Monday, January 31, 2022
6:50 a.m. Room 1102 Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
I don’t have a great deal to say about yesterday. I spent the bulk of the day working on YouTube-related stuff. For lunch, I returned to the noodle shop I’d discovered the other day. I was worried that it would be closed on Sundays, but it was open. I was glad about that, because I already know this noodle shop will be a regular place for me. And for dinner, I went across the street to Casa Mia. I wanted to give their Thai food a chance. They don’t have a wide selection of dishes, but I was curious to see if their rice-based dishes and Pad Thai could be a regular feature of my daily attempts to feed myself. During the day, the place sits largely empty, but there were five people there for dinner last night. An American man I’d met before was sitting at a table near the front, and I ended up joining him at his table. We had a good chat. It was good he was there, because he was a regular, and he kind of guided me through the ordering process. Without him, I might have ended up being a bit annoyed and just leaving. The problem is that they have no systems. I sat with him for what felt like the longest time just looking at the menu, but no one ever came to take my order. And this man told me that I should just go to the kitchen and talk to them. If I don’t, he said, I’ll never get any food. I would normally be uncomfortable doing that. I don’t like to bother people when they are busy working. And it would annoy me that I was being forced to do that because they can’t be bothered to have any wait staff. Rather than doing that, I’d just leave and get dinner somewhere else. But I was all chatty and feeling relaxed, and I just went to the back and placed an order for both a fried rice dish and for Pad Thai. They warned me that the portions were large, but I insisted on getting both. I wanted to sample both types of food. And they cost only 40 baht each, which is about $1.20 US. And I found the portions pretty ordinary. Maybe they were large by Thai standards, but I powered through both dishes easily and could easily have had a third plus dessert. The rice was unremarkable, but the Pad Thai was quite good. I can see myself ordering it many times in the future. It wouldn’t be a full meal, so I’d have to combine it with something else though.
An acquaintance sent me a link to a YouTube video yesterday. And this video was from a Canadian woman named Megan Kaptein. I don’t know anything about her as yet except that she likes to ride motorcycles and she makes YouTube videos. The video I watched was of her trip around the Mae Hong Son Loop. I just looked at her overall channel, and to my surprise, she has posted only thirty-five videos in total going back over the last two years. I say that surprises me, because she could clearly have made tons more, and they would have been very popular. The YouTube motorcycle community is really strong. If you really love motorcycles and ride nice bikes and focus on them and that lifestyle, you’re almost guaranteed to have a large and dedicated audience. And Megan just happens to be on the attractive end of the human spectrum: tall, slim, blonde, pretty, very warm and full of energy and happiness. And she seems to go on her trips with quite an arsenal of camera equipment, including a drone. So it’s surprising that she made so few videos. I imagine she has a very busy life doing something else that is more important to her, and the videos are just an afterthought.
Her experience was completely different from mine, of course, whether you are talking about the video or the trip itself. In terms of the video, she made just one 25-minute video about her entire motorcycle journey in Thailand. I could never do that. I would have trouble talking about the Pad Thai I had last night in less than 25 minutes. By the time I’m done, if I find the time, I could make as many as thirty videos about my trip on the Mae Hong Son Loop, and each video could be an hour long if I let it.
Her trip was as relatively short as her video. She actually started in Canada and had to fly to Thailand to even begin the trip, and that involved a layover in Taipei. And then she flew from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. And once she got her motorcycle, she went around the Mae Hong Son Loop in four or five days. She went all the way from Chiang Mai to Mae Sariang in one day. I think she spent one night in Mae Sariang, and the next day, she rode to Mae Hong Son, spent one night there, and then rode to Bang Mapha, spent maybe two nights there, and then rode to Pai. And that was it. That seems so fast to me. I wouldn’t even make it out of my first town in that amount of time. And if I flew around the world for a trip, there’s no way I could possibly be there for that short a time. To justify the agony of a flight that long, I’d have to plan for a stay of at least two months, and I’d probably end up staying six months.
