Letters from Thailand...

Dear Jesse

I am back on the mainland and I don't know what to do.  I walked for 45 minutes through this crowded port city to find this internet cafe. I have not had breakfast yet, but the nice lady here is bringing me coffee. I had hoped I would find a place to breakfast during my walk - but all of the street stands look too dingy - I don't know what is safe to eat - also it is weird to see all of these roasted ducks with their heads still on wrapped around metal bars by their necks. Probably it is safe - but all of these cities are filthy!

I stepped into a 7-eleven hoping to find a snack - they have donuts filled with shredded pork! I am always so grateful to find chicken cooked in a clean kitchen, and it can be hard.

Here is a funny story I have been meaning to share with you:

Three nights ago I was exploring the northern tip of the island, and I could see a gigantic storm coming in from the ocean. It was dark and windy and I was feeling powerful and imaginative. I was clambering over some limestone, when all of a sudden a crazy bird started making weird loud calls. I stopped, scared. I imagined that this bird was warning me not to come any closer, for danger lay ahead. After a moment I decided I wanted a better look at the bird. As soon as I took another step, the bird bellowed once again and dramatically took off over the dark and windy ocean. I was terrified! I imagined that I had offended the island spirit which was resting just over the next ridge, and now he was coming for me. I quickly went back to the town. By then it was dark. As I walked along the narrow, smelly street, I thought I heard a deep growl behind one of the wooden fences. I hurried on, glancing at the fence. In my mind, I imagined seeing a GIANT RED-EYED MANTICORE looking at me from behind the fence! Oh great, I thought, I have awakened both the spirit of the island AND the ancient guardian spirits of Thailand with my petulant American confidence. Soon I came to a small group of stray dogs. (Thailand is also the kingdom of small stray dogs) - usually these dogs love me but tonight they were edgy. I tried to continue past them quickly, but one curly little dog ventured a very timid bark, as if to test the waters. I Jumped! I watched the dogs as the vibration of my fear extended out through the electromagnetic field and into their brains. For a moment they just stared. Then they all jumped! And then they all started barking! And coming towards me! "Stop that!" I said tersely, now convinced that dogs really could sense fear, and sure that if I could only stay calm, it would calm them as well. I stood my ground and stared at them. Some of them became intimidated and disappeared into the shadows, ashamed. But others of them just stood there barking as I slowly backed away and made my way back to my bungalow.

I felt terror as I walked through the wooded darkness toward my locked door. I had really spooked myself. Who knew what was in the dark? I took a deep breath and took off the padlock to my room. Once inside, I quickly locked the door and turned on the light. I sat down on my bed, relieved. After a couple moments, I

glanced over at the trash can. THERE WAS A GIANT SPIDER BEHIND THE TRASH CAN. "What?" I thought, "that can't possibly be what it looks like" (after all, on the way into the glade, I had mistaken a tree stump for a prostrated Unicorn and jumped). I slowly crept toward the giant spider, trying to imagine that it was something else - a weird bump in the wall, or a strange crack that just happened to extend in 8 directions. IT MOVED! It was the size of a tarantula, but it wasn't a tarantula, it was a giant spider! (Take your fingers and make a circle with your thumbs and middle fingers pressed together, that's how big it was.) It's head looked like a human skull. Oh great, I thought, the Island Spirit, the Manticore, and the CIA have all sent this giant death spider to kill me. I stared at the spider for a very long time. "Please leave" I said, but it just stood there. I was horrified. Well, I thought, since it's so big, maybe it moves slowly and I can catch it in a bucket. As I edged toward the spider with the bucket, It took off racing across the room! It was the fastest thing I had ever seen! My badly sunburned legs crackled with pain as blood rushed to them to power my backwards jump.

Finally I went to the lady at the front desk to ask for a broom.   She didn't speak English, so I had to make sweeping and spider movements with my hands. She quickly turned to a skinny younger woman who was sitting behind her and said something. The skinny woman got up and starting sorting through shelves to find the right kind of insecticide. "Oh no," I said, shaking my hand "That's okay" - I noticed a broom and picked it up, "I'll use this." The old lady stared at me blankly and the motioned to the skinny woman who was disappearing in the direction of my cabin "You go!" she said.

