As my flight was making its final approach toward Chiang Mai two weeks ago, I noticed a strange object out the window. An unidentified flying object, as it were.
It was a small cube, flying through the air at least as fast as an airplane would, moving forward in space without much up-down undulation. There was no obvious propulsion device, nor was there exhaust or light of any kind. Just a box zooming thousands of feet above the jungles of Thailand’s north.
I thought about this sci-fi scene hours later on the ground within the Old City Walls, as I locked eyes with a fruit seller with a sharp knife in his hand. His face was as leathered as his hands, which he didn’t guard in any way as he diced up an entire papaya, then used the side of the blade to tip the cubes into a plastic bag, all in a matter of seconds.
He had no customers; he was doing this, seemingly, as a means of preparation. What’s funny is that had I been hungry, I almost certainly would’ve selected ma-la-goh; the particular glint in his eye suggested he knew this.
Maybe he was the one piloting the box, I thought, the one calling all the shots.
I was headed toward Wat Phan Tao, which some quick internet research a few days earlier had told me would be the most picturesque launch point for lanterns during that night’s Yi Peng Festival.
The air was cool by Thai standards, which almost called to mind the Indian summer walk I’d had with my sister and her dogs the day before I left on this trip.
It was the second Friday in October; I had been in Bhutan, Tibet and mainland China since then. The autumn I realized I would miss that evening, at which point the trees had only barely changed color, had now completely passed.
I can’t sugar-coat this: My first day back in Chiang Mai in almost three years disappointed me. I learned, just moments before nightfall, that the Wat Phan Tao Yi Peng celebration had been canceled “due to covid” (from a monk who, quite bizarrely in post-pandemic Thailand, was not wearing a mask).
Even worse than that, the entire rest of the city descended into mayhem due to the other lantern celebration, Loy Krathong.
Loy Krathong, of course, had been the entire reason I decided to schedule my Mae Hong Son Loop road trip (which I’d originally planned to take in February) for November; it’s the reason I was in Chiang Mai at this time at all.
I ended up the evening anxious on the banks of the Ping River, which were almost too crowded for me to get any decent pictures, never mind the fact that local children were launching fireworks so carelessly that they might as well have been aiming at onlookers, rather than “accidentally” almost hitting them.
This is to say nothing of the foreign tourists who were there, who (as is always the case in Chiang Mai) are the very worst sorts of Western tourists.
You know, the sorts who visit the most cliché destinations and do the most typical things there, but claim with conviction that they’ve gone “off the beaten path,” usually because of some kind of attitudinal shift (or, at least here, a wardrobe change, usually in the form of elephant pants).
Making my way away from the river and taking the southern route—in other words, via the seedy Chiang Mai Night Bazaar—back to my quiet guest house near Wat Phra Singh, I realized that I should think more magnanimous thoughts, my outward silence notwithstanding.
I did, after all, run one of the largest independent Thailand travel blogs. At least a few of the people I looked upon with such contempt as I walked had probably recognized me.
Just then, a gaze in the distance pulled me out of my head. It was the box-pilot fruit seller who, to my surprise, was still working hard hours past sunset, albeit several blocks away from where he’d been earlier.
To my surprise he had a bag of papaya ready to go for me when I ordered it; I crossed my fingers that it wasn’t the one he had cut up at lunchtime.
In spite of having walked nearly 30,000 steps without a break, after being on the road for almost six weeks without a break, I spent my first night in Chiang Mai restless. I tossed and turned beneath my comforter, which too severely counteracted the frigid air conditioning pumping through the room.
Then, there were the hallucinations. I felt bugs crawling all over me, but every time I pulled down the blanket and used my flashlight to inspect the innards of the bed, failed to spot a single ant, spider or flea.
At some point I passed out completely, waking only when my alarm shrieked at me a few short hours later at 5. To my shock, I looked down in the shower to see two legs completely covered in bite marks.