But still, her video was fun to watch. I enjoyed it. And I enjoyed seeing all the familiar places. She put a lot of work into the editing, with music and drone footage and voiceover narration and exciting GoPro shots of carving up the curves on her motorcycle. But I couldn’t help but read between the lines and be critical. It always annoys me when people make broad general statements based on very limited experience. I’m talking about the usual happy and intensely positive statements that are commonly related to experiences like this. She went on and on about how amazing Thailand was and how warm and friendly the people are and how honest they are and how incredible this is and how amazing that is. And I keep thinking, “You were there for five days. And you spent most of that time either on your motorcycle or hanging out with other Westerners. How can you possibly know anything about Thailand or Thai people?”
And with my intense interest in logistics and the minutiae of daily life, I can never find a video like this truly satisfying. I need more information than she can provide in a 25-minute video. I think that in particular I need the struggle portrayed. I want to hear about the planning and the effort involved in booking the flights and making decisions. I want to know about the preparations and packing and the trip to the Toronto airport and then landing in Taipei and then arriving in Bangkok exhausted and perhaps doubting the whole project.
There was one funny moment towards the end of her video that makes a nice contrast between her experience and mine. She went to visit a bamboo bridge outside of the town of Pai. It’s a big tourist attraction there. And she showed very little of the place. The entire bamboo bridge portion of her video amounted to 45 seconds, and it consisted mainly of her saying this:
“We’re at this amazing bridge, this beautiful bridge, and we came in the evening. There’s barely anyone here, so it’s just us enjoying this incredible place. It’s just so peaceful and so perfect right now: the temperature, the weather, the lighting. It’s like a little slice of paradise here.”
I noticed that her main reason for liking this place was that she got there when few other people were there. This happens a lot in these types of videos, where the person is compelled to argue that they are having some kind of unique experience that no one else has ever had. You often hear the statement that this or that person went to a place where tourists never go. They talk about how the people there never see foreigners and maybe have never seen a white person before. And this, of course, is utter nonsense. And even if they go to a normal type of tourist attraction, as Megan did in going to this bamboo bridge, they take pains to argue that their experience of the place is unique. They might say that they are there before anyone else or after everyone else has left. They’ll say they happened to be there on a special day when they are having a festival. Basically, they argue that their experience of the place is better than the experience other people have had at the same place. Megan wants to frame her experience at this bamboo bridge as some kind of special and natural adventure that she found and no one else knows about. She saw the “Real Thailand”, not the places where tourists go. But I went to this bamboo bridge, and I know that it is a pure tourist attraction. Thousands and thousands of people go there every month. You have to buy a ticket to enter. There are selfie-stations all over the place for people to pose for the regular tourist pictures. You can buy fish food to feed the fish in the pond. You can climb a stairway to nowhere and pose for pictures. There are souvenir shops and coffee shops right along the bridge.
I thought it was a very interesting place, and I enjoyed myself very much for lots of reasons. But in my wildest dreams, I wouldn’t try to convince you that I stumbled across an untouched part of Thailand that no one visits. That would be like trying to argue that you discovered Disneyland, a place that no one else knows about. I noticed that in her video, she was careful to edit out anything that smacked of tourism. She shot video of just the bamboo bridge in the fields and inserted little clips of a water buffalo and a Buddhist monk. She made it look like this was a natural piece of rural village life in Thailand. She didn’t show the ticket booth at the front, the nice coffee shop, the restaurant, the souvenir shop, the T-shirts for sale, the six-foot-high letters in the field spelling out the name of the place, the giant statues of water buffalo, the fish-feeding station, or the big parking lot. Of course, my video of the same place will probably be an hour long, and it will show all of that stuff.
It’s interesting, too, that she was trying to portray this bamboo bridge as a natural and untouched piece of Thailand. Yet, she missed entirely the actual reason the bridge exists in the first place. And that reason IS connected to the “real Thailand”, if such a thing can be said to exist. These bamboo bridges generally connect a farming community with a Buddhist temple. It allows for the monks and the villagers to walk back and forth between the temple and the village over the rice fields without having to walk through the mud. And the only reason you would learn this is if you walked the entire length of the bamboo bridge to the very end, which I did. And at the end of the bridge, I found a beautiful and very large temple complex: Wat Huai Khai Khiri Maruekhathayawan Monastery. It was a special place with buildings made of natural materials, such as wood and stone. That temple and the monks who live there is why this bridge was built and why it is maintained. But Megan was so interested in the mood of the setting that she neglected any facts about the place.
