Mai pen rai

I like to think that wisdom is knowing that I was a fool yesterday, and tomorrow I’ll know I was a fool today, though hopefully not the same fool! I have a story from ten years ago that I have never told anyone (at least not in full) because it really does show me for a fool, but perhaps it might be a helpful lesson, or at the very least, amusing.

There once was a man, André. He was handsome and charming and witty and adventurous. However, we had really hardly met before he set off to travel the globe for an indefinite length of time. Also, he was pretty certain he was going to become a priest. Yes, I really know how to pick ‘em.

Nonetheless, as he traveled, we exchanged long emails about traveling, faith, purpose, and life. There was depth and feeling in those emails that was difficult not to be attracted to even though his commitment to the priesthood made any romance seem highly unlikely. But his sense of purpose and adventure inspired me. So I bought an open ticket to Asia and Oceania and lit out for parts unknown.

Now, don’t misunderstand and think I just headed off to re-enact The Thorn Birds and try to dissuade him from taking vows. I had wanted to travel overseas for a long while but just had never gotten up the guts to do so. The finances had to be right. The circumstances had to be right. Various projects and goals had to be completed. But if nothing else, André did inspire me to stop waiting for everything to be “just right” and to stop setting grand goals out on the horizon that would never be reached. He was all about finding happiness in the moment, and while that is risky, inertia is just as risky. If I waited, I risked living my whole life without having had Adventure. “Adventure” does mean a perilous undertaking ruled by chance, after all, no matter what the travel brochures tell you.

I set off on my thirtieth birthday. I was charmed by San Francisco and deeply touched by the hospitality I found in Seoul. I may tell the stories of those places later, but for now, I will just say that I was so full of the wonder of travel that I was bursting to tell someone who would understand, not just the wonder, but the moments of loneliness, the frustration of negotiating new cultures, and also the bitter-sweetness of experiencing these things alone.

I arrived in Bangkok at Thanksgiving and was met with more generous hospitality from family friends. Bangkok was overwhelming. Many visitors despise Bangkok, but I found its vivid, dirty swirl of bright smiles, dank mildew, ornately carved fruit, mangy soi dogs, pungent spice markets, rank canals and gaudy golden temples intoxicating. Again, I wished that I could be sharing the experience with someone close to me.

Although André had been on no particular itinerary and he and his friend Seb were meandering through some remote part of China when I left Canada, somehow we figured out that we would be in Thailand at the same time. He was excited that I was traveling too and looked forward to connecting. Through brief emails and briefer phone calls (connectivity was a lot less ten years ago) we arranged to meet at Rai Leh Beach in the south of Thailand.

I was apprehensive when I boarded the bus in the infamous tourist ghetto of Khaosan Road. Until I had visited Thailand, I had envisioned the country as something… not quite so Westernized. I thought I would be traveling with other Thai people, but it seemed I was on a Spring Break bus to Daytona Beach. The bus was full of people in board shorts and bikini tops, except for the empty seat next to me.

One last man boarded, a Westerner, but absolutely unlike every other Westerner on the bus. His head was completely shaved including his eyebrows. He was dressed in a rough brown cotton shirt, fisherman’s pants and sandals made from old car tires and cord. He carried a small canvas rucksack that couldn’t have had more than a book or two in it. His manner was measured and calm. He sat carefully next to me with the rucksack in his lap and was still. I boldly turned up my personal stereo and stared out the sweaty window at the swirl of Bangkok as we pulled away.

It’s an eight hour trip to the south of Thailand so I couldn’t hide behind the personal stereo the whole way. Also, Thai tourist buses offer video entertainment, but over very loud speakers instead of headsets, so listening to music was rather fruitless. The movie was The World Is Not Enough. James Bond was squealing around steep corners in his convertible as a thundering helicopter armed with a giant chainsaw roared after him.

“My master would say that James Bond needs to live a quieter life,” said the man.

I laughed and replied, “Oh, are you a monk?”

“No, I’m a novice. If I was a monk, I wouldn’t be able to talk to you, or even sit next to you, unfortunately, because you’re a woman! My name is Chris.” He shook my hand. I introduced myself.

Chris explained that he was traveling south to the border with Malaysia so that he could renew his visa and complete his novitiate. He was originally from France and he had come to this part of the world to serve with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in India. He worked there for a while, but became disillusioned. “I discovered that they did not relieve suffering, not really. I sought for a way to truly relieve suffering and in my search I found Buddhism and that brought me here.”

He was surprised that I knew so much about Buddhism. We talked at length about its tenets and what it meant to relieve suffering. I wasn’t sure that I agreed with everything he said. I was particularly bothered when he said, “All emotions are transient. They are like a breeze that stirs a leaf on a tree. Anger stirs the leaf, the leaf flutters violently, but then the breeze is gone, and the leaf is still. Happiness stirs the leaf, but once again the leaf is still… Love stirs the leaf, but after a time it passes and again the leaf returns to stillness.”

I didn’t want to think that these things were entirely transient. Especially love.

After a time, the two of us returned to stillness and did not talk for duration of the trip. Left to my own thoughts, I wondered about what my real expectations were and what would happen at Rai Leh. I would be lying to say that I didn’t have a small hope for romance, but I also had little doubt about André’s commitment to the priesthood, so I knew that our time together would be bittersweet. But at least I would have a friend I could talk to who would understand what I had been through. Since I hadn’t waited for the finances to be perfect when I left, I also hoped to split a bungalow with he and Seb and save money!

