Balance and friends

Well it’s been a while once again, I’m sorry to everyone who’s been sitting eagerly on the edge of their seats waiting for another blog entry from me. No need to deny it kids, it’s natural, I am undeniably, pretty freaking awesome.

So anyway, now that my ego has had it’s fun let’s get down to business. What have I been up to? I’m not really sure actually.

I am most definitely still in Chiang Mai, that I am sure of. I still have my little flat, although the bathroom is now starting to smell a little bit because the only cleaning products I can find are: nothing, or extreme hydrochloric acid which literally burns the soles of my feet when I use it to scrub the floor. So at the moment it’s nothing except a bit of a wipe down every now and then which isn’t quite holding the slightly dank smell at bay. But that’s OK, I am a boy.

I have of course still been programming, although I’m finding a lot more balance in my life at the moment, which incidentally doesn’t seem to make me less productive. Plans are still under way to write games or die trying, with regular Skype meetings with people back in Oz and whatnot. My work friends/colleagues were recently seen at several indie games and mobile development conferences around Melbourne which is exciting. I still program into the early hours of the morning sometimes, but I’ve certainly noticed that staring at a computer screen after the sun goes down causes me serious sleep issues no matter how tired I feel and I’ve become a fair bit more disciplined about it.

I may have written this already, but I’m currently doing Kung Fu 3 times a week. It’s fantastic, for a while there I was the only student and so got 1-on-1 training, now there are 4 students and 2 teachers so the numbers are still pretty good. It’s really fantastic for my health, I’m feeling much stronger and healthier now than I have in years. I also think martial arts are just generally good for you. Like many such exercises, they help you become aware of your body, your strengths and weaknesses, and your balance. Plus I think it’s good for boys to channel competitive behaviour into something disciplined like that, I’ve always enjoyed a good rumble and it’s great to be able to fulfil that without hurting anyone else.

Actually, my life has really turned a corner in many ways. Months ago I wrote a lot about things that I had noticed about myself that I didn’t think were healthy and how difficult I was finding it to change them. Well for the most part I’ve made all of the changes. The only time I have drunk alcohol in months now was when I found a German brewery in Chiang Mai, but even then I was really aware that I only felt like a small amount and stopped fairly naturally after 2 beers. I’ve got my food situation under control, I rarely eat too much anymore, I avoid sweet and fatty things pretty naturally now and when I do eat them I’m conscious of the fact that it’ll likely cause me stomach pain later. I meditate for about half an hour every day which is probably the most broadly beneficial habit I’ve made, I think it’s certainly very synergistic with the others. I’m also finding more balance with social life, previously I would interleave massive work stints and big party stints, neither of which is healthy. Now I’m really enjoying hanging out with people and programming in fairly equal measure, and as I said previously, it doesn’t seem to make me less productive even though I’m spending less time actually on the computer. Somehow it keeps my brain on track and makes me function more efficiently when I do work. Or perhaps that’s the meditation, I’m not sure, probably a mixture of the two. Anyway, balance is the word. I feel like I’m finding a lot of equilibrium at the moment and really putting a lot of things into motion which I’ve been consciously or unconsciously working on for a while.

I’ve got a really great bunch of friends at the moment too. My gaggle of girls, or frank’s harem as they occasionally refer to themselves. It’s an interesting thing that I make friends with girls far more easily than with boys, and that I generally feel much more at home and natural when I’m hanging out with girls. Here’s another pointer, people’s mother’s invariably love me, and as a child and young adult I was always afraid of meeting people’s fathers. That doesn’t hold so much anymore, but it’s still interesting. I don’t believe it has to be “one or the other”, that people can only be good at male OR female socialising. Interestingly enough I’ve met plenty of people from both sexes who agree to a greater or lesser extent that they get on better with the opposite sex because it feels like there’s less bullshit stuck in the middle. I do think there’s a subtle shift there as I get older however, I have always had some close male friends, and I think I get better at it with age. But anyway, yeah a really lovely bunch of girls whom I have a lot of love for and hope I’ll see more of in the future (a couple are Aussies and the others are planning to or already have tickets to come to Oz).

My dear mumsie is coming to visit within the week, which will be lots of fun. I’m looking forward to a couple of weeks of quality mum time, although she’s organising a bunch of things to do on her own which is probably a good idea too. It’s always more rewarding not to be dependent on people. But that will be great.

OK, that’s probably enough for now, it can become difficult to write about new and exciting things when you’re not doing new and exciting things all the time. In general I’m just enjoying the quiet life over here.

Love to you all, Frankie.

P.S. Here are the obligatory photos:

My kung fu friend Yutt and his wife at Wat Chediluang, a really oldschool Wat here in Chiang Mai with one of the biggest old stuppa's around. You can see some of it behind us.

My friends Sky and Alila. Sky is an Aussie who has now gone back home, Alila is a crazy Thai lady who seems to adopt random travellers and loves to talk. She's fantastic :-)

A giant scorpion I found on the side of the road in the middle of Chiang Mai. You can see the size of the bottle top next to it. The picture is blurry because I was trying to simultaneously watch to make sure the thing didn't charge me while trying to work out my camera in the dark. I snapped this as I was freaking out that it had started running all over the place.

