Vientiane Visa Run

The days seem to be sliding one into the next and time is going by surprisingly quickly lately. When I was here last year, it often seemed like days were weeks, weeks were years and the ten weeks of my stay could almost have been a lifetime. It’s been nearly nine weeks since I arrived this time, and it feels like less than that. Certainly not like a lifetime. Time is really a strange thing, and much more subjective than we generally give it credit for. I think we each have our own personal little time system and the universe runs on different clocks for each of us. Why not? It’s an infinite universe after all, so I figure it has room to give everybody their own time experience and still manage to fit it all together somehow… J

There has not been a great deal of adventure or news to write about lately, and I’ve found myself being somewhat disinclined to write much anyway – hence the dearth of postings of late. However, I just returned on Thursday from a trip to Laos to extend my visa and thought that the trip was worthy of a few words at least.

Visas are a big thing for travellers over here and the “visa run” is a something that everyone staying here for more than a couple of months has to get used to. In order to get an extension you have to leave the country, pay for a new visa and then come back again. This means going across the nearest border, hanging out for a couple of days, spending time waiting in lines at the consulate, and things like that. There’s also a whole service business built up around it, I discovered.

In my usual way of not doing a lot of planning beforehand, I looked up (or actually Che Ning looked up for me) some traveler’s posts about visa runs and got the basic outline, as explained above. Thus armed with a minimal idea of where I was going and what I was doing, I caught a lift most of the way to Nhong Kai (Thai city on the Thai side of the Maekong river) and took a bus the rest of the way. I stayed the night in Nhong Kai and had quite a pleasant time walking along the river at dusk and hanging out in a restaurant catering to westerners, eating French fries and listening to “soft rock oldy” sorts of music. 

Nhong Kai side of the river, looking at Laos

A very slow triple wide boat, labouring up the river

I decided I wouldn’t get in too much of a hurry, so I had a relaxing morning and a leisurely breakfast of toast and eggs (what a treat!) and then found a tuk tuk to take me to the border. Tuk tuk drivers pretty much always take you where they think you ought to go, rather than where you actually requested, and my driver stopped off at a visa service place that helps people with their visa runs. I got fixed up with some passport pictures, an application for a Laos visa (which I’m not sure I actually needed) a lift to the border, someone to walk through with me and make sure everything went the way it was supposed to, and a minivan ride to the Thai consulate. All for about 3000 baht, or about $120.  So the trip across the border was pretty simple. I think it would have been fairly simple even without the help (and less expensive), but I wouldn’t have had a picture and it would have been a lot slower. As it was, I breezed through and was at the Thai consulate in no time.

On stepping out of the minivan I was immediately accosted by several people wishing to help me with the Visa application. I went with one of them and for another 3000 baht had an application put together in a jiffy. I was a bit uncertain when he said he’d take my passport and I could come back for it in two days. He was just this guy with a tent and a photocopier on the sidewalk after all. But he gave me his phone number and seemed sincere, so I decided why not. If I lose my passport then it will just be a bit longer adventure, with a few extra twists thrown in.

A tuk tuk driver deposited me at a nearby hotel, which I didn’t like very much as there wasn’t much of interest nearby and it didn’t seem overly clean. I stayed anyway though, as there wasn’t anything else immediately apparent. It was hot and so I spent the afternoon in my room watching TV (kind of a habit in motel rooms I’m afraid), but went for a long walk in the evening.  The next day I went down to the touristy area of Vientiane, which probably covers 10 or 15 square blocks near a wide walking area along the river. The hotel that I decided on here was pretty basic, but much cleaner, and there were many more things to see and do within easy walking distance.

It’s a busy tourist time and there were lots of Europeans around – German and French mostly it seemed, with a few Australians and various others thrown in. I met one Canadian woman from Sqaumish who was there with her husband. He was working on an environmental review project having to do with some thoughts of putting hydro electric dams on the Maekong apparently.

