Ni Dieu Ni Maitre

The Going Itself is the Way

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  • The Square Root of Pai

    Should have doctored this photo, which clearly showed the rainbow on my phone… here it looks like a barely visible double rainbow. Nearly everyone is a petrochemical junkie here, most all the backpackers have scooters.

    Anyway, Pai is suiting my needs quite well. Sleeping a lot every night, bicyclong 10 to 12 km on my 2 daily trips to town, breakfast and evening meal with some beer. This is hilly enough on my not many gears, too small bike… but the exercise is priceless. The restaurants offer good variety, Indian, Mexican, of course lots of Thai, which is quite good. Loads of bars, mostly vacant… it’s the rainy season.

    Again, the photographer in me was thwarted… couldn’t wait to dig in to this whole fish covered in cashews and fruit chunks, mushrooms and vegetables. Ordered shrimp Tom Yum soup the other night and got a tureen full, more than I could eat of a really delicious stew. The backpacker crowd eats while walking down the ‘walking street’, grabbing bites from street vendors. I’d rather sit with a good meal and a beer.

    And the festival… diverting, drew a good crowd for three nights, paid lip service to jazz and featured mainly guitar bands of varying relationships to the blues. And was free. Why have this in rainy season?

    These festival princesses are heading to parts unknown in a light drizzle.

    Just one day so far it was drizzling on the morning bike into Pai, and raining on the way back. In the evening, rain, and so it was beer and potato chips from the nearby 7/11 for supper. Otherwise, the rain is very sporadic and unpredictable, often just a matter of waiting a few minutes for it to stop.

    Japanese crooner doing standard material to a large crowd.

    The contrast between Thailand and Sri Lanka is pretty stark. The Lankans are a smiling and friendly bunch for the most part, and this rubs off on the tourists (not all, of course) who are also generally happy and friendly. Here in Thailand, let’s just say it is a polite place, reserved and businesslike. And the tourists? Not one in 20 will even respond to a friendly nod. I have made not a single friend here, with the exception of the ‘old’ man (65), who rents me my bicycle.

    The money is problematic… all the bills are identical, front and back, and the amount is only visible on one side. All the bills are pastel, and in dim light, the 100, 500 and 1000 are almost indistinguishable. As for the coins, fortunately they aren’t worth much as there are 2 or 3 sets in circulation, with 10’s and 20’S the same size.

    Mostly, things are dry, generally cloudy. I read 3 hours or so a day, watch a movie and get high in the evenings… pot runs a mild 24% THC, but that’s what they got. And the beer is really not worth mentioning, all run of the mill lagers. Still, I cannot think of a reason to travel at the moment, everything necessary for contentment is here.

  • Welcome to the ‘GREEN SEASON’!

    Much like the ‘Smoke Season’ which obscures the very real transformation of the Northern Thai Air Quality from excellent to unhealthy for two months of agricultural burning, the euphemistic ‘Green Season’ attempts to disguise the rainy season as something you might actually enjoy…

    And, in fact, it just rains sporadically and quite unpredictably, occasionally becoming a downpour… In 10 days here, I got caught out only once, on the first evening as I attempted to walk to town and got caught (with raincoat) in a real soaker. This is big sky country, a valley surrounded by hills, where blue skies in one direction are regularly matched by storm clouds here there and everywhere else.

    Sun shining on the main road into town,dark clouds threatening elsewhere.

    Eating a great breakfast at the Lemon Thyme Cafe, I noticed that many of the patrons looked somehow Israeli .Later, I found that the cafe featured a rear entrance a bit further along and a back patio and dining room… full of the supposed Israeli’s. This brought back memories of 2 previous 3 month bicycle tours in India in 2011 or so, where I visited a backpacker haven on both trips, Hampi in Southern Central India and Leh, Capital of Ladakh in the far north of India on the former Tibetan border.

    In both of these places there was a large, and separate, Israeli presence, mostly young people who had completed their mandatory military service and were rewarded with a vacation in a country where the were not outwardly unpopular. In Hampi, the Israeli’s lived across the river from everyone else, and in Leh, a further journey up the main road brought you into the Israeli enclave.

