Went to sleep last night under blue mosquito netting to the sound of soft jazz wafting over the cool January night air in northeast Thailand. The saxophone and its music maker were nowhere in sight, but its so sweet string of improvisation rocked us all to sleep in this little community of wooden rooms on stubby stilted legs overlooking the Mekong River. Unexpected friendships blossom in places like Nong Khai, Thailand, where people come to linger.

Upon arrival to S.E. Asia about two weeks ago, the first person Ellie and I met was a gentleman from Michigan, U.S.A., with whom we shared a ride to our nearby hotel. It was about 2 a.m. As we waited in the registration line we briefly exchanged little bits of information. I’m a curious sight with my overloaded backpack carrying essentials for our three-month trip – a backpacker with things, a mother laden with a treasure trove of medical supplies determined to return Ellie without incident to her father. He was here on business. In comparison, he seemed too perky. Perhaps he had the benefit of sleep in a first class seat. But as we waited a bit longer in line together, it became clear he was simply happy to be here. He travels all over Asia, and while he agreed that jet leg is no fun, he reflected, “ I can’t stop; I need to keep coming back to see all the friends I’ve made.” He added, “They’re just such great people.” Although not mentioned, I could tell he wasn’t talking about fellow Americans but rather Thais, Vietnamese, Mongolians, and many other nationalities. He had been drawn in by these other cultures and wasn’t going to let go. I thought to myself that he was really a traveler disguised as a businessman.

Last night, here at Mut Mee in Nong Khai, a young woman from Switzerland joined us at one of the two outdoor tables with Internet connections. The cord didn’t quite make it from the plug to her laptop computer. We spent a few minutes repositioning the table so we could snug up against the wooden beam with the outlets. She was petite and soft spoken. But as soon as she was situated, maybe even before, certainly before introductions, she asked us where we were traveling. When we said Cambodia, she asked us to come visit her. The invitation was a little different than when someone typically makes such an offering. Or was she asking for an offering from us?

She wanted us to come see where she worked. “The kids would love Ellie,” she smiled. “You could spend a day helping me in the classroom, playing games, coloring pictures…whatever, it doesn’t matter,” she said still smiling and quite serious about the offer. Still before introductions, she asked where we were going in Cambodia. With my reply, her face looked concerned. Apparently from Siem Reap it would be a long, bumpy bus ride. “How long?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she replied, as if it might not be something even she would consider. “The roads from Phnom Penh are better,” she suggested. “But, come from Siem Reap, you’ll have a great time.” “While you’re there, we can go to the village and visit children, many of whom are HIV positive and have parents dying of AIDS.” She repeated her invitation, “Stay two or three days, more if you like.” A play date in Cambodia.

Funny thing is, we just might go. We stopped to exchange e-mails, still without introductions. But from her e-mail address, I knew I was talking to Jenny. Not wasting time, Jenny opened Tean Thor’s website, the NGO for which she works in Battambang and showed Ellie pictures of the children she teaches. Ellie liked the photographs, and Jenny’s gentle coaxing. She announced with a 10-year old’s certainty, “Sounds like fun. I’d like to go.”

In contrast to my friendships in New Jersey, which are carefully nurtured and evolve over time, friendships found in route spring up in an evening. Never mind that I’m 47, Jenny at 21 is just barely 2 years older than my son, and Ellie is 10. Never mind that Jenny, like all the other backpackers here seem to practice meditation and yoga, go to bed at 10 p.m. and carry water bottles everywhere, the tall, over-sized 1.5 litre bottles, while I’m resorting to Chang beer and Ben-Gay for healing. It’s a different scene than my 20-something years. But, if we go to visit Jenny in Battambang, a bond will be formed that will last a lifetime even if we never meet again.

Last night as we just finished dinner, Tulli, a 9-year old from Australia, came bounding over from another table to introduce herself. Shortly after, her mom, Kathy, joined us. Within minutes we planned a bike ride for the next day, about 20 kilometers there and back, to Sala Keoku, a vast network of towering concrete sculptures created by one man, Boun Leus Sourirat, in honor of his Buddhist teacher. Journalist, Roger Warner, describes the sculptures in his article, “Asian Sculptors Make the Meaning of Life Concrete,” as follows:

It was amazing. It was like nothing I had seen before as – not the Millesgarden in Stockholm or Vigeland Park in Oslo or sculpture gardens in the United States, like the one at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum. This was an altogether different kind of enterprise, if size counts for anything, it was world-class.

Indeed, these statues, which are more like buildings in size, are a wonder.

It was a magical day, weaving through Nong Khai on our rickety bikes, passing through the large market filled with flavors for all the senses, stopping to watch a cock fight we stumbled upon by chance, spying new born puppies behind a wat, and discovering that the entrance to the samsara-cycle enclosure at Sala Keoku is through a large concrete vagina, which provided endless chuckles and whispers between Tulli and Ellie for the remainder of the day. Samsura is the Buddhist concept of a wheel of life, an endless cycle of improvement to make merit and lessen suffering in the next life. It begins with conception.

