Saturday, December 25, 2021
5:30 a.m. Room B4 Meungchaem House
Mae Chaem, Chiang Mai Province
Thailand
People make a big deal out of Christmas Day itself. And today is Christmas Day. But December 25th was never a big deal to me. For me and my family, Christmas Eve, the evening of December 24th was the height of the holiday. That was the important time. On December 25th, my family would drag me off to church, and that was always such a letdown after the excitement of December 24th. It made life seem so ordinary after all the wonderful activity of the 24th. Anyway, today is Christmas Day.
And my plan is to spend Christmas Day on Doi Inthanon, the highest mountain in Thailand. To be honest, I wouldn’t normally worry about where I was spending Christmas Day. I haven’t had a normal Christmas in a very long time. I can’t even remember the last one. It was probably fifteen years ago or more. Christmas and my birthday and every other special day has just become an ordinary day for me. That’s what comes with living a solitary life. All days are largely the same, which, to be honest, I don’t mind in the slightest. It feels right for me. But I’m glad that I’m doing something at least a little special on Christmas Day. And the highest mountain in Thailand seems like a good choice. There won’t be snow up there, but it will certainly be cold. That’s appropriate for a Canadian Christmas.
I’m not sure how to handle the video of this day. I’ve been experimenting with some new techniques lately, and I’m not sure if I will do the same thing today. I’m not feeling in the mood. So I will probably shoot a more standard vlog. But I don’t know if I want to start the vlog here at the guest house and document my day, as I normally do, or whether I should begin the video right at the peak of the mountain. That’s what a good YouTuber would do, I suppose. There would be a cry of “Merry Christmas from the highest and coldest place in Thailand!” And then the YouTuber would jump in the air (perhaps in front of a waterfall) and capture a freeze-frame of that moment and then the scene would fade into a glorious drone shot of the mountain and the surroundings. But I’m fairly certain I won’t be doing that.
I can already feel that my efforts will fall far short of that crowd-pleasing effort. For one thing, I’m already annoyed at Doi Inthanon, and confused by it. I’m annoyed, because the mountain is inside a National Park. And that comes with National Park prices and National Park rules. The cost to enter the park appears to be 330 baht for foreigners and 50 baht for Thai citizens. And there is some kind of hiking trail in the park. But it costs 200 baht to go on the trail because you are forced to hire a guide. A guide, it should be noted, who can’t speak English. And there are a couple of nice pagodas with flower gardens, but it costs 40 baht to visit those. And then there are the usual waterfalls for your selfie-pleasure, but they appear to be scattered all about. And I’ve read that there are checkpoints scattered about to check your ticket and your vaccination status. That all annoys me in a mild sort of way.
The park also confuses me because, as with most national parks, I can’t figure out where the boundaries of the park are or where the attractions are. It wasn’t until last night that I finally managed to get my head around where the actual mountain is located. The whole point for me is to be able to claim a superlative for Christmas. I want to be at the highest point in all of Thailand on Christmas Day. But where is that exactly? This entire time, I’ve been scouring the area around where it says Doi Inthanon National Park on Google Maps. But it turns out the place where you actually go is far from there. There’s a small road way before that point, and this road goes up to a much smaller area, and, as far as I can make out, the mountain peak is there. That’s where I need to go, but it took me a long time to figure that out.
I also dislike places where there are so many assumptions about what one will do or should do. For example, when I showed up at my guest house yesterday afternoon, the man who checked me into my room just assumed that I would be going up to Doi Inthanon early to see the sunrise. That’s what everyone does. But I have no interest in sunrises per se. If I happen to see one because I woke up early, that’s great. But I dislike the herd mentality of feeling like you must see the sunrise from every mountain and famous place you visit. And in this case, it makes no sense because it will be extremely cold that early in the morning. There is no way I want to be riding my scooter up that 30-kilometer road before the sun has come up. And there is a 100% certainty that the skies will be heavily overcast all morning. There won’t be a visible sunrise. And even if there was one, it would feel weird to be standing there with the dozens or hundreds of other people also there to see the sunrise from the one designated sunrise-viewing position.
The other assumption is, of course, that I am super excited to see the waterfalls in the park. Being excited about waterfalls just seems to me like a sign that you lack imagination. With nothing else to be excited about, you just fall back on the one thing that everyone in the world agrees is amazing: waterfalls. I imagine I will go to see the waterfalls. Why not? It’s what you do in national parks in Thailand. But I can’t imagine that I will feel one way or the other about it. Water goes downhill. It’s gravity. It’s how things work. And I guess they’re pretty. But they’re hardly unique. Every state or province in every country in the world has its famous waterfalls. The darn things are everywhere.