Escape Velocity

Markets are maybe my favorite thing about travel. I love them all; supermarkets, bodegas, city markets, wet markets, farmer’s markets, art fairs, you name it. I think you get a good sense of a place when you visit its markets.

Chiang Mai has some great ones, and I’m determined to drag Jack to every one of them. The small city market near us has a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices, all so beautiful and inspiring that I wish I were shopping to cook.

One day we ventured outside the Old City to the biggest city market, a rabbit warren of market buildings and alleyways with hundreds of stalls offering dry goods, fresh food, crafts, clothing, household items, appliances, and so on. Whatever you need you can get here as long as you have the patience to find it. I love this kind of market but it’s not Jack’s favorite and I admit it can be exhausting. Someone told us this is called the Chinese market because it’s in the middle of Chinatown.

Behind the Chinese market along the riverfront is the flower market. There are dozens of vendors with beautiful fresh flowers, so fragrant and tempting.

Our guesthouse host suggested we visit a weekly organic food and craft market, also outside the Old City. This one is more upscale with a produce pavilion, several lovely cafés, crafts from some of the hill tribes plus beautiful clothing from local designers. I don’t usually photograph clothing or jewelry because I worry that the designers will think I want to copy their work, but it was all beautiful and well made. If I weren’t living out of a suitcase I’d have a whole new wardrobe.

Coffee is a very big deal here in northern Thailand, and making a pourover cup from single source beans is a ritual.

In addition to the traditional crafts there are lots of quirky local artists. I wish I could have bought one of these cats.

The prepared foods here looked great but we opted for ice cream, our first in Thailand.

There are a couple of daily night markets in Chiang Mai but the big one is the Sunday one on the Walking Street. It runs halfway through the Old City and along some side streets too, with several hundred vendors selling new and used clothing, crafts, food, leather goods, paintings. It’s impossible to take it all in.

One night a troop of Hari Krishnas chanted and drummed their way through the crowd. We hadn’t seen them for years.

Most of the food stalls are in the temple grounds, and there are quite a few temples along the route. You can usually find an empty table to sit and enjoy your food.

There are always lots of buskers playing every kind of music.

As the sun goes down the crowd gets bigger until it’s shoulder to shoulder along some stretches. That’s when we take a side street to get out of the fray and head home for some peace and quiet. But we always go again the next week.

Chiang Mai is the second largest city in Thailand with a population of 1.2 million people, and located in the northern highlands. There are upscale shopping malls, universities and technical schools, an international airport, museums and cultural centers, a giddying array of dining options, modern hospitals and medical centers, nearby national parks and enough recreational activities to keep a traveler busy for years.

We, however, have chosen to park ourselves in a quiet corner of Old City, the original walled and moated square mile established in the 13th century as the capital of the Lan Na Kingdom. The wall is mostly gone now, destroyed and rebuilt through the centuries, the bricks pilfered by the occupying Japanese during World War II, and the remains now stabilized and protected. The moat is still there, a blessing to the character of the Old City and a curse to drivers who can only cross in limited places.

We spent our first days in Chiang Mai exploring the Old City by foot. I downloaded a self-guided walking tour and we used that as a guide.

If you’ve ever traveled in this part of Southeast Asia you know that most of the points of interest are going to be temples, and it’s easy to get “templed out.”

Since touring many of the hundreds of temples and temple ruins of Angkor Wat, we have perhaps a keener interest in temple art and architecture, and rarely suffer from overtempling. I compare it to touring Italy, where a guidebook may lead you to church after chapel after cathedral, but each is unique and beautiful, and it’s the same with temples. Once you recognize the basic elements, styles and building functions, you come to appreciate the unique features and designs.

Some of the older temples date from the 13th or 14th centuries. Many are well preserved, some are left in their natural state. This one, the largest in the old city, Wat Chedi Luang, was damaged by an earthquake in 1545.

These are all Buddhist temples, but there’s often Hindu iconography displayed, something that confused me in Cambodia, too. It seems this region was once part of the originally Hindu Khmer Empire (the people who built Angkor Wat) and much of Hindu culture lingered even after the population became Buddhist. It’s not uncommon to see the much revered Ganesh, remover of obstacles. You might remember we stumbled on the Ganesh Chaturthi festival on the beach in Fiji. You can read about that here.