Tomorrow we end this leg of our trip, crossing over the Friendship Bridge into Laos, a new culture, a new beginning. But we are bridged to what we’ll leave behind in Thailand by friendships sprung out of uncommon journeys and chance meetings that require little, if any, introduction.

Beth Van Hoeven

bvanhoev@waltzingmatildatravel.com

Lamai Homestay is about 6 hours north of Bangkok by bus in the northeast region of Thailand known as Isan. If not careful, the bus driver will go right past Ban Sida and you’ll find yourself an hour and half further north at the scheduled bus stop, Khon Kaen. The home stay is another 10 minutes down a dirt road in the small village of Ban Kho Phet.

Our host is a welsh ex-pat who dresses (if you could call it that) in shorts with side pockets for his cigarettes and otherwise remains bare-chested, showing off his lean torso and smattering of tattoos. He has thinning, shoulder-length gray hair with a slight curl at its ends. Jimmy retired to Thailand about ten years ago and met Lamai, our hostess, in Pattaya shortly after she ran away from home. Together they now have a daughter, Lizzy, and a plot of land in Lamai’s childhood village. Jimmy seems both generous of heart and honorable, in a pragmatic kind of way.

Unlike the village homes built on stilts so as to keep the cows safely tucked under the floor boards at night, Jimmy and Lamai’s home is made of cement at ground level. But that’s not all that distinguishes their home from the drab wooden shacks in the village. Much like an antique bizarre, every inch of their ground is covered with plants, patios or walkways displaying colorful mosaics of stone and tiles, Buddha statues, small ponds, spirit houses, hammocks, thatched roof salons with bamboo furniture, pagodas, fountains, and much more that the eye misses as it searches for a place to rest.

Ellie and I are here for five days to learn more about village life. Never more than 6 at a time, guests can focus their stay on such things as silk spinning and weaving, bamboo and raffia craft making, food foraging with village elders or more cultural excursions including the less traveled but significant Phi Mai archaeological site. We chose food foraging, which sounds perfect for a 10 year old. Since the village and its outlying “suburb” consist of about 150 people, it turns out Lamai is distant relative of nearly everyone. The village elder who guided us through our mini food foraging tutorial is Lamai’s mother, who looks to be about 80 (but is only 53 or 54 according to Lamai) in her soft white-rimmed hat and hoe used as a staff when not digging.

The rice fields sit on the edge of town and provide for virtually every need. Arriving a month into the dry season, our food foraging in the rice fields consists primarily of digging for crabs and scorpions, unleashing ants from their mounds, spying bees’ nests for honey, picking mulberry leaves for the silk worms, and learning how a simple plastic coke bottle can be used to catch shrimp in the irrigation canal. The scorpions and crabs were later served for dinner, panned fried until they popped and flavored with a hint of lime.

The topic of land ownership remains unclear. There seems to be a lot of 99-year mortgages, which children inherit but never expect to pay on their 20 baht/day earnings. The debt increases or land diminishes as calamitous events happen in the life of a family.

Jimmy, not wanting Lamai’s extended family to be dependent on his generosity, assisted the family in acquiring title to 10 or 20 times the average rice field of 2 or 3 acres. By doing so, he has enriched the entire village, because with its communal ethos at work, no one in the village ever lacks for food source as long as Lamai’s family is around.

Jimmy further helped by convincing Lamai’s family to relinquish enough land so that he could bring in heavy machinery and dig an irrigation canal to retain water. Thus unlike the rest of the village, Lamai’s family can now irrigate their land year round using a long cylindrical metal pump powered by a hand-cranked. When not cultivating rice during the rainy season, every conceivable vegetable but potatoes flourishes on the ridges separating the parcels of rice fields. The bounty is available to whomever needs it.

In the meantime, the rice fields provide much more than rice for each family. It turns out that every season when rice is sowed hundreds of baby fish are also thrown into the seasonal retention basins. After three months, the rice is harvested and so are the fish. A hole is dug in the mound of dirt separating each field and nets capture most of the fish as they try to swim through. As the water recedes, the remaining mudskipper type fish (that look like catfish to me) use their fins and skirt across ground to the next watering hole until they are eventually caught or die.

Since hundreds, probably thousands, of fish are caught at once when the rice is harvested, the villagers throw some on their roofs to dry and the rest are put in big stone pots where they are left to putrefy. For variety, the lids are removed so that flies can deposit eggs, providing a bit of maggot-enhanced zest to the overall flavor. Putrefied fish is considered a delicacy, particularly when aged, much like a good malt whiskey.

At this point in the growing cycle, the leftover rice stalks are still in the ground, looking much like Kansas wheat fields during harvest season. The green is gone and the golden hue has set in. And while Lamai’s mother digs for scorpions, Lamai, all 48 kilos, nearly barefoot with plastic shoes half on and half off and an uneven skirt carrying subtle stripes, looks like she so completely belonged. She melts into the rice fields like an antelope on an Africa plain. She looks so content and at peace I couldn’t help wonder why she ran away from home in the first place. There is undoubtedly much more than scorpions and crabs burrowing deep below the surface in rural Isan. Although, to my foreign eye, this little village of Ban Ko Phet looked golden.

Beth Van Hoeven

bvanhoev@waltzingmatildatravel.com