I arrived in Chiang Mai by train, a very auspicious entry. I wasn’t able to catch any trains in Cambodia because the passenger train system was apparently shut down a few years ago. To my great disappointment, train travel in Burma was also no kind of option, firstly because it was onerously expensive and secondly because of the talk of forced labour gangs building and maintaining the lines. Of course, I then saw the road labour gangs and realised that the bus was only the cheaper, rather than the more ethical route.
Anyway, the sleeper train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai reminded me of why I like train travel. You’re rocked in a cradle rather than lurching over pot-holed roads and the beds on this train were actually extremely comfortable. The train is patrolled by people selling good things to eat and drink; there are enough Scenes from Human Life to inject colour and movement into vacant gazing into the carriage and once that’s done with, you can pull a set of blue curtains and retreat into a cocoon of doze. Excellent.
The centre of Chiang Mai looks rather like North Thailand’s answer to Glebe Point Road. Perhaps that should be the other way around: GPR is clearly Sydney’s answer to the North of Thailand. Second hand bookshops and yoga studios everywhere, massages offered on every street corner, vego-vegan-organic-macro food in abundance, a big market, and plenty of opportunities for self-improvement in the form of massage, yoga teaching, cooking, kickboxing courses and so on. Once I’d found a place to stay, I ambled down the road and stumbled into a bookshop-cum vego eatery. Suddenly, I’m eating a salad special, drinking organic coffee, man, reading a back issue of the New York Review of Books (with a long article by Joan Didion) and wondering which yoga class I’ll go to that afternoon. Time and place warped somewhat.
One has to be careful in hippy towns and there are some signs which are keeping me on flake-out alert. As seduced as I am by the rancho-relaxo-dom of GPR, Byron and surrounds, and now Chiang Mai, I fear losing my tough cynical edge. You know, I’m happy to wear fisherman’s pants and long strings of beads and abandon grooming in order to get closer to my animal self; I’ll get as excited about tempeh on a menu and centres devoted to biodiversity as the next earth-lovin’ peacenik but I fear being sucked into the irony free vortex of peace and love. There are no Kahuna massages on offer but there are some dubious signs.
1. A reggae bar called Freedom with a ganga leaf stencilled over the front door. Skinny white dreadlocked boys in service to Jah all around.
2. The reading needs of the followers of Osho (creepy creepy tantric sex cult) are so well addressed in the local bookshops that I suspect that there is an Osho centre (an oshram?) nearby.
3. Past life therapy. There is little that I am more cynical about than past life therapy. I’m sometimes tempted to go along just to enjoy the claim that I was once one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies in waiting or a Tibetan shamaness or a lieutenant who fought in the Boer War in drag or actually Djuna Barnes (who died after I was born, I think, but had lost it, by common consensus, well before 1977) but my ego holds me back. What if the past life therapist, using not clairvoyance but common sense to pick up on my scepticism, decided to teach me a lesson and told me that my past lives were all lived mucking out stables and emptying chamberpots and supervising latrines, that centuries of dung preceded this life? Then where would I be?
4. Meet a shaman! From a tourist brochure: ‘Interested in a Soul Experience? Diana Manilova, a Russian expatriate has lived in Thailand for the past 5 years. Working with individuals and groups, leaders, business people and scientists, her psychic gifts are globally recognised. She is a classically trained musician, published author and talented, Russian certified healer.
Regardless of your spiritual beliefs, meeting Diana can be an unexpected discovery. You may even find yourself taking part in a healing meditation and walking on broken glass.’
I swear I didn’t make that up. All I wanted to do was interrupt via square brackets. I’m far from ready for soul experiences.
5. New Age capitalism. You can buy into holistic investment schemes and make money from macrobiotic capital. Yay.
6. Dolphin paraphernalia. Lots of it. Enough said.
7. T-shirt slogan; ‘Slow down and enjoy the present moment.’
I was told by a man in a bar that I had a long way to go before I had fully abandoned my farang (foreigner) ways. I think this was an oblique was of suggesting I was a little uptight (avec raison, mes amis). I will, however, keep holding on very tightly to my farang ways if they protect me from a potentially fatal over-immersion in the present moment, if they act as a talisman against the siren song of the dolphin.
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