Some of the temples have remarkably lifelike wax figures of monks staged inside, which more than once gave me a start.

Jack rarely goes inside the temples because he doesn’t like taking his shoes off but I go in nearly every one and sit quietly for a few moments, or walk the perimeter to see the art.

Each temple is not just a single structure, but a collection of buildings, each with its own purpose. If there are resident monks, there are also domestic buildings. It’s not unusual to find graves, or a chicken coop, or kitchen garden.

The best part about visiting the temples — except for the ones on the popular tourist routes — is the stillness within the walls of the grounds, where you can hear birds, or chanting or temple bells. It’s a beautiful break from the outside world.

If all goes well today we should be in Chiang Mai by 1:00 am tomorrow. So now we begin the Universal Traveler’s Dance. Checkout at the beach bungalow is 11:30am but our flight isn’t until 9:30pm so the owner kindly said we can hang out on the deck until our airport ride picks us up at 3:00 pm for the one and a half hour drive to the airport.

We have an old sailing buddy who washed-up in Phuket and we’d love to meet up, but we’re schlepping all our worldly goods, including our new vacuum cleaner jammed in a new rolling duffel, and dragging this excess baggage on and off public buses to see him is not in the cards. We couldn’t push the airport ride any later due to the rush hour penalty and we’re on a late flight because, well, it was the cheapest. After all, budgets are budgets.

We landed in Chiang Mai way past our bedtime, collected our bags, waited in the taxi queue for a lift, then wound our way through the dark back alleys of the Old City until the we came to a dead end. A small dimly-lit sign read Wayside Guesthouse. No front door, open to the air with a dozen pairs of shoes and sandals just inside.

A young man checked us in, then gave me a long look and announced sheepishly that the room is on the third floor. On the way up the stairs we noticed the impeccably clean varnished wood parquet floors, quite the change from our primitive beach hut. Exhausted, we flopped down on a thinly padded, semi-hard king size bed.

In the morning as we made our way down the stairs we could smell coffee and toast wafting up the staircase. We met our new best friend Jackie, the owner, tiny, smart, energetic and a magnificent maker of breakfasts, included. Budgets are budgets.

Bathed in Thai sunshine I was helped in tying my shoes by several neighborhood cats who extorted a few head pats. It turns out Thailand is a cat country.

We’re off to see where we are. Within a few meters of our guesthouse we entered a tree-covered park that shelters a beautiful peaceful temple. Classic Thailand. Not to borrow a phrase but you can’t swing a cat in Thailand without hitting a temple. And this is our neighborhood. For now.

◦

There’s a funny thing that happens in your head when you spend years on a boat at anchor.

On a boat you choose an anchor spot that’s protected from wind and waves, that takes into account a possible change in wind direction and tide so that when the boat swings it’ll still be a safe distance from the shore. Our ears are attuned to every noise on the boat and a sure get-out-of-bed sound is breaking waves, evidence that you’re too close to shore and need to move. Now.

Only once did we intentionally anchor within the sound of waves crashing on rocks. It was in narrow Baie de Hane on the island of Ua Huka in the Marquesas, French Polynesia. We sailed into the tiny sliver between rocky shores as darkness fell, a wary eye on the surf on either side, and eased in as far as we could to escape the ocean swell. We put out the bare minimum of anchor chain plus a little extra for safety and hoped for the best. The next day our friends on French Curve tucked in close behind us and we spent three days exploring this rarely-visited treasure. Our anchor and chain never budged but the constant disconcerting sound of breaking waves on the rocks kept us on high alert the whole time.

Old habits die hard. We’re in a wooden cabin perched on a steep slope above a rocky shoreline about 12 meters from the sea. When the tide comes in the sound of waves crashing over the boulders — some the size of Volkswagens — makes the muscles in my neck tense and I unconsciously wait for the tug of the anchor chain reassuring me that we’re still stuck to the bottom.

Then I remember we’re on land in a virtual tree house and we’re safe.

