Akha Chronicles
Book 1: Maesai
Chapter 4: Maesai

Maesai
Maesai is where my work took shape and there were many days that I spent just in town, waiting for the opportunity to do the things that I wished to do.  I didn't always have the money to proceed. But there are many things you can learn when you don't have money.  From Maesai I learned of Asia, Thailand and the north. From Maesai I delivered services and made expeditions out into the Akha villages.
Maesai is a gangster border town known for smuggling, drugs and hookers.  There are more catholic girls in Maesai than there are at the mission in Keng Tung where they come from.  For them and the people who send them it is an acceptable contradiction.
One of the beauties of Maesai was its straight street to the bridge, the main road, knowing every shop, and the mountains of Burma straight ahead. I got a feeling like it was the deck of an aircraft carrier, launching people into Burma. Small enough to be comfortable, there was everything here. And the greatest part about it was that after you had been here a while and got to know people it was fun. I went there for breakfast, here for afternoon coffee, there to the bank, over there to get some item, and it was like one big living room, with the addition of lots of dust.
Here in the north the Thais were some different, and Chiangmai changed faster than Maesai, in part due to all the foreigners. Chiangmai did have that forever tropical feel to it, but I didn't like all the foreigners, how they were endlessly busy getting into hassles with their hookers or trying to screw everybody else over. The foreigners who came to Thailand were often cast out druggies or alcoholics. The missionaries were just as twisted, without so much alcohol. They came from places in the south of the US, to give you an idea of their racial perspective, and you didn't see any minority missionaries, just very white missionaries. No one else was blessed to be here. The missionaries had long histories here with the CIA all the while pretending that they didn't, that they were really normal spiritual people trying to do God's work, like anyone here for long would buy that.

Machinations of a small town
Everything went on here, if one thing could be said for Maesai, it was its tolerance, its very wide acceptance of different perspectives on life. Yours, mine, everybody's. What I like about the orient is the way in which people make in their society and minds so much room for other people.  Like the Thais might not like the Akha, but the Thais in Maesai who worked with the Akha had a different perspective, were accepting, depending on who they were.
     Some Maesai merchants were unable to see an Akha beyond a person to exploit, a household servant. Others were different.
     Sometimes one could see conflicts going on in town, and knew once again that it was best to stay out of it. But generally the Thais tride to negotiate things, resolve them there at the very moment, the system was not always trying to pull your life completely into the gears, not to say that some cash was not required. However, even this began to change as things westernized.
   Not counting the problems, if there was something distinctly nice about Thailand it was that Thailand was different from the west.  The problems with Thailand were the things that it did in response or as a result of payoff by the west. When it came to hazards to the indigenous, many of these hazards started from the west, the World Bank, western farm chemicals and fertilizers, western style prisons, the drug war, vaccinations, the western take on property, western land and forestry practices, consumerism, missionary hospitals that the indigenous could not afford, the CIA, DEA, the war in Laos, the war in Burma and China and the "opium" wars to name a few.

Towns
     Lack of city planning often plagued Thai towns, that had started out small and just sort of spun a web of congestion. Lampang was a hard town to park in. I went there to see Akha prisoners in the two prisons there. 
     Lack of education infrastructure was visible, like a library in Maesai, that took a long time to happen. The park was limited to the one near the hospital, an excercise park. Keeping streets clean would take a street sweeper, but one could not be found. Just people swept the street, they didn't do it often enough for a main thoroughfare and the dirt and dust blew everywhere. The people in Thailand didn't spit as much as some other places. Like China. But quite a few people did their spitting in the street, mixing with dust, and passing on TB where possible.
     As congestion and traffick grew lack of planning on the intersections, lights, location of markets, and cluttering of the sidewalks became a bigger and bigger problem. But that didn't change the fun of walking through an older Thai food market, smiling at the vendors, buying favorites of this and that, having some soy pudding with ginger syrup and just forgetting about it all for a while.  The people around didn't bother themselves with most of it. They were not from the west, they hadn't to worry so many things, they hadn't so many things whipping around in their minds. This became even more comparable when one got out in the smaller Thai towns, a temple in some beautiful lush green place, coconut palms, rice fields of the richest green the human eye can imagine, quiet lanes, and small gatherings of people in the noodle shop. One could slip quietly into one of these places and if you could speak Thai a little, didn't act like a demanding rude foreigner, then you could just slip in there mostly unnoticed and have fun like as if you were a local. That was fun Thailand.  Being white and western was an automatic obstacle to many things, people took you different, and when you saw  how foreigners acted, or remember how you had acted yourself, you could see some of the things they attatched to that, they swung WIDE and made big allowances for the western people who they saw as blind, big or fat, uncaring, rude, demanding, smelly, selfish, mono optic, stingy, quick to think they had been cheated and most dangerous of all, very quick to get angry.
One thing I noticed about Thai communities was that few will give up the personal for the betterment of the collective.  So that would mean that one might not see much sense about community, care of the streets, addressing community problems, fixing congestion, driving safely to keep other people alive, paying attention to other people in line, waiting your turn, putting trash where it belonged.
     To take care? You must be joking, and because we do they are always amazed. Not that all foreigners took care, but some did. The Thais always wondered why we took care at an accident, involved ourselves, tried to help. They often just had the spectator look, stood by, pointed at the body, or picked it up like potatoes and hauled it away with no sense of concern. Their capacity to distance themselves was great.  While the western capacity to be close to the scene, was in obvious contradiction to what western society could do to people at the same time as long it was hid from view.

Contradictions
     One of the nicest things about Thailand as compared to the west was that the Thai mind and society could allow a LOT of contradictions. People were considered friends and enemies on many levels, which of course did not require that you diss someone or not talk to them any more.  As well, people could allow you or themselves many different convergent or apparently contradicting opinions on something or someone, and did not automatically flip into a judgemental position just because you had taken a position.  At the same time they didn't expect you to hold them to it when they took a position and then start judging them harshly.  Thais appreciated to avoid conflict and so if you opted out, or gave them an easy way to opt out, or changed the conversation or topic, they were happy enough. If one overstepped ones self and said something rude or too harshly, one could immediately smile, change one's tone of voice, speak softly and slowly and be pleasant and the Thais were very glad to forget it all. Try doing that in the west. Do something and people will make that their only impression of you and hold it against you forever. Period. There is a black and a white view of everything, and that is that.
       The other thing I didn't see in Thai society that I always saw in America was the attitude of ego and ownership.  In the west, people were immediately ready to show you the liine and enforce what they considered their territory. Ego's were enormous, couldn't get bigger, big guts, big mouths, shoving you around, telling you how it was going to be, you parked in the wrong place, you were standing in the wrong line, it was enough to make you puke. Pulling rank at every turn of the road, then concealing and hiding events behind convenient rules.

Maesai Days, Years
Ah there are many stories from Thailand that I am sure I failed to tell. 
Afternoons at the market, friends.  A marriage that ended or walked out the door I should say.
Motorcycle rides to the mountains, Akha villages, staying over night.  New road construction.  The genocide of Akha culture in Thailand . Pollution.  Injustice. Prostitution on a mass scale.
     My friend, Hom Dwan, who went to Hatyai.
     The beautiful Doi Tung and adjacent mountains .  Orchids.  The many villages I visited. 
Surin. The train.  The Kmer's.  Nan Kai.
After I began my work with the Akha, very seperate than my persuit of money or wealth or business, it began to require more and more of my time, taking it in small bits here and there until it left very little room for anything else. 
As a result there were many hard times I endured in this town.  By logic, when I was out of money, I should have left.  But I knew of a reality that if I left, I would be in a different world and getting back to this place would be hard, and much time would be lost, and who would know if I would make it back at all?
Even in those times in which I did not have money, I had time to gather bits and pieces of knowledge and experience that benefitted me greatly for the work later on.  During times when I didn't have money I saw things that I would have passed by had I money, very important things.  I was also able to determine the emphasis on money between the times when I had it and when I didn't.  It was nice to get to know people that way. Later when I had money I was less likely to get burned. But the important thing is to follow life, not the money, to find some kind of peace in the heart, some hope, some joy, and some ambition.

Maesai Slowly
I was getting to know this region better in slow, forward moving steps.
Mental stimulation was the greatest lacking component.  A conversation or two wandered into town. Maesai had whore houses, a few bars with loud Thai bands and a dirty movie theatre.  No real new  stories here I sometimes felt.  Burma grows and the Tachilek economy is busy with Thai Tourists and cheap Chinese goods.  Some times chinese good were only 10% the cost of the Thai goods.
      The maesai plaza guest house is habitually empty.  Only two or three Japanese guests, most of the others had rented appartments.
Sailom Joi finally got its road side drain system and concrete paving.
The few westerners here either get dumb like Cary and Joe, their elevators not working, or they search for mental stimulation.  There were the occasional fifedoms.  Joe always wanted one of those, enough money and power so he could push people around and feel like a big shot.  Joe Esparza. Married a Wa girl, she was actually pretty nice, everyone deserves some good things. Once he got pissed at her and cut off her hair. She ran home to Keng Tung so Joe bought her dad a motorbike so that she would get sent back. Joe had a smaller wife. A Shan girl, two boys with her, but wouldn't take care of them, that is sad, wether you like someone or not, it is sad to see someone abandon their own. She was pretty smart too.
I was working on the idea of an occasional Akha magazine, so much per copy, when I get it produced.
     Oh yeah, we had 7-11 now here in Maesai.  Air filled food at expensive prices.  Great mark up.  A three baht egg and few greens called a salad, for 25 baht.  An icy coke for 14 baht instead of 8.
Donuts for 15 baht each. I figured if you had a backpack big enough you could easily carry all the contents of the store out on your back, it was all so light.
     The fried chicken stand was still the best deal in town, great flavor, tender chicken, garlic, 15 baht. I would get me a piece of this, some sticky rice, some egg plant and chili pepper mashed into a sauce and take it to the Top North where I would pull up a seat, order toast and coffee, and have a good meal, part mine, part theirs. They never minded, I watched the street go by, sitting at a table on the sidewalk out front.
     Sometimes I met friends there, sometimes I read the paper, sometimes I just sat there alone and had a coke.
     It was important to me to savor the food, to think all day, that one day when my money came, I'd get a piece of chicken, some sauce, and some sticky rice, and two cold cokes, not just one, and ice, the condensation running down the outside of the glass. Fizz coming off the top of it, the cold ice cubes.  And I'd sit there and eat it and drink the coke and think of how many days I had survived, or what had happened, or that I was still alive, in this town so real, so human, so full of humanity and life, at every stage, the winners, the loosers, the contenders, but all there right in front of you in all the grime and intensity, the struggle for life.

Motorcycle Fatality Curve
At the south end of Maesai the road went into a curve. That was the end of town. The man lay in the road dying if not dead, his pulverized twitching body no match for the truck which had crumpled his nearby motorcycle.
The crowd of spectators did no more than gawk until a I approached and then someone said "falang" like they were embarassed so they drug his body like so much trash to a nearby truck and threw him in back, by legs and feet, speeding away.

Maesai, What a place!
The morning was cool before the heat would come up. A killing heat.  You didn’t want to be out in it in the afternoon but around 10am it could also be quite directly hot.
Those who had fever on days like this were unfortunate.  I know of at least two, in a very small circle around here who were dying.  The old woman and Ah Dtee, I suppose.
Goodness  knew what was going on in the villages where there wasn’t the best or enough food.  Life was given up early, one unable to hold onto it.  I thought of all the ways people in the west talked about God. But that was easy for them to say where they felt they controlled so much.  What about people who lay dying here, or watched their kid lay dying, and prayed to God, and no help came?  It put everything in a different perspective when one shifted out of one culture into another and had to take a second look at their assumptions about God. You got cerebral malaria here and you died just as fast if not faster than the next guy.  Lots of people in the west took credit for their comfortable lives. I wondered if it wasn't the inverse of all the plundered third world one saw?  If the third world was plundered by the west, then was the west living on more than its share?  And if it was living on more than its share then was it always right for people in western churches to brag about how much God had blessed them and how lucky they were?  Were they thanking God for their greed, their selfishness and their claim that they didn't have any idea how the west got so much and how the third world appeared to have so little?
      Could one say that the western powerful and colonial world had impoverished the third world? But don't we always hear the west talking about DEVELOPING the third world?  And don't we always hear this sort of blame that is put on the third world for their own poverty, like we really don't know how they got that way or what part colonialism and gun boat diplomacy had on any of this?

Later Days In Maesai
In later days in Maesai, it became increasingly clear that much of what I encountered in the difficult situation of the Akha was VERY much tied to the missions and their relationship to the history of the place.  Helping the Akha wasn't just a matter of fixing a little poverty, but was in relationship to a lot of people and forces who would gladly give them nothing while grinding them to fine dust like between so many large stones.  The missions used them for money bait and cheap labor around many facilities, whose wealth continued to grow and grow. The Catholics in Keng Tung were no exception, and if there was anything noteworthy it was the possibility that the protestants had copied the model many times over and put it everywhere, how to exploit people, build a mission like a small franchise business in Jesus's name, and get money and power.  You could set up a McJesus anywhere.  What a scam. 

Slow Days in Maesai
I have been here a long time in Maesai.  I am not moving ahead with my project as fast as I want to.  There are various reasons for that. 
My writing has gotten more difficult.  Writer's block, who knows.
I have numerous language projects, an Akha word book, the children’s phrase book and a collection of words as well. Mooh Dzurh's brother is working on the NT to put it in the new script. There is also a 300 phrase book and a 1000 word list.  So there is much language work to do.  It took me more than seven years, working with the Akha, to complete the new script. A concise phonetic script.

Looking Back Maesai
Most of the time that I have spent in Thailand those first few years I have spent in Maesai for many different reasons.  All though the time was not wasted it was not always as productive as I wanted it to be.  Never the less I learned a lot about poor people from the experience and how they behave.  I also learned much about the orient.
      Early on I gained frustration with my spare time on hand waiting for orders and so I began to do first aid work and to work with the Akha language.  Some of the christian Akha  often exploited that effort as much as they could with no real responsibility that I was paying for their assistance and wether or not they should deliver results for money paid.  Such a story it is.  Never the less, I did make some progress on the language, getting a system of phonetic pronunciation started and getting a new tonal system designed.  Wether I will do any more with it remains to be seen.  So despite the hardships I made progress, just wasn't at the speed I would have enjoyed.
     Much of my work in Maesai had to do with beads.  Other than that I had lots of spare time, too much.  I made a trip or two to Surin, visa runs to Penang, trips to Bangkok, purchases of medicine, a trip to Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, China at Kunming and trips into Burma.  At Bangkok I sometimes got over to the Thai Pharmaceutical office and store and bought hard to get items up here in Maesai, like fungicide. Clotrimazole or Mircanazole cream.  Very effective against skin fungus.  Skin fungus could get out of control, and when it did, people really suffered.
      In Maesai I didn't feel I got as much done as I wanted, but I saw and wrote about many things.  Other than these stories that occur in a border town there was not much else to talk about.  My experiences with the foreigners was the same as theirs, none of us got along.  I found early on to avoid them, to be careful, one didn't know who one was really dealing with and weird things happened. Nuts, kooks, criminals, wackos.
      Occasionally I was of service to a tourist but this usually took far more time and energy and money than it paid.
In the end the bead business died.
The ruby business is a possibility which I learned something about.
The bead business may be resurrected.
However said or done, the loss, the closure, of the bead business was a great loss to me, both in friends, but also in opportunities that I had only begun to explore.
I tinker with the idea in my mind, that someday, after the project here is running well, I could very well put my hand to this again.
To have experience in the orient, being from the west, is very valuable, the more varied the experience the better the view on life.

Evening in Maesai
The street lay empty and mostly still except for a lone somlor creaking slowly down the gentle slope from the closed gates at the bridge that crossed to Burma.  A few last stragglers made their way home as if trying to get there before the powers that be threw some imaginary switch and brought everything to a halt.
     The long road that led up through town and ended at the bridge was lined with merchant’s buildings on both sides.  The town had a special feel to it, like it had many stories to tell, some obvious, some not so obvious.  When the street was empty like in the evenings there was this wild west feel to the place, like everyone and everything was getting ready for another day of relentless events, too many for the mind to keep track of, as so many things and so many peoples crossed this center of the earth as it were.

Back at the 7-11 Store
I went down to the 7-11, yes, Maesai had one now.  Didn’t hurt.  Someone had learned the idea about clean, well lit space and not too much of any one item.  The place was cool and I got a slurpee like I did when I was a kid of 7 so many years ago at the corner of Jurupa and Adams street in Riverside, California.
The slurpee was cool and I stood in the shade out front and watched people come and go.  Parking their motorbikes, shuffling inside in their thongs and out again.  Sometimes I squatted against the wall, on  my heels, and ate a hamburger there in the shade.
Beggar women from a different world came by.  The shop owner next door signalled to one to come and get some food that he set aside for her. She did. 
I got back on my Honda motorbike and drove down to the fish supply shop to get some food for my two fish that were in the large crock outside my door, room 61.  I had made shade there with sun cloth above and plants of green and cool below.  Then a stack of little turtles caught my eye so I got two for 80 baht each and some turtle food as well. 
One more stop at the copy shop near the old post office on the way out of town and I picked up 500 more sheets of paper for my printer.  Lots of computer work these days, getting some office work caught up and some writing done.
The weather was hot and dry and not too long till April, and they would start throwing water.  I didn’t care for it much, so I just stayed in doors and wrote.  Was suppose to be for three days or something like that but it lasted for two weeks here it seemed.  Part of my year.
Now I had a tv and vcr and could stay in my room.  I wish I had a little portable air conditioner like they make because my room was small, stuffy and hot.  Quieter than concrete but hot.
When I got back I cleaned out the one large crock where I had tried to grow some veggies but there wasn’t enough light so they didn’t do well and the rats ate the tops off.  I replanted some nice ferns, scooped out an area and put a shallow pot that I filled with water and let the two turtles go.  I would probably have to protect them from the rats too.  I remembered the possum that chewed the legs of that turtle my friend had in California and woke me up with its chewing on the shell outside my trailer, trying to get the turtle to stick its head out and feed on some brains.  I chased the overgrown rat off, finished the hideous job with a shovel and buried it and went back to bed.
The rats came to my room a lot.  Dinner was always there, bright pink rat pellets.  They loved them.  Then sometimes they liked water after to cool their hot little asses or whatever the pellets made hot and they drowned themselves in the fish crock or the water dipping crock outside my door.
But sometimes they ransacked around my room and I was obliged to get up and go after them with the fish spear, the rat jumping about and me trying to see where they got behind and then I killed them if they didn’t make it to some hole under the sink. 
But I caught on to the sink and put lots of pellets under it so they could get at the pellets without even coming up into the house.  That seemed to help.  And no visiting children could get the pellets either, which always worried me, the little crawlers.
The Akha family came over earlier in the day, watched a video of a Japanese girl who ran away in Australia from her miserable little husband with the tight shoes.
My room was not a mess, but pull anything out of its place and and it soon would be.

7 - 11 Red Head
Next door to the seven eleven there was a red head and her friends at the clothing shop. Seven eleven had these different prizes and coupons and stuff, which I never kept up with so I always gave them to these gals.  Part of the life here, knowing different people in different ways, all in a day. They always stopped me to take my children away from me, to hold them, to play with them.  Sometimes I didn't get to see my kid for quite some time as they passed the child about.  This clothing store belonged to the owner of the 7-11 and her brother and folks.  She never quit working I noticed.  We noticed it about each other.

25 noodle restaurant 
The "25" was a restaurant on the main street in Maesai towards the movie theatre, where the sign said Sakura House which was up the side street, a massage parlor.  The "25" stayed open very late. If you wanted a meal at two or three in the morning this would be about the only place to get it.
The late night party people came there after the hooker houses and bars closed.
The place was sort of sunk down below the new road now, some tables on the sidewalk, a dirty blue paint.
A fat guy slopping food out of caldrons, never looked apetizing to me.  But Jon knew what to order and we went there often after beer. Nam da ju or something like that, soup with pork and soi curds and greens.
     There was real good food in Thailand but the best stuff was expensive.  The average fair on the road and in the restaurants was greasy and tasted bland.  Spice was often a cover for not knowing how to cook at all or the meat having gone bad.  Well I shouldn't say that. A lot of food on the street was better than food in the restaurants, and safer.  If you got to know the carts you could put together some pretty good low tech fare.  One could always put together a meal, and not have to walk far to do it. And the experience, the people, each place with a different personality.  Mostly, people in restaurants always were good to me, I liked them, I liked to sit and wait, to watch, to enjoy, and to come back again and they recognized me. Its nice when people recognize you, saw you once before, they smile, that is the test, or maybe there is a frown behind it, but it is nice, and I smile back to them, compliment them on their good food, sah bai sah bai.  The small things in life between people.

Jo Jos. 
There was this dark pouty girl in there, many young women actually, racing around, moving the food real fast, your food could be at your table before you sat down. I liked the eggplant and curry chicken over rice, that was spicy but real good, a kind of milky green curry.  The girls moved hot trays, put your food in a small pan and fired it up even hotter, all looked dangerous to me. But in years it closed, around 2004.  The dark pouty girl was gone. I'd go in there just to smile to her, as it seemed to make her more pouty and all the other girls joked her about it.

Ancient massage
The ancient massage was a two story building on the south end of Maesai that was strung with long laces of lights from the top floors to the ground.  There was always a security guard out front, girls, guys and motorbikes.  Going inside you would have a photo album thrust in your hand and a bunch of pasty faced bored girls who would offer to chew gum while you watched for an hour for 150 baht, while they pretended to offer a massage.  Really the place was a brothel, and foreigners were not considered customers, and massage wasn't the real job, so to go there for a massage was in their mind wasting THEIR time.  It sure was a waste of one's own as they didn't know anything about massage.  Much of Thai massage was uncomfortable.  The girls had stiff mechanical routines. The concept that massage of the muscles and tendons could make one feel better, that the hand should try to perceive and the eye might look to the person to see if the grip was too strong or painful was totally lost on the people in even the genuine massage houses.  More often than not, the massage could be painful, or so boring and meaningless that your brain hurt just looking at this person who pretended not to be there.  On more than one occasion I said to the lady, look, you lay here and I will show you what massage is about, and spend most of an hour giving her a massage.  Fingers were eyes, looking for painful muscles, tension, taught skin.

Apples
Of late years you could buy apples from China in Maesai, they came down the Mekong river and were cheap.  An apple from Washington State cost a small fortune for one while you could buy a whole kilo from china.  The Washington state apples came in clearly marked boxes with little stickers on the apples, the apples were bright red and waxy polished and weren't very fresh, already mealy.  They looked very well preserved, almost artificial, unhealthy.  So normally for an apple that looked like an apple and tasted like one, I bought the Chinese ones and made apple pie when I had the time and energy.  There was a lot going on for me to be able to do this all the time. The most time consuming part was mixing and rolling out the pie dough.  I had thought to make a press to do this.  But I made up a couple other tricks instead that made it pretty easy.  Everyone like the pie.

An old bicycle?
Most all the bicycles seemed to lack for brakes and people use their sandle on the front tire to slow it down. Some people ride on a jump seat on back or even the men will ride on the front axle while their friend peddles, anything to get back across the bridge on time.  There aren't as many bicycles here as in China, but still quite a few.  On the Thai side, ladies rode bikes, ladies rode as passengers, but on the Burma side the bicycles were the family car.

Avacados
Dreams and memories of California.  Memories of friends who died, people you grew up with, teachers, students, relatives.  Amazing what a swarthy black skinned fruit can remind you of.  That is the way they were here, don't know if they came from Burma or through Burma from China.  Occasionally I would buy one and cut it, put salt and lime juice on it, was really great that way. They lined up the street in boxes, and fruit, mushrooms and nuts of all kinds in season. Of late years lots of confection fruits packaged fancy from China and tea, teapots with little strainers, fancy Tea shops for tasting.
The avacados sold near the bridge or they could also be found cheaply in Keng Tung.
Over the years there was more and more fruit in Maesai than before, everything in its season.  For anything else one might say, Thailand had more fruit than one could imagine.  One of my favorites was the mangosteen.  They had a fruit like sharamoyas here, but it wasn't quite as good as the ones I had in Whittier, California.  And I hadn't seen any St.Johns bread.  There were powdered flat persimons, dried persimons and oranges. A lot of food on the main street like nothing but a big market. Then sometimes the city fathers would push them all off the street. But actually the city fathers started it, because when Burma closed the bridge with Thailand, the people of Maesai lost their jobs and so out of compassion the mayor asked people to sell what ever they could in the street at the bridge to boost everyone's spirits and this is how the market started. Simple joys.

Axle repair shop, dead trucks on the Keng Tung road
Up the river road just a short way from the bridge there was a machine shop for a long time.  He repaired axles and differentials from broken trucks on the Keng Tung road. He wasn't a pleasant fellow.  Normally one doesn't associate machinists with sleaze and greed, there is too much work involved, it is an artisan trade, but in this case I found an exception. He was rude, greedy, like a shark. I would some times bring by a piece of steel for a pump to have it cut or welded and he was rude and dismissing.  His son was on the ugly side in this same kind of way.  There wasn't as much work these later years as the road to Keng Tung got better, but one could still see the broken trucks with men pulling out the axles, engines, transmissions, differentials, some major breakdown that had stopped them. Maybe when there weren't so many hostages to be taken at the machine shop, business slowed.  For what ever reason the shop was one day gone, maybe moved. I don't know. 
Over by Boom Street mini market down the side road there was a wrecker, he had lots of parts for everything, engines and more piled everywhere, he knew his stuff pretty well, an older man, reminded me of George C. Scott.
The trucks coming down the Keng Tung road were very old and very overloaded.  They groaned and rolled from side to side and they had many buckets, drums, water tanks, fuel tanks, spare tires, blocks, irons and of course a shipload of stowaways for taking care of all this should part of the truck break.  Once broken down they set up camp beside the road for the days it would take to make the repair and get the truck underway again. There was a kind of invincibility to the process. Everything prepared for. Life where you can taste the dirt, the oil, the dust, and see the steel up close, rather than polished paper thin sheet metal like is on everything these days, hiding its increased vulnerability.
The road to Keng Tung, repairs and breakdowns, these things were important. There was this wild west feel to it, the frontier, which it certainly was. To  me the road was great, it was an awesomoe experience each and every time I went  down it. The best times were when I went with friends or by myself.  When I took guests they were generally annoyed with inconveniences, like they missed the whole point of where they were. 
     There were long distances of jungle and farm land where no one much appeared to live and then some more villages, primitive in a world that had forgotten primitive, in a world that was all about manufacturing and the un-natural earth.  So this road, Keng Tung, I loved it very much.

Another Funeral
July 97
Sad music wept from a truck escort megaphone as another young man goes to his smoky funeral.  Now quite common from AIDS.
Some towns have more people dying of aids than new births.
Once again cut off from the land of the living, not much ceremony to it. Wasn't quite the same as going to a grave stone to visit a loved one who was gone, thinking of the times long forgotten, the harsh words, the moments of joy, the unfathomable loss of dreams realized too late to do anyone any good.  There were bridges between humans.  There should be, and often we didn't even realize what someone was about or meant to us until they were gone.  Even people who we didn't know and didn't pretend to like, they were actors on the edges of our life stage, ugly people maybe, but still crucial to all the memories.  I wondered if these ugly mean people weren't sometimes the people we looked back at the most, wondering why we had so misjudged them or felt so threatened by them when now they were dead. And we hoped those in life to whom we had been or still appeared to be ugly, didn't judge us too harshly, that as long as we had breath, we still laid repair to our life, to do better, to be kinder, more patient, more helpful.
I had buried my share of people, and at no time did I find it pleasant.  Not because of the smell or the site, but because of the incredible contradiction to the beauty of life in our eyes and in the bodies of those all around us.  Life was fluid.  Death was very still.  It was this incredibly unexplained collapse of all that was good and lived out, taken down to the cold in a final defeat.  Maybe not so final.  And maybe not so much a defeat, depending on how we lived it.
But there was joy in life, holiness, and people forgot to know this, to think of this, and lived in a puny way, there was so much more.
As humans it was hard sometimes to know how to bless people, to give all the thanks and gratitude that one could to someone. Some cultures had barriers up to this, so that people couldn't easily receive the good you wanted to give them. To accept it was to allow you to get some credit maybe and they begrudged this too. Some people even wanted to stand there and quibble if your good was good enough, or if it was good being it wasn't the exact package they felt they had coming. Maybe they would prefer a good case of leprosy.
Speaking of which, there was a leper colony in Keng Tung. Run by the catholics. A priest at Camillion social center in Chiangrai said nothing was as good as a leper colony for raising money, money just poured in when one had one of those. An interesting note, since the missions at Keng Tung always pretended they  had no money at all. But they did have a leper colony.

Akha Ridge Storm
Above Maesai on the west side there was a mountain ridge, and this was also the border with Burma. This ridge ran south all the length of the Thai Burmese border, a road on top in many places, dividing the water sheds and the countries. From the top you could see into Burma so very far, and the mountains there were beautiful.  Looking east back into Thailand one saw flat rice fields, the valley floor, for miles, as Thailand didn't have so many mountains, but more rice. Rice lands everywhere, sometimes full of water, a deep emerald green, clouds, rain, rainbows.
Once I was up in the border mountains near Maesai on a bigger motorbike and this incredible storm hit as I was driving up the ridge above Maesai.  It was so fierce I stopped the bike and ran and hid in a very thick bunch of bamboo.  The storm raged, at incredible speed there where it crossed the ridge and I waited.  I feared it would even throw the motorbike over on its side.  When the storm was over many trees were broken including one big banana tree.  So I cut through the great banana stems and loaded the bananas, two very large clusters, across my handlebars, to where I could barely control the motorbike, but made my way down the mountain anyway and gave them all to the guest house staff.  They squealed when a rats nest fell out full of baby pink rats. These were pitched into the klong for safe keeping.

