Pai -- The CouchSurfing Collective

so where did we leave off?

after our first night in pai, skeelow and i decided that we would make the most of our experience there. we decided that we would take our scooters up into the mountains to look for this natural hot spring that visnick told us about.

the trip was pretty crazy. we only had to go about 10 km, but we went through some serious farm country on our way there. all around, there were turnoffs for new age spa type places with promises of massages, hot springs, and rikki, which is some sort of newfangled type of yoga that the peaceniks like. visnick's directions were pretty clear. go past the first turnoff, head towards jim's elephant tours, keep going past the other elephant place, and then go to the second resort place. there, we would find the best hot springs in pai.

the elephant tour places were a trip. first of all, as we approached them, the aroma of elephant shit filled the air. we had to weave and dodge all sorts of dung piles and even almost ran smack dab into a group of tourists on elephants. by the way, we were told to never go on any of these tours because of the way the trainers and guides treat the elephants. they beat them with metal hooks until they submit. we saw some of it firsthand and it was disturbing, to say the least. it was like going to the zoo, but getting to see the behind the scenes version of what happens. elephants are intelligent and they can cry; its distressing to see such a magnificent beast subjected to torture, but thats how they do it in asia.

so after a few wrong turns, we ended up at the place that we thought that visnick was talking about. most of the natural hot springs in pai are very far from being natural in the classical sense. the best ones have huge resorts build around them. these are the places that the rich tourists go with their families. you get to stay in a bungalow right next to the spring, and the spring itself is harnessed into a swimming pool type thing. the place we went to was a little bit smaller than the rest. the lady who worked there also doubled as a massage therapist and herbalist. skeelow and i got there, changed, and soaked our motorcycle wounds in the therapeutic waters.

after soaking for a while, we played some frisbee on their well-manicured lawn and laid out in the scorching sun for a little bit. after a refreshing shower, we decided to head back into town. on our way there, we happened to pass another place that visnick had mentioned: fluid.

fluid is one of the weirder places in pai. first of all, its not much more than a gigantic, olympic sized swimming pool surrounded by some grass. inside the main place, there was a gym where you could work out and a place where the dudes who work there do natural bamboo tattooing. all of the people there had tats all over. most of the patrons had these new tats as well. people really get into the tat thing when theyre in a place like that. it costs the equivalent of about 3 dollars to use the facilities all day. when we got there, it was already an hour to closing and we weren't sure if we should shell out the money.

i asked the dude if i could walk the grounds a bit to get a feel for the place. one thing i should mention before i get into this is what visnick told us about fluid. he told us that if we wanted to meet hot chicks, fluid was the place to go. before going in, we actually peered through the fence to confirm that there were, indeed, hot chicks present. (there were.)

so as i was wandering around the pool, i noticed that a bunch of the people there were american. it had been a long time since skeelow and i had encountered americans at all. these appeared to be quite friendly and they all seemed to be together in some sort of group. one of the dudes complimented me on my tee shirt and we got to talking. he was from san francisco. that was enough for skeelow and i to decide to shell out the 3 bucks.

this is when the story gets weird. so skeelow and i break out our frisbee, which had been given to him by some guy named frank who had surfed on his couch in sedona. up until that point, that was the only thing i knew about couchsurfing.com. what it is is a website where you build a profile with pictures and descriptions of yourself, your philosophies, and your travels. through that profile, you can add friends and look at other people's profiles. the creed of the website is that as long as you have a couch available to be surfed on, you can go almost anywhere in the world and surf on someone else's couch. i know it sounds weird, but its a brilliant idea. so, say i have a place in san diego and someone from australia or something wants to come visit sea world, but doesnt know anyone and doesnt want to spend an arm and a leg on a hotel. that person sends me a message via the website and i can peruse his profile to decide if he is a good candidate to surf on my couch. i dont know how skeelow heard about the site, but that canadian guy frank contacted him through couchsurfing and skeelow left him his key. frank stayed for a couple of days, partied with skeelows homies, and gave him his frisbee as a token of his gratitude. thats how it works.

