AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds

001

MONKS ON MOPEDS

Laurie Gough

The midnight boat to the island of Koh Phangan was full of hippies. Not friendly hippies, but people who liked to dress the part. They didn’t smile. For such a ragged, dreadlocked, motley crew, they took themselves extremely seriously. I lay awake on the deck for most of the night and let my thoughts sink into the deep purple sky over Thailand. I was thrilled to be in a country I had read so much about, a country so ancient and storied, the Venice of the East, filled with temples of dawn and northern hill tribes. I recalled what I had seen earlier that day on the train through the southern tip of Thailand: jagged mountains, jungles, rubber plantations and giant Buddhas that sat contemplatively in rice paddies.

When the boat reached the island in the morning, I found a bamboo hut to rent on the beach. Over the next ten days I discovered Koh Phangan’s outstanding features: nasty dogs that bite your ankles wherever you go, the most delicious food in the entire world (noodles with ginger, chilies, cashews, shrimp in coconut milk, sticky rice), full-moon parties where foreign tourists eat magic mushrooms and fly to solitary planets where conversation is neither required nor even possible, and wandering old men who use their thumbs as instruments of torture.

A Danish woman recommended the Thai massage administered by elderly men who stroll the beaches, soliciting willing victims. When the eighty-year-old masseur offered to ply his trade on my body, I eagerly complied, overjoyed at the idea of soothing my aching shoulders, which had heaved a far too heavy backpack far too long. Just before he began, I noticed his thumbs. These were no ordinary thumbs but appendages of astounding proportions, mutated digits, round and flat, the size of dessert spoons. Clearly he had spent his life cultivating his thumbs for the art of massage.

While I lay on the sand, the man with the thumbs prodded and poked his way from my feet up my legs with cruel and unyielding force, even took unnecessary jabs at my knees, showing no mercy at my protests. I had been far less tense before the massage began. He applied his thumbs to the deepest reaches of my body, surely causing irreparable damage to my life-giving organs. By the time he reached my stomach, I was overcome with self-pity. His thumbs forced down into my stomach with such a weight, they seemed to touch the ground beneath me. I couldn’t keep my eyes off his face, which was severe, determined and hardened.

Clearly, massage was serious business to this man, and flinching was for sissies. Clearly, I was a sissy. When he tried to grab hold of my tongue, I clamped my teeth to prevent the intrusion. Then, in a strange and dreadful moment, the giant thumbs were boring into my ears. No one had ever done such a thing, and I stopped the thumbs at that point, but not before I heard something pop. Afterwards, I went for a swim in the sea and couldn’t get the water out of my ears for two days. The thumbs had carved a small cave in my inner ear for water to sit in, resulting in a painful ear infection that lasted two weeks.

Thailand didn’t seem to hold the romance and mystical intrigue I had imagined.

From the moment I arrived in Bangkok, I was shoved up against a human tide, jostled by bodies of every description. Every time I walked out of my guest house, I encountered monsoons of activity: human, animal and vegetable. On the streets, I watched people who had fallen half-mad into the gutters of life. Vacant, destitute faces begged for acknowledgement of their existence. Children with rakes for bodies stared at me with eyes bigger than all the world’s darkest secrets. Mangy dogs ate rotten vegetables off the roads. I gazed into the rich, brown, beautiful faces of the women who sold me combs, cheap soap and pineapples on the sidewalks. I wandered through night markets that sold pig heads, red coiled intestines in glass jars, dripping animal appendages, green leafy vegetable shoots, smoked fish and pyramid mounds of spices. In these markets, every passing scent was either sublime or rank.

Small shops and sidewalk stalls in Bangkok are run by old men with cataracts, who have seen too much and give none of it away. They would wrap my passion fruit carefully in yesterday’s newspaper, fold all the edges as if it were a wedding present. I watched monks on mopeds, sometimes two on a bike, race down the streets, their saffron robes flowing behind them as they sped through the chaos. Glorious smiles, shaved heads, and Doc Martens on their feet.

Bangkok endures annual floods and an eternal stickiness—a stickiness in the air, in the rice, in the sex sold on the streets. This is the city where Japanese businessmen come for sex holidays, whole planeloads of them seeking out the young Thai girls from the hill tribes, whose starving parents sell them into prostitution. Young boys sell themselves for movie tickets. Street life sharpens to a razor’s edge on which few can balance.

It seemed to me that Bangkok lay smouldering under a blue haze of exhaust fumes and smog: the city of perpetually honking horns. Wheels and people are everywhere, all spinning like the city and your head, spinning fast toward the Western world of chaos, Coca-Cola and Internet cafés.