I didn’t talk to many people actually. I found it so easy to meet people when I was travelling in my early twenties, but it seems harder now. There are lots of “older” guys wandering around Thailand and Laos, often with a younger Thai or Laos woman with them, and so I feel kind of like I’m lumped into that general demographic. I don’t really fit in with the youth hostel crowd anymore, and I’m not quite in the “rich and retired” group either, so I didn’t quite know how to fit in. The lady from Squamish had some good advice though – she said you just have to say something immediately when you go into a room, or when you see someone. If you say something right away you can often get a conversation going. If not, it’s like a wall goes up and it’s a lot harder. She’s right actually…

I didn’t really mind the quiet though. I did a lot of walking around looking at shops and restaurants and temples, watching people, walking along the river, watching the sunset, walking through the very large number of booths set up in the evenings on the river walk to sell clothes and paintings, watches and toys and doodads of all sorts, and just practicing enjoying my own company. It seemed to go OK and I got along with myself reasonably well most of the time.  J

Part of the river park and walk area, Laos side

Riverside park area

I also treated myself to a few really good meals. I splurged and went to exclusive, expensive, touristy restaurants – something which I don’t normally do. Splurging in Laos means spending $10.00 for a meal instead of $1 or $2, but it all adds up you know. Anyway, my two favorites were the Balsamic chicken at “Sticky Fingers” – served artistically with mashed potatotoes, vegetables, marinated eggplant and capers and very very good, and a “Salade peasan” with a foundation of soft buttercrunch type lettuce, two softly poached eggs, shredded red cabbage, soft sundried tomatoes, bacon pieces, marinated mushrooms and a dressing that tied it all together. Really tasty!  J

I went for a long walk along in the sand on the river flood plain the morning of the day I was to pick up my passport and found a place where I could get to the water and stick a foot in it. (I seem to have been rewarded for this with a slightly infected toe however – or maybe it was from something else. It’s presently bandaged with antiseptic ointment and getting better I think). Then it was back to the consulate to find William (my passport guy) waiting with the visa all done and a driver to take me back to the border. So, off I went, zoomed through the border, picked up some coffee at the duty free for some people at the temple and was just about to get on the bus to go across the bridge back to the Thai side of the river when someone called out “Todd??”. It turns out some people from the temple had gone over to shop at the duty free store, so I got a ride back to the temple with them. It all went pretty smoothly. Not planning, when done trustingly and flexibly, can work out pretty well!

Sandy cut-bank - Laos side

Small boat, and looking across at Thailand

That’s about it for now. I’ve been doing some minor leaf raking and helping Che Ning work on an English FAQ for the temple website (haven’t gotten very far yet) and enjoying the cooler temperatures. The afternoons are still a bit uncomfortable, but much more bearable and the mornings and evenings are wonderful. December is a great time to be in Thailand actually!

For learning lately, I think a movie I watched the other day kind of sums it up nicely. The movie was “Bolt” – the Walt Disney cartoon about a dog who plays a TV superhero dog and thinks he has all these super powers. He ends up getting lost and finds out he doesn’t actually have the super powers he thought he did, and has to find his way across the country back home again with a reluctant cat. Along the way he discovers it’s kind of fun just being a dog and learns how to do “dog stuff”, like sticking his head out of a car window with his tongue hanging out, chasing sticks, burying bones and things like that. It was kind of a fun message in the ongoing repeated message to myself that it’s really OK to just be who and what I am, how I am. Also, the message – from a couple of rather different sources – that “enlightenment” just is, and it is already. As David Hawkins says, “All you have to do to be enlightened is to stop being unenlightened”.  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcOW6-dHPtc takes you to the short David Hawkins video from which this quote cameth. This one about "surrender" is kind of interesting too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjyVBG3WvdE )  Or, as a person here at the temple said, enlightenment comes before the “path”. First, know you’re already there. Then live as if you were.

Sounds pretty good I guess…

I probably won’t get another post out before Christmas, but I believe I will be spending Christmas camping at the top of Phu Kra deung, a nearby mountain and wildlife reserve area – so I’ll probably have something to tell about when I get back.

Until then, have a wonderful holiday season. Wishing you lightness and ease and being OK with whatever is with you…

Have a very Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

Todd

Make me one with everything...