But the funny part is what happened at the end. This woman had a wonderful and fun experience at this bamboo bridge. And that about sums it up. But when I was leaving this bridge, doing my usual GoPro thing, I got distracted, and I slammed my left foot into a piece of bamboo that had broken and was sticking up from the mat. The bamboo sliced into my toe, and blood pooled into my sandal around my toes. And I was slipping and sliding around in my own blood as I limped away. The woman at the ticket counter saw this happen, and she was quite concerned, and she wanted to whisk me away to her nearby house to deliver first aid. But I told her I was fine. I just found a hose inside a nearby bathroom and washed all the blood away. And it turned out that I bruised my toe so badly that I lost the entire nail. It eventually came right off, and my toe is currently busy growing a new toenail. And that will be part of my story of visiting the bamboo bridge when I eventually finish it. I just thought that was a funny contrast between her experience and mine.
When I left on this trip, my idea was to change my video style. I was going to make shorter, snappier videos about fun experiences without worrying overly about context. And I wanted this to happen in real time. The idea was to focus more on actual life and treat the video project as an aside, kind of like sending video postcards to a friend. But either I totally forgot about that plan or I’m just not capable of it, because I fell right back into my habit of making very long videos that cover the entire sequence of a day, very much like my usual written journal. And as I’ve mentioned many times, video is a voracious beast where time is concerned. I found myself in a situation where it felt like I was racing like mad just to keep up.
A quick aside from the life going on around me: a meowing was heard, and I looked out the window to see the guest house cat looking intently at my door. I thought this cat was afraid of people. I saw it run in terror and hide a couple of times when people came near. But I guess I was wrong about that. I opened my door as carefully and slowly as I could so as not to startle her, but I needn’t have bothered. Once the door was open wide enough, she came bounding inside and made herself at home. There was much purring and exploring and curling up here and there. There was a sense of purpose to her explorations, and I got the sense that she was looking for a place to have kittens. A quick petting confirmed that there was a bounty of kittens in there waiting patiently to emerge. Her favorite spot appeared to be on top of my small stack of clothes folded on a shelf underneath a bedside table. But since she doesn’t have automatic access to my room, I think she will end up choosing a more accessible place somewhere outside.
Another update from my life is that I’m thinking seriously of abandoning any hope of returning to Malaysia. It makes logical sense to give up and move on. It will likely be many more months before tourists will be allowed to enter Malaysia. And even then, it will still be very expensive and complicated. And with many of the requirements now being put in place, it may even be impossible for me. And even if I did get back into Malaysia and was reunited with my possessions, there is no possibility of continuing on with a bike tour. All I’d do is sell the bike or ship it to Canada anyway. The same can be said of everything that I have in Malaysia. I have a bunch of expensive camera lenses and other electronics there (such as my beloved Kindle and my NEO). But I seem to have moved away from photography, and all those lenses are meant for photography. I seem to be content these days with a GoPro for video and my smartphone for pictures. Even if I had all those camera lenses, I wouldn’t want to carry them around with me anyway. I’d just store them in Canada or sell them. Same thing for all the camping equipment. I can’t think of anything in those boxes that is absolutely essential, particularly right now. There are no personal documents or ID or anything like that that I can remember leaving behind. I brought everything essential with me to Myanmar just in case something like a worldwide pandemic happened. I can leave from this room in Mae Sot with just my backpack and what I have here, and there would be no issue. Everything I need is right here with me.
So I think I am going to shift my plans. I’ll reach out to a few people in Kuala Lumpur and see if someone will be willing to sort through my boxes and pack up the most valuable items and ship them to Canada. As for the bike and the bicycle trailer, I don’t know. I might have to say goodbye to them. I’m fine with all of that. It just bothers me that I can’t do this myself. I hate to ask friends in Kuala Lumpur for help. It will be such a hassle for them. And it will be complicated because my gear in Malaysia is quite complex and jumbled up in various boxes. It will take time to sort through it all.
Looking back, I can see multiple times when “stuff” was a problem in my life. I was writing about this just recently as I compared my problems leaving Mae Sot with similar problems I had when I left from Taiwan. The idea is that I made the mistake of doing too many big things at one time. For my trip to the Mae Hong Son Loop, I combined planning and leaving for that trip with leaving the guest house, where I had essentially been living. And I had also made my YouTube life a big deal for the trip, and those three things together at the same time were too much.
