Travel Diaries #26 - Pai
I travel from Chiang Mai to the mountains for a few days, to the backpackers' paradise of Pai
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I don’t know much about Pai other than I’d been recommended it by a couple of people, it’s close to Chiang Mai and I’d gotten bored of Chiang Mai, or at least felt like I should tick another destination off the list, which was only really growing as I visited more places which hadn’t been on any list in the first place, rather like my to-do lists in general, to which I’d add things like “eat” or “read a book” immediately after doing them, just to then immediately draw a line through them with my red pen, just to feel like I’d accomplished something, as simply being in Chiang Mai or Pai, or at this stage anywhere on Earth, wasn’t enough for me to feel like I was achieving enough out of life.
I find my accommodation out the road and I’m not too impressed with it. It’s been sold to me as a homestay, that is, a popular accommodation offering in many south-east Asian countries where you, literally enough, stay in someone’s home. In theory it’s a more ‘authentic’ option than staying in, say, a commercial premises like a hotel or a hostel, and in a ‘good’ one (i.e. one that conforms to your expectations) you’ll get to sit around and eat dinner with the family in between guzzling three-in-one instant coffees and chain smoking cheap local cigarettes barefooted on the concrete porch, playing with their young children while exhaling smoke in their direction and patting yourself on the back for giving back to the community.
I resent that showers and hot water and electricity are contained in out-houses though there’s wi-fi floating around in the muggy air of the rooms all the same. I wouldn’t mind any of this but it’s clearly not someone’s home, it’s a comfortless hostel masquerading as an authentic experience, I even got checked in through a sliding window by a girl at a desk, as if I was sending something at the post office, and never see anyone other than solo tourists for the remainder of my stay.
I’ve been told that at the Sunset Bar they serve Happy Shakes, which anyone who’s been to a bar south-east Asia, or even just to some dodgy bar literally anywhere else in the world, knows are milkshakes containing magic mushrooms (I’m not even sure they contain milk to be fair). I’ve nothing else for doing and it’s almost evening time so I tell myself I wouldn’t mind seeing a good sunset and trot off down the road.
The bar is situated at the end of a short dirt road and run by a team of cheerful ladyboys who yap and coo and work behind the bar listening to music more suitable for about 12 hours into the future. On the way in there’s a sign advertising a beautiful swimming pool and behind it a dusty, empty swimming pool, empty not just of people but of water. Across from the bar, facing the countryside and the setting sun, beneath which lies Myanmar, not fifty miles away. There’s a raised bamboo platform with pillows and cushions and futons and little candles in glass jars. The whole bar is outdoors, under the sky and a bamboo lid.
At the bottom of the glass I relax back on the cushions and stare over the fields at the overcast sky, the ending of the day, the murky conclusion of nothing. All summer I’ve tried my best to resist becoming One of Them, a backpacker, a traveller, just another tourist, and have wished instead to become simply one of myself. I’m the only one here, to start, which makes it easier not to talk to anyone. So many questions to ask the ladyboys behind the bar, about their lives and their culture and their own personal lifestyle choices, though I prefer to withdraw to myself and attempt to answer them all on my own – how else can you remain sovereign of spirit but to exist alone and apart from the world? To get to know the world too closely you need to get to know its people, though that requires a sacrifice of yourself, something I was not interested in doing at this moment. I’d walked every street in Chiang Mai for two days alone and refused to speak to any fellow tourists in my hostel, not in the sense that if someone spoke to me I would point blank ignore them, but I never made any attempt to put myself out there either, far too concerned with becoming infected with the naïve tourist’s mindset to risk talking to someone else and catching the contagion of ignorance.
If you gaze too long at monsters you will become one yourself, and if you never talk to one you might never find out that you too are a monster, and you have been along, the literal and metaphorical monster in this instance being a tourist. And what crime have we all committed? None, of course, the resistance of being what you truly are is the crime, though more like an injury and a wound. Anyone who has ever called themselves a Traveller rather than a Tourist is a liar, for as with yin and yang, chaos and order, masculine and feminine, and happy and unhappy families, life is a duality and not a plurality – there is only everything or nothing, someone who is at Home and someone who is not at Home, and although there exist variances of relationships one may have to it at a given time, whether you’re an ex-pat or traveller or tourist or holiday-maker – or maybe you just throw your hands up and readily admit to being lost – it’s all the same, and you know nothing. The only difference between states of ignorance is your level of awareness of them, and at the end of the day you are objectively clueless either way.
