The sun is shining through the wonderfully clean and brand-new windows in Hug Hostel. Matt’s returned to Chiang Mai from his two-day trek and decided to forego another night of terrors at BMP Residence in lieu of cheaper yet more extravagant living arrangements. Separate rooms for showers and toilets? What opulence! But this is the way the Westerner has grown accustomed to living. And for 280 baht a night ($8.64), it’s a tough price point to beat.

He wanders down to the common room to chat with his 11-hour lagged girlfriend back in Washington, DC. It’s 8am, which means it’s just him and his laptop in the gorgeous lounging room (floor to ceiling windows for a 180 degree view of the moat and Old City walls!). Few backpackers leave their beds this early unless otherwise compelled.

“So what’ve you been doing? How was last night with the guys?” Chelsea asks him via video chat.

It’s wonderful to see her face and watch it laugh in time to his jokes and stories. Well, maybe a few seconds delayed. 8,400 miles of separation isn’t exactly down the street and information can only travel so fast.

“Oh man,” Matt feels the familiar surge of energy that comes as he leaps off the first few words and dives into a story. “We saw a real Muay Thai fight!”

* * *

“Fifty baht on Blue!” Henry agrees to the bookie.

The bookie has a wad of colorful Thai bills in one hand, while the other is scanning, fanning, waving for attention from prospective clients. Or shaking their hands after a bet is sealed. He’s shaking Henry’s hand now, taking his fifty. He casually slips a hundred-baht note under the Aussie’s drink in exchange. If Blue wins, the money stays on the table. If he doesn’t, the bookie knows where he’s put his money. The man has a sharpness to him that silences any thoughts of cheating.

“Fifty on Red then!” Matt calls out to the other bookie.

He ambles over and trades a fifty for a hundred under the always-full rum and Coke on the table. Each of the bookies takes a single side in each fight, ensuring there is no arguing over which side you bet on.

“Oh, it’s on now!” Henry crows.

Seated around Matt and Henry are Franz, P’ter, Leon, and Joh. Leon has been sick in Chiang Mai for the past few days, so this is his first night out after spending three staring at the floor in his hotel room. Joh had invited them all out after they returned from the jungle and is their unofficial butler for the evening. He places their orders, haggles for prices, and makes sure that each of their small plastic tumblers is filled with the cheapest rum and Cokes the establishment has to offer. It makes for a blurry memory the next morning.

The establishment itself is fairly new, but not too new. The concrete floors are haunted with the blood and pain of fights it’s seen over the past few years, hastily covered with rush mats and plastic tables. Joh’s posse is sitting in decent seats, not the best, but still only ten, maybe fifteen feet from the ring. The ring itself is raised three or so feet from the floor (locals might refer to this height as ‘a meter’) and has two fighters strafing in circles.

Muay Thai is one of, if not the most, brutal fighting sports in the world. It encourages the use of punches, kicks, knees, elbows, anything goes. Not until one fighter died in the ring almost one hundred years ago did they stop fighting with knotted rope around their hands in favor of a more cushioned mini glove.

In this ring, one such fighter wears blue shorts and gloves, the other wears red. It’s more of a pink, really, but the point is made.

“Daeng! [Red!]” Matt hoots with the cheers of the crowd when his fighter makes a good play, a knee to his opponents side. Had he bet like Henry, he’d be shouting ‘Si fa!’ [Blue!].

Soon, he wishes that he had bet with Henry. The blue fighter connects a devastating kick to the red fighter’s temple. Mr. Red, who has already been flagging, falls over and can’t do more than wave an arm before falling back to the mat.

One bookie comes by their table. He takes the note from under Matt’s cup.

* * *

“One sec,” Matt says to his computer screen, “I’m hungry. I’m gonna leave the chat open, so you’ll be able to see who steals my laptop if anyone does.”

A minute later he’s back with some gummy bears. Fuck yeah, gummy bears for breakfast.

An hour even later and he’s power-walking with Leon through the middle of the city, bee-lining southward to the BMP Residence to take advantage of Joh’s offer to be their tour guide for the day.

Matt checks his watch. “We’ve got like twenty minutes to get down there and it took us almost thirty yesterday. Hmmm… Anyways, you saw those three girls coming out of the hostel with me when you got here, yeah? They were all complaining about these two Brits having sex in their dorm this morning.”

Matt affects the French accent of one of the girls, Joline, who had told him of her horror,”’I was reading my book and zey were just fucking, lights on, so loud! We were all up, everyone iz up, and he finishes and I think they are done, but no! Round two! Zese fucking British!’”

The pair cracks up as they pass a school on their right.

“You should really come back with me to my hostel tonight for drinks,” Matt offers. “It’s great for meeting people.”