I had intended to get this posted on Monday, but I’ve been sick for a few days and so haven’t gotten it done. It’s the first time I’ve been stay-in-bed sick in all of my time in Thailand so far, so I guess that’s not too bad. I’m glad to be feeling better though, as it was one of those flues that seems to affect pretty much every part of the body. I spent a bit of time amusing myself at one point with describing my various complaints like Snow White’s dwarves – I had Achy, Dizzy, Crampy, Grumpy, Sweaty, and occasionally Chilly, Shakey and Runny (I won’t go into which end Runny was concerned with). Add to that a few inflamed mosquito bites (Itchy) and a rather discourteous return of a few ants (Crawley) and I had the full complement of 7, plus 3 extra dwarves, all in the same bed. Not a very happy prospect, I can tell you!  Thankfully, things do change and pretty much the entire troupe has now “Hi Ho, Hi Ho’d” off to somewhere else.

It is now Dec. 1 and although I know I shouldn’t be complaining, I’m been having some twinges of missing cooler, drier air that doesn’t make one’s clothes stick to one, and suck the energy out of a person quite so effectively. I think maybe Grumpy is still hanging around actually as he keeps popping up. It’s been raining quite a lot the last few days and the air is very humid. The nights are cooler, but there is so much water in the air that the cool evenings make the dew fall almost like rain. The sun is shining brightly at the moment though.

I had a bit of an adventure last weekend when I went on a trip to visit another “Guru” sort of person, and to attend another Khaiten for a small forest temple. I left the temple here at around 4:00 AM Sat. morning in the company of several monks, nuns and other laypeople in a very full van and drove about six hours to the home of this teacher. I won’t say a great deal about him, as I’m not sure how much he wants to be advertised. It was very interesting to meet another “teacher” with some renown, however, and to see the vast differences in style and way of being that teachers have. I did feel quite honoured though, in that he gave me some special attention, some gifts, and a new name. Kind of cool. J

We stayed at his house on Sat. night and had dinner there, which was also rather an adventure for me. It was “country food” consisting of raw shrimp (cleaned but with tails on and soaked in a sauce of some sort), cooked whole shrimp, something apparently made from pig’s blood or some mushed up inner part of a pig (covered with a bit of blood for sauce – cooked I think), what I believe was cow intestine or stomach, rice, and some sort of soup. I made it through most of the raw shrimp, tripe, cooked shrimp, and rice, but didn’t eat much of the pig stuff. It’s all in what you get used to I guess.

Dinner

The next morning was the Khaetin celebration at the forest temple. The temple was very rustic and basic, but quite a pretty place with a small pond and trees drooping branches over the water. I’m finding that I am not very interested in ceremonial Buddhism at this point, but the monks did a bit of chanting that was quite relaxing to listen to, and I think meant to convey a blessing. There was also a big meal, served first to the monks (far more than they could eat) and then served to everybody else from what was left over – still more than we could eat.

After the meal we made a quick trip back to the house and then headed for home. The drive this time seemed to me to go on and on. We drove through small towns, past rice paddies being readied for new planting, and others with rice still nearing readiness for harvest, shanty-town looking vending stalls by the roadside all empty at this season with their thatched roofs in disarray, lakes and mountains, forests and a small city or two. Our driver was very good, but drove in the thai style of find a tailgate and stick to it until there’s a small opening in the other lane, dash around and jump back onto your own side in the nick of time, dodge the motorcycles, zoom up to the next slower vehicle, and so on. Everyone drives this way and it all works rather well. People make room for each other and I think they are able to bend space kind of like the Night Bus on Harry Potter, getting thinner at just the right moment so that more vehicles than are supposed to fit on a particular stretch of road can pass each other without colliding.

