The chicken baskets of Gowalo

Our Chiang Mai hike took us through several Karen hill tribe villages, some as small as three or four houses.We stayed overnight in one, called Gowalo, although I'm not sure of the spelling.

The village was clean and organized, and compared to some Dayak villages we've been to in Indonesian Borneo, the tribal culture seemed pretty intact. People went about their business and didn't pay us much attention. The kids didn't ask for money or candy.

A lot of the residents still wore traditional clothing.

My favorite thing about the village, though, was the chickens: each one had her own little hand-woven basket to nest in.

Good walls make good neighbors

I think every town should have ancient defensive walls and a moat.

Not only are they pretty, but they're a gentle reminder that you are neither the first nor the last person on earth.

Chiang Mai's wall and moat are hundreds of years old, but the wall is only partial and is largely reconstructed. They form a square in the middle of town, so if you ever get lost you can just look for the wall and follow it around till you're found. 

As a defensive strategy, however, the wall/moat combo was not a big success: Chiang Mai fell to the Burmese in 1556 and was ruled by a succession of conquerers for 200 years. It even sat empty for two decades in the late 1700s before finding its feet again as the unofficial capital of Northern Thailand.

*Title credit to Robert Frost: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15719

Eggsicles

I've seen a lot of things roasted on sticks since I've been in Southeast Asia: chicken intestines, bugs, whole squid, etc. But eggs, complete with the shell? That was a new one on me.

They were at the night market near Chiang Mai's southern gate. Chad ate some porky Tom Yum soup, and I just got a soda water because I had an unhappy stomach. But we saw these as we were leaving, and with my love for hard-boiled eggs and my other love for things on sticks, I couldn't pass them up.

Back in our room (that's our scratchy hotel blanket in the background), we peeled them cautiously. They turned out to be smoky-tasting, as you would expect, with a brownish-yellow hue and with a surprisingly velvety texture, like custard. There seemed to be hardly any difference between the yolk and the white, as if they were dissolving into each other.

I figure the eggs must be boiled before roasting, but I'm still perplexed as to how they acquire that texture. A quick Google search yielded no answers. Anybody out there know?

The temperature rises in Bangkok

As you may have heard, the Thai government clashed with the Red Shirt protesters last night and a rebel general leading one of the more rabid factions was shot. I was impressed and amused by the coolness of the New York Times story, since the reporter who wrote it was interviewing the general at the moment he got shot. This is how colorful he is permitted to wax about it:

"The reporter, who was two feet away and facing the general, heard a loud bang similar to that of a firecracker"

when clearly what he was thinking is more like: "HOLY CRAP! One second I'm talking to the guy and the next second he's got a bullet in his head! And I don't see a shooter anywhere! I hope that sniper doesn't get trigger-happy!"

Seriously, it must have been terrifying. Kudos to him for getting the story in.

 General Seh Daeng. He is reportedly in critical condition.

Asked to comment on reports that the general was shot by a sniper, a government spokesman said the government could not break the law. *Please excuse me while I snort coffee out my nose. There, that's better.*

Today feels like a crucial juncture and it's unclear which way things will go. Can the army round up the Red Shirts relatively peacefully? Will things disintegrate into hand-to-hand combat in downtown Bangkok? Will Red Shirt factions in the countryside start stirring up trouble? The protesters appear increasingly factionalized and leaderless, so it's tough to know what they'll do at any given moment.

I'm hoping very hard for a peaceful resolution, but even if that happens it's hard to see an end to this political divide. Each side has legitimate grievances and each side has some sins to answer for. Even a new round of elections seems unlikely to address the ever-growing mountain of bad feelings. Of course, civil war isn't a great answer either.

Meanwhile we are still in Chiang Mai but probably heading to Udon Thani tomorrow. Things are quiet here; the one change I can see is that the cafes around the corner from our hotel are now blaring the news on their televisions, whereas yesterday they were showing badminton.

The thirsty earth

An Aussie civil servant once told me Jakarta was widely considered a "10k posting." Happily Chad and I haven't put on 10 kilograms, but we're definitely feeling flabbier after four years of getting practically no exercise while eating lots of food that's fried or stewed in coconut milk (sometimes fried AND stewed in coconut milk).

So part of the agenda of our 3-month Southeast Asia trip is to get outside and get back in shape. To that end, we signed up for a 3-day hike in Chiang Mai, the hiking capital of Thailand.

I was expecting jungle, so I was surprised to find the landscape hot and blasted. It's the tail end of the dry season, so the soil was dusty and a lot of the trees were brown.

The trek took us through forests, rice paddies and pastures, past the occasional curious water buffalo. The buffaloes looked pretty parched too.

The termite community, however, seemed to like the conditions just fine.

It didn't help that this is the time of year when people traditionally burn the fields to clear them for planting. On the first two days we breathed smoke and came close to fire a few times, but it was only on the last day that we actually walked through it.

We had stopped at a waterfall to cool off, and we could see flames on the hill sloping up from where we were. When we hiked out, we found the fire had burned straight through a rubber water hose and was marching down to the falls. We walked through with low but steady flames burning on both sides of the trail.

 
I don't know whether that hose was meant as a firebreak, or whether it was merely carrying water to some other location, but it isn't doing much of either now.

Internet massage

I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone figured out the technology.

Chiang Mai, near Tha Pae gate

Three smells, five fillings

Another day, another bus ride -- this one a 10-hour marathon from the big station in Bangkok to Chiang Mai. It was a 2nd-class bus, so it stopped in every hick town along the way, which turned out to be a lot of hick towns.

I enjoyed getting out to stretch my legs and check out the snack shops, though. I'm a bit of a mochi fanatic so I was excited to see big stacks of it on offer.Naturally I couldn't resist the promise of three smells and five fillings.

They looked so cute in their many artificial colors, but they were a sad disappointment: crumbly and tasteless and generally having "more in common with sand than mochi," as Chad put it.

We stumbled off the bus dazed and hungry. The tuk-tuk driver cheered me right up, though. He had a dog who rode with him everywhere, snoozing right through hairpin turns and sudden stops.