Some of my Chiang Mai girls, and me making a funny face while trying to hold the camera steady. I love these guys.

Some pre-pubescent bananas growing in the heart of Chiang Mai. This is what a banana flower looks like. Incidentally I found some wild banana palms in the jungle one time. Those bananas were interesting, they had massive seeds so there really wasn't much flesh on the bananas, and they tasted a lot more tangy rather than sweet.

Sima and Chiang Mai

So then I was back to Chiang Mai, and here I’ve been every since, though my current 2 month visa runs out again around the 14^th. But I have a final 2 monther lined up; I just need to do a border run.

A few days after I got into Chiang Mai my dear English friend Sima Cutting arrived from Oz on her way back home. After some discussion we decided to get a flat in Chiang Mai. I’d considered this myself previously but had just never committed. But this time I was planning to be in Chiang Mai for the 2 months I had, and Sima was happy to have a base camp, so we got a little room in S.U.P. Court inside the old city. It’s a pretty basic room with a double bed, a wardrobe, a dresser, a cold shower, and a toilet. But it costs 1700B per month, which is around $60 :-D. I slightly lament the lack of food prep area, but when I think about it, many Thais don’t have a food prep area either and they still manage. You often see familial groups of 5 or more all sitting around on the floor eating rice and curry, or barbequing chicken over buckets of coals. Plus the street and restaurant food here is so cheap and SO amazing and inspirational that I’m perfectly happy eating out.

Anyway, there we were feeling very grown up with our own flat and all. Sima kept us very busy. She was on a totally different time scale from me so she really wanted to cram activities in, which was fine by me, and a great change to my current pace of life. So we hired a scooter and hammered around to other little town up to about 150km away from Chiang Mai. This was great, I freaking LOVE riding! We found caves and waterfalls, cute little towns (Pai, great place, if a little cliché), markets, etc. So much fun. The roads up to Pai were pretty crazy, very windy and mountainous, I was in my element having grown up in the hills. I get bored riding on straight road, but that riding was really fun!! But poor Sima was petrified. She doesn’t deal with hills. She also doesn’t deal with curves. And this was hours of some of the steepest and most windy road I’ve ever driven on. But she managed.

We also visited a fair bunch of the lovely markets up here, and I bought a few of the lovely things I’ve been telling some of you about and admiring for a while. It’s good to have someone else around when you’re buying these things in case it’s a bad idea. For instance the “Will I wear this anywhere in the real world?” test is a must for any item of clothing. But I’m really happy with the things I’ve bought. An Asian styled dress up jacket (because I have a bit of a thing for jackets), a crazy little waistcoat which will be great for looking silly in, and some embroidered things for decorating a room. Sima bought a beautiful green embroidered dress which I’d been perving on for weeks but didn’t have anyone to buy it for. I’m so glad that it fit her, it’s truly spectacular :-).

Then I went south with her as far as Sukhothai where there are some amazing old ruins of an old Thai empire (The Sukhothai empire in fact, it was the capital city). Unfortunately the modern day Thais had done a little reconstruction. Nothing big, just fixing an arch here and a wall there, but they did it in such a shoddy way that it really started to get to me once I started noticing it. It was SO different from the original, and felt a little disrespectful and tacky. But it was still a beautiful place. It’s amazing to see the scale on which they built their temples. In its heyday the temple district would have taken up several kilometres, and some of Buddha statues were absolutely mammoth.

Then we parted ways and she headed south to the islands (against my suggestion I might add, and was I right Sima? Yes I was :-P ) and I went north back to Chiang Mai. She has put some photos up on Facebook of our good times together, the album can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=442469&id=761960523&l=34d648eaaa Thanks Sima :-).

Since then life has gone back to normal for me over here. I’m listening to a lot of Harry Potter audio books which are most enjoyable, though I’m having trouble finding number 6. Gee they start getting a bit dark towards the end though don’t they? I hear they just get darker from here, can’t say I’m complaining though. I’ve also started Kung Fu classes because I decided I needed some more exercise than the spot of yoga I was doing in my room. The classes have been really good; it’s not the super flashy variety (not that I would have minded actually, I just might have felt a bit silly); and it’s great to get a sweat up and gives me something to practice in my room when I get cramped up over my laptop or something. I actually wanted to try Tai Chi, but this place I checked wasn’t running it now due to lack of students, so I chose the Kung Fu instead. The downside is that it’s about doubling my living expenses (it’s about $36 per week for 3 lessons), but that’s alright, I’m doing pretty well on the money front anyway.

I also went to the hospital while Sima was around to find out once and for all whether I had a stomach ulcer or not. It had been playing on my mind, and it annoyed me that every non-medical person I mentioned it to always scoffed and told me flat that I certainly didn’t have a stomach ulcer with lines like “Just look at you!” But unfortunately the hospital didn’t do the conclusive tests I wanted, the doctor asked me some questions, listened to my stomach, and then just handed over some antibiotics to get rid of it. So I still don’t know, but I took the drugs and now I don’t really get the pain there anymore, so that’s a good sign.