“Yeah,” Leon nods, “I want to do something tonight! Finally, I can drink again!”

Eighteen minutes in and the pair is hopelessly late. They can’t communicate and negotiate with the tuktuks without a map (although they’ve tried) and they only have two minutes left until 10am.

“I knew I shouldn’t have stopped for that pork skewer,” Matt mutters.

His companion does not disagree.

They turn down their final street and from behind them barrels past a songthaew. Literally meaning ‘two rows’ for it’s two parallel rows of seats, it’s the type of pick-up truck the trekking crew used to get around the past few days. It’s full of Western passengers, but still has room on the bumper. And it’s going their way.

Matt takes off after it.

“Wait! Wait! Stop that truck!” he calls out. “Stop!”

The truck continues on into the distance for a few seconds longer and then rolls to a stop.

Matt redoubles his efforts and shouts back to Leon. “Come on, man, let’s go!”

Leon hadn’t moved, but at the urging breaks into a run. The truck is already up and moving again by the time he finally tosses his water bottle to Matt and launches himself at the metal handholds, joining his friend on the bumper of the truck.

“Hi there,” Matt grins at the two rows of tourists staring up at him. “Thanks for picking us up. Where are you going?”

A pause.

“The temple?” one man answers.

“The temple?” Matt doesn’t ask them which one of the literally dozens in Chiang Mai. “Right on. Where are you from?”

“We are from Germany,” a woman answers this time.

“No way! Leon,” Matt jerks his thumb to the skinny youth hanging onto the bouncing truck next to him, “is from Bavaria! Dude, you should say hi.”

“Hello!” Leon greets them.

“In German.”

“Is the same! Is ‘hallo’!”

“Oh.”

The Germans converse outside of Matt’s ability to understand, and after a few blocks the pair hops off, waving at the retreating songthaew.

“You’re crazy, man,” Leon says, grinning and shaking his head.

Matt checks his watch again. “We’re on time, aren’t we?”

Soon they’re in an SUV with the familiar German brothers, Franz and P’ter. Joh is riding shotgun and his nameless local friend is driving. The now-three Germans speak in their native tongue and Matt tunes out, looking out the window at the tropical landscape whizzing past. Was he crazy for hopping onto that truck? The call to adventure never breaks your door down and demands you come along like it does in The Hobbit.

He thinks of his time in grade school, where he first began to understand the nature of seizing opportunities.

* * *

It’s 1997 and Matt’s in fifth grade in SAR Academy, his childhood Yeshiva. Every day from 12:30 to 4:30 his class of twenty-odd students learn Torah, the Jewish bible, which includes the words themselves and the rabbinic commentaries. Often there’s a sermon from their teacher.

His teacher is Rabbi Rosenberg. Rabbi Rosenberg is a rotund, bearded, and jolly man who’d be a great contender for a brown-bearded Santa Claus if it weren’t for the kippah on his head and tzitzit tassels hanging from his waist (and of course his staunch Judaic faith). The man is always patient, quick to smile, and best of all, gives out candies for correct answers. Matt likes Rabbi Rosenberg.

Today he is telling a story about a flood. Not the flood, with Noah and arcs, but a hypothetical flood.

“And so Rabbi Schmalmel sits on his roof watching the water rise around him,” the rabbi tells his students in the lilting voice and expansive gestures endemic to his vocation, “but he did not leave. He thinks to himself ‘Hashem [God] will save me’ and he waits.

“Soon, a rowboat comes up to him, because the waters are coming in through his windows, and the boatman says to him, ‘Come, Rabbi Schmalmel, come with me! I can save you!’ But the rabbi tells him, ‘No, Hashem will save me.’ And the rowboat leaves without him.

“And then later, the water keeps rising and it’s almost to the roof! Another boat comes to him, bigger and stronger than the other one. The crew of the boat sails up to the rabbi and they shout to him, ‘Come, Rabbi Schmalmel, come with us! We can save you!’ But the rabbi tells them again, ‘No, Hashem will save me.’ And the big boat leaves without him.

“Later still, and the water is up to the roof and the rabbi is standing on his chimney and can only see water around him when a helicopter flies overhead. The pilot calls down with his megaphone,” Rabbi Rosenfeld cups his hands around his mouth for effect,”’Come, Rabbi Schmalmel, come with me! I can save you!’ But the rabbi shouts up to the helicopter, ‘No! Hashem will save me!’ So the helicopter, the helicopter leaves without him.

“Soon after, the water rises up and the rabbi tries to swim and he swims and swims, but cannot swim any longer… and he drowns. In heaven, he goes to Hashem and says to him, ‘Hashem, why didn’t you save me? Why did you let me drown?!’ Hashem tells him, “Rabbi Schmalmel! I sent two boats and a helicopter! What more do you want me to do, Rabbi Schmalmel?!’”