The bus arrived at Surat Thani where Chris and I were heading in different directions: he south to the border and I west to the coast. Earlier in the trip he had asked me why I was traveling south and I had said I was going to Rai Leh to meet friends and expressed my apprehension about the beach party atmosphere suggested by our fellow travellers. When he and I parted, he said with a gentle smile and an unsettlingly knowing look, “I hope that you find what you’re looking for in Rai Leh, but I am afraid you will be disappointed.”

After a dusty, bumpy ride on a much smaller bus through rubber tree plantations, I reached the rather grungy coastal town of Krabi. Fortunately there were numerous longtail boats eager to spirit me away and soon I was buzzing across crystal blue water, past palms nodding below green-draped sugar loaf mountains towards I knew not what. Chris’ warning hung in my head. I did my best to prepare myself with minimal expectations. Just some good company ahead, that was all. A friendly, familiar face.

André had given me directions to where they were staying, which happened to be just steps from where the boats landed. I tried not to hurry, but something I saw made me miss a step before the sight registered consciously. There was a bikini hanging on the drying line on the porch of the bungalow. Apprehensively, I knocked. Perhaps it wasn’t the right bungalow. A woman opened the door, wrapping her obviously naked self with a towel as she did so. Seb and André were scrambling out of the two single beds in the background. There may have been a second woman, it was all a blur.

“Stunned” doesn’t begin to cover how I felt.

Immediately there were blustered greetings of “Hey, you made it!” and awkward replies from me that may or may not have made any sense through the thickness in my throat, but somehow I pushed myself through into a place of functional numbness long enough to clarify that I’d have to look around for a place of my own, and they gave me some recommendations of places to try, and that was that.

The Thai people have a saying, “Mai pen rai”, which means, something like “Oh well, never mind, no worries, so it goes, there’s nothing I can do about it.” I walked mechanically along the pathway saying to myself over and over again, “Mai pen rai, mai pen rai, mai pen rai.”

I went to the office for the bungalow complex. Sorry, high season was starting. No rooms.

“Mai pen rai!”

I tried a few more places, each more expensive than the last and all full anyway, high season, they told me. I was utterly alone, the entire globe between me and home, instantly alienated from the one person I might have had some company with and I had no place to stay.

“Mai pen rai!”

After a perfunctory survey of the obviously unaffordable resorts of the west beach, I walked inland and then stopped, not sure what to do next. A Thai girl was approaching along the path, one of the few Thai people I had seen besides resort managers. She was a bright, smiling transvestite who laughed when she saw me, “What are you sad about?!” I explained that I was having trouble finding a place to stay, but she laughed again and said she’d show me to a place. So I joined her and she described her show for that night as we walked to the Diamond Cave Bungalows. There she left me with another laugh and a wave. I regret that I neglected to ask where she was performing.

The manager at Diamond Cave again told me that it was high season and all of the single rooms were taken. However, he had one triple room that he would let to me for the double rate, and if another single woman came along, he would send her to me to share the room.

I thanked him deeply, took my key and let myself into the tidy but modest room, chose the closest of the three beds to throw myself onto, and cried. “The mind is like a leaf,” I told myself, but the gale kept howling.

And then it stopped, briefly, for a knock at the door. It was the manager, and he had found a woman to room with me. She was Jane from New Zealand. Jane was there to climb the limestone rock that Rai Leh is famous for, not to party. We spent the rest of our week in Rai Leh together. She lent me her climbing gear so that I could try climbing for the first time, I “lent” her my Immodium for the return bus ride to Bangkok. I have visited her and her family in New Zealand twice and we continue to correspond.

I did see André again, and in fact, we spent quite a bit of time together. He and I talked about his commitment to the priesthood over rum while Seb listened darkly (he did not approve). Yes, André was still committed to that, which, in a bizarre way, seemed explanation if not justification for his actions. I got quite drunk, which is unusual for me, but not unusual under the circumstances. However, if it was sorrows that started it, it was silliness that finished the bottle. Myself and a handsome, intelligent Indian doctor named Anan who was on his way to a Médicins Sans Frontières mission polished off a bottle together. And then we shared sloppy wet drunken kisses and groping in front of all and sundry. The next morning he told me he had a girlfriend there and would I please not say anything? He was shocked and puzzled when I laughed. His slurred flattery of the night before and him turning out to be yet another jerk was oddly good therapy. “No worries!” I told him, and I meant it.

I had set out in hopes of meaningful company on the journey and though I was disappointed in my expectations, as Chris had warned me, I met other guides and companions, like Chris and Jane… even André in a different way, and Seb and their friends. Now, when I am disappointed by my expectations of companionship, I try to remember that remarkable episode in which other pilgrims came out of the woodwork to join me just as I seemed most alone.

I won’t say that the leaf was still. It was a long, long time before it entirely settled from that storm, but Chris was right that it did. I did reach an enjoyable peace with André while we were in Thailand. We went climbing and swimming and traveled back to Bangkok together. Seb even judiciously left us alone to talk for an hour on Khaosan Road when we returned to Bangkok, so we had one more conversation about traveling, faith, purpose, and life—everything except what happened when I knocked on the door of the bungalow a week earlier. Nevertheless, I told them the next day that I hadn’t made it to the Cambodian Embassy in time to get my visa to join them there. In truth, I very deliberately didn’t go to the embassy. I set off a few days later, by myself, on the most frightening, saddening, wonderful, inspiring, and humbling ten days of my time overseas, and a tale for another day. It was a real adventure, truly perilous and guided by chance, complete with poisonous snakes, armed roadblocks and lemon-pepper frogs’ legs. I had to undertake it alone, for worse and for better.

André and I never addressed what happened on our first meeting at Rai Leh in person, but it came up later in email, and that ended our correspondence! I haven’t seen him since we parted on Khaosan Road.

Mai pen rai!