"You see?" I said, pulling the table away from the wall and then jumping back, pointing. The skinny woman grimaced. She crouched, leaning forward, as if preparing for a fight. I looked up and put my hands in the prayer position, asking God to please forgive me for what was about to happen. The skinny lady struck! The Spider ran desperately up the wall, and the skinny lady ran after, spraying poison. The Spider ran across the room, trying to hid in the crevice of a window, and finally hitting the floor somewhere near the door. It still wasn't dead! It just kept trying to crawl away, coated as it was with a foam of poisonous lather. "Yuk!" said the skinny woman, as she continued to spray. She reached for my broom, and to my horror, she lifted it and whacked the poor little spider as hard as she could, and then again, and again. Stereotypically, the last act of the poor spider was to draw it's little legs in to its body. The skinny woman swept the spider out the door.

An awkward silence followed. The room smelled like poison. I lit some incense as the skinny lady walked around my room, spraying poison under the bed and into the corners. After a while she left. I sat on the bed for a long time, thinking about the spider. I felt very guilty, but what could I do? I said a little prayer and did a fast psychic meditation in which I imagined myself reaching back in time to pull the spider out of its dying body quickly, and then help transform its energies so that it would be reincarnated as a giant butterfly. I imagined that I was wrong to distrust the spider - maybe it had only come to visit the traveler from California. And look what had happened. At the same time, I was still tense with fear. I lay still for a while, examining my fear of arachnids and trying to calm down. When I was finally calm, I got up to turn off the light. THERE WAS A GIANT SPIDER ON THE INSIDE OF THE WINDOW!

Yesterday I went to the Siracha Tiger Zoo, part of the Amazing Thailand (tm) Tourism campaign. I had very mixed feelings about the way they were treating the animals. In one display, a confused tiger was in a small cage with a bunch of piglets. The sign said "happy family." I also saw a really degrading elephant show, in which the elephants danced to Thai techno. Like I said, I had mixed feelings. Also, last night, I took a long walk and came upon a pet store with many puppies in little pens out front. One of the puppies was barking, and the woman watching them rolled up her magazine and hit the puppy right on the nose! Three times! The puppy then turned to me and went "Ei! Ei! Ei!" But what could I do? You can't save everyone. I stuck my fingers in the cage and let the puppies chew on them for a little bit. And then I left.

Today I am going to the most heavily touristed beach in Thailand, and tomorrow I'm going back inland to see the ruins of the ancient capital. After that I have to start heading south toward Singapore.

For some reason, you are the only person I want to tell this too.

I hope you are doing well.

Love,

Jonathan

PS I gently pushed the second spider outside with a broom.

Dear Jesse

I am sitting in the "Cookies cheap email and motorbikes" headquarters on the much balliehood backpackers paradise island of Ko Pha-gnan.  Here, internet costs $1 an hour, motorbikes cost $3 a day, my BEACH FRONT BUNGALOW costs $3 a day, and I am snacking on sour skittles $0.5 and Lays "sweet basil" potato chips $0.25.  I am also drinking my third "Spy Premium Wine Cooler" $0.75, about to move on to my fourth.

My budget is only $20 a day, and do you know that thus far, i have gone at least $5 over budget every day?  Thank God this vacation is over in five days!

I am staying in an amazingly quiet area of the island - "Porn Sawang" the Beach bungalows for peace-and-quiet lovers, apparently.  I have spent the last two days mostly just recovering from recent trauma (see below) - lying in a hammok outside of my bungalow and staring at the ocean.  I have never sat still for so long and it is wonderful.  Today thought, i finally motivated in the late afternoon to take a taxi to the other side of the island $1.25 which is the party central.  It was really cool to tell you the truth, but I wasn't in the mood (see below) - even so this seems like a wonderful place to come with friends.  All of these attractive people made eyes at me and i felt tortured to be so self-contained and unwilling to participate in their "vacation" - I am, unlike them, a "traveling student"

Anyway:  Two days ago I woke up at 6 AM on a train and got off in the city of Surat Thana and two hours later got on a bus $1.25 to Khao Sok (say "cow" the animal, "soak" with water) national park - a rain forest!  the ride took two hours and was beautiful.  With help from a local, I made it into the park without paying $5 and, although I had had nothing for breakfast but Yogurt and rice, I took off into the treacherous, treacherous trails.

I was heading to a waterfall 4 Kilometers from the park entrance.  It seemed like an easy hike in theory, in in reality it was terrifying - the path was often only 1 foot thick made of mud on a cliffside, and the rain forest is actually a pretty scary place, dense with moisture, life and sound, and full of giant leeches and giant insects - who cares about the fucking bears and tigers!  The further I got in the more scary and archetypal it became.  As usual i began to default back to my "amazing journey" consciousness and starting hoping that some mystic spirit was waiting for me with a special message at the end of my trek.

