I don't have too much to say about this except I found these files on my phone. We were in Virginia Beach back in September and decided to go roller skating with Megan brother, greg, and his daughter Lili. Correctly speaking, that makes them my brother and niece. Picture a room packed (over 100) with 13 year olds and then us. I started to feel the immense insecurity of being that age. Not a good feeling. But roller skating was fun.
Normally, when it comes to cutting my hair, I view this as a necessary evil in my life and attempt to get it done as quickly as possible. In fact, I purposefully choose a barber shop in seattle, Magnolia Barber, where the women that cut hair don't really speak english so that I can get in and out of there without having to say much. It's nothing against the people who cut my hair, its just one of those things that I have never felt comfortable doing.
However, the haircutting experience in Thailand is a whole different thing. Here, getting your hair cut is only a small part of the experience. Yesterday, I went and got the detox and hair cut. The detox is essentially a 1 hour shampooing of my hair/ scalp. I lied there (still slightly jet lagged) for and hour as a woman massaged and rubbed my scalp and neck into pure bliss. These pictures are of my friends Josh and Cacci also getting the same treatment.
After that, they dry your hair, and rub down your shoulders for 15 minutes. Then, a guy comes and cuts my hair which takes around 1/2 hour, and then it is followed by a final shampooing (and massage). All this costs... 20 dollars. Worth the price of the flight. Why can't we get this kind of service in the states? I might actually look forward to a hair cut.
You know you are back in Thailand when... there are ants climbing across your keyboard as you try to blog. In fact, I'm pretty sure there was an ant nest in my computer last time i was here.
But you also know you are back in Thailand when... you wake up in the morning, make the short trek (by riding three up on a motor scooter) to get Kao Man Gai with a friend you haven't seen in a year. Kao Man Gai is, literally translated, Rice with Chicken. And that really is all it is. You boil an entire chicken. Cook rice in the water used to boil the chicken. Cut up the chicken, put it on top of rice, pour a sauce of ginger, chili sauce, and vinegar over the top and sink into a blissful heaven. It sounds simple, but there is certainly an art to the way it is put together, and our favorite place, aptly nicknamed "smiling chicken with fork" does it like none other. the woman who runs the place always remembers us and I get to push the limits of my Thai as I explain what we have been up to for the last year and why we are in town. We laugh about how cold it is right now (lows of 60 at night) and how I come all the way over from the states to eat her food. We arrived in Thailand for a 3 week trip. We have two couples that are getting married within 5 days of each other so we had to come over and visit. Amazingly, this place still feels like home. From the minute we stepped off the airplane, I feel like i belong here. The thai script which always keeps me entertained trying to decipher it. The obsession with food that thais have. The fantastic community of friends that we have here. One friend is Dao. When Dao started dating our good friend Jeff a few years ago it was like instantly adding a best friend to my life. She is a unique person in her ability to mesh her culture (Northern Thai) with her curiosity about the rest of the world. She has the ability to see outside of her personal world perspective and be open to any all new ideas. If only we could all be so open in our lives, I'm sure that the world would be a better place. So we are staying at Dao's place while we are here which is about 2 blocks away from where we used to live when we lived here. She has opened up her place to use so it quite feels like I can slip back into my old life here with a home in a great neighborhood. The plan is to be in Chiang Mai for a couple of days, then hop on the motorcycle and drive about 3 hours north of here to Doi Ang Kang. This is where my post about caving takes place and a place we first discovered on the tour de rain a couple of years ago. Last year, when I showed to area to my good friend Josh, I think it got the wheels turning in his head about a place to get married, and sure enough this is where he is going to have his wedding. It is going to be a hell of time. Josh does nothing on the sly, so when him and Kat decided to get hitched in Doi Ang Kang, the befriended the head of the Royal Project National Park at Doi Ang Kang. Now, with the ultimate connection, they are throwing the ultimate wedding in one of the more lovely places in the world. After that, we head to another wedding on a remote island in Southern Thailand (read tropical beach paradise) for our friends Kieran and Heather. Then it is back to Chiang Mai for a couple weeks of caving.
I will try my darndest to post more as we start the indulgent adventures of bubbs and bubs phase two.
It all started back when I was young. I seem to remember it as being when I was in 7th grade or so, but an internet search shows it as March 1991. National Geographic ran an article about the discovery and subsequent exploration of the Lechuguilla Cave. I remember being glued to the images and actually reading the text of the article (as opposed to doing what most of us do which is to only look at the pictures). This was something that I wanted to do when I grew up! Find a new cave, keep it a secret, and spend some serious time exploring, mapping and and discovering a new world right here on this planet. Who wouldn't want to do that?