The other thing was, at about the same time, that I change my eating habits. I’ve written before about the fact that I basically have an eating disorder where I eat way too much and that I find it really difficult to change the habit. It’s exacerbated by the fact that nobody ever believes me (once again the “Just look at you!” call) and I then feel the need to prove that I’m not anorexic or bulimic or something. But I was in a permanent state of exhaustion where I found it difficult to get out of bed in the morning, and the flights of stairs up and down from the flat were a serious obstacle. And Sima was worried too which gave me some added conviction. So when I decided to go to the hospital I also decided that I should put some effort in on the eating front as well. So I went off refined fats and sugars (bye bye sweet roti, I haven’t had one since :’-( ), coffee, alcohol, and most of the chilli I was eating. All things I love unfortunately, though I’m not being anal about avoiding these things I’m just making a concerted effort to avoid them as much as possible. Luckily I’ve been able to replace the roti addiction I had with mango sticky rice which never makes me feel crap afterwards. I also really tried to avoid eating too much, and failed a few times, but with Sima as my conscience I started to get a grip on that too. Which was great because now I rarely overeat, though I frequently still have the urge. And lo and behold, my energy came back in leaps, bounds, and lunges. I was a bit blown away by the difference I have to admit, I couldn’t believe that food could have that much affect on me. I knew eating too much made me stupid, but to make me that exhausted was pretty crazy! But I believe it now as I haven’t had an exhausted day since I changed my eating habits, and the alternative isn’t really an option. I think it’s probably exacerbated by the heat here. A lot of people say they go off food entirely when they come to Thailand because of the heat, and it makes sense because your body doesn’t need to burn energy to warm itself up, but it DOES need to eat salt and electrolytes because you sweat nearly constantly. Hence they add salt to EVERYTHING, including the ubiquitous fruit shakes and mango sticky rice (don’t knock it ‘till you’ve tried it, they’re WAY more refreshing with). My diet at the moment involves about one meal of fruit, one vege curry or other rice dish, and one of bread. The bread part surprises the hell out of me because I’ve actually been anti bread for a while as I’m not sure that modern wheat strains are very nutritious. But I’ve become a bit addicted to it since finding an Irish pub which bakes loaves of fresh bread every day. They have some really dark rye’s which I can just eat plain when they’re still hot out of the oven, and they’re SO SO SO tasty, and my body seems to love the stuff so I’m not about to argue with it.

Well anyway, that’s probably enough for now. Let’s hope I haven’t doubled up on anything, I guess I can check the blog next time I get online, but I doubt I’ll be bothered making changes :-P.

I hope you’re all kicking goals in whatever games you’re playing. Don’t feel shy about writing me with news about whatever you feel like. Speaking of news... how ‘bout K-Rudd? That was a bit of a surprise to me. I knew he’d basically turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, but I guess I’ve been out of the mainstream Oz news for too long because I hadn’t expected THAT!!!

But anyway, bye bye!!!!
Love, Frankie

Isan (Apologies for the slight duplication)

Hi folks. I’m sorry for the long absentia, no idea why it’s been so long really. I just haven’t really felt like writing. I guess I’m just getting used to lots of alone time.

I don’t even remember what I wrote last... Lets guess that I was in Nong Kai, which I left for Khon Kaen in the heart of the Isan region. On that bus trip I had my first experience with slightly dodgy Thais. First up one of the ticket inspectors bustled me onto the bus roughly and sat me down and then asked for a bunch more money than the bus ride was worth. Which is a fairly common one, and luckily I’d bought my ticket the day before. Then one of the bus guys jumped under the bus and into the luggage compartment during one of the quick stops we made to drop people off. This isn’t such an uncommon occurrence either and doesn’t necessarily mean he’s doing anything dodge. But I just had bad feeling about this crew of bus operators, and there are enough stories of things going missing in this manner. I’d sat myself over the luggage door to keep an eye out for this anyway, and luckily I was getting off at the next stop. And sure enough when one of the guys opened the luggage compartment door at the next stop he did a quick peer over to make sure everything was in order. I checked my bag right there before I took it off, and it hadn’t been tampered with so that was lucky. Maybe I was just being paranoid. The majority of my bus rides are great and the bus crew never do anything wrong, but it doesn’t hurt to be aware of these things.

Then I stayed at a place called First Choice in Khon Kaen, run by an old white guy and an old Thai woman who were married and seemed to hate each other. It seems like they were once a good couple though, much of an age and both relatively normal people, unlike a lot of the expats over here. But I had a good time there, and watched a lot of news because it was always on. The BP oil spill had just happened, and Israel had just dropped commandos from a helicopter onto a boat load of peace activists, resulting in 10 deaths. I did lots of programming there, and it turned out that the old geezer who ran the place was actually a pretty techy guy. I forget now what he’d worked on, but he was extremely high up in some American tech firm, and currently trying to disentangle himself from it and retire. We had some pretty fascinating conversations about esoteric programming languages, Steve Jobs, and electronic products, during which I realised that he was also fantastically rich and unhappy.

