row, row, row your boat

After a week hanging out in northern Thailand, a group of ten of us decided it was time to move.

Destination: Luang Prabang, Laos.
Method of travel: overnight bus to the border, followed by a slow boat ride down the Mekong.

I had heard a lot about these 'slow boat' adventures. But nothing anyone had said really prepared me for the experience.

It was quite possibly one of the wierdest things I've ever been a part of.

After crossing the border at 8 a.m. and figuring out our visas, about 80 people were piled into a boat approximately 5 meters wide (and I'm being generous), and 30 meters long. Cozy.

Knowing myself, I decided to head to the back of the boat where there was a little outdoor 'deck' (again, I use the term liberally), which could have seated three or four people comfortably.

There were 10 of us back there.

And then the drinking started.
Now we all know I'm never one to shy away from a party, but this particular venue just seemed bizarre to me. Here's a big group of white tourists, crammed onto a boat, pumping music on their portable Ipod speakers, getting ridiculously drunk and ignoring the whole 'point' of the boat trip: viewing the Laotian country side and slowly savouring a new culture.

Those who have taken a slow boat before will know that as you travel down the Mekong, you pass by some incredibly remote villages (hamlets, really) - five or six bamboo huts stuck into the hills, hours and hours from anything that could be considered civilization.

And on a daily basis, hundreds of drunk tourists cruise by these isolated towns, throwing cigarette buts overboard, yelling and screaming, etc. etc. Really culurally sensitive.

All I could think of the entire time is "What must the Lao people in these villages think of us? "


Not to say I didn't enjoy the experience. It was just..different. Interesting, but I wouldn't do it again.

After the slow boat ride I spent three days in Luang Prabang with some of my slow boat buddies, and then a group of us caught an early bus to Vang Vieng, where I am now. Tomorrow we're going tubing....which I am willing to wager will be an experience similar to the slow boat. Minus the boat.



On another note, Laos is freaking gorgeous. Everywhere you look there are these fantastic rolling hills covered in lush tropical vegetation. Occassionally you see an elephant or water buffalo chilling out, and there are some of the most spectacular waterfalls I've ever swam in.

Life is beautiful.

Tidbits

I'm finding it harder and harder to summarize everything that I've been experiencing in a few paragraphs. There's so much happening at all times, and I have so many thoughts and reflections to make...how do I pick and chose what to tell you?

I could tell you about the open water diving course I completed, or the bar run by a pirate ladyboy (seriously a pirate...complete with parrot. it was cool). Or I could try to describe a few of the incredible people I've been hanging out with...and how bizarre it is to say goodybe knowing I will never see most of them again. Or I could tell you about the pollution and lack of education and poverty in Thailand; the fact that most people need a calculator to add 40 + 30, that last night at the bar there were three children under the age of 8 trying to sell me flowers until 3 a.m. (we just picked them up and started dancing with them instead), and that it is impossible to find a garbage can anywhere. I could try to describe the lush tropical beauty of the landscape here, so you could picture the bamboo bungalow that I'm staying in right now (situated on the edge of a little river, surrounded by jungle and rolling hills, and completely smoked in at the momen - the farmers are burning all their fields to fertilize them so there's a heavy layer of haze over everything north of Chiang Mai). I could try to compare the different cities and towns I've visited - the south where everyone sits on the beach drinking beers and watching sunsets, the north where we have amazing coffee and zoom around on scooters in little towns like Pai....

But even if I told you about all those things in detail (which would require a post of epic proportions, so I'll spare you)...it still wouldn't even skim the surface of what I'm living right now.

I think that's pretty amazing.

A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose....

That's what the Buddhists say at least...

Ok. So. How do I summarize my five days of silence and meditation to you all? I guess I should start by saying that yes, I did check out early. And before you all say it, it wasn't because it was too 'hard'. It was more because I felt I had gotten everything I could out of the experience, and there were enough things that I disagreed with that I felt it was time for me to leave before I started resenting being there.

Nuff said.

Now.
How to sum up the experience of sitting in silent meditation for 12 hours a day (out of 17 hours awake), sleeping on a slab of concrete, eating two vegan meals a day (last meal finished at 1 o'clock), and generally being completely isolated from 'life'?

For starters, I discovered that Buddhism is in fact a religion. Not a philosophy. A religion. Any 'philosophy' where there is a revered god (Buddah...who they do revere. They talk about him like a god all the time), where you have 10 'noble' truths (why can't they just be truths, plain and simple?), where you chant in a suspiciously prayer like manner...to me all of this spells religion. Which is fine, but came as a bit of a shock to me.

Then there are the underlying principles of Buddhism. I think in North America we get a very commercialized, glamourized version of what Buddhism is. It's all very trendy and hip and you meditate in your Lulu pants and then go for a fair trade coffee afterwards.

THAT, I could do.

But this was very different. Aside from the obvious lack of lulus and coffee, the entire belief system really took me by surprise.

During our daily Dhamma lectures, the monks and nuns constantly talked about 'clearing your mind, letting go of all your worries and troubles and stresses'. Which led me to wonder: why am here? I don't really feel like I have worries and stresses...c'mon, I'm bumming around the world with zero responsibilites. How stressful can that be? So I began to wonder if maybe this was not the right place for me. What is the point of meditation? If it's just to get rid of stress...well then I might as well check out right away. In adddition, I had a bit of a problem with the idea of 'letting go' being the solution to your troubles. If you have a problem, in my mind it makes sense to think it through and figure out how to deal with it. If you just 'let go' of the troubled thoughts, well that's not really going to solve theproblem, just delay it...right?

So on the fourth day, I was able to spend half an hour speaking to one of the monks. It was very...enriching. Basically I asked him what the point of all this is. And his response was that in order for someone to achieve total harmony and balance in life, you need to accept that a flower is just a flower, a sunset is just a sunset, a teddy bear is just a teddy bear. When you sigh over the flower, or your heart flutters at the sunset or you hug your teddy - these are all our ways of projecting our own dukkah (roughly translated as 'baggage') onto the external world. If you can accept that the flower is really just a flower, nothing more, then your life becomes simpler. You become more at peace, you're able to clear your mind...and that puts you on the path to enlightenment.

Which is all fine in theory.

Except that to me, that sounds an awful lot like skipping out on the process of LIVING life. To me, the whole point of being here is to enjoy things. If a sunset is beautiful, well then I'm going to sigh over it! I love to FEEL life, really love it and live it to it's fullest....and this whole Buddhist philiosophy to me doesn't seem to match that.

I said this to the monk, whose response to me was "well the Buddhists would say that you have a lot of dukkah if that's what you need". If I need to live the 'hollywood' life, as he called it, then there's obviously something missing inside. If I need to turn to the external world for satisfaction, then I'm not in balance, not achieving anything close to enlightment.

Maybe so. But I think I'll run the risk of missing enlightenment if it means I get to laugh a lot.