To cross a street in Bangkok is to risk your life. Pedestrians have no rights. I would always have to wait for a flood of rickshaws and careening cabs, tuk-tuks, bikes and buses to cease, and sometimes I waited half an hour. Sidewalks end abruptly with cement walls in your face, and they’re full of gaping holes, wide-open sewage holes that are gateways to the underworld. I worried for the children and dogs who might slip in silently. Somewhere in that city, lost souls must wander in the sewers, like filthy fallen angels.

I took a bus north out of Bangkok. I wanted to breathe oxygen again. Just outside a village, I stayed at a guest house run by a woman with too many children to count. Sumalee started working before the sun came up and didn’t stop until after it set. She cooked, cleaned, gardened, took care of her children, and in the evenings, if she had foreign guests, she practised other languages. She loved singing and knew all the words to Over the Rainbow. Although she said she didn’t keep track, she thought she was close to thirty-five years old. When I asked where her husband was, she told me, very poetically I thought, that he was experimenting with different hearts.

In the lantern-lit evening, I watched the rich communal life of Sumalee’s family. As in many non-Western countries, everyone is related and no one is ever alone. Mothers are never isolated and burdened with small, bored children. Children have many mothers, most of them cousins, aunts and older sisters. Social intimacy comes at the cost of privacy, however. Everybody in that extended family seemed to know each other’s business. They also seemed to know intimate details about every person in the village.

A week later, I camped in the countryside near a wide glassy river. All night long I gagged from the sickly sweet stench of a burning pile of organic matter and garbage near my tent. I had seen these fires from bus and train windows all over the country. So overpowering were the fumes that I tried to put out the fire, and when that didn’t work, I uprooted and moved my tent in the middle of the night. To think I had left Bangkok because of its noxious fumes. Smoke choked even the country skies in an eternal season of burning. Where was the ancient soft pure air of Thailand?

In Chiang Mai, I hooked up with my Canadian friend Charlie. We stayed at the Be Happy Guest House, run by an elderly couple who fed us sticky rice and vegetables with fish sauce. After dinner we explored Chiang Mai and discovered the Be More Happy Guest House, just down the street. If only we’d known. The next morning when we were eating breakfast at an outdoor restaurant, a little boy came by, holding a cage full of birds. Give me five baht and I’ll let the birds go, he said to us. We refused to pay the wildlife kidnapper’s ransom and he moved on to other tourists at the next table.

Charlie and I continued north. In Chiang Rai, everyone and his brother tried to get us to go on a hill tribe trek. These treks were all the rage. Ride elephants into the past, see hill tribe people untouched by the modern world, they advertised. A Dutch couple, recently returned from one of the more popular expeditions, told us they had walked ahead of their group and arrived at the hill tribe station an hour before they were expected. Through the trees they watched the hill people preparing for the visitors by changing from their ordinary ragged clothes into bright costumes, traditional elaborate hats, and jewellery.

Charlie and I decided to do our own exploring of northern Thailand. We rented a motorcycle in Chiang Rai and set off early one morning into the hills. On the main road north we learned the only law of Thai highway travel: might is right. Every vehicle larger than our motorcycle bullied us over to the extreme edge of the road, beside the gutter. We drove on the shoulder—one dead dog and we’d be dead too—and let the wailing, streaking, hurtling consciousness of the highway leave us in the dust.

Soon we escaped the main highway and, on our rickety motorcycle with its sputtering engine, began to follow switchback roads that led into the sky. Thai soldiers had warned us of the danger in the green terraced mountains leading to the Golden Triangle, danger from drug dealers and thieves, communist terrorists and Laotian soldiers who might fly out of the hills to attack travellers at any time. Higher up into the clouds, the mountains become tough and weather-worn, like the skin of the barefoot people who stood and watched us from the roadside. These northern hills were inhabited by ten thousand lives, people eking out their existence in tattered dirt villages that cling to the sides of mountains like bats to cave walls.

TO CROSS A STREET IN BANGKOK IS TO RISK YOUR LIFE.

When our motorcycle needed a rest, we stopped in a village where we saw a woman smoking opium from a pipe as she breast-fed her baby. She looked fifty but was probably much younger. I smiled at her and she thrust her hand out toward me. Five baht to make picture, she said.

Farther up the road we found a Buddha statue inside a cave. The cave was deliciously cold and tranquil after the thick heat of the day. A monk from a nearby temple came to greet us. He wore biker sunglasses and an orange robe; tattoos laced his forearms. In broken English, he told us about his simple life in the hills and how much happier he was now than when he was young. Life is a handful of days, then poof, he blew on his hands, then it’s all over. He laughed and bowed for us as he turned to leave. His jack-o’-lantern robe ruffling in the wind as he walked up a wooded path was a scene of golden beauty.