In advance of my planned sojourn to a lake just outside the city where Yi Peng had definitely not be canceled, I decided to do some daytime exploring. Namely at Wat Sri Suphan, a temple built from jagged shards of metal, located just south of the Old City Walls in a neighborhood no one would otherwise have any reason to visit.
As I made my way down the final stretch of the 20-minute walk, a monk approached me with a small notecard written in English. “Take a picture of this meditation,” it commanded. “Doing it every day will bring you peace.”
It reminded me of the clandestine message the medical assistant had conveyed to Demi Moore’s character in The Substance, seemingly under the guise of helping her, but ultimately sealing her doom. I didn’t delete the photo; I also never looked at it again.
Of course, my consciousness had long ago undergone an Elizabeth-Sue split, even if it wasn’t a matter of youth versus agedness. I’ve written about this in other essays (namely this one), but I truly believe that my “travel self” is a distinctly different human being than I am when I’m at home.
And I don’t mean in a DID sense—I truly think an alternate version of my software boots up inside my increasingly weathered hardware the moment I landed on some far away shore.
Which is not to say there isn’t some bleed. For example, the tendency of “Home Robert” to want to shirk progress in the name of comfort sometimes bubbles up when I travel.
To be sure, as I headed back into the old city after spending some time inside Wat Sri Suphan (where only men are allowed—I was one of just two there the entire time), I fantasized about pulling the plug on my evening excursion.
Although I obviously wanted to see the floating lanterns with my own eyes—and, more importantly, to capture the spectacle—the idea of vegging out and sleeping early seemed so much more appealing at this point in my trip.
In that moment, Home Robert had almost fully re-emerged, seemingly ready to do anything to avoid sinking beneath the subconscious again, not unlike how Sue had literally stolen Elizabeth’s spinal fluid in order to have another couple of days in the sun.
But I—Travel Robert, this is—made it to the lake. As has been the case many times throughout this trip, whether we’re talking about canceling Bhutan or coming home from Beijing early, my self-harm fantasies never so much as make it into spoken words, let alone actions.
At the same time, it’s also true that while I watched lanterns launch into the sky for almost two hours, I wasn’t particularly present in the moment.
No, I was just outside it, which is the only perspective from which you can really document sometime. I wasn’t living in it; I was creating a proxy version of it that a future version of myself could inhabit when he one day can’t or won’t seek out these sorts of experiences.
My bites were itching as I entered back into my room, where yet another inspection beneath my sheets revealed a total lack of creepy crawlies.
What I did come upon was a person who lived in the house next door playing the intro to George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” on alto sax, over and over again. This was serendipitous—the song was #1 the day I was born—but also annoying. I combed through my bag for the card the monk had given me.
Had I returned to Bangkok the next morning, as Home Robert wanted to do, I probably would’ve still felt triumphant. I’d capped off a fulfilling 60 hours in the northern capital with a celebratory stroll down the Chiang Mai walking street, where a perfect sunset had given an almost cinematic feeling to my long weekend.
The thought of doing so had instilled a profound sense of peace in me, like the way my father had been at his birthday dinner just days before I left on my trip—the same night, in fact, that my sister and I had walked her dogs.
Dad generally seems pretty young for his age (68, as of this last birthday) but it dawned on me that when he behaves as if he is content, or simply presents himself in a kind way, he comes across as older, he seems more frail.
The same, I realized thinking deeper, was also true for Parker, the older (and my favorite) of my sister’s two dogs. At his canine middle age—he’s halfway between six and seven—he spends his walks not pulling me around the neighborhood as he used to, but slowly sniffing every square inch of grass, seemingly without an end goal.
I’ll be there one day, I thought, as I inched trepidatiously toward the rental car office just outside the Old City Walls. But today is not that day.
Some say that one key to staying young is doing at least one thing a year that scares you. I, of course, seem to do one thing a day that scares me (especially when I’m on the road); today it was driving in Thailand for the first time.
