I leave Bangkok with nothing more than the name of a town and the hope that I will get there to the mountain where a temple and monastery sit uniquely in Thailand’s interior. I only know about the monastery in the mountains because a shifty British expat using a fake name, sitting outside a 7 Eleven in Bangkok, told me that it’s a place few foreigners had ever seen.

Google in English yielded nothing about how to get there, so on the night before my departure, I turn to Tinder for help. One match tells me to go to the Mochit at bus station in Bangkok and then to buy a ticket to Chai Nat which is 40 km or so from my destination.

She writes for me in Thai the name of a town nearby, Hankha, where I could stage a mission to this mountain that in my mind I call Bear Paw Mountain, since the Brit who told me about it described it as a mountain where bears missing paws roam, released there after the government confiscated them from specialty food joints serving the black market dish bear paw soup, which crazy Koreans with too much money think eating will harness the power of the bear.

Before the bus station, I stop at the Chatuchat Market in Bangkok to buy white clothes and sandals, garbs I’ll need if they allow me to live at the temple.

A Hellish Bus Ride to Chai Nat

The bus ride is hell, because after falling asleep I wake up to shooting pain in my back and arm, and realize that caring a light backpack has shown me my back problem, now a month-old, is still as the debilitating as ever. Sometimes in the throes of these pains, I just want to run home and rest in the arms of a compassionate lover, and that’s when my usual elation dries up and I feel like life is slapping me in the face because I have no permanent home to run to.

I realize on the bus, anxious from the pain of this still undiagnosed condition, that writing-wise for the last three years I’ve been in first gear trying to go 80 mph. I need to do better, get paid more and establish a permanent home base. These are the spinning doubts I carry with me to Chai Nat. The bus deposits me and my bag and I walk around without much of a plan. I buy a coconut from a street vendor. Something about the coconuts of Thailand, they are infinitely more delicious than any of the already delicious varieties I’ve tasted in Central America, South America, the Caribbean, and Africa.

I get the impression from glances I get in town that not many Farangs stop in Chai Nat. I sit down and take out my phrasebook to memorize how to ask where the bus station is. After five minutes of wandering, I’ve managed to lose it. I consider that my utter lack of directional skills is directly related to always being lost somewhere in my mind. When I was a kid, the running joke in my family was that Luke was always drifting off to Lala Land, a magical place where I often rode dinosaurs. No one but me knew what went on there, but half of my reality as a kid was lived in imaginary worlds of my own creation. Often, I lived in Outer Space. Other times, under the sea with a special device that allowed me to breath.

I stop by a mechanic’s shop where a husband and wife duo are working on motorbikes. I deliver the phrase I’ve been practicing. They don’t understand or speak any English.

“Chang Mai?” the wife asks. “Bangkok?” because where else would a Farang be going?

I queue up on my phone the Tinder conversation where a helpful match has written the name of the town where I want to go. Conversation passes between them. They turn to me and speak a string of words I don’t understand, except for Bangkok. I assume they are telling me to return from where I’ve just come from, so I bow and thank them and turn to leave. The husband hops on a motorbike and waves me over, indicating that I hop on. I get on and I’m driven to a mini bus station a mile or so away. The mechanic says something to a man waiting and points to me. I gather that I am to wait until the man tells me to get on a bus. The mechanic turns to leave and I gesture for him to wait while I reach into my vest pocket. He waves this off, thinking I am grabbing money, but looks genuinely grateful when I produce two Guatemalan friendship bracelets, one for him and one for his wife.

Almost immediately, a minibus pulls up and the man points to it. Inside is a woman and a military officer. I greet the woman and show her the Thai spelling of Hankha from the screenshot of my Tinder conversation. She exchanges words with the driver. Before we’ve gone half a mile, the minibus pulls over. The woman hops out and gestures that I do the same. We cross a busy highway. She takes my notepad and scrawls three lines of Thai characters in it. A motorbike pilot outside a police station exchanges some words with her. I can tell from the tone that he is negating whatever she is asking. The woman gets flustered at his answers and I stand there simultaneously wondering why I put myself in such situations and answering it by loving such random adventuring that can only be found by being lost geographically and linguistically.

The microbus waits patiently by the side of the road. It’s humbling and  amazing that a bus driver, a military officer, and a woman are willing to put everything on hold to help someone who can’t speak their language, can only smile and point to a name of a town in a telephone.