Since traveling on land after selling Escape Velocity we always seem to gravitate toward the water. I miss boat life. I miss the peace and privacy of life at anchor. I miss living in harmony with nature. I miss flexing the skills that became automatic with experience.

Now we’re on land looking at the water instead of on the water looking at the land. Which is better? Boat life is definitely more fun, but land life is less stressful. Maybe. I think the sea is calling us back. Time will tell.

I think we can all agree that whatever your age, a drive to the beach is always going to feel like it’s taking far too long. If I’m being honest we were already an hour and a half into an hour long ride to Khao Lak but maybe the less than inspired scenery was part of the reason I was impatient. We pulled into the carpark in a cloud of dust. I looked over at a steep two foot wide roughly-paved concrete pathway that disappeared into a wild tangle of jungle and a sign pointing toward Poseidon Bungalows.

This is not the first time I was glad I’d kept my walking cane. I really didn’t need it anymore but at Phuket immigration I‘d felt like a celebrity, shuttled to the front of the line for my own passport guy. Who knew? The anxious crowd stared over at the lucky guy —Yours Truly — thinking “Who the hell is that?”

At our new digs, cane at the ready, I started to work out how I might build a little momentum up the steep grade but when I finally reached the top of the path it sharply turned towards the crashing sea and pitched over at an amazingly steep angle.

The torturous path ahead looked more like a rollercoaster than a way to get from point A to point B. It was certainly picturesque but Dr. Aaron’s last words echoed in my brain. “Just. Don’t. Fall. Down.” Turns out until new bone builds up, the knee is just glued in and not as strong as it will be.

Every walk from our tree house along the undulating cliffside path made me more confident and stronger, and the jungle color and atmosphere were amazing.

Breakfast and dinner were served at the main covered deck perched on stilts overlooking the river that emptied into the bay right under our feet. After a couple of days I threw down the cane.

At the end of our rollercoaster cliffside path was an overlook with steep uneven stone and concrete steps leading down to a magnificent crescent-shaped sandy beach with open air restaurants including, of course, Thai massage tables scattered about. You could walk for miles along this magnificent beach, and we did.

Every night we lay in our camp-style bungalow and absorbed the sweet music of the ocean swell breaking over massive well-worn black rocks just below our heads. During the day we often sat together on our tiny covered front deck in the trees writing, listening, only interrupted occasionally by a long-tail fishing boat passing close by. We eventually found our way down another set of steep steps to our own private beach.

This week of beach decompression was so restorative that we felt ready to tackle the rigors of the old walled city of Chiang Mai. I decided it was time to pass on my cane to someone in need and we were off to the airport.

After the hospital we moved back into an Airbnb in the same building as before but facing the other direction. We missed our water view and the balcony was smaller but the unit itself was nicer and our host was very kind and responsive. In fact the doormen were also very helpful when we came and went every day. We didn’t have a wheelchair and it was initially a long walk for Jack to the elevator, so we borrowed a straight chair from the lobby which Jack used as support, pushing it ahead of him from the front door all the way to the elevator. It made an ear splitting screech on the tiles but we all laughed and the guards always jumped up to help.

The apartment was well equipped, including a USB rechargeable stick vacuum. Eureka! we thought, this would be fantastic in the van where charging via 12v USB is so much more convenient. We’d never seen one like this and it worked great. I asked our host where he got it and he actually picked it up for us and delivered it. Then we realized it wasn’t going to fit in the one shared rolling duffle we travel with (it folds flat; boaters and vanlifers know how important that is) so we had to buy another one. Now we’re traveling with two checked bags, something we’re loathe to do, and we’ll be schlepping a vacuum cleaner in our luggage for months before we return to our campervan. “If customs asks we’ll tell them we like to do a little light cleaning wherever we go,” says Jack. Maybe we should have thought this through. It’s a nice vacuum, though.

As Jack got stronger we started walking to nearby restaurants for lunch, past the ubiquitous shrines. Penang has large Chinese and Indian populations, so it’s common to see actively visited shrines tucked into every cranny.