Rabbi Rosenfeld continues on to explain his meaning of the story: God doesn’t perform grand miracles anymore like he did in the Torah. Nowadays we must all be responsible for our own destiny and trust that the universe sends the right opportunities and that we have the wherewithal to seize them.

* * *

Franz is peering into a rickety bamboo cage. “Wo ist die schlange? [Where is the snake?]” he asks the group.

Their first stop on Joh’s tour of the Chiang Mai area is a snake farm. It’s more like a snake zoo.

The cage Franz is looking into appears empty. The rest of the cages are barely different, containing slapped together ‘ecosystems’ with tired and hiding reptiles. The signs on the cages are sparse, some are hand-written. The one in front of Franz reads ‘Jumping Snake’. Jumping snake…?

P’ter points and his brother leaps back with a start. The snake had been at eye-level, coiled up on the crossbeams making up the roof of the cage. The jumping snake doesn’t even register their presence.

Later, the four of them sit in the small arena reserved for the snake show. They’re the only ones there. The trainer has only just taken out the first two serpents and the speaker system only just started blasting Top 40 from the past few years, when they stop and start packing it all up again.

“Can you wait ten, fifteen minute?” a young man rushes over to ask them. “Another group coming.”

Twenty minutes later and Katy Perry is once again setting the ambiance. The stadium-style seats are filling up from the new group. Matt does a quick count and he finds at least eighty people have just rocked up to the snake farm.

One of the newcomers bumps into Matt and she quickly apologizes. “Slicha [Pardon me].” Again with the Hebrew?

The snakes are back out and the trainer is slapping the ground in front of their mesmerizing gaze, barely dodging them as they dive to strike. The announcer lets them know that these snakes are poisonous and their venom hasn’t been removed. Franz points out that this trainer is missing his right index finger. The wound is cauterized at the very first knuckle.

The group of Israelis are hooting with delight, with one of the tour leads being obviously frightened. He’s getting up out of his seat to back away through the door when the trainer pulls another snake from a woven basket. He wrestles with it and seems to lose the tussle as the snake goes flying into the audience.

Right at the frightened man.

He starts screaming, batting at his face and shoulders. He leaps down the benches to the main floor and out one of the entryways. The children, adults, and even the elderly, everyone who’s with him is laughing and calling out after him. The only words that can be clearly heard are the announcer’s. Oddly enough he’s speaking in Hebrew for his audience.

“Lo amity! Lo amity!” he’s shouting through his laughter, “Not real!”

They retrieve the man, but he’ll only come as far as looking in through the open tent flaps of the entryway. He watches the trainers take out three jumping snakes and catch them as they leap. One in each hand and the last one in the trainer’s mouth. After a round of applause they too go back into their baskets.

The baskets have all been exhausted and so a black garbage bag is hauled out. The plastic strains with the weight from inside. They dump the contents and out pours an anaconda, writhing out into the center of the ring. The audience bursts into cries of surprise and delight. The hysterical man takes off running again.

The anaconda quickly finds itself and slithers over to the pool of water, maybe ten feet in diameter, that’s been sitting to the side, ignored until now. The slimy water engulfs the snake in an instant, and the monster is gone. The water barely ripples at the smooth entry.

“Eifoh ha’nachash? Eifoh ha’nachash?” the announcer rings out over the crowd.

“He’s saying ‘Where’s the snake?’” Matt translates for his friends.

The nine-fingered head trainer dives in after it. He’s treading water in the deceptively deep well for a few seconds before diving in to wrangle the snake swirling below him. The dark water churns around the invisible combatants.

The seconds tick by and the audience inches forward on the edge of their seats. Surely the man is trained, surely the snake has been fed? Surely there’s no real danger here? Surely…

The water splashes and the man looks around at them all, a slick smile on his face. His thin grey hair is plastered to his head, the perspiration of the exertion lost in the well. In one hand he grips the beast’s head, while his other arm braces against its body, preventing the lung-crushing constriction.

This grand finale wraps up the show and soon the audience is back in their air conditioned jeeps and minivans, on to the next stop in their tour. The Israelis go off to unknown locales and Team Joh heads off to see some temples before heading back to the city proper.

Later in Chiang Mai where an earlier storm has spent its fury, the sun has long since set. Leon, P’ter, and Matt sit on a restaurant patio to enjoy the cool, albeit damp, evening. Franz has gone home to rest, leaving the three on their own to enjoy the Western-style hamburgers and live music.