The Akha At Joe's
She was rude and laughed, reminded me like a retired hooker, how she treated people.  She made fun of all the customers and didn't help them so finally she got thrown out. She would often carry on bawdy conversations with the one Thai woman there about all the men she had taken, what she liked, and didn't like, all between emphatic phrases and roars of laughter.  "One kilo.  No, No, that will never due, not enough, never less than two kilos!"

Ahm the wa girl, scabies and TB
Later I think she worked at a whore house and died, surely must have.
She worked for me.  For a few weeks only.  Couldn't have gotten thinner.  She chewed a huge clot of tobacco at all times, I mean huge, it filled her mouth, and she had TB and wouldn't take her medicine and left.  I saw her later walking with all the girls from a hooker house, and then didn't see her after this.  Getting these people to take their medicine was very hard.  They were over run and didn't take much of anything seriously, like survivors of a plane crash walking around in a daze, maybe for years.  TB required that you took your medicine sometimes for six months. I had heard enough stories.  One woman telling me that as a child she traveled long mountain trails with her mother and father and they came down this one river and they could see down into the river from the ridge.  There were many Yao tribes people laying dead in the river, so many bodies, they had all been slaughtered, far up in Burma.  Burma had been at war for years, the old Chinese, the new Chinese, all the ethnic groups, the Burmese.  Least now there was finally some order to it. Even the Thai had fought the Burmese in Burma. Elephants and all.

The 01 Karaoke and Bead Shop
The 01 Karoake belonged to Ma Ta as he was called.  The 01. He owned the bead shop too.   His wife was chinese but he was Akha from China.
I bought beads at his shop many times and had a few beers at his massage parlor where he "moved" Akha girls as well.  Actually one half of the place was massage, and the front half was a karaoke for chinese girls who were high priced. A lot of sex selling going on. Once I got talked into going to that side with a friend, by a couple of Thais, but they were real drunk and got upset and we thought it was better to leave, which we did. In upper entertainment places like this it was more polite to leave the Thais to their peace, not intruding, even if invited, it was more wise and in the long run polite to refuse.
     The massage parlor in back became a rather boring place as Maesai commercialized. Before one could get a good massage, but that changed. It was obvious they were interested in only the kind of transactions that made the motorbike payments on all the new motorbikes parked beside the building. 
     But then Ma Ta got killed in a gun battle outside Chiangrai in Jan of 2001. The Karoke closed and became an computer video arcade, the massage place continuing on. His wife's brother continued to tend to the businesses.  However, by this time the family had so much wealth stashed, sending their kids to all the best schools, that it didn't look like it affected them much. 
    A lot changed around Maesai as the army moved in close.

Akha Beggars In Chiangmai
The Akha beggars from Burma had a "train" that they took to Chiangmai.  I wasn't sure who or what it was but they were always able to get to Chiangmai to beg on the streets, make some money and come back. I ran into them often and would buy whatever medicine I needed to fix them up if they were down on their luck, or buy them a meal.
For many years my project was so poor that I didn't often get to Chiangmai.  The road was bad and the bus ride horribly slow and weaving.  Only after I got the truck did I go there much, driving down.

Akha on the bus
The bus attendants always said that the Akha got sick on the bus and they did, even if they stood in back, and the attendants were always kind to them and doused the area with water as a kindness to the rest of us.
When the Akha rode with me they by far prefered to ride outside the truck, rather than inside.  And if they did ride inside they consistently rolled the window down and got sick.

Akha zoo
Vans came up to the villages and markets, full of fat white people all wanting to shove their $1200 camera in the face of an Akha woman, but seldom wanting to be of any help.  The had a camera, that was their "permit" as they traveled about the world consuming.  Sometimes I wanted to think that they were not mean people, they just didn't know, but when people spend all their lives intentionally "just not knowing", then I think that like it or not, they are mean people, deaf to the pain of others, much of what they make advantage of.  The tourists with their spendy cameras always got pissed off when the Akha asked for a ten baht coin after the tourist took their picture. "No, NO" the fat tourist would say, "I don't pay for photos, I'm just a selfish fat f--k and I take what I want for free".

Akha Hand Bag Loi Tung
I had bought an Akha hand bag call a "peh tauh" from a girl on loi tung.  It had sunset colors and design to it.  I bought it because of the pastel effect upon the eyes that the pattern had. She sold near the temple on the Doi Tung mount along with the other Akha and all of their wares.  The mount was a beautiful place full of bells that you could ring.  I don't know what the history of this tradition was but it was beautiful enough. In the later years the Akha came and set up tables along the walk and sold many beautiful wares, I got to know so many of them, they were such fun to visit and talk to and find out if they had problems of this and that sort, what news they had, what they could tell me about conditions they faced.

Shan Attack on Tachilek 1994
The attack on Tachilek for me was without warning, though some reporters knew and were already in town waiting for it, as if it was a killing carnival, pictures of killing for fun.
Many people died, more suffering was brought on the poor and the bridge was closed because the Thais were involved and the Burmese suspected this.
The attack started early, before six I think, and I woke up to look out my guest house room window and saw tracers and explosions and gunfire on the other side of the river starting at the left and moving up the street towards the center of town.
The big gun on the hill opened up defensively, had no downward angle, so could only fire skyward.
I could hear the men yelling as they stormed up the street, much shooting, and then big clouds of black smoke from something set on fire.
Not knowing it was still going on, I went down for breakfast. As I sat beside the railing in my usual space the Shan soldiers soon poured back across the river to the Thai side and got in trucks. A few stragglers came out across the field, a Burmese soldier or two chasing them, and some didn't make it in time and got stranded on the Burma side of the river. About five Shan soldiers hid in the houses. 
The Burmese took up position and fought to get them out of the houses, firing with bazookas and 50 caliber machine guns into the houses, ripping through brick walls, tearing up tin roofs.  The non fighting Shans came out with their hands up and ran to the river. When a bazooka hit a house, the whole house thundered. The Burmese army used a bazooka on one house, quite a large explosion but the men were not in that house at the time. 
Finally the Burmese army burned the neighborhood down to get them out. I saw the long bamboo pole go up in the air with a white flag on it, and the Burmse took the prisoners away.
People fled across the river to the Thai side with some small belongings.  Smoke poured skyward, thick and black.
Mortars fell in the river and the Riverside guesthouse was struck by small gernades.
After the attack a Thai army man stayed in the guest house for many days with a special video camera filming the other side.
One man on the other side had lost a very big house and two dump trucks which he had no chance of getting out when the fire came. After a while he rebuilt with a bigger house than before.
The Burmese quickly built pillboxes of concrete on the other side and strung up much barbed wire but there was no more action between the two countries for a very long time.
This was the spring of 1994 before Khun Sa surrendered. Khun Sa had put it all on for show, and alerted the media, which was all up on top of the hotel we found out, and many people died that day, just for a show.

Akha man at market I split fish with
I had many Akha friends at the market. One fellow was very thin, a hard working Akha in his 40's. He was energetic and fun to talk to.  He had a deap scar on his face where he was cut by a knife one time.  Sometimes his wife came, sometimes not. I would buy a good cooked fish or some fried chicken and we would eat it there together in the shade of the Akha alley market, our backs against the block wall.  I knew many of the Akha there for years, many years, taking care for them with medicine, listening to the language, which you don't have to understand to enjoy.  Soft by times, poetic by others and emphatic so often.  I could still see all their faces and remember them although many were dead and many had gone away.

All the new shops on way to building
Sailom Joi was getting busy at one end with all the shops selling imported items from China for very cheap.  Video CD's were now barely a dollar for each movie. I could barely get my truck down the street on a busy day.  Sometimes it required I either go under the bridge and down the alley or up over the hill to the back side of town, and then out to the highway.

Ant villages
The Ant village that I knew of was east of Keng Tung and north a little.  I don't know much about the Ant people but they all dressed in black with black turbans on the heads of the women.  There were many distinct tribal groups in Burma. 

Banking: The lost 100,000 baht
Oh yes, banking experiences, they deserve their own chapter
Well my friend said he was going to send me a  large check which he did.  I told him how to go about sending it, bank check registered mail.  It came surface mail and on a personal account, a tax exempt account.  Well, he said send it back if I needed to but I went to the bank and asked them how long it would take to clear.  They said two weeks.  I didn’t want to trouble the donor so I said OK and gave it to the bank.  The Baht had been at an all time low of 56 to the dollar.  Well it didn’t take two weeks it took five and in that time the baht rose from 56 to 44.  So I lost about 100,000 or nearly 20%.
What can you do?

Banking Problems
Sooner or later if you live here very long you open a bank account.   The Thai bank personell are always nice and you can make a casual friend or two.  Someone speaks english and they help at the foreign exchange desk.  There was the short pretty girl and then the tall professional woman who I knew for so long. So you open up an account.  Then people send money and you don’t get it and so you keep checking Bangkok and so forth. I used to do business with the Krung Thai bank, it was close to the bridge, but the money got delayed so many times and they always told me to wait two weeks or a month for it after it had been sent so I switched to Bangkok Bank.  But another problem is that the people sending it often don’t really send it. I know they say they did, they really are going to, but it doesn’t get done and it sure didn't happen this time either. But you go and check anyway, and about the fiftieth time you really convince yourself they lied and really didn't send it. Later they may even tell you they didn't, like the six weeks you waited was no big deal, could all be fixed by them telling you now they never sent it. 
Generally most foreigners consider the bank people as stupid.  They aren’t, they just don’t know enough english to tell how the whole things works.  Generally they are pretty good people and always so polite.  The foreigners on the other hand come into the bank in any condition, from the sweaty outside. 
Maybe the money didn’t come so you had to walk everywhere and maybe you had to check once a day and it was all a lot of bother.  Maybe you weren’t eating and your shirt didn’t have air conditioning. They didn’t have the auto scanners in those days where you could check your account yourself like they have now.  But many foreigners don’t bathe or change their clothes and they come into the bank poorly dressed and so forth and then become angry at the bank people, sure, your money didn’t come and you aren’t going to be eating or paying for your room or whatever. Add to that you might have a stomach problem and gee you’re happy now.  So I did that a few times, looked like the angry foreigner because all that I hoped and all that didn’t happen all came together there in a moment of stopping time at the bank desk in that nice air conditioned bank, a sort of contradiction to walking back out onto the hot sweaty sidewalk which was what you were going to be doing next, still broke.  The trick was to prepare yourself for it, like jumping a big wave, so that you didn't get stuck with just that sinking feeling when you went back out and hit the street.  Maybe I had twenty baht left in my pocket, and on the way to the bank I would spot some good mangos and tell myself that after the money didn't come I would console myself there. Even if I had no money at all, then I would plan something else, like go sit on the bridge, or talk to a friend, or hope somebody I knew would show up in town.
In the lobby of the bank a big black grandfather clock ticked nearby, and there was the one guard and then there were a few Thai newspapers and a tv for all the employees to pass the time with as they worked.  Some had sofas while you waited for your bank book to be processed.  I was a cultural genius when I first figured out how the Thai line system works.  It goes like this or at least it used to in the bank. You walk in, you crowd to the front, you make eye contact with the teller you want and push your book under the teller's window or on top of the pile there already.  It was his job to remember who was next, etc.  If you stood in the line like a stiff goat, every body crowded past and you got all irritated at these smaller pushy faster asians who didn’t respect your size or that couldn’t see you thought you were in a line.  And then the bank teller usually took compassion on you as some big dinasour without eyes and got ahold of your book and got you out of there as fast as he could, because they all knew that foreigners blew up like that day in the post office.
Some foreigners even made a point of competing in the line like it was a contest in which he thought the other people there were in a line but they weren’t.  So he would try to prove that they couldn’t cut in front of him, oh no, that wasn’t going to happen, the world had lines and they would just have to learn, and so he would make all these obvious movements with his big sweaty smelly body exagerated to put them all on notice of what they had done and that he wasn’t a manican standing there.  That was always funny and embarrassing to watch if you were also a foreigner.  I got to where I didn’t like going places with foreigners because they always had some lesson to show off how they dealt with Thais, rather than learning to go with the flow. After all, if you were in Thailand you shouldn’t be in a hurry I would think, go to New York for that and run your ass off like a bicycle courier.

The time the $600 got held up
Onetime someone screwed up at the US end. It was the Interstate bank and the money didn’t come and had to be sent again after six weeks.  I was staying at Nimits, that turkey vulture.  Why did I ever work on behalf of these people? Not in a cold day in hell would they show the same traits of sharing with another.  Anyway, the clerk had typed the wrong number, lost the money, and I was in a bad situation to have to wait. Couldn't pay my bill in the village so of course the bill went up with each day.
Few people would imagine what it was like to live among the desperately poor, and in this village the house I was in was full of heroin and speed addicts.  And then you owe them money, while you are trying to help them, go figure. I mean, I was poorer than they were.

The Torn Bank Book
Money hadn't come in a very long time.  Promises that it had been sent, but hadn't.  I was so furious one time that when I walked out of the bank I tore the book in half.  Course next time I came back I had to have another one made and the bank staff joked that I and my girlfriend had a fight over money and thus it had occured.

The Banking girl looses money
I knew this one girl in the Krung Thai bank.
We often talked.  She was very talkative and civil. I liked her, she liked me.
Once we went to dinner with all the other bankers to the Riverside Guest House where the food was good at that time. The view of the river was great. I was shy, cause I spoke very little Thai, and this was all their back yard and they were very polite, neatly dressed business people. She said that normally Thai girls never wanted to be seen with foreigners, but she didn't care. I knew what she meant, so I thanked her for the invitation. 
     She worked at the money changing window.
     One time she came to the guest house at night with one of the other men bank tellers. She asked for me.  She had given one foreign customer a sizeable wrong amount of money too much and wanted to get it back if possible, but they weren't staying at my guest house.  She lost nearly $400 US dollars which would have to come out of her pay.  The person either didn't notice it either or saw it and said nothing. I felt real bad for my friend.

Back From Prison
The Shan fellow had just come back from the prison at Chiangrai.  He had taken cigarrettes to the markert on the Thai side in Maesai to sell and the police had caught him.  His family in Burma had to pay 50,000 baht which was two thousand dollars and he had to stay in jail two months.  He also lost the cigarettes.  He looked well none the less and said the treatment was good.  Just a business transaction.  No problem.  At least the Thais weren't Serbs. But he cursed the Thais anyway, because people, people with souls, just poor and trying to make a buck, got screwed this way. Some of them even died.
In fairness to Thais, I must say that Thailand is very much an open country. You can break the law and go to jail, but survive, and they do compromise, both the law and jail. But if you are not lucky you can die in jail too, sometimes mysteriously without a trace, many did, many Akha also, never had a chance, poor all their lives, tried to do good for their families, got caught at this or that and died. That was a poverty so mean, no one would believe it.  In the west no one knew shit about this kind of poverty and they didn't give a damn anyway.
If you are in a Thai jail you can try and beg on their mercy and get a reduced sentence, try doing that in America.
One Akha I knew had complained that he was habitually sick, so they finally got tired of it and let him out early.
I saw him the other day, running his little store again in San Chai, happy as a lark.  He chuckled just a little, but we were both glad that he was alive, he had been there for years, a long time, and it was happy to see a friend alive when so many were dead.  Everytime I went out in the villages someone else was dead, some tragedy had eaten up more lives, that is all there was to it, like clock work. That is why I kept on helping the Akha.

Big tree lizard

When I had time or needed a break from the congestion of town in Maesai, I would take a motorbike if I could afford it, and ride up on the ridge road. This was unimproved mud and dirt for many years, but later steep concrete.  The views on a clear day could let you see far over the rice lands of Thailand and deep into the mountains of Burma which were inviting and mysterious directly proportional for the fact that they took you AWAY from western civilization, things made of concrete and steel, painted buildings, things that had to be "correct" square, fast made, uniform made, factory made, all of this.
This once I saw this big scaggy tree lizard jump off the road. I turned the bike fast and chased it down a side road, quite a job on a small road with a big motorbike. The lizard was nearly two feet long, rose up clear off the ground when it ran and hauled ass.  Tail out behind, clawlike feet whipping like you were glad the think wasn't any bigger. I chased it till it ran off into the trees. 
I often had to go to Malaysia to do my visa and once I chased a big lizard that was more than a meter long in Malaysia that ran onto the road and then back into the ditch.  I chased it but the damn thing must have lived on chickens it was so fast, and it shot through a sheep fence like it wasn't even there in a blind rush to get away.
I was real lucky it didn't come at me.

Broom making season
Every year the hilltribe people collect the tassles from a tall mountain grass with stems and broad leaves.  They roll the tassles under their hands on the ground till all the seeds are knocked loose, making a green powder on the ground all over the road.
Then they sold the tassles by the kilo to the Thais and the Thais shipped the tassles to elsewhere by the huge truckload and made brooms which ended up in houses all over Thailand. 
By pushing the hilltribe more and more out of the mountains and taking more and more of the land from them, the hilltribe were not able to stimulate the growth of this grass as much and broom tassle was getting more and more scarce, the price going higher.

Army man rapes akha girl
One Sunday a team of Akha workers on the Tachilek side went out to do some kind of city service working in the homes of army officers and one girl went to clean house for a military doctor.  He raped her and killed her and dumped her body.  The Akha looked everywhere for her when she didn't come home at the appointed time in the evening and eventually someone found her body.  The Doctor was implicated and taken to Rangoon where he was later sent to CoCo Island to serve time for murder. But to hear people talk, you always thought that crime went unpunished in Burma.  Try reporting a rape if you were a woman in Thailand, you'd just get laughter.
Another time two soldiers raped a girl from Pah Luang village near Tachilek where Ymm Boeuh lives.  They got caught, the girl died.  They had to pay a lot of money to the family.  The families often got to choose, jail or money, and sometimes took the money.

Baked eggs on the bridge with soy sauce
The coca cola drink seller on the bridge lost his wife and took care of his tiny daughter by himself.  I often bought soda drinks from him during the early years that I was in Maesai.  I could sit on the bridge and watch all the traffic as there was hardly anything to do in Maesai as it was a small border town.  He had a red bicycle cart, with a big red and white umbrella, and made drinks of different flavors.  There was so little traffic on the bridge that he might be there with his cart all day.
A cart also came along selling baked eggs roasted over coals. There were little plastic bags of soy sauce to put on them.  The Thais put lots of things in plastic bags, rubber bands cleverly twisted around the top.

Bead Shop
There was a bead shop in town, well actually there were two, but I did my business mostly at one.  When there was business I bought a fair amount, sometimes cloth and a few baskets, never much cloth items though.  But there were old good beads and I bought what I could of them.  Old Czeck glass and bavarian stone, cobalts, whitehearts, etc.
An old Akha lady, the mother of the Akha husband, made Pah Meeh style head dresses at the door. She could be seen there often.  Except not lately.  I think her son was dead.  At any rate, I caught Ah Daw there sometimes and bought silver from her that she brought down from Keng Tung.  She was a story in herself.
The shop also sold Akha cloth, about 60 baht a loom, which is an Akha measurement about as wide as your arms, more than a meter.  I made a stick for it so I got it always long enough.  Some measured short. This was the Akha woven cloth about 9 inches wide, and dyed in plant leaf dye.  The Pah Meeh village in Keng Tung was good at doing this.  The old ladies had it down to a science.  From hand spinning the thread to be really smoothe, to the way they got the thread ready to weave, then the weaving in a small hut in the yard, and finally the dying process which to me was the most interesting.
For the dying they had many crocks.  The leaves came from two different plants, which they mashed into a paste.  One plant you propigated by cuttings and one plant you propigated by seed.  Once a mash was made the Akha women added Akha whiskey to it to keep it from spoiling.  One crock with the pure mash, then several with various mixes of the mash and water.  It was into these latter crocks that they dipped the cloth and then hung it on the fence to dry.  They dipped the cloth as many as 30 times in this liquid to get a proper blue looking cloth.
They also sold the Akha women's dresses at the bead shop, the synthetic ones and the traditional cloth ones.  They had assorted colored cloths for making the designs on the Akha jackets.  All of this was still hand dyed in some places. The women cut it into small strips to sew onto the jackets. 

Beads in surin
In the Thai town of  Surin, near the Cambodian border there were the silver filled beads.  I went there once to buy, don't remember if I went there twice.  It was a very interesting industry all done at people's homes and they seemed to get good money out of the deal, as compared to other things they might do.  Kaow Sin Arin was the name of the village outside of Surin.  I didn't see the beads around so much anymore, so I don't know if they are still making them. 
The villagers rolled out strips of silver in a metal roller after pulling silver wire through a die.  Then they cut the silver strip into lengths, which the curled around a wooden peg and soldered the side of.  After this they used a tiny hammer to tap the ends over to leave a small hole only.  Tiny wire shaped into rings was soldered around the end hole to make the bead more attractive  Once this was done they took pine pitch, pork fat and sifted dirt and heated it in the right proportions till they had a thick taffy like substance.  This they made into long stick like pieces.  One it was cool it turned hard, so they would heat one piece again, and pull on one end till it was in a taper. They would take each bead on a hot piece of steal, and press the taffy mixture into the end of the bead till the bead was full.  Then they took a hot nail and made a hole through the bead.  Once the bead cooled they would take a shaped piece of wood and make designs of flowers by pressing into the bead, impressing the design in the thin silver with the taffy fill.  One particular house might specialize in one size or style of bead while another house did another style. They would make beads in batches, and after each batch decide if they wanted to switch production to a new style of bead that there was not enough of.  So all in all, in the whole village, a large quantity of these silver foil beads were made.
The villagers were all actually Kmer as the area had been Cambodia territory before the Thais took parts of it over.  One could see the Kmer ruins here and there. The villagers also spoke Kmer as well as Thai.

Being chinese
The owners of the shops in Maesai who were Chinese, which made up most of them, were a hard bunch.  A chinese shop is a very strange arrangement, like a few items set in the mouth of a very large sea bass.  The owner and their elderly folks always live in the dark back, sometimes in view, sometimes not.  Occasionally they wander out.  The children of this family fortune are prisoners of the shop, and seldom get time off.  In addition there must be bright smiling faces at the sidewalk, so always for this you need slave girls, otherwise no one would ever come in and buy from these people.  Of course the slave girls are not Chinese, least not in Thailand, they are Shan or Burmese or Hilltribe.  The Chinese shop owners don't know how to smile much.  Now if you should come on a day when the slaves have quit or gone home, then the lady in the curled hair will be more in view and when you ask her if she has this or that she will just reply "no".  That is all.  You are looking for something.  You have money.  You want to buy it.  "no".  Do you have it? Do you know where I can get it.  Doesn't matter what the question, only "no".

Being the monkey is no fun
So in the early years in Maesai there were seldom any foreigners who lived here and I don't think that the Thais were really used to foreigners so no matter where you went you stirred laughter, no matter what you asked.  This was annoying sometimes, and always you heard endlessly "Falang"  as the Thais called foreigners.  If you could understand Thai you would hear even worse things sometimes.  The Thais could say really stupid rude things with you right there if they thought you didn't speak Thai.  Always it was something super dumb. My friend Jon, who understood Thai better than I did, often understood what people in restaurants said and it always made him mad, leaving me the feeling maybe I was better off not to speak or understand Thai better than I did.

Bicycle, mans shirt, I fall down
So I got this bicycle to ride around town for fun, nice bike, little long on the straight handlebars.  They had these sticky rubber grips.  I wasn't sure they weren't magnetic.  Anyway, they had an affinity for this man's shirt as I went by, caught just a little and then really bit into the shirt and whipped the front wheel, me going off to the right.  Gee, was I really  that close?  He of course was unharmed and we had an excellent laugh of the ridiculous matter.  I was some scratched up, and a little sore the next day, but otherwise unharmed.

Bicycle shop
The Chinese bicycle shop near the top north was quite useless, but the one down by the market in the middle of town was very helpful.  The owner, she spoke fluent english and was always in the shop and always very polite.  But then a friend stole the bicycle and I never bought a second one.  About the same time they stole my boots.

The Barber
There was this old barber behind the gem market. He had a bad eye.  He had been a Maesai cop. Someone shot him close up, but didn't kill him. Damaged his eye though. He wasn’t the best but I enjoyed relaxing while he took his time.  Sometimes he knicked me because I don’t think he could see all that good even with his glasses on but he was friendly and I always like a good close shave now and then and get all my whiskers trimmed and kick back in the heat and close my eyes while he worked.  Least they always put in a new razor.  But after a while he got the shakes and knicked me so much I stopped going to him. He  moved shops, was there a while and then I didn't see him anymore.  But I remember his wooden shop house, wooden doors open, pin up calenders on the wall.  If he was sleeping his wife would call him out, in this way, Thais were very nice. He was always accomodating, while other barbers were better shaving but not so relaxed in their shops.  So for me to go to his old shop was always a treat, he was always pleasant, told me he had a daughter in America or Australia, pointed to her picture on the wall.  Or he would be busy talking to some old man hanging out in the shop and I could pick up on this and that part of the conversation.

Building Maesai
Maesai was getting built up and so was Tachilek.
New tall buildings got built on the new concrete road we had here on Sailom Joi. Now the road was wide and nice and everyone began building nice houses, tearing down the old ones.  Soon you couldn’t see much of Burma, but Maesai wasn’t sleepy anymore so I wasn’t so sure it even mattered.

Edward
Edward the Pakistani had a shop in Bangkok now and I hadn’t seen him in a while.
Once we stopped in at this restaurant for a beer.  He was fast with the girls.  He made this one girl and took her to the back room for a good poke.  Asked me if I wanted a turn which I diplomatically turned down. 
Edward was one of the most enegetic obstacle overcoming people I ever met.  He was very careful how he wired his vocabulary.  He was very conscious that the words he picked and used, if not fully positive and success oriented in the beginning would bring about certain defeat.  I went far and beyond lip service, he put it firmly into practice, running on a self produced coffee at all times.  Did this mean he didn't have setbacks? No, matter of fact a deal had gone bad in Bangkok where he lost all his money and then the people came and shot him over and over, but he didn't die.
I saw the bullet holes.  Chest, arms, back.
He never used the NO word.  Not only didn't say it much, he never used it.  He always used the YES word, religiously, a solution to everything in every situation.  He was an excellent salesman.  He saw quite surely that people need to give themselves permission to succeed and that it is simply a matter of mental paper work being shuffled to make a sale of anything and that is what he did as a salesman.
He showed me how it worked, I wished I had studied it more because it was so clever.  There was sure a lot one could learn from this guy. 
He ran a clothing business, and also was married to a Thai, and also ran an English school in Maesai, one in Mae Chan and one in Chiang Saen for a while.  He was very fast at talking to people and helping them out.
He could move quickly from one sales job to another, not miss a beat. 
He had grown up in Pakistan and was now working back in Bangkok.
I never met a more energetic smiling person, quick to talk.  He grew however more on the dark side, not using his insight and gift always in a good way.

Baking oven
I got my first baking oven with the first school and baked bread and pies and all else.  Was a humble beginning and everything here was very hard to start up and keep going.  After a while the man wanted the oven back and I was willing to be done with it so he came and got it.
I let the school go and would start it again later.

Bamboo kick ball
The Akha and the Thai both played an energetic bamboo kickball.  Sometimes played in a circle on the street or in the village center, it got most energetic if a net was set up with a team on each side. This was a favorite of hill tribe and motorcycle taxi drivers. Sometimes when you went to hit the ball with your hand, your hand in fact would get nearly kicked off by the foot of a high flying young man on the run.

Bamboo rafts
Coming down the Maesai river like islands of green, these rafts made of many bamboo pieces tied together was how the jungle men got the bamboo down the mountain to Maesai to sell.  The rafts were heavy because the bamboo was fresh and green so water swept across the tops of them and the men poled them along.  West of Maesai in the mountains from where they had come the river was very rough and full of rocks. I was reminded of Huckleberry Finn.

Bats and bugs
There were lots of bats here in Maesai.  Once some kids gave me a tiny baby black one, soft black like leather, it climbed up whereever you put it.  Finally I left it outside, not much I could do for it.
Sometimes I hit the bats at night on the motorbike. They would swerve for a bug in the motorcycle light, I don't know why, and not pull up in time and hit the top of my helmet very hard. When they did this they would let out a tiny frightened cry.
There was a big buzz bug, cicada, that flew aggressively around a light at night and made a buzzing noise.  I caught one, and their entire abdomen was an empty shell and they had two hammers inside that vibrated together to make the incredible sound inside. A drum of their own.  The Akha pulled the legs off these bugs and gave them to the children to hold after tying a thread around them with a stick.  The Akha kids let the bug fly madly around buzzing as it went.

Bear at house of man who Atookala bought truck from
This guy lived up against the mountain not far from Som Pah Sak Akha and had a bear in a cage, bears get into lots of trouble otherwise.  But the cages are too small and the relationship between a bear and a cage always seems to end in cruely.
Two young men came up who were working for a wildlife project as volunteers.  They were traveling around Thailand and looking for caged bears.  They couldn't release them yet or buy them to freedom, but they were making maps of where all these captured unfortunate animals were.  Many of them were from Burma of course.  Once I saw two small cubs at a Chinese Circus in Tachilek which were for sale. They were small, muddy and stinky of course, about a foot or so long.

Bees
The Wang Tong was a big pretentious hotel near the bridge.  They said it was five star, surely was no better than a four star.  The owner was said to have sold icecream on the street in Keng Tung many years before.
They built it while I was first here in Maesai.  About eight floors up under the roof eaves there were some big honey combs hanging with bees as is the asia style.  I took an Akha up to the balcony to see them, he had never been in an elevator before.
The owner left them there because it was good luck for his building he said.
Maesai had a beekeepers association but Chiangmai had an association shop right across from the night market and compared to what things cost in the United States, the boxes and wax and all the tools were real cheap.

Bit by dog
I had these high top boots, and I was walking down the street one day when these two big mean dogs jumped on a smaller black poodle like dog at his own house.  This happened right at my feet and I kicked at the two big dogs because they were just wailing on this smaller dog and he was flailing all about to save his life, in which event he caught my boot, just above the top, and hooked my leg.  A few days later he was still alive so I didn't give it any worry.  The owner's son at the guesthouse had gotten bitten and taken all the shots for rabies.