But unlike the dozens of other foreigners who set off on the Mae Hong Son Loop every day—it doesn’t sound as “scary” when I frame it that I way—I was in a Honda City, and not on a death-trap motorbike.
My first stop was Pai, a town I’ve always misremembered myself as having visited over a decade ago, but where I’d actually never been until November of 2024. My first impression (which was almost indistinguishable from my last impression; I only stayed 12 hours) was that it aligned exactly with what I expected.
I was hungry, you see, walking toward the town’s Big Buddha (which should’ve been my first red flag—the worst places in Thailand always have Big Buddhas), and stopped into an eatery whose name (Earth Tone) sounded like it could’ve been open in Austin when I first moved there in 2006.
Unsurprisingly, the open-air restaurant was full of barefoot, patchouli smelling white people, who convey via the cadence of their speech as much as the foods they ate and the beverages they chose to wash it down, that they were changing the world.
As had been the case in the Texas capital just past the turn of the century, the flower children calling Pai home for the night (or for the week) sought not so much to settle into the rhythm of their temporary domicile, but instead to contort their image and disposition into what they thought the place demanded of outsiders.
It was an approach I myself had been guilty of during my early days as an Austinite, but jettisoned not long into my life as a world traveler. Effective, sustainable traveling is about showing up as close to the same version of yourself in every place you visit, and not letting places change or even absorb you.
I realize that on the surface, of course, this seems hypocritical: I’ve stated that I feel like an entirely separate person when I travel. The distinction, for me, is that Travel Robert is more or less the same whether in Thailand or Tanzania, whether in Pai or Portland. I change because of the journey, not because of any particular destination.
It’s not entire dissimilar from how Parker is when he falls into sniffing. He puts his nose to the ground to gain information, not necessarily to follow it anywhere.
Having had enough of Pai’s town center after a single stroll along its main streets, I redirected my attention to the chartreuse rice field near my “resort,” which fell far short of living up to that moniker.
I walked down the hill into the field to snap some pictures, though I quickly regretted this. Fire ants began nibbling at my ankles almost immediately, and not in the subtle way the normal ants in my Chiang Mai bed had done.
Returning to my bungalow, my legs still burning and swollen, I noticed an emaciated tabby cat begging to enter—it actually came inside briefly when I unlocked the door. I forced it out unceremoniously; to my surprise, it did not make even a single protest meow.
Certainly, I rationalized, hours later in bed, still restless. One of Pai’s bigger-hearted foreign residents must’ve opened their door to her.
I left town the next morning as early as I possibly could. On the way out, a child who couldn’t have been older than 10 sped past me on a motorbike. He was smoking a cigarette and going significantly faster than the speed limit; I wondered how Pai’s transient citizenry would try to make sense of such a spectacle.
Or, rather I didn’t: I was eager to leave, and (at least for the moment) to put the short time I’d spent in Pai out of my mind.
Initially, my surroundings seemed to justify this course of action. Seas of clouds hovered over the valleys visible on either side of Doi Kiew Lum viewpoint, forming scenes of complex beauty that made me feel less regretful for having chosen to skip both Pai Canyon and Tham Lot Cave.
However, as I headed westward and then due northward to Ban Rak Tai, a highly reputed village that straddles Thailand’s border with Myanmar, it seemed like I might’ve made too rose-colored a pre-judgment.
The natural world sent me the first signal toward this end. In contrast to the rice field next to my “resort” in Pai, most of the ones I passed on the way to north (and then back south toward Mae Hong Son town) were brown and parched, as if they hadn’t been completely underwater just weeks ago.
Then there was Ban Rak Thai itself, which in spite of sitting less than a mile from Burmese territory had been contrived as a sort of fake Chinese village, in the cheapest sort of way. It was disappointing after such a long drive, to the extent that I scolded a woman who asked me to take a picture instead of just ignoring her.