The name ‘Happy Shake’ is the giveaway that tomfoolery and deception afoot, these trips may lull one with a temporary blissful state, but there is equal opportunity that they will collapse the reality of the world you once knew, smash it like a hammer to glass into 86,400 pieces; happiness is not desirable, it is to be rejected as a false guide, a real trip around the world or around the orbit of your skull will leave you rattled and flattened face down on the floor, everything you knew gone, left shattered like brightly stained-glass, though here I simply relax and enjoy the mild visual and introspective display on the staggered mountain-scape in the distance.
I recline and enjoy the perfectly (if not suspiciously) functional trip brought on by the milkless shake, content I would have to do no further travelling to find what I was looking for, but rather than some chaotic journey instead it was curiously orderly, almost as if it were on a strict schedule, precisely measured in both volume and potency like a gin and tonic, and instead of the expected and apprehended trip my mind cycled through life’s preoccupations with a sort of predictable efficiency like I was trying to solve the weekly shopping list rather than get to the bottom of any interesting existential or personal issues, or better yet, to see veil lifted on the worlds of fairies and spirits. And the crowds beginto filter in, all queueing at the bar to order the same thing off the menu, to enjoy, I was beginning to suspect, the exact same trip as me – though how bad – it was quite thoroughly and pleasantly satisfactory to be honest.
Patrons bearing the weight of the summer air quiz each other about their respective travels, share their experiences in this country or that with one another, compare motorbike exhaust burns and count how much money they’d been scammed out of or tot up how many hours they’d spent on buses after dark to get to The Next Place. One lap on the south-east Asian circuit, a rollercoaster, a fairground attraction. The trip feels curiously linear, like there’s never any fear that you may break out of the neatly measured limits of its kaleidoscopic vision of the world. There are colours yes but you’re strapped in for them, a full spectrum From A to B and back again, a Dulux swatch book of cultures and pagodas.
All assorted attractive visitors, temporarily dishevelled on their way to somewhere else, though it’s all enhanced by the setting and the substances consumed, everyone fulfilling their role in appropriate uniform of elephant pants and halter-necks and cargo shorts and Bintang singlets, all beauty and innocence and charm and enthusiasm for life. Young and posh and free, students and teachers on summer holidays we are, bubbles safe from reality all the way down. For now, we exist only on holidays. All looking to tick experiences off a list, to do the things we believe that we should,, all of it just dots to connect on a wider canvas before it all gets set ablaze on your return home.
Amidst the comfort of the cushions we all play bingo with our observations on the world, now and again an echo bounces around of someone else’s reasons for being here, everyone’s personal mishaps and instances of miscommunication and grapples with exotic animals, either cooked or in the wild with hearts still beating, all reverberations of self-deprecating observations of being caught in traps crudely lain for tourists with everyone else, like tuna suspended from a net, though with no ideas of how to get out other than to just drive off the edge of a cliff on a rented scooter. I am done with all of this and see no point in further continuing with the game within a game, though in reality there is little difference in living anywhere in the world than your own perceptions, which are dense and every bit as real as the traffic that would run you over and splatter your head amongst the clouds were you to cross paths with it. In this sense, all of your prejudices and insecurities are more real than anything you could imagine, and would probably have much the same effect were you to face up to them.
Everyone around is mildly but amusingly overwhelmed, their sense shaken but not their spirits as they sip on warm cocktails and beer. Overheard conversations ping about as if they’re being announced over and over again, the final call at an airport for a flight going anywhere you want
“Have you tried psychedelics before?” she asks,
“Once, in college” he impresses upon her, “though just for the experience” he assures her, as if he’s in a job interview, looking to stress that he’s open-but-not-too-open, that he’s learned from his experiences and is really looking for a role he can sink his teeth into for the next five years, the head of creative marketing, perhaps.
“It was an interesting experience”, though obviously not a convincing one judging by his tone of voice, assurance sought at all stages by her presumed reaction.
The sun has long set over Pai, beyond the mountains in the distance, gone to sleep beneath the rice paddies. Colours settle into a colourblind spread of orange to yellow to brown around the dimming bar, a concrete floor, a spectrum from lights to wood to old faithful bamboo. Over and over the conversations fire off here and there and ping around the bar as if playing through headphones, an echo locator and sonar device searching for the meaning of life.
I get chatting to three Dutch girls who remind me of the girls from Friends; there’s the quirky blonde one, the prim dark-haired one and the beautiful innocent one with the other hair colour. They’re all beautiful though, the shackles of conformity to the standards of the world shaken off by the comforting darkness of the night.
