Trekking in Chiang Mai
By Marie Bismonte
It was on the second day of my trek, up north of Chiang Mai on the Thai-Burma border, during sunset, that I contemplated on the movement of time. Upon rolling hills and mountains, overlapping trees and decadent greens, the vista which my eyes had taken possession of swayed like a pendulum, from a stoned-set past to a vast future of uncertainties. There I stood in that fateful junction, with all the pains of travel and history on my back.
It became cooler; the breeze offered respite from the hot and humid air. Sitting with the Lahu hill tribe children and fellow trekkers in the hut, I listened to the ticking of the night, each minute adding darkness to the palette of the sky. The children sang the eternal innocence of youth, while we, in our opium-laced eyes and Beer Chang bellies, buzzed around like mosquitoes, random lives coming together, if only at this one point. We all had our stories to tell; yet we shared nothing.
I was alone when I embarked on this trek. The friends I came to Thailand with headed down to the beaches in the south. I stayed. My story was that I met someone in Chiang Mai. He was the reason for my presence in the mountains. And there, in his hopeful and quiet eyes, I got lost. In the ocean of July rain that poured, I drowned.
I am not sure what brought me to Thailand in 1999. What brings us to certain spaces but the dynamics of change, whether deliberate or unintentional, or the urgency of flight and the pursuit of love? Or perhaps, because I am the faithful seeker, it was my search for “belonging” that drove me farther away from home. All I knew was that I had to be somewhere far. In my 28 years, I have traveled some distance – from the Philippines to New York, from unknown cities and towns to familiar streets, from youth to maturity, from strangers to friends, lovers and enemies. Restlessness propelled my desire for adventure and destitution drove me to escape.
Yet what does it really mean to belong? What can encompass the feeling that is ‘home’? What makes the human heart yearn for something that it could not have?
I went back to Thailand this summer to undertake a post-graduate internship at the UN Inter-agency Project for Trafficking in Women and Children, UNDP Bangkok. I arrived a week before I officially started working and, on my second day, I headed to Khao San Road where I took a 150-baht overnight bus to Chiang Mai. As the bus fought its way out of Bangkok traffic, following the northern route, I sat still as water; tempest brewing in my depths, anxiously awaiting a lover. The urban frenzy faded into the night and toward rustic scenery, the headlights approached calm. I did not sleep.
At 6 a.m., there was no lover waiting for me at the station. Instead, I met Lukas, a German guy who was on his way to Laos, and Isabel, a Spanish girl who had been travelling Asia for over four years. We walked towards the city looking for a guesthouse. In particular, I was looking for my guesthouse of two years ago, Julie’s Guesthouse, a family-ran lodging facility owned by a “no bullshit” (her famed expression) transwoman named Julie, the organizer of the backpacker renowned “French Fry Trek.” In the three-and-a-half weeks that I stayed there in 1999, the family took me in as one of their own, reminding me always that I look like Thai people. Same-same. I fit right in – riding motorbikes all over town without a helmet and with no regard for my own mortality, eating chili peppers as if I was born sucking on them, going to the wat (temples) to worship, and doing the wai (lowering the head with the palms of the hands pressed together raised on the face as a sign of respect) to the elderly or people of stature.
Over coffee, Lukas, Isabel and I had the usual traveler conversation. It was not so much like the getting-to-know-you talk; it was more like a mapping exercise of places and memories, narrowing the distance between two points: where we had been and where we are going. I, the veteran, talked so eagerly about the adventures up north – Fang, Pie, Chiang Rai, Mae Hong Son, and in Chiang Mai – the night bazaar, Doi Suthep, the remnants of an ancient city gate, and the restaurants and nightlife along Moon Muang Road. It was great retrieving the absent revelries of the past in the actual place of occurrence. In the presence of a captive audience, time is no longer an isolating factor and movement no longer a disruption. The vastness of memories was diminished by the immensity of nostalgia.
