Update

Update part 2:

First, before I forget, I need to include a message from one of my friends who I’m staying with in Mae Sot (Matt). He says that if you know him, you should come visit him because he wants to see you, and that if you come, you should bring him some good beer. His favorites are microbrew IPAs and ESB’s. When I first saw his traditional Thai house, I was impressed by his collection of microbrew bottles sitting on a shelf (among other things about his house, see the picture below). It turns out that he’s accumulated them from friends visiting and bringing beers. So, you should mostly visit him because he wants to see you, but also because Thailand doesn’t have very good beer. Their beer is better than Sri Lanka’s though, so if you’re feeling beer-pity, come visit me first.

Since I started composing this email, I’ve been exploring the Mae Sot area more, and its awesome. First, I realized how many ex-pats there are here. There are probably as many or more westerners living in Mae Sot as in Colombo, but it’s a much smaller town, and I can relate to many of the people a lot more. I was lucky enough to spend the last three days with a group of four other American NGO workers who are all generally my age and either have bachelors or masters degrees and have been living abroad about as long as I have (except for Matt who has been here for two and a half years now). It was interesting to talk a lot with people who are in my age group having similar experiences to mine in a south asian country. I was very interested to find out about their work, because working directly with students or refugees is both very different from what I’m doing right now, and something that I’ve thought I might like to do. Furthermore, I learned that one of them had played ultimate for Stanford for the last 5 years (I had played against him twice), and two of them went to the same college as me.

The five of us booked a bungalow at a national park for two nights, and, in classic 20-something fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants style, didn’t know much about what was in the park, where the park was (other than a general area it might be), what the bungalow would look like, if there would be food there, and a variety of other potentially important variables. We packed for the trip by buying 5 rice and curry packets, about 15 lbs of fruit including 2 enormous pineapples, and about 20 L of water. Matt had a piece of paper with a description of the place we wanted to be dropped off written on a piece of paper in Thai that we could give to the bus driver. At this point I should explain that the reason that he doesn’t speak very much Thai is that he mainly works with Burmese people, so his Burmese is quite good despite his location in Thailand. This was true of the other people in our group, so despite their collective five + years of living in Thailand we still resembled a group of tourists who had been in Thailand for a week.

After doing our shopping, we jumped on a couple of motorbike taxis with our backpacks (2 of us per motorbike, plus the driver) and sped off quickly towards the bus station. Once there, we waited for a bus towards Tok, showed our piece of paper to the bus driver, crammed into seats which were much too small for the three of us who are over 6’2” and sped off at a heart-stopping rate towards our destination. It turns out the park has a huge sign on the road that even has English writing on it: “Lansang National Park.” A 3 Kilometer hike in along the road brought us to the entrance to the park where we were picked up by a pickup truck, which brought us to our bungalow. In the vicinity of the bungalow were a couple of restaurants and a variety of other amenities. Our bungalow had 4 beds (most people here sleep on mats), a real shower (many people use bucket showers), a real toilet (as opposed to a squat toilet), and even hot water coming from the showerhead. Unfortunately, the water was only hot, and the water pressure was so low that Matt described taking a shower as (trying to wash your hair using a mist machine). Fortunately, there was also a bucket available for a bucket shower. That evening we hiked a short ways up to Lansang waterfall, the namesake of the park. The water of a small creek flows over some beautiful limestone to make several very pretty waterfalls, the first of which we got to see that first night.

We headed back to our bungalow at dark, took all of the chairs in the vicinity, and set up a nice area on the grass in front of our bungalow. We sent Thane off to grab some beer and soda water and ice, opened up one of the bottles of “good” Thai whiskey we had brought along, and hung out and told stories late into the night. Altogether it was a very nice experience. The next morning we were awoken by the people living in the bungalow next to ours playing lout Thai music and talking loudly at about 6 in the morning. We collectively went back to sleep until about 9am.

We got up and walked down to one of he restaurants and decided that after breakfast we would go explore the rest of the waterfalls. Most of us were feeling pretty good despite the litre of whiskey and bunch of beers that we had finished over the course of the previous night and after a pretty good breakfast of fried rice we set off towards the creek. At the base of the first waterfall we came to a consensus that it would be much more fun to try to navigate up the creek itself rather than simply hike the trail. None of the waterfalls were completely vertical, and all had easy climbing lines with bucket handholds carved into the granite by the water. The air was cooler down by the water, and between waterfalls we got to wade up the streambed to stay cool. All of us were wearing flip-flops, which we stuck in the waist of our shorts to climb. At the top of the second waterfall Matt, who was leading the group, encountered something that I had already been nervously expecting. He poked his head over the top of a ledge to see a large snake slither quickly into the pool at the top of the falls. His frozen demeanor had me guessing immediately that he had seen a snake. That snake disappeared before any of the rest of us made it up there, but we were a little more careful from that point forwards. It also gave Matt an excuse to find a large stick to bang on the rocks with to alert snakes of our presence.