Actually, I realised something very important while at that guest house. My room was up on the third floor and consisted of 2 coconut fibre filled mattresses, a desk, and a chair. The first night I slept on those incredibly hard mattresses I awoke with a sore lower back. This worried me as generally lower back pain is a bad thing. The next night I slept with a pillow under my knees to try and rotate my hips a little while I slept. Luckily I’d long since taught myself to sleep on my back or I would have been in trouble. By the fourth night I’d lost the second pillow again as my back was feeling great. It felt like it was getting stronger, and I noticed that it felt better than normal during the day as well. I was a little blown away by all of this to be honest. Beds are one of those things which you don’t really get to test enough. You just have one, and you don’t know how good it is because you really need to sleep on another one by yourself for a week to see how it measures up. And most people have pretty similar beds so even when I’ve slept over at other people’s houses it’s usually on another soft Western mattress. Westerners in Thailand all agree that the beds here are universally very hard, but these coconut filled beds were yet another order of magnitude of hardness again on normal Thai beds. And yet they were freaking AWESOME once I got used to them. Which makes sense when I think about it, because we didn’t evolve with beds, they’re really a very recent invention on the scale of human evolution. We were designed to sleep on the ground, or maybe on furs. But not on 30cm of squishy foam, no matter how many scientists have endorsed it. SO I think I’m going to have to ditch my mattress when I get home and try a sleeping on a futon or something. When I got back to Chaing Mai from Khon Kaen and took a room I found the bed far too soft on the first night, though it was one of the firm 5cm Thai mattresses. My back hurt again the next day :-(. So for the next couple of nights I slept on the tile floor on a folded up wool blanket. But then I kept waking up around 4 every morning with sore hip bones and had to climb into bed anyway. So it seem I need a really firm bed which doesn’t mould itself to my back or let my hips rotate, but which is still soft enough that it does’t bruise my hip bones.

Back to Chiang Mai

Well, I guess it's time for another blog post, I'm feeling decidedly lazy about it. My monkey mind has been occupied with programming rather life thoughts, but I actually feel happier than I have in ages.

I think partly I'm just on the mend and time is doing it's job, hurried along by being on my own, but partly I think I got a kick start from doing Tash's survey (here for those who are interested and who I haven't already sent the link to). Basically Tash is a lovely girl I know who's doing her honors, or masters or something really smart, in positive psychology. The survey involves answering some questions, and then possibly doing an activity for a week and reporting back afterwards (very important!!! that's where all the interesting stuff comes from). So I ended up doing one of the exercises which I won't go into, and at the end of the day I think just focusing on something positive for a little while once per day kind of kicked me out of a rut I was ready to get out of anyway, but hadn't yet. I took to it quite well and have been feeling really positive ever since, although I'm no longer doing the exercise itself, I'm now just a little more conscious of being happy about things. So that's nice.

Another interesting thing is that I'm listening to an audio book by the Dalai Lama and a western psychologist who's name I forget called "The Art of Happiness". It's quite amazing, The Dalai Lama himself is just such an amazing character, and I admire the way he's able to separate out and distill many techniques from Buddhism, but removed from the Buddhist religion side of things and present them in an agnostic manner. His basic premise is that every living thing is born with the right to seek, and the ability to achieve, lasting happiness. He then discusses that premise and his own beliefs on how to achieve it with prompting and additional discourse from the psychologist on common western beliefs and problems. I encourage everyone to at least give him a shot, listen to or read anything by him and make up your mind for yourself. He's incredibly profound and yet very clear and simple in his explanations. Bjorn, the German guy I was hanging out with in Laos was also really into him, and had actually spent a fair amount of time in Dharamsala where the Tibetan government-in-exile and Dalai Lama currently call home. One really fascinating thing I find is that I'd already practiced a fair number of the techniques he provides for achieving happiness earlier in my life. At around 18 years old I was going to a youth group called Reach which did quite amazing things for me in terms of appreciating life and loved ones, but I'd also taken inspiration from a physics teacher I had in high school who was a bit zany, but inspirational in terms of humility and his childlike expression of excitement for things he found interesting, whether the students around him thought so or not. The end result was a man who wrote everything on the black board in meticulously multi-coloured chalk, would lunge and generally wave his arms around excitedly (yes this is quite likely where I picked it up), and who would give up any amount of his own time to help students who required it. At the time I had noticed that I could change my behavior long term if I tried, but had previously often changed in ways which ended up being problematic because I hadn't been very conscious about what I was practicing. So I took all of this and quite consciously picked and chose things that I admired in some people, tried to put myself in a good mood every morning, and set about reviewing my actions every day to see how I thought I was doing. And I seemed to just luck out on a pretty fundamental level, because at the time I was just experimenting with no guidance whatsoever, but those are all things the Dalai Lama advises people to do as a start on the road to happiness. Those and subsequent years were fundamentally the happiest of my life. They weren't perfect of course, but I feel like I almost accidentally, but quite effectively, put myself on track to becoming someone I really wanted to be, and I was definitely consciously practicing being happy.

