Chuck D

A few days ago, Will, Liz, and Carson -- a girl who works with Will and Liz at NES -- took the motorbikes about an hour and a half north of Chiang Mai to Srilanna national park. The ride took us through a few dirty highway towns, banana plantations, rolling misty hills, dusty farm towns and a shrine or two, leaving us at dusk by Eakachai (sp.) lake. We showed up just as the few inhabitants of the area were closing down their tiny market, though a few low voices carried on in a dark bar over a game of checkers in a half-submerged bar off the bank of the lake. We had time for a Sangsum and soda as we waited for a boat to our floating cabin.
Our captain showed up inexplicably out of breath and extremely apologetic, but also found that he had time for a quick drink before we shot off across the dark lake in a longboat -- a long, thin thing which is driven and steered by a tiny propeller extended into the water by a long rudder.
Our floating guesthouse, was at the end of a tiny floating village which had another bar, and even a karaoke machine which was turned off when we arrived, but found itself rocking in full disco-fury at about 7 in the morning. The only other guests in the village were a few old crocodiles, old ex-pats who take up with young thai women. The three or four of these guys were sitting around a table with a bottle of whiskey a jug of wine and a woman for each of them, who smiled and laughed. When I asked them what they were doing there, as in if there was any hiking, fishing etc., one of them, a grizzled, tooth deprived, Brit answered: "we're Thai, this is what we do." I excused myself and walked away as they chattered and guffawed like old pirates knocking the glass bottoms of jugs and bottles on their little wood table.
We sat outside our house on our floating deck and listened to the lake lap at the boards. The air was clean, the water was cold, it was refreshing to get away from the smog and grime of Chiang Mai, which is only a third that of Bangkok -- but good to know that you can escape it all pretty easily by motorbike and find something off the map. In the morning we ate our banana pancake breakfast, swam, paddled around, and got a great view of the lake and the misty green mountains surrounding. In the afternoon, we headed on back.

That evening, I met up with an Australian dude I had met on the train to Chiang Mai. We went out that night, with Will, Liz and Carson and set out to find a lantern to set on fire: there is a festival coming up in Chiang Mai and this is the time of year when you can see a ton of these lanterns flying up in the air, like hot air balloons, only to crash somewhere you can't see them and probably set somebody's house on fire. This city, in some ways, seems like it's run by children. There is a big pretend moat around, there are markets everywhere, and when the festivals come around, everybody tries to blow up as much stuff as they can. Every night there are firecrackers going off somewhere. As the festival goes on they start lighting bigger firecrackers, and then they start throwing what I think our bombs, then cannons: it's absurdly rauccus and awesome.
Anyhow, I got my lantern and wrote Chuck D. on it. The Thai word for 'cheers' sounds something like Chuck D., so everytime we drink we end up drinking to Chuck, and Flava Flav, and eventually Ol'Dirty Bastard and any other rapper we can think of. Strange. I lit my lantern and watched my sins float away. I watched as my lantern lit assunder as a burning ember detached from the bounds of earth to alight into the ether of the night sky to compete with the glow and heat of Mars and try the limits of heaven. Actually, it just sort of lit up and drifted over a roof top and I have no idea where it went or what it eventually destroyed.
That night, my Australian friend (Rohan), Carson and I walked around until we found a bar in a van. Clearly, someone had driven this bar into an alley, parked, opened the windows and put seats around it. Every once in a while as we sat there we had to stand up to let a car pass by us. We ended up drinking a few Maekong whiskeys and chatted for a while. We watched as a bar girl(van bar girl I guess) flirted with a pair of Finnish headbangers who would not respond when I screamed Iron Maiden lyrics at them -- so fuck 'em. The bar girl later confided in Carson, telling her that she hates her job, she's 22, and her boyfriend, an English or Italian guy or something, had just broken up with her when he went back home. This seems to be the story of the city: some western guy comes around throws some cash and gets himself a nice Thai girlfriend, goes back to his country and lets her run the limit of his attention span -- he ditches her and never sees the wreckage.
We carried on at the bar for a while, before stumbling over to Thae Pae Gate where we sat perched on the wall that surrounds the city, drinking Chang beer now. Literally straddling the boundary between the old and new city I waxed philosophical on the various paradoxes between traditional Chiang Mai culture and the invading west, even came up with a metaphor or two (lanterns as something or other): but I was pretty drunk so, meh -- fuck it.