They speak perfectly in the Dutch dialect of English and are on their way to Australia or something. Everyone is either charting a linear path through Asia to Australia or doing a loop of the region before returning home, there is no middle path. They order chicken nuggets and giggle. A look of orgasmic confusion now and then at the end of the sort of meandering sentence one internalises from spending too much time reading motivational quotes on Tumblr, the one with the other hair colour apologises for losing her train of thought, for not being able to put her immediate and entire life experience into words, English words, the veil of beauty sagging as the dosage increases, I tell her I can empathise but never truly understand as I’ve never tripped in a foreign language before, feeling very clever about myself indeed, so clever I might just about burst out laughing in her pretty face.
To this day I regret being too lazy to Shazam the song banging out from behind the bar, I can still hear it and it still rattles around my head, and just like her I will never have the words to express it to anyone else to help me identify the source of it, it is the same feeling of being overwhelmed with thoughts and no ability to verbalise them to those around you.
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“How’s everyone doing here”, a twee Canadian accent enquires, the head of HR has just popped her head in to see how we’re settling in before she calls us in for the group interview. She’s plucked up the courage to come and inspect us lab rats, quietly getting on with our lives over on the bamboo platform, the stage for visitors to come and have a look. Someone once told me that there are bars in Tokyo where westerners can get drunk for free so that Japanese people can pay in to gawk at them and their antics, and naturally I did my damnedest to find the bloody place, but alas, I believe it to have been a misunderstanding on my friend’s part, a mixing up of various cultural phenomena probably in part informed by bars like this, where some of our own come to gawk at their peers, coming to feast on the blood of experience.
She’s come to gape at all these crazy hippies having an interesting time of it, having a real go at this thing they call life. Well dressed, her own uniform that more of the annual holiday hiker than the wandering free-spirited lunatic, though she’s interested in interesting experiences herself and has come to have a look, to see what people having an interesting experience look like. Another Nervous Canadian Guy who can’t handle the tension of admitting to Human Resources to having taking magic mushrooms before without qualifying it with the “just one time, in university”, despite Human Resources being a bar full of twenty-something year old backpackers run by ladyboys in the north of Thailand. There is no judgement here, whoever you are, just relax and enjoy the trip pal. Get it out of your system. The courage of the twee girl on psychedelic safari is in full display as she interviews everyone about their interesting experience mildly tripping on the futons. I find the whole thing hilarious, bizarre, a realm of reflexive meta-experience, a script from a BBC sitcom that gets greenlighted 10 years from now and given the Saturday evening slot, 7pm before your parents fall asleep on the couch, everyone here to dutifully fulfil their roles as adventurous travellers of the internal and external worlds, no idea anymore what’s real and what isn’t, and wonder if the whole evening isn’t just an elaborate theatre of satire, too ridiculously inane to be real, though of course life itself is the greatest satire, and everything that has ever happened is too ridiculous to be real, myself playing my own role too amidst all of it.
The interview continues, the Dutch girls have vacated their futons to climb the treacherous muddy path to the toilets, so slick in the pouring rain as to have to have been a practical joke on the part of the ladyboys, leaving behind them a portion of chicken nuggets they’d ordered from the bar.
“Would you like a chicken nugget” I offer, kindly gifting her someone else’s leftovers with a bow.
“Wow, are these really chicken nuggets?”
She is really straddling the edge of experience here.
“Well, I guess so. They taste like chicken nuggets so I just called them chicken nuggets. They might call them chicken balls on the menu…”
Her eyes are dazzling, they’re practically incandescent, she is more enthused than the rest of us here put together, her mouth agape with wonder.
“They don’t have pot in them, do they?!”
I give up.
Call the police for all I care, the gods of satire are committing crimes against reality.
The rain pours down though we’re safe under the bamboo roof. The evening goes on but there’s nowhere to go.
Life in Pai can be calculated to approximately 3.1415926535 different places around the world, all of them the same as each other. I went in search of something and found exactly that, which is to say the equally indefinite nothing, which is also everything, all of which are more than you could ever hope for. Deep secrets revealed in the pastures of nothingness about what you truly desire, or perhaps what you don’t, a terrible secret: I’d little desire to actually travel at all, at least not around the world or to examine in great depth anything externally. Basic commercial interactions with gracious local hosts were about the extent of it, though I preferred to use Booking.com to handle my business, I might have even preferred if it could handle my social transactions too. I wished to speak to no-one, though if I had to, I’d prefer if they were just like me, fellow lost travellers, lost tourists, holiday-makers with zero awareness of the world through which we walked, much less of ourselves or out places in it. A blissful ignorance, a thoroughly enjoyable trip with some moments of beauty piercing through the overcast skies, enough to tempt us out of our homes, maybe, but never enough to tempt us away from them, to plough forward and answer the call to truly know, that call to adventure. For now, if I did have to venture outside the cosy confines of my own soul I would choose the low-hanging fruit only; when I said I wanted to travel “to meet other people”, the other people I was looking to meet weren’t ‘others’ in the sense that they were different to me, outside of me and apart from me, defined by their differentness, their separateness, even their exotic-ness, for the paradox is that is only those that are truly different can shine a mirror onto us, whereas those who mimic us so closely, physically, mentally, spiritually, when we look at our mirror image, we see nothing staring back at us – the mirror is empty. These are the ones I sought, the backpackers, self-styled world-travellers and the forever soon-to-be-crowned experts of global culture, dazed and confused and possibly ever so lonely, forever wandering and always on the cusp of greatness, flip-flopping their way around ancient eastern lands in search of something, and finding nothing, which is exactly what we came to Pai to find.
