Friday, January 28, 2022
6:36 a.m. Room 1102, Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
I ended up NOT going to Casa Mia for breakfast yesterday. I went over the menu on my phone, and I decided that their breakfast dishes were quite overpriced for what they were. It would feel silly to pay 160 baht for two slices of toast, two eggs, and coffee when an entire loaf of bread and a dozen eggs in the market would probably cost 70 baht.
Instead of having breakfast there, I decided to skip breakfast and save my appetite for lunch. As the morning was winding down, I set off on foot for the nearby Tesco outlet. My idea for this errand was to buy the cleaning supplies I needed for this room. And the Tesco mall has quite a good food court. The food courts in malls in Taiwan and here in Thailand have nothing in common with the horror shows that are mall food courts in Canada. They serve great food at really good prices here. And I enjoy the system at Tesco. All the food outlets in one big area have pictures of the dishes they offer. They serve all Asian food, of course. And they are all connected to the same payment system using a type of debit card. I have a food court debit card, and I can put 500 baht on it or whatever amount I wish, and then I can hand over this card every time I order something and they scan it and delete the required amount. It’s quite convenient.
I ended up getting two meals. I had something to eat as soon as I arrived. And then I did my shopping at Tesco. And when I was done with that, I had a second dish at the food court. I love going there. It allows me to sample from a wide variety of tasty local dishes with no confusion and no chaos. I even developed my own system for ordering. The one problem is that the photographs of all the dishes face outward to the customer. The staff behind the counters can’t see them. So I can’t point at them. I’d normally still be reduced to having to place my order verbally even though I made my choice through a photograph. But after I decide what I want to order, I take a picture of it with my phone. This picture contains their photograph of the dish as well as the name of it in Thai and the menu item number. And I show that picture to the staff member, and they understand instantly. This system works perfectly. They also have a display of real cutlery. I can get really nice chopsticks and nice metal forks and spoons and knives. And they have lots of staff going around with carts on wheels to clean up tables after customers have left. There is tons of comfortable seating. All the chairs are regular chairs with backrests. And, finally, since this is inside a mall, it is air conditioned. I get all the good food of Thailand with none of the heat and crowding and discomfort and verbal confusion that usually comes with going to a local restaurant. The one downside is that the portions are on the small side. Even in a normal Thai restaurant, I find the portions to be small. I generally have to order at least two of everything to have a full meal. And at the food court, the portions are even smaller than that. But since ordering is so simple and the food preparation is so fast, getting more food if you’re still hungry is not a problem. And despite the speed at which they prepare these meals, the ingredients are all clearly fresh.
Not much else happened for the rest of the day. I came back to Phannu House to settle into my room to work on some videos from my trip to the north. When I first got back to the hotel, I ran into another foreigner in the parking area. I can’t remember his name right now, but he’s an older man, a foreigner, from the UK I believe. Or maybe American. Sitting here right now, I can’t remember his accent. I’d met him once before, and I got the impression that he was a regular Mae Sot expat. He’s lived here for fifteen years, I think, and has lived in a room at the Phannu for nine of them. He has a large room on the roof of the building, which he calls the penthouse. He likes it because it is secure, large and airy, offers great views of the neighborhood, is inexpensive, and allows him to cook. Plus, he is so busy that he is rarely home anyway. So, he doesn’t need a house. Finally, he thinks the family that runs the Phannu consists of friendly and nice people.
I don’t know exactly what this man does. I met him at random the first time in the Mae Sot market. I was there doing my GoPro thing. He was there in an old brown pickup truck that was full of migrant workers or refugees from Myanmar. He came up to me and he told me that he was interested in shooting video, and he wanted to ask questions and get advice. And he told me that he had to be very careful with video, because his work with refugees was sensitive and he had to be careful of security. And then when I met him here at the Phannu yesterday, he told me the exact same thing all over again. But I don’t know if he has a salaried position with an NGO or if he is simply retired and doing random helpful things on a volunteer basis for local refugees.
I was just outside for a few minutes for the morning romp of the dogs. It appears my novelty has worn off, and the black dog and the husky had much more important things to do than spend time with me. They raced right by my feet several times and never stopped. I think the difference was that there were a number of new vehicles in the parking lot. And the tires of those vehicles are like a mail service for the dogs. They had to sniff all the tires of every new vehicle to get the odiferous messages from all the other dogs of the world. With so many new tires to sniff, I was left out in the cold.
But I was not left entirely without love. There is a third dog here that I haven’t mentioned yet. This dog is more of an inside dog, I guess. It’s an elderly white dog, and the patriarch of the Phannu family takes this dog for slow and stately walks up and down the property occasionally. Its extreme age and extreme weight make it a slow dog, and it hadn’t as yet bothered to make the long trip of fifteen feet over to see me. But on its return journey this morning, it chose a different path that took it right to me. And it stopped to investigate me and was more than happy to be pet and scratched. I was a bit disturbed to get a close look and a clear physical sense of just how fat this dog was. I guess that kind of overfeeding also falls into a form of animal abuse. This poor dog was so fat that it could hardly move. I had no sense of touching a muscled body. It was more like petting a solid barrel of fat.