“Take off your mask,” I chided her, in a mix of English and Thai. “I refuse to take your picture if you’re going to cover your face with that thing.” She kept it down around her chin; I took a few pictures anyway.
“How do I look?” She asked me completely in English, and in complete obliviousness, before I handed her phone back to her.
I hesitated, then went for it. “You look like a fool. The pandemic ended years ago.”
(Contrary to what foreigners think, the assertion that “masking has always been common in Thailand” is a complete lie, formulated mostly in retrospect to Thailand destroying its reputation as the Land of Smiles in response to a cold.
It’s less painful to pretend that something has always been terrible, than to admit that it used to be wonderful but got destroyed.
The plus side of my bad mood is that it allowed me to blow the fuck past the small amount of lingering anxiety I had over driving in Thailand. Which, in spite of how trepidatious I felt literally days before getting behind the wheel, was not stressful at all.
The road quality is amazing; though they were mostly one lane on each side, it was surprisingly easy for more aggressive drivers like me to pass slower ones, who mostly drove onto the shoulder when they could sense that someone wanted to overtake them.
Then there was Mae Hong Son town itself which, in many ways, is like the upside-down version of Pai. In retrospect, I wish I’d budgeted more nights there.
Locals seemed to outnumber tourists at least five (and maybe 10) to one; whether in the Burmese-style temples or the cuisine served in most restaurants by refugees from Myanmar’s Shan State, the character of the place was distinct, not to mention impervious to perversion by the vanity of visitors.
And there had been some vain visitors. Checking into my resort, a forest-nestled idyll that was everything I wished my place in Pai had been, a picture of the receptionist with mid-2000s Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt sat atop a tablecloth that matched the flowered shirt I had on.
I actually chatted for a relatively long time with the now 50-something woman, in a mixture of English and Thai, and was surprised that she didn’t mention the encounter once. She let the picture speak for itself.
Certainly, she had no idea that I myself was a Niche Internet Micro Celebrity or Nimcel, not to be confused with incel.
Nor did I bother telling her. I wasn’t as rich as Brangelina had been when they were together; I also had nothing to gain by outing myself as someone whose opinion might matter. I didn’t want to be catered to; I didn’t want to owe anything beyond the money I paid and the time I made myself available.
Seeing a younger version of Angelina had reminded me that I wanted to see her in Maria as soon as possible, though the thought of doing so brought up its own emotions.
Would I one day be a has-been eccentric living out what I didn’t know was the final chapter of my life in a city that should’ve instead served as the backdrop for my climax?
I left Mae Hong Son about as early as I’d left Pai the previous day, though certainly not with the same joie de partir.
And yet almost immediately after driving out of town, a medium-sized Buddha hovering high over the twisty road served as an early sign that I had made the right decision, even if attempting to photograph it in context proved slightly more disappointing once I got out my car than it had from the driver’s seat.
Poinsettia trees shaded either side of the misty scene, calling to mind the Nepalese city of Pokhara, which thus far is the only other time I’ve seen the plants not in pots. Today, of course, I was bound for sunflower fields.
Well, not sunflowers in the sense that an American or European might know them; the ones that were said to cover a hillside about halfway along the road between Mae Hong Son and Mae Sariang (my next destination) were probably more similar to what we’d call Brown-eyed Susans or even yellow daisies.
This—the fact that the “sunflowers” were not really sunflowers—was not what surprised me when I finally got there.
No, the shock had come in the fact that the field (which really was on a hillside—it was mostly too steep to walk through) was more or less open to the public, who could park along the road and wander to their heart’s content. It hadn’t been monetized or commoditized or even regulated; it was just there.
This was a fitting preview for Mae Sariang itself—which, on one hand, was disappointing. Here, I’d experienced neither the strange (albeit decades-removed) familiarity of Pai, nor the genuine hospitality of Mae Hong Son.
People in Mae Sariang seemed cold, not out of spite, but because they had their own lives to live. The presence of tourists like me was simply a means to an end.
