I Ate All of the Bananas on Doi Pha Ngaem (ดอยผาแง่ม)

Happy New Year! To celebrate, the whole Mae Mut Garden Gang climbed up to the highest Buddhist shrine in Thailand, on Doi Pha Ngaem. The whole time we were hiking, I was deceived that this was Doi Inthanon, the most ultra prominent peak in Thailand, and even repeated multiple times in Thai, "We are hiking up Doi Inthanon, I am very tired!" but I guess I pronounced "Inthanon" with such mangled tones that it was perceived to be farang¹ gibberish.

It's a Wat Tam Doi Tone tradition to make such a pilgrimage around the time of every New Year, and this was the first time that the denizens of Mae Mut have gone. At five in the morning, Phil and I piled into the bed of the truck along with a bunch of blankets and Pîi Hom's daughter, Nong Nam. (Three is actually a small number to cart along in the back—we were passed by pick-ups with many more passengers traveling at much higher speeds). At the temple, an impressive picnic lunch was being prepared for a dozen monks and about a hundred people. They even packed along two enormous burners for pots of soup large enough to fit a multitude of children. I nearly suggested it.

(A digression. The temple had an assortment of well-fed, happy-looking dogs, two of whom shared names with the dogs of Mae Mut. Their Tua Lèk was nothing like mine: this one was a little dumpling with stump legs and a curly tail. There was also a Nam Thaan (which in Thai means sugar, and also brown, because palm sugar is brown), who instead of being Pîi Hom's pint-sized yapper of terror, was a large, docile dog who could have eaten about six little Nam Thaans without chewing.)

From the temple, it was an hour to get to the base of the mountain. Picnic lunches distributed from the back of another pick-up² were received with alacrity, since temple food has a reputation for being mouth-wateringly delicious³, I found a monk on an iPad, and then we were off! Nok stayed behind with Baby Serena to supervise her various engagements with the 200 people who wanted to photograph her.

Three hours up, two hours down was the motto of the morning. A hundred of us crowded the road up to the base of the mountain, past the Carnation Production Office, onto a narrow path through vast fields of cabbages and the aforementioned carnations that were produced, and finally into a dense forest. Marco immediately commented on the impressive soil, which was loose with loam and nutrients and a variety of dead and/or decaying things. "When Serena is a grandmama," he said, "our soil will be like this. Hopefully."

The path was narrow, occasionally slippery, and always quite steep, but with the help of walking sticks borrowed from the cabbage patch, we navigated our way up rock faces, over fallen logs, and across the patched-together pipes that brought water all the way down to the village of Mae Mut. Children scampered up non-paths around the line of grown-ups marching far too slowly on the path. Everyone made their way up the slope and nobody fell into the cushiony blankets of clouds, which were well below us. And we learned more Italian. A crucial phrase. According to Bruno (Marco's Italian cousin), it is a sort of Italian triathletic slang phrase to say é finito le banani—"I have finished the bananas!"—when one is very tired.

I can't use words well enough to explain how beautiful the view from a summit is—climb a mountain and you will immediately understand. The vastness beneath, the cumulus landscape—like giants were cultivating fields of clouds—how far you could see, the road like a dropped piece of string, the impossible number of trees just swarming over the mountain range like the penultimate scene in Macbeth. We sat on the edge of the mountain by the shrine. It was beautiful. We could have fallen to our deaths so easily.

In the forest.

The view to the north.

The view to the west.

A perilous grip.

Light breaks down at the bottom.

The professor and the fools.

We spent a while on the top of the mountain, in the shade. When we were ready to go back down, we happened upon a fellow American and his Thai friend, both of them visiting from Bangkok. Turns out they both teach art at a university there, and the Thai professor had designed the shrine!

I swear I'm not doing this on purpose, and when I took these pictures I had no intention of doing so, but when I was going through my pictures I came across another pair of photographs begging to be a GIF. Sorry, Phil, you are not so fly enough to fly.



¹ "Farang" is the Thai word for "foreigner," but it's not derogatory at all. Etymologically it comes from the Thai pronunciation of "French." This is clear when you look at the Thai words for foreign countries: France is "Farang-set" and Germany is, hilariously, "Yeroman."
² Here, driving a pick-up says nothing about you as a person. Driving a pick-up is simply necessary. It's either a pick-up, or else a motorcycle that can weave around the enormous potholes that make our country roads so bucolic. Besides, how many people could you fit into the back of a sedan?
³ Large temples have a team of devoted cooks who make all of the monks' meals. We've had quite a few samplers from this particular temple, and man! I wish I could be a stagiare in one of them kitchens. There were these mushrooms, and this coconut-sesame-sticky rice steamed in a bamboo leaf....