    But of course they were, keeping to themselves, ‘guarded’ by orthodox rebs all in black with long curls hanging down. And all former military or police… most of the backpackers kept away from them and the Indians were full of complaints. But that was then. The behavior of Israelis in those years was bad and frowned upon, but it wasn’t genocide. One young Israeli tried to explain to me that “Indians are just like Palestinians. They are children, and it is our job to care of these children”.

    And now we have the Genocide, the wanton killing and destruction, land theft, cold blooded murders and on and on. And here are the Israeli’s getting their R&R on the ‘Banana Pancake Trail.’ Same as it always was. And we have the Chabad House in Pai to see to their religious needs. They’ve taken care of ‘the children’.

    A strange article:

    https://www.khaosodenglish.com/featured/2025/02/23/why-some-thais-fear-israelis-turning-pai-into-an-occupied-land

  • More Pai, Please Sir.

    Rainy season so far means a little rain at one or two random times every day, and almost always threatening skies. This is an off-season for tourists, and I go nowhere without a rain jacket, but we’re looking at 90% no rain. Stayed ’til after 9PM last night and the truth was, things got even quieter after 8:30. My restaurant shut down.

    Drizzle, as a sparse crowd visits the ‘walking street’ food push carts. The bars are empty, restaurants with few or no customers. The 7/11 packs them in at all times, however. My recovery is looking good, getting daily exercise on the bicycle on 2 runs into town for lunch and the evening meal, eating quite well and doing a little exploring down the many side streets of town.

    Rickety, but safe, bamboo bridge over the town’s river.

    There seem to be a lot of minor diversions to see around the area, a large cave system, waterfalls, a Chinese village inhabited by refugees many years ago, the white temple, and of course, something I first encountered in the 90’s in Laos, Tipsy Tubing!

    Didn’t really see the point back then, and am still missing it. At mid-day, you commence drinking and pot smoking, lay in a large rubber tube and slowly float down river, stopping for yet more alcohol along the way… well, it’s what’s done on the famous ‘Banana Pancake Trail’ which I have inadvertently followed out of Chaing Mai. The river, quite brown though it is and certainly of questionable cleanliness as it runs through a moderately large town, is quite lovely in spots.

    Taken from a bridge

    I am in Thailand on a 60 day visa, just by luck, as they have quickly switched the length of stay to 30 days. Get in and get out, and leave lots of money. It is true that the backpackers individually don’t spend much money and like to hang out, but these types of changes are poison for places like Pai. This type of change, combined with the general air pollution problem in many places has greatly affected my overall plans. Still, there’s Laos, Vietnam and if I can stomach it, Scambodia.

  • Pai, a town with a bad rep.

    On the hill is the White Temple, featuring 750 steps… it’s on the list.

    Well, upon arrival after the twisty road, I was so weak that I had to sit on a bench for over an hour just to be able to take a taxi to my hotel, 2km out of town. Got to rebuild my gut microbiome in a hurry to regain some energy. Pai, on first glance, seems harmless enough. Lots of 20 somethings wandering about, almost all of them on scooters. They live in cheap dormitories and supposedly are drunk, stoned and rowdy in the evenings.

    The town in daytime. Not much happening, quite a few pot shops… had to dabble and got really rather stoned, but back at the hotel where I had a very enjoyable evening. Rented a way too small bicycle, which makes the 2km to town quite easy. Got caught in a large rainstorm attempting a night time walk into town and didn’t quite make it.

    This being Thailand, there are temples everywhere.

    Got to town in the evening after several days, located the Indian restaurant and had Channa Masala, beans in a good very spicy sauce, and garlic naan… this sort of meal is just what is needed to straighten out my digestion, back toward normal. Ate too much and couldn’t do much more than people watching. Yes, some obviously middle aged westerners with young Thai ‘girlfriends’. Otherwise, the twenty somethings being very well behaved.

    Went home early, 8:30, so maybe I missed a riot but it did not seem so. No heavy boozing, no pot smells… nothing much but the night market food stalls.