Charlie and I searched most of the afternoon for the Golden Triangle. Considered by some to be one of the most exotic places in the world, and long a centre for drug trafficking, the infamous Golden Triangle is found at the intersection of the Mekong and Ruak rivers, forming the borders between Burma, Laos and northern Thailand. Road signs were extremely poor and misleading and we got lost several times. So desolate were the roads, many of them ending abruptly into a dead open nowhere, we thought the Golden Triangle must be remote and unvisited.

We rounded a corner and found ourselves on a gleaming paved highway full of honking horns. The first sign of the Golden Triangle was a slick, air-conditioned Japanese tour bus glistening in the sun. I was reminded of Niagara Falls. Cameras clicked incessantly at the small triangular island on the Mekong River. Pepsi and Coke competed for attention like ten-year-old brats. Posters of half-naked Thai women advertised orange pop. A little girl dressed in hill tribe garb asked if I wanted to take her picture for five baht, and pouted when I said no.

We fled and got lost again as we headed south, drawn off the beaten tourist track onto smaller, narrower roads. After a while, we found ourselves snaking through a different kind of countryside. An emptiness seemed to clutch hold of the rolling land around us, but it wasn’t lonely or barren. The villages we passed in this new and different land were rich with details of seemingly simple and joyful lives. The people were evidently not accustomed to outsiders, and they stared, waved, smiled and laughed as we passed them on the road. A little girl ran when she saw us and hid behind a tree.

Outside one village, some water buffalo crossing the road forced us to stop and wait. The farmer ran behind the beasts to hurry them off the road. He grinned sheepishly, embarrassed about interrupting our journey. No problem, Charlie said to the man with a wave of his hand.

No problem? said the water buffalo herder. No problem, no problem, he continued to say over and over. He started laughing. He laughed so hard he doubled over and held his stomach. I wondered if this was the first time he’d actually heard an English speaker use the phrase. Perhaps he had heard it once in a movie. No problem, no problem, continued the man. Once his water buffalo had crossed and we drove on, I turned around to see the laughing man running toward his house, probably to tell his family what he’d heard.

Soon after, we realized we were seriously lost. Our map was entirely useless, and it was getting dark. In the next village, we stopped to ask a boy the way to Chiang Rai, but he didn’t have a clue what we were saying. Frightened, he ran away to his house. An older man came along and didn’t understand us either. Soon a gathering of people surrounded us, the lost falangs. Repeatedly we said, Chiang Rai, pointed to our map, pointed ahead and then behind us on the road, trying to discern which way to go. Either the villagers didn’t know the way to Chiang Rai or we weren’t pronouncing it correctly. Then, we looked up from the map and saw two teenage boys dragging a younger boy by his shirt across the road. Proudly, they deposited him in front of us. The little boy’s eyes shone at our decrepit motorcycle. Very slowly, he said, Where … you … want go? The villagers had given us their prize linguist.

The boy pointed the way back for us, and on seeing the boy do this, the whole village pointed the way back for us too. The whole village pointed. It set off inside me a surge of sweet gratitude. The handful of days we’re given on earth exploded on the road before us into a thousand shards of light. The way back would be easy to find. The way back would be paved in Judy Garland songs.

No problem.

Laurie Gough is the author of Island of the Human Heart: A Woman’s Travel Odyssey (entitled Kite Strings of the Southern Cross in the rest of the world), finalist for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and winner of ForeWord Magazine’s Silver Medal for Travel Book of the Year. She also contributes to salon.com, the Globe and Mail, the Los Angeles Times and numerous travel anthologies. She has just moved to Wakefield, Quebec, where she’s writing her next book.

Boats are scattered in clusters, as if waiting for the tide to float them.

002

INCIDENT

AT RANKIN INLET

Peter Unwin

Stories tend not to unfold in the Arctic the same way they do in the south. The contours are different, and the outcomes are different too. At one time off Rankin Inlet, an Inuit woman in a small boat needed to relieve herself. Her husband begged her not to urinate in the water, arguing that this would offend the gods. Desperate, she called upon a spirit to help her. The spirit agreed to help but demanded the woman forfeit her life.

In the south, there would be no deal. But in the Arctic, the woman agreed. The spirit at once transformed a nearby iceberg into an island for her convenience, and having relieved herself, she died moments later while crawling on her hands and knees on the cobble beach.

