If You Do Not Change Direction, You May End Up Where You Are Heading*

I have a good sense of direction. It runs in the family so I take it for granted and am sometimes taken aback when I tell someone I’ll meet them on the southwest corner and they say, “Huh?”

Therefore it was with some surprise and anxiety that I berated myself when I got lost in Thailand once. This was in a small town in the north called Chiang Rai. I had arrived in the evening with my driver (long story and not as glamorous as it sounds) and we’d got our rooms in a cheap hotel with ugly, peeling paint and no amenities (see?), although I take that back as I believe the toilet was of the sitting rather than squatting variety. Not that I particularly minded the latter, but that isn’t really relevant here. What is relevant is that after settling in my driver pointed me in the direction of the night market, which was apparently where to go. My travel journals are more or less in cold storage or I would do better justice to the details of this story but it’s been seven years and the water keeps flowing, so to speak. (That is not a toilet reference, apt as it may be. I am not really about toilet humor although, it happens. So to speak.)

Where was I? Ah, heading out to find the action of an evening in Chiang Rai. I strolled along, taking note of the street the hotel was on and the temple on the corner, and soon found myself at the market. Based on internet pictures I've seen, I'm thinking this was an off night, or too early perhaps. Or too late perhaps, what do I know? Come to think of it, maybe I was in the wrong place altogether. It certainly wasn’t what I had expected, being not very hopping and yet something of a tourist-oriented spot at the same time. Not that there were many tourists – of the plume-feathered Western-variety at any rate – but you could still tell that the food on offer and the “events” were geared toward such visitors. I had a bite to eat anyway (I'm sure my journal would tell us exactly what that was) then wandered off to find the "real" Chiang Rai. I don’t know that there’s much to see there; we were en route to or from the Golden Triangle, I can’t remember; but most towns in a country you’ve never been to before are interesting to walk through, and it’s always nice to strike up conversations of the part-your-language-part-my-language-part-flailing hands variety. (Although to be honest, the shy smile was often my best attempt on that trip. I did whip