Beggars rounded up by police
There were lots of beggars in town and occasionally there was a round up by police.  They always came back and so I always wondered why the police bothered since it didn't seem to be for more than a moment that they rounded these beggars up. The beggars pestered everyone on the main street near the bridge.  When there was war or something they didn't come, which of course was great. And that only got worse with years. In a casual kind of way you could teach them nothing, and they wanted to learn nothing.  Had one set up to work with them over many years, there might be some progress. I did what I could. Many of their parents were addicts to heroin or opium or both.  In the later years the boys got into sniffing gas and glue and messing about, which was rather sad. There were a lot more sad stories here than good and so many events and people willing to pull everyone down.  But the fact of the matter was that the beggars still made more cash for their families than many other families earned working hard, so the street always supported a number of them.  Be it Thai or western tourists, the beggars hoped to get some coins.
Some people came to town and feigned to help the children, but never in any way that had any continuity to it or took the time to break the cycle.  You could throw all the money in the world at it and yet if you didn't stick to it persistently long enough it would do no good or even make matters worse. You had to be  hard and caring both at the same time, nobody's fool, but always quite a lot of grace and mercy for the human condition.

Behind the press, the missing answers to the book about Naga and Lahu
So I paid this guy to put together some dictionaries for me, actually small pocket books, more or less.  He was suppose to do five hundred, and distribute them. In the meanwhile I had to travel and was in no position to know for sure if he in fact printed five hundred. But I didn't doubt him. But one day years later, when I was checking at the press shop I saw some left over covers from my book behind the press. It occured to me that I might have been tricked and to ask the printer how many he printed.  He said sixty maximum!  Oh well, so much for that story.  Probably, what I wanted to get done, was ranked less pressing than what my "friend" wanted to get done and in fact if that had been the case, would have been nice if he told me.

Big catfish, turtle
The guest house offered a great view from the balconies and one day I spotted the typical battery pack electric fishermen going up the river.  Soon someone had a big turtle, big as a football and another had a very large catfish nearly a meter long.  I was quite surprised and this was into the dry season with not much water in the river at all.  I then heard that this is when they go upstream.

‘Big baskets’
Western dress standards are not exactly the same for asia.  Asia tends to be more polite.  On this particular occasion a black woman in her thirties came up to the bridge in very short cut off jeans.  I mean these jeans had pockets in back, no more cloth than that.  "Big baskets", yes that woman has "big baskets", said the Burmese women as they roared in laughter that was difficult to conceal.

Blacksmith near the afternoon market
Not far from where I bought soy pudding from the old Thai lady in the afternoon Maesai market there was an old Thai man who was a blacksmith, lots of charcoal dust and ash around his place. He made knives and whatever else, an old man now. He could help me with this and that, heating things up, or forging something. Knife and other work was integral to any Thai or Akha village.

Hardware past Huai Krai
On the super highway I had friends at a hardware. This is where I got concrete and rings for my well projects. Generally they were dependable so I continued to buy from them and have them truck supplies locally.  They did not however like to go to the mountains.  If it was at all past three in the afternoon the likelyhood that they would go was remote. If I got there early enough they would haul just about anywhere, for a price.
The owner's husband died. She knew Buay in Maesai, the woman who was married to Tom, the American, who ran off with their son.  Well Buay went to the Bahamas to work as a nanny but later got fired. She took the people's son all over the island without permission.  And she apparently didn't do her job very well, so she had to come back.  She was going to go to the US to find her son, but apparently that didn't work out either, or she went and couldn't find Tom, who was living near Spokane or something.  But Buay was sort of weird. Word was she had hosed the town pretty well, something people often did here, as I had seen. She went back to work at her mother's small drug store near to the police station.

Boards on head, lumber to town, sailom Joi
Skinny withered men walked down Sailom Joi bringing cut boards, cut by hand, that they floated down the river and then carried through town and sold.  They carried a few at a time on a donut of cloth either wrapped on their head or on a shoulder.  Very hard work, trousers wrapped up above their knees and nothing but sinyew.  Almost every man had been doing this for too long, ankles and knees swollen from the weight.  The wood was green and wet, and it barely floated it was so heavy.  The price on boards in the lumber yard was so high, one was not surprised there were "other" suppliers for the occasional board.  Lumber in Thailand was very controlled in the later years, illegal logging had always been a problem, and now Thailand basically stole as much wood as they could exploit from their neighbours.  When one went to the lumberyard the wood was all incredible hard woods, some of it now even imported from Borneo and places like South America.  As long as wood showed up, no one cared where it came from seemed to be the attitude.  One could buy boards of dark almost black wood like teak and other such, which one would not be able to touch in the west.  I didn't have much need for it, but couldn't help but notice its value.  The stuff was hard as rock to cut and very beautiful.

Bomb next to the burmese building
There was a big bang a few nights after Tachilek was attacked there in 94.  We went and took a look, and someone had laid a  bomb up against the new governemnt custom house on the Burmese side. Of course they didn't know what they were doing and it didn't do any damage, just left a big black mark.

Boo is fresh crab
Som Tom.  I ordered it when it was hot weather.  Green papaya shreddings.  Tomato. Peanuts, garlic, sugar, lime and chili if I wanted.  Normally people put fish paste and crab in it, the dark ones from the creek but I avoided them, they weren't cooked, not a good idea I thought. They also put a kind of granulated sugar paste in it.  I learned where to go for the best stuff, this or that woman who could make a good mix depending on where one happened to be when they got hungry for it.  Usually there was this glass box with all the green papaya shavings in it, and tomatoes and pieces of egg plant.  All the fixings were there, I gave the woman instructions on how I liked it, then took a chair at a table where it could all be served up, and relaxed.

Border line monks
Up on the hill overlooking the river and maesai there was a border line outpost that the Burmese ran.  There were Burmese monks there and just a couple of huts.  I got there by walking up the trail to the left just before the Maesai Guest House. 
Religion always thinks it owns tops of hills.  Never wants to leave anything to nature.  In Thailand it is temples, in the west it is shrines of another sort and crosses.
The monks had this beautiful spot, I think it was some effort to find common ground rather than fighting. But when I took the super tall guy with the green hair and his girlfriend from England up there, just for a hike, turned out there was a Burmese intel guy there too. Didn't look too happy that we came, but the view was spectacular, so it was worth it. We left after a while, bid the monks good bye.

Red Tassle Trees
There are some trees here that have long red tassles on them.  It is a flower of sorts.  The Akha copy this for their head dressess by dying chicken feathers that they weave into the threads of a cotton  cord. They dye the chicken feathers red and it makes a tassle.  The long red tassles on the bushes are about the same length, around 8 inches long, hanging down all over.

Brass casting and small kiln
Well, for a while someone was going to order brass cast beads and ornaments from me and I was going to set up a kiln to do it.  A good idea but never materialized.

Breaking a bottle
Once in the market I saw how drunk Thais like to fight, they like to break the end off a bottle and go for the face.  Sort of stupid. Generally when they get drunk and angry they can't back out and things go from worse to worse, a good time to get a long way away and stay away.  Just because someone walks off in anger, don't suppose that they won't be back in five minutes with a knife or a gun.

Brothels get rebuilt bigger and one was shack brothel from taxi newyorker days
This was a brothel you passed on the way to the market.  Poor, there was always a girl or two laying on the benches in the early afternoon, getting ready for the night shift.  In some ten years I had seen as these owners built their business.  Their buildings were torn down to replace them with bigger and more working rooms.  TV's, refrigerators, cold beer, all the trimmings of brothel prosperity.  Hard to say how many girls had come and gone, how many lives, how many of them got aids and died.  Dying, didn't have to be by aids, they all appeared quite dead even while living.
A curse for them, a curse on them, few would escape it.  It was frightful to see the places, deaths door, hope destroyed, put out in fire as it were, and only the shackles left. The girls were simple mountain girls, Shan girls, girls who tried to make something better for their family, but their family didn't look long to the future.  Many men took the girls till each girl could take no more.  They came in soft, fresh, pleasant flesh and happy hopeful faces.  But with time the sorrow carved into their faces and they tried to distance their face with a mask of white powder, festers here and there, many rabid things racing wildly through their bodies, their health declining with each man, their future, their lives.
Men, caught between desire and observation of the tragedy looked on.  It was hard to understand the driving force except that there were a lot of men who could not afford a wife, and came to these places instead.  They were instant satisfaction, an endless supply of young flesh, always looking permament but never so, and over the years hundreds of girls moved through these places to never return one could suppose.
When I looked at tragedy I was filled with the thought of why it could not be turned around but also at the subtle way in which people took part in the tragedy, not looking at the bigger picture, but looking only at the window of time that appeared to them, so that they felt as though it was no tragedy at all and that they themselves were not contributing to it.
From this one brothel with the dirt floor and the tourquoise painted metal gate, the New Yorker had met his lady of love and lost all his money, sad, he went back to New York to drive taxi once again.

Buddist necklace stands
Collectors gathered the buddhist images and cleaned them, traded them, selling them on the street from little stands.  Was rather interesting the different people who took to some specialty job and tried to make a living at it.  I never knew how they did make a living but was always thankful that people tried different things which appealed to the eyes and made life more interesting to the rest of us.
Usually a middle aged or older man, with his little stand set up, a lense in one hand for looking at detail, maybe a strong light, and repairs for people passing buy.  Men stopped by to look at this and that neclace and the detail of the images.  There were also magazines published that had many details of lore about these Buddist images.
The images themselves were enclosed in a silver or gold locket, with a glass front window.  Some men, maybe men with greedy bad lives, wore many of these around their necks for a kind of protection.  Humans were always looking for ways to protect themselves from the retribution of their own private forgivenesses.

Bullet holes in brothel steel door
One of the brothels down in the Koh Sai District where all the brothels were had big dents in the steel doors from where a drunk cop fired his gun off when he couldn't get what it was he wanted.  I had seen this same telltale trace on gas pumps as well.  No one there, well just shoot the gas pump, take me to  your leader or else!
Bullet tracks could remind you just what all kinds of other lives this place had, dark sides, sinister sides, the stories abounded when you got around a bit and listened to the tales.

The Chiang Saen Corner
There was a man near the antique shop on the corner. In the porch area out front, with a sewing machine, been there for years, hardly noticed, right on the sidewalk, and the man next to him made keys. This was a busy corner, on the main Maesai road, right in the middle of town, east side, and this road led to Chiang Saen if you took it out of town. Used to be there was a fish shop around the corner, a guy who repaired TV's after that, and all along the street the blue pickup trucks waited for riders to Chiang Saen.  On the opposite corner was an old drug store.  A friend went in there one time to show me how they sold tincture of opium.
The antique shop sold silver bracelets, some quite large with porcelain inlaid flowers, and other items.  I bought an Israeli medalian here once. They had textiles and old battered wood things. I wasn't sure who all the customers were and I think, like all the other stores in town, it was a front for something else, some other real business.
Next door to the antique shop was a book store and a newpaper stand.

Building styles, concrete replacing Thai teak
Some nice concrete building styles are making their way to north Thailand.  The new stuff sure has much more class than the ugly boxy chinese style. 

Burl Wood
Burl wood was plentiful in Burma and some Japanese marketed it to Japan or Europe.  These later days I even saw burlwood boxes showing up in Maesai, I had thought it beautiful for years and now that I saw them for real on the street I couldn't imagine why I would need one or what I would use it for? 

Burma in revolts
Bertil Litner wrote "Burma in Revolt".  He was married to a rebel Shan.
The Burmese didn't like him.  They thought he blamed them for conditions in Burma, but western people were always criticizing places they couldn't go.  The Burmese were glad they weren't america maybe.  I was glad Burma wasn't America.  But Bertil didn't write a book about the slave girls of Thailand. They were everywhere, but it wasn't a story.

Burma market
The Burma market on the Tachilek side was cluttered.  Lots of animal parts for sale.  But also lots of great bronze, particularly bells, cymbals and gongs that had fantastic bronze sounds.  You could not find nicer sounding bells. And they also had many designs on them, some crude and some fine, or some unusual scene.

Burma runs its own show
Burma ground along, a slow economy and everything poor and very conservative.
Didn't seem to care what Thailand wanted, Burma always did its own thing.  If the bridge closed, it closed, everyone buckled down and that was it.  But now in these later days Tachilek, though still dusty, showed lots of prosperity, lots of business, full of trucks and cars, many with Wa license plates.

Burmese 1st mate, no log entry
There was a oil tanker captain who often stayed at the Maesai Guest House for a few weeks at a time.  Once I met him.  He told me that as a Brit, he like the Americans.  He was captain on an American tanker and one time his Burmese first mate took the helm, while he went and got a shower.  The tanker was on autopilot going north up the west coast of Saudi Arabia. While he was in the shower he felt a strange vibration.
So he came up to the bridge to take a look and the ship was off autopilot. The tanker was heading due east instead of North, as it had been, and they were run aground off the coast of Saudi.  He asked the First Mate what had happened but he could not answer.  So he called the US office, where the man told him to have some champagne and take a break while they decided what to do.  Scavenger ships were soon pulling along side.  In the end they pumped off a large quantity of the oil, which the scavenger ships took, and they refloated the ship and got back on course.  All told, including repairs, the incident would cost the company millions of dollars. 
According to maritime law he offered the first mate two choices.  Leave the last log book entry blank, or write it in.  The first mate chose to leave it blank, then took leave of his job and went back to Burma.  Many people in the merchant marine were from Burma, even the crew I met on the mediteranean ferries were Burmese.

Burmese airplane to tachilek
Twice a day there were flights to tachilek and the plane came in over the river. Once it didn't make it. The pilot tried to land a second time in the rain, was given permission to go on to He Ho, but tried one more time, possibly on command of an officer on board, and struck the mountain near the airport.  No one spotted the plane for five days while the Shans looted it.  Many people lived but were either killed by the Shans or died of their injuries.  In the end several people were said to have been executed for taking part in the looting.  It was even rumored that some of the women were alive and were raped and killed.  Many photographs circulated of the wreck till the Burmese army tried to collect them all up.  Pictures of Burmese Army officers caught in all the twisted metal, gruesome pictures of humans in their final pose. A junk collector salvaged the air plane metal.

Burmese book keeper, knife tooth, this was tin tin
The book keeper was a pain in the arse.  Her name was Tin Tin. She would come out to the tables while people were eating and say rude things. Once I went into the kitchen and got a big knife and she wasn't ever rude after that.
Later she had a very bad tooth and I helped her with that, so we became good friends.
We were friends many years.  Then she got a Japanese boyfriend.  After a while her sister came to town to work, a very beautiful Burmese woman, but when she got involved with a Canadian Tin Tin got angry and beat her very badly.
She left from the guest house and went to work at the boss's shop.  She was very sad, and the Canadian man let her down, not having any experience at such things.

Burmese bring goods to sell on maesai sidewalks
They clutter the sidewalks endlessly, some are rude, some are not, but the burmese like to rip the customers off or talk badly about them behind their backs in english if they don't buy.  Generally don't bother to have the pleasantness of the Thai, even if the Thai don't mean it. But this was all part of the hard life of hawkers at a border, working to make enough money to feed their families, one could not judge them too harshly. We were many friends, and we always talked about what the latest news was, who was in town, what was going on, and what the cops were up to.

Burmese carry home bits of construction debri wood
In the evening, before the bridge closes, the Burmese workers head over the bridge, bundles of wood tied to their bikes, or carried on backs and heads.  Little blocks of wood, a rolled piece of corrugated tin, some bundled cardboard, some twisted rebar, bundles of cut binding strap. All of it spoke of the poverty on one hand and the resourcefulness to use everything for something useful rather than abandon it.

Burmese consulate takeover
A few days after the activist and Burmese renegade Johnny was out of prison in Bangkok he got together some other guys and took over the Burmese embassy. Then they were flown to the border in helicopters and released so the "hostages" would be unharmed.  The Burmese figured Thai complicity and so they closed the border bridge, during which time many people drowned trying to get across the river.  Later Johnny and others stormed the hospital down that way to get treatment for their wounded.  The Thais over ran them and captured the hospital, and after the process killed everyone of the ten Burmese with a gunshot to the head.  Johnny escaped. Later he was caught by the Thai army and an officer executed him. He ended his career this way.  The Thais were in part making it clear to the Burmese after the fact that they wouldn't tolerate these guys after the embassy raid.  The Thais were always kissing Burma's ass when they wanted a favor. Otherwise they didn't like the Burmese, but the feeling was mutual.  The Burmese had lots of raw resources and ultimately to get it, the Thais would do quite a lot of ass kissing. The Burmese got jerked around by the Thais but were much tougher people.  Lives in this region were always cheap.

James Mawdsley's Time In the Keng Tung Jail
James Mawdsley was up our way, this protester to Burma, he brought difficulty to the Burmese government and the Burmese government put him in prison.  James ended up in Keng Tung, in his own little building, in his own little cell.  Some of the Akha I knew had seen him there, were quite sure what it was all about, but it did nothing for their lives. James went home and wrote a book, that was his fifteen minutes of fame, a westerner trying to make the world like they want it, overlooking all the inconsistencies of their position.  I never saw the Burmese turn down help. Here Burma was right there at the edge of Thailand, there were lots of tourists, but never anyone bringing aid to take across to the other side. Why not? If they were so concerned about Burma, why didn't they bring practical aid? There was no law against it, no moral law, and the Burmese were in fact quite appreciative of this sort of help. At any rate, James stunt cost his family a lot of grief, and generally made everyone around the border more jittery.

Burmese cutting forest near shan area
Up in north shan state near monglar area the burmese were cutting every tree for firewood for charcoal or the brick kilns of keng tung.  Bricks for construction everywhere.  Later however, concrete construction became more popular as the road from the boarder got better, and the last time I went up there I found a big fancy officer's center in Keng Tung.

Burmese guest house under water
The single guest houses across the river in Burma all flooded every year till they filled the whole place with dirt and rock and started building a casino.  The casino was large and right across from my place, the work stopped for the mini border war but would start soon again as the bridge opened and they could buy more concrete. Rumor was that it belonged to Chavalit's wife.

Bus runs over beggars boys leg
The main street of Maesai in the old days had a lot of buses on it. The buses came to the end of the street, turned around and then parked to one side. This beggar kid sat down behind the bus to Chiangmai and then the bus backed up over his leg spitting the flesh but not breaking the leg of all things. I could not imagine how the bone was not broken.  I wonder if he lived to grow up?  I think the leg healed. Those days near the bridge were really poor, back then this whole region was quite poor and the road to Maesai was nothing more than a small battered ribbon of blacktop.

Bus trips
The long bus trips around Thailand or from north to south to get a visa were mostly horrible, not the travel, but going without a shower, the cramped seats, bad food, and air conditioning that made you sick, the slowness of it all. 

Burma rock pit
On the Burma side there was a rock pit where workers blasted rock from the mountain side and workers broke the rock into pieces with hammers and it was used for mixing with cement.
I knew many Akha who worked here when they didn't have any other work, but many were injured by rock chips.  One man had an infection in his leg which damaged by a piece of flying rock when he was swinging a big hammer. The infection exposed the tendon from one of these rock chips.  I got some medicine for him and hoped that it healed.

Badmitton
Kids played it on the main street of Maesai in front of the top north at night.  Without cars and motorbikes and food hawkers the street got very big and empty.  But of these last days the street stayed busy later and later into the evening with people setting up a small night market, selling this and that, having fun too.

Batman motorcycle woman and the spoke in my tire
I rented a motorbike with a friend and didn't get far when the rear tire went flat and I had to have it repaired. The owner, when I came back,  she didn't believe it was there when I set out.  But I hardly picked up a motorcycle spoke off the road when one from the wheel was missing.  The shop owners were quite ready to blame you for damage,  but then when you saw how foreigners treated their bikes it was no wonder.  People who nearly destroyed the bikes would take them back and plead that the motorbike was exactly as it had been before they shot off the cliff. I showed her the piece of steel I pulled out of the tire and she relented.

Burmese charlie knife fight
This guy got drunk and fought with Charlie at his house, chopping charlie in the face with a knife. Charlie pulled out a hidden knife that he had in the house just for such events and stabed the young man in the stomach.  The man lived but charlie's face had a huge scar. The fellow was the son of a rich man and came back later and apologized after his stomach was all sewn up. 
Charlie married an Akha girl from the guesthouse, a nice girl who cared for him when he had malaria.  They had at least two kids when I visited their house the last time.
Charlie somehow ended up with a baking oven and ran himself a little bakery.  He said the bread spoiled, but not if he put a lot of chemicals in it.  He hired a baker to bake all the bread for him. 

Burmese guy pitches 2500 baht powder in river after searched by cop 
I was sitting near to the bridge in a restaurant and I saw the police were searching this young Burmese guy who worked in the other restaurant next to the bridge on the downstream side. They didn't find anything but just when they turned away he threw a small pack of heroin into the river.  Later I asked him about it, he said he lost 2500 baht.
Many foreigners came here and used the heroin which was too strong or polluted and they died.  They didn't know how to mix it in the blood properly and their hearts stopped while the needle was still in their hand. 
Other people put a small amount of heroin on the tabacco of a cigarette and smoked it.  If you put too much this would kill you too.

Burmese guys I know
There used to be many hawkers at the bridge.  Some of them, many of them, had an eye ailment, where their eyes were very red and there was this tissue growth covering up part of their iris.

Musicians
     On this particular day, I and a German friend were investigating an alley to find a woman that had a little soy curd making operation set up. While we were looking for it, this blind boy came down the alley with his sister.  He played this wooden block by clacking it on another block. The one block had been cut in a certain way so it made a resonating sound I think and that is what he did for people to get a donation. 
The hard wooden block had cuts the length of it, side by side, but not all the way through. At least he did something. He sang and she guided him along to where he would sit down in front of the next  house.
     Sometimes one would see blind people with a small amplifier, singing traditional Thai folk songs as well, an old woman or sister leading him, holding out a tin cup for coins.
     We moved on and next to the river we finally found this little hut, boards nailed together, the place looking like it was nearly falling apart, and there in side were all the pots and workings of the woman who made soy curd.  I can't remember now if my German friend bought any or she was already out for the day, but the whole operation was most interesting, what people do, how food is made, what the rest of us get to enjoy.

Burmese man, Burmese girl, American Fry from Colorado
This American man named Fry was in town to buy gem stones.  A Burmese woman from one of the shops near the bridge came to his room to see him because she was with this big Burmese guy who she did not want to be with and hoped that the American would save her.  But he had not a clue and the Burmese man took her to his room and she got raped all night.  The Japanese man who lived next door told of it.  Once such things happen near my room as well. I went up and banged on their door and told the man to leave the girl alone. 

Burmese merchant marine man, the submarine commander
They were friends of Jon's father in law.  One was in the merchant marine, his friend called him the submarine commander, I have no idea why. He came to the border to see Burma without officially going back to Burma. He always wore heavy black glasses.  They took us out to dinner many times and were always lots of fun, having traveled the world finding many ideas. Jon's wife on the other hand was not near so cunning or nice, an incredible loathesome bitch.  Finally Jon got fed up and left her.

Bootie

Bootie: Her baby, now lives in the upper village
Her father lost his sight now for some  years.
His legs got swollen in the hot season.  He had short bristly hair and always puffed on a pipe and tried to perceive who was there and speak quickly and friendly to you.  He had lived at Hua Mae Kom before the army moved his whole village. Hua Mae Kom was a beautiful Akha village near the Burmese border where the flowers bloomed yellow in November.
The death of his father's second wife came some years later.  I bought her a new Akha dress.  Often I would find her resting on the back porch with her frail hands clutching a cane which she would let go of long enough to take hold of my hands. She was such a sweet old woman.
I played her to the sand man, but that is another story.
That someone in no pain, could ask for death to come and take them?
Here long enough.
     Bootie, she got married, and moved to the upper village where the mission was. Her baby was born deformed, I figured it was all the herbicide exposure in the area. The Akha who were relocated, often had to work for Thais on their farms. The Thais had the Akhas use all the chemicals that the western countries shipped in since they didn't like to use them theirselves. Many babies were born without an anus, which is what happened to Bootie's baby.

Beer bar across the street is a pit stop for Akha
The girls were hookers anywhere they could find it. They tried this bar and that bar and this restaurant or whatever, then a small store where the Akha even bought this and that.  Then it closed and changed again.  For a while one of the sisters was married to an American Pakistani. He bought her many motorbikes to rent and she scammed it long enough that he grew tired of it, sold everything and went home.  They of course, went back to Bangkok where one of them got the big boobies put in. 
They built another house for their parents, and then kept using the old house for a bar, every sister a hooker. 
The oldest sister, the one with the fake boobies, she used to have a cop for a boyfriend, or he volunteered her services for some debt, so he showed up every afternoon like clock work, took a little bit of time inside, and then was off again.

Bananas
Big ones and then the little ones in the villages with the seeds in them.  Big seeds! There were many banana varieties in Thailand.  I could only eat so many.  The Akha were always giving them to me for gifts in the villages but they only got battered to mush in the truck.  Best in shakes.  I heard that the Dutch had collected many varieties from Thailand and now brought them back to Thailand for the Thais to rebuild their banana stock.

Being  fundamentalist chinese
The Christian Chinese tend to look down on everyone.  They are brilliant money grubbers.  No one is quite so equal to them.  They also have an incredible twisted version of theology and the world, I think it is called racism in most places.  I met this Jewish fellow in town. He said he didn't want a Jewish wife, cause they had big boobs and were pushy.  But the Chinese, he said all they cared about was money, they were worse than the Jews. Least that is what he said. I tended to agree with him, though someone with savy about money is better than someone who isn't and is broke.

Bottle brush tree
I knew of only one bottle brush tree here in the north of Thailand and that was at Martin and Goi's old place.
Martin was from Germany, living in Switzerland, and Goi was a Thai woman he married. They ran a small guest house and restaurant, bread, cheese, use the computer, stuff like that.  Later they got deported, I don't know why, but the police gave them enough time to gather themselves together.

Cary Bartholomew
He was a gem cutter from the US married to a Shan girl named Da.  I left an Akha headdress with him to keep safely, but when I came back he said some bill this and that were not paid and that he would just keep the thing, which cost nearly a thousand dollars.  He liked to laugh and cackle like a bald headed chicken, then laugh at his own joke, but the joke was on you and your wallet. He ripped a lot of people off this way, for thousands of dollars.
It was sort of strange, cause he was smart, smart enough to have a life without stealing from people.
But then maybe he was dumb too.  He was always going on about how the Akha believed in free sex, just like he loaned out his wife or something, talking shit about other people when he knew nothing about them, the epitome of a stupid white man.  Some people said he "section 8'd" out of the US military. One could find a lot of his type all over Thailand, bragging about killing people in Vietnam and Laos.
At any rate, he knew well how to cut gemstones, and had a pretty good life in Thailand.

Chiang Kong
Two miles from Maesai, we can do visa's there. Least used to be able to.  More guest houses of late, on the river, crossing to Laos.
The drive is quite long from Maesai and the road not so good.  Once there was a big flood come out of the mountains and rocks the size of cars washed down the road and tore up half of it.
     There was a pepsi stand next to the boat ramp and immigration box.  The pepsi stand took care of visa arrangements normally.  This was easy enough and it cost up to 1800 baht.  Then they got to cheating somehow, so rather than just get on with business the Lao embassy made everyone get a visa at Bangkok first.  Well, this was fine.  One fellow in Chiangrai did the whole thing for me for the same price and I didn't even have to go to Chiang Kong.
My one friend took his passport to Chiang Kong to send to Bangkok and they then gave him the cock and bull story that it was stolen, so he had to go to Bangkok himself and get a new one.
These were the difficulties of living in Thailand, always on the visa chase it seemed. The Thais didn't really want us there, though they liked our money.

Chiang mai
Chiangmai had a big night market, but in Chiangmai there were also many things you can buy in the way of equipment.
Chiangmai had many things that the north didn't have, like selection, ovens, equipment for jewelry, bulk silver, and ideas. 
Chiangmai was great to me.  But especially because of the air and temperature and the old fort like city, the ancientness of the place and a sense of a laid back feeling.  A feeling that things weren't built of concrete just yesterday, but that there was a civilization here, over many years.  I could drive through old neighborhoods, old teak houses, shutters, tilting, listing, trees, many things stacked about the place years in the gathering, and so many specialties.  You know when you see one place that has a ton of merchandise all along the same line, all used, that it has been there for a while, that the manufacturing was around for a while, that many people bought the items because they were good, and maybe now the old ones are collected from people who die to be used for parts for those still in use.  Otherwise, who collects Edsels and stacks them in their yard?  No one needs the parts.
Old shops, when you walked in and the tiles were worn, the tables were worn, the walls had dirt on them, but it was of an institutional kind, dirt like what had become family, ok dirt, and maybe the dirt was like a ear that recorded all the voices of the people, growing in time, memories fond, late night chats of lovers and newly marrieds waiting for their first baby to make up its mind and be born, waiting till the rain outside stopped boiling into steam on the sidewalk, people chattering by, kids playing in disregard, cars of every make and vintage passing the door, and the motorcycles which were like the children of Abraham, as stars in the sky and sands of the sea, without number.  They invented the wheel.  And then they invented the motorcylce wheel, and that was a whole different thing.  Girls sitting side saddle behind their boyfriends, long skirts, always the warm Thai smiles.  The Thais can be forgiven all their failings for their addiction to the kind and soft smile on all occasions, even in times of stress and strife.  If you don't speak Thai much, and only live on the smiles, then it be easy to say you seldom hear an unkind word.
Bus journeys to Chiangmai were long.  The station battered. The big building complex.  I wonder who built these, some government contract scam because the shops were always empty and run down, full of squatters and the upper stories never used.
Ten years, now the same busses were running, never upgraded, other buses in Thailand of a tourist sort were plush and beautiful. Even the Blue VIP 999 buses were old now, worn, dirty and rumbling.  Big engines, the doors open for air and cooling, looking to be huge and heavy, a second diesel rattling to the forward section running the air conditioning.
Fungus lived in their vents, giving you a fungal cold almost immediately.  To run chlorine through them just once in a while would kill it all and be better for everyone.
Chiangmai had gotten all that much more huge over the years, the ring road all around the city, and now you could get lost in any part of its guts.
Foreigners had made it a city of their own in a way, dominating aspects of the commerce and spending huge sums on nick nacks and this and that finely made hand craft item in the night market, the Thais always full of colorful creations to catch the eye in one mini industry after another.
Good western food could also be had in Chiangmai.  If you wanted to see a fat missionary this was the place to do it, in MacDonalds, Pizza Hut or one of the many hotels with bakeries or internet cafe's.
The Chiangmai night market also had a disturbing side.  Many artists exploited the hilltribe for art and such.  They all  had signs posted.  "NO PHOTOGRAPHY".  I found this funny, since they all worked off photos taken of the hilltribe.  A travel booth here and there selling tours and treks, all to the hilltribe which got little to nothing. 
The Akha sold on the steps and grannies sold nicknacks, the booth people acting like they were a nuisance while making their living in many cases off images of the same people. 
 The foreigners were sure interested in these people.