It was far, far worse when I wound up my life in Taiwan. That experience nearly killed me, and when I look back, I can see how I should have done it. At that time, I was eager to get out of Taiwan. So I combined three things into one very short time period: quitting my job; leaving my apartment; and flying to the Philippines with my touring bicycle. And the problems all came from my position as a foreigner in a foreign land. When I quit my job, I lost my work visa, and because of that, I had a very short window of time to get out of the country. Everything became compressed, and I just about fell to pieces. It was too much to do in too short a time.
To be honest, I was aware of what I should have done at the time. And I was aware of the problems I was creating for myself. But I was worried that if I came back into Taiwan on a tourist visa and just resumed living in my apartment in Taipei while not working, I’d end up delaying my departure for too long and months and months and months would go by as I delayed and procrastinated my departure. I wanted to force myself to get moving and get on a plane as soon as possible. But I had grossly underestimated the amount of work involved in leaving Taiwan, just as I did here in Mae Sot. I think back to that time and just have to laugh. I was such a wreck when I finally stumbled out of my apartment with my giant bicycle box in tow and struggled to get to the airport.
What I was actually thinking about was the stuff involved. I had stuff in the apartment to deal with. And I had stuff I needed for bike touring. And I had the stuff I needed for my photography hobby. And stuff for this and stuff for that. Just stuff. And I can look back over my life and with the number of times I packed up and left places, a surprising number of my brain cells were occupied with thinking about stuff. And backpackers in general can’t help but talk about stuff. Backpackers stress out over the stuff in their backpack, whether they are carrying too much or too little or whatever. My personal solution to the matter was to recognize that it wasn’t the stuff that was the problem. Stuff is just stuff and it doesn’t change. It just sits there and remains stuff. The problem that might need fixing was my relationship with stuff and my feelings about it.
What I mean is that a lot of people are bothered by the idea of that stuff just being there and existing even though it doesn’t cause any problems at all. My dad was insanely like that. And it often made no sense. If you have the room for the stuff and it doesn’t get in the way, what does it matter? You can just leave it there. My dad had the entire house. He had entire rooms and many closets and attic crawl spaces and cupboards and drawers that he never ever went into or even thought about. But it would drive him insane that there was something in those closets. He’d obsess about wanting to clean out that closet and throw everything away. Yet, nothing would change if he did so. He’d just have an empty closet in the upstairs part of the house. He didn’t need the closet space for anything else. Now that the closet was completely empty, he just had an empty closet. It didn’t actually change anything in his life.
It’s like we think we’ll feel better and less burdened if we get rid of that stuff. And we go through the process of getting rid of it. But, assuming you had no use for the now empty space, getting rid of the stuff didn’t actually change anything. It’s how you feel about the stuff being there that is the issue, not the stuff itself. And what I do is a little mental game where I imagine simply walking away from the house or the apartment forever. Just right now walking away and leaving all the stuff there. And would it matter? Or I imagine a fire or flood destroying the entire house and everything is gone. Does it matter? And the answer is no.
And as soon as you break your mental connection to that stuff, you are suddenly content to let it sit there. You realize it has nothing to do with you. You don’t have to get rid of it anymore because you’ve changed your relationship to it. I’m going through that process right now with my stuff in Malaysia. I’m adjusting my mental relationship with that stuff. I’m shifting my view of it and fully embracing this idea that I’m NOT going back to Malaysia. That’s the new plan, so that stuff has no connection to me anymore. And I’m slowly adjusting to this new reality, one in which I could hop on a plane with just my backpack tomorrow and fly to Vancouver or Karachi or Colombo or anywhere. Hopefully, I can someday take some of that stuff in Malaysia and turn it into money that I can use for some kind of life experience. But other than that, that stuff is gone.
Related to this topic are all my boxes and boxes of handwritten journals sitting in a basement crawlspace in Canada. I was lamenting again, just a few days ago, my poor memory when it comes to large periods of my life. And it would be nice to be able to refresh my memory with the journals that I may or may not have kept during those times. One advantage to abandoning any thought of returning to Malaysia is that it does at least open up the possibility of going back to Canada this summer for a visit at least. And if that happens (a very slim possibility, I admit), I can see myself rummaging through some boxes and perhaps scanning a journal or two.