Where thro' gleams that untravelled world: Thai Pad and Tokays: Settling into Sangkhlaburi

My new home, Sangkhlaburi, as seen from its famous wooden bridge.

Sawatdii-ka and mungerah-ow from Sangkhlaburi, Thailand! Now 1/12 through my Thailand experience--seems that I find myself writing in very even intervals here--2 days, 2 weeks, one month, must be related to the local importance of auspicious numbers.

I've spent 1 1.2 weeks in the office now, where my job is 'capacity building' for the staff. There are 4 staff members and one Director. I work with the Director on grant proposals, building relationships with donors, and organizational goals, etc. I work with the staff on developing their professional skills, including electronic communication, Microsoft Office use, and time management. They have basic English skills, but not enough for communication with donors or other English-speaking partners, so I am spending the mornings teaching English class. I like to do it, I was missing teaching already. The afternoons are then spent more fluidly, meeting with the director, staff and sometimes other partner organizations to discuss projects, reports, budgets, etc. The staff are great fun. They work, in their own words, as 'finance manager,' 'driver,' 'manager of medical programs,' and 'accountant for receive vouchers.' Two are tiny little girls, probably older than me, but you wouldn't know it to look at them. They cook all the meals and I have a standing invitation to eat. Vegetarian in Mon/Burmese is 'ta ta low,' so they are always informing me what's what, as most is curry and a bit mashed together. Of course fish sauce goes into EVERYTHING as flavoring; asking them to take that out would be like fighting the tide of the entire Pacific. My Mon vocabulary revolves almost exclusively around food. "Shi-kaw" is delicious, and "Shi-pan-gam-haa?" is "Do you want to eat rice?" (Duh, it's not a meal without rice!) "Oo-paw-yeh" is "I'm full" "Dangoon" is "Thank you" and, perhaps my favorite word "ñi ñi," means "a little." Unfortunately, English alphabet letters do not begin to express the absurd amount of vowel variation and tone in Mon, but my mind and my computer don't have the Mon alphabet down yet, so this will have to do. There will be MANY more observations about staff and language and the office, however, as it turns out I spend an insane part of my day at work...so I'll leave it at that for now.

A different sort of observation has been Thailand's strange epidemic of stumpy-tailed cats. The first one I saw in Bangkok I thought had been in some sort of accident. They aren't that one species that has no tail, it just looks like really botched inbreeding or a road accident. Regardless, our beautiful long-tailed office cat, named 'Sambaby,' (a corruption of Sam's baby, the name of the fellow who preceded me here), has got herself a stumpy-tailed husband. The jerk dumped her off with 4 children and now only comes back to steal her food sometimes and meow really pitifully. A real-life experiment with gene tables proves that the stumpy-tail gene is dominant, 3 of our four little kittens have club tails, perhaps explaining Thailand's unfortunate epidemic. Regardless, I'm already madly in love with them all, even the chubby little bully who hogs all the milk from momma. They are so tiny, they only opened their eyes last week. Cute little blue kitten eyes. Sigh. They still fit into my palm. I'd love to adopt one, but my current home has an official no-pets policy.

Note the dominant stump tail gene.

What can you possibly say to this? Incomprehensible baby gibberish sounds.

Unofficial pets seem to be inevitable. Not only kittens, but also spiders come in palm-sized. A great big hairy one was hanging out next to my squat toilet this morning, as if he wanted me to get me at my most vulnerable. He hung out throughout my shower, as I warily watched and washed, and then he creeped over the wall in that creepy spider way. No doubt he and his brethren will be back soon. I knew it was only a matter of time until I saw a really big spider. This is the jungle, after all. I have seen just about every variation on vegetal-shaped bug possible. Brown stick bugs, green stick bugs, curvy leaf bugs, flat bark-like bugs, flat green leaf bugs, camouflage moths, camouflage butterflies...just think how many I haven't spotted yet. And all of them are BIG, the size that makes a dull thudding sound when it runs into something. Stealthy coloring must be the only evolutionary advantage working for the poor things, because they are incredibly dumb and fly into stuff all the time, including the fan, which means that sometimes showers of moth wings sprinkle the mosquito net and floor. The problem with the bugs being so large is that the general violence of the bug world--eat and be eaten--is amply on display. It's traumatic, honestly, to watch one of the bajillion geckos co-habiting with me bite the head off of a moth and watch the thing struggle. Eewww...