Fat leg beggar, after all these years
Pesistent, bold, had a browning of the lower legs and feet. Always begging, limping, had a walking cain, hit the kids who begged to drive them away, had a big pout on his face, shoved his hand in your way in the most determined beligerant manner, demanding a coin. If you gave him a one baht coin he looked at it and then shoved the hand back out and asked for ten  baht. He begged as long as I could remember in Maesai, the  most persistent beggar I ever saw.

Watch in the mud puddle
This guy was wandering around in the road. When I got there he told me in a drunken slurry that he had dropped his watch in the puddle there. It wasn't a very big puddle, I thought he was joking, and then he staggered off.  On second thought I went back to the puddle, and fished around in it with my hand, and sure enough out popped a watch.  The man was no where to be found, so I sold it.

Perspectives in Joy room 28
28, not yet knowing a lot, simplicity, a simple perspective
the magic of that balcony
Don't be bitter or cynical
I never lived in 28 again, it was like a memory though I went up there sometimes to have a beer on the balcony. People make places.
I had gotten older and  much innocence of not knowing this and that was gone.
Sitting there was a measuring stick of time that had passed.
So many changes with time, we want to make it mean good things.
Richard Core.
When I came to 28 I believed in good happening, when I moved to 61 I learned to realize bad happening.
It makes me think deeply.

The guy at the northern with his tourquoise and his burmese hooker
This American bead collector was staying at the Top North Guest House in the two story concrete building next to the river. He said he was waiting for a hooker he ordered to be delivered from the Burma side. He was powerful. He had made a special arrangement, like half the hookers in Thailand weren't destitute from Burma. I always wondered about these guys. They bragged about this gal or that gal they were able to get and then finally went back to the US to live like the typical western person with nothing and no one at all.
Sustainable guys, is it sustainable?

Debra Perlan
She worked with kids, and tried to get Meeh Juuh to go to US.
Parents saw Meeh Juuh as a cash flow and didn't want to risk that. She never went, what would she do in the US anyway?  Parents were afraid of never seeing their kids again. Debra, she was very good hearted and we kept in touch for quite a few years. She worked with some refugee sponsoring agency in Colorado.

Meeh Daw
Meeh Daw had five brothers
and five sisters plus her. 11 people. She worked in the school for a while, cooked, made good, made trouble. Finally ended up married again to a taxi driver and then some second guy too. She was a widow, poor, kids, many stories though, she told so many stories. I asked her one time about these marks on her hands, around the finger nails. She said that the rats came in the night and they chewed all the callouses off a person's hand, around all the fingers, careful not to bite and wake you. That is how poor it was in Burma.

Joe's borrowed truck
Joe borrowed the four wheel drive from the landlord and drove it up into Burma so many times that he ran it to death, just beat it to nothing. Then he got his own truck. Drove it up from Chiangmai, but didn't notice that the oil cooler for the engine was mounted directly above it, never did cool, and the engine fried. So he ended up buying an engine. Nick towed it back to Maesai for him.

Joe Says someone should sugar his engine
One time my motor went dead in my truck. A guy in the guesthouse next door named Rob said that Joe said it would be real funny to sugar my engine. I saw Joe near the truck, so that is probably what happened. I had to replace it, cost me 70,000 baht. But that was Joe, he had a heck of a time getting away from himself, made a lot of enemies and sold a lot of snake oil.

The jeep the guy wanted to sell me
     There was this one guy in town, son of rich people. He drove a red Jeep Wagoneer. He also had an old US Army Jeep. He wanted to sell it to me, said the brakes didn't work well and that the noise deep in the motor (sounded like the crank shaft) wasn't anything to worry about.  Foreigners apparently were such suckers in Thailand that the Thais took it for granted and would tell you just about anything, thinking you would believe it just like the guy before you.

Joe's mongoose got away
When joe was at the big building downstream from the bridge, he rented the upstairs attic which was hot as hell, and started a guest house when he first came to town. He had a mongoose there which he had caught, but it got away, ran away through the building and found its way to the river no doubt.
     Later he had a monkey when he moved to Sailom Joi. But it was a mean monkey, just like Joe. He thought it funny that it could visciously bite the working girls.

Christian from Chiang Saen and Uwe
Christian was this Swiss guy from Chiang Saen. He was living in Chiangmai now. Married to a Thai. A good fellow it seemed.
     Uwe said he was dead, but I met him on the street after that. A lot of what Uwe said was trash, but he was not a half bad type, could be good friends, if a little psychotic, but he was also very intelligent. His greatest weak spot was that he exaggerated a lot, fabricated a lot, and said bad things about people behind their backs for the purpose of creating evil, which of course he did on occasion. Bad feelings for people, things like that. He had an alcoholic wife, ran a few guest rooms, and once they found a guy dead there. He liked Tiger beer, and kept tract of just about everything, but some of the connections were bad and I didn't go there too much after that.

Maechan
Wasn't much going on in Maechan sept the hilltribe coming to the market to buy and sell.  The town was sleepy, flat and often flooded.  It was a northern junction town, taxis and the battered green weenie buses pulling through.  Lots of students on the buses making them crowded.
A Royal Project school which had many hilltribe students boarding nearby and learning there, the quality of education and future not so much for these students.  But as the Mae Faluang University was being built, maybe that would change some.
Maechan has a well known bead shop where the Akha buy and sell beads, cloth, silver and thread. It is also the junction for Taton.

Chiang Rai
A quiet concrete town.  Shops close together, small streets, no planning, congestion, and ALL concrete.  Most all the wooden houses and shops gone, only a few wooden buildings were still left.
The government hospital was large and congested.  Care was poor, rooms full of the sick, full of mosquitos, no mosquito control effort.  The infant ward was a nightmare of disconcern, seriously ill babies which would die due to lack of care.  I extracted a few Akha babies from there and always felt bad for the hilltribe still stuck there along with the Thai babies that got the same care. It was so hopeless I would not take another baby there or go back.

Chiang Saen
Sleepy town.  Had old temple ruins, a moat wall all around the city that of late they were cleaning and repairing. There was a similar large earth wall south end of Maesai.  I wasn't sure what that was about.

Chicken cashew nut
A favored dish.  I got it on occasion for the flavor, garlic, ginger, chili peppers, the dried red ones, and chicken of course.  Usually they put way too much chicken in it, with a few mushrooms.  I didn't like to eat meat all that much. I could never correctly pronounce the Thai name for this dish.

Chinese circus bears
At the Chinese circus there were two bear cubs used in the show.  Not sure what role they played.  They were small, size of big footballs, stinky, chained to a metal tent stakes driven into the ground.  The stakes made of an old truck axle.

Chinese fire cracker funeral, rockets, fire kites
At the Chinese funerals they fired phospherous bomb rockets. During some festivities, like the Chinese New Year they sent up box kites with candles that went high into the air.  In later years one could see many of these hot air boxes, colorful cloth colors, beside the road.  They were like a big cloth sock, you got a candle with them, and they filled up with hot air and slowly went high into the sky.

Chinese jewelry tool supply
She had a shop on the corner of Sailom Joi at the bridge.
She had several workers who built much of the nick nack that the hilltribes sold at the mountain markets.  It was cheap, the hilltribe pushed it off as made by them, and they didn't have to do more than quickly go to maesai and buy it.  This woman was shrewd, sold jewelry making gear as well, but limited, and always had Akha or Yao waiting outside her place to finish buying all the things they needed.   She once wanted me to teach her burmese worker how to speak better english to attract tourists but I didn't have time.  Sure enough tourists passed her corner.

Chinese tool supply market
This younger chinese man worked with his brother in his father's house and old shop in the main market.  He was kind, but I checked his prices over what I could buy the same things in Keng Tung and his pricing was enormous.  Looks can be deceptive, no wonder he was pleasant to me.  A metal wire pulling die what would cost 300 baht in Keng Tung was 2200 baht at his shop.  Later he told me that he didn't know they were available so cheap up there. He got all of his from Bangkok, the long way around.
He had hammers for jewelry, burners, billows, scales, grinders, mandrels for rings, all this sort of gear.  I bought the billows and charge chambers that used gasoline to run the torch.  Seemed dangerous but OK if you knew what you were doing and had a concrete shop where you mounted the little jars.
Pumping the billows caused bubbles in the gas which fumes were used to burn in the torch.  A very simple conserving system, many shops used this througout asia without the need to buy special equipment.  Even the billows could be hand made.  Near to his shop there were fire rings, lead weights, fishing nets, people actually hand tied these, and beads and thread of different weights and material, and needles.  Across the way was the Indian fabric shop that I got cloth from for baby blankets for the villages and cloth for the Akha flags and jackets.

CIA 2,4,d
I had heard this story when I first came to Maesai from a woman named Julie who did a little research on it.  The CIA sold helicopters and 2,4,d to the Burmese to irradicate poppies, which was sprayed from the air, and many people got sick and poisoned and the water was polluted. Julie was looking into it, but in those years I did not yet know the scale of what was going on, and people were only passing through, so we did not keep in touch.

Citizenship rights
For the Akha, this is getting better. Not refugees so what are they?
The hilltribe were refugees in Thailand.  Refugees of the KMT wars in Burma. The CIA sure knew this as the DEA did yet they allowed Thailand to never classify these people as refugees, and for years, even to date, many of them are extorted over land rights and other human need issues, as people without a status.  The Karen and other Burmese get UN recognition and some aid, not these people.  The forgotten people. In fact, many of the Akha are refugees but many are not, and have been in Thailand over one hundred years.

Coffee cart near bridge
Sold coffee, iced coffee, etc
Mobile coffee service, long before Starbucks and their fancy yuppie shops, which Maesai still didn't have. A cart with stainless steel water heating tank, cloths for filtering the coffee grounds out, funnels, all kinds of things, you could get hot chocolate, condensed milk, tea, iced coffee, just about anything you wanted.
I loved all these different carts, some the same, others not, you could find this and that to your liking at most any time of day, and the cart vendors themselves were most interesting and fun to talk to.  They got to know you, know what you wanted, and it was a good life. 
But I had coffee at top north mostly. This gave me opportunity to watch the people, write a little, relax, remember things I had to do, and meet new friends.

Collect calls
Collect calls were always a pain in the early days, getting or sending a fax, calling home.
Sometimes I paid the fifty baht at the Northern Guest House to make collect calls.  The northern was an old guesthouse by the river.  I was told the wife of a General owned it, hard to say.  The land was now like a big park close to the river but it always flooded each year to nearly a meter deep, wiping out many plants, bringing in new fresh rich soils and the workers would clean up, plant more and the place got thicker and thicker with plants each year despite the floods.  Rambling huts and rotting boards, and one or two concrete buildings.

Concrete house, wooden houses
Wooden houses are nice but dark and full of mosquitos and take lots of trees.
Concrete houses are damp, but light, and maybe less cost on the environment?
Course I hear there is not enough cement.  And cement is slow to recycle itself.  Cement reminds of a kind of arrogance that people can be and will always be around, yet it sets the form in fixed style of the designer, and then we have to put up with it for years, not as a comparison to wood, but does seem people are more clever with wood.
Wood breathes, feels dryer than concrete, and the temptation with concrete is to pave everything over, leaving no rooms for soil or plants.
Concrete doesn't burn, but falls down quite readily in an earth quake, cracks, takes on water.  The concrete buildings mold and turn black, the paint peals, the smartest people being those who don't paint it the first time.
Lots of tiles and railings are used with concrete in Thailand. 

Concrete power poles
These poles would stop a car or bus fast.  Sometimes they got broken off by a truck or bus. One fellow was unhappy with his life situation so getting in his car up the street, he revved the engine, than drove it full speed into the power pole out front of my place, chopping his face to mincemeat in the windshield and leaving a small girl rumpled on the floor in the car. 
She had a big bump on her head, hit the glove box, then slumped on the floor, that was all, while he was taken to Chiangrai.
I don't know what happened to her.  The impact was immense and the car totally destroyed, a little Dihatsu.

Condoms
Shops were full of them, every gimmick one could think of, even flavored condoms for those with not enough to do.  The stores had them stacked on the counter, encouraging people to use them rather than get AIDS or other diseases.

Construction at the Plaza guest house
The owner was always building in the early years, making new cabins but now the good years are over and the place is mostly empty. The owner does well to keep ahead of the termites which he doesn't, and then some concrete here and there to repair, finally concreting over all the flower beds so he didn't have to weed them.  My garden was gone and moved away from the place, to the Akha fish village.  Rags wrapped around the wooden posts that precariously held up the cabins contained chemical to drive away bugs and ants.  The wood was old hard teak, so it had a good chance of lasting for some time.  Overall the place was an incredible fire trap if a fire ever got started there.  Few would escape the heat that would climb up through those cabins.  There used to be fire extinguishers, but they seldom worked, and the water line system wasn't up to anything.

Corrupt Police
All of the police of Thailand are corrupt the Thais say. Extortion of fees and fines from motorists and others.  I had gotten stopped and inspected many times.  Once I had this old man and woman with me and they got totally searched, and then we went our way.  I sighed in relief and then asked if the man had anything.  "Oh, a ball of opium, but they didn't find it", he said.  Whenever I got stopped I watched the police like hawks because I knew damn well they could plant speed pills in my truck.

Calagas
These were murals with cloth and sequins that were made in Burma, but they were murals about Burmese, Thai or Shan life. Sold in a shop at the bridge that the chinaman from the plaza leased out.  He couldn't get the guy to leave when the lease was over so he asked him if he would move out while retiling the floor and the man did and then he wouldn't let him move back in and renew the lease.  These kinds of disputes where someone walks all over  you are bad here.  So he had to do it this way to get the guy out.  Then the guy gave the police 30,000 baht or something and the police made the Chinaman pay some money to the guy, but it was finally over. Money could sway the police this way or that way, depending on whose ear you had.

Camera taken
I took my camera into the Fuji shop to get it cleaned.  But when I came back there was a "mistake".  He had sold it on accident. 

Camera crews under riverside
While the Tachilek war went on for one day in 1994 the Burmese Army could see us under the Riverside Guest house with cameras and kept firing m-70 grenades at us.  They blew the pipes off the water tank and hit the hillside and a couple of rooms but we were still there.  I could hear the grenade fire and duck low in the concrete pillars before it hit on our side.  They could hit above us, but it was hard to get right on us with a direct hit, but had they the little pieces of shrapnel would have eaten us alive.

Canvas
Finding painting canvases in town was hard, someone made them but mostly I got mine in Chiangrai.
I liked to fiddle with oil paints when I got time.  Which I didn't get for nearly two years now.

Moving cars to China
To move a car to China to sell at a profit they would tape the whole care with packing tape to protect the paint from scratches then carefully remove it when they got there.  But I figure it was a mess cause it got hot on the trip up and might peal the car paint underneath. I saw it a couple times, cars taped like this when the road was bad, but here of late the road was made huge, dumping dirt in the rivers, and rock, and then the trip took 3 hours instead of 15.

Card playing Attur
My friend finally left his wife because she wouldn't stop playing cards and loosing money.  Gambling for the Thais was a big problem in this regard.  They would kill, steal and cheat to get money for their bad card habbits, which were mostly a loosing venture, but their social psyche was heavily invested in the face they showed at the parlors.

Catholics 
The catholics don't appear so jerked around by the wind as the protestant Akha here, but they are destroyed just the same. 

Ccr music, taxi driver
The chiangmai taxi driver played this ccr music tape, then drove me to Doi Suthep and after we came back he gave me the tape.  That was many years ago when I first come to this Thailand. There were certain tapes, music that was played in Thailand, and then you heard it over and over, but with the advent of quickly duplicated CD's the music business went full boom with bootleg CD's.

Cemetary
The cemetary was a chinese kind out of town just a ways.  There were hilltribe christian cemetaries, thai christian cemetaries but not so often.  But I had to say there was something kind about a cemetary as compared with fire.  Same could be said for Akha burial grounds though you couldn't see them unless you knew they were there.
The Chinese buried their dead in either vaults above the ground or vaults that were buried with one face showing out the side like a door. One friend I knew, he was married to an Akha woman, he worked full time making these chinese burial vaults for people.  But then the Chinese started putting them on every hill all around and it got to be a bother. One here, one there, a vault everywhere. The Chinese guy was married to this goofy Akha woman, a christian, who lived next to Ah Zeh's place in the flat village. Word was the hut was plenty busy when he was gone. She prattled a lot so a lot of other people did too.

Central Store
Yeah, this girl with plenty ample breasts sold bras of all things at the central department store in town.  I always thought that was funny. I think she knew a lot about it. The Central was a big store chain in Thailand.

Chad
He had a guesthouse. He was always in the face till I ignored him long enough that he finally stopped speaking.  A real nosy guy.  Thought it some kind of hero job to rebuild old army jeeps but then they lined the street and mostly people couldn't sell them. He had a guest house too. Not a nice place, his family always hanging out.
But then years later we became friends, talked to each other. He told me there were lots of bad things going on, very disturbing, spooks and all that kind of stuff.
Once when I was walking up the highway, out of gas, he gave me a lift. We talked after that, when we met.

Shan girl, their right and their obligation to steal
The Shans stole more than the hilltribe did, this is what heard.  Even the Shan were afraid of the Shan and said they wouldn't go late into a village or people would throw stones at them if they were drunk and wanted to fight.  And heavy drinking you could always find in one of their villages. But in the end, you  make your own friends, and the local prejudices go away. I had a Shan builder, he was a real good guy, I liked him, he did good work.

Chana book
For many years the owner of Chana book who was married to one of the Top North daughters, had a bright yellow vespa.  Then he got a tiny car.  He was in the Lyons club. A pleasant educated fellow. Professional, courteous.

Chanburi sunglasses
The ruby dealers from chantaburi brought with them their need for sunglasses, a fancy gold kind, so all the hookers who worked with them needed them too, till after a few years.  Then aids spread around a lot and it wasn't such a big deal to be rich and buy what you wanted when you wanted it.

Chang mai man at shop
The one Akha man in Chianmai sold beads, but also sold other stuff.  He would see the Akha coming with something to sell and then rush around the corner so the westerners didn't see how little he paid them for it which was just about nothing.  He got his beads from his sister in Maesai, sometimes I bought from him if maesai was sold out.
He had a second wife in a village in Huai Krai, their first baby had a skin ailment, where the skin was shinny and always shed. 

Chasing and catching the wrong chicken
So the guesthouse owner had one of his chickens escape and asked us to help him chase it down, which we thought to help him out with.  Finally I got close enough and really got after the chicken and it kept on going but I kept up and then it hopped right into the hutch and I grabbed it.  The hutch. Yep, and it was the wrong chicken and I was in this guys back yard with his chicken in my hands which I had hounded there.  I obviously looked surprised, let it go and retraced my steps back to the road.

Coconut tree climbing monkeys
Beside the road from Chiang Kong to Chiangrai, mean looking as hell, big, in iron cages, went up the trees for coconuts, traveled in caravan of three bikes, three monkeys.  A rope tether brought them back to owner, naturally they looked like they could bite the hell out of you, big as dogs. I think the owners beat them with sticks when no one was looking, it took a lot of work to get a monkey to look that mean.

Cut and burned prostitute
These two germans had this prostitute to Maesai from Bangkok, and she had all these burns and cuts on her arm, hard to tell what from, she said someone did it to her and she didn't want to talk about those days.  It was healed now but looked very ugly, scars on both sides of her left arm mostly, the back of the hand with burns etc.
She lost her wallet on the Burma side and the two germans left her on her own. 

Computer, walk to san chai, drunks, no money no ride
     Those were the hard days.  No one would believe me now.  Pasang is some 27 kilometers from Maesai.  I would have twenty baht.  Enough to get to the junction one way, with ten baht left over.  I would take the computer and printer that fit in a case together down there with me.  Then get out at the junction in the late afternoon, early evening and start walking.  And the computer weighed total about 22 lbs or something like that.  Anyway, I would walk all the way to San Chai, so that I could get the next part or some fragments of the language finished.  I was working on the alphabet at that time.
And it is a long walk, not much of a shoulder, some 19 kilometers to the village.  After I did this many times I sometimes got offered a ride at the very end if I could pay, which I couldn't so I just refused it.  Sometimes I didn't get to the village till like three o'clock in the morning, braving more than one nasty dog on the road.  Seems a long time ago when I think about it now. I don't recall it raining on me, for that I could be happy, 
Sometimes drunks came weaving down the road on their motorbikes in the dark, two people, then would ask me if I had any money for a lift, but I didn't want to ride with them. 
Some of the people got to know me in the area, and I got a few lifts that way, but it wasn't anything I could depend on.

Computer ground rod, armature
Later I moved all the computer equipment into the village because I had art work to do and the layout of the first children's book.  Mind you this is several years ago.  Getting the alphabet was an ordeal.  Nimit was totally wacked out on heroin the most part of every day, the place was a mess, and getting the last of the alphabet took a lot of time.  I was not convinced I had it all but put the book together anyway.  To do that I set up in a tiny house, that had electric.  Big old bugs flying around.  The scanner needed a ground wire so I pounded a copper rod into the ground out behind the place.  I didn't have a hammer but had brought the armature out of a motor from an old pump and used that to beat the rod into the ground.

Coffee Dreams of Shade
There wasn't much organized effort to get coffee growing in the mountains yet.  Doi Tung was doing it a little bit but this was quite silent and proprietary.
Coffee grew well in shade areas and there was a lot of places around the Akha where it would do very well.  I hoped to invest in getting some going in some of the villages.  Problem was that the villages that sprouted it or had the skill and access to the beans sold it for more than I could afford to buy and I wasn't handy by to see what beans they bought where for how much and when.
The villages that sold the sprouted plants were also a long ways from where I need the plants and transport would be costly, more costly than the plants.

Cutting Delilah’s Hair
It was the best story in Maesai yet as far as I was concerned.
I had just spent my last 100 baht, gave it to her older daughter to go home and buy food with.
She also needed a 1200 baht sack of rice cause it was all gone from when I bought it last.
I had been saving it.  The hundred baht. Put it in the flap of my black leather passport holder.
But they needed food and I was out of money.
So I grease up my boots, they were cracked and dry from so much walking in the mud and the dust, the heat and the dry and the sweat.
And my friend John Fernquest came by with his new Burmese wife to see if I wanted to play badmitton.
And then after they left it was about two and I went down and had a coke in the eating area of the old rambled guest house, and then I had a chew of tabacco and sat next to the klong and thought and thought but could come up with nothing.
So I went back to my room and asked my cook a few questions of the day.  (She had been living off of my house and money for the last year with her family of 9 counting her.)
And then out of the blue she says to me ‘ I want to go work in the mountain fields.’
I couldn’t imagine it was anything I said, or did, so it wasn’t exactly like cutting Sampson’s hair.  But close.
So then I asked her what she meant.
Well, you see I have this bunch of land up in the mountains near here, big chunk on this side of the mountain facing that way and another big chunk on the other part of the mountain over there facing this way and one other piece of land with a little bit of water on it.  I got a lot of land. But I did have a piece with a lot of water on it but I sold that when my husband died and I needed the money.  7,000 baht, to Ah Murh’s father.
You could have blown me out of the room with a small gust of cool air.
I had struggled, I had given up any money I had over and over to feed her family, I had bought sewing machines to try and give her kids opportunity, I had done anything you can imagine to meet their needs.  And I had been spoofed.
And that is why she said with such confidence that she wouldn’t send her kids to work in the mountains and farm.  It was because she had better and didn’t feel the need. 
While I had been looking for ways to help her, she had the key, and wasn't even willing to show it.
But most of all I asked her why she didn't tell me, cause I would have bought her fruit trees for the land, that is how I am.
She was soon gone, bye bye.

Canvas for painting
I saw these two girls with some new canvases and before I could find where they went to ask them who made them, they were gone. Sometimes I would go to Chiangrai and buy at the one book store near the clock tower but they quit stocking them. Apparently didn't sell enough.  And when talking to the artists, didn't appear that any of them  had any Japanese dryer. Linseed oil was hard enough to get. All the oil paints came from England.

Golden Triangle
There are a lot of boats to watch and it is just one more peaceful Thai situation so I never minded it.  Some times I went down the river on the boat if I had the spare money.  The boats are fast speed boats, colorful in the Thai manner, and loud. If it is raining at all you should have a motorcycle helmet with a face shield because at that speed the rain is like bullets in the face.

Chinese circus horses
A friend of mine told me about these large horses they had on the Burmese side, so I went over and sure there they were.  I got permission to take one for a spin and that was fun and when I got back to the street from the field the place was covered in Burmese Intelligence officers.  Boy did they get excited, then seeing all it was that I was doing, they went their way.
Lets see, what does the manual say?
There is also a monk on the Thai side who has some horses.  He gets lots of money from people.  Looks like a good business.
I sat with him while he wrote A, B, C, D on little wooden penis's and hung them around people's necks after they gave him a big envelope of money and bowed to him.
He was mocking them no doubt, but also maybe it was deserved.  Here people came and gave him money, probably for some great greed or wrong they had done, and wanted him to make everything cool, while they kept right on, sort of like buying off your sins.  Maybe he figured that such pathetic people didn't deserve much sept to mock them and take their money.
His horses were ill kept though, many of them were sick. Then they were all gone, and it was quite a while before he got more. But for his temple operation the money just kept pouring in. Sin is good business.

The Chinese Girl
On this particular trip to Bangkok and Malaysia for a visa I took the train to Bangkok and then bought a seat and sleeper for the next day from Bangkok to Butterworth on the Malaysian end station where one takes a ferry for a few coins over to Penang Island and spends a couple days getting a visa for another two months in Thailand, which one could extend for another month. I took the bus to Chiangmai, caught the train from there. The ride on the train to Bangkok was exceeding slow due to the hot weather, and the diesel needing to stop every ten minutes to cool down.  So slow I sat on the steps of the passenger car, a few feet from the ground enjoying the breeze.  Besides I had a full fledged flaming transvestite in the seat beside me.  Boring rather than particularly offensive.  Going somewhere with his otherwise perfectly normal looking  parents and sister.  The trip south from Bangkok was slow but offered a sleeper.  It always began with a long gentle curve out of Bangkok with a wonderful view of the backs of  poor housing where the better people of Thailand lived along the klongs which are said to be rapidly disappearing along with the ouster of those poor good people.  Somewhere near the border, especially when coming back into the country the border police search for contraband, and foot passengers hop on the train with goods and race away half a kilometer later with their bags of garlic.
However this night in Bangkok I got a hotel near the station, walked into the neighborhood of Chinese and coffin makers, and had some soup.  I sat on a corner, watching the traffic and a man next to me on the sidewalk table shoveling rice into his groper face in a wolfing fashion that would have put a starving dog to shame.  I always pity the woman who has to put up with this sort of buffoon, based on the assumption she must be a good woman, yet in reality she might be a devil on his back, an impossible oaf never satisfied, manipulating, every ounce the unsightly hagg, a far cry from his first satisfying grunting above her. 
I asked for a massage house and I needed one. I  was directed to the local brothel, a block or two away where a slew of motorcycles testified to its popularity and use.  A row of lamposts marked the street, round globes lighting the way. Inside a milky blue fish eyed man met me, suggesting a girl, while I picked another, and paid for only massage.  First though, I had a piss in a common bath where girls shot it into the wall urinals as well as the men it seemed.  The stairway was ample proof that this was a constant race track of hell.  The girl took me past a maze of rooms, some doors open, operations in full swing.  At the top of the stairs, a door was open and a monk in saffron was busy rolling over. 
The doors had their bottom six inches cut off and a hole to view through.  For security I suppose, at any rate one doesn’t fear he is being watched so much.  The tile floor, black vinyl massage table, bath and walls.  I climbed in the tub of water she drew and got a good bath. I got my massage and headed back to the old battered room with all its red vinyl furniture.

Catching up on what happened while I was gone
So here I am talking to all my Akha friends, catching up on old times, finding out who went where, who got married, and who isn’t around much any more. The weather is hot and the memories come back slowly.
There is Booma, Meesu (my favorite from the bridge), Alley (Attur’s sister’s daughter), Bootee, Boosaw. 
Meesu has grown much bigger than what she was as a small kid on the bridge but still small for her age.  There aren't so many boys around, no idea where they go, probably to the fields. 
     I hear Appa got married and is pregnant. 
It is nice to see them move on in the human line, giving births to hopes when you know that the despairs are sure to come. Yet here I think that the despair is different. That some how they cope better with it than in our culture which is a cash economy and in which it is a crime to be poor. The tragic part of it is that there is just so much more despair.  Hard grinding despair. The amount these people survive on is a few dollars a day at most. Maybe one or two. Two is pretty common, for the whole family.
But there are not so many ruthless aspects built in here. By western standards the average Akha man has nothing, is nothing, yet he is better able to feed his family and himself than his western counterpart in the same circumstances. Yet I don’t think that he would have too much difficulty surviving there in the west as well. The gift that they have is that they are able to get by on nothing and make something of industry out of nothing, while us westerners have advanced to such a complex level that we have a hard time returning to the simple, just to survive.