so, back to fluid. skeelow and i were throwing bombs to each other over the pool and chatting it up with our new american friends when one of them asked us if we were couchsurfers. i was utterly confused. i thought that maybe they had seen the logo on frank's frisbee (which was this innocuous canadian flag/eye symbol thing) and that was a sign to them that we were couchsurfers. i really didnt know. skeelow was likewise confused, but quickly told the frank story. we didnt really get a good response from them; we still werent sure who the fuck they were and why they thought we were of all things couchsurfers.

after getting in the water and joshing around with them some more, we were very surprised to discover that these people were, in fact, the founders and higher ups of the couchsurfing community. every six months, they choose a new place in the world to go and set up these "collectives", which are these kind of summer camp like things where avid couchsurfers volunteer 4 months of their time to help run the website. in return, they get free housing, food, fun, and the opportunity to live in an exotic locale with other couchsurfers. not a bad deal, if you can swing it. skeelow and i had just happened upon them as they were taking a group outing to the pool.

the couchsurfers were very nice to us. they invited us to come have dinner with them and party afterwards. skeelow and i could not have been happier to have met them. the collective consisted of people from all over the world and all walks of life. the main founder's name is casey. he is pretty much the man. he got the idea for the website and pushed and pushed for it. when money was tight, he contributed his own funds. when morale was low, he never got down. if you go to the couchsurfing website, you can read all about it. we met solani from india, weston from mexico, doogie from belgium, jelena from switzerland, and various others. there was even this older chick named virginia who had been a member of a german cult that featured blood orgies and group sex pecking orders. (she told us all about it over dinner that night. she also told us that she was working at some education center in chile or peru and had just traveled for about 48 hours just to get to pai so she could contribute to the collective. what a trooper.) we met shelley, who was only 21 and was in charge of doling out all of the money for the collective. we met hillary, a totally rad chick from northern cali whose job we cant talk about in this space. we met charish from australia, alice from san diego and various assorted other people. im telling you, it was kind of like a hippie commune with all sorts of people of all ages, creeds, etc -- but they were all working for the same cause and it was kind of beautiful altogether. i get kinda misty thinking about it now. the most important thing was that casey just happened to be turning 30 that night and we were invited along for the ride.

we ate dinner at this place that served some pretty authentic italian food. we had all different kinds of pizza and pasta and bread all on the couchsurfing dime. the place was owned by this thai guy who had spent some time learning the trade in italy and had brought his skills back to the homeland. he was extremely stringent in his ways and techniques and apparently was kind of the pizza nazi in those parts, very averse to any sort of criticism of his operation. after some initial awkwardness with the collective members, mainly consisting of the sort of "who the fuck are these guys?" looks we all know so well, we were readily accepted into the community. in fact, a number of the people who were not at fluid and had shown up for the pizza party actually thought that we were new volunteers who were there to help them out -- like virginia.

i should also mention that the collective was a fluid sort of place, no pun intended. there was a core group of people who were there the entire 4 months, but the rest of the community was made up of "part-timers", who came and went on a weekly or monthly basis. its funny, we found out later that they all live in this big house that they had rented in advance and ate their meals primarily in their office space. which was situated in a pretty sweet building/bungalow thing under the largest mango tree in thailand. all of the collective members had various chores and responsibilities laid out for them in minute detail. the part-timers, as it turns out, had the shittiest chores, like cleaning up after dinner and doing craftsy projects that were designed to make them feel more a part of the community. most of the people in the collective initially believed us to be new part-timers who had just arrived and had just happened to learn that they were out at fluid for an outing and had shown up because we really wanted to help. i guess that's why they were so friendly and inviting to us.