We had a lot of geckos living in the school in Mexico as well, which was almost always fine with me as they like to eat mosquitoes. There's a variation on the gecko here that I'm not so eager to share a space with, however. The "tokay" gecko gets its name from the ridiculously loud "TO-KAY!," or "GKO-GKE!" barking noise it makes. Sounds like a really bad alarm clock. Most geckos make a birdlike chirping noise, but these things, they don't even sound real. They're "the pitbull" of the gecko world because once they bite down on something they, and their foot-long bodies, will not let go. Eek! I've been warned by a roommate--and by their obscenely loud barking outside my room--that they sometimes come into the house, but that I shouldn't worry. Well, I'm not necessarily worried that one will bite me, but I can't guarantee I won't shriek just a little when I flip on a light switch and see one of these suckers staring at me:

All I can say is that if one tries to eat one of my kittens, he'll get what's coming to him.

You may think, well just shut the door. It's not so simple here--houses and offices aren't closed off from the elements in the way they are in the States. Intentional, decorative holes (aside from windows) are built into the sides of buildings to let in more ventilation. It's possible to get mesh screens, but to net over everything and to seal the cracks in the door would just be unrealistic, hot and prohibitively expensive. You just deal with it. Just as the hammock was Isla Mujeres' bedding item de rigueur, here it is the mosquito net. I have a really nice one that I brought from the States, doused in likely-toxic levels of permethrin, and it fits with lots of folds to spare around my little twin bed. So far I haven't awoken to anything too crazy on the outside of it. In part I'm just hoping that it keeps the geckos from crapping on me as they chill with their sticky feet on my ceiling. Ah, the tropics...

Gecko-dropping and malaria insurance

So, all in all, I've been pleasantly surprised with things. I expected much more of a "hardship" post, if you will. But my Mon co-workers are great fun, and there's a sizeable 'farang' community here, which means we have coffeeshops and relatively high wi-fi coverage. They are really friendly, as are all of the locals I've met so far, and I feel quite welcome already. I'm having a hard time getting myself homesick when lattes and luck are on my side. In my last post, I wrote about missing Mexico's 200th Independence Day...but if you'll believe it, I found two Mexicans in the jungle bordering Burma! They are traveling with a gap year group around the world, and were doing a bit of volunteering at a local school. They happened to be here during September 15th, the big day, and they obviously wanted to celebrate. A big group of us ended up at Sangkhlaburi's ONLY bar, drinking really bad tequila under paper Mexican flags and balloons. I got to practice my Spanish extensively and even sing Las Mañanitas, Mexico's birthday song, to a new friend of mine. Fate always seems to know better than I do...estuvo un milagro mexicano!

Life sucks.

Anyway,tomorrow's a big full moon festival. I'm meeting up with the staff at 4:00 AM outside of my place to celebrate a big Mon/Buddhist holiday. I'll leave you with some captioned pictures, and catch you again soon! Enjoy...

In the bus, third one of the trip, on the maiden voyage to Sangkhlaburi. Thais drive on the left, by the way, which was ridiculous to get used to at first on the bike in Mae Sot--damned right turns.

A typical Thai crop. Any guesses? Cassava (origin of tapioca), which apparently looks enough like something else that tourists visiting the Thai countryside will sometimes steal leaves off of the plants. Smoke on that for awhile...


Accidental impressionism of the Thai countryside. I didn't realize my camera was in macro mode.

My first glimpse of Sangkhlaburi. You can just make out the temple on the Mon side toward the left. The grass at the forefront, had this been a normal year, would actually be all lake. (Take that, global warming skeptics.)

Sangkhla's best known temple.

In the interest of symbolism, I made my first offering at Sangkhlaburi's Mon side temple with 12 sticks of incense, one to represent each month I'll have here.

Sangkhlaburi's big claim to fame is the longest wooden bridge in Thailand. I know you never thought that was a big deal-distinction before...but it's got you thinking now, doesn't it? All of the houseboats in the picture should be much higher. The lake's gone so low that a few have ended up in the grass!