Sept. 9
Just adding on some here. Its been a long time but I am finally feeling like I am getting some structure to what it is that I am trying to do here and I am finally getting some assistants with the Akha books.
Meeh Kong is still there, but her older sister became a prostitute.  She came to me for medicine for blisters all over her face but later died of aids as did her brother.
  Work is going well here on the translation, with a new alphabet from before. Also I am trying out a new, more logically recognized tonal marker system.
There is much writing to do.  I am hoping that the bead business will pick up again. Slowly I am getting some catalogues sent out.
     The maid was back, not much for her to do but I paid her by the month anyway.

Colored yarn
Sometimes I did just casual things for the street kids, like buy them little rolls of colored yarn to play with.  Course they loved that though it didn't last very long at all. 
     Books were good, crayons, and then they would sit down on the street somewhere and use them all up. 

Chinese restaurant girl take me to eat
This one daughter of a chinese family that owned a restaurant at the Thai Tong hotel, invited me to eat numerous times.  But then later she got on speed pills and I didn't see her much after that.  Many of the youth in Thailand got on speed pills and ruined their minds or killed others and themselves.  Then this last year I saw her again, very heavy set, her hair short and unkept, wearing baggy unsightly clothes. Her sisters told me she was on meth, and didn't speak very well of her, I wonder what went on in that family.

Doi Tung Coffee
Grew it, roasted it and canned it, sure the Akha didn't get most of that.
What about carpets?
I was told there was a fancy carpet factory for export, making big bucks on fancy carpets for hotels.  Part of the Craft Project.
Just how much income was going into Akha households?

DEA
There was a DEA office in Chiangmai.
With all the goings on here, one wondered what they did or supervised.  Brian Barney in Chiangrai often played basketball with them in Chiangmai on sundays he said.  They would call him to alert him of raids on this or that Akha village and warn him.  One hand was supplying American missionaries, one hand was killing their men, and one hand was taking their children. It was a great American tradition, being two faced and claiming not to know what was going on.  What one had to rely on was that one American would report on what another son of a bitch was doing.

Doi mae salong
Doi Mae Salong was a ridge community of KMT, tea, fruits, flowers and hilltribe with a great view.  They said once a year they let the old men parade their tanks which they had driven all the way down to there at the end of being driven out of Burma, but I had never seen any evidence of that.  I knew where the place was where they said they were but didn't go in to check it out. Had lots of other things to do.

Dark side of the moon
In the very poor days I first lived in room 28, happy, exploring, learning about all this place and trying desperately to survive.  I depended on funds from the US and they were seldom coming and I was trying to help these people, build a work up or build a business up or both.  To go back was the same as to quit and I never knew when I would get this way again.

Defence dept maps
Getting defense department maps of this area are really hard.  I find this really interesting, like what could there possibly be to hide?  I had two, they were quite big scale, but they covered the Thai Burma border.  With a GPS they could be used to plot the border areas. 

Doors, I like doors
Especially in burma, the doors seem to get theselves noticed.
There were doors that were long closed, painted over or even bricked shut.  Other wooden doors that were seldom used. Locked. There were doors that were used so much they seldom closed.  Always open, maybe hardly hanging on the hinge. Paneled and worn with dirt and hands.  Some doors were two pieces but very narrow.  In a wooden wall or a house wall of brick and stone, plastered and thick, like walking into a castle.  People stood in doors, like half in and half out of two worlds at the same time.  Looking, not decided, just holding the door open or the wall up, and doorways lent themselves to this on lazy days. 
I remembered the tiny house we lived in there in Riverside, down there in California. The screen door always banging shut, or the spring creaking while it was opened.  Mostly the screen doors were wood built well or flimsy metal.  Nice for the heat, but often as a child you looked out doors at a world big and busy and going by and mother said it was too late to go out again for the evening and one wondered when they would be big and free.  Going back to that place many years later I wondered how we all made it in that tiny crowded neighborhood.  Doors, they could take you anywhere.

Drip irrigation
Drip irrigation shows up a little in Thailand, not much yet. Would be suitable for many crops like trees, etc.

Drunk tuk tuk driver
The drunk Tuk Tuk driver whipped me down the road and to the place where I wanted to go, very drunk though.  He skidded into the parking spot and I paid him and he left. Some Tuk Tuk  drivers had a lot of flair, they could help you find just about anything. Some were dead beats, and some were more than just helpful. Tuk Tuks, you had to duck your head, sort of lean back, in order to fit back there. Propane driven, loud, sputting, smelly, and hard to see out of.

Duck shop
This was one shop that sold duck soup, a specialty in Thailand.
The ducks hung up by their necks, all cooked and ready to be sliced into little pieces of dark meat with some rice.
Like I said, I used the specialty shops to change my menu, rather than order something different and confuse them. Across from the police station in Maesai they set up a duck soup shop on the street at night. One got used to the different flavors of the different shops, and settled with one that was most enjoyable. This one had jelled blood, dark broth. In a lot of Thai dishes there was too much meat for my tastes.
There was a noodle shop down the street a ways, on the east side, past the corner, a Thai guy set it up, he was real nice, I always had my chicken soup there, and he had good spices on the tables. Sour chili peppers were my favorite.

Down the Mekong
You can go down the Mekong on a speed boat as I mentioned, the mehkong is big an powerful with lots of big rocks to go around and wide across and Laos is there, the buildings a few here and there, the kids bathing and swimming and then the long wood boats barging up and down the coast.  The water is muddy and powerful and you can see the marks it leaves behind its wide width, a mystique all of its own.  There are giant catfish they catch during the hot season when the river is low and the fish are running, hundreds of kilos, very large in visual size even. Even the sight of so vast water can relieve and ease the mind, bring back memories, looking at moving water, remembering other places of moving water like how the jade green hues of water would surge in whirling clouds under the piers in Seattle when the ferry boats came in and reversed their motors.

Dogs
They were a lot of fun.  Thai owners loved to stand idly by while their dog with its back up went for your legs repeatedly.  I tried different tactics like persuing the dog, and dressing down the owner. Once I made a whip out of rope that I could crack in the dark and they understood that. One wasn't too bad, but three or four could gang up and work you on a dark street. Getting bit was no fun. Dogs tended to tell you about the local economics, and if the economy was bad, the meaner the dogs were.
Often I ended up walking from the highway at Ban Prasang to San Chai.  However, as I became better known in those parts, the closer I came to San Sook the more the odds increased that I would be picked up, most usually by the motorcyle rider going back to the village.  But often it was the case that they would know that I was going to walk the whole way so they would even turn around and pick me up and take me way back up the hill on occasions.  This always restored my hope, especially when I thought of all the times I had needed to go back to the pharmacy for one of the sick Akha when I would just as soon not have bothered.  I was glad that I could be on the receiving end on occasion.
When I had money I was generous, but when I was out of money I often felt lonely and poor.  Black fog plagued the mind, thinking oneself up out of the well without a ladder, the feet aching and blistered, maybe the wind blowing the rain to every thread of cloth on my body and making me feel badly about the leather in my boots which always got too wet or too dry or too dirty to last as long as I would need them.
     I always strove to pull more from my own internal resources, finding better solutions to the problems of the project.  Knowing what step to take first was always hard for me.  Especially when I felt that no matter what I did there wouldn’t be enough money. 
There was so much that I wanted to do here in the way of learning the languages.  But for me for some reason learning them was difficult, maybe I had just too much on my plate, but that couldn’t be helped.  Now it was almost August and soon people would be coming back to do more work in this region and to see me and I couldn’t afford to leave now unless I was sure that I would be able to raise more funds and get back.

Death of the Border
Jon said that one fellow would get calls from the soldiers asking him if he wanted to go up behind Maesai where they shot Burmese guys and dumped them over the boarder.  The soldiers and other guys took turns shooting them. They had been caught for this or that. Killing was cheap, dying was cheaper, being discarded where not even the birds cared. 
The Akha would tell of finding bodies in the fields, and just staying away from that section for a while. You might even find mounds where such a body had been covered over beside the trail.

Democracy riots
They shot up the Royal Hotel during the democracy riots. 1991
I was headed there to get a room, but didn't have enough time before my flight, so I wentto the airport instead and then saw it on TV.  I was headed back to the US.
When I came back to Maesai I saw a soldier at the border watching the river.  But when I said hello to him he quickly said, "No, I not same army" without really hearing what I said.  People were that embarassed about all the students killed.

Dead man
Run over in the road, like a rag.  I first thought that was what it was when I went driving by. But it was someone dead laying there in the dark very small.  A car stopped and they put him in it, but he flopped over out of site.  I followed them to the hospital and they checked him roughly.  Dead from a broken neck.  His family came and cried loudly and so the nurses put amonia under their noses to make them stop.

Drowned boy of two years
A small boy played on the steps near the bridge.  I didn't see it happen, but he got too close to the lapping water and maybe thinking it was safe or shallow being very young, he tested it and fell clear out of sight and was quickly swept away.  I don't know if they ever found his body.  Many men came with long poles, diving in the river, probing, the young mother there in tears, but they did not find him then. The Maesai river  has taken the lives of so many people, it looks so deceptive as to what it is and how strong it is because it is not so far across near the bridge there, but it is actually quite deep and powerful as it gets narrow enough to go through there.

Dang bakery
Dang had a bakery near the corner of the Sailom Joi just before you got to the Northern guesthouse on the right hand side. Sometimes there were a lot of motorbikes parked out front of her place, jumping snakes. Not sure what became of her.  Hadn't seen her in years.  She ran the bakery very well but then married someone rich they said and closed it all up.

Death Exchange
A Thai man crossed the river during one of the disputes and a burmese soldier shot him.  The Thais immediately took a Burmese dishwasher from the Thai Tong and shot him in the head and threw him on the river bank.  He had nothing to do with it, was only poor and Burmese, that was all.  My friend at the Wang Tong reception was his good friend.  He had a wife and family on the Burma side. The Thais had no problem to be cruel. Sarayud had killed many that way.

Embasies in Chiang Mai
There are embasies in Chiang Mai like the one for China. Also an American consulate near the river.  I had gone there a number of times, a small office and only open for US citizens twice a week for a couple of hours.  Course they had to mount a major security effort to let you in. 

Embassies Bangkok
This is called embassy row, there is a moat in this area. The embassies are big, take a lot of time at security, like fortresses, and the main buildings are back quite a way from the road. But you can see they have been there many years.  The road is called Wireless Road.  The ground is low and has a high water table from the very old days of Siam.  Wars and new wars have all bid their time coming and going past these embassies. 

Embassy newsletter
The embassy has a  newsletter for Americans.  It seemed very official and I never availed myself of it.  People who work in embassies tend to be very stark Americans, like the world is near as pleasant outside as inside.  I did meet one fellow, he was most helpful, I forget now even what the problem was.  Overall embassies don't like to be bothered regarding the trouble their citizens get into.

Evening clinic Sailom Joi
The lab assistant from the  hospital ran it. A small room at the street in the front of a house, where some old people lived, they made the deal for some extra income.  Sometimes the hospital would even send me there instead of at the hospital to make sure she got enough business.  That was a hassle, so I only availed myself of the place a few times, once to test for malaria for one of my workers.  Later she closed or relocated though she still worked at the hospital. 

Every bit of wood used
Not very much wood is wasted.  Scavengers come for every last piece, seldom do you see wood debri fires. Can't remember seeing one, though these were common on American construction sites.  The wood is heavy like teak, hard and a wonder that anyone can drive a nail in it at all.  Getting nails back out is even harder and they often break off in the wood.  The wood is so hard that it helps to drill a hole in it first before driving the nail.

Eels
River eels, the Thai eat them, sometimes you see them in the river during or after a storm, swimming along the river bank.  Once I saw a bunch near the bridge all at one time.

Eat Rice
There must be 700 diffferent ways here to shove rice into your mouth.  Many pause, like they can’t believe they are eating ant larva again.  Others shovel it in biting into the bowl, like a dog.  I get sick of the stuff myself.  Akha rice is fine, but Thai rice has every last bit of nutrition and vitamin milled out of it.
Some eat it in a way that makes the space between their nose and upper lip tripple in height, for the event, like some charicature of Breshnev’s mother.
With the diet here it seems no wonder they are small people.  I  never feel full, like my brain is always going hungry.  A snickers bar off the newstand every now and then is good.
Today I got a berth on a sleeper for Malaysia.  This is like an extended vacation then back to maesai. Usually the trip takes 8 days.

Earthquake
I was staying in Wisid guest house in Chiangrai, really it was closed, but they rented me a room. I was waiting for my money to make it to the bank so I could go home.  On the second night there was another earthquake like a couple of nights before in the Akha village San Chai.
That time about 3 am the hut swayed and Asor woke up with an exclamation as the whole village woke and voices could be heard through out.  The beauty of a village.
And on this night the two story guest house swayed and creaked in a prolonged quake.  I got up and went out since I didn’t trust the building and the boards creaked over head and the fan rattled.  Didn’t need that.
At the same time I felt like a little foolish, like I was over reacting, but when I got out on the street, half the neighborhood was there.
I waited five minutes or so to see if it would reoccur but it didn’t so I went back to bed where I could still feel the tremblers.
I had been in a deep dream when the quake woke me.  I had just been ready to go back for seconds.

Educating the thai young people about the hill tribe
This would help the hilltribe. The Thai young people didn't know. Youth was like that.  They only knew what the teachers taught them that was wrong about the hilltribe but seldom asked questions themselves or tried to identify with the people and what was going on.
They also found themselves pitted against the same problems of the glass ceiling in Thai society that the Hilltribe had, it was only that they were a rung above the hilltribe to start with, that was all.  Complacency would do them no favors at all.
Shown how their problems were similar the barriers could be overcome to work together, though they might never be close, there would be common ground.

Factories
There are jade factories in maesai, carving factories, sculpture.  Some people electroplated gold onto copper too. There used to be lots of weaving.  There are also gem cutting factories in the good times.  I knew of one where a lot of Chin workers were employed.  Zera took me there once. Up the temple road at the south end of town, across from Boom Street Mini Market.

Falang, falanger engalee
Thais always called this out like Falangs were not human.  No matter where  you went, someone called this out, not always rudely in tone, but often so.  Kids were sometimes the worst, yelling it loudly, such as in a store and pointing at you, their parents amused, not at all taken back at the rudeness of it.  Sometimes I responded by saying "Thai" "Thai" like that, in the same kind of voice and pointing back at the children in the conspicuous presence of their parents.
In the seven eleven you could often see the fat Thai children screaming and shouting and having fits about what it was that they wanted.  Mostly the merchandise offered was of a light puffy air nature, which the Thais bought much of. 
But once again, I could not stress enough that I lived in Thailand because I liked the weather, the chill, the mountains of the north, both the Thai and the Hilltribe, and the culture.  There were annoyances, but the benefits of being guests in these people's countries far outweighted the disadvantages.

Fang
South of Tatong, a small town.  A few Akha villages from there.  The food is interesting and you can find hilltribe in the market in the morning, buying this and that.  The noodle soup in town is scant and very plain, the price the same as very busy noodle soup in maesai.  In this case Maesai is a better deal.  But Fang was also a genuine Thai town, nothing big going on, the highway even offering a way around town which I never took, always prefering to slow down and bump through town and look at it all and always the hardware or merchantile shop caught my eye.  They had many interesting things in the local farm shops, tools and items unique to the area, that you might not see somewhere else.  And always things for rice, the principle food, and for fishing and catching small bugs, crabs and the tiniest of fish.  Some fish never got very big, you ate them that way, you had to clean all the mud out of the silver little creatures not much more than an inch long.  I didn't like them because they always lived in such smelly water, but the Thais and Akhas both depended on them for a food supply. 
With all the use of chemicals in the fields I couldn't help but wonder if they were getting scarcer?  Surely Monsanto or Zeneca would not mind some of its chemicals in the eyes of a few small fish who didn't vote or write law?  Did God hear the cries of the small fish for their children?

Big snails
Behind the afternoon market in Maesai there were all these huge snails that could be seen in an lychee fruit tree orchard.  I don't think anyone ate them, but they were super huge, nearly as big as tennis balls. I only saw them when there was a month of rain or more and the ground flooded. 
The snails were yellow and blue, big round smooth shells.  For some reason the Thai didn't collect them, knew not to maybe.  I never asked but they were in the bushel basket fulls, covering the ground.  The orchard sat close to the flood plain so full on into the rainy season it didn't drain well and filled up with grass and this clear water, not runoff, just rain, and it didn't stink which was fortunate. 
The lychee trees were also full of those big orange ants that could bite you pretty good.  They were everywhere, sort of a spindly ant, lived maybe on aphids that they transported around or was it sap?  They also had a habit of falling out of the tree on you if you walked under it.
The field was soon being filled in with dirt, the trees cut down little by little to make room for houses and buildings, the Thais not being very big on sponsoring green inside their neighborhoods.  Potted plants and plants on the roof were as close as it came to this.  All of which took a lot of hand watering of course.  If you couldn't get someone to do this for you while you were gone all your plants would die.

Fire crackers for domestic fueders
This Thai couple came to the room behind mine, number 28 in the Maesai Plaza Guest House and fought half the night. The man was drunk, maybe herself as well, and it went on for very long.
So come about seven when I had to get up I set off a big firecracker at their door. 
In the neighborhoods the drunk Thais fought a lot, family disputes, the children getting caught in the crossfire, tiny units of concrete, crowded together, hot, no air, ants, and little green for the soul.  One needed this to live.  Planners of development for the poor areas had little clue.  Slums were one thing, because they were close to the dirt and water a lot grew and lived naturally around  them but building sites, where all was built over offered nothing to the people who lived there.  Woe unto them who build house upon house and leave no place for man to be alone?

Fire pot flares, sparklers and bottle rockets
They have these clay pots full of phosperous.  They flame up huge into the night sky in a geisure of sparks when you light them.  A Local Thailand and Burma fire works display.  Often people set them off at special times of year at the temples.  I could see them flair up way over on the burma side, still loud and bright from so far away. 
Then there were the roman candles, and bottle rockets which were most common.  Certain times of year people near the main highway blew up big fire crackers very close to the shoulder, and the explosions were so intense as to nearly frighten you to crash your motorbike.  In the night they were punctuated with a large bright flash.
The bottle rockets amused, fired here and there, across houses, over to the Burma side and high into the air, popping with a flash and a delayed sound in the dark of the night.

Careless Concrete Work
Concrete work in Thailand was scary.  If a concrete form for a support pillar didn't fill, you just plaster over it. Doesn't matter it is the bottom end of a pillar that the concrete didn't get to.
There was one building that was on such thin pillars on the highway to Chiangrai that no one ever did rent or occupy the building, which was two story.  More often than not concrete was mixed on the ground in a makeshift pile, a different worker doing it each time, with a different concrete formula for as many different guys.  Usually too much water was added, and much cement seperated out of the mix.  Sometimes a mixer was used but not so often.  In the rare jobs a cement and pump truck might actually show up or you might find someone with a vibrating wand shoved down in forms to make sure they filled.  Rare events in deed, and it was little wonder that buildings fell down in these countries when there was earthquakes, and sometimes it didn't even take that much..

Four corner nets
The women used them in the klongs. They were a net that was stretched on sticks in a square, with a hoop to each corner.  It lay flat in the klong, then when they lifted up on it the sides pulled up.  I think it was mostly used for catching crabs or other small things different than fish.

Flipped jeep coming into keng tung
This guy rented a jeep and drove it to keng tung from Maesai.  When he was coming down the curves off the last ridge he flipped it. Lucky no one was killed. The road there is where you come down from the last way station below Lwe Mwe mountain.  There is even a backroad to Lwe Mwe that comes out there.  This became some of the worst road to Keng Tung when they tore it up, never was good however, very steep and curving.  The driver obviously didn't have too much experience. 

Apple Pie
A favorite, loved to eat this.  Baking it was lots of work.  Chiefly the making of the crust took lots of effort, it was delicate and broke up easily.  The rest was easy and if you had workers all that much the better.  I never had trouble getting rid of apple pie.  I would have sold it to the Top North hotel but the woman wanted it for nothing and it was way too much work to sell it cheap.  Sometimes Yai at the Chinese Pharmacy bought a pie.  The Wang Tong didn't have any and didn't want to buy any either. My pie was very good and I didn't like to give it away.  It would keep for days so if I didn't have guests I just polished it off myself.  The tins were deep and big and I used about a full kilo of apples, or six big apples, in one pie.

Tourists Pay More
Tourists often had the complaint that they had to pay more for everything than the Thai people did. They were mostly right about this.

Flour shop
At the market, there was a flour shop.  I always bought my baking supplies there, cooking oil, flour, yeast, sugar, salt, and Kim Chee.  But the kimchee had so much strong chemical in it that it tore your stomach up.  Delicious never the less.

Frame shop
On the main street there was a frame shop that made metal and wood frames, mirrors, windows, cart boxes of glass that people sold food out of.  I went to the shop on a number of occasions but the owner would just ignore me.  This could often be the case in other shops too.  You might be talking to the owner or paying for something, or waiting for an order to be filled and the owner would constantly leave your order and go fill someone elses order or take their money until you just plain yelled at the people, told them to wait and then got the owner to finish your order.  Otherwise as the foreigner you would be ignored and walked on endlessly.

French shop had a large hornet's nest
She had a very large hornets nest in the place, hanging as an ornament, three feet across.
She prided herself on the junk she sold.  She always had her slave girls. After many years she bought herself a white mercedes while they continued to slave on for nothing.  After many years her brother came once to stay at the Plaza, not "rich" like her. She had a tiny house made like a chalet on Sailom Joi.  She had pictures of herself in France or some other such place, fifteen minutes of fame.  The slave girls endlessly did all the work and tended her shop while she made sure she got the prices she wanted for the junk she sold.

Freight trucks with wooden sides
The freight trucks have very nice painted and varnished one slab wooden sides. Some of the trucks are quite old and have ornamental metal work as well as colorful painting of designs on the wood.  The oldest trucks in Thailand had no doors but were solid open cabs making it cool and easy to get in and out of the truck.

The newer trucks were stacked very high and overloaded.  Many of them raced through town or down the highway at quite dangerous speeds.  Many innocent people were hit by these trucks, the drives often speeding on and not stopping.

Fried chicken stand
She had been frying chicken for nearly 18 years she said. Always it was fresh in the morning with sticky rice and chilli sauce made of egg plant and onions, very tasty.  Her carts were right next to the road near the bridge, front of where they were building the new customs house now days. She sold fried fish and pork, and of course I thought the chicken had some of the best flavor I had ever tasted.  I had been buying chicken from her for ten years of that 18.

Friends die of aids
The Shan driver to Keng Tung said that all his high school friends got aids and died.  He was the driver for us to Keng Tung.  Kevin Wood thought he drove too fast for the dirt roads, but one would do anything to make those roads come to an end early in the afternoon.  His truck, a four wheel drive van that didn't have four wheel drive, was battered and full of dust from the road.  It was a completely fatiguing filthy experience.  The van was nearly vibrated apart, nothing sealed so all the dust came right in.  At best the road was a twelve hour ride during the dry season, clouds of dust covering you from the vehicles speeding ahead of you.  Many of the vehicles on the road were toyota station wagons, like everything else, beat to death.

Fruit stands
Many fruit stands on the main street at night in maesai selling every kind of tropical fruit. There were so  many in fact that between these and the other carts there were hardly any places to park a vehicle if you owned one.  Street vendors blocked all the sidewalk, carts and stands blocked all the road, not much of an order to anything, so more often than not I just parked in front of them with my truck on the road and tended to business.

Fruit cart
Women also pushed carts selling different kinds of fruit during the day, from mangos to watermelons, a scale tied to one end of the cart.
Then other women pushed glass carts full of cut up fruit, or if it wasn't they would cut it up fresh when you picked it out.  They were quite expert at cutting the fruit, putting it in a bag.  Was enjoyable to watch them work.

Fuji photo shop, akha women from doi mae salong
I needed some pictures of the Akha so I got these three women to pose for a picture, paid them well.  After many years I found out where they lived and finally got the picture back to them.
Years later I took my camera to this Fuji shop to have it cleaned and he sold it before I could pick it up.  A nice Canon A2.  Course I never did any business there of any kind after that, but these people don't think that way.

Fungus  cream, was there a herbal variety also?
Fungus cream was expensive, I wondered at a herbal remedy or what people did in the old days?

The Fungus Girl
A man called me.  He lived in a tiny room on the river.  It was a long wood building, tiny rooms for rent.  It had been a whore house but now they rented the rooms out to couples.  His wife had a huge fungus infection from her groin all the way over her hip.  All covered in scab.  Fungus medication was very expensive but the site was so horrible and she was so badly afflicted, that I applied it all over the scabby wound until it cleared up completely.  He took me there every day to clean it.  It had a strange smell to it, but slowly it completely disappeared. It easily covered a square foot of her body.

Fire ball over trees
One time when I was walking out of the village down the hill to San Sook there was this storm coming, it was spring, and lightning was all around.  One could also see these webs of elcectricity running across the tops of the clouds, shooting out in balls from cloud to cloud, very different than lightning itself.

Fog on mtn, akha woman wants to buy rice
Lwe Mwe in Keng Tung Burma was very cold the time I visited it with the people from Singapore.  We took the bumpy ride up the mountain and got there in the early afternoon but it could have been evening.  A few shops, that were made of wood was all that we could find, and in one I looked to purchase a blanket for the guests cause the car was so cold.  In the shop that I went to buy it in, a tiny Akha woman in very worn clothes was asking the owner how much the rice cost.  She wanted to buy only a couple hand fulls.  I wondered how poor she must be if she had to ask the cost of a couple of hand fulls, dreadfully poor.
There was a lake up there on the mountain top and a leper colony not too far away and a convent as usual, everywhere the catholic church had imprisoned souls.  Scattered around the lake were the old twin houses that the British had built when they were there.  But there had also been very old trees. Burmese army soldiers with nothing to do cut them all down and made them into charcooal.  This was the mentality of the Burmese Army for the most part.

The old man with the funny white cart
There was this old man with a white food cart on the street at night, parked it down a side alley from Akha alley, where Cary once chased a girl up her skirt.
He sold drinks, icys I think, spun the block right there to make the carved ice for the drink. The pharmacy guy remembers him for many years, way back, and his cart had wires, lights, everything sort of strung on it.

Fat beggar at night market with stick
He was fat.  His face was wide and thick, he waddled more than walked.  His feet were dark from the ankle up about a foot.  Some kind of ailment.  He would walk up to you and stick his fat hand in your face and ask for twenty baht.  Yes, he was fat, a fat beggar, with a stick that he used for a cane and also to try and chase the young beggar children away if he found a popular spot to beg.  I drove him off a time or two, gave him a good crack for sticking his filthy hand in my face a time too many.

Flooded road
When the river came up Sailom Joi would completely flood.  Sometimes a foot or more water on it in front of the guest house.

Garden ground
Booh Burh tilled it, so did I.
After she dug out the bamboo stump she and I tilled it all up. 
We were going to plant it. Romolo came in those days.  The place was noisy and I couldn't sleep so I moved out and left it all behind.  The big house, the guy had a restaurant and every night they came back at around one or two in the morning, unloading carts, banging, talking, starting the dogs to barking.  Not nice at all.

Garish houses
People would get some money, from maybe a daughter in bangkok and then build an absolutely horrible looking house like a large tile bathroom turned inside out.

Gearge Darveaux
Started me in beads.  I met him in the line at the Chiangmai airport and asked him where he was going.  He told me Maesai, and I had never heard of such a place and had not traveled in Thailand much, so I joined him and came up and he showed me how to buy beads and it worked for me to a great extent.

Generator to zera
Zera asked me to buy a generator for their village.  They had a diesel motor for it.  I did buy it and they used it for many years till they got normal electricity from the government who bought it from Thailand side.

Gernade hits guest house
Blew a hole in the wall.
Nearly killed Tin Tin who just stepped out of the shower.
She heard something and ducked, and a piece of shrapnel went right through the mirror where she had been standing and buried itself in the cement wall behind it.

Glasses Son: one beer makes him happy
The glasses son, he was happy after one beer, could laugh at the TV.
He baby-sat the counter at the guest house. Didn't appear to have a happy life working for his father and the family.  His father looked for wives for his sons, but could find none.  People didn't like his house.  His grandfather died and they built a big wooden coffin that they carved out of a log for his bones more than a year after he died and buried them at some chinese cemetary.  I wasn't sure, but his father might have been dead many years.  I was told the log was buried for a good long time too before they dug it up and carved it.  The Akha often buried wood to season it for carving so that the moisture would be cured and there would not be splitting and cracking.  The wood for Akha spindles was treated in this way.

Go to Laos
Something I wanted to do to see Akha there.  It was part of the dream here that I had which I put off for many years because I did not have the money. There were said to be some 30,000 Akha living in Laos.

The green bus
Starting up and pulling down the main street and out of town so slowly
yeah, this is how they get the last passengers. You won't miss the bus this way, there is a ten to twenty minute slowly rolling interval where you can still catch it from your motorcycle taxi. Seems to work.  You know when you go to the station that you can catch one bus, just the way they do it.

Girl from Adaw’s Family, prostitute, maesai
I had nursed her when she was sick once, she still knew some of the old ways which you could find in a catholic village still, Sah Kauh Pah Urh, stuff like that. She was from the really messed up catholic village in Keng Tung.
Anyway, she came down to maesai and became a prostitute.
Guess that is how it all goes.
The mission location had a very big involvement in the shipping of girls.  I asked the priest about it, he was very evasive, I wondered seriously that the church might be involved in this.

Gutters full of black nasty water
Anywhere one went in Thailand they were likely to find canals or gutters full of trash and black grey dirty water, very stagnent.  Breeding disease and always an eye sore.  Maesai and other towns were doing a little more to clean up in the later years with trash bins everywhere.

Gatow , gatai, old man upper fvillage, 13 days to remarry
Two shan villages in the Keng Tung valley. I went to an Akha village way up in the mountain side above this valley and visited my friend a headman.  His daughter was home after splitting from her husband.  She had thirteen days to remarry.  That was all she could stay in her father's house before she had to remarry or move out.  It was the Akha way of saying they didn't encourage divorce, and it was the married women's way of saying "don't be after my old man."