over dinner, we heard about a lot of the collective's exploits over the previous 3 months in pai. the place is so small that a large community of people all hanging out together was quite a conspicuous sight. almost all of them had been to almost every place in pai, so skeelow and i got some more tips on the places that we could go to have a good time. more immediately though, they told us that the collective was at a weird point because most of the founders were leaving for a week or so. casey, the head honcho, as i have mentioned before, was celebrating his 30th birthday that night. after the party, he would be headed to angkor wat first and to the jungles of thailand later to participate in the gibbon project, an ecotourism event where people pay a lot of money for the opportunity to view and interact with gibbons in their natural habitat. all of the money goes towards preserving their ecosystem and saving gibbons. it sounded like a blast, but skeelow and i couldnt afford it.

back to the birthday party: so after dinner, they invited us back to their diggs for some drinks. originally, they were planning on having some sort of bonfire celebration, but after a few calls and head scratching, they decided on the less ambitious plan of hanging out at the house, drinking, and then using the outdoor adobe sauna that they had on the grounds. skeelow and i were definitely in for that.

at the house, we got to take a look at their living environment. it was pretty much as we expected: 2 to a room and no hooking up. all of the people seemed to genuinely care about each other and were all pretty affectionate with each other, especially after boozing for awhile. after getting to know some more of the people who weren't at dinner and getting a little bit wasted on their booze, we felt right at home. then, they fired up the sauna.

the sauna is this big clay adobe looking thing that had a natural wood stove in the back where you feed wood for the fire. the fire, in turn, heats the adobe up to an incredible temperature. next to the sauna was a splash pool filled with cold water where you go to freshen up after sweating your balls off in the sauna. so skeelow and i borrowed some towels from the collective, stripped down, and headed in.

most of the members of the collective were hippie-ish, so they were very at peace with being naked around others. actually, to be more specific, most of the girls were pretty ok with being naked in front of strangers. i think skeelow and i were lucky in that most of the people in the community had been together for about 3 months and were very comfortable with each other. in any case, we saw a lot of beaver and even more tofu in our time in the sauna. it was a great experience because we never saw it coming.

after cooling off in the splash pool and going back in for more torture several more times, everyone decided that they had had enough so we continued drinking outside in towels and ended up getting pretty tipsy. casey seemed very happy that we were there and we wasted no time in complimenting him on what he as accomplished. he gave us heterosexual man hugs and told us that we could hang out as long as we liked. skeelow had read an article about him in some travel magazine, so he was especially enamored.

after some more drinking and schmoozing, we decided to call it a night. we jumped on our scooters and returned to the very romantic sun hut to retire for the evening. by the way, i cant think of many things cooler than bombing down an empty stretch of road, not knowing exactly where you're going, blitzed out of your mind. i kind of felt like james dean. lets just say that i really opened her up on the way back to the hotel.

we ended up getting back pretty late and discovered that these giant ants came out at night. they crawled right up out of the sink and were all around the bathroom. in the morning, they were all gone. there was also some sort of wild animal that kept making ridiculous noises just outside of our hut. if we were girls, we would have probably been a bit freaked out about it.

for the next week, shelley kept inviting us over to hang out with the collective. the place they were staying was this house owned by this guy named dave who was an expat from the US. in fact, he was from somewhere in western massachusetts, but hadnt been back in the states in like 15 years. it was weird talking to him because he had come to thailand, pulled a thai wife, and had had a kid with her. her name was wahlin. the house was named in her honor: wahlin house. if you guys ever get a chance to go out there, hit up dave at the wahlin house. you wont be disappointed. there are musical instruments all over the place and, of course, there is a sauna.

dave spent most of his time next door at this bagel bakery that he owned next door. for a while, every morning, i would go into his bagel place, order a coffee and a bagel with cream cheese, and watch cnn international or something like that with dave. dave is of the opinion that our government is out to get us in some way. he is also a big subscriber to the theory that the government was behind the events of 9/11. he even insisted that we watch the newest "loose change" video on the subject. (if you havent seen any of those documentaries, check them out. they'll blow your mind. the latest one is really tightened up and has lots and lots of convincing footage and commentary from higher up officials and experts. you may never look at 9/11 the same again. and to me, thats probably a good thing.) dave's bagels, coffee, and muffins were tremendous, by the way: fresh, homemade, and delicious.