We walk to a bus stop where there are two young Thai women waiting. The woman from the minibus asks them something and they nod. The woman points to them indicating that they will now let me know when I am to get on a bus. I realize that if I don’t get where I’m going, it doesn’t matter, because where I am headed no one is waiting for me and in that moment I doubt that there is a single place in Thailand I wouldn’t find worth being.

Passed from Bus to Bus

Soon a red bus clunkers to a halt at the stop and the two women jump up to indicate that this is the bus. One of the women comes briefly aboard to explain to the driver’s assistant about me and where I want to go. After she collects my fare, I show her the notebook were the first woman wrote three lines of Thai. She nods and says something I don’t understand, but I presume means, “Don’t worry cowboy, we’ll get ya there.”

I’m seated next to a young man and I point to the bus and ask in Thai, “How say in Thai Language?” After repeating myself a few times, he understands and answers, “Rot-meh.” For the rest of the trip I repeat this keyword in my head and occasionally turn to him and ask while pointing to the bus, “Rot-meh?” to confirm I still got it.

“Rot-meh!” he confirms, both of us triumphant, him because he has taught the Farang and me because the Farang has learned.

The red bus takes me to another town and the assistant indicates I get out. She comes out with me and speaks to a woman and points to me, caring out the emerging tradition of passing me from helpful Thai to helpful Thai until I get there. After a quarter of an hour, the woman points to a minibus that pulls up, indicating I should get on. So I get on, thinking how easy it would be to kidnap me.

This minibus is the final trip of the day and it deposits me in Hankha as the sun is halfway through its setting.

Seeing a Farang with a backpack, a motorcycle taxi pulls up next to me. I pronounce the name of the mountain and he looks at me every time I open my mouth as if instead of speaking, I am making strange animal noises. After telling the man what must have sounded to him, “Cockadoodledoo,” a woman from a food booth across the street comes over to help. She knows a bit of English and is able to understand that I am headed to the mountain. I realize that it is likely too late in the day to just roll up to a temple and expect to be admitted. So I ask about a hotel and the man takes me to a
bungalow at the edge of town where $12 gets me $100 worth of American hotel luxury.

Humble Hankha

Hankha has a simple, but proudly  decorated style. From each streetlamp hangs a golden ship conveying dragons into the night. When I venture to town for a delicious $1 dollar dinner, I see my motorcycle taxi driver again and make animal noises that are meant to mean in the next day I would like to go to the mountain Sarapatdi if he would take me. I pantomime sleeping, complete with sounds of snoring, show the rising sun with the same hand motion of the children’s song, “Mr. Sun, Sun, Mr. Golden Sun, please shine down on me.” Then I pantomime a motorcycle throttle to communicate, I sleep, the sun rises, the we drive off into the horizon to Mount Sarapatdi.

He walks away with a look of contemplative confusion, perhaps wondering if I am not just foreign but also a madman.

But my talent for confusing the locals is my saving grace. Because the next morning a man shows up on a motorbike and asks me in English, “Where do you want to go?”

His name is Ofp. The motorcycle taxi driver asked him to come since he could not understand whatever I was trying to say to him the night before. When I ask him how much it will be to take me, he tells me, “No charge
you, I want to do it to help you.”

He had appeared so angelically, filling the gap of my one need, so seamlessly, I think that maybe this is some ploy to rob me, if not to kidnap me, but that is just Central America thinking.

So I hop on. Ofp majored in English and now owns a carwash in town. I tell him of some hijinks from my own time working in a carwash in high school, leaving out a detail that would’ve made the stories make more sense — the majority of my coworkers were men in their 30s and 40s who tended to be high on crystal meth.

Ofp had spent some time in the temple as a youth, but chose to continue drinking and smoking to the monastic life. He is now married and has a nine-year-old daughter and a seven-year-old son. I try not to be awkward by over-thanking him for his kindness of driving me to my destination. He not only helped me, but saved me from failing in my mission. The Abbot at the temple does not speak a word of English and I lay my request before him through Ofp. He reluctantly agrees to admit me into the the monastery on the condition that I quickly learn Thai. So long as our conversation consists of me pointing to a bus while declaring, “Bus!” I should be okay.

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