When Jack finished his course of outpatient physiotherapy we left our high rise Airbnb near the hospital and moved to the historic district of Georgetown where we could walk to all of our favorite haunts. First stop, Holy Guacamole for Mexican food.

Seems like all we did for the next couple of weeks was walk around, eat, watch World Cup matches when we could, all while Jack continued to regain strength and balance. He still carried the cane, but rarely used it except as a pointing device.

Six weeks after arriving in Penang we had the final appointments with the surgeon and the cardiologist and Jack was pronounced good to go. And nearly three years after the global pandemic nixed a planned sail north, we are finally going to Thailand.

I struggled up as if from a deep abyss. Up towards the surface I kicked one last time and I’ll allow that last kick was a mistake, but I was suddenly conscious. Nurses were everywhere assembling clear tubes to valves into various beeping boxes with bags hanging from stands filled with clear liquid and Marce holding my hand. It’s coming back to me in dribs and drabs now. I remember sitting up in bed leaning forward and the nurse saying hold this pillow in front of you this might pinch a little. The next thing was the abyss.

I asked for this, as a matter of fact we paid for this, but I pushed that poor knee until I felt there was just no alternative. It was a lot like when I was a kid and my friends and I rode our bikes all over the place on a steamy hot Pennsylvania summer day and somebody said let’s ride over to a well known public water fountain for a drink. I remember saying, “not me, I’m not thirsty enough yet.”

It’s a sobering decision to have your leg sawn in half with a Bosch saber saw, or whatever they use. Three years ago we went through this same process but under very different circumstances. At the time I was responsible for our safety on a sailing yacht and I had only a rough idea what I was in for. I was encouraged when I could stand on my leg the next day. I had to learn patience, but it turns out not much happens until the swelling goes down.

This time I had much better movement from the get-go and a couple of times I startled my doctor and he would say, “slow down!” Point taken. After all, it’s just glued on.

Maybe it was better pain control and better physiotherapy in a brand new wing of Island Hospital with more exercise machines than one of those fitness gyms where they yell at you.

You get really close to your Physio; after all you’re in it together. Mine was Zoey, maybe 90 lbs. but she could make me cry squeezing my leg with just two fingers.

I walked out of here without a cane mostly due to Dr. Aaron, or “Mr. Aaron” as they prefer in Malaysia, but he’d be the last to stand on ceremony.

He’s witty, loves bright colors especially the Rosso Corsa of his Ferrari that I pass every day in my Proton Grab ride.

They say all’s well that ends well and that works for me.

As soon as we arrived in Penang we made an appointment with the surgeon for pre-op tests and evaluation, then set out to reacquaint ourselves with one of our favorite places to hang out. It was Diwali, or as they call it in Malaysia, Deepavali, so the big malls were festooned for the occasion.

We hoped we could enjoy a similar Diwali to the one we experienced in Trinidad where families dressed in new fancy clothes and decorated their houses with lights and handed out sweets to passersby, but our Grab drivers told us most families in Penang live in high rise buildings and celebrate at home with family. There would be nothing for us to see beyond the special displays in the shops of Little India.

We enjoyed that first week’s Airbnb with the great view toward the north and the Malacca Strait and spent our days discovering more of Penang’s famous street art.

Jack was determined to sample every kind of Eggs Benedict offered in Penang.

On the day of Jack’s appointment we joined the scrum at check-in and saw Dr. Aaron Lim for the first time in three years. He’s still the fashion icon.

During all the pre-op tests the cardiologist wasn’t happy with Jack’s blood pressure so they pushed back the surgery a few days to allow time to get it under control. Then a week after landing in Penang, we left the Airbnb and and moved to the hospital where Jack was prepped for surgery in the morning. I stayed with Jack in his room.

With the correct knee well-labeled, Jack was off to surgery. I paced in the room and occasionally badgered the nurse for updates when it seemed to take much longer than the first time.

Finally Jack was back, still loopy and feeling no pain. Later Dr. Aaron came to check his handiwork and pronounced it good. Tomorrow, the work begins.

Missing the northern lights in the perfect spot was a big disappointment but time is getting too short and we’ve got to get down to business. So back toward Glasgow we go, a place we’re starting to think of as a home base.