next door to daves bagel place was this store owned by this other american expat named willow. he was almost 80 years old and had been in thailand for some time. willow's wife was a good 50 years younger than him and was part of the ahka tribe, one of the many mountain tribes of that region. i dont know how the hell willow pulled her, but she would spend most of her time making traditional ahka clothing and wares and willow would sell them from his storefront. we never got a chance to meet his wife because she was back with her people doing something or the other.

willow was a hell of an interesting guy. he grew up in some shitty place, moved to san francisco as a young man, got super into speed and somehow gutted his way through medical school with an 11th grade education. he got super into LSD and other sorts of hallucinogens because he was there during the heart of the hippie movement in the 60's. after graduating from medical school, he apparently kicked his meth habit and started getting really into marijuana cultivation. in fact, he was so fascinated by the whole thing that he quit whatever he was doing, presumably medicine, and moved out to the hindu kush mountains in pakistan to learn how to make the highest grade hash. he also picked up some farming tips out there and now has a permafarm somewhere in the hills behind his property. i cant remember when or how he got to thailand, but it was well after he had been doing whatever he was doing in pakistan and india. he was in pretty good shape for his age given his drug history and he really enjoyed shooting the shit with me whenever i came by. in fact, most of the time, willow sat outside of the store and read cheap science fiction novels. crazy motherfucker, right?

the collective had all of their meals either at restaurants or, more frequently, in their workplace. every day, a caterer would make a ton of food -- enough for 30+ people -- and lay it out in big trays, buffet style. because so many people were gone that week, shelley told us that it would be perfectly ok for skye and i to have our meals with them. so almost every day for a week, skeelow and i had our meals paid for. they even started inviting us out on their group excursions. we went to another set of natural hot springs, did more sauna, went out at night with them, and ate their food. in return, all we had to do was be cool and sometimes clean up a little. not a bad deal.



[editor's note: due to a cease and desist notice from the CS upper brass, this post has been edited to better serve everyone's needs. while i'm flattered that anyone at all is still reading this blog, and am duly impressed that i received word of my infraction less than 24 hours after this post was written, i would have to say that those people who are truly concerned that the content of this post would be damaging in any way should step back, take a deep breath, look in the mirror, and decide if this is really something that is worth devoting time and energy to. to all of my other readers, i apologize for not being able to give you a consistent account of skeelow and my travels. hopefully, this allays everyone's fears. to quote the notice: 'as we all know, these things can take on a life of their own.' if you guys want to get the real story, let me know.]



after way overstaying our welcome, skeelow and i decided that we had to move on with our journey. we had places to go and things to see. pai could not have worked out better for us: we made some cool new friends, got to experience the couchsurfing collective firsthand, and had most of our fun activities paid for. we couldnt thank the couchsurfing community enough for what they did for us. we actually could have qualified as short-termers except that we did absolutely nothing to advance the website. we were lucky that most of the higher-ups -- the decisionmakers -- liked our style and our company so we were never asked to leave and were always welcomed with open arms.

i want to take a minute to pimp the couchsurfing website. go to couchsurfing.com and set up an account. it takes no time and it allows you check out the situations of people from all over the world who are open-minded and love to travel. i promise that you won't be disappointed.

by the end of the week, the community was going on a rockclimbing excursion back in chiang mai. we were invited, but skeelow and i had to be moving on. after taking a break from the hub bub of the big cities and being unexpectedly accepted into a really cool situation, we were ready to embark on the next part of our journey: lao.





[PS THANKS COUCHSURFERS! if any of you are reading this, you guys were fucking the coolest ever. i want you guys to know that any and all of you can surf on my couch anytime.... if i ever make it back home, that is.]