We went down to the city last week to enjoy the Loy Kratong Festival. It takes place during the full moon of the 12th lunar month of the Thai calendar, which is (almost) always in November. It is Thailand's second-biggest festival, but students still have to go to school. With that in mind, I had to ask off for most of my first week (volunteer) teaching in the village. I didn't feel too guilty.

The Loy Kratong (lit. 'Raft Floating') festival is all about putting distance between yourself and your bad luck. As I read over that sentence, I realize that's a cheap way of stating it. It's much holier than that. Buddhists believe that life is full of suffering because humans have a knack for misinterpreting their circumstances in a massive way. This misinterpretation stems from trusting your senses and doubting your 'inner Buddha' which is something like your heart of hearts. I'll probably write a Bhudda-blog another day (I just winced at the word 'blog'--I'll eventually quit inserting these blog disclaimers), but for now I'll just say that this human misunderstanding (read: 'Human Condition') causes us to put our eggs in the wrong karmic basket. The result is a cycle of rebirths that pave the way for more pain and suffering. Enlightenment extinguishes the karmic flame.

So take pure Buddhism; move it from India to Southeast Asia; and sprinkle in a heavy dose of animistic religions that value ancestral spirits and you've got Thai Buddhism. Funny thing, people love to dog Thai Buddhism for being untrue to its origins. The truth is, Thai Buddhism (known as 'Theravada') is the oldest living form of Buddhism on the planet. It's origins predate Christianity by 500 years. Anyway, the local animistic religions stamped Theravada Buddhism with all kinds of un-Buddhist rituals. It's exactly what happened to Christianity once it took hold in Rome. The Roman fertility holiday called Ishtar (featuring fertile bunnies and chicken eggs) becomes Easter. That's why the word 'Easter' doesn't seem to fit in the Christian pantheon. The pagan winter holiday arbitrarily becomes Jesus' birthday. Note that both of these holidays are observed on solstices, an event significant to Pagans but not to Christians. Funny, huh?

So Loy Kratong Festival puts distance between you and your bad luck, an event which should improve your karma enough to put you in a good rebirth position. Likewise, a good rebirth puts you in a better position to study the Dharma (Buddhist teaching) and move toward enlightenment. Monks meditate, study and focus on enlightenment, while the laity practice animistic rituals and focus on a better rebirth. This process translates as 'making merit'. Here's how merit is made during this festival:

You take a hand-made banana-leaf raft with a candle in it (called a 'kratong'); place a few coins in it; light the candle and float it down the river. The raft carts away your karmic baggage, or your bad luck. There's no ready translation for this transaction.

The other way to make merit is to launch a hot air balloon. This is my personal favorite activity. I've done it three out of the past five years. Merit made.

So now for the pictures. Niti and I went down to the river to celebrate. Loy Kratong 2004 was the first time we held hands, so it's special enough. I had to work a lot harder to get her to kiss me.

This is a blurry shot, but I threw it in here because you can see the river as well as strangers launching a balloon.


Here's a banana-leaf kratong raft with flowers and a candle.


This kid is a genius. He came floating through the main drag of the river on an intertube at 9:00 PM or so. He's collecting coins from the kratong. Brilliant.


And here's me preparing to launch our balloon. In a minute, Niti sets down the camera and helps me release it.


And there it goes. Full moon in the upper left.


This is the main street in Chiang Mai. We're on a bridge looking over the river, and there are way more tourists than in the other spot where we launched our balloon.


And here's us trying to look cute and memorable. Notice our jackets ... it's chilly now. People keep asking me if I'm cold, and I always tell them no. I follow up with 'Indiana's much colder right now.' I don't mention that in Indiana I can enjoy central heating and that I only go outside if I have to when it's this cold. I'd rather my neighbours think I'm tougher than I am.

Life in the Village

The nicest building in the village is the school. There are 67 children, representing something like 70 households, which tells you something about the age demographic. Fewer Akha people are staying in the village, so there aren't as many children as you'd expect. Niti's mom was one 12 kids, I believe, but those were the old days.

The school just reopened after semester break, and every household was required to send one volunteer to help sickle the grass to discourage snakes from moving in. My job as a volunteer was to take pictures of people working that the school administrator would have proof that the community turned out to help. I also managed to agree to teach English six hours a week. I start on Monday.


Here's what I've been doing lately: I get up in the morning; eat a bowl of cereal (which everyone thinks is really weird); walk on a trail like the one above to one of the extended family's fields. One of our recent projects was to harvest the rice.


Here's a savvy gentleman using his scythe to cut off the grain heads.


And here's me looking much less adept. Lots of bending over with my scythe. We were actually short one blade, so at one point in the week I was lopping off rice heads with a paring knife.


This is the source (in two senses) of my income. I draw water from this pool in a little creek and let it flow downstream into the Chinese generator I recently purchased. Power from the generator runs 150 ft uphill to our hut where I plug in my computer and write travel guides all day long. During the first few pre-generator days in the village, I had to power the laptop with solar cells. Rainy days were loathesome, and I constantly fretted about meeting my deadlines. Now I can write well into the night if I want to.


So water from the source flows 450 ft downhill, gaining energy until it finally surges into my generator. The generator cost a little over $100, but the pvc pipes cost twice that. I also bought a $60 voltage regulator that protects my electronics on days when the creek is feeling extra robust. Lots of family members and neighbors helped install the whole system, which is why I gladly put writing on hold and help out with things like harvesting rice and hauling sacks of who-knows-what.


With so many side projects going on, it's easy to forget why we came here in the first place. Here's the inside of the nursery. Seedbed is in the back corner, and then the rest of the space is for the bags that will eventually have saplings in them. Right now we have about 1,000 bags prepared.


And finally, the humble abode. The thatched roof is half-new, half-old thatch. That's why the colurs alternate. The stilts are about six feet high on one side and eight feet high on the other. On teh far right, you can see the solar panel. Coming in from the left is my power line from the generator. And then there on the deck is my lovely wife and reluctant photo subject. The house has a hardwood floor with bamboo walls and rafters. The grass roof doesn't let the least bit of rain in.

The first few weeks, we cooked over a concrete hearth with scrap bamboo embers. The fires were shortlived and aggrevating. We recently bought a gas range top and a tank to power it. We have a home-made wooden mousetrap that reminds me of the children's game with all the moving parts. Mouse wanders into this wooden box and sniffs around. Next thing you know, a giant block of wood falls on it. When it works, it's quick and painles; when it doesn't ... well, you can imagine.

We also brought up an old television which we hooked up to the neighbors aerial antenna. The generator is a bit picky; but I think I've got it figured out. You can use the computer, plug in a flourescent bulb, charge a cell phone and maybe power another desk lamp. You can run the television and nothing else, in which case you use the solar reserves to turn a light on. If you turn on too many things, the voltage regulator has a small battery backup which kicks in for extra juice. Then you get about 15 minutes of power before everything crashes and realize that you shouldn't have plugged so many things in.


Night falls quickly here. One minute you're square in the middle of the afternoon, and the next the sun dips behind the mountain and the whole valley settles into darkness. On days that I work in the fields, I have to write after it gets dark. Otherwise, we head across the mud-slick to the neighbors house to play card games. On those days when neighbors show up to help install eqiupment, build the nursery or haul dirt, then I run to the old lady merchant down the street and buy a fifth of whiskey to share with the workers. Only the young men like it, though. The old men say they don't know how to drink anything but rice whiskey.

Chiang Mai and Environs

Last time I was in Chiang Mai, I took a couple of pictures of the city. A lot of these pictures are temples, just because they're everywhere in Chiang Mai.


A moat goes around the old city. I took this from outside the old city looking in.

Motorcycles are everywhere. Mine looks like these except that it has an extra 25 cc's of raw power (for a grand total of 125cc's), giving it that extra boost to climb those muddy mountain roads.



I was hoping to get one of these creatures as a pet, but as it ends up, they're prohibitively expensive.

We took a trip up to Mae Sai border town (with Myanmar) where phony knock-off brands, pirated DVDs and cheap made-in-China merchandise reigns supreme. The Buddhist sculptures here have a distinct Burmese flavour, and while Theravada (read: ancient and conservative) is still the norm, there's a light infusion of Mahayana (think fat, laughing Buddha) trickling down from China.

Biggest Rat I've Ever Seen

This is not a joke. One of Niti's cats pulled this thing up to the door one afternoon. After I took the picture, the cat drug it under the deck for some privacy.

First Trip to the Village

I don't have many pictures worth showing yet, but here are a couple shots that Niti took during our first trip to the village.



The first one is just a shot down the street that our house sits on. Just a quarter of a mile back, the road is completely unsealed and prone to washing out, but once you make it this far things are a lot better.


The second picture is at an overlook point when you first enter the village. The tripod in the back is a huge swing that is used during their annual (and aptly named) 'Swing Festival'. The young man sitting on the left is Anuchit, Niti's older brother. He's been driving us all around the country on his days off, and then taking the bus to Bangkok to sell handicrafts on the weekends.

Foxy and Red Bull

So Niti and I had been planning to get a couple of puppies at some point. Her mom said she would be happy to take care of them for us when we return to Hawaii next year. Originally, we were going to take one from a litter at Niti's cousin's house. But after we picked out the one we wanted, he 14 year-old nephew decided he wanted to keep it.

We ran across these two on Tha Pae road (kind of the main drag downtown) and after a little bargaining talked the seller down from $15 to $12 per puppy.






We named this one 'Foxy' because it sounds fun with a Thai accent (that was my motive, anyway). Sounds like a name for a Thai disco. She's a bangaew mix, which is a Thai breed used for herding cows or bufallo, I think.








Then this is Red Bull, a Yellow Labrador mix. All this one does is sleep, pee and whine. She's cute, though. She's alwas about ten seconds from passing out.





The house in the village is about to become liveable, so we'll be moving the dogs to the countryside here in a few days.

After much debate...

I have decided to give in to the global obsession with blogging about mundane things in your own life. Above all, I see this as an easy way to share photos with friends and family without forwarding bulky, attachment-laden emails. You'll have to forgive me, as the only way I can stomach doing this is by inserting a lot of metatext and cynical remarks along the way.