We're Alive!

Saawaatdee kha(p) from Mae Mut Garden! It's been exactly a week since we arrived in Thailand, and so much has happened in the past six days that there are a dozen different ways this post could go. After two days on planes and in airports, we took a fourteen-hour train ride from Bangkok up to Chiang Mai, and stayed there for a few days. We'll write about Chiang Mai in a bit--this is what we're up to right now.

On Monday, Marco picked us up in Chiang Mai, along with his Italian cousin Bruno, and together we filled the car with a babble of English, Italian, and broken Romance languages. We've figured out a haphazard system of triangulation using Phil's Spanish, my French, and Bruno's iPhone app for English. (Marco is fluent in English and Thai, like his wife Nok, and eventually their baby Serena). It's worked well enough for Bruno to give me a refresher course on how to ride a motorcycle!

Marco and Nok's farm is in Mae Wang, about an hour southwest of the city. The loud city advertisements and traffic evaporated after the highway, along with any trace of English. On the train up from Bangkok, we had a sense of the green giants around us, but it's nothing like being nestled in the crook of a mountain range. Everywhere we look it's just mountains, going endlessly back like a hall of increasingly foggy mirrors. We wake up every morning to dew on our shoes and the village loudspeaker announcing the news through the mist.


There are ten acres, split up into rice paddies, fruit groves, a macademia nut orchard, a miniature hardwood forest, and a vegetable patch. We missed the rice harvest by about a week, but we've been figuratively reaping the benefits thereof with every bowl of sticky rice we consume.

This is our house:

Right now, Phil and I share it with two Karen boys, who live in the adjoining room and laugh like happy teenagers. They're making bricks from bright red beds of clay, which will eventually become a new addition to Marco and Nok's adobe house. When we first arrived, they were motorcycling down the mountain from their village, which is about thirty minutes away, but now it's too cold, since it's gone below 80ºF/26ºC, brr! It's definitely wool sock weather in Thailand...

Phil, hulling dried peanuts that we'll plant later this week. Not pictured: me, writing this with a banana in my hand.

Phil and I have been hard at work, learning what it means to run a sustainable organic farm. Our mornings have been spent doing any number of things: weeding between raised beds of infant asparagus; covering the walkways with rice straw to prevent any new weeds from coming up; resuscitating parched coffee plants; watering the fruit trees; collecting chicken eggs. My special task yesterday was washing the dogs--there are four of them, and they are my special friends. The boys are Italian, and the girls are Thai.

Spaghetti

Tua lèk (little one)

The other two are Pizza, the leader of the pack, who was too busy at the time of writing to pose for a photograph, and Nuu Doi (mountain mouse), who was ferreting out rats in the fields. (Marco says that on the days that a rat is caught, the Karen workers start to make a fire. Fingers crossed I get to try some when this happens! Ma, if you are reading, the rats eat the same organic food we eat on the farm, so it's perfectly safe).

Speaking of food--it is non-stop excellent. Nok and Pîi Hom teach me the Thai words for everything we make, and everything except the meat is grown right here on the farm. Rice, eggplants, tomatoes, lettuce, an abundance of Thai greens, herbs, chilis, eggs, and an endless supply of bananas and papaya. I swear, I will never be able to eat a banana after this, because nothing can compare.