Grafting near som pah sak
I saw the days they brought the big grafting crew to the orchard near Som Pah Sak Akha.  They worked on it for days, but then years later I saw that they left the very large orchard to grow to weed.  Looked like a peach orchard, which of course was too low an elevation around Som Pah Sak to grow peaches.  For that you had to be in the mountains to do, up where it got at least cool if not cold in the winter months.

Grapes
One did not see these growing in the north, not sure if possible in the mountains or not.
The grapes in the market come from california best I can tell, come packed in styrofoam boxes

Green fruit
The people here in Thailand liked cut up pieces of any green fruit dipped in salt, sugar, spice.  Mango was a favorite, or pickled fruit.  Sometimes plums, they were now grown in Doi Maesalong too.  Small and sour most of the time, an ornamental plum.  Just to think what our mothers would have said if they knew that all those green fruits we ate as kids were quite normal?  We just didn't know about the salt and chili pepper powder. 

One Pharmacy
He owned one of the pharmacies in maesai, couldn't understand very well and couldn't see very well.  Had thick green lensed glasses. His wife and son  were pleasant and came out to help.  But he was so hard to understand or talk to that I went to the pharmacy across the street.

Green top mosque in burma gets gold
For many years it was just green.  An american disappeared over there, he was muslim, or wanted to be.  I never saw if he left or not. I could see the mosque from the guest house.  Later they did the turrets in gold.  I went there once looking for prayer beads.  A woman wanted like 20,000 sets but when I gave her a price she never replied.  The big man that was often at the mosque actually spoke Hindi.

Gems
Near the bridge many gem stones were sold, mostly they were glass or misrepresentations of the real thing.  They were always overpriced of course as were Cary's gems.  Cary had sold many people gems at prices that they could not possible resell them at, which they didn't discover till they got back to the US.

The cowboy bar with potion drinks
This skinny dude, friend of Edward, set up a herbal liquor bar behind the old theatre in the back of the Maesai market.  He spent a lot of money and effort on it, but did not survive.  Many people set up cowboy bars in Maesai, they never lasted long.  The buildings might even be the nicer part of the operation, but were soon closed.  One wondered what these people were thinking as it had been done and failed so often.

Gold Chain Mamasan
She and her brother or husband ran the brothel where the New York Taxi driver lost all his money.
He took the kids to school and back on a motorbike, the children enjoying a future that the girls who made it possible didn't enjoy.

Girlfriend at checkpoint
Once I took my girlfriend toward Chiang Saen. They police stopped us, THE THAI POLICE just in case you wondered.  And they took her hostage for money. She didn't have her ID card with her so they said I had to pay 3,000 baht.  I of course didn't have it.  But it didn't look like she was going free without it. I raced back to Maesai to see what I would do and then I met my friend from Colorado and he loaned me the money and drove his bike back with me and all this in record time some 10 kilometers.  My girlfriend was crying and said she counted every motorbike that came back until mine came, the 5th motorbike.  I paid the police and we left together, the three of us, but this is just to say that Thailand will never be taken credibly until it does something about police corruption.  As it stands the police are above the law and extort from people non-stop in Thailand. 
I was new then in Thailand.  They are counting on the times they can get away with it.

Girlfriend kidnapped over beads
This fellow from Burma wanted me to buy beads that I did not want to buy and when I wouldn't buy them he asked my girlfriend if she could stop by the house. He then took her to the Burma side where he had her call to me  that I had to buy the beads or she wouldn't be coming home.  I peered across and there she was standing on the far bank of the river, on the Burma side. Finally she tricked the man and got away, but in the end he got a very bad life, split from his wife and many other things went bad for him. I of course never bought the beads. Day traders, all these people, one half day, one deal. They didn't think as far ahead as the afternoon.

Green leaf drink, pennywart
There is a great drink made of the pennywort leaf.  The Thais sell it along the side of the road from their carts, which also have coconut drink and an orange tea drink, all of which are tasty.

Huxai visa experience
Kevin wood from Australia, he and I took the speed boats down the mehkong and then had to wait a long time after that to get our visas done on the Laos side.  They really wanted us to stay the night, get a room, spend money.  That sort of thing. But we had to go back, we insisted on our visas and got them and left again but it was already past five in the evening when they finally got done, then we took the taxi back to maesai late.

Huxai
Huxai on the Lao border at Chiang Kong was also known as the site of a large heroin factory in the KMT days after they had gotten driven out of Burma. There is reference to the Opium War at Huxai when Bill Young led a raid to intercept a Shan opium shipment at Huxai. The Lao airforce came up and bombed the story goes, and the shipment made it no further, leaving one to wonder where it went, and how it was that missionaries showed up at such events. 
I asked Bill Young about this at one time, on the phone from Chiangmai. He said that no Americans were involved in drugs in Laos because they didn't need the money, unlike the French.  God, what a bullshitter.  He said his second cousin was Marcus Young in Maesai, the guy who pretends to be a missionary to the Wa.

The Errant Hand Grenade
After the attack on tachilek, there was one explosion at night, injured a burmese soldier when he messed up with a grenade. They told us the next day that his hand had been torn off.

Hawaiian and his Isan Wife
A young man from Hawaii often came to Maesai.  He married an Isan girl. She ran away after a few months in Hawaii, didn't even phone for weeks.
Went with a guy to LA. Then divorced him.  He was naive, but I felt sorry for him because he meant no ill. He got married to another woman and I never saw him again over the years.

Heroin: Notes on addiction
Heroin addicts in Maesai
Many heroin addicts bought their supply behind the Maesai Guest house next to the border.  Not a good place.  You could see them injecting along the trail, passed out, or sleeping.  Once they broke into John's room in the guesthouse and stold some items.  Many of these people died of aids from sharing needles.  A word to the wise.
You could also see them injecting under the bridge or  under the piers of the restaurant next to the bridge.  Sometimes they sat down up on the bridge, deep in a stupor, their heads hung down on their chest, closed off to worry and the world yet next to death's door.

Hillside fire at guest house
Really burned, I went and fought some of it, could have set the whole guest house off. It was in the Bamboo above the place next door.

Hitting the motorbike on way back from Thatong
So I am coming down the highway from Thatong and am almost at Maechan.  There is this car pulled over on the left shoulder with two people standing next to it talking to the passengers.  I go to the right.  On the right shoulder their friend is on a motorbike and talking as well.  Just as I arrive to go by the man on the motorbike flips on his light, does a u-turn right in front of me into the road.  I braked hard and swerved to the right.  He was nearly killed.  I hit him right behing the leg against the rear wheel of the motorbike, he slammed up against the side of the truck as I went by, and I went off into the ditch before I got stopped.
He was very apologetic.  The drunks in the truck were cops and called a leutenant who could speak english.  One Thai guy wanted me to pay.  I told him no way, it was the motorcyles fault.  At which point the driver, the one hurt asked me to never mind and thy cop said that since the bike driver had no mirrors, no helmut, and didn't look before he pulled out, I was free to go.
If he had mirrors or even bothered to look he would have seen me coming.  The Thais always want to blame an accident on any nearby foreigner or if a foreigner is involved have the pay.  "Pay money" "Pay money" is the only words they know.  "Are you ok, are you hurt" are not words you will hear.
Otherwise, if a foreigner is not involved they resolve most accidents rather in a friendly fashion, looking at the damage, fixing it, hazards of traveling the road together, not particularly anyone's fault.

Hornets
I had just rented a new building for the school and money didn't come in.  I had to get some money for food and there was this huge hornets nest hanging off the eave.   I knew that the grubs were very expensive, that I could sell them, so I made a long pole with a net to catch the nest, but had no idea how massive and heavy it was.
I tried once to pull it down but the super big hornets got really angry, saw me some three meters away and attacked me.  I ran through the house, the hornets in my hair, welding my skull over and over.  I finally killed them all.  They were huge, three or four of them, more than an inch long, great black and red.  My head throbbed and hurt as much as it can without bleeding.
I took a pole, wrapped a rag around it, doused it in oil and burned the bastards.  The nest fell in the river and floated away when I tried to catch it, was really heavy, probably fourty pounds or more.

Hot March Afternoon Maesai
The afternoon is hot and the sky hazy from un necessary burnt fields and mountains.  Army border police types drivef by in light trucks to check the border to the west with Burma.
Children trudge along the road, motorcycles speeding past in the heat and dust.
A man from Switzerland stops by for a chat about Burma and then goes his way.
Japanese long term guests relaz at tables enjoying sips of fresh sugar cane juice cooled on ice.
All the road has a orangish hue from sunlight filtered through haze.
Whatever gguests may be appear to be in hiding from the mostly still heat which will only get hotter towards five oclock before cooling down.
Construction, upgrading , goes on and on at this guest house, one phase after another.  Some 80 rooms now.
This was the afternoon to be it the arms of a lover with a cool breeze across the skin.

Ivan Polunin
Once I went to Keng Tung with the Doctor Ivan from Singapore.  He liked to study insects, fireflies, simultaneous lighting that they did, how they knew to do that.
Well, he was a great talker and I don't think I slept much during the trip. His mind was full on and alive, and he was 74. 
He collected pottery shards, had a museum he had just built in singapore and was lots of fun.
Well, he wanted to stay longer and when we got back my house maids had moved to Joe's who was angry that they did that and he had to feed them, cause my rice ran out, but I didn't ask him to do that so wasn't my fault. 
Anyway, Boney, she hid evreything that looked of any value in my house to some corner of the room or behind this or that place lest someone should steal anything. I was really surprised.  Then she moved onto another job and I didn't see her time I came back from Burma.

Dec 97
It was December, I needed to be headed north into Burma.
I needed to be getting more language work done.
Seemed to me like every month there came a time to fast, probably good for mind and body.  Of course it wasn’t voluntary, but if you wer going to have the goal of staying here without having to spend years generating support in the west you had better learn how.  And if you did no one could throw you out because it cost money to do that too.  I was reminded of brother David in Jerusalem who got rid of his passport for that reason.  I didn’t think it would work in Thailand. He spent six months in an Israeli jail and in the end they said oh well and let him out.  He was still there, a small moving riot on God’s behalf with a really big voice.  Give him a tamberine and watch him dance!

Ice cream on a stick carts, coconut
They had this round tin full of sticks that were frozen in ice cream.
Was odd and interesting looking.  The whole tin was filled with ice.  The long tin cone came out, the woman would dip in water, to get the ice cream to release and then put the empty tin cone back in the large tin assembly.

Yellow Surprise
This was the name of a water company in Maesai. We joked about that often. Like the Bat Man Club Disco, but when they abreviated it on the sign they said the "BM Club".

Tapin Bridge River Crossing
At the crossing of the Tapin Bridge to go to monglar there was a security point. The road was horrible in these days to get that far.  The river was big, a metal suspension bridge from the second world war crossed it.  A Military Intelligence officer asked me what country I was from, looked in the truck, had no uniform but a revolver with a ring in the handle protruding from his pocket. 

Inter tubes
Inner tubes came out in the hot season, for floating on ponds or down the Maesai River.  At the Rimkok many inner tubes were in use, rented from the beach.

Jade dying
Mahinder, he knew just a little bit about this. He was seventh day adventist.  Occasionally his wife came down from some where in Burma called Kah Lay.  Life was hard for him in those years trying to feed his family in Burma.  He stayed on Sailom Joi next to the Klong in the little house with the woman who had the tiny noodle stand in that low room at the end of her house near the intersection.  He stayed at the other end.  He would buy fabrics in Singapore for a few years and his wife would sell them, but this got harder with time and I think he finally went back to Burma.  His brother was a doctor in Texas and no longer cared anything for the family. 

Jo-Jo’s
A clean table.
Quick service.
Skimpy food.
Interesting help.
Akhas, Shans, Burmese and a few others.
Foreigners and the traveled liked the place along with bussiness men and women, cops, army from Burma and probably a few from the higher eschelons.
The owner's daughter ran the place, her elderly mother sometimes sitting there, and you couldn't imagine a less interesting person.
They required the help to endlessly pull the trays of food out of the cabinet and reheat them, and carry them back from the propane stoves very hot, with great risk of an accident.  When I think of stupid people, I think of the woman who runs this place.  She had a way of packaging stupidity and irreverance in an ultimate kind of way.

Jumping Bean's Father
The recycling Akha men
One he was the father of the little jumping bean boy, but the cops caught him and he went to jail and for some reason died there.  He didn't do anyone any harm, didn't smoke opium or do drugs. Pushed a cart late into the night collecting like the toothless guy from the Akha village and his wife did too.  That man, always happy, not a thing to be happy about, no teeth. Wondered how he did it.  His wife often ill.

June 1, 1995
Maesai
The border is still closed. 
I had the good fortune to get introduced to one of the Akha leaders in Thailand and have been able to get an overview from him as well as full support for my script and my children’s book.  He speaks fluent English and is not religious so there is no mixed agenda.  Unfortunately in the past all my dealings with educated Akha were in Burma and they didn’t seem to care as long as they were meeting their religious agenda.  I suspected that I was getting very little assistance and when I came to visit this man, he knew all of my people and it became obvious that they had all been just stringing me along.  But I am glad for the four years in the school of hard knocks because now I know what people’s real intentions were while they had the opportunity to be deceptive. 
I hope now to make some real progress.  I have discovered that the religious organizations were doing nothing but enriching the leadership and that basically no one is helping in the villages in Thailand at all in any organized way.  To think all of these years I stayed out of their ‘territories’.  But like I say it was good in some ways.  Careful what you hear and believe.

Jan 98
Maesai
I was now diving full bore into the Akha language work.  There was much to do on the language.  I began going through my old papers and copying out the good stuff onto new sheets, discarding the old.  a slow but necessary process.
I am making sheets after sheet of words and phrases.  Meeh Daw, the cook from Burma is of great help.
After I will enter all into the computer.  I have a few thousand words and phrases to copy first.
Then I begin translating and glossing words and phrases from books.
My work is now all focused on the language with only a few projects in the village as money allows.

Jack fruit
These were big and dark and green, covered with small spiny like skin.  The fruit was sweet but the sap was sticky so you cleaned out the pods around the seeds with a plastic bag over your hand and washed them each off.  Otherwise your hand got like rubber.

Jing hong
This is a city up in Yunnan Province where there are many tribal people living, Hani, Akha and so many others.  Jim Goodman wrote some excellent books about the area with great photography.

Joes monekey bites girl
Yeah, a nasty monkey that was, bit people, finally gave it away out of maesai.
Didn't matter who was holding the monkey and  his chain. When someone else came close the monkey would get very defensive and try to bite, a very dirty nasty animal.

Juice pears
The juice pears come from China, expensive and not much flavor to them.

Kicking head at beer bar
Across the street they had an argument in the bar, and it came out on the street.  First a little shoving then the guy went down on the ground and two guys kicked him at the same time in the head from opposite sides till he didn't move any more.  A tuk tuk came and hauled him away. Bar owners, in general in the world, are an evil sort.  They never take responsibility for the damage done by the alcohol they so generously push and the people who are injured.  Sure the men are a few.  Sure the women are a few.  Alcohol is a mean drink.  Where ever I have been in the world, the greed of bartenders was most noteable.
And to think I went to bartending school one time.  Well, it hardly suited me and I never stuck to it, but it did give me some education about what goes on behind the bar, the varieties and how they are put together.  Different drinks are suitable only to some processes and a good bar tender is really a chemist.
But I wasn't referring to these kind of bartenders, I was referring to places that sell mostly straight hard liquor and endless beer.
White color places are a whole different breed and if they come with cigars, so much the better, like a California Cigar Bar.
Jonathan's in Salem, was one of the few nice bars I had been in. A real family kind of place, people of all ideas and friendships, small, everyone pressed close together with lots of fun and talk, standing or sitting down, waiting for people, looking for familiar faces and old friends. Green, dark green, deep mahogany red wood, glass inlaid on the tops, brass and a tile floor.

Khun Sah attack
The attack came early in the morning, at first I thought it was a Chinese funeral, but it was way too early so that did not make sense.  So that people can understand that this was only a political point in the making, let me outline that Khun Sa stated that this attack would occur, and international media were on top of the Wang Tong hotel filming it from the start.  The goal was not to take Tachilek, but just to strike at it, in child's play, people dying along the way.  And that is what happened.  Many died along the way.
A gernade hit the guest house nearly killing one of the staff.
The Shan came crossing back over river, red scarf, single file, no shirt on one man.
‘Divah Divah’ a Burmese soldier yelled as he came running in persuit, shooting at the fleeing men, dropping to one knee to fire.
pop pop pop gunfire
Some of the fleeing men were cut off by this lone soldier and  hid in the shan neighborhood rather than dare crossing the river which would actually have been the better idea to do.
Instead they got trapped and later surrendered to die.
The Burmese burned the Shan neighborhood to get them out, there across from the Riverside Guest House.
There were Burmese troops up in the bamboo above the neighborhood one could see.
They fired m-70 grenades at the Thai side, then into the neigborhood till it burned.
A couple mortars fell in the river, fired by Shans, but once again, child's play.
Burned trucks, thirty or more houses, pall of smoke over river, that was all we could see.
People leave to thai side under smoke, cross river with possesions.
dtoom dtoom dtoom as the Burmese fire into buildings, trying to get the men to surrender.
Some Burmese buildings were burned in the attack, as we cou ld see a fire ball over the trees.
They said that there were some dead burmese army officers
Later the Burmese army built pill boxes and fences along the border.
When the heavy fire began the Thai side retreated, both army, police, etc.
TV camera crews under riverside guest house continued to film the matter even with grenades coming across.  For them it was action for people not involved.

Wong Tong  and the Cowboy Bar
My friend was a receptionist at the Wong Tong and he and I and a man from Singapore went to the cowboy bar down by the Koh Sai district.  But a young man who was a waiter at the Wong Tong Restaurant added drinks to our bill.  I made the waiter take them off and then we left.  The waiter from the Wong Tong was not happy and got angry at the bar owner.  The bar people beat him for causing a scene and trying to steal money.
He came back, drunk, his face cut at the forhead and bleading and a Thai customer, older man, took him in arm and cooled him down, put a rag to his forhead, which was a kind act.

Katendang truck with music, bottle caps
The energizer drinks as they are called have marked caps and give away prizes like soap and cola drinks.  A truck drives through towns collecting the caps for the company and giving out the prices show on the inside of the caps. The special caps are quite frequent usually, but I have never taken advantage of them.  Instead I give the special marked caps to the kids and let them collect them.  The trucks that stop for these caps are always beat up, covered with stickers, loudspeaker blaring.  The drivers don't look like they make much, maybe somewhere below a paper route driver in the states.

Kids fishing the clong with a net
The kids would come up the klong next to the guest house and gather all the tiny little fish and bugs they could. I always wondered how they didn't step on glass since broken glass was everywhere in Thailand, especially in the water.

Knife stabbed man today pretty wife
He was still around, his face pinched like a jackal. His brother looked worse, I never saw his father.  The jackal family.  They lived across the street. I thought maybe the older one died of Aids like half guys on this street.  Hadn't seen him in a couple years.  It was the closest I felt I ever came to seeing the devil.  I was coming out of the guesthouse, and there was someone lying on one of the benches at one of the tables.  I looked down to my left as I went by and I saw the horrible face of the brother, all pinched up, the nose looking as it had some hook to it, the skin dark, the eyes beady looking.  But the younger brother got married to a very nice looking shan girl and they soon had kids.  I never saw the brothers often so don't know where they went or worked.

Lahu village
I went to this Lahu village along the river Mekong once.
This foreigner invited me. You meet lots of people who come to town. Their names you never hear, never ask or can't remember. We went to the home of some family he knew.  But he seemed strange, like he wanted to bring me there but then didn't like it that I made friends with the family. They had a small boy and girl. The girl looked to be a slight bit "off".  The kids were about 6 and 7. I felt I was intruding, not so much as in the family, but in this foreigners space, so I walked out of the back of the village, down the mountain and kept walking.  I spotted a large truck offloading fertilizer for smuggling across the Mekong into Laos.  So I waited and they gave me a ride to Chiang Saen where I caught a bus back to Maesai.

Lee Wiggins Missing Money
I met Lee Wiggins in Chiangmai, I think while he was busy talking to Marvin Hatfield.  He had a place in New Mexico near Santa Fe.  Deacon knew him and had visited him down that way.
He told me how the drug police in those days down in New Mexico caught this girl with a new baby and told her that if she didn't testify against her boyfriend they would take her child away from her with a court order.  Cops, mostly think like this?
Well, he had a vinyard there at his farm, and then he got a wife from Vietnam.  He took several loads of medical equipment to Vietnam, but didn't think they liked americans all that much and who could blame them.
Mike, from Maesai, the American who invested in currency, he met Lee one time in a guest house in Cambodia where these two foreigners were going at it just smashing this place one of them owned during a fight and Lee was trying to break it up.
But seems I ran into him in an alley drunk and he told me how this gal dug in his pocket a certain kind of way and when he checked his pocket his money was all gone.

Lomi shaw
Loh Meeh Shaw meant Bear Mountain.  It was a mountain place far north of Keng Tung that was north and west of the Tapin Bridge or north and east of Wah Tah Poh, in a kind of "Y" north of the river.  It was hard to get to.  I had been close but had not gotten there.  Many traditional Akha lived there.
There they grew these big fruits called mah gaw, that were sour, and also a lot of opium of course.
I had wanted to go many times, the one time an Akha woman got me almost there but the very day before they had set up a new road immigration point and they caught me and wouldn't let me through.
One day I would arrive to that spectacular high  mountain place.
I wondered, from up there, when so many of those people had seen war, and seen their kin move south to Thailand over so many years, and how the Thais treated them, how some came ill and died, how their families grew to prosper or fail, how they felt about all that as a people.  So many tragedies had befallen them in Thailand.  Was it a win or a loose?  Maybe the Akha saw themselves as an entity, short of land, sometimes short, very short of life, they went on as a group, sure not as an individual.

Laos road to china
You can take the back road to china via laos, you need to get two laos visas, one for coming in this side and then one for coming back in from China when you return. I hadn't traveled around in Laos much.
People passing through say it is really nice, but the roads are in some cases bad.  Very slow and quiet in Laos.

Loi katung parade up street
Every year they had a float parade to Maesai during Loi Katung.  People let little hand made floats full of flowers go in the river candles lighting their way as they bobbed down stream.  They had a festival at one end of the street too. It was usually cold and windy that time of year but people waited a long time for the floats to all come up through town, I had no idea where they came from.

Lizards around lights
Eating the bugs, the lizards waited for them around the lights. It was dangerous to sit under a light and eat food.  Sometimes besides dropping little parcels on you, the lizards tried to get a bug and fell on your table.

Lacking institutions for knowledge and education here
Maesai and Thailand in general, lack sufficient education institutions.  Thailand also lacks libraries or an appreciation of books in most towns.  One is lucky to find a handful of books for sale in the small towns.  Bigger towns have bigger bookstores of course, but still very limited.  For that one must go to Chiangmai or Bangkok.  Now after many years Maesai was getting a library near the hospital.

Lars, ligtning strikes near you
Lars, came to my desk for the salt and then died that morning from a heroin over dose.  The death angel.
lazy massage. post office
This was a massage house down the street before the post office.  I think it was mostly for hooking.
I went there once and the massage was very lazy so I left.  They wanted only money for sex, not really massage and as the years went by in Maesai it became nearly impossible to get a massage of any real kind.

London dreads fellow and the incident with the little guy down stairs
He told the guy he was patronizing and where to go.  He was really a big guy and had long colored green, yellow and violet dreads.  The guy with the lecturing attitude was older but really small.  He got real quiet.

Look out point
Above maesai, many steps
Really there was a temple of sorts up there.
Sometimes when I had nothing better to do I would take time late at night to run up these two hundred plus steps to the top.  Was fun to do that, to see the view and to get the workout.

Lychee
Many people plant it including Akha, use lots of pesticide on it, and herbicide below it.  This ruins many things and is hazardous to the workers.  Good plants could be grown below it instead.  As well the ants make tunnels in the core of the branches and eventually the trees tend to die.
comes in the dry season, all around good, some small and sweet, some very large and sour.

Lam prabang
Lam Prabang is a river destination where people go when moving south from Chiang Khong on the Mehkhong I think, by boat.  Need to check the map on this.  From Lam prabang people go overland in Laos.

M-loy hah sip 150
A stimulant drink sold in thailand tastes like cherry extract and is full of cafeine.  There are many brands, they cost around ten baht, are strong and will keep you up half the night if you drink one late.  The bottles are great for putting scabie medicine in for the Akha.  Sometimes the bottles are used by putting a wick in a hole that one makes in the screw on lid, putting in some oil and then tying them to a stick.  Many of these are placed along a road during a celebration.

Mercantile man
Too many "sustitues" he said, meaning prostitutes.  He sold wares in town.  He told me he didn't like Thailand because there were too many "sustitutes".  He did his best to speak english, gave me fair and discounted prices and I bought much from him over the years for schools and houses.

Meh kohng
Her sister prostituted, got aids, died.  I saw her when she was still alive and had massive facial herpes zoster blisters.  They lived in the catholic village on the Burma side.  The village was pretty rough and dirty, sort of the worst place you could live if you were an Akha.  Heroin got in there and most the men died from sharing needles and getting aids.  Meh Kong went down to Chiangmai or where ever and I never saw her again.

Much Writing
Then there is my writing, and it is with this that I have the most frustration.  Lots of mush which I threw away and then have about a hundred pages of anecdotes and notes.

Maesai, for me has changed over the years
First I was here solely for business and then I got involved in the Akha thing with the medicine and then it seemed like a good thing to continue doing.  The polish is off it.  There have been hard experiences that took some of the joy out of it, but I reckon that some of that will come back with time.
I look forward to doing more research in the villages in the way of just better knowing what is going on and getting to know more people whom I don’t yet know.
There is photography and video work. Both of those are up in the air although there is the need for some concise articles about the Akha, like essays with some photos to go along with them, black and white sort of thing.
I have never built a work of this kind before and it is always difficult to know what will work best as you are growing it up.
I am hoping that the literacy and literature program progresses nicely over the next year.  I need more money to interest people to write and that is always it would seem the problem, money.

My Trip To Yunan
I took a trip to Yunnan once.  Was most interesting, China, or anywhere different for that matter.  But Yunnan at Kunming was interesting.  I stayed at the cheap Three Leaves boarding hotel.  Only a few people there.  I wondered when they built the place because neither water or anything else seemed to work, it was all rusted. 
The market was ugly and dirty and thuggish in a sort of typical Chinese way.  The Chinese really lacked in taste or finishing touches.  Everything was just slopped about and done for the masses it would seem.
On the street ethnic women were the money changers.  Old ethnic women begged, but this was only a disguise, they actually were security for their daughters doing the changing of the money.
There were different kinds of police, and they knew which ones to look out for and run away.
There was an interesting coffee shop on one main street, I sat there and had coffee.  It was the ONLY such coffee shop where someone would bring you a clean cup on a saucer.  The street was a swarm of bicycles, no one able to fall over cause there wasn't room.
I shopped for beads, silk, tea.  Lots to see, I really liked the place.  At night the streets got dark and empty and the hookers came out.  They liked to stay in front of the main hotels, there were about five.  The one had a man from Portland Oregon who was manager.  I met a German in the lobby restaurant there.  He was busy installing cigarrette machines.  He said the Chinese would destroy them so the rule was they weren't allowed to touch or adjust them.
He said that one machine paid for itself in about 9 months, the business was so lucrative, making and selling cigarettes.
I wanted to go to some outlying areas but money was too short.
The plane trip back on Thai Airways was fine, once I got past the movie crew who stacked all their gear in front of the airport door.  When I commented about it, the one chinese man got angry, saying this was china, not some where else.

Make Him Pay
So he wanted a minor wife she figured.  It didn’t change much as she watched the blood drip into the bucket.  An hour of grueling pain and the baby still hadn’t come out.  The little white pills did their job and now all she had to do was wait, she’d punish the bastard, no more kids with him, starting with this little piece of shit that she pushed like shat out from between her cramping legs.  Some would have just left him, but why give life a boost, or why stay on and pretend that life was black and white, that you got it bad no matter what and so why not have a morsel of joy?  She told the little boy he was a shit.  He was dead now.  Wonder who was in the life club? Wasn’t there enough death around here any way, what did eight inches more of unwanted spat matter?  Down the road bitches grunted on their backs, faces white as the dogs crawled across their bodies fucking them all night long, squeezing breasts, breathing alcohol and pressing wads of cash into the fat woman’s hands.  No redemption to it but nothing felt but a little money in the pocket, actually more and longerlasting a wad than the one the boys put in and the one they left behind. Some puked before they finished, some fell asleep, and some couldn't get it up. The girl started laughing, the guy yelled, kicked open the door, stood there with a condom hanging on something so small you couldn't see it.  The owner yelled at him, told him he was a fool, get his clothes on, he was embarassing everyone, ruining our beer.

Maesai and change in Asia
Maesai was a direct thermometer of change in Asia, in this part of asia as the continent tried to reconnect itself with its own past.  The road to china and how many scores of chinese were already bred into Thailand and hoping for some connection back to the past?  And China at the same time was expanding outward, its hordes moving slowly across the land.  And in the middle of this all was Maesai, the border town from Thailand to that little buffer zone called Burma and then southwestern China.  I had predicted that this was a major route in 91 and nothing had proved me wrong.  Still things here changed slow.  The new road and all that.  I still remember when it was just a ribbon that went to Chiangrai and that when there wasn’t traffic coming the bus drove right down the center stripe because the shoulder was so broken up.  And that bus, the green weenie as I called it, was small and could get quite crowded as busses in asia tended to.  Actually the ones in thailand were most pretty good. 

Music dancers at those kind of bars
These are bars where chubby girls in very short skirts sing horrible sounding melodies, if you could call them that, but the places have a kind of flavor, people come there I think to sort of mock themselves, get a little drunk, forget the day, bring a lot of people, eat food in a place that really doesn't want to flaunt it's kitchen and so forth, a roadside oddity that has its own unique air that one wouldn't necessarily dismiss completely.  Matter of fact, the longer you listened in the more jovial the music sounded, a kind of country folk music.

One guy in Maesai ran these cabaret's for years, was known for it and for singing in them too.