    One note: I was perplexed by the clean air here in Northern Thailand becoming quite polluted in the spring and now back to very fine air quality. They have what is called ‘Smoke Season’ when the farmers burn their fields, and this closes a lot of things down due to unhealthy air. And it goes on for quite a while.

  • Welcome to Thailand!

    Arrived at 6AM after 3 flights, searches, baggage lines… and why is my Gate always the one on the far other side of the enormous airport? Does this happen to everyone? Miles of walking. In Guwahati, they would not let me board until I produced proof of a ticket out of Thailand, which they claimed was necessary to board my flight to Delhi… hmmm. So I bought a train ticket from Chaing Rai to Vientiane, Laos while in India. In Bangkok, they never asked about my onward plans… By the way, I got a 60 day visa shortly before Thailand changed the rules to a 30 day visa, citing unruly visitors. Let’s all shut the doors! Get in, spend lots of money in a hurry and get the fuck out of here. Friendly, aren’t they?

    View from my hotel balcony, with everything flattened out by my phone camera… these hills are quite steep. Shillong and Kohima are two of the places I have been with the steepest roads of anywhere, but the camera flattened most of those out as well.

    Onward. Arriving around 6AM, check in time 2PM, I slept on a sofa in the lobby, and in my room until dark, when I visited the next door Noor restaurant. Had a small fish entree and one beer and immediately didn’t feel well.

    Sign in the Noor bathroom, a portent of things to come.

    Yes, I got severe diarrhea from my first Thai meal. Went to the doctor, took the antibiotics, got weaker and weaker, but finally it stopped. Took almost a week and my gut microbiome has been completely destroyed. I am not myself. I am weak, and for once in my 81 years, I feel old and vulnerable… and I sure don’t like it.

    I did get to walk around a little bit during the ordeal, and Thailand is quite a pleasant place. It is the rainy season, and there is a bit of rain, or a lot, for short spells every day. Ate packaged nuts and bananas from the ubiquitous 7/11 stores, which are everywhere here.

    Didn’t see a lot of Chiang Mai, just from cabs, but it is just another megalopolis now. I bicycled through here in the late ’90’s, when it was quite charming. I was on my way north from Bangkok to Laos, where I spent a month cycling, mainly in the mountains on dirt roads. Still weak, I decided to travel by van into the northern hills and the ‘hippie’ town of Pai. As if I don’t know ‘hippie towns’ for god’s sake. This ride featured the road of 172 sharp turns, often on switchbacks at high speeds…

    The road to Pai, as seen while levitating… or not. I felt like I was levitating, and wasn’t the only passenger to puke on this ride.

  • In transit to Thailand, so long India…

    The bus to Guwahati left at 2:30 in the afternoon and arrived there at 4:30 AM.We stopped on non-scenic Dimapur for 45 minutes of choking on pollution and milling around the muddy bus stand.

    It was a pretty comfortable old bus, with legroom and I actually dozed off for a half hour several times. Got a hotel next to Hotel Assam, as they didn’t open until 8 AM. Slept a lot, then walked down to the market and drank a few beers, ate supper at Hotel Assam and got ready for the doozy of a flight to Delhi, Bangkok and then Chiang Rai, also starting at 2:30 in the afternoon and arriving in Chiang Mai at 6AM.

    Here’s a cow eating trash outside the bar near the airport.

    Not to knock good old India just because after a lifetime of enjoying 90 day visas, they have pulled the plug on me, a person who has spent over a year mainly bicycling in this country over many decades, meeting the people, enjoying the sights, extolling its virtues in print… Oh, no… The 30 day visa is plenty long for those rich tourists who flock here for a few weeks for sun and fun, throwing their euros around left and right Good luck with that pipe dream. This is actually the sidewalk from my hotel to the market. There is also trash dumped all along it. And the smells! The endless horn honking! A tourist paradise.

    Same sidewalk. Wouldn’t want to be wandering along here after dark.

    Here’s the new Guwahati airport, not the one I arrived at. Note the faux bamboo decor, both outside and inside. Another triumph for the petrochemical industry currently destroying breathable air for the majority of Indian citizens.