The performance is mostly a woman singing into the mic and a man on a synthesizer playing gentle accompaniment. She does mostly country songs, which suits the vibe of the place and the patrons just fine. There are only three others sitting in the corner establishment and one of them, a tall, weathered Canadian gets up and pulls out his harmonica.

“Is he allowed to do that?” P’ter asks.

No one answers as the ballsy patron begins to jam. He’s good, and the authentic tunes he plays blend with the woman’s voice and gentle background from the synthesizer. The music makes scarlet of the red wallpaper and ambiance of the shadows in the corners. It makes the gentle murmurings in the travelers’ chests more nourishing than the food on the table. It goes on forever, yet lasts only a few minutes.

After a song ends and the ensuing applause dies down, Leon turns back to his table. “This music, makes me think like home. I do not know why, but I feel this.”

His table agrees. They stay until the encores have been exhausted and they’re drawn away from the restaurant and deeper into the bar district. The Electronic and Pop music that echoes down the alleys toward them isn’t quite the same as the performance they’ve just enjoyed, but it’ll suffice.

Several songs and many beers later they’re sitting around a wooden table with some exchange students. These young Westerners are coming from the America and Canada to live in Thailand and study at Chiang Mai University (the other CMU). The group, mostly young women, has generally congregated around Leon and P’ter. The two Germans have a beer in one hand and girls leaning on them and sitting on their laps. P’ter tells stories of his trekking and the parties on Koh Phangan and Leon talks of his diving excursions. The girls are enraptured.

Matt doesn’t care about the girls and is instead having an increasingly frustrating conversation with a young man named Charlie. Charlie is an Anthropology major from The States and has been in Chiang Mai for two months so far, a bit less than a third of his exchange semester. The young student pushes his circular, thick-rimmed glasses back up the bridge of his slippery nose. The humidity has barely noticed that the sun had gone down hours ago, giving everyone a just-showered sheen (though the smell would dispel that misconception rather quickly).

“So is that what you’re doing out here?” Charlie says, handling the recently-folded twenty-baht terrier. “Origami and backpacking?”

Matt winces at how nonchalantly Charlie is squishing the bill. “Well like I said, I’m also writing a blog, chronicling my travels in third-person, practicing my writing while I entertain my family and friends. That kind of thing.”

“Yeah, cool,” Charlie nods absentmindedly and tosses the animal onto the nearby table. He brushes some of his long, stringy hair out of his face and turns to the young woman sitting next to him.

“Ooooo!” Kate, Charlie’s lady-friend, squeals and scoops up the dog, ignoring his touch. “So cute! Did you make this?”

Matt basks as she comes over to bestow him with a sweaty hug.

Charlie’s demeanor darkens. “Your writing, man, you know you just can’t capture this area of the world with words.”

“Right on, but that’s not what I’m trying to do. It’s more of a third person narrative of my travels, the people I meet, the situations–”

“Yea, but so many people, over so many years have tried to define this,” Charlie spreads his arms a la Sound of Music, “and none of them could do it.”

“I get it, but I’m not doing that. I’m just writing a story, a collection of stories of me and other people–”

“Because this,” Charlie isn’t listening, “all of this around us? It’s bigger than us, man. No person, no human could encompass all of this. You know? All of this and the hundreds and thousands of years of culture, you can’t just define that.” Charlie goes on and on about the grandeur and ineffability of Thailand, ignoring his audience’s clenched fist.

Eventually, Charlie is done.

“You know,” Matt says, standing up and waving goodbye to the Germans through the throng of laughing girls, “you should really just read it.”

“Sure, man, but I dunno if it’s possible to really get this experience, you know?”

“Fucking hipster,” Matt mutters to himself on his solitary walk from the bars back to his hostel.

The streets are empty and silent save for the gentle dripping of gutters and the odd punctuation of a revved motorbike down a side-street.

The young man walks down the alley, his words barely audible, “…fucking stupid glasses…” He leans on a rain slick gate to steady himself and get his bearings.

A growling and barking issue forth from the shadows up the alley. A black and mangy dog of indeterminate breed stalks into the light, ears flat against its head. Matt doesn’t know much about dogs, but this one seems pissed. And with no tags, no collar, and no one else around, this dog is looking pretty ferocious.

The young man gives zero fucks. “Rahhhh! Graahhhhh! Blagah-blagah-blagaaaah!!” he starts barking back as if the animal was wearing a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. He waves his hands, gnashes his teeth, and starts towards the beast.

The dog barks back, but soon cowers and retreats back into the shadows. Matt goes on shouting only long enough to ensure he’s in the clear and continues on his circuitous path home.

He has to wake up early in the morning. Tomorrow the train takes him back to Bangkok.

A street vendor cutting up some durian fruit, one of the supposedly smelliest fruits in the world. It tasted just fine, kind of like a banana