Chaiyaphum I

During the semester break in October, I was invited by my next-door neighbor to visit her home in Chaiyaphum, which is in the northeastern region of Thailand known as Isaan.  Isaan is home to sticky rice and grilled chicken and most importantly, at least on the culinary front, som dtam, an addictive spicy green papaya salad (except when it’s made with cucumbers instead of papaya).  It’s a place of many dialects, some of which are virtually indistinguishable from Lao.  It has mountains and waterfalls and rice fields and bamboo groves in abundance.  It’s still predominantly agricultural, and the population is aging, in large part because most people prefer other sorts of occupations to farming and so move away the cities or regions with more varied ways of earning a living.

In what has by now become a common experience, I wasn’t actually sure we were going until the evening before when my neighbor, Rat, called me to tell me when they would pick me up.  (Her husband lives at a naval base about an hour away from our school, so she goes there on the weekends and during holidays.)  They arrived with a neighbor from Chaiyaphum and her daughter, whom they were giving a ride back home.  So, this meant a total of 5 adults and 3 children in an extended cab pickup truck.  (The bed of the truck was filled with luggage and food.  And on the way back we added one more person, so one of the kids, age 11 I think, rode in the back on top of the luggage.)  Mai, my neighbor’s 4-year-old son, spent most of the trip perched on the little compartment between the driver’s and front passenger’s seats, the perfect place from which to sail straight through the windshield should we have a collision of any kind.  Even though traffic accidents are one of the leading causes of death here in Thailand (although, granted, I think it’s more frequently a person on a motorcycle or a pedestrian who gets killed rather than anyone in a vehicle), no one gives this a second thought. 

As the crow flies, it’s around 200 miles from school to Rat’s home.  You might therefore imagine that it takes about 4 hours.  Think again.  6 hours?  Keep going.  8 hours?  Getting warmer.  9 hours? Almost.  That’s right, it took us just shy of 10 hours.  Admittedly, this did include stops for food and fuel, but still the actual driving time was probably around 8 hours, the last half hour of which was on a dirt road so filled with potholes (strange expression that, how can something be “full” of “holes”? shouldn’t it rather be “empty” of “holes”?) that we had to crawl along at about 2 or 3 mph, swerving this way and that to avoid the worst of them.  So, yes, road conditions, traffic, and the practice of frequent stopping to eat, buy snacks, and pee, generally mean that you can at least double how long you think any given trip should reasonably take.

Rat’s home is in a village of a few hundred people in an area consisting primarily of rice, sugar cane, and bamboo fields.  As you look across these variegated swathes of green you see mountains in the near distance.  Her husband lives in another village of similar size a few kilometers away.  And most of their immediate families live within a half hour’s drive.  This includes Rat’s mother’s new “boyfriend,” who has a shop of some kind.  I was not clear on what it was; it seemed to be a combination of auto repair, restaurant, and general store. 

No one actually lives in the house anymore.  Rat’s parents are divorced and her father moved away; her mother lives with her at school.  The house is a pretty standard country house with two stories, constructed of concrete and dark wood.  There is one bedroom on the ground floor, the rest of the space given over to one big open area for cooking and eating with a bathroom off to one side.  Bamboo shoots hang from the rafters.  The top floor is also one large room partitioned off with screens into three sleeping areas.  The flooring has gaps and the occasional hole.  The bathroom consists of a large cistern and a squat toilet.  There’s also a washing machine.

This was probably my favorite trip I’ve taken so far here in Thailand.  Stay tuned for the details.