Last night, I noticed that three large and gorgeous touring motorcycles had parked in the parking lot of the Phannu. And while I was sitting outside with my coffee, three Frenchmen came out of their rooms to load up their bikes and get on the move. I find that this is another classic conversational situation. I end up pondering deeply the right thing to do. What I would LOVE to do is go have coffee with all three men for three hours and hear every single story of their trip so far – where they’ve been and where they plan to go. I wanted to hear the entire tale of their journey, from planning to preparation to execution. But that’s not possible, of course. So I have to strike a balance between what I want and my desire to not annoy them.
In this case, one man came out first. And he went up to a gorgeous Triumph. He made eye contact with me and smiled and greeted me in English. This was a good sign, and I made sure to present the right body language to indicate that if he wanted to come over and have a chat, I was open to it. But he was clearly focused on getting the motorcycle ready, and he returned to his room to get his next bag and then the next. I was watching him intently and trying to gauge just how busy he was and to what extent my coming up and talking to him would be an annoyance. But before I could make my move, his two companions emerged from their rooms, and they started loading up their motorcycles. And now the three of them were engaged in conversation with each other in French. And their movements got faster, so it was clear that they had set an appointed time to be on the road as a group. And that time was approaching or was already past.
I gave up on any idea of having a detailed conversation with any of the men, but at a minimum I did want to know where they were going today. And I chose what appeared to be an appropriate moment, and I got up and walked over to the friendliest of the men, the one that had come out first. One of the men had already left on his motorcycle, and the two remaining men were clearly going to get on their bikes and leave within the next minute or two. But I figured twenty or thirty seconds for a quick hello and one question would be okay. And the man told me that they were going to Mae Hong Son today.
That told me a lot. It told me that, like most people on the Mae Hong Son Loop, they were more interested in the riding than the places. They were riding all the way to Mae Hong Son in one day, which means they would be skipping all the places in between. It took me fifteen or sixteen days to cover that same distance. I stopped in a lot of places and spent days going on little trips here and there. And it told me that they were at the start of their trip. They were doing the Mae Hong Son Loop in the clockwise direction and they were just starting the loop today. So they hadn’t been to any of the places in the north yet.
And that situation is always an interesting one. I’m very sensitive to the conversational etiquette involved. I had just finished the Loop, and my head was bursting with stories and experiences from my trip. And when someone is about to go on a trip that you just completed, or is going to a country that you’ve been to yourself, you really want to tell them things. You want to talk about all the places you went, give them advice, give them information, recount your stories. But is that the right thing to do? My sense is that it is NOT the right thing to do. It’s kind of a selfish act. It’s an attempt to claim their trip as partially your own, if you know what I mean. Without really intending to, you end up hijacking their upcoming experience as you tell them how much they’re going to enjoy it and about all the things they’re going to see. These guys are at the very beginning of their own personal adventure, after all. It’s probably something they’ve been planning for a long time and looking forward to. The last thing they want is for some random stranger to start telling them all their stories from that same trip. The more polite approach has always seemed to me to let other people discover things for themselves. I don’t have to tell them that the stretch of road from Mae Hong Son to Pai is really beautiful. It’s better to let them find that out for themselves. It’s best to leave the experience fresh and exciting and new in their minds.
And at the same time, why lessen the excitement of their trip by being a reminder that thousands and thousands of other people are doing that exact same trip every month? Everyone knows that, of course. It’s not like you are the first person to ride the Mae Hong Son Loop. It’s one of the biggest tourist attractions in Thailand. It’s a long-standing institution of backpacking through Thailand. We know that this is nothing new. But at the same time, the last thing you want is to be reminded of that on the very day that you are starting your trip. And why tell these guys about places I went and enjoyed and about how I did the trip? This might make them doubt their own choices and make them wonder if they’re missing out on certain experiences.
With all that in my mind, I usually hold back. I don’t instantly start telling stories when a person tells me that they are going to a place that I’ve already been to. Why dilute their excitement? But you also don’t want to appear aloof and weird. It would be weird to let someone tell you all about visiting a certain city, and then afterwards, this person finds out that you lived in that city for ten years. They’ll wonder why you didn’t say something.
So, as usual, I tried to strike a balance. In this case, I limited myself to asking this man where they were going. He said that they were going to Mae Hong Son and were therefore just starting the trip around the Loop. And very quickly, I dropped the information that I had just finished the Loop. I had just come from Mae Hong Son. And that’s all I said. It would have been weird not to mention that fact. Then it is up to him if he wants to ask me for any information. And in this case, he did. He asked me if Highway 105 to Mae Hong Son was open. He was wondering if there were any problems with crossing the border between provinces because of the pandemic and travel restrictions. And I was able to assure him that the road was wide open, and I had encountered no problems with travel restrictions at all.
And with that, I wished them a good time on their trip, backed away, and let them get on their motorcycles and leave. Of course, I wanted to know a lot more. I wanted to be the energetic puppy bouncing around their feet and peppering them with a hundred questions. But the time wasn’t right for that conversation, and I didn’t want to be that annoying dude that talks to them for twenty minutes while they’re trying to pack up and leave.