As The Crow Flies

When I came back home after hiking the PCT, I went to Thailand for the winter, (as my job was seasonal and I didn’t have to work winters), to take a cob cottage building class. After the class was over, I decided to head to Laos.

When I got to the Laos border, I found they were no longer issuing visas at the border so I had to stay in Thailand. On the bus back, I met two teenage boys that had been over in Laos visiting one of their fathers. I was the only Westerner on the bus so they decided to practice their English on me. They said, “In my village all the people get up at 4 am., where I live no one wears shoes. Where I live, no one eats meat. Where I live we all keep the 5 precepts: No lying, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, no intoxicants, and no killing.” I asked where they lived and decided to check it out.

When I got there the next day, I found not really a village but an intentional community that was a little perplexed as to why I was there. They however gave me a place to sleep, introduced to me the English-speaking nun, fed me, and asked me where I wanted to work. I could chose from the herbal medicine shop, the mushroom farm, the fruit and vegetable gardens, the sewing shop, the dump, or compost making. I choose the herbal medicine shop. 2 months later, I was still there and loving it. I taught English and worked in the herbal medicine factory. The people were all so nice to me. I thought it was a wonderful place to live. The village stressed simplicity. There were two meals a day but you were supposed to try to only eat once a day. If you were only eating once a day the people would say, “Oh, very good.” You were supposed to be up a 4 am and you weren’t supposed to take a nap during the day. You were also supposed to go barefoot.

When the nun would go out almsing in the mornings, sometimes I would go with her in a practice known as bin da bawt or something like that. It means walking in the path of a nun. I would follow behind her. One day they put new gravel down, she had thirty years of walking barefoot, but I thought my tender feet would start bleeding.

I wasn’t spending hardly any money at all, maybe a dollar a week, when I would go into town to use the internet and maybe get a treat. Since I wasn’t spending any money I figured I didn’t need to make any money. So I started thinking about instead of returning home and going back to work, of going home and selling my house and all my stuff and moving back to the Asoke village in Thailand.

On my way back, I got the idea to sell my house and buy a piece of vacation property with the money, that could be rented out by the day or week. Then, if I wanted to come home I could tell the management folks to stop renting it so I could move into it. While looking for some practical piece of vacation property I found my dream property, a beautiful cabin on the water and bought it. Since I had my dream cabin I went there instead and have never made it back to Thailand or work.

So far things have worked out okay. It’s pretty cheap to live in a primitive cabin. For five years I didn’t have a laptop, solar panel, or telephone. Now that I do, I can tell you that those things don’t make things better, they just make things different.

Too late to be hibernating too early to be hiking. Seems like winter should be over. I’ve watched something like 150 DVD’s from Netflick this winter, all the deleted scenes and director commentaries too. Most of them have been documentaries but some independent and foreign. I think I’m pretty much caught up on what’s happening in the video media. I’ve watched most of the  DVD’s that interest me and have had to look harder for stuff to add to my queue.   I started looking through the TV shows for some possible picks.  My two favorite have been, and this is just weird, “The Dog Whisperer” and “Project Runway”. I don’t have a dog and I own two outfits, three if you count rain gear as an outfit, but for some reason I’m just entranced by both shows.

On “The Dog Whisperer” this guy comes to a house with an unruly dog, puts a leash on it, takes it for a walk and, poof, the dog is well behaved. On Project Runway, all these flamboyant designers design outfits but there is always some sort of challenge. Like they will take them to a grocery store and give them 30 minutes to pick out the material for an outfit. Then they get something like 6 hours to design and sew an outfit out of what ever they bought. Next, they get a model who models it on a runway in front of these judges that say stuff like, “ho hum, another garbage bag dress? It’s been done.” And, “In fashion you are either in or you are out and you are out. Auf Wiedersehen.”

Tom Robbins wrote a story about a creature that worked hard to appear to be a human and to be pleasing to other humans, but he overlooked some things, like he had big patches of hair behind his knees and he smelled really funky. The creature thought those things were insignificant and that no one would notice.

My neighbor invited me to go to lunch with her and two other people. As I was getting ready, I felt like that creature only my thoughts were more, “I’ll never pass�. To my surprise, I wasn’t that far off the mark from the other women. In a town of rugged individualists, everyone looks a little off or even if they don‘t, they don‘t mind if you do. In a store, a woman came up to me, touched my Sunday Afternoon Adventure hat, and said, “ My, that is some hat. You look good.�

Note: The skirt is a Macabi Travel/hiking Skirt ,for both men and women.  It has a clip so that you can make it into trousers or shorts too.

Bukit Lawang is a magical little village built next to the orangutan preserve in Sumatra. The cars remain on the outside. A river runs through it with a swinging bridge over it and has little children diving off of it. There is a night club in a cave. There are some native rock climbers that live in a tree house and climb all day on the cliffs by their place. People come down to the river to wash their clothes and beat them on the rocks. I stayed for three weeks and would have stayed longer if I could have changed my ticket.

A lot of the orangutans were pets and were being rehabilitated. Western women flocked there, and lined up for a chance to work with them. Twice daily ungainly orangutans who were in the middle stage of their rehabilitation would come to the feeding center to be fed bananas.

I had the honeymoon suite at a place on the river. I got it because it was the only place in Bukit Lawang that had a hammock. There was lots of artful tile work. Water worn branches were bent into a canopy bed. The bathroom only had a roof over part of it, as is common in Indonesia. A tree grew up in the middle of the bathroom and from a tilted terra-cotta pot in its branches cold water flowed for a shower. There were tropical flowers growing in the bathroom. But the biggest attraction for me was the covered tile porch with a hammock.

I was lying on the hammock sleeping when I heard screaming. I opened my eyes to see across the river an orangutan with a t-shirt on and a bunch of natives from the city yelling and running away. Then this orangutan took off the shirt and started washing it in the river and banging it on the rocks like the people do. Then it tried to put the wet t-shirt on again, but because it was wet it couldn’t get it back on right and had it all stretched out.

Costs: When I was there in 1999, the first place I stayed at was .62 cents USD(United States Dollar) a night and had a private bath. When I moved up to the beautiful place on the river it ran me 7.50 USD a night. A plate of fried rice and a plate of passion fruit was less than one USD total. Whitewater rafting, overnight treks, rock climbing, orangutan watching and inter-tubing down the river were all affordable once the bargaining was done.

Note: According to this article, Bukit Lawang was washed away in 2003 and a lot of people were killed. According to the Wikipedia article they are rebuilding higher up and are back in business.

Since my last trip with my propane tank in my backpack was so painful, this time I thought I would try to improve things. I ripped the plastic lid off of a bin and put that in the inside of the pack against my back. It worked great and I was able to walk the seven and a half mile loop down to the little store, up the road to my mailbox, and then back up to my cabin without any problem. The plastic lid made my backpack more supportive and kept the propane tank from poking me in the spine.

Once the tank was full and my snow shoes were strapped to the pack it was almost 45 lbs (20.4 kilos), which is a lot for a pack that weighs a little over 2 lbs. (1 kilo). My pack is the Mountain Smith Ghost. I bought it after trying on every sub 3lb(1.36 k) pack in Portland.  It can lift all the weight off of my shoulders if I want it to. Sadly, it’s no longer made.

This is a great opportunity to get trail ready and accomplish something.