And then somewhere along the line I stopped practicing. I remember when it was, around the end of my first year at uni, and I'm not sure why. I guess I just felt really good about myself and didn't think I needed to practice anymore. Oops. Over subsequent years I was knocked around by life a lot more, I had big ups and big downs, although I've only just noticed that recently in reflection. I've being remembering this a fair bit recently, even before starting this book, because I remember consciously practicing being happy, and I knew that I should be doing that again. But I found it intensely difficult to actually practice because I couldn't muster the feeling of happiness or joy to any level I noticed, and I wasn't sure how to go about stimulating them. So then I would get frustrated and angry and sad again instead. That's been a real core of my issues over the past while, not knowing how to practice feeling something when I can't feel it, no matter how many amazing mountain top views I see.

The Dalai Lama also stresses that a lot of time is required. And that's what I didn't give myself. I was making progress ages ago, but it was slow and and often very slippery progress. I would feel emotions, but just very flatly, and then I'd focus on them so much that they'd disappear. I noticed quite recently that I was actually afraid of feeling positive emotions at all. That was an eye opener I had when I noticed that my skin prickled all over when I read or heard the word love. I also remember my mind going absolutely crazy at one moment when I first started yoga and the instructor asked us to visualise gathering warmth and goodwill into a ball of light and then sending it out to someone. I couldn't do it, my mind was racing way to fast, and my heartbeat sped up and I couldn't think anymore. Now I know that's called anxiety, but I hadn't started counseling sessions at that stage, so I didn't know. Luckily I seem to be getting over those aversions. It's a bit like a big rock that's nearly impossible to get started, but which gathers momentum as you role it.

Anyway, I'm back in Chiang Mai now, just arrived this morning on an overnight bus from Khon Kaen in the Isan region of Thailand. I'm feeling pretty under the weather, I think I ate something dodge before getting on the bus so I had a pretty nasty bus ride and the rest of today has been pretty terrible too. But I'm getting better. Hopefully I'll be better tomorrow. Being back in Thailand has been good, it's possible to eat for so cheap, and the street food is, for the most part, amazing. But I'm discovering that different regions are quite different. Isan doesn't seem to understand what a vegetable is either, slightly more than Laos, but not by much. I found it really difficult to eat healthy, although I found a lot of pretty good food around the place, it all had meat.

They did have a really great market though. Ahh, the markets of Thailand, it's something I'm really going to miss when I get back home. Imagine the Queen Victoria market in Melbourne with all the stupid knick knacks, shirts, watches, and most importantly, the fresh produce. Now make the produce fresher, and add a big dose of crazy shit that you've never seen before (most of the fruit is new to me, and there's a LOT of fruit). People buy pigs heads for soup (yeah, I guess I've been eating that for a while now), fish which are killed and gutted as you buy them, little walnut sized eggplants, strings of green undried pepper corns, bags of homemade chips and sugar peanuts and dried fruit bigger than me, and sacks of basil. It goes on. And there's not a brand name in site. AND it's open as early as you want to get up in the morning, and goes until after sundown. Plus there's always the people who go all night selling soups and fresh bags of greens at any hour of the night. Plus an entire food market which goes through to 4am EVERY NIGHT OF THE WEEK where you can buy stir fries, soups, mango sticky rice, waffles, sweet roti, and a bunch of other things uniquely Thai which I won't bother explaining. The markets are really one of the key things which make Thailand for me. The convenience to be able to go and buy fruit shakes, fried shit, or mangoes and bananas at any hour of any day, and spent about $1 for each meal.

So I discovered a compromise for these meat heavy regions where I buy about 20 bananas every 2 or 3 days and eat the shit out of them, supplementing with any other fruit that catches my eye. That seems to counteract eating noodle and meat broth for every other meal. But it is good to be back in Chiang Mai where I know I can get vegetarian when I have the craving, and where a green curry is made cheaply everywhere rather than having to be sought out. And it's nice that all my favorite haunts remember me. I've just got to get better enough to make the most of it.

Sima Cutting will be arriving on the 9th or 10th in Chiang Mai to spend some time hanging out and generally being her cool self with me around. I'm really looking forward to having her around, I don't really seem to get lonely as I thought I might. But it'll be nice to have somebody from home to hang out with. Lets hope it doesn't make me homesick :-).

Anyway, I have to go, it's getting a bit later over here and I really need to sleep and rest my guts up.

One thing I have wanted to share was this comic. It functions as a most succinct and romanticised reply to the odd statement people make about me being brave or some such thing for writing so candidly in my blog. Although it still freaks me out a bit too sometimes.

Love to you all,

Frankie.

P.S. If you've got time have a flick through some of that guys other comics. Some of them are really smart/funny/touching/sad, etc. He's an ex-NASA scientist who gave up his day job to write stick figure comics instead.

Chiang Mai - Laos - Vientiane - Nong Kai

Leaving Chiang Mai

So, I am still among the world of the living. I’m in the capital of Laos: Vientiane. I’ve had an interesting time since I left Thailand.

