Dog polarities

The handlers tells you where to touch and where not to touch: 

Please remember where not to touch. No sudden moves - that's a no-brainer. And don't bring anything dangling into the cage, such as a necklace or a camera strap. It's catnip to these brutes.  Catnip, get it? Haha. He's been fed chicken carcasses since yesterday, so he's sated, and his long incarceration has accustomed him to humans, but even a playful swipe of his paw - say, if you brushed his arm by accident - might leave you short a trachea. Ever seen a tiger paw? You don't want to. Boy, I can tell you stories raise the hair on your-- well, anyway, just... for the love of God, remember where not to touch, okay? Did you get all that? Alright, go in, go. That, uh... that's happy purring. No cause for alarm. You can move in closer. Oh, almost forgot - don't ever look alarmed. Makes 'em jumpy.

And... say Cheese!

Yup. This one's definitely going on Facebook.

Do tigers make you sneeze if you're allergic to cats? I am, and have always wondered. In Chiang Mai you can also pay to ride an elephant, "be as a gibbon" by ziplining over the rain forest (which also has real gibbons,) and ogle long-neck hill-tribe women. So much exotica, so little time. Barely anyone notices the freely available street dogs plopped semiconsciously all over town. I've noticed this before. Dogs here are either the very picture of mange and neglect, limping bags of disease normally missing an eye, their fur, or health in general and quietly waiting to die in the tropical heat - or they're pampered display dogs whose owners carry in their arms like babies, brush to a lustrous sheen, and dress up as headwaiters with little doggy vests, bow ties, etc. I don't see much in between. You might say that Thailand's canine socioeconomics mirror its human ones.

I find Thai dogs fascinating, but since they're not a show with its own pamphlets, prices, and street-side pushers, it's not something tourists linger over. Maybe it's because they're free to watch. Just as "if the patient doesn't pay, the patient doesn't get better" (Freud?), it seems that if the tourist doesn't pay, the tourist doesn't experience anything. But is it so? Does the essence of visiting Chiang Mai, for example, subsist in the thick top-growth of manufactured thrills and pamperings through which you, the tourist, must machete your path every day? If you scraped that coating off, and didn't ride an elephant or stroke a tiger or get a massage or shop in the night bazaar or fuck a prostitute or eat a banana pancake in your guesthouse or volunteer with poor kids the way you never did back home or take a Thai cooking course or a massage course or a Tao meditation course, would you still have been "somewhere"?

I know I can be an extremist. To borrow from the Coen brothers' Barton Fink, I believe that most of travel is "the life of the mind." In other words, the only wild beast I really wish to meet is me. I want to see what my mind throws up, where it goes, what it does as I negotiate the everyday of a place far from home, where you meet lots of new people. That is the core of travel, which I once knew and am once again discovering. It's not all, but it's the core, and you have to stick with the essential or you lose yourself. I did, for a bit, and it made me feel distracted and stupid and small. It's a mental diet of confetti. So yesterday I climbed a mountain.

Mt. Doi Suthep is just outside Chiang Mai, with a famous temple at the top of a serpentine 10km road, normally reached by motorcycle or songtheaw, the red share-taxi trucks used here as public transport. For some time, I've entertained the thought of making it on foot. Not just because I wanted to do something real and defined, something with a goal rather than just hanging out all day, but also because I needed some real time with me, time to refocus: being alone with all the trivial distractions, I'd lost sight of myself. Yesterday I finally felt strong enough to try.

I had a light breakfast and headed out with nothing but water, a tube of imitation Oreos, and chutzpah. It was hard. I made the first part through the rocks and forests beside a waterfall at the bottom, panting like a tubercular old lady. The disgusting car smog here - Thai emission standards are low - has reduced my lungs to a couple of weepy scrotal sacs. I knew I had to make a powerful initial push, maybe slightly past my limit, if I was to break through my atrophy and gain momentum to reach the temple. I reached the top of the first stretch, and there under an intimate canopy of green, to the sound of the waterfall and the tweeting of the birds, had diarrhea. 

(This is not TMI!... I want you to know how hard it was.)

I rested at the waterfall, ate a couple of imitation Oreos, and continued on up using the mountain road. To the best of my knowledge, I was the only person on foot that day. Everyone else was either motorized or a race-biker. People passing me stared in confusion ("crazy farang"...) and some cheered me. The way up was tough, done almost entirely through exhaustion, and a sense that I would collapse the following day, having just now overcome a cold. Sometimes I felt weak, not just physically but mentally too. Pathetic. Sometimes I cursed myself to prod myself onward. Sometimes I sang songs. But I fucking walked. My shirt was soaked, my hat was soaked, my washcloth was soaked. The wind chilled me. I kept thinking of Woody Guthrie's hillbilly pronunciation of "hairpin turn" in the song Talking Dust Bowl Blues:

"It was a hairpin turn / I didn't make it."

I stopped at Wat Palad, a temple halfway to the famous temple, and ten times as beautiful. It was like something out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. No, I did not take photos. They could never do it justice. I continued. I allowed myself a rest every once in a while, to sip water and eat a few more of those shitty Oreo-like discs. I'd like to say that I communed with nature, and found renewed personal insight. I can say that I saw beautiful trees for the better part of six hours, and felt a sense of accomplishment when I reached the Doi Suthep temple. My legs ached, and I was dog-tired. But I did it, and I did it alone, and I had a good time. And nothing happened, I'm fine today. And something inside is a little better, a little more correct.

On the way down I took a red share taxi. So easy. I watched the mountain, my mountain that I had taken step by step, reel backwards in some sort of instant replay. I'm no Edmund Hillary, but I am me, and to that I took a step closer. Paying to pet a tiger wouldn't get me there.

Street dog begging - very rare.
Has a collar though.

Chiang Mai zoo has an amazing gateway with suchlike
animal statues.

Derelict dogs everywhere. This is at the cable car house
at Doi Suthep. That little girl was very friendly.

Couple of Thai mooks having their photo taken
at the waterfall

First time I went to the waterfall, not the big climb.
These Thais gave me some food and water.