After scrambling around in the riverbed for another couple of hours and seeing all of the beautiful waterfalls the drainage had to offer, we found ourselves at the most distant named waterfall from the trailhead. The trail did not extend any farther, and the waterfall was a 35-foot near vertical slide into a fairly shallow pool. We stopped there and had lunch of bread and peanut butter served on some banana leaves we found, swam in the nice cool pool, and played a guessing game that is some sort of mix between 20 questions and contact, and then decided to see if we could go off-trail up and around to the top of the waterfall. To do this we had to scramble up a particularly steep slope covered in very slick dried bamboo leaves. I was most nervous about encountering another snake in an environment where it blended in very well, so I was happy when the group decided to turn around and head down in favor of an afternoon of tossing a Frisbee, playing cards, swimming, and relaxing. We climbed most of the way back down the creek; I briefly spotted another snake darting off into the water as well as a dried snake carcass that was missing its head. A roundtrip of only about 6 Kilometers felt much longer at the end of the 5 or 6 hours that it took us, and we were all exhausted. That night a dinner of fried chicken, corn on the cob, sticky rice and beer almost re-created the atmosphere of car camping at a US park. We retired to our bungalow to play an evenly matched game of spoons, and in-between rounds would work on riddle games that one of the other guys and I provided (including: green glass door, counting elephants, the train game, the land of bologna, big blue moon, and a few others). We crashed early.

The next morning we were awoken early again by our other Thai neighbors conversing loudly. When they saw that they had woken us they good-naturedly bellowed “hello” and “good morning” into our open windows. Despite the circumstances I think most of us managed to sleep in until at least 8. We had a pineapple for breakfast, got a truck ride out of the park, jumped on a bus back to Mae Sot, and were home before 11. Total expense per person for the trip: about $33 including food, drink, lodging, and transportation. Thailand is cheap. Come visit Matt.

The rest of my stay in Thailand was also great fun, if not quite as adventuresome. I got to spend a lot of time in the school that Katie works at hanging out with her students and even teaching a couple of classes. I have a lecture on why water management is important, and another one on gender studies and why it is important. The kids were totally on board for water, but not as much for gender studies. However, I think it did help to have a man presenting a gender studies class; normally the students are taught by Katie, and perhaps got the impression that only women can be feminists or care about gender studies. Hopefully I helped to remedy that a little. Hanging out at the school was wonderful. The kids were constantly bringing me tea or coffee, unripe mango with chile powder, or something else delicious. I spent one great afternoon learning a little bit of guitar from the students and singing along to the english songs that they had memorized. Another evening I had dinner with them, and committed my only cultural faux pas of the trip. I remembered not to point my feet at anyone, not to touch anyone on the head, to return everyone's slight bow and hands praying gesture, and all the other stuff I was supposed to. The kids at the school tricked me. I hung out with them in the kitchen all afternoon as they cooked the food, offered to help ("no teacher, you don't know how to make our food"), and then sat down to dinner with them. They served me up the food they were eating, and 2 extra dishes of curry. I asked why I none of them were eating the curries that I was eating. They said that in Burma teachers have to eat better than their students--there is a hierarchy that needs to be respected for these things. So, I decided that it was best to show them gratitude, and finish everything that they served me. This turned out to be the mistake. It turns out that they love having guests so that they can make their better curries, and then finish the leftovers that the guests leave. So, a combination of my ridiculous appetite and a misunderstanding of their intention led me to finish EVERYTHING they gave me. woops...
Katie and Matt both told me that they expect foreigners to do stupid things like that, and, as a result they often think that foreigners can't do anything properly (hence their refusal to let me do any cooking, including simply chopping garlic). Oh well...

I took the bus back to Bangkok a few days later and spent another hectic day in there, splitting time between street markets and the Siam Center where I found a bookstore and drooled over some of the books on my reading list (including Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses, and a few others). Alli, I'm even farther ahead of you on the 1001 books now...

Anyway, one more email is in the works about Sri Lanka, so expect another one this weekend. I'm currently working hard on this UNEP report where I need to have a rough draft done on Friday, so I should have time after that.

I’ll also re-iterate my request that you should write me back or give me a call on skype. If you’re receiving this email it means I care enough about you to want to know how you’re doing, so when you get a chance you should let me know. Also, if you’ve been thinking of coming to visit Sri Lanka, now is the time to look into it. I’ll only be here until June 15 and you probably won’t ever come up with as good an excuse to visit this country.

I hope that you all are well, and I was really happy to see a lot of you this winter.

Luke