low profile fangin'

Here she is, Pink Shirley, the truest steed that e’er did bear a woman home.

Requests were tendered for a photo of me on the bike but I suffered an uncharacteristic bout of reticence and couldn't quite bring myself to ask anyone to take the necessary photograph. I couldn't swallow the slightly foolish feeling which arose when I considered asking someone to take the snap. And I definitely couldn't swallow the absurdly proud goofy grin which lopped onto my face everytime I got on the bike. Poop poop and all that. By the way, I think I deserve more kudos for actually hopping on the bike...

Anyway, I think it's time for a profile photo on this blog. The question is, do I post an image of myself looking quite dashing and respectable and employable and chat-uppable? Believe it or not, photos like this do exist. Should I post something joking and foolish in order to signal that I'm not taking this whole caper too seriously, that I came of age in the mid-nineties and will never shift out of the rut of self-deprecating irony? Or should I post an image of someone or something else entirely to show just how shifting and transient identity can be. A picture of my cat or a road sign or Greta Garbo or some earplugs or somesuch. These are the questions I am asking myself. Any suggestions welcome.

Paiku à la Piquée

This post is destined to have a small readership. Alas. To add colour and interest, I append this picture. Mexican hot chocolate (too good to be true) amidst the books on offer for casual reading at the Witching Well. For those short of eyesight, there is a book called Deerdancer, which is about shamanic shapeshifting, a book on love magic, and a beginner's guide to Scrying, which is communication with the spirits. I really am living la vida loca here.

Mountains sing to clouds,
Another bloody rain dirge.
Please don’t hum along.

Man, if you dig Pai
Get yourself to In-deeee-aaah.
With a spade, I guess.

Tribal tatts and dreads
Mark the anthropologists.
Tough dress code, this.

I float like a stone;
Monsoon strikes the yoga class.
Will this hut float too?

Mangos thunder down,
Sweet tropical torpedos.
There goes the moment.

Here’s to you, Nancy Reagan

One of the many pleasures of Pai is to make one’s way to a waterfall. There are at least four easily reachable on a motorbike. Got that? On a motorbike. A vehicle which I now claim as my minion. Anyway, the general concept is pretty simple: buzz to a waterfall, sit down, enjoy the view, and ingest a hefty dose of the good old ambient negative ions. Leave feeling refreshed of body and spirit. Easy. The only complication to the Pai waterfall pleasure scheme, apart from getting lost, is posed by the men of short stature who LEAP out of the bushes, both on the road to the waterfalls and at the waterfalls themselves, with marijuana and opium to sell. I tells you, the first time, I almost jumped out of me skin. I’m in the honeymoon period with my little two wheeler, Shirley, and the last thing I want right now is trouble, the kind of trouble that begins with some reasonably innocent sampling of the local specialties and some wayward cruising through the hills and ends with a ker-rash, a splatter of blood (mine), a tangle of metal (Shirl’s), a broken limb or three (mine) and who knows what else. So let it be known that I’ve said no to drugs in Thailand. Repeatedly. Put that in your pipes, and smoke it, kiddlywinks. Actually, it’s not just my fear of totalling my bike and myself which has made me shake my head regretfully at the leaping gentlemen. My good friend Sam very wisely put the fear of God in me when he told me that there are more undercover cops in Thailand than there are in uniform. Wherever I’ve been, I’ve heard tales of dumb farang getting busted for buying or using drugs in Thailand such that I suspect that at least one of the so-called hill-tribesmen who popped out of the bushes was just itching to turn me into the next high profile Australian drug moll. The very thought of the rogue’s gallery that I would join were this the case is enough to make me stick to herbal tea and tonic water for the rest of my life. What a tawdry comeuppance joining this parade would be: La Schappelle, deserving of compassion for being terribly unlucky or terribly stupid; Michelle Lee, living proof that pretty girls do get an easier run; Renae Lawrence, tough, tough enough to take Schappelle under her wing in prison and then…. moi? Surely not! Please agree that I just would not fit in. Heavens, if I were ever to be typecast as the clever, slightly awkward one who, out of everyone here, should have known better, this would be the time, and it would last forever. I cannot imagine that the depths of opiate dependency could produce a greater iniquity.

I realise that I’m hexing myself in writing this. If someone should mistake me for a mule (unthinkable) and shove some forbidden substances into my laptop case and thereby set in train some hideous travesty of both Thai and cosmic justice, please bring this post to the attention of my lawyers. Tell the media hordes that I’ll only talk to Red Kerry. Alone. Oh yes, and in the event of such misadventure, you will each be permitted three milliseconds of sadly resigned retrospective laughter at the bitter irony of this post and not a squitter more.

No beets in beatnik town

These are the first paragraphs of Tom Robbins’ excellent Jitterbug Perfume, a book to whose convoluted plot beetroot makes a significant contribution.