  • Leaving Nagaland.

    One problem with this adventure intro the North Eastern States is the new 30 day visa policy. Not very much time to relax and see Assam, Meghalaya, or Nagaland not to mention Manipur, Tripura, Mizoram, Arunchal Pradesh, and Sikkim (a former country in the Himalayas, now a state) or Bhutan (still a country) or the gateway to all this, Darjeeling. Each of the last 5 times I have visited India, I was given 90 days, including just last year.

    The other problem is the lack of tourist services. The main airport for the 6 state region at Guwahati has no ATM or money change facility in the Arrivals section and arrivals are not allowed into the Departures section, which has a currency changer. And I’ve covered my other problems on arrival here. Not really set up for tourism, after many decades of being generally off-limits to foreigners. I got very frustrated in Assam and happily left for Shillong, where I got lucky and had a fine time.

    In Nagaland, Dimapur is just ghastly ,hot flatland roadside sprawl complete with choking air pollution. The road up to Kohima was worth the trip… great scenery passing into and through lovely mountain vistas. I was the only guest at my hotel or in their spacious restaurant, and the very young staff admitted that other than the October Hornbill Festival, they don’t see much business at all.

    Incidents at the hotel? One evening I looked up from reading to discover dozens and dozens of winged insects getting through some cracks in the glass wall to the balcony and I had to call for reinforcements, They fly up at night to die which they did on the floor, the bed, in the bathroom… This only happened once.

    Another incident. My, room was locked on leaving by a doorknob push button, and one night as I went across the lobby to the restaurant, I forgot to put the room key in my pocket and locked myself out. The young staff pulled out dozens of keys from the lobby desk, none of which fit my room and there was no master key. The young desk girl urged the young man to try a suicide mission, going onto the adjacent room ‘s balcony and in the pitch dark cross on a tiny ledge with plastic pipes on it, ducking under a protruding air conditioner and swinging onto my tiny balcony and open the door from the inside. There’s a 5 story drop from these little balconies. He made it. I suggested that it might be a good idea to have a key copy made.

    Kohima itself has quite an appealing location, sprawling up and down high ridges, but basically there’s not much going on. Might as well mention something I suspected, since Shillong has dogs everywhere and Kohima almost none. I took no pictures of little paws sticking up on butchers tables, or wrote about the morning screams of animals being slaughtered somewhere below my hotel balcony but, yes, the Nagas will eat anything.

    Will I come up here again? Yes, if I can wrangle a 90 day visa and move around at a relaxed pace. It would be attractive to me in the winter, when the highlands actually get bracing cold. SE Asia has got plenty of heat almost everywhere and most of the time. But cold, or even cool… hard to come by.

  • Kohima, Nagaland

    Like Shillong, Kohima is built in the hills, but runs mainly along several ridges. the main street is one of the very few flat spots in the town. The main tourist draw here is the Hornbill Festival, held in October. Otherwise there seems to be little of touristic interest. I know, Shillong was in many respects similar, but there I had some really nice hiking opportunities right out the door of my hotel and did enjoy my trip into town there.

    Hornbill Festival dress up party. The Nagas are nearly 90% Christian Baptists now and quite ‘Indianized’.

    During my time here I did do quite a bit of up and down walking, and visited several of the supposed sites of interest, first the memorial to dead from the Battle of Kohima. Just small gravestones on a hilltop. The battle itself (which you can read about on wikipedia) was horrific as the Japanese attempted to move through strategic Kohima and onward into colonial India, to seize that entire country. They didn’t make it, and scads of Brits and Japs were slaughtered in a bloody, miserable protracted struggle on this very site.

    Next up on a short list was the Catholic Cathedral, situated on one of the many overlooks above the town. Baptists are not into iconography, but the Catholics sure are… this place had a disneylandish aura about it.

    14 larger than life stations of the cross as you walk around the spectacular viewpoint.

    After spending a while here, I walked several k’s down to the town center. Bustling, but really no traffic jams, just loads of small shops and a mix of restaurants, some having plains Indian food. As mentioned, the Nagas are carnivorous, with their places featuring mostly pork dishes and a bit of chicken.