As readers of this blog might already know, a lot of my time in Thailand has been spent searching out limestone areas and obsessing over scoping out new caves.
The good news: there are tons of caves in thailand.
The bad news: most locals know about all of them.
The good news part 2: In general thai people are afraid to go inside caves because they are full of ghosts.
The bad news 2: There are plenty of people who aren't afraid to go in them.
The good news 3: While on a motorcycle ride (see article: Tour de Rain) in an area where hardly any cave hardy tourists go, I scoped what I thought to be the future of caving in Northern Thailand.
The bad news 3: I ran out of time in Thailand to get the opportunity to go back and see what lay underground.
Well... here I am back in thailand for a 6 week vacation and I was able to talk my buddy Josh into going up to this area to see what we could find. He speaks fluent Thai which was helpful when talking to the farmers. Almost everyone we talked to knew of a cave in his orchard or of a cave on that hill over there. We spent two days following creeks into the hillside. We found lead after lead of potentially new stuff, the most promising of which was an enormous entrance with a creek gushing into it and a big drop 1/4 mile into the cave. When picking apples from a heavily laden tree, you might as well pluck the low hanging fruit first, eh? We can leave the other river flowing into cracks for later.
We put together a team of 4, grabbed every static rope we could find and headed back up last week for a 3 day event. Like me, Josh was giddy. The possibilities that lay in this cave were massive. During our scoping adventure, we had stood at the edge of a drop with water pouring down and a steady breeze at our back (for cavers, a breeze indicates ongoing passage- the air has to be going somewhere, right?). What was down that drop. Where did the water go? Would we be able to find the basement level of this system with some massive underground stream flowing into Burma? How big was thing going to be? Were we the first to ever go in here?
I won't give a blow by blow, but we found what is for sure the deepest recorded cave in thailand and might just be the longest (we were lazy and didn't map it). Three days of exploration resulted in rappel after rappel, the longest of which is a 65 meter free hanging tube plunging straight down into earth. It took a rock 3-4 seconds to hit the ground after we threw it off. That's long enough to not be able to see the bottom from the top using our headlamps. The system holds untold complexity.
We found fossil passage that hasn't been altered in what I think to be really long time (100,000 years). We found large bat populations and animals that live off the bats and bat poop (giant translucent cave leeches, blind cave crickets with 10 cm long antennae, wacky cave centipedes with extra long legs). We found enormous mud cracks positioned on mud with large stalagmites growing on top, a utah style slot canyon that goes on for 2 km or so, giant columns, cave pearls, 100 meter high rooms 500 meters below the surface of the earth. We left untold booming passages unexplored (for now).
It was 3 days of what I would consider to be absolute underground bliss. Often, we would have to stop for a second to look at each other and remind ourselves of the coolness of what we were doing. This was it, for three days I couldn't think of anything else in the world I'd rather be doing. I had been dreaming of this moment for most of my life. We found the holy grail for cavers. Massive unexplored passage. We figured we were the first humans on the planet to see these rooms and it wasn't just a puny cave. It is huge!
In 56 hours, we were underground for 29. Many of our friends asked if we got an itch to see the sun after being underground for 8 hours. The answer is a resolute "no." I could have easily camped in this thing and stayed under for days on end. The only thing that made us turn around at the end of an 11 hour day, was that we told a guy on the surface that we would check in with him at 10pm. We were focused and our hearts were gleeful.
Eventually, we were expected back in Chiang Mai. We cleaned up our ropes and rolled back in, stopping occasionally to buy a can of beer. We sat in the car, talking excitedly a moment and then silent and thoughtful the next. We were pondering what we had just done, and the fact that so much more adventure lay ahead.
I head back to America on Saturday, and for me, this cave will have to wait for the future. But my list of things I must do before I die is now a bit shorter. I still need to open that goat farm. Maybe I can do it at the mouth of this cave.
[Saluting a great flow feature. Actually, we were holding down the "ultra-bright" buttons on our lamps to get more light for the photo]
[Squeezing through a narrow section- the inner canyon is only about 5 meters deep, but the cave is around 40 meters tall here (at least we think- we couldn't really make out the ceiling)]
[Packing up gear to go into the cave. Next time, we will definitely sleep in the cave but this time we stayed at the killer place called the Happy House. 50 dollars a night rented us this enormous house with private patio and fire place]
[A big bat on the ground. He was alive, but couldn't seem to fly. We felt a bit guilty because it was probably us who caused him to fall to the ground. After all, they aren't too used to seing anything in this cave.]