We drove right past the public parking lot at Balmoral Castle. You can actually overnight there in designated motorhome spots but with no spare time to explore the grounds we nixed the idea for now and drove on.

Farther west I picked an innocuous parkup in a layby on a gravelly road in the Cairngorms. With barely a moment’s warning, the predicted solar activity that failed to materialize two days before while we were in Portsoy suddenly came to life where we were surrounded by mountains and on a road with occasional traffic. I barely had time to set up the camera while keeping an eye on the dark clouds rolling in.

Despite being interrupted by headlights and eventually obscured by clouds, we saw the coveted and rare red Aurora. It only lasted a short time but what an unexpected thrill it was!

The foul weather that moved in overnight continued through next day and we skipped some planned tourist stops and carried on westward.

During the next week we booked storage for the van, did some last minute travel shopping, dug out our warm weather clothing, found accommodations in Penang, and generally prepared for living out of a suitcase, something we’ve never done for longer than a couple of weeks. All the while we stayed in some new parkups and some old familiar ones and made creative meals out of fridge and pantry leftovers.

Of course we visited yet another castle, one we’d driven past a number of times but hadn’t noticed. And of course it was closed.

At a parkup along the Firth of Clyde we saw the conning tower and rudder of a submarine sliding by. It was almost out of sight before I recognized what I was seeing. It was a US flagged nuclear sub on its way home from a summer at Faslane military base. I didn’t get a photo but you can see video someone else captured here.

We spent a night at a campground flushing the tanks and doing laundry. There’d been so much rain that we were nearly surrounded by mushrooms, some I’d never seen in real life before.

From the campground we moved to a hotel for two days while we deep cleaned the van and packed for an indefinite odyssey to mostly unknown destinations.

On departure day we dropped off the van at the storage place, got a ride to the airport, and started on our 2-day, badly planned (by me) four-flights-with-long-layovers journey to the other side of the planet.

We left the UK at 10am Monday morning and arrived at our Airbnb in Penang at 2pm Wednesday. A few hours later we were in t-shirts eating takeaway Banh Mi on our balcony overlooking the Malacca Strait. It’s been eleven months since we were here. We missed the place!

Today’s installment begins with a rare parkup failure, which is to say that paper will sit still for anything and as we pulled off the hard road this place didn’t look anything like what was promised. It hadn’t a view and was exposed to the weather. But as I turned off the road my peripheral vision caught a brief snapshot of what might be a footpath along the steep cliffside over toward Portsoy, the next village along the coast. We were left facing down a narrow death spiral half lane, twisting around an outcrop of rock where you can be assured that if somebody’s coming up around that blind corner while you’re going down, you’re both going to have a bad day. It’s steep, tight, twisty, and there’s no way to see if anything is coming.

As we inched down, Marce practically stood up in her seat. Luckily we met nothing coming up. As a matter of fact, no one was down at the bottom either so we had this beautiful rocky coastal parkup to ourselves.

This place was chosen as an Aurora observatory for Marce, having northern exposure, low light pollution, and an observable horizon, but it necessitated a drive across most of the country.

To our left we found strange concrete constructions tying massive piles of rocks together in what appeared to be a way to keep the ocean in a tidal pool for swimming but there was a sign that forbids swimming in the tidal pool.

We decided the empty pool deserved further exploration but it was called due to darkness.

It seems the electromagnetic gods giveth and they also taketh away in what feels like a completely arbitrary way without regard to how far you might have driven. It seems the high Aurora activity alert was pushed back a day but Marce was on full watch all night which it must be said makes for poor companionability aboard Escape Velocity in the morning.

After caffeinating, we decided an exploratory stroll along the cliffside path into Old Portsoy was just the ticket.

It was a fine morning and eschewing the twisty access road, we soon found our way up a steep path to the top of the ridge and spectacular views.

Calling Portsoy quirky may be an understatement after we bumped into this memorial.

Turns out some of the TV show Peaky Blinders was shot in Portsoy. A genuine brush with fame.

Back at the parkup, with the tide filling in, the pool starts to make sense.

After a second night of little or no electromagnetic activity you just have to accept that sometimes there are things over which you have no control.