After close to two hours of pressing forward, I came to wide stream.  The path seemed to continue on the other side of the stream, and i couldn't see any way to cross.  Earlier in the day I had seen some Thai kids moving across a similar obstacle by removing their shoes and wading.  However, having at this point seen the giant leeches with my own eyes, i wasn't about to take off my shoes.  I decided I would move a little further downstream in search of a better crossing point.

Really, I tell you - I was imagining Gary Larson's Far Side Jungle characters and thinking to myself the words, "we are intrepid explorers!" - as my foot landed not firmly on a mossy rock and my legs went flying into the air, and Jonathan came a-tumbling down, face first, into the rocky rocks.  As it happened, my thought process went something like this:

I'm falling!

Fuck!

Where are my arms!

Oh my God I Landed on my Face!

Stupid!

Ouch!

Blood!

OH MY GOD BLOOD EVERYWHERE!

This is just like that time as a kid when there was the earthquake and I had a premonition and rolled out of the way just in time but the falling TV still gouged the side of my head and there was blood everywhere!

Oh God I hope I don't Scar!

At which point Madonna started singing, "Cause I've climbed the tree of life/ and that is why/ I'm not longer scared if I fall..."

She continued singing as I got my bearings, took off my sweat-soaked shirt and pressed it to my head to staunch the blood flow.  I was 2.5 KM out and suddenly feeling very vulnerable and maybe even lucky to be alive.  All of my doubts about everything came rolling in - the fact of my physical body, my own fallibility, the notion of chaos in the universe, the possibility that there is no god, my own stupid ineptitude ... for a couple minutes I tried to dispel the thought and just sit on a rock and meditate on closing the wound.  I didn't have a mirror so i couldn't see how bad it was - i tried to have a look with a metal spoon in my bag, but it was a tarnished spoon and my imagination was not to be relied upon in this instance.  For a moment i considered whether to supposedly "be a man" and continue on to the water fall - or if I hadn't better turn around and go back before it started raining.  I was still bleeding pretty badly.

Believe it or not I didn't stop bleeding completely until about nine hours later when I was drinking Rum and Coke with some English kids and settling down to sleep on the night-ferry to the island.  By then I had checked myself in several mirrors and swathed my open wound with "western Family Antibiotic" which I had bought when we were all together in Oregon.

I will be honest with you that even though I pressed forward, I was absolutely shattered by the whole experience.  The open wound on my brow was like a hole in my worldly interface - a place that was neither me nor the external world but something in-between.  I was worried about the possibilities of both infection and concussion, and I questioned if traveling by night to the island was a good idea. 

 Lying on the boat and trying to recall exactly how it had happened, it seemed to me as though I had put my foot down on darkness - and then a great force had lifted me violently and angrily, twisted me about, and then slammed me face first into the rocks.  Well aware of my own dubiously over-active imagination, I was wary of this impression - but the impression remains.  The other thing that kept coming to me as I was lying there was the echoing sensation that the chemistry of the rock had actually made contact and ground against the bone beneath my left eyebrow.  If such is the case I am lucky that the wound closed so quickly.  Also I think that rock-to-bone is one of the most intimate kind of communications that a person can have with a rain forest - regardless of belief system.

whew!  Sorry!  That went deep in too many ways, maybe.  It's taken me three days to be able to write about it.  So thanks for reading.  When I got to the island my eye was a swollen mess - but two days in a hammock have done wonders, and I have another day yet before I head back to the mainland and catch the train through Malaysia.  I don't have to be in Singapore until Friday.  I never would have guessed it, but after three weeks in Thailand, Singapore is coming as a tremendous relief.

Whatever- this whole island is a tremendous relief.  Tomorrow I am going to rent a motor bike and see everything.  Either that or rest in my hammock.

The Mutant pigeons in Europe made my heart sink too.  I wonder why?

I have got to stop writing this email and go get dinner.  I hope you are well.

Love,

Jonathan

PS: after making it back to the camp and resting for a while, I trekked another mile to the highway and waited with some native Thais who asked about my face and gave me beer - we all felt cool to be hanging out with each other.  On the 2 hour bus ride back to Surat Thana $1.25 I meditated on how fucking cool my brow scar was going to look.  It took a fall to the face for me to start appreciating Thailand, but as they say - the bigger they are ... the harder my Zo bites them!

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