Arrived back in Bangkok this morning at 5:30am and was greeted with a surprise. My bag was gone. Yes, it was my first stroke of luck after all these years of traveling. I have never had any trouble with bad water, food, or pickpockets, but my luck ran out. Brica nad I took the night bus back from Chiang Mai last night. I personally put my big ole purple backpack on the bus. It was the last one on the bus, but I assumed it was all right. Well, it wasn't. Somewhere along the way during the night, someone opened the rear door to the bus and made off with my bag. This may sound like a real catastrophe, but after assessing the damage, I decided that I would survive. Luckily my passport, plane tickets, cash, address book, Japanese dictionary, and journal were not in my bag. They are all irreplaceable. The US$2000 worth of clothes, tent, stove, hiking boots, travel books, etc that were in my bag are no big loss.
And so our two week adventure in Thailand comes to an exciting close. One might think that I would be cursing the country after this sort of incident, but I am not so sure that the same would not have happened on the Greyhound in America. Anyway, it still doesn't change all the fun that we have had here. And besides, who needs clothes anyway?
Since the last update, Brica and I have been in the northern province of Chiang
Mai. Besides being an interesting place to visit temples and shopping malls,
Chiang Mai is the home of jungle treks. Probably at least half of all the tourists
that pour into Thailand each year make the pilgrimage up north to see the wacky
hill tribes, ride elephants, take rafts and generally enjoy themselves in the
jungles near the Burma and Laos borders. Personally, I wanted to see some part of
nature that we don't have in the states: a rainforest. I wanted to see wild
monkeys and elephants and whatnot. Well, I was a little disappointed.
We arrived at 6am (do you see a pattern here?) and were faced with the choice of what place to stay and whose tour to take. For no reason at all we chose Johnny Boy Guest House in the center of Chiang Mai city. They had a four day, 1650baht (US$66) trek leaving that morning at 9am. It was the usual tour package in my opinion, but they tout it as a "non-touristic" (my friends heard this as naturalistic) tour through quiet mountain villages with the obligatory elephant ride and bamboo raft trip.
It was honestly pretty cool, but there was no jungle and there were no monkeys. Our guide, Mai, informed us early on that the local people "eat anything that moves," so we wouldn't be running into any exotic life forms (unless you are fascinated with mosquitoes). Rainforests aside, we did have a good time. We walked all day through rice fields and not so damp forests, and spent the night in rather secluded villages of the Karen and Meo tribes. Mai told us a lot about how the tribespeople are slowly changing due o external pressures. This was very evident in our second night at a Karen village. We (there were four Americans, two Japanese, Brica and I, and a couple other people on the tour) sat around a picnic table outside our shelter and sang songs for hours. To my surprise the village children were quite good singers of not only Karen and Thai songs, but also English, French, Japanese and a few other languages. Mai lectured us about how the US government's crackdown on drugs was affecting the opium production in the region. Crops change, people change, "everything different."
So that is all I have to say about Bangkok for now. We developed nine rolls of film today. Some good shots. I hope to spruce up these pages when I get back to Japan, but first: Nepal. Brica and I were looking over our travel guides and thinking about all the things that we need but don't have now due to the theft. I have a total of two T-shirts (th Korean World Cup and a Coca Cola shirt written in Thai script), one pair of shorts, and my Birkenstock sandals. Not exactly the preferred gear for a trek to Mt. Everest, but the show must go on. We leave in the morning for two weeks of trekking in the Himalayas. I don't expect to update this again until April. Until then...Aaron