My my my, PAI!
Gone are the days of the Panya Project, with its gardens and fruit trees, mud plastering and compost-heated shower experiments, communal meals and beautiful friends. Now we reign in an era of Pai, a hippie paradise set in the mountains of North Thailand about 100km from the Burmese boarder, where the sun is always shining (in the dry season, which it is) and the smiles extend late into the night, when you can hear live music (especially the ubiquitous reggae) emanating from nearly every one of the plethora of bars that line the streets. It's hard to really capture the awesome essence of Pai, but lots of tourists feel so captivated by it that they decide to simply plant roots and kick it permanent-style (but fear not, for we have already sadly departed Pai's mountain peaks and reggae-filled streets). And yes, Pai is where we rode the mighty elephant! (Chang in Thai---named Noy.)
It's been said before: it's a small world; but this particular idiom, capitalized upon by the evil Disney Corp., really comes into focus when nearly every day we run into one of the few people we know from this vast country. Despite being 3 hours from the city of Chiang Mai (present location), where Panya is located and therefore where we met most of the beautiful people we've encountered here, we still managed to run into friends, with whom we enjoyed smoothies at street-side tiki bars in the afternoons and fine Thai brews (donning pictures of elephants and lepoards!) by riverside bonfires at night.
So everyone here calls handheld flashlights "torches" if they're speaking in English (fai chai in Thai), for which I blame the copious Brits & Aussies here. And I think that "torch" sounds way more badass than "flashlight." But using an actual torch is far more badass. And that is how I started the day last Wednesday: cave exploring with a native Hilltribe (Ka-ren tribe) woman near her village in the mountainous jungle (or is it junglous mountains?).
The hilltribe way of life is a testament to sustainability and tradition: they grow their own food, or harvest it from the jungle, make their own clothes in explosive Day-Glo patterns, and live in tight-knit tribal communities, everyone supporting everyone else. They also make a bangin' jug o' moonshine---so I'm told. So we hired a guide from a Karen tribe named Cha, who is quite knowledgeable about the flora (showing us wild tiger balm and wild bananas chock full of seeds) and, thankfully, also about the many twisting trails in the junglountains. Cha was a funny guy and a prankster for sure, jumping out from behind bushes to scare Sarah and telling us it was another 2 hours up hill as we finally neared our destination village. A 48- & 49-year-old brother and sister from the Czech Republic also powered along on the steep trails, rarely teetering alarmingly close to the edge.
We saw the biggest bamboo ever there in the jungle valley. Giant bamboo, a foot in diameter and a hundred feet tall, growing in tight clusters like clumps of grass, which, in fact, it is. We hiked to a magnificent towering waterfall and ate delicious bagged tofu and rice off of banana leaves serving as picnic blankets. And WATER BUFFALO! Yes, we saw them too, wallowing in the cool waters of the winding river that guided us through the valley. Other strange things too: ants in an ant super-highway, apparently paved black by all the ant-traffic. Then, immediately afterwards, a huge bumbling, bristling, writhing pile of daddy long legs (yeah!?) apparently orgying in a ditch and up the bushes and trees; crAzy! And then the destination Karen village was obscured to my experience by an unrelenting illness that plagued me throughout the night. But I got better.
So here we are back in Chiang Mai, headed to Laos the day after tomorrow! Goin' up the river!
Hope all is super-splendid, exciting and fun!
Wow, so many Pai pictures!: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.812375635735.2379791.18403674&l=89f615266b
"Leaving his kingdom and loved ones behind, Siddhartha became a wandering monk. He cut off his hair to show that he had renounced the worldly lifestyle and called himself Gautama.
ReplyDeleteHe wore ragged robes and wandered from place to place. In his search for truth, he studied with the wisest teachers of his day. None of them knew how to end suffering, so he continued the search on his own.
For six years he practiced severe asceticism thinking this would lead him to enlightenment. He sat in meditation and ate only roots, leaves and fruit. At times he ate nothing. He could endure more hardships than anyone else, but this did not take him anywhere. He thought, "Neither my life of luxury in the palace nor my life as an ascetic in the forest is the way to freedom. Overdoing things can not lead to happiness. " He began to eat nourishing food again and regained his strength."
http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/Buddhism/footsteps.htm