23 July 2016
For those of you waiting on tenterhooks for my next blog post, here it is – finally. As promised, although perhaps later than expected, this one will actually be about the things I have been seeing and doing rather than a long-winded and vaguely political opinion piece (although I couldn’t quite bring myself to do my Top Ten Bali-Inspired Breakfast Smoothies, sorry).
It is hard to believe that five weeks have already passed, that Bali and Thailand have both come and gone, and that yesterday morning I arrived in Ireland. A few days ago, I was sitting in the open air downstairs area of a beautiful wooden home on an organic farm in northern Thailand. Earlier that afternoon it had rained heavily, and I could still smell the wet fragrance of the tilled soil long after it passed. I took a bike ride after the clouds had cleared through the rice fields; on the way back I stopped to say hello to a cow that had wandered into the road, and it licked my hand with a tongue as rough as a cat’s and offered me its damp head to be scratched. Now, as I write this, I am sitting in the common area of a Dublin hostel. A group of men wearing lederhosen just walked in and the culture shock is at an all-time high, so it seems like an appropriate moment to sit back and reflect.
So – what have I been doing? Most obviously I’ve been Not Writing Blog Posts, because I had other extremely important things to do such as:
a) Napping
b) Making papaya & banana smoothies on a near constant rotation
c) Booking various plane tickets and planning jobs for my first several weeks post-Asia
d) Sweating
e) Spraying myself with mosquito repellent
f) Eating curry (or, alternately, pad thai) for dinner six days in a row
In all seriousness, though, it has been a jam-packed month. Bali was marked in intervals by days of indolence in the Nusa Dua house where we stayed part of the time (it was the first chance I’d had to fully unpack my backpack since I left home, which was a highlight of the month in and of itself) and days of road tripping around the island. Returning to Bali felt strangely familiar, and also like walking into an old house that you once knew quite well but that has since been subtly redecorated. Most of this was merely the passage of time – the island became exponentially more crowded in the last decade, meaning more cars, more buildings, more restaurants, more everything. Temples that in my memory were vast and sprawling upon return just seemed kind of small; the massive stone statues in the Monkey Forest that I once climbed up for a photograph revealed themselves to be about the height of my shoulders. Granted, not all of it was different – the smell of the burn piles made me laugh out loud in delight the first day I was there, because it was like opening up a dusty, long-forgotten trunk in my memory; the chickens still scratched, the dogs still begged, and the gamelan music and the smell of nasi goreng still mingled in the air.
Too much was seen and done in those four weeks for me to reasonably recount every detail here – but one place did really stick with me on this trip, as it did on the first trip I took to Bali eleven years ago. Ubud is an inland town, known largely for its arts & crafts, its famous Monkey Forest, its yoga, and its popularity with American writers on year-long round-the-world journeys (not me – think more along the lines of Eat, Pray, Love). Despite the crowds it so often attracts, it is a really lovely place – lively, cool nights, quiet warungs in the rice fields just a few steps off the busy main road, and an endless supply of cheap & delicious restaurants to eat at.
I spent several days there while my parents drove back to Nusa Dua, and I loved it now just as I did as a child (albeit with an increased level of independence). I spent my days writing, swimming in the mercifully cold pool at my homestay, and ambling through the full-to-bursting art market in the center of town. Every evening, I took myself to dinner at the Dewa Warung, and every evening I ordered their chicken curry. Dewa Warung was small, and featured five long communal tables – and so rather than being lonely, my solo dinners were a chance to socialize and talk to people from all over the world who had landed in Ubud at the same time as I had.
After dinner, I would invariably wander the streets a bit more – night walks are one of my favorite pastimes, and Ubud was at its best after sunset, when the crowds and the heat had both dispersed. On my last night there, I met up with a friend I had made in Australia; after a dinner of chicken curry – what else? – we walked out to the rice fields to see the stars, and were greeted instead by hundreds of tiny fireflies. I have only seen fireflies once before in my life, and this time – like the first – I was nearly moved to tears watching them blink and flicker across the path and across the vast, dark fields of rice.
Despite the fact that I have essentially uprooted myself by choice for a year and half, I am at heart a person who loves little routines, and so these days in Ubud were, to me, full of nothing but the warmest kind of peace and calm – plus, that chicken curry was the best I have ever tasted and probably will ever taste, and I needed to consume as much of it as humanly possible before I left.
