fingerfuls of sticky rice, the conversation drifted easily from Thai to English and back, from neighborhood gossip to world affairs. After dinner, there was more relaxed talk in the warm glow created by the company of friends and sips of Wu Chia Pi. I reflected that evenings like this were the rare gifts you occasionally received from really living in a culture and not just passing through it as a tourist. We reciprocated their invitation on more than one occasion.
From mid-April to mid-May, we finally went on home leave, after much indecision on the part of Peace Corps administration. One highlight on the way was a visit with the Blisses in Kabul. It was exactly as tough and tribal as they had described it. When Afghans take a dump in the countryside, they just reach for the nearest rock – preferably smooth- to wipe themselves. Dean said that, although adults in Afghanistan were generally friendly and welcoming, kids in the city made a serious sport of throwing rocks at foreigners. He tolerated this for a time but after smiles and friendly chatter in Dari failed to win the tykes over to the American side, he started carrying his own supply of stones and gave the little shits tit-for-tat. One can only guess that Afghan children pick up this clannish xenophobia by osmosis from their parents. We saw hunters coming into town from the mountains dressed in furs and carrying muzzle-loading firearms. Of course, women are treated like property, and, like elsewhere in the world, the groom’s family has to pony up a huge bride price, which seems to me as though the husband is basically buying the wife. We tried unsuccessfully to attend a buzkashi match, in which teams on horseback fight over a headless goat’s carcass. Unfortunately, the contests were being held in faraway Mazar-I-Sharif.
The markets were like those in Libya but rougher and messier. CARE packages, which should have been distributed free, were broken up and sold to the highest bidder. In the produce stalls, an unsuccessful attempt had been made to contain the vegetables in trays and boxes, and the lettuce and carrots rested on a slope that gradually merged with the mud in the street. Maybe the items buried at the bottom were less expensive. We bought a small Bokhara-style carpet and carried it back home.
We managed to spend an afternoon at the Kabul zoo, which was small and did not seem expertly managed or adequately funded. My only memory of that visit was looking at a listless Caspian tiger. That subspecies was sliding rapidly towards extinction at the time and the individual on display was likewise not long for the world. When it squatted at stool, it deposited – instead of recognizable feces – a writhing ball of worms.
The Blisses had a servant who did their housekeeping and cooking. His efforts to prepare “beef roulades” were always less than optimal and Dean and Stephanie nicknamed the results “camel turds”. One day, as an experiment, they took a scraping from under his fingernail and had it cultured just to see what bugs would grow. The results were spectacular and scary. Polio was one of the headliners.
We spent a few days in London and this provided a good opportunity to shop for sleeping bags, which we needed badly. We acquired two excellent goose down models at a reasonable price, as well as foam pads, and were set for whatever future treks we might undertake. We went to see Jesus Christ Superstar at a West End theater and, improbably, bumped into Scott Parkin, Royse’s cousin.
Compared to all these jet-setting shenanigans, the time at home in the States with friends and family seemed pretty tame, although it was clear that, while we were leading exotic but poor lives, our peers were getting on with their careers. We could see that after our gallivanting was done, we would have some catching up to do. This realization was to become a source of stress and anxiety for me. We visited Barry Golson and his wife Cynthia in rural Litchfield County in western Connecticut and spent several relaxing days doing nothing much. They were managing to live in the country and work in New York. One afternoon Barry and I went to a small country store to buy some groceries. In the line for the cash register, there was a scruffy local in front of us dressed in frayed work clothes – perhaps a retired janitor. I paid him no attention whatsoever. After we left the store, Barry pointed out that I had been standing behind playwright Arthur Miller. This was years after he and Marilyn Monroe had gotten divorced. Once back in Cleveland, one enjoyable project for us was making two backpacks for use during our third year. We had ordered two kits from a small company we found in The Last Whole Earth Catalog and they were waiting for us. Royse sewed and I riveted. The resulting packs looked home-made but were strong and serviceable. We hung out with family, performed various other social duties, and eventually were in the aluminum tube again headed back to Asia. On the way, we made a brief stop at the Anchorage airport, which provided me with my first and only visit to the state of Alaska and the chance, in the lobby, to view a very large taxidermied polar bear standing rampant with forepaws threateningly extended inside a suitably commodious glass display case. I guess the intended message was that Alaska is big and wild. After that We made a few bucket-list stops, the first of which was several days in Japan. We found a hotel in Tokyo for $12.00 per night. No, I did not misplace a decimal. Twelve dollars. Though the accommodations were cheap, I found Japanese cuisine lacking in taste and variety. Perhaps that was because we couldn’t read the menus and, misjudging the plastic samples in the restaurant windows, made poor choices. We climbed aboard the shinkansen bullet train and watched Mount Fuji slip by to the north as we headed to Kyoto, which had mostly escaped the damage of World War II Allied bombing and has survived as a jewel box of cultural treasures. We stayed in a tiny ryokan with manicured dry landscapes of gravel and bonsai. We padded around in our socks, slept on tatami mats and willingly boiled ourselves in a cedarwood ofuro [soaking tub], some of which are large enough to accommodate entire families. We saw the renowned Zen garden at Ryoan-ji Temple, which fully lived up to its reputation.
Our last stop before Bangkok was Hong Kong. Back then, landing at the old Kai Tak airport was always a special experience since it was dangerously hemmed in by the city and mountainous terrain. Airliners would approach from the west, and pilots would look for Checkerboard Hill, a site in Kowloon City north of the airport which had been painted in red and white checkerboard squares as a visual reference point. When they reached the hill, they would make the diving “Hong Kong Turn”, a 47 degree descending right turn to the south. Then, skimming within a few hundred feet of Kowloon’s buildings, they would line up for their short final approach to the one and only runway. I remember looking out the window and being so close that you could see people sitting in chairs on their rooftops with their laundry drying on clothes lines. That white-knuckle aviation locale was shut down in 1998 when the new airport was opened on reclaimed land far to the west adjacent to Lantau Island in the New Territories. Hong Kong is a dense, noisy, vibrant warren packed shoulder-to-shoulder with people doing business, all day, every day. You can certainly be a tourist there but don’t forget that you’re also a commodity. We stayed at the YMCA in Kowloon, because the city of Victoria on Hong Kong proper was far beyond our budget. After hard and prolonged bargaining at one of the numerous hole-in-the-wall camera stores, I bought a nice Minolta SLR and a bunch of lenses. We took the ferry across to Hong Kong island and rode the tram to Victoria Peak, which offered spectacular views of the famous harbor. However, we couldn’t continue loafing and sightseeing forever, and, as time and money began to run low, the jig was up. It was back to Chiang Rai and back to work for our third and final year.