I found myself pondering what makes things ordinary or extraordinary on my way home. Here I was, zooming dangerously down a road in Thailand with a van full of monks after just visiting a guru of some apparent renown, and feeling like it was all fairly normal. Just me, sitting here you know…   J

My brother, Jeremy, and I were going to write a course about “Making the Ordinary Extraordinary”, at one time. I think that most of the time we actually do the opposite – we make the extraordinary world around us and all of our extraordinary experiences into just ordinary life. I suppose that a Buddhist would say that really, nothing is either ordinary or extraordinary. It just is…  There is a difference in experience between the dullness of “ordinary” and the vibrancy of “IS” however, even though they may refer to the same object or experience.

I have had some changing ideas about what it is that makes a “Master” or “Guru” in the sense of teachers of Buddhism, or perhaps teachers of “Truth” regardless of religion – though “truth” is a bit of a loaded word with many different meanings to different people. “Masters” it seems, tend to not fit into molds or stereotypes, not conform to social conventions, and not fit into one’s expectations. People have a tendency to put their teacher(s) up on a shelf and think that there can be no questioning, no disagreeing and the master can do no wrong. They create an illusion of what they expect and drape it over the “master” like a blanket – or perhaps more aptly, project it on him or her as if from a movie projector. Part of a “master’s” job, perhaps, is to sometimes shock people out of this by doing things that don’t fit the picture.

Ajahn Cha, a famous teacher from this area, says that enlightened beings live in the world just like worldy beings. They look like everyone else and you never know if the person you pass on the street is ordinary or extraordinary. The difference is that enlightened people know how to let go of what they feel and experience almost immediately and they have no need to follow the thoughts, feelings and desires so they don’t make them bigger.  They know that they are OK as they are, they don’t need to learn more or be more, so whatever is just IS and they don't make more suffering for themselves with their minds. That’s the only difference between ordinary and extraordinary.  

I've also been thinking about words and explanations, and their relative worth. It can be kind of freeing to consider the possibility that knowledge and thoughts and explanations like I try to give in some of these posts are all wrong anyway, because they are already gone. The words are records of experience that has already happened, in a context that no longer fully exists. They are useful, but only as a flowing part of experience that continues on without them. I hope that if you find things here that cause you to feel upset or to think too much or in other ways bother you that you will just let them go and consider them as unimportant and of no use to you - and accept my apologies...  It is not my intention to cause misunderstandings or difficulties!

A friend (thanks Fraser) sent this Zen poem that I like very much. In typical Zen fashion it has some extra meaning, “hidden” where words can’t go…

A Six line Poem

Be still and know that I am God.

Be still and know that I am.

Be still and know.

Be still.

Be.

(Hint – you have to count the lines in order for this poem to have its full meaning)

Ajahn Cha compared learning about the “truth” as he saw it to the way a mango grows. (If you’re interested, here’s a link to the full text: http://www.ajahnchah.org/book/Knowing_World1.php) For those of us from colder climbs, an apple or zucchini would do just as well I suppose. J The point is that the apple or zucchini starts as a seed, grows into a plant, sprouts a blossom, goes through various stages of growing and ripening, and becomes a ripened fruit. In the same way the poem above explains there is a time to know that there is God, there is a time to know that “I am” there is a time to just be and…  For all things there is a season and a time and we each are ripening in our own way and own time. A good teacher, like a good gardener, gives what is needed (not what is expected) at the time that it is needed.

One of the teachings that seems to be in its “time” right now around here is to have and express an intention to let go of expectations in all ways and of all types. Keep giving away expectations and you will eventually begin to automatically act without expectation and to live without expectation. This is a big step in freedom…

Well, I think I’ll stop writing here before my attempts to explain things become even more confusing. I think it’s helpful to not take any of it too seriously, so I’ll end with another little story that I quite like, with thanks to Andrew for sending it to me:

A Zen monk walks into the pizza parlour.

Cook: What do you want to order?

Monk: Make me one with everything

The cook makes the pizza and gives the monk his pie. The monk pays with a fifty and waits to get his change back but no change is offered.

Monk: Hey, where's my change?

Cook: Real change comes from within.

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So that's it for this time.  One note though - apparently making comments is not working very well for some of you. That's OK actually, as I don't get a chance to read them very often anyway. It would be better to send a note to me via email as then I will be more likely to actually see it. If you don't have my email address, it's: stormchild1@gmail.com