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is a melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip…

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin’s favourite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.

And so it goes on. The beet is definitely one of my favourite vegetables and reading this book has incited a desperate craving for beetroot. Not just any old beetroot, mind you, but beetroot prepared by mine own hands: grated raw in a salad; roasted with horseradish or aioli or tabouleh or goat’s cheese; as the mystery ingredient in the magical magenta hummus...staining my hands and everything else, resisting peeling and generally causing trouble. Curse you, Tom Robbins, for inducing a serious pang of culinary homesickness and producing a fixation that will be difficult to immediately dislodge as I can’t recollect having seen a beetroot since I left Sydney, either unadulterated at the markets or on a menu.

Signs of the times

I do know that it’s quite cheap and not particularly sophisticated to take photos of signs in foreign countries and then laugh at them. That knowledge does not incite forbearance. After all, I could be devoting vast amounts of space to typographical errors in menus or somesuch and justifying it on the grounds that I grandiloquently theorised typographical error in my PhD.

Be cool. Be a waterfall here. Be a waterfall girded by some fierce and fiendish rocks. These rocks be sloshed and rocked by the waters of ages. Be watch out, smartypants white girl, or you be slip down into the abyss.
The poetics of international sign language. A potentially quite gruesome scenario is depicted here. If the jungle catches fire, watch out, ye conductors of motorised vehicles, because deer will flee the blazing shelter and obstruct your passage. And yet, this sign is quite beautiful, the sort of gentle whimsy that might make its way onto a threadless T-shirt. I’m still ropable that some scoundrel swiped my favourite threadless t-shirt from the washing line of my building. So much so that I have to post the image here.

showdown of social networking sites

As some of you know, i have been a lurker on myspace with various amounts of enthusiasm for some time now. i wanted to become one with the tech-savvy youth in my postmodernism classes. i wanted to truly experience tech-utopia. I wanted in on all the free gigs. I wanted to broadcast a superfunky avatar of myself in the hope that the profile surfers would be fooled. It was an intoxicating ride, for a while. And then somehow, I found myself joining Facebook. And now I have a Facebook profile. It's here. Otherwise you can find it via my hotmail. The possibilities for timewasting on Facebook seem far greater than those on myspace. I think it is good that my internet access is restricted, being in a small and remote town in Northern Thailand, and all. It's also very lucky, I think, that I didn't discover Twitter until after I left the land of constant internet access...

bluuuuue moon

Strange things happen once in a blue moon. Tonight the second full moon of May will hang from the sky and so mark the beginning of a new lunar cycle. My sight of the first full moon of this auspicious month was obscured by a heavy wad of cloud over Mandalay so i'm humming and hoping to see this one over Pai....

Seeing the light

I will forever remember Pai as a place of revelation. I was warned in advance by several parties that there’s something of the vortex about Pai. You plan to stay for one day, you wind up here for a week. You plan to stay for a week, you wind up here for a month. Something in the air, etc etc. If there’s a pinch of Byron Bay in the Chiang Mai mix, there’s a whopping great spoonful of Nimbin (without the junkies on the street) in Pai. This is the main bridge across town…

Little town, pitched on a slow moving river, surrounded by lush rainforest and rice paddies. As far as accommodation goes, there’s a wide range of cheap bamboo bungalows to choose from and then some slightly ritzier digs near the hot springs up the road. I’m staying in the Sun Huts, where all the huts are named after planets; the Unicorn Huts (‘one big Family’), Rainbow Huts and the Lazy Chair bar and restaurant are located nearby, as are the Pai Treehouses and some centre called the Natural Mystic. There’s plenty of puns on the name of the town too: Cinema Pairadiso, Pairadise, Pai in the Sky… but no Pai-ning for the fjords, in spite of the heat. The fact that Pai rhymes with high hasn't escaped the punsters either. All round, it’s pretty herbal and people from all around the world come to Pai seeking some sort of revelation.
The life is a journey not a destination crowd are particularly well represented here; Japanese and Israeli karma counters constitute some sort of demographic hump. You can get a pair of traditional fringed leather moccasins made here although whose traditions are being followed I know not. Lots of people are working hard to give folk music a very bad name, sighing and yeah-yiiieaah-yeahing their way through some ill-advised covers. I did a yoga workshop with a childless woman who called herself Mama. It’s resolutely off-the-beaten track. One company selling treks into the hilltribe villages offers a 50% refund if you see other tourists. Inexplicably the same operation also advertised mental help as part of the package. I sat in a café called ‘The Witching Well’ (hold your fire, they work some serious voodoo magic with cocoa and cinnamon and call the result Mexican hot chocolate) and flicked through some of the books on the bookshelf. Information on Wicca, shamanism (the Amazonian, rather than the Nordic or Siberio-Mongolian varieties being favoured), and my old favourite, reiki, was available in abundance. If I wanted to, I could read The Celestine Prophecy here and follow it up with The Teachings of Don Juan. It’s extremely beautiful here, I’m quite relaxed and my defences are down but I’m not ready for that level of enlightenment. Noooonono, not just yet.