Maesai
The fan spun lazily from the ceiling in ths small room where I lay on the bed looking up at its wooden blades.
Consulting providence I wondered what I was going to do next.
Surely it happend.

Mekong Mall
Along the Maesai river close to the Mekhong they cut huge wood b oards and built a mall there.  But there was no future and today most all the wood on this huge two story building is destroyed.  an environemental crime.  I remember when the brought the big logs and wooden blocks of teak to cut the smaller boards out of.  Now the boards were all warped and cracked, the varnish long gone.  Even the tour boats that someone had brought north to ply the Mehkong were never used because they couldn't readily get past the river rocks going north to China and there was no cooperation in the area.  As a result they sat forever in the river, going no where and running down till they were hauled in ruins back to Chiangmai or elsewhere.
May I have a copy of the notes.  Evangelicals.  Religion as business
They had this training conference at the Maesai Baptist Church.  Slap stick fundametalism.  I asked for copies of the notes, but they would not give me any. I gave them free bread rolls I baked up.  The guy from Texas. Cheesy religion. coordinated by Asia Outreach from Singapore, I think they were CIA.  They also banned the Akha gates.

Macadamia nuts
Some of these are on Doi Tung. I think that they would grow well  here, just a matter of finding out more about them and what the bug hazards are.
So many transplanted crops require lots of pesticides.

Machinist
Chai.  He was expensive, slow and never took my time seriously but always took my money seriously.
His shop was in Huai Krai.  After I couldn't wait any longer I pulled all my work out and took it all back to the building I now had in Maesai.  I would have to buy my own welding equipment.

Mae Hon Son
A very bad road to get to here.  A mountain community which was sort of a day trip for many people by plane from Chiangmai.

Maesai south strawberries
During the dry season strawberries were sold along the road south of maesai, much pesticide one would guess.  Stawberry juice and strawberry wine.

Mahinder jade and trip to hong kon and how I met cary cutting the stone
I went to hong kong.  The jade I had was no good.  The cutting houses showed me what was really hot in Hong Kong now.  Smoke clear and grey jade with black spots in it, really fantastic looking but wasn't even green.  There was nice green stuff, but it was candy apple green one could say.
After I got back to Maesai I went ahead and cut all the jade one time, it was all bogus.  This was how I met the man Cary.
Course when I thought about it later, the problem he had with the passport and all, probably all a ruse, that is how he kept off the plane and out of shame, and kept the money. Stay out of stones.

Mandalay shop
sold expensive stuff for tourists, had a factory.
They did manage to hold onto the factory and the tours and the sales house for a long time which was a feat for anyone in maesai, so after many years I had to give them credit for this.

Mangos and sticky rice
excellent treat.  You could buy this during these hot spring months before the rains came and all the mangos got ripe. 
There are a lot of mangos, different kinds, many very fine and sweet and they are expensive.  They cut them carefully and put them over sticky rice with a coconut sauce and it is very tasty.

Mark the american, coke bottle finger
A fellow named Mark, an American, came to maesai.  Don't know why.  He showed me where he had his finger split all apart, now healed.  It happened when he was messing with a Thai man's girl in Hatyai.  The guy dropped a coke bottle blow to his head and he put his hand to the top of his head just in time.
He came up here and had some bad contacts with the death angel and died after a fall in the river.  He was found downstream in bad shape they say but I was gone to Surin at the time so only got the rumor mill when I came back.

Meat stands in market, chicken, beef and pork
you can buy it all and mostly fresh, whatever cut, same price.
Backstrap is particularly tasty.

Mechanic and motorcycle rent tong
I rented here many times but the bikes were worn out and the rent went up because Joe raised his rates.

Medicine on the Bridge
Did this for years. Not sure how much money it cost me.  But I helped a lot of women and babies especially.  The babies of the poor in Burma at that time really suffered.

Melons
Watermelons sold in maesai or way south of town on the highway.
I bought a truckload for villagers a time or two.
Took them up for all the kids.  Boy we had fun.  The melons were cheap and great tasting.

Military hill
On the burma side,  had a big anti aircraft gun there.
They fired it when Khun Sa attacked, but of course could only fire it sky ward, the red tracers drifting off.

Mixing cement piles
this is how the Thai did it, the cement was naturally of low quality. They poorued cement in a circle, the sand and gravel all around, the water in the middle and let it set until it was all wet and the mixed it together.  I suppose it was suitable for a few things, but mostly seemed for log grade cement mixing.

Money changer
A chinese guy in maesai that changed any moneys you wanted, burmese, Thai, chinese.
There had been another money changer in town.  But some fools from Burma called  him to the hotel room at the wang tong and killed him, supposing that he had lots of money on him which he didn't.

Money from germany through joseph matin luther yohanz
Yeah, and maybe something about heroin.  But they used Nimit's signatures to verify something on documents for germany, someone pocketing the money.
He had a wife and daughter up in Aleh Akha near Doi Maesalong, but didn't come and see her much. She had been a prostitute and Nimit made the arrangements.

Mong Pyeh
Half way to Keng Tung, the sick kitchen there.  Everytime I ate there I got nasty sick, so I just limited myself to drinking soda pop.

Monks collect food
On the streets early morning.
monks singel file
Sometimes barefoot.
Lined up to receive alms, coming or going.  I thought I saw them more in years gone by than I do now.
The temple behind Sailom Joi was rather fantastic looking.

Mortocycle runs anna over on bridge.  Stick in eye 
Anna had a scar on face from being run over on the bridge while begging.  She also had one bad eye cause she got hit with a stick when smaller.

Mosquito killer
they always went dead after a short time.
You could buy them in the shops. They were cheap electric ones.  They zapped the mosquitos for a while then did not work any more.  Common to many things from China.  Of course there was no guarantee which is why many people went to the bigger shops like Big C in Chiangrai to buy.

Motorbike against metal door, domestic disputes
The guy comes home and bangs his motorcycle against the metal doors till he gets his wife up and they fight and she finally lets him in after the whole neighborhood is woken up. Events that reminded you that you lived in a neighborhood, domestic disputes, bits of adventure.

Motorcycle mail man
Always could tell me if I had mail or not.
I often spotted him in the street, was a nice extra in the day, a piece of mail.  Maybe I got a hundred pieces in ten years.

Movie ad truck, flying banana
I used to throw at these obnoxious trucks, bananas, tomatoes. They came up the road past the guesthouse at seven in the morning or earlier, loudspeakers blaring.  I had water balloons, fruit, lined up on my railing high up on the hill and got good at leading them and throwing the right distance far down to the street to where the fruit would splatter on the hood of their trucks.  Thais had NO sense of peace and quiet at all.  Everything had to be loud and stupid.  Thai bars were the same way, so loud you could not hear anything.

Movie made at guest house japanese boy, akha girl, my silver coin, brown plastic on lights
The Japanese came to the guest house to make a set for making a movie about a japanese man who falls in love with an Akha girl.  The Akha girl was recruited straight off the hill and didn't seem much interested in what she was a part of, or a saying her lines, we sat around and played rather dull looking extras. They got near the end, but the Akha girl would no longer act, so I fished into my wallet and there I had been saving this silver coin, an American silver dime, from the 1960's, and I gave this to her, and she suddenly perked up and said her last lines and we all called it a night.

Movie on main street at night , movie truck
A highlight in Maesai was a movie truck that came and set up and showed a movie on the  main street in the winters.  A big canvas screen and people gathered round.  I had seen the truck but not the movie set up for years now.  They still showed in smaller places I assumed.

Mujihadeen trucks and tractors
The Mujihadeen had tractors and trucks in Maesai for earth work and hauling.  Mostly they were Pakistani someone said, but I thought they were Afghanistan people.  I had heard that there was a pakistani Maesai drug connection.  Maybe this was it.

Muling Beads
I used to haul beads back and forth to the US.   But this got old and I didn't have much of a life.  I didn't like being on the road all the time in the US selling either. After a while all the Denny's, hotel 6's and fast food places looked the same.  Maybe it would be easier now with mobile phones and email. 

Mushrooms dried in bags
Chinese sold and bought them, made me sick once, so I didn't know what kind they were or what they were treated with.  So I didn't buy them any more, but sure lots of them for sale.

Muslim fired cake rolls
Rotti.  This was a highly oily cake, cooked in palm oil on a grill metal on a cart. Then they added egg or banana, lots of syrup and sugar, and rolled it up in paper, which then was like taking a grease ball in your hand.  Better if you had a shower right afterwards.
There is one muslim woman on the main drag, been there a long time.
Her daughter married the Packy Muslim.  He has a work permit, never know what he is up to.

Muslim with a gun
Once a saw a muslim jeep stop along the road, right at a restaurant where I was eating, the guy opens the glove box, pulls a gun, checks the load and puts it in his pocket.  One of those red jeeps with no doors. Then they drove off to some kind of an appointment.

Maesai Street Vendor
There was this one Thai woman who wanted to marry me  years ago.  She still sold food, was still friendly and they said she had two husbands.
Least she had energy.  She sold different kinds of meat sticks and food dishes.

Monks from Burma
Monks come and beg from Burma
I call it begging. They call it "alms" I think.  Not sure what the difference is?

Mangosteen
purple, probably one of the best fruits.  A thick purple skin that is pithy, you have to break it and peal it in one big piece and the beatiful white segments of the fruit are found inside.  Never see this fruit canned, maybe not suitable to that, but sure is tasty.

Navy cigars
These were a dark black cigar sold from Burma. You could buy them in a box. They were cheap and there were even cheaper ones that you could buy, or the common green ones.  The common green ones had many flavors including aromatic ones, cigarettes always tasted bad to me.
The green ones were not roled but had pieces of tabaco, like dry chips in them.

New church near boobers house
Ah Gaw's home in this area, and his church also. Everyone was in the church business here to get money, and good money it was.  Naive people would always give to what they didn't know.

Noises from upstairs room on corner
Sometimes tourists are mean to their girlfriends, their Thai girlfriends or hired prostitutes.  There was this one girl who was crying and complaining about what her boyfriend was doing to her so the police came

Noisy motor bikes
Racers.  Lots of young people racing their bikes with loud mufflers, very loud.  Some people complain, most do not.

Noodle piles, banana leaf
you eat it off the leaf with a toothpick.  Add the spice you want.
The woman vendor sells it this way, a small pile of noodles loaded on a banana leaf for you.

Noodle shop owner motorcycle ride
this was in surin.  He took me everywhere to see the country around Kwao Sin Arin.

Northern bus station bkk
This is a really big bus station and it would not be so intimidating except that the buses are dirty, crowded, you get sick from the air conditioning and the toilets are small and dirty and hard to use while the bus lurches every way here and there.  Soon the are very contaminated as well from all the lurching about.

Notes
The king, the serious king, sat at one side of the spacious lobby, luxuriously decorated, in a moment he laughed which set everyone at ease.
The ditzy thai girl washed dishes and stood on one foot while she chased mosquitos away with the other foot.
The wat spire stood black silhouette in the sunset against the purple orange sky.
He laid back and relaxed as the man pedaled the samlor to the wrong place.
Barbecued meats, peppers and pineapple, a treat even if the dirt on the sidewalk could be called sleaze.
Sometimes he just needed to hear his own language.  Much of that was Akha now.
The guys filed in for their short times with the sows.
Then try to get a Thai person to say some word for you in Thai.  ‘How do you say this in Thai?’  And they give you this dumb look and repeat in Thai language ‘How do you say this in Thai?’

Namibia
Cary bought amythist from Namibia, well his partner mined them there and then sent them to Thailand where Cary cut them, but after South Africa changed this situation seemed to stop which was probably fine, but Cary didn't do much cutting of stones after that.

Opium look
You could always recognize the people who smoked opium cause the had this green yellow look to them.  A dark look.  Didn't keep themselves as well. Slept most the day, stayed up most the night. Got emaciated down to nothing, no vision, no hope and no health.  Yet they held the best to the culture over the others who seemed to be going somewhere (no where) at great speed.

Oil paints
I did oil painting in Maesai when I had time and the mental peace for it.

Old couple doing bible translation, amish ‘they’re wrong’
I met this old couple from Pennsylvania in Maesai.  They were translating the Bible into some variety of Kachin.
I asked them what they thought of the Amish in their area in the US?  The lady turned and looked at me sternly in her black horn rimmed glassses.  "They are wrong" was all she said. The man new better than to open  his mouth, least the way he had agreed on that relationship.  Funny how the critics always accuse Bible thumpers of being pro patriarchy.  I had yet to see a Patriarch who was married to a Bible thumper.  They were all matriarchs so far.

Old jap stuff in burma
Many of the items from the war of Japanese trademark are for sale in Japan, some Japanese coming to search for them and sell them back in Tokyo.
The Thais are endlessly searching for hidden Japanese Gold from the war.

Old thai yai women
Tops off, their big breasts hanging in the air, white like bread, brushing their hair, yelling at each other across the fences.

Orange vest motorcyle taxis
Handle all the pedestrian traffic.  Located near many a corner, you just wave them down.

Orchids
collecting.
I got a couple orchids from around my room.  There was a tree next to the road with a couple on it, so I moved them.  But orchids in general are endangered in Thailand, too many removed from their natural habitat in the mountains and the forest being destroyed.

Orphanage pentacostal church and the sick boy
There was an orphanage up the road in Burma from Tachilek. Some guy got money to build a new pentacostal church there but there was a problem and it stopped before it was done, the church empty next to the area where the orphanage was, just an orphanage in name, no buildings.
Anyway, I was there when some guy was yelling and preaching in the old bamboo church. I came to see the sick boy. Couldn't move him, no money for that, and he had advanced malaria, his spleen swollen.
There was also a sick baby with weird marks on her skin.  Her father gave her blood but then later he died. I wondered what happend? 
Was very hard life for these people.
I brought books and pencils for the kids when I could.

Oversize dry grapefruit
We sat around in the shade, eating oversize grapefruit, the kind that are dry inside, you peal the segments.  The Thais like to dip them in chili powder mixed with sugar and salt.

Old grizzled dogs
Nasty creatures on the streets and curbs. You see them all over Thailand. In burma they poison them because they are considered a health hazard which of course they are.

Orange
Good and bad. Once only expensive more and more are being planted and harvested in the Thatong area, orchards slowly making their ways into the Akha hills.

Old Dog
Then there was that one old dog outside a brothel you had to pass on the way to the market.  Its head covered with scars, it could hear me coming from the sound of my motorbike or something. I chased it a time or two but that was a mistake because I didn’t chase it enough to make it phobic, just enough so that it would remember me well and then every time I came by it barked and snapped and followed.
But over the years the old boy got older and older and barely had the energy to open its eyes and look from where it slept.
One time I suggested to the owner that he get a new younger dog, well, was worth a try.

One time in Maesai
Rents here have been driven up because all of the ruby dealers from down by the Cambodian border have moved to town to take advantage of all of the rough rubies that are coming in from Monsu. At first, two years ago it was a trickle, but now it has swollen to hundreds of pounds a day and they say million DOLLARS changes hands in this town on a daily basis, so you can imagine what has happened to my sleepy town. Bars and girls out the ying yang and the rents have gone up to where I must pay some $200 per month for my shop house. But the location close to the bridge is necessary so that the kids can come safely and they do. Other than that I live meagerly, and work on my language studies when I can put my mind to it, but my first priority is to improve things for the kids.
We have had a lot of rain this year with the river flooding every other day, and once into my house just before I rented it so I must stay close to home and keep a watchful eye. Everything is up off the floor and unplugged just in case. 
Collectors pick up every shred of wood and plastic and glass, giving the poorer peoples a way to make some income.
A friend offered me a monkey but it kept tearing up the house, as monkeys are apt to do so I gave it back.

Oh yes, the Ya house
Cary’s fling there with his chubby little stone cutting teacher from down the alley behind his house where that man parked his funky cart with enough gadgets, bottles, dooh dads and wires on it to gear up a battleship.
And then Miss Q who had the fruit stand.  She used to work for Cary too but a lot of the girls complained of eye problems and didn’t stay on forever.
It was funny, next to the time card machine at his factory there was a bronze statue of a woman and I guess the girls had this habit of fondling the right breast all the time while they waited to check their card in the meter because that breast was all pollished from being handled.

Old Desks I worked at 
As I sit here in Maesai at an old wooden coated table, the laquer surface chipping I am remided of desks I hav written at.
I had an old desk painted black, as a child, then boards on barrels as in Everett.  Now I just work at tables.  Like this one.

Palong
There were palong with silver and gold rings around their waste and then ones with Black rings.  They all had big ear rings.  The men liked to wear bright green pants and rubber boots of the same bright green.  Often they came to the market.

PDA on Dapa
I went to PDA in Chiangrai.  I asked them about DAPA where Brian Barney worked at the time.  He said that he knew what they say they do but really din’t know what they do for sure.
Peddle three wheel bike cart
Many small deliveries used to be made with peddling carts that had three wheels. That was long ago in Maesai, you only see the red motorized ones now for hauling ice and propane bottles.

Peeping security guards and the note  written at the hole
Once I saw this hole in a guest house wall and looking I saw there was some writing there.   It said, "The security guard who lives in room 57 comes and looks through this hole."

People who are waiting
Marie Herde was a woman who came here to see me and the Akha.  She often worked in India.
She said that the Akha were a people who were "waiting".

Pharmacy says girls  die in six month
The pharmacy friend Yai told me that the girls who test positive for HIV give up, quit eating and die in six months.

Photo girls on the bridge and their lottery
Knife, paper, stone, scissor.  This hand lottery was used to split uneven amounts of money at the end of the day, any indiscretion very hard fought over.

Pineapple, from north of chiangrai
North of Chiangrai there was a large stretch that sold pineapples.  Rose Martinez had her Christian Happy Home orphanage there.  Many said she was a lesbian, acted like a man.  The latter was not hard to miss as the years went by.

Police station burnt down
This happened a couple yeares before I got here.  Khun Sa attacked the police station and burned it down.   This has happened in other places in Thailand so I would not be surprised, seems the public or somebody controls police corruption that way.

People in the opium business their stories
In the opium business the Akha who grew, bought, transported, sold the thick black pitch had a whole culture.  There was better than a hundred years of business and use, terms for weight, for cutting the opium with counterfeit tree sap from certain trees.  This would give you a headache if you smoked it.  The best opium came from certain places or certain old men who supervised its farming and had a good name.  Many men had stories of times they spent buying opium for Khun Sa.  One could learn a lot from these people. They told me how "robbery" wasn't so much allowed, but they carried guns anyway.  Robbery was greatly suppressed in the region, makes you wonder why so much is tolerated in the west?

Penang
I had to make visa runs to Penang for a while. This was the worst.  Once every three months, down to Bangkok by bus, from Bangkok by train to the end of the run, and then ferry across to Penang Island.  I stayed in an ugly grim Chinese motel.  What other kind would they run?  Like taking the Chinese one in Maesai, the Top North, and moving it with a sky crane to Penang. Same flavor, same pathetic lazy attitude of the owners, with slaves as helpers.  I could not imagine Chinese of any kind exporting culture to the rest of the world.  Little pieces of the great wall?
I met an englishman there.  He had a son who was all grown up.  He had a wife from French Guyana but she ran away and got nothing, left the son with him.  He wanted a new wife, but it would take time.
I stayed in the hotel for a number of days before going back.  It was here that I met Bobby Clampitt from Meadow vista that was to help my project so often.

pomegranite
In street behind the Wang Tong hotel there was the Wan Com Condo. Across the street from it there was a big house and enclosed wharehouse. They bought and stored broom grass there.  The Burmese said that in the years gone by the man who lived here was a hit man, killed many people for hire.  But he was dead and his son had taken over the place.
In the front yard, out of sight if you were walking on the street but clearly visible from a house across the road there was a pomegranite tree.  Not so common in this area.

potatoes
Really expensive in Thailand. Tiny runty sometimes, big other times.
planer sound
This was a noise of hot sleepy afternoons, particularly from Burma, and they even had a river mill there for a while, floating the wood down from the hills, milling it, then pulling the doors across the river on a rope.

peaches
some raised at Doi Mae Salong
Pickled and sold green as well

police bus checks
All the buses regularly stopped at checkpoints.  The police were looking for the nervous person or the person of makeup that they might be from Burma, and often these people who didn't have sufficient papers were pulled off the bus.
Farming Akha were usually ignored.  On occasion they asked me for my passport but this was not very often.

Preacher said if a girl walks with her feet out will be promiscuous
A preacher I knew said that he could tell if a girl was promiscuous by how she walked with her feet.  If her feet pointed out when she walked it meant she was promiscuous. Yes?

printing press man
The man who wanted to sell me his press was suspicious and not trusting.
The press sat for years while I looked for the money and built the project, having to invest in writers and so forth.  There was very little trust among the Thais.  One saw little investment in the community short of Temples.

Libraries? Parks? Not as much.  And business or community credit? 
But I did buy his press, when he was no longer using it, we became friends. He had a  hard life, he fell for the Amway thing one time, then went back to teaching school, his wife was an alcoholic, so bad her brain was addled.

prostitutes test center and hospital lousy blood handling
One of the workers wanted to have her blood tested so I took her down to the test center.  What I encountered made me very nervous.  The blood was drawn in casual conditions, then squirted into test tubes with a name hastily written on it, for testing later.
The table was cleaned of blood drops or splatters with a grey rag that was once white.
Thais showed little concern for blood and blood handling and this was one such case.

The Restaurant
Then there was that day the New York woman ate all the peanut topping at our table and then at the next also, bop, just jumped up, went over and took them and said excuse me like she was popping the septre out of the kings hand and came back, dumped them on her plate and said how good they were as she ate them all.  Really, you just never know what people are going to do.  That was after she pulled a bushel of vegies out of the cooler and had them cooked up much to the humor of the Thais and sure ate them all.
But hey, what could you expect of someone who went around with a painter’s air filter mask on?
Sometimes people went to me to a village and ate in one of the huts with the family, many people wouldn't note the poor conditions or how many of the people were wasted away as compared to their own fat bodies and they would just keep eating till all the greens and meat or whatever was gone, sometimes not even bothering to eat rice.
The Akha and I would of course just look at each other.  This was good reason why I seldom took foreigners to a village at all. 

Rhino beetle fights
The thai kids had these rhino beetles that they carried around on a piece of sugar cane and then they fought them in competitions I think.  They would find a female beatle, which would burrow into the sugar cane completely, then two male beatles above her would fite continously.  I am not sure how they measured a win, short of a kill.  But there was money that road on these fights.

Rubies
There are lots of rubies traders here in Maesai.  One section of town is nthing but this kind of business. Hundreds of kilos must cross the river every day.  Some people have offices and do well at it, others just trade back and forth on the street and live from day to day off the enterprise. There are also girls who pick up from one man and try to sell for him, going from shop to shop, trying to get the best price. The rubies are from Mon Shu, they are light red or nearly pink in color, dark red and dull when first brought over.  But with or without heat treatment they are still beautiful once they are cut.
The Chinese guy with the big coke bottle glasses.  He did some ruby selling till he stole one and left town.  John saw him once in Bangkok I think, but he never came back here.  He seemed like a real smart guy and nice, but got messed up more and more in life. You got to be careful that life doesn't eat you.
Made me sort of glad that I was busy trying to help people, much more challenging, and pursuing money all the time is boring, working every angle, so you can do this, and do that and buy this and buy that and in the end all for what?
With rubies it was always how much you could sell it for, always trying to ride on speculation, buy for this, hope to sell for that. About one dimension thick.

Raising cocks in maesai
Some guys, that is all they did, raise fighting cocks. They often fought them in the grass on the other side of the fence behind where the Akha women sold spice sticks near to the bridge at the turn of the corner.
It was also a comment on being male in Thai society.  Nothing to do all day long sept raise chickens and fight them on occasion, then get stupid drunk and insist your chicken really won.
Walk around half the day handling your chickens, cleaning up after them, carrying one under the arm, seemed like a real good use of time to me.
To say nothing that fighting cocks for sport is sort of cruel anyway, I mean it is a stupid chicken, but wether much harm is done or not, it is a cruel kind of thinking.
But cruelty didn't compare with seeing all the lazy men involved in the sport.

restaurant near police station
This restaurant had the most excellent food in town, anything you ordered was good, better than good.  A little expensive but occasionally well worth it.

rickshaw drivers powerful
The drivers were often older men, maybe abandoned, they slept in their rickshaws, not so many of them these last years.  They would fill up on food at the market and then peddle it to where ever, you could see their legs,  solid muscle, straining to make it up the incline in town and then they knew when to jump down at just the right moment and walk the  cycle up the steep parts.  Sometimes the chain popped off and they had to stop and fix that before you could go on. I was bigger than was comfortable to sit in one of either those or a tuk tuk.  Some of the rickshaws were polished wood, others were painted over, but it was an art from days gone by, not just a rickshaw, but art.  Birds and design fancied the metal, and tiny lights operated off a generator or battery.

Relations over the truck, gas station
Buying the truck was not easy.  It took me two very hard months to pay for it and I am sure the guy figured I was stringing him along.  People pledged money then backed out.  Not very fair to me but  you take what you can get.  Finally I got it paid for.

rainy season bloom
In the rainy season everything blooms green in celebration. The rainy season coming is relief to hot days, sleepless nights.
I always looked forward to it.
What was a scene of buildings and vehicles, roads and houses, soon became the rule of plant life again as all began to grow up once more and turn a vibrant green.  Rain dictated the planting of rice if people wanted to eat, and they got it free from the earth if they were to work.  In the case of the north here, the Akha increasingly did the hard work for the Thais to plant and harvest the rice for them, truckloads of Akhas coming of the mountains for both planting season and harvest.  Gathering some money and going home.

Rat and the butcher knife
Rats in the room were a problem, I dispatched a few who became confused and could not make their way out of the room in time.

Redge from australia
Redge was a bloated red faced fellow who had been in Maesai as long as I had been here.  Well, he came to this place for that long and longer though he didn't stay for long months.  I hadn't seen him come back for years so I guess his glory days were over.  He had a bad temper and said something about his maid quitting and his family trying to sell the ranch back in Australia out from under him.
river saw mill making doors and windows and floating them across
They used to be real busy, making doors and window shutters, floating them across the river, pulling them across with a rope in the high season.  Selling them to construction sites on the Thai side.

Spring 98
I am waiting for my next roll of the dice of good luck and for what money will come in.
There is a fantastic king cab 4x4 truck, large hauling truck, on the highway into town.
It is an Isuzu and is a 95 but didn’t get used much at all it would appear.  Not beat up or worn but could have been cleaned real well.  There is no way to tell the mileage but the wear inside is almost nothing.
Well number one was done and I was waiting for the money for well number two which I had already picked out.
Other than that I was working on the children’s book pictures with Meeh Daw's Daughter
and an 1800 word book for Akha, Thai, Burmese and Chinese.

The Street Lay Empty
The street lay empty and mostly still except for a lone rickshaw creaking slowly down the gentle slope from the closed gates at the bridge that crossed to Burma.  A few last stragglers made their way home as if trying to get there before the powers that be threw some imaginary switch and brought everything to a halt.
The long road that led up through town and ended at the bridge was lined with merchant’s buildings on both sides.  The town had a special feel to it, like it had many stories to tell, some obvious, some not so obvious.  When the street was empty like in the evenings there was this wild west feel to the place, like everyone and everything was getting ready for another day of relentless events, too many for the mind to keep track of, as so many things and so many peoples crossed this second center of the earth as it were.
The sow lay grunting as four piglets pushed and jostled her breasts to shake down the milk.
The buildings facing the street laughed and jostled each other at all the goings on of the day.

Stories of hard lives
I had gotten used to bad stories here but I quite frankly did not realize the the life events for these people were so grinding hard.  The stories rolled in. Many times bad stories, too many.  It was not so  much the sadness of the events that were told to me so often as it was the hurling bluntness with which they were relayed to me.  This was a place where every one of these people were lucky to be alive and every one of their children as well, and why fuss around about the realities of it? 
The story here was much worse than I imagined and it was only the limitations in my knowledge of the language that kept me from seeing more of what was going on.  Not much mercy for anyone here.  You were on your own, and that explained why they often could not figure out why we would come here to work on a language, it had to be a luxury.

Stolen Boots
Who would have ever dreamed that it was a mistake to leave them just inside the door, hardly worn yet, not work boots, comfortable walkabout boots?
But they were gone.  I tried to figure out what the lax moment of security was.  My room was a little way at the end and I had only left the door open one time and that was when I ran and answered the phone at the front desk.  Must have been then.
It really aggravated me.  I had learned that Elk was the best leather for getting wet and going soft again, not like cowhide.  I bought my first pair in Wyoming at the Cheyenne Western Store, there in Cheyenne, while I waited for lift.  It was cold, snow and ice on the ground, I didn't need much out of life but a pair of glasses and a small bible and a good hat and good solid boots that would take me anywhere.  That first pair was Olathe's.  Made in Kansas.  Olathe, Kansas.  I had just got done riding a horse across the continent and was headed back to Oregon.  I got that first pair.
Then by many a turn in the road of life I ended up in Thailand, so many years later, and ideas and thoughts and cold nights or days only a distant memory.
I had bought this second pair before coming over.  But they were defective in one thing.  The store wouldn't take them back so I had a useless pair of boots.  So I decided to fix them and took them to my friend John at Edwards Boot Repair there in Oregon. He was just recovering from heart bypass, hardly that old did I imagine, but he said he would fix them before my flight and he did. 
All a man needed in life sometimes was a good boot smith or cobbler, and a good saddle maker.  I had both, so I felt rich, and both of these men were good story tellers and kind.  Leather and basics seems to do that to people.  The saddle maker was Paul White out on the Santiam highway there, and he used to ride bronks till he busted up his back.  But he did fine damn saddle work and cut leather for me, built pack saddles for me, anything I needed at all.  Belts and bags. He had made me fine gear that I designed and repaired my Maclellan saddles for those long rides through mountains and states.
We always talked, he always said goodbye with the words "Be Gentle". 
So I got on the plane and was back in Maesai and the boots ended up at my door and then they were gone, and I had hardly worn them.  They were so fantastic because they were cowboy boots number one, but easy to slip on and off not like work boots one must lace up.  Great for loafing about or slipping into a stirrup and few people ever wore a boot out loafing or slipping it into the stirrups.
I missed those boots. I felt cheated.  But it was years later that Charlie, a burmese hawker from the other side of the bridge told me that my girlfriend had taken the boots.  I wasn't sure I believed him, and always wanted to know who had feet that big.