    Here there is also a competing Baptist Cathedral, one of several around the town. I was told by a local that in Eastern Nagaland, bordering Myanmar, there is a still primitive tribe which sells human skulls, remnants of their days as headhunters… but you do hear stories.

    Chickens and a duck for sale on the sidewalk.

  • TRIP TO NAGALAND

    Chanrei’s uncle, a clergyman, arranged this trip by van, specifically getting me the front seat for comfortable leg room. I had thought that since Nagaland is directly east of Meghalaya this would be a fairly short trip. But no, there is no direct road east, and the journey involved going north to Assam state, turning east just shy of Guwahati traffic and pollution on bad roads, crossing a lot of pretty flat Assam before turning south to Dimapur, the first city in Nagaland.

    Most of the road was a so-so 4 lane highway, but there were quite a few diversions over some truly bad stuff. We stopped several times on the 11 hour journey as the driver, carrying 5 passengers and a load of boxes for delivery, needed food and alcohol for his own use.

    The Nagas are real carnivores…

    Pressing onward, we stopped at a roadside collection of fruit and vegetable stands while still in Assam, scenically located by a muddy river.

    Finally, we turned south and entered Dimapur, a large lowland city, the first in Nagaland, of no interest whatever. From here we entered the hills. Very reminiscent of the Shillong area, very beautiful, with the roads sporting “FALLING ROCKS” signs and plenty of evidence of same alongside the road.

    Down to just the driver, his Kohima neighbor and me, we stopped for a beer, having become friends on the long ride. Arriving in Kohima, they drove me right to my hotel, a pretty nice place. After a shower, I headed out to do some mainly uphill walking just before dark, met a friendly local who took me up a steep fight of stairs to have a local rice beer in a wooden flagon. Sweet, grainy, supposedly 5%. One was good enough.

    The hotel fortunately has a restaurant, because this and future walks around the neighborhood have revealed none anywhere nearby. I’m pretty sure Kohima is at a higher elevation than Shillong… the whole town is spread over ridges and hilltops… but it is warmer here, mid 70’s to 80C.

    View from the Manna Inn’s tiny balcony. Slightly cockeyed, isn’t it.

  • The Olympic Stair Climb

    I took up hiking after a nearly 50 year layoff when I had devoted my energies to bicycling and cycle touring. Restarting at age 75 was a most pleasant experience, with the surprisingly added benefit of strengthening my lower back muscles and solving a decades long chronic back problem. And so, the one remaining task in Shillong was to climb to the top of Shillong Peak at around 6,600 feet. Out of hiking shape? Yes, but I had spent a week of daily walks and hikes in the up and down heights of Meghalaya, and so, onward.

    The stairs to the top are located just around the corner from the hotel, and there are many, many of them. As mentioned earlier, the ground here is a pinkish hard clay which, when wet, is very slippery, thus the use of stairs as it is generally always at the least damp. I did not think I could do this climb, but physical perseverance is built into my nature by now.

    Slowly, with frequent stops to catch my breath, I moved ever upward. It doesn’t seem as though this trail gets a lot of use as parts of it were nearly overgrown with little thorny vines. However, there were people living up here in small shacks and I stopped to let a flock of small black goats cross the stairs. Eventually the shepherd came along as well and invited me to his camp for tea.

    But the mood was on to progress upward, and I told him I would see him on the way down. Eventually, the steps ended and there was a brief dirt trail to a concrete walkway which seemed to wander upward and around the mountain to the official peak at the top. Unfortunately, this uphill trail was covered with pine needles and other vegetative debris and was damp and quite slippery. This was manageable enough going uphill, but as I walked along the thought of coming back down on the slippery, occasionally steep concrete and its potential for injury grew and grew.

    The dirt trail

    A bit of the concrete trail on the left here. Going back down, I mainly stayed on the dirt where possible and only slid down on my butt once on the concrete. And so, I didn’t get to the official top, but very nearly and that will have to suffice. Here’s the trail to the shepherds encampment.