Click on this photo for a slideshow of lots of images from the trip- captioned even
We originally were supposed to fly to Bangkok from Seattle on November 30, but about 2000 people in Bangkok decided they didn't like the democratically (and massively corrupt) government and thought it a good idea to shut down the Bangkok airports in order to get their point across. This meant we couldn't fly when intended. The protestors eventually got what they wanted in the form of a judicial coup when the Thai courts ruled that the current political party in charge was put there illegally and that there will have to be new elections. All very frustrating to someone trying to fly to Bangkok and apparently for the rest of Thailand who like having tourists fly to their country and spend money. I read a poll that said 75 percent of thais were embarrassed by what went on in Bangkok and didn't agree with it. Anyway, we scrambled to reschedule out tickets and decided to take Bangkok out of the picture all together which meant flying to seoul, enjoying a nice 25 hour layover, and then going straight to Chiang Mai. [Korean toilet] Normally a 25 hour layover would be torture, but not with Korean air. We arrived tired and hungry in Seoul around 8:45 at night. I was particularly tired because we weren't able to reserve seats on the flight and got plopped down right in the middle of the "kids section" of the airplane. And let me tell you... there were a lot of kids. In front of me was a cute Korean kid that smelled of poo and to my left was a 2 year old girl who is going to be one hell of a firecracker when she is older. She basically screamed and fought for the entire 12 hour flight. Amazing stamina. Fortunately, the aircraft was new, had comfortable seats, and had around 50 movies to choose from. I watched 6. [merry christmas from Seoul] So we arrive in Seoul, go to the Korean air desk (our luggage was checked straight through to thailand so we had nice light bags) and get all our little vouchers. A nice old man throws us into his minivan and off we go to a pretty sweet little hotel. It had one of those super cool toilets with a heated seat, front and back warm water sprayer and blow dryer to dry you off after the squirting. Soooooo goooood. The next morning, we jumped on the incredibly efficient subway and cruised into town for the day. We ran a count of how many white people we saw and I think we counted 28 for the entire day. I'm pretty sure we were the only tourists in town. And here is why... it was around 15 degrees fahrenheit. The kind of cold where my breath would instantly freeze to my mustache. [the seoul tower] This would have been ok except that we were headed to thailand and didn't really have warm clothes. So we'd go out, tourist for a while and then have to jump in somewhere to warm up. "Oh look... a free photo gallery with pictures of germany in 1935. That looks warm." "How about another cup of coffee." "That kitchen supply market looks like it is warm inside" "Maybe if we stand next to this bathroom door, warm air will come out." That kind of stuff. [artistic...] We walked around, ate when we could, and hiked up to the Seoul tower. Seoul is a big city surrounded by rocky hills and has a big hill in the middle of town. There are trails all around this hill and a big space needle like tower on top. So we walked all around it, saw a cool 400 year old archery range where you shoot arrows across a canyon to targets really far away and enjoyed great views of the city. After getting nearly hypothermic we finally finished up our time in seoul and hopped on our plane to Chiang Mai. [the archery range] We were picked up at the airport by my friend Josh and immediately felt like we were home. After having lived here for two years this place feels more like home than even seattle does. I'm trying to figure out why. I think that in Seattle I am trying to scheme on how to go live somewhere else. I love seattle and the community of people that we have there, but ultimately, when I am there, I want to leave. But in Chiang Mai, this is where I want to be. It is the fun experience that I looking for when trying to leave seattle. So in that sense, I feel settled here. [our friend Black... we have people friends too] Our friends in Chiang Mai are fantastic people and it so fun to be here again. And then there is the food. Mmmmmmmm. I've gone to about half of my favorite haunts here. After I finish this blog, I think I will go and get some Kao Soy from my favorite place over by the 3 kings monument.
[our new condo] It really has been a long time. A very long time. What all has happened: We came back to the states, I freaked out about it, we went on a month long climbing trip in Utah, Megan and I threw 8 events for Gore-tex all over the country, we witnessed the crash of America and then the pride of a democratic revolution in the states, we bought a condo in Seattle, and we got stressed out about a non-democratic revolution in Thailand. And then... we went back to thailand. Never a dull moment really. [the bathroom in our condo]
| RSS/Atom Subscription