After a greasy, fire-hot lunch of pad grapao moo grob, I spent the afternoon searching for the perfect vantage point for sunset. It came as no surprise than in a place like Mae Sariang (a tourist town that was not touristic) no consensus existed on this.
I started at a white pagoda on what appeared to be the town’s highest hillside, but ended up making my way toward a sparkling golden stupa in a more unassuming spot.
It ended up being a sweet one. Not just because the sky the setting sun left in its wake was the most colorful one I’d seen on my entire trip, but because the satisfaction I felt as I snapped pictures allowed me to accept a simple truth: Mae Sariang was what I wished the entire Mae Hong Son Loop had been like.
Which is fitting, in a way: Only by completing almost the entire loop could I receive the gift of understanding its essence.
Driving back into town as the last light faded from the day, the sad side of this truth dawned on me. I’d spent much of my road trip somewhere between light anxiety and utter dread, Home Robert imploring me to cancel, and even Travel Robert more cynical than sanguine.
The next morning, having walked to 7-Eleven in search of coffee only to find that this particular location didn’t have a machine, I spotted a flock of monks walking around town barefoot begging for food.
Had I been in a place with more than a dozen foreign tourists, I might’ve concluded that this was some sort of put-on alms ceremony, like the one that takes place each morning in Luang Prabang, Laos.
But no, it was just me, and the surprisingly few locals who were even awake, let alone willing to give anything to the mysterious orange robes floating through the barely lit streets. I had neither my camera nor even my phone; I actually did rush up to my room to grab the former.
They weren’t moving very fast, I told myself. And the town isn’t very big. You will definitely be able to find them again, especially if you come back down quickly.
A matter of seconds was all it ended up taking, but they were already gone.
To end this particular Thailand trip on a high note, I planned a two-in-one day excursion to Koh Larn island and Pattaya. I headed out early; by 10 AM I was already on my way from the island’s pier up to its main viewpoint.
Looking down from the precipice, dozens of speedboats seemed to be circling around the base of a golden Guan Yin statue, which was actually hundreds of feet above them. From this perspective, the reality of Travel Robert’s imminent hibernation hit me like a ton of bricks.
The free, happy reality that now defines my day-to-day would, less than 48 hours from that moment, be nothing more than a memory, a past I long for and a future I plan for.
If I had no other considerations in my life— if I had no semblance of a life beyond this one—then this would be all I’d ever need.
But I do, and I do, so it isn’t.
At several points during the last few days of my trip, in fact, I briefly thought about extending. This, of course, would’ve seemed inconceivable during the days and weeks after I arrived back in Asia, when Home Robert was very much still calling the shots.
He, of course, eventually relented and allowed the version of me that’s writing (it’s Travel Robert, if you’re wondering) to live as I wanted. So I realized that now, I have to step aside. I’ll emerge again soon, but my time is almost up.
At some turns, I have, of course invited this. Such as when I documented the lantern festival with delight, but also couldn’t wait for it to be over. You can love something and enjoy it with every bit of your being, and yet not really be able to bear it.
Remember you are one. This may have been a line from a fictional movie, but it’s also now a hugely important mantra for me in my own life. Or rather, lives.
Indeed, unlike both Elizabeth and Sue, neither of whom could stop exploiting one another long enough to realize the inevitable destruction they were destined for, I have come to an inescapable conclusion: Self-control (and, in some cases, self-suppression) is the key to success, and the antidote to failure.
(Even if success, for me, is that I remain a Nimcel throughout the entirety of my middle age.)
Some days, I need to be kinder like Dad, even if that makes me seem (or become) older and more content; I need to be curious like Parker, even if I cover less ground.
On other days, I can be a box zooming thousands of feet over the jungle, propelled by nothing but my own free will.
(Even if, in reality, some unassuming fruit vendor on the ground somewhere is really the one calling the shots, the slices of his blade through orange papaya flesh a clandestine morse code that makes literal magic happen).