Sooner than my mind’s sometimes tenuous grasp on the speed with which time passes wanted me to believe, we had left Bali and found ourselves deposited in Chiang Mai. The next week took us in a big loop around Northern Thailand, starting, obviously, in Chiang Mai – a city of the best rice noodles I have ever tasted (sometimes I feel like this year has been nothing but various leaps from one delicious meal to the next) and the largest night market I have ever experienced. I am sure there are larger and glitzier, but I am merely a small town girl in a big world, and this one was the pinnacle of big & glitzy in my eyes. A massive neon sign proclaimed that we were in the NIGHT BAZAAR; the streets and underground alleyways full of every color & flavor & scent you could imagine as well as the glamorous, gender-bending cabaret dancers advertising outside the clubs confirmed that moniker beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Two nights later found us in Pai, a mountainous hippie town in the north that has been “discovered” by the West relatively recently (much to the regret of the aforementioned hippies). Pai was, to me, a paradise of laid-back vibes – waterfalls, night markets more reminiscent of a street fair back home than the Moulin Rouge, water buffalos and packs of dogs lying calmly in the roadways, rutted-out dirt side roads taken on the off chance that the advertised viewpoint actually existed, simply because we had the time.
My favorite place in Pai was undoubtedly the Mor Paeng Waterfall, a cool granite-pooled beauty that reminded me of another favorite place – a spot tucked away in the Sierra Nevadas, the coordinates of which I will share with a very select few and otherwise take to the grave (yep, it’s that special. If you’re reading this and you are a person who’s in on this particular piece of secret magic – consider this a cyber fist-bump and knowing wink).
Our final stop took us south of Pai, to an organic farm outside of the province of Mae Tha. The farm, run by a Thai woman called Pui and her parents, was the warmest and most genuine welcome we received in Thailand (not to discredit anywhere else we went – this is simply to point out the extra-ordinariness of this place). Transitioned 30 years ago to organic methods by Pui’s father, the farm has since grown to be a place of education for people from all across the world and a shining example to the local agricultural community on the methods and benefits of organic farming. With a rice field, a backyard garden, and another off-property piece of farmland, Pui’s family grows nearly all of their own food; what they cannot or do not grow, they trade for with their neighbors.
As guests there we were treated to some of the freshest and most fantastically prepared Thai food I have ever eaten (again, just leaping from one delicious meal to the next) – eggs laid by their chickens, home-baked bread with wild honey harvested from the forest, bamboo shoots and long beans from the garden, baby corn from the neighbors, rice grown in their fields. More than simply the good food, staying at this family’s home was an experience in warmth and hospitality, in a deep dedication to creating a healthy and productive agricultural system, and an even deeper love for one’s community.
As of now, though, I have left the tropical heat of Southeast Asia behind for the cooler weather of Ireland. After 20+ hours of travel, I made it to Dublin & spent most of yesterday wandering around the city in a confused and exhausted haze, trying to force myself to stay up long enough to get my sleep schedule on track in this new time zone. I made it, barely, and reached a new culinary low point when I ate plain bread and a dry, flavorless orange for dinner.
(Listen – after the minuscule amount of sleep I got the night before, I could barely fill up a water glass without spilling. Boiling pasta was out of the question).
Yesterday’s exhaustion aside, I am already falling in love with Dublin – its street performers, its ancient stone buildings, its cathedrals and castles and bars, bars, bars, its horse-drawn carts, the sound of seagulls and church bells mingling in the cool air – and I am so excited to have the next five days to explore it.
To be honest, leaving Southeast Asia and coming to Ireland feels like a major transition point in this trip, even bigger than returning to Bali. It is now almost exactly 6 months since I left home; half of the year is gone, and this hemisphere will bring an entirely new set of sights, experiences, and adventures. It feels a bit like passing GO on a Monopoly board – a sort of reset button, a time to get recharged and to bolster up my energy for another go-around. Because of that, it seems appropriate to end this post the same way I ended my very first post, way back in Auckland:
Writing about my travels has been one of my greatest joys thus far, and I hope to continue to be honest and earnest and candid with everything I experience and write about for the next step of this trip and beyond. To everyone who responded to news of this insane journey with endless enthusiasm and support, and who have continued in that enthusiasm and support: thank you. It means the world to me, literally and figuratively.
Here’s to an unforgettable rest of the year, and, as always: safe travels.
-Sierra
SGBRSH 