Stolen Bicycle
I talked to Charlie the burmese man.  He said it was a friend who stole the bicycle.  When would I learn.  Keeping from being ripped off.
The bicycle was a lot of fun.

Santi School
At this school near Mae Salong run by the fundamentalist chinese, there is a drug rehab place.  Someone told me the place was pretty harsh and had the men in chains but they were not allowed to stay long or talk to the men.  I never got in to look so did not know for myself.
Speed of change, the new road to keng tung that didn’t happen
The road to keng Tung wasn't going to finish any time soon, one wondered about why it appeared to be held up on purpose.

Smiles
This was about the only straight massage place in town.  Fie used to work there. The room was upstairs, one big room.  Workers, sheets, airconditioning, food, tea, drinks, and a reasonably good massage for not too expensive.  Many rich Thai men and women came here.  It was a good place to take leave of the mind for an hour or two and relax.

Soy kurd and ginger juice
The old lady at the market, round faced, like a grandmother and always quietly happy.
Big aluminum buckets full of soy curd and bottles of ginger syrup to pour on it.

Short snake in my back yard next to cary not actually a snake
A snipe they call them.  Dark grey with yellow side stripe, little mole like eyes, about a foot long.  There is a picture of one, was in Martin's back yard hatching eggs.  Laid its eggs on top of itself in a neat pile, exposed, wonder why the birds and rats didn't eat them, think the sun incubated them.

Sailom joi house fire
A house caught fire not far from the Guest House and really burned.  The "fire" department arrived, much in disarray, hoses here, water there but little of it on the fire.
The entire house was a blaze and red hot coals before they got any much water on it and at that point it wasn't worth much.

Sign painter
I sometimes had work for a sign painter who also made printed t-shirts for me when I needed them.

Silk in surin
In Surin you could by Mudmee silk as it was spoken.  Rich and soft, dark colors, older cloth and newer looking.  The old cloth was soft, cool and fantastic.
Smugglers alley on Sailom Joi near the river
An unofficial border crossing near the bridge where load after load of merchandise rolled out in small pickups.  Believe it or not it was a semi official crossing, like custom officers that owned part of the river for their own use.

Soy milk cart girl
She always had a chuckle and a smile
I only saw her out with her cart on the cold nights of the winter months.  The wobbly son of the Chinese guy who owned the Maesai Plaza Guest house, worked there some times. I wasn't sure what the connection of that was.

Star fruit
A tree behind the machinist's shop.
In the market it was yellow green, but when it hung on the tree and ripened it turned gold, very dark gold and the flavor was sweet and fantastic.  Otherwise it was somewhat sour.

Stores which are always open but no stock, what do they really sell?
An interesting site in maesai is all the shops that were open every day, glass cabinets on all the shop walls with either a few old items in them or nothing at all.  An elderly person usually sat in the shop, there were no customers and it didn't look like anything at all was sold.

Suu kyi  1 kyat note
The engraver made a one Kyat note for the Burmese government but the Father of Suu Kyi was replaced with a watermark of her with his hat.  It got distributed and I even got copies before the government found it, sent the engraver to prison and tried to collect all the notes.

Swimming for drift wood during storms
When the river got high, much drift wood, boards and timber, came down the river.
Swimmers on the Thai side would go out for it and drag it back to shore for selling the wood.

Swimming kids near bridge
When it was getting hot in the dry season the kids would use the bridge to jump off of, climbing onto the pillars and with much noise, diving into the water.

Squid smoked
They had these little knurled rolling machines, real salty squid, and some coals they would heat them over, the smell was really strong, and people ate that stuff while drinking.

Thatong, the chalet place at bridge
They had nice food but business got slow so they closed it for the most part, just did a few meals out of the back.  They had a nice river front view, so they planted trees in the bank that fully blocked it.

The Rising River
The Maesai river was coming up slowly.  The last two years it had flooded and this year it would brobably rise higher.  About once a year it over ran Sailom Joi Rd, here at the Burmese border in Maesai.

The cart loans
I had loaned money to two women I had known for a long time so that they could buy carts for hauling fruit from Burma to sell on Maesai streets. I got half the money back, that was ok.  I could have gotten it all back but I the women were having hard times in their lives about other things. 
Anyway, it comes out today that Boo Nyurh was four months pregnant and because her husband wanted a lesser wife she took medicine and killed the baby.
And Kah Mooh, who took a baby to term gave still birth.  So I don’t know how it all goes around.  I wish that they would bring me some really bad stories or some really good ones rather than such bland ones as these.

The Finished Highway
The road into town was all finished now, so it was a big highway all the way to the bridge.  The road on the other side in Burma was still shit.  The Burmese army collected 2700 baht from every house hold to pay to fix it but the day the Burmese would figure out how to spend money to fix a road instead of steal the money would be the day.  How, pray tell do you build a road without tar?
The Thailand side, well now the cars flew into town without any need to slow and motorbikes paid the price, many dead people.  It added up with time, one could only guess at how many that was.
I came on one man after he got hit, dead like a rag in the road, which is what I first thought I saw, and they loaded him into a car like potatoes and hauled him to the hospital where they very soon figured out he was dead and his neck was broken.

The good luck bees
There was a great cluster of bees on the rafter of the Wang Tong. The owner said they were good luck and wanted to leave them there.
Ill maintained hotel, rooms not clean enough for foreigners, the manager said.  Maybe just an expensive brothel, yet then wasn’t Thailand all one big brothel?
Green jade like lions in the lobby
Spongy woven rugs
Glass doors with brass
The Baker said: ‘we have our own bakery. No we don’t have apple pie.  Would you like to buy some? No we have our own bakery.  Would you like to learn how to bake apple pies? No, we have our own bakery.
Big clock, black and white pepper stone.  Floors and counter 
Tall ceilings. Murals of naked maidens in the jungle or next to a fountain.

The Chin Around Here Fear Akha
This is interesting but I note that the chin around here fear the Akha very much, dislike them.

Jan 97
Thailand Booming?
People said Thailand was booming up till they closed the banks and floated the baht, but I couldn’t see it.  Sure they built a lot around Maesai, but so much of it was empty and I saw very little manufacturing.  The men sitting around in the neighborhoods doing nothing but shootin at the birds in the nearby trees all day.
In seven years maybe two people had asked to be taught english.
So as far as I could tell there wasn’t so much industriousness here.

The tall Yao woman at the market, quite, beautiful.
They and the Akha lived together, and she could speak Akha as well, but they couldn't speak Yao.

The street Akha
There were always the Akha in Maesai who begged.  They came primarily from a Catholic village on the other side in Burma.  I asked the catechist and priest about this, why the church could destroy the culture but then this problem was coming up?  They said something to the effect that poor people will always be around but nothing about their hand in it, and sure silent about their own local vast land holdings.

The thumb akha (repeat)
One of the first women I gave first aid to had this thumb abcess that I cared for till it was cleared up.  It was already messed up when she came to me, but it healed, her thumb a little wider looking than normal.  I saw her in Mae Salong here lately, selling vegetables on the street, even though she was from Tachilek.  More and more the Akha could travel without excess hassle by the police.

The ngo business
When I first got to helping the Akha I didn't know anything about the forms of this work in the public sector.  Some of it I ended up following but most I did not.
In the end one found out that there was the NGO business, making money off poor people.  Few NGO's delivered much in the way of services to the villages. I really tried to pattern my work different from this.

The Elements
This morning the klong is muddy water.
I like the elements.  cool.  Cloudy, mist in the air, the visible jungle more green thatn before.  A breeze something refreshing, beautifuyl.  I feel now.

Two wheel cart pulled by motorbike, cloth sack over seat
Lots of merchandise was moved this way.  Once a man was trying to get up the steep hump by the market and stalled, the cart broke loose and flipped on the child that was inside along with his mother.  I helped him out. The kid was mostly scared bad was all.

The Village
He took beads and dresses called pee dees up for the young ladies at this one village.  His favorite was Acuh, but the other one with the half pout, half haughty face was actually more friendly.  Then for a couple years he didn't get there and when he did get back it appeared that many of the ladies of the village had succumbed to prostitution including these two.

The Knife Man
John and I were walking down an alley late at night and some guy drove by us down the narrow part, crossed the little klong bridge there, got off his motorcycle and pulled a big knife.  He was still some fifty yards ahead of us.  John who is much bigger than I got real scared, but I told him that the guy was probably drunk and we should take him.  John was too scared and run off down the alley, time I caught up with him to discuss it there wasn't much point in going back.

The Burmese Book Keeper (put with Tin Tin in guest house)
There is this Burmese girl who works at the desk keeping tract of numbers.  She has worked at the owners shop before that.
She is stupid.  In a self destructive sort of way.  She is abrassive to people who live here as myself and also some of the other guests who come.  She has this ‘I don’t know’ attitude when you ask her why something is.
Today she told some of the Akha children they couldn’t come to see me, then they told me they couldn’t come and she thought herself so clever till I found out why.

The Thais learn to use the mtns
In the recent years the Thais wanted the mountains more and more for parks and wanted the hilltribe who had lived there remotely for years to get the hell out.  Thai farmers came in and rapidly exploited soils and waters, digging ponds, causing erosion and building big pig farms near the water.
Almost every project resulted in polution, use of herbicides and pesticides, the average Thai totaly uninformed about this and the Chinese shop keepers out to sell as much of everything as possible, regardless of what it caused.

The Chinese Restaurant
In this place the service was poor and no matter what you ordered they couldn't figure out the order.  I always ordered the same thing to make it easy on people.  If I ordered anything different, I didn't change menus but restaurants, so they wouldn't be confused.  The Chinese place next to the shell station was horrible, horrible food and six people sitting in there watching tv, if you wanted service you had to bang on the table.

The unfinished road
Work progressed on the Keng Tung road, but for years it was unfinished and one could only wonder at this being the intention to block Chinese and Thai cooperation through an unwilling Burma.  Not on the part of the Shan but on the part of the occupying Burmese.
They slaved the people and the army boys each year on it, breaking rock, hauling rock on the back and stacking rock in big heaps next to the road.  One year they put a bunch of round rocks on the road.  I drove it.  Was just like driving on footballs.  Really a mess and hard on the truck.  They never heard of tar one would think but in reality the army officers were stealing all the money, not one in the whole east shan state army had a clue how to get much done, so after ten  years the road still wasn't done.
Wrecked and derelick equipment lay next to the road, overgrown in weeds, engines missing.

The Girl
I was having a beer.  The girl came back to her friends. Apparently a hooker, she told them that her paying customer had three friends who didn't pay.  All the other girls chuckled. The fat one laughed and made some comment in Thai I did not understand.

The Drowning
There was this one girl at the market from Pah Lay Akha, Ymm Boeuh’s village.
Her mother stood up in the boat during a corssing of the swollen maesai river and the boat flipped and the mother and a 7 year old boy drowned.  Every year many people died in the Maesai river, people were also shot and dumped into the river, ending up forever in the Mehkong on the way out to sea.
John at the Baan Boran Hotel said that bodies floated by his place quite frequently.
Drownings of Akhas happened now and then too.
Two girls from Cheh Pah Kah village were working at a restaurant on the pond, when you are driving back to Pasang Junction there on the right side from Haen Taek.  Its a good sized resevoir, they went swimming and didn't make it and both drowned.  Generally the Akha don't live near water, some of the guys can swim well, but parents don't want water where small kids can wander into.
There were two ponds or more in Cheh Pah Kah village, they grew a lot of tea there. Some small boy wandered into one and drowned there.
Down in Chaingmai, the klong near Tapae gate. Two Akha girls went for a swim to cool off and they both drowned too.  They were waiting for their mothers who hadn't come yet. The sides of the klong are steep.
A foreigner had dropped his wallet in that same klong and dove in to get it, and drowned too. He was drunk. What a way to end a vacation.

Thai TV commercials were funny
Funnier than American in many ways I think.
The Thais make good artists, good imaginers, they have a flare for it, for the slap your face funny. Burp.

The Mooser Girl Dies
The Lahu girl married a Thai boy, he was 19.  He went fishing one day and drowned.  His wife came by for help, she was pregnant, I was gone, the Thai family threw her out and so she went and hung herself.

Thai man lays in road at night trying to get run over
One night this one Thai man laid in the street for the longest time, till the police finally came and got him.  He was hoping someone would hit him or at least look.

The bridge closes and maesai becomes like a ghost town
Every time that there was a spat with Burma, which was at least once a  year it seemed, they always did the stupid thing and closed the bridge.  They really didn't care about people and the fact that most people were just trying to stay alive on both sides of the border.  A bridge closure was very hard on the poor who needed to cross to sell things in the markets on the Maesai side.

The Shan Palace torn down 90 or earlier
The Shan Palace in Keng Tung was torn down in 1990 I think. Was big and impressive and definitely beautiful. The burmese were mean to do such a thing.

The Jew five baht coffee, cigarette lighter for a pack of matches 70 baht for the akha girl 
So this Jewish fellow, by his own admission, was bragging about how he took this girl home, had sex with her all night, paid her two dollars.  He asked for the man's lighter, handed him back a pack of matches and walked out the door.  No wonder they didn't have a good reputation as tourists.

The nuts you crack with your teeth
These nuts are gathered from spiny pods high in the mountains, they fall on the ground beneath great trees.  The hands can be filled with spines from cleaning the husks off them.  The Akha get a small price for each can of them and then the Thai bake them in fine gravel that is heated over a fire side of the street.  You must have a cracker or use your teeth which can also be broken by the nuts, which have an acorn like consistency inside.
There can be great risk to the Akha to get the nuts if they are near the burmese border.

The pink church in brothel district, filming from balcony
Ellen gets locked up. She snuck into this brothel while the papasan was asleep, video taped the rooms with the girls and then the owner woke up and caught her, his snoring coming to an end.
The police came and made her erase the tape, her not being fast enough to hide it or destroy and alternative tape.
First she had filmed from across the street from the balcony offices of the church.  We joked that the church was built high and the pastor had his office at the top so he could look down and keep track of his girls, which of course was very easy to do from the church building.

The toka gets pissed off and leaps into jungle
There was a Toka lizard near my room.  I tried to catch him several times but he would go back in his hole.  But this oneside he went back in then shot out with a great noise into the jungle like he had second thoughts and was very fed up with me trying to catch him.  I was trying to catch him or chase him away because he made so much noise.

The tourist policeman asks me not to speak of brothels to tourists
So there was this guide telling these two tourists brightly about the wonderful bridge with Burma and all there was to know.  So I piped in that just to the right a few hundred meters were lots of slave girls too who they could go and see.  The guide got angry and went and got the police who turned out to be a man I knew, and so to please her he just spoke to me pleasantly not to mention such things.

The toy man and his two monkeys
A poor man sold baloons and toys from a cart, often had a monkey in the early years, but they ran away, and he was still poor, abandoned.

Thorn in foot
When the driver got us stuck in the mud we all had to get out and push his four wheel drive van that didn't really have four wheel drive because it was broken, and the Banker from Singapore stepped on this huge thorn that went right up through his shoe.  He screamed at me to pull it out, I didn't know yet what it was, but jerked up his shoe in the dark and yanked on this pencil sized thorn till it came out with a heave.

Tiger at keng tung zoo
It was very unusual to see a tiger, such a splendid animal, I wondered where they found him.  He was good sized and had the most beautiful long tail.

Tobacco drying house south end of maesai
You could see them everywhere, tall brick drying kilns and then the long sorting rooms of dark wood construction where the tabacco was brought in and prepared.

Toothpaste
I got up to go to the bathroom on this bus headed for Bangkok and there was the hostess girl, rubbing toothpaste on her hands, burned by scalding water when the bus jolted.  It didn't look to help and I wondered how these young people made it with no working standards imposed on the companies.

Two doctors from london, top north
We had a meal together.  We were talking about the Akha and he complained that if you helped him once you would only have to help them again.  His wife, also a doctor from another part of London, was very dismayed by what he said, not seeing it that way at all.  I guess people vary in their cynicism.

The Mexico Orphanage
The Mexican orphanage was one of the sights I had early in life that inspired me to help people in need.  They were so poor, the one man from California working and so much he had to do, with no help and no tractor and no equipment. 

Temple banyan tree
Noticed this behind the afternoon market, when all the refugees fled fighting in Burma and filled all the temples. The tree was really big but one year they trimmed it back severely.

Tambon chief
Big house, punched zera years ago for coming through his neighborhood without asking.

Thai polotics
Who could keep up with it.  Every election you couldn’t find fifty baht notes from all the vote buying.  Coups and resignations.  They had a problem with it.  Poloticians looting the country.  Petty corruption and mega corruption.  Channel 5.  Oh well.

Tuk tuk, marvin hatfield grass at checkpoint in Ch mai
Yeah, that was dumb, I was going to kill him if he had anything and we got busted. He did, but they didn't find it.

Vatican journals at the vatican library
Finally I met Lorenzo from Italy, from Rome, and he went to the Vatican and looked for the Journals that the priests wrote.  He did find them but they were all about the lives of the priestsand little about the lives of the people they worked with.
I had visited the Keng Tung Catholic mission for years and was always amazed that they also had no printing or book writing effort.  Not even Father Ah Pah, who died in summer of 2000.  He was the first Akha priest, but never wrote down what must have been considerable life experience from those times.  I wondered as I saw him last if that left some bitterness for him.  I think it so important to write, because otherwise few know what happened, what we saw.  We must not write foolishly, but the facts and impressions as we remember them to give others a reflection on that aspect of time.
Father Bosco also died summer 2000 but he was not Akha and did not seem to have much affection for them.  He spoke of them in the general demeaning terms of the church, pagans.

Visa routine to encourage prostitution
Thailand always made visas hard on tourists or foreigners living here.  Always having to get a new one.  Never stopped.  You could go to lots of hassles to get a one year visa, or just get one once a month, either way you got the immigration office hassle.  And mostly we brought money into Thailand, we sure didn't work at paying jobs.  So instead of spending spare money in Maesai, one had to travel to a border somewhere and get another visa.  Stress and a hassle throughout and one area that the Thai really didn't treat the foreigner well.  Did they want us here or not, they really needed to make up their mind.

VIP 999 Bus
These were the bigger buses with three seats to a row.  You could lean the seat back and sleep but the airconditioning was cold and made you sick even with a blanket covering you.  Fungus lived in the ducks.  There was a TV but the movies horrible, and the food stops worse.  Pitty you if you needed to use the toilet frequently. The tickets were not cheap and the rides were long, the drivers sleepy and going to fast on the road.  Often there were pictures of fatal bus wrecks with these big faster buses.  But they were not so new any more.  I took the VIP 999 to Bangkok many times.

Volunteer nurses and doctors, menglar nurse
I met a nurse from the Keng Tung Nursing School. She was Akha.  She finished the school and then paid back with two years of work in the mountain villages, which she said she really liked.

Winds of Fall
Now the winds of fall blow out of the west canyon and into my bones and I have had a little bit of a cold for the last few days and this last night the cold chill took over like a blessing from God and rolled me into itself like some beautiful blanket. Before this has come, with the fever, like in Hawaii. With all the worries I find it difficult to get deep down into my heart where the good writing is.  I found it once again this last night as some of that chill ran through me. A chill was blowing in the patio this morning when I went out to throw water on the dogs and it reminds me of waking up with Mac - N- Water way out in Kansas somewhere.  The fever, I knew it, and when it would leave, I would have a clarity in my mind that would last for weeks. It was like some kind of magical kiss.  Came maybe once every two or three years and cleaned the slate of dust, and made it so I could see everywhere in my mind all at once, with a sparkle that I don’t exactly know how to discribe except to say it was other earth like.  Cause I sure couldn’t make it happen on my own.

The Wang Tong
The desk staff at the wong thong hotel
They said they wanted to learn english, but never made any attempt to. I knew one fellow there, he was Shan, a very nice fellow, sometimes came by my house for a talk. He would also let me know of things that went on, sometimes there was murder in the rooms, things like that.  Later he went to Tawnje to work on the road there.

Wong Tong Hotel Basement Band
There was a bar, long closed, under the Want Tong hotel.  The transvestites came there, the band was horrible and the noise terrific.  Soon the transvestites would get fights going till the band would stop and the police came.
Thais don't really know how to do the bar scene and they always close, management fights, fights over girls, police, people that expect favors, drunks, bands, you name it.
Once Joe got drunk there, struggling with the police who were kind enough to load him on home.

What I found out after some years
I had gone to Keng Tung now for ten years.  Life at the mission never got better though there were more and more crosses built and more and more churches built throughout the neighborhood.  Alcohol was a common fair that was being sold as well as the scores of girls who'se only dream was to head south to become a whore. 
I asked Father Norman about this, and he said that in fact it was a problem, a lack of vision and possibly some complicity.  Father Appa who died, thought it was more than complicity, more than just a little.
At any rate, I asked around in the community about this and they told me that the mission didn't have much money but that the Bishop had lots, that he ferreted it away in banks in Thailand and such and that was why no money or progress  every appeared at the mission itself.

Wobling happy son
The one son of the Chinaman who owned the guesthouse never once owned up to a care in the world.  Any question was forwarded to Chai, "Ask Chai".  He would be hard to tell from a guest house worker, except he didn't work, he was only a person to sit the desk when the brother could not.  He pulled "duty" that was all, nothing more.
He had a wobble back and forth kind of way of walking, a chuckle always on the face about to happen.  Even his speech had a chuckle to it. 
Chai, the brother, he let the job bother him too much, didn't like it and showed it.  He had to fix everything, coordinate everything, and then only sometimes got time off for a beer.  I saw him in town sometimes, he really was funny too and liked to laugh but could never escape the job for long and didn't have much of a life it would appear.
I felt sort of sorry for the guy because he really was a good hearted fellow.

Waiting for money to clear the bank
Meeh Daw did not come today.  She told me yesterday that the girls only came to learn the language and work on the children’s book because she made them and that they didn’t really want to come.  I was sick of this sort of power play so I quietly asked the daughters if this was true, not expecting an answer and said thait it made me sad and left it at that.  I think that getting called on her own bluff sort of made her feel like she had been just a bit rude.  At any rate she did not come today and though she might come back this is still going to be a key issue.  Will she let her daughter work undisturbed or will she use it as a pawn item for leverage on something else she perceives she wants?
Last night Jim Goodman got back from Keng Tung.  Rough ride and yet he likes the town as I used to.  He said that all the Akha were Christian, this not completely true but much more so than one would like.  What Pual Loathas and the catholics did is a shame in their stamping out of the culture but it is obvious that some are having second thoughts about it.
I am getting to know Jim Goodman better and respect him for all the efforts he puts into his work to research different people groups in different areas of Yunnan. 
Often times I was so busy with an idea that I had not been on a voyage across my small room to the other side in weeks, not even seeing what was over there on the table next to the door where one could hardly think that you would miss it.
And then this year it had been humid as hec. I got some kind of fungus irritation on my skin, lots of sweat pimples and particularly saddle sores from the motorcycle and all the driving I did up into the mountains.  My posterior port was the worse for wear, complaining often.  Then I got scabies that the kids brought to the school house and it took a month to figure it out and when I did track them all down and get them out from under my skin it then took three months for the bumps and skin irritation to go away.  Some toxin! I’ll say.

Why I Returned To Northern Thailand?
I don’t know completely how you tell a story like this because it is chiefly voices obscure that creap across the mind of the night and linger in the shadows of the heart as I leave the village. 
I came to the conclusion that I had to go back to the village as I sat eating pizza and talking to my Palestinian friend in the shop where he worked in downtown Jerusalem. All that seems long ago now. But I knew then that my life, my times would be written in this land that I called Akha land, this stretch of mountains in Northern Thailand to the Chinese border.
Why the Akha they ask me? Well that is as much a part of the vapor as any of it. All I can say is that the Akha took a special part of my heart, they tied into my connection with all the tribal villagers that I had known in my life, be it that Indian girl in America or the Ethiopian Jews, somewhat lost in Israel. I had a special connection with the Akha. It wasn’t what I had to give them but what they had to give me. They had soul. The children had it. The old men had it. The young and old women had it down to the last line in a weathered face. 
When I lay asleep on the floor of an Akha hut, the murmur of voices around the fire, I was at last home. There was no going back, only in, into this life to be lost in it forever.
I can not say precisely what I have with these people, but a look in the face conveys the link completely, and be it for a day or a fleeting moment, the love is passed from them to I and from I to them.
How often I had captured that look as I walked down the road, as if we had known each other for ever.

wang tong shuttle girls
She was a pudgy akha girl always waited in the alley of the wang tong and got girls up the backstairs. They came out of the brothel right there and later I saw  her in very bad shape at the chiangrai river elephant camp, like it didn't pay off too well.

want to hear his father say what a shit he was just one more time
The son of the CIA guy said that.  He never did join. He said they tried the last time to recruit him in his early thirties.  His father died.  His mother called him.  Said to let him know when it was over, then he would come over, not before, cause he didn't want to hear just one last time what a shit he was.

washing laundry in creek
Many people did that on both sides of the river, the burmese women across the way beating the laundry with a club.

washing shingles in the clong
The chinese guest house owner bought them somewhere, bought boards used where he could and posts too. The wood shingles he had carefully washed in the clong and then put them up on the roofs.  The whole place was one immense fire trap.

watching the akha come and go as I drank coffee at the top north hotel
They would go up and down the street on the way to the market and also come by selling vegies. 

water bottle delivery trucks
Everyone got their water this way. There were numbers of companies and the water from some was better than others. Never buy water from a company named "Yellow Surprise".

water chessnuts
Sold near the bridge or the bangkok bank, a can of them for five baht, slippery and tasty if you had time to peal them and a place to wash your hands. 

water color painting akha girl
It was her first time and she used different colors and painted in rectangles like different fields of food that she planted in the hills.

water pipe in klong
carried the fresh water into town from the pumping station on the river just near the riverside and later they built a new one beyond the Maesai Guest House just before the border. Rats used it for a highway and snakes used it to help them get up the klong.

water pump pulley cross die
I took the old pulleys and made dies out of the cast iron material.  This was very good for my little silver casting projects.

weaving roof tiles from grass
that is what the Akha did.  First the collected the bundles of cut grass, which the raked with a wooden hand rake to pull out the bad short pieces, then they tied them with strips of bamboo called "ah nay" and carried them in huge bundles on their backs, all the way back to the village, the bundle often much higher and bigger than they were, making them quite noticeable from a distance.

weaving scene
on the road to chiang saen through the back villages many women have looms and do weaving.

welding without eye protection 
bridge man with daughter now working like that in such 
very bad for the eyes, but that is how they do it, never saw a work bench, everything squatting while 
they work.

ya house looses two cabins
This was an old guest house in Maesai.  They had two cabins which the river ate.  They used to have lots of paper back books, shelves of them, but I don't know what happened, the whole place ran down with time.

Yao
The Yao hilltribe had a village on road to Doi Maesalong.  They had several villages up in that region.  They prefered silver work, the woman wore balck turban head coverings and big jackets that always looked very hot.

yao collector michael goh and his story about lewis head dress sales
michael goh collected yao ornament, but he knew of lewis dealing in Akha Head dresses.

you get in a wreck as a foreigner, you have to pay
unless you are clever, but the thais always think you should

young burmese fellow at corner shop of wang thong
they all gathered here.  They sold cigarettes and soveniers to the tourists, sometimes charging what they could to make a profit.

Zera’s village burned 
Half of it.  Zera’s house.  Everyone has rebuilt but him.  No money being pastor and all.
He came to me and said he lacked money skill.  He knew how to sell land but that took capital, but didn’t know how to make persistent small money.

Maesai Sept. 16, 2000
Chinese Restaurant
I ate there a lot in the evenings.  Not because the food was so fantastic but because there weren't a whole lot of food choices in maesai at night.  I never really got them trained even though I always ordered exactly the same thing each night so as to not confuse them.  You have to make it extremely simple for people here. 
The place was well lit, a little cluttered and picutres of Jesus everywhere, rather in contrast to the fact that mindless Thai sitcoms played non stop and it was almost impossible to get service at your table because they were all so glued to the TV like the big boob.  They seldom could get an order right and seldom tried, you really had to spell it out to them.   Bring any western friend and you had to warn them by aggreement before you sat down that the restaurant would not get the order right.
Located near the Shell gas station.  There was a phone booth out front that stayed busy for some reason, and Sah Jeh's house was across the street.  An Akha bead shop next door was connected to the whole Pah Meeh Akha situation in Maesai.
If you sat out on the sidewalk at one of the tables there it was sort of a theatre. Akha girls from the massage parlor waddled by, unaware of how many others waddled by before them like some kind of grad school.  The Akha massage instructor walked by on her way to work each night, first at Smiles Massage then at the Ancient Massage.  Smiles was a mostly legit massage place next door to the restaurant but most the girls had left and went to the Ancient Massage place which was really tacky and a hooking situation as well.
01 massage was up the street further. Ma Ta ran that but was killed, so the karaoke section was closed by his wife's brother and converted into a internet cafe, and the massage parlor kept going in back, another horrible spot in town.
Beef gravy and mustard greens didn't taste too bad.  Some cashew nuts, some vitamilk or a coke, some squid salad maybe.
To try to order something new or different left them all confused, they really were to be pittied.
Zera was connected to this shop.  He got some mail here and knew them.  I never really knew what Zera was up to and after a final time trying to help him and coordinate with him I gave up when I saw that for the most part he could never get out of the take mode when it was related to me.  When I needed, he wasn't there, and it cost me a lot one time when he was very late to pay the  money.  A lot!
Getting good service was difficult in any restaurant in Maesai, one had to go to Chiangmai for that.  Chiangrai had some but mostly they were related to foreigners and bars that they ran and that was sort of a waste of time.
The falang scene in Chiangrai had a real negative side to it and the Akhas who were stuck