Horses and Puppies and Roosters, Chiang Rai!

Who would have thought that I would go to Thailand to train horses? I had a conniption when I first found this farm listed on WWOOF: five horses?! I had to go. I made us go. So we went.

Appaloosa Stables, subdivision Friendly Farm LLC, is run by Hans and Aye, who have lived in Chiang Rai for nearly twenty years. They started out running a guesthouse, but Aye's Thai restaurant was so much more popular that they stopped letting people sleep there and just called it Aye's. Then Hans opened an Italian place, but expats kept storming the counter with requests for this many olives or that many slices of cheese that there's now a deli shop around back. That's three restaurants, and counting. One of the lovely perks of this arrangement was that we ate delicious leftover restaurant food (hang leh three times a week, mmm) and every Saturday headed out into town for a meal on the house and a stroll through the weekly Walking Street, which is the Thai equivalent of the mall. Everyone hangs out at the mall on a Saturday night.

Fruits on the Farm

Although we left Mae Mut Garden a few weeks ago, we still reminisce about the fresh fruit that we had every day, even during the dry season. Thailand experiences three sort-of seasons: the dry and cool (Nov-Feb), the dry and hot (Mar-May), and the wet (June-Oct). Apparently it's so abysmal in April that everyone tries to leave! Hence we've planned our trip to Burma during that period.

The dry season is the only time that watering is necessary, and even then, it's important to neglect the fruit trees a bit, because they need to feel dry in order to flower, and later bear fruit. But while we were there, plenty of fruits trees were flowering, ripening, or already giving us ready-made snacks (no pesky going to the supermarket). I took most of these photographs in one morning, with the exception of the pineapple photograph.

ทุเรียนเทศ | A new one to me, from South America, the soursop is a part of the custard apple family. Early research has shown that the leaves could have anti-cancer properties.

A Buddhist Full Moon Service

Just to keep you on your toes about the details of our lives, welcome to a bonus post (it’s shorter I promise) from the thus far ghostwriterly Pil.

Another of the illuminating and heartwarming community experiences from our time at Mae Mut Garden was the full moon service at the local temple, Wat Wimuttikaram. As we may or may not have mentioned at some earlier time (I am illiterate), there are a lot of wats everywhere we’ve been in Thailand so far. If they were not large walled estates containing several buildings, you’d basically be tripping over them. They are fascinating, beautiful places with many doors, and we’ll have more to say about them in future posts. The point, for now, is that Wimuttikaram is the wat nearest to the house of Marco, Nok, and Her Imperial Highness Serena.

The first we heard of the service was the day before, when Nok invited us. That night, after the Ruler of All had fallen asleep, Steppil + Nok assembled small plastic bags containing smaller packets of rice, noodles, and instant coffee. These bags, Nok explained in a low voice so as not to wake the Serena-monster, are gifts that serve a double purpose. They are a contribution toward our own nourishment in future reincarnations—but in this lifetime, they are also presented as a gift to the hungry poor of the village.

Every family also offers flowers, which are added to communal decorative platters and somehow look like hour-long arrangements, despite being the work of minutes. The pink ones on the right were ours.

Finding Nemo in a Karen Village

If some unspeakably cruel person were to hold me hostage and forced me to choose my top five experiences in Thailand thus far, I would think this person an exceedingly dull villain. It's hard to choose. I would talk about reaching the highest shrine in Thailand, the lights over the Ping River, the dogs of Mae Mut greeting me every morning with wagging tails, I would talk about my brush with the divine when I first slurped Chiang Mai noodles in Chiang Mai, and then I would then launch into the story of the weekend that Phil, Molly, and I spent in Baan Hoi Hoi, the Karen village nearest the farm.

No Hinting. Stay on Trial.

At Mae Mut Garden, we typically work six days per week and take Sunday off. (Partly this is because the Karen staff, being Christian, take Sunday off anyway.) On our Sundays, we go out and see the surrounding area. The first two times, Step and I went out on a motor-scooter by ourselves, to chase those infamous waterfalls. Since then, we have been fortunate enough to go out with the whole family, including Pii Hom and her 14-year-old daughter, Nong Nam.

No hinting.
Stay on trial.
Don't write.

One of our recent such outings was to Mae Wang National Park—home of strange, amazing sandstone-like formations as well as many ambitious pebbles. Originally, weeks ago, we had been discussing the aforementioned Sundays-out-in-the-world plan after lunch. Marco disappeared into the house and brought out a glossy tri-fold brochure with beautiful photos of this place and much writing in Thai. “Where is this?” he asked one of the staff in Thai, pointing at the photo, and thus our adventure was born.

Fast forward. After breakfast and watering, we pile in the pickup truck. In the cab, we have Marco, Nok, Her Highness Serena, Pii Hom, and Bruno. In the bed, facing backwards and waving at two intrepid Thai children doing the same thing but standing up, we have Step, Molly (our super-co-volunteer—American, my age, superb company, former New Orleans mule driver and tour guide), and Pil. We just go where they take us, you know? As we rumble down the road, all four dogs sprint after us. We discuss the logistics of stealing one and bringing it to Burma. We do not. (Editor’s Note: We haven’t gone to Burma yet, so the possibility has not been ruled out, and also, it’s not stealing if every other day your host tells you to take every single dog except for Spaghetti.)