Everyone is different, different but the same, adopt the persona, the persona non grata of the worldly traveller. The contented traveller walks around, or always floats along the surface of the earth on scooter or sandal, forever gliding past nice buildings but never really venturing inside, putting in a hard day’s work seeing everything, but never really getting to know everything, something, nothing, anything in depth, then knocking off at the end of their shift to catch up at the pub with one’s fellow travellers, the safest friends and family one could ever hope to find – and imagine, at this bar, in this hostel, in this town, in this region, in this corner of the world? What are the chances! – never laid eyes on before today, but known inside out nonetheless.
Signs erected everywhere proclaiming how much love there is in Pai, and just how great Pai is: I Am Pai, Pai In Love, Pai Is Love, Coffee In Love, and no doubt there’s one insisting ‘Keep Pai Weird’, somewhere, and if someone roars out loud in the jungle of the world their declaration that they are full of love, but no-one is around to hear it, are they not still the same either way.
Everywhere is a bamboo hut and everything is a bright colour. Many people come for two days and stay here for twenty, or come for a week and stay for three months. Even if forced, pretension is often the only path towards action, and the authentic desire to be free, although weak in one may be collectively shared amongst many, and they giddily push towards the light of their collective freedom, fragile though it is on its own.
Revelations abound staring into where the sunset is supposed to be, looking out over the countryside. The calm before the storm. We’d all leave here with smiles on our faces, maybe feeling a little bit better about ourselves, but maybe we weren’t supposed to. A good trip should raise as many questions as it answers, whether a concoction of plant medicines or a dutiful circuit of the developing world, and maybe if you’re doing it right the answers should terrify you. The bad times are the best of times, as the fella said, presumably at the end of a terrifying journey which had brought him closer to God, and you must break down before you break through.
I could swear upon my first arrival at my so-called homestay I saw a guest in the distance out hacking indiscriminately in the saturated rice paddies with a hoe, presumably seeking to immerse himself fully in the authentic experience of fulfilling some backbreaking labour with the local farmers, up to his knees in mud and shit, a temporary escape from his trip to do some meaningful work for once, though always floating, gliding, above the ground, never touching it. Perhaps he received payment of a few Baht for his time and energy, perhaps they appreciated the labour and it was only I that thought he was a delirious prick.
All just an experience.
Visions of home away from home and where I now stand, or lie, declarations of hope and love as I sit in cafes scribbling furiously and trying to put some order on my life back in Hanoi and my life outside the bubble and make sense of it all, but the bubble must be addressed first, it’s reality all the way up. A year, a year and a half I’ve been living on the other side of the world, not long from now I’d even start referring to Hanoi as ‘home’.
There were no breakthroughs in Pai, just a pleasant evening, an amusing escapade, and we all returned to our respective homes, either directly following the circle to its completion or via Australia, or in my case via Hanoi, where the storm I desired awaited.
Depleted I return to the homestay, and unable to find an adequate streaming service, rely on receiving updates by text about the status of the All-Ireland football qualifier match between Mayo and Cork from a close friend back in Ireland.
I go back the following evening, looking for something I left behind, or maybe I never found it in the first place. Two days blur into one, being a less fastidious taker of notes in those days means I can’t separate the two through record or recollection, the Sunset Bar transcended time and existed only as a place, and of course, or a set schedule at the cinema.
I get a bus back to Chiang Mai to continue my travels, content that I’d got something from my trip up to the mountain town I’d heard so much about by hiking up a trail to float under a waterfall with my GoPro camera (ah the GoPro! That great backpacker’s crutch, enabling them to believe their trip mattered because a record of it exists, that the recording of one’s life resembles a transcendent music video, life recorded in first person, the gateway drug to being a writer), capturing some no-doubt great footage of my amazing trip, to be uploaded to the backpacker Olympics that is social media at a later date after careful editing and sound-tracking, the trip transcending by being cast in video form and held in the cloud in perpetuity, to forever exist in the ether, in the Great Beyond.
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