That shining piece of rock is called Marble Island. Made almost entirely of quartz, it glows a brilliant white beneath clear skies. In 1721, a gold-seeking expedition led by James Knight, consisting of two ships and twenty-five men, landed on the island. During the course of the next two years, scurvy, starvation and mortal conflict with the Eskemays turned the site into one of the grimmest locations in the history of Northern exploration. The entire expedition vanished; no survivors, no skeletons, not even any graves were ever found.

Today on the island’s western tip, whales are still flensed by men and women wielding sivaks and ulus, the gendered knives of the Inuit. Visitors approach the island on their hands and knees in deference to a legendary woman who needed to pee, and perhaps to the many others who have died horrible deaths here and whose stories have never been told.

Twenty miles away on the mainland lies the modern settlement of Rankin Inlet. In a rock field just outside of town, a few dog carcasses in various stages of decomposition are scattered about. Some have the red plastic casing of a shotgun shell lying next to them. Scampering everywhere are the siskiit, a nervous, corpulent ground squirrel the size of a terrier, the preferred target of Inuit boys who hurl stones at them with astonishing accuracy.

Out on the land sit several large rusted compressors with evidence of people having overnighted in them: a few berths bolted to the walls, a television antenna, three or four small windows—small enough to keep the polar bears from getting in—blowtorched out of the side. Other examples of Inuit adaptability are near at hand, including a snowmobile’s cracked Plexiglas windshield sewn exquisitely back together with wire. This sort of ingenuity is legendary in the Arctic. An Inuk in the 1950s was said to have opened the back of a thirty-five-millimetre camera for a traveller and fixed the broken timing mechanism, having never seen a camera before in his life.

The town is named after the British naval officer John Rankin. History remembers him as the man who lied about the Northwest Passage. He swore not only that it existed at this latitude (sixty-four), but that Christopher Middleton, his commanding officer and one of history’s finest navigators, was deliberately concealing it for his own profit.

Rankin Inlet is a windswept settlement of prefabricated buildings mounted on rocks. The wind is legendary and scours the ancient bedrock while venting itself continuously southward. There are no flags in Rankin Inlet, only half flags, the ends torn to shreds. It is said here that flags snapping loudly but straight out indicate winds of thirty-five kilometres. A snapping flag inclined upward means winds of more than thirty-five kilometres. Boats are scattered in clusters, like the houses, down by the waters of Hudson Bay, as if waiting for the tide to float them.

Unlike the neighbouring coastal communities of Arviat and Whale Cove, which were established in the 1950s to save the Inuit from starvation following a change in the caribou migrations, Rankin Inlet began as a mining town. According to the 1998 Nunavut Handbook, the Inuit were very hard workers and much appreciated by the mine owners. In plain English, Inuit men received half the wages of the white miners and were required to eat in separate lunchrooms. The mine closed in 1962. The giant shaft head that dominated Rankin Inlet burnt to the ground in the mid-1980s. Today there is a nasty, ongoing lawsuit concerning who exactly owns the rights to the land and the nickel that lies beneath the ground.

THERE ARE NO FLAGS IN RANKIN INLET, ONLY HALF FLAGS, THE ENDS TORN TO SHREDS.

Across the street from this abandoned mine is the Northern Store, formerly owned by the Hudson’s Bay Company, a massive prefabricated shed that sells everything from T-shirts to white rolled slabs of whale fat labelled Muuktuuk. In a small stall off the side is a combination pizza parlour, fried chicken restaurant and video store. An enormous walrus head is mounted above the videos. The place is packed with Inuit children. A few fries are getting eaten, and more kids file in and look about the room the way grown men enter a tavern.

Inuit children are granted a freedom rare in the south. At Iqaluit, in a friend’s house, following a dinner of frozen peas, instant mashed potatoes and fresh caribou, I watched a powerful boy of five begin to push a broken stereo console across the living room floor. The women played cards and smoked cigarettes. The men smoked and watched, transfixed, a documentary on the hunting techniques of large jungle cats. They had watched this same video many times and fell into a familiar reverential silence in the moments leading up to the kill. Finally the boy, with a great deal of proud grunting, managed to shoulder the cabinet to the lip of the landing and send it crashing down the flight of stairs. The noise was deafening. No one in the room even looked up. Another time, at Arviat, a seven-year-old boy, clutching a ticket, boarded the twin-prop Saab on which I was travelling, and took a seat. The flight attendant spent ten minutes attempting, in English, to find out who he was. Who’s your mommy? she asked repeatedly. But the boy did not speak English, he spoke Inuktitut. After skidding sideways through ferocious Arctic bubbles, the plane landed.