I was in Chiang Mai right up until my visa was nearly finished, and I realised that I really should organise a bus to a border somewhere since they usually seem to just miss the connection at the border so you have to stay in one of their friends guest houses. Maybe I’m being a little cynical, but they do frequently seem to miss the immigration office hours anyway. So I jumped on a bus from Chiang Mai the night before my birthday at around 8pm and headed to Chiang Kong on the border with Laos. I met some english girls who reminded me of Sima, and an Australian couple from Melbourne. It’s funny viewing Australians from an outsiders perspective. We have a reputation for being laid back and for travelling a lot, especially Melbournians I think for those people who notice, though I haven’t been away long enough myself to notice that. You don’t really notice the laid back thing until you spend some time around non-Australians for a while and then meet some Aussies again. We really are pretty laid back compared to a lot of other people, especially Americans I think, but also compared to plenty of other western cultures (I think Laotian people beat us though). And you do meet a surprising number of Aussies travelling considering our population, although S.E. Asia is pretty close. So anyway, I arrived in Chiang Kong at around 4am on May 1^st (My birthday) and stumbled into a guest house which apparently was included in my bus fare. Then I got up around 6.30am with everyone else to go and cross the border into Huay Xai on the Laos side, which is done via a rickety old longtail boat (really long skinny boats which fit 2 people abreast and about 8 lengthwise, and have an old car motor on the back attached to a really long shaft off into the water for propulsion. They look like they have a really long tail. They also sit very low in the water and rock alarmingly whenever more than a 5cm wave hits it). Then through immigration and I met an amazing character called Caras.

He’s 88 but looks and seems younger than plenty of 50 or 60 year olds I’ve met. He has some of the most insane life stories I’ve ever heard. He looks after his adopted father who is now 111. He ran a Special Forces team in Burma during WWII and later spent time on several occasions getting interesting people out of countries where it’s no longer safe for them to be, like Cambodia as Pol Pot was coming into power. He spent years living with African tribes. He’s one of 7 people at the top of some kind of old school Celtic group of druid like things who have apparently been around for thousands of years. Anyway, basically he was a totally crazy old dude with so many crazy stories that you almost didn’t want to believe them all. But I never once caught him bullshitting about anything, including when we were talking about quantum physics and all sorts of other things I didn’t expect him to know much about. If he didn’t know something he’d just say that, so I think he was legitimate. So anyway, he was heading way up north into the mountains of Laos (well, the EVEN MORE mountainous region of Laos) to a place called Phong Sali to meet a friend and then head into China to find tea. As I had no plans of my own and didn’t want to spend the night in a border town (full of tourist traps) I went with him, he seemed interesting. So we jump on a bus that night at around 5pm to Udom Xai, got in at about 4am again and found a guest house for 2 hours sleep before getting up at about 6.30am again to get on another bus up to Phong Sali.

Phong Sali

Laos is full of mountains. And in Laos, Phong Sali is “Up in the mountains”. It’s a crazy bus ride up there on dirt roads on an old school bus with all the colourful locals. Tough little old hill tribe women with black teeth from chewing beetlenut and opium fed me steamed bamboo shoots, and some more of the locals fed me sticky rice and fermented fish... stuff. Laotians are so generous. We got in that night at about 5pm. Phong Sali is close to the Chinese border and their cuisine is heavily influenced by the Chinese. Which meant everything was made out of meat, and was dripping in oil. When I wasn’t clogged up it was only because I had the runs. And more often than not people didn’t want to serve me in restaurants either. All in all it was quite a strange experience. I have some spectacular photos though, see below. They grow a kind of green tea up there called Pu Fa which is really quite good, and they have endless rolling mountains as far as the eye can see in all directions.

Here's a photo of a truck on the way up to Phong Sali which has fallen off the road.

Probably the funniest thing which happened was when I climbed up to the top of the mountain Phong Sali sits on to the Buddhist shrine at the top. The view was stunning, and the sun was pretty low in the sky when I got up there with a big statue of the Buddha sheltered by the many headed Naga king, a traditional posture for the Buddha. Mostly I feel like crying in places like that for some reason, so I sat by myself and looked out over the town and mountains. But then I was invited several times by a bunch of in uniform police officers to come and drink Lao Lao with them (Local Laos whiskey, yellow, sweet, and very strong). So I did. They were all very drunk and immediately put me on catch up. Still, there wasn’t enough left at that stage to do much damage to my liver. Not many of them spoke English, but that was never a barrier to good times. Then they drove me down the mountain to my guest house (yes I got driven home by wasted in uniform police officers). Then I went out to dinner with one of them who spoke very good English, and Chinese, which was fun. The whole time I felt a little bit strange, if police ever want to fuck you up in any of these countries, they just can and you can’t really help it. But you can’t spend your life hiding under rocks either, so I just went with it and had a good time and it all turned out alright. Apparently there’s not much more for youth to do in country Laos as there is in country Australia, except get wasted and do stupid things.

Here are some photos of the top looking down over Phong Sali, but none of the cops unfortunately.

Then Caras left with his friend Yani, a 28 year old Chinese girl who had crossed into Laos illegally for a few days to meet him. They went up to China, and I hung around for another day for my stomach to feel better before catching the bus back down the hill to Udom Xai. Caras was a very interesting character to have around. Very inspiring, he’s the sort of person who makes the world happen around him, like a catalyst. And hanging out with someone that old who I still related to so well really put some perspective on my own age.

In fact here is a photo from a high point in Phong Sali with Caras in the corner:

Vientiane

I’d hung out with German guy by the name of Bjorn of about 30 in Phong Sali as well, but not as much as with Caras. On the way back down to Udom Xai we got chatting a bit more and turned out to be really quite similar. So we hung out together on the track to the capital of Laos: Vientiane. We both needed to get visas, he was moving on to Vietnam, and I just wanted to go back to Chiang Mai in Thailand where the food is so healthy and good, and everything is so cheap. His English was amazing (no surprise as he wants to become a teacher of music and English). We shared a room with air conditioning. It is so hot over here at the moment, you have no idea. I can barely think. I’ve got to go put my head under the tap every little while to stave off the headaches. Everything is warmer than body temperature, the water I drink, the air the fan blows, the floor, the walls, everything. Even the locals are saying this is crazy hot. Anyway, so we listened to a fair bit of music which was nice, he was interested in all kinds of music, and also loved Terry Pratchett books. So we basically hung out in Vientiane and ate western food, interspersed with the odd trip to respective consulates to organise visas. I seem to be a culinary traveller at the moment, everywhere I go seems to be rated on how much I like the food I can find there. Laos food I found to be basically uninspiring. They don’t really seem to have much of their own cuisine, although sticky rice is ubiquitous. They don’t really do street food so much either, just a few carts kicking around the place. I guess it’s a much poorer nation than Thailand which means people don’t eat out so much. Hence street food is correspondingly more expensive. The only times I really enjoyed the food was because it was foreign food. But they do that quite well, especially French bakeries, baguettes, cakes, and deserts. And we found an Italian place with really great pizza and some amazing imported beers like Leffe, Duvel, and Chimay. That was a highlight as I hadn’t really had any great beers over in S.E. Asia yet. A bunch of food vendors also set up tables and chairs and cushions on this construction site on the banks of the mighty Meekong, which is a good place to eat for relatively cheap. They string globes around, and build tables out of every raw piece of wood they can get their hands on, and serve some quite passable food. And somehow they end up making this construction yard into a really great place to sit and hang out as the sun goes down. Here's a couple of photos of said construction site, one with Bjorn's pretty face.

We had a third bed in our room which we fairly quickly filled with Lily, an English girl who also needed to get a Thai visa. We all really enjoyed each others company. What with Caras in Phong Sali, and those two in Vientiane, Laos turned out to be a time of intellectually stimulating conversation. Which seems to mean I feel like writing a lot less in my blog, perhaps I get a bit starved of meaningful conversation sometimes. We went to the French Embassy one night to a Swiss movie called “Vitus” as part of a European Film festival they were having. It turned out to be a great movie, touching and funny.

Oh yes!!! And here's some porcelain porn I found in a very fancy craft shop in Vientiane. It's a bit blurry because I was trying to snap the photos a bit surreptitiously. I don't think the owners would have liked it.

One interesting thing about Laos is that the living costs are really high! An average meal will cost you $3-$4 dollars (without looking too hard for alternatives). To be honest I did spoil myself in Vientiane, but my living costs per day went up to around $30 from $10-$15 in Thailand. Amazing considering how much poorer the country is.

So that’s basically that. I’m now over the border in Nong Kai in Thailand once again in a guest house run by a woman with a totally maniacal laugh. I’ll make my slow way back to Chiang Mai and probably put my feet up again with amazing curries and hill tribe coffee, and get some more programming done. I'm sorry this is a bit rushed, I'm feeling really crap at the moment with this heat.

Some photos by popular request

Well after the responses I’ve had from people I guess I will keep writing about random shit (but maybe I’ll try and ponder things a little more before I post them for my own piece of mind). However some good constructive criticism was to keep posts around 1000 words, and put more photos in so I’ll try and take that on board. Admittedly I have been a bit lax with photos. But I just don’t really like them!!!! But I have taken some with the intent of putting them up, and I want to make good of that intention so here goes. There’s a few up on Facebook as well here (I don’t think you need an account to view them).

These have been accumulated over the past little while, I hope you all enjoy :-). They’re not in any particular chronological order.

Actually the first I’ll write out because it was just a collection of quotes by famous people in the front of the menu in a vegetarian cafe near here:

Nothing will benefit human health and increase chance of survival on earth, as much as an evolution to a vegetarian diet.

Albert Einstein

Actually I’ll just write that one. There are some other good ones from people like Pythagoras and some other famous people, but I like Einstein. And yet I still eat meat. What a hypocrite.

This street runs along the side of the 3 Kings monument and shows how bad the pollution is here. In fact this is a good day, a lot of the time you can’t even see the hills at all. It does make for some quite nice sunsets though.

This is one of my dancing related injuries. I’m sorry if you have a foot phobia, I don’t really see the big deal. But I’m quite proud of them (there’s a matching one on the other big toe and a new one about that big on my heel as well).

Behold!! A Thai fresh produce market. They’re really good at fresh produce over here, you never get anything wilted despite the heat.

It turns out I’m quite good at food carving. A potato and a carrot.

Some more pretty flowers near my house.

My first attempt at home cooked mango sticky rice. It tasted pretty damn good I have to admit, although I didn’t have a bamboo steamer for the sticky rice so I had to boil it. It was still pretty sticky, but more in a custard way than a bread way. But that’s OK for mango sticky rice since you then cook it up with sugar and coconut cream anyway. I've since tried steaming the sticky rice in a bamboo steamer (which left it tasting funny), and a handkerchief which worked fairly well. But I don't really think it needs to be steamed when you're just going to add coconut milk for a rice pudding like this.

OK, here’s something I find really strange and funny all at once. I’ve noticed that a lot of the temples have what I can only describe as soft-core porn in amongst their artwork. It’s never explicit, but I’ve yet to find another explanation for some of the positions you find people in. This one is fairly tame, but it’s not that uncommon to see all sorts of groping going on, or threesomes. It’s really strange. This one just has some extremely optimistic topless Thai girls on it, floating above the Buddha statue in the middle. Buddha, boobies, Buddha, boobies.

Here is another one I found on the wall of a building.

A peanut I think. But I’ve never seen a raw one like this before. It’s quite pretty and tasty too. The flesh is actually mostly clear before they’re roasted.

Have a look at this mango!!! Notice the relative thickness of the pip comparative to the flesh. It’s almost nonexistent, while ours at home have humungous pips. Australian mangos == So lame, Thai Mangos == So good. I have found some of our thick pip variety over here, but these ones are much better.

A picture I shot on the way down the mountain around Doi Sutep (A big temple up here on a mountain). I find at this point that I didn’t include any pictures of the temple itself, but to be honest temples are kind of all same-same but different, and usually very touristy. You’ve seen 10 and you’ve seen them all, just on different scales. Visit Thailand and you’ll know what I mean. But THIS is pretty.

CHOCOLATE. That’s all. We got sick.

This is the Somtom Ninja near the Chiang Mai gate, which is the gate in the south of the old wall in Chiang Mai. Somtom is a traditional Thai seafood salad made with: Lots of chilli, garlic, dried shrimp, pickled whole crabs, fish sauce, other random seafood, green papaya, tomatoes, peanuts, and probably some other stuff I’ve forgotten. It’s really great so long as you don’t get the pickled crab. I tried that one time and it was hard to finish, especially with 10cm crab legs stabbing me in the tonsils. This guy makes the best somtom I’ve found yet, and he makes it super fast. Hence Somtom Ninja.

And that’s that. I hope you like them :-).

One thing I will talk briefly about though is a peculiar habit people have when they’ve got a camera. They’ll walk into a really beautiful place, snap a bunch of photos of everything for later, and then walk out without actually appreciating anything. I saw it happen a fair bit when I went up to Doi Sutep. I kind of feel like there are times when a camera is good, but photos are really artistic more than anything. Snapping a trillion photos of a temple or images of the Buddha is kind of silly because I think it completely misses most of the impact of actually being there. I guess I have nothing against taking photos of them, but surely it should remind you of how you felt when you were there. And if you don’t actually take the time to appreciate it at all in the moment then the photos are just like a postcard you can show to your friends rather than anything meaningful.

Actually another thing I feel compelled to say is: I rescind my assertion that Thai people are so healthy. They eat TONS of fried food ALL THE TIME. They will literally deep fry anything in batter, from bananas, to scorpions, to chickens feet. Somehow they don’t die from it like we do. But I think if you avoid the fried food the rest is pretty healthy.

Narcissistic self indulgence

I read a good quote in a book recently: “Most conversations are monologues in the presence of another person” (Magnificently Insignificant by Noel Odou if anyone’s interested). That’s basically what I’m doing here. I end up writing these great big posts about life and random thoughts going through my head, much of which is fairly unstructured and probably semi-incoherent. Most of it in fact belongs in my diary and I often get half way through writing a post and wish I had a copy-paste from my computer to my diary. I guess I could print them out later and paste them in. But anyway, what I’m getting at is that it’s really one way, it’s often quite candid, there’s no input from anyone else, and I’m basically just preaching my opinion at a captive audience who initially tuned in for travel updates from me. That’s if I haven’t scared everyone off already :-P, I actually have no idea how many people even visit this page anymore. I’m still not 100% sure why I even write the stream of consciousness ones, maybe it makes me feel connected to people back home, or maybe I hope to provoke thought in people. I do get some emails back sometimes from people wanting to discuss a topic or something, so maybe that keeps me going. Maybe it’s just that the stuff I physically do each day doesn’t really seem that important or interesting. Oops, here I go again, it just kind of happens and suddenly I’m getting all long winded.

So anyway, I guess I’m asking for advice, I feel a bit like I’m abusing this blog for my own ends, and maybe I should stop preaching my opinion and realisations I have. Is it interesting or do people find themselves skipping paragraphs and rolling their eyes at me? It’s a democracy people; nothing’s going to change unless you speak up! So I want the good AND the bad.

This is kind of why I’ve always been against blogging in the first place!!! It’s strange that people feel so self-important that they have to share their life with the world, and here I am being the worst kind of culprit!!! (2499 words of mental diarrhoea today people!!!)