What is it then that has been revealed to me in Pai? Are you now reading the blog of a healer? Am I going to start extolling the virtues of wormwort which hasn't been turned into absinthe? Has my totem amphibian lead me to a tumultuous understanding of my place in the cosmos? None of the above… Amigos, hold on to your hats for a bold truth is approaching…I’ve learnt to ride a motorbike! Yep, I have discarded some of my former inhibitions about being in charge of motorised wheels and got me a motorbike! Sure, it’s a bit of a girly bike, a 125cc automatic number, and it’s hot pink (photo to come) but I have managed to fang my way through the backroads of Pai, visiting waterfalls and temples, without injury to myself or any others.

How on earth did I swing this, you may well ask. Who in their right mind would rent me a motorbike? After so many capable people were unable to teach me to drive, how on earth did I manage to overcome a language barrier and learn to ride a motorbike? I have never ridden a motorbike on my own, I don’t have a driver’s licence, I have the spatial instincts of a drunken mule…

My friends, the truth is, I lied. I lied and bluffed my way into the rental contract and fluked my way out of the gates. I was given a fifteen second refresher lesson in the operation of the vehicle (admittedly not too complicated), took a deep breath and summonsed up all the Menzies-Pike capacities, willing the ancestral technical prowess which had laid dormant, nay morbid, for my entire life, to spring to the surface, and somehow managed miraculously to start the putterpuss and ride off before they realised their mistake. A little automatic bike isn’t too hard to negotiate but, as much as I enjoy the egotism of the autodidact, I think I possibly could have done with a little more initial advice. Learning to conjugate Russian verbs on my own? No problem. Figuring out how to slow down, look out for traffic and pedestrians moving in fourteen different directions, stay on the bike and turn around a corner… not entirely unproblematic. I have in the past been a notoriously reluctant recipient of mechanical advice but I confess that a little more help, especially on the turning of corners and the turning of motorbikes right around when one has been travelling in the wrong direction, would have gone a long way. I was pretty bumpy on the old start-stop business for a while there too but now, even though I’m not going to break any land speed records, I think I’ve got the basics licked. The roads are in pretty good shape here and there is very very little traffic. It’s low season, there aren’t many tourists around, and life is pretty slow moving anyway. I wouldn’t say the small children of Pai are necessarily safe, nor would it be entirely true to say that there haven’t been some close shaves with the local bantam population (unpredictable little blighters, chickens).

Watch out! I’m going to get my motorbike licence once I return to the more settled life. I’ve got the Easyrider soundtrack on high rotation in my head (and the last twenty minutes of the film in the denials box). I’m convinced that people will take me very seriously if I ride a motorbike. I’m all ready to tell the sceptics that my great uncle raced motorbikes at Penrith in his teens, so there, it’s in my blood. I have even had the odd delusional thought that I could get a motorbike licence in the UK and then make my travel around Europe a little easier and more exotic but this sounds like too scatterbrained a scheme, even for me, even in Pai.

Reasons you want to stay on my dinner party list

It may not look like much, but mango sticky rice is a divine dessert.
The laudatory descriptions delivered prior to my departure by la belle Hoffmann-Ekstein put my palate in an anticipatory state. The reality here in Thailandia has been all too splendid. I’ve eaten banana sticky rice in Sydney and think of it fondly because it is the complementary dessert which accompanies home deliveries from Eat Thai, a stalwart of sedentary evenings in the inner-east. Banana sticky rice, as good as it is, isn’t a patch on mango sticky rice and it’s all in the texture. Sticky rice is steamed which makes it, at its best, chewy and sticky. The mango, should, ideally, be a firm and juicy counterpoint to the rice. One could make a case that a good banana should be firm but not too firm but a juicy banana is either overripe or squashed and hence the antithesis of firm. Ergo, mango is the superior accompaniment to sticky rice. A drizzle of fresh coconut cream seals the deal. And now, finally, I know how to make sticky rice. Hurrah!

PS: note P.G. Wodehouse casually placed in the background, what ho.

rain man

This is the best campaign poster I have ever seen. Strategists, take note.
The Chiang Mai elections are being held in the not too distant future and this man is one of the candidates. There have been some serious floods in CM over the last few years and this chap is clearly keen to demonstrate his credentials as a man on the front line of community aid. What strikes me firstly is that he looks ever so slightly ineffectual in this photo and secondly that the bright whiteness of the polo shirt is quite startling compared with the brown water engulfing the rest of him. The babykissing stakes have been raised!