We continued walking through the maze of narrow, almost-urban-but-still-rural streets and came upon the soi leading to Julie’s. At the corner, we parted ways. With much trepidation, I drifted towards the guesthouse. It was towards noon when I slowly opened the corroded gates. There was no one at the dining area having coffee or breakfast. I inched closer to the reception desk and found it empty. I imagined Julie was out at the bus station picking up travelers and trekkers. I put my duffel bag down and waited. A woman came out and said something in Thai. I asked where Julie was in English. She said she didn’t not know anyone named Julie. Pointing at the sign: “Julie’s Guesthouse. Chill-out roof for everyone,” I said, the owner of this place. Where is she? The woman said that the people who used to own this place moved out a year-and-a-half ago, five months after I left Chiang Mai. I turned around and walked back out to the corner.
The next night I took the bus back to Bangkok. Getting on, a flash of memory came to mind.
August 1999. The guy I met in Chiang Mai walks me to the bus. He wants to know how I am, and asks if I had a good time. Without looking into his eyes and stringing my words softly and carefully, I say, I’m okay. Yes … I had a good time. Thank you. Holding my right hand with his left, he says, I wish I could go with you to Bangkok. The US … is a world away. Awkwardly, we kiss and hug, and, for eternity, become quiet. He says, I love you … from the first day I saw you at Julie’s. You look like Thai people, he tells me for the last time.
From my seat, looking out of the window, as I did back then, I waved goodbye and closed my eyes. (New York, October 2002)
This was published in the Lifestyle Section of the Daily Tribune (Philippines), 28 April 2004. Print.
POEMS
Notes from Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina
In the Office for the Lost
by Marie Bismonte
Everything is still in place, including time.
At 9:00 a.m., they came, cutting short the morning, rendering the day dead.
The sun was cut too so nothing could be seen, for there is such irreverence to
not being blind to the panic of the coming. The cobblestones quivered and
the preceding seconds undulated to seize the hands of the clock, of all
the clocks in the old city hall, now permanently closed off with a big rock salt
where people can hammer, pick and chisel their messages to those who remained
inside. The desks were moved a nudge. The chairs were set apart to make room
for a perfunctory procession of hauling the bodies out; bodies found floating
on their blood. There was no time to look at the faces. Not now. The grief would be
postponed for years later when peace signed the approval of tears. Everything was still.
All the objects in there shifted but were never moved back. Likewise, the angling of
perspective will never go back. There is no bigger picture. Only clocks.
All stopped at 9:00 a.m.
Notes from Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina
On the Street of Broken Youth
by Marie Bismonte
If a mountain is moved, we appoint the whole nation to carry it
back to its original position. We plot points, recalculate space,
approximate mass and then we re-christen it with a new name.
The mending of roads is necessary, so is sewing back the bridges.
Buildings rise from debris and streets are washed cleaned.
Then we say don’t look back and so we plod and plow,
planting trees and crops; we remind ourselves that if we look back
once, we risk looking back twice or more. There’s a new notion of time –
it is faceless; a stranger to us. Looking in his eye is not necessary.
Familiarity is not an option: we adjust our moods and work habits.
We walk on different streets, turn onto corners never seen.
We add our sorrows and pour it on to the pavement.
We create memorials so we could ease the burden of memory.
We write their names on the wall so that we remember their lives
and not the horror of their deaths. We are seventy-one fewer now.
We are a hundred fewer now if our children had their own children.
We are a thousand fewer now if their children had children.
There are a million more now carrying this mountain, but we cannot move it back.
On 25 May 1995, at 20:55 hours, a shrapnel shell fired by a 130mm towed artillery piece, detonated in Kapija Square in Tuzla where 71 people were killed and 240 were wounded. All of the victims were civilians and the majority were between the ages of 18-25.
Both poems published in the Philippine Graphic Magazine (Manila), around February or March 2011. Print.