Khao Tom Muu

The smell of fried garlic and steaming rice broth is what greets us on our way down to the farm house, three out of seven days. (On the other days, it’s porridge and bananas for three, and the day after we make bread, it’s toast and a plethora of jams). Khao tom means rice soup in Thai, and it’s one of the most simple, unglamorous things you could make: rice cooked in pork broth. It’s become one of my favorite things to wake up to, especially when it’s got a garden of cilantro and scallions on top.

On New Year’s Day, Nok’s best friend Nok¹ fried garlic and onions to serve alongside, and made the broth using a pork bone instead of a bouillon cube. Ever since I’ve been utterly captivated, and this is absolutely one of those dishes that I’m going to keep making once we leave this continent.

An Interview with Two Village Elders

This morning, Phil and I spent three hours clearing around tree trunks, piling on cow shit, and then rearranging hoses. This afternoon, we played with colored pencils. “There are a lot of things that you can do that don’t involve a shovel,” Marco told us at the beginning of our stay here. So Phil has been working on a map of the watering system here, which is complex, and includes a spot on the map lovingly referred to as the Land of Five Valves, because all the trees there are on a drip-line—no hoses! I've been drawing a kind of welcome map of the property, so that nobody gets lost in a banana grove when they come to the farm for a visit.

Last week, we had an especially cool project, with Marco immediately suggested after we said that we were writers. (Mostly out of relief that he could begin having us write his blog posts for him). We interviewed two village elders, Ooey Khambao (age 84) and Ooey Jum Supaeng (age 77), and wrote up what the village was like when they were born and how it's changed. (Ooey is a Thai term for grandmother or elder that precedes their name.)¹

So with Marco and Nok translating (and, of course, in turn fielding questions about Empress Baby Serena), we wrote a story that synthesizes their voices and their experiences. There's probably a little that we missed, but we tried to catch it all, and swear that we didn't make anything up, not even the tigers.

Like a Ton of Bricks. Or A Pit.

Every day when we head back up to the house to shower, Phil and I are faced with an insurmountable number of bricks. The first day we were so impressed to learn that they were made by hand, and we were even more impressed later when we saw them in action, and realized that they were also made by foot. And now, we've made them ourselves!

Something like 2500 bricks are going into the addition to the farmhouse, which is being built now. It's been awesome to see the ground go from being shaded by an enormous banana tree, to being a square of cement, to being a skeletal brick frame, to reaching over our heads. The biggest lesson we have taken away from this: "Be very careful where you plant banana trees. They are a piece of work when you want to get them out."

"With the video, you can see they're definitely alive."

And we ate them, by the lake, with karaoke playing in the background.

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.

Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls, Because You Will Get Lost Repeatedly

Yesterday, Phil and I used our day off to hit the Mae Sapok Waterfall (nam-tok mesa-pohk; น้ำตกแม่สะป๊อก). Except first we hit a few potholes, and then we hit the sign for the Mae Sapok Waterfall, and then we didn't hit the Mae Sapok Waterfall, we hit a mini-waterfall, because if experience has taught us anything, is that we are terrible at finding waterfalls. Last week we tried to find this same waterfall and instead ended up at the Mae Wang Waterfall, where my camera died capturing Phil walking across a narrow bamboo bridge. It's an accurate depiction of how this feat made my stomach feel.

Image taken in-camera, no Photoshop applied.

Well, this week we decided we'd do it right. We followed Marco's directions to a tee, and then came to a sign that said in Roman characters (in addition to a thousand Thai ones): MAE SAPOK WATERFALL. We registered that it was in 500m, but failed to register the arrow pointing right. So we turned left.

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.

We Are Not in Thailand Yet

But on Friday, we will be.

The San Francisco airport is boring, we're so surprised. Except the art, the art we appreciate. But not the lack of beds. Note to SFO: install more beds. We are halfway through our six (6!) hour layover. Then we go to Beijing, where another multi-hour layover awaits us (which due to indecipherable time zones, I cannot decipher the exact number of hours thereof). I will use this layover to introduce our endeavor.

Phil and I are going to Thailand to volunteer on organic farms, learning about permaculture and sustainability in a warmer climate than rainy Portland, Oregon. The umbrella organization is WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), which is like a dating website for farms. Farms post info about themselves, what they grow, whether they like long walks on the beach, and when they're available to host volunteers (aka WWOOFers). We've lined up dates well into May, and at sixty-day intervals (or so) we'll abide by our tourist visas and take a sojourn through one of the neighboring Southeast Asian countries.

Our flight is scheduled to land in Bangkok on Friday morning. Then we're running errands, like getting Thai cell phones, picking up emergency malaria medication, and buying train tickets to Chiang Mai. The plan is to scoot on up north right away on an overnight train and stay in Chiang Mai for a few days--ostensibly to give our Japanese Encephalitis (a truly nasty brain infection; I encourage you to look it up) vaccines a chance to kick in. But mostly it is to see beautiful Chiang Mai for a bit before taking the bus down to the Mae Wang province, where we will be staying for the first month.

Fingers crossed it all goes according to plan! More or less.

PS: A note on the title of the blog. Since Thai doesn't include the syllable ph, which inconveniently pops up in both of our names, we've decided to make it easy on our hosts by picking travel pseudonyms. We could've gone way out there, and been like, Amelie and Don (Quixote), but instead we made our own names into funny words: Step and Pil. It is an apt metaphor for how we will likely blunder our way through the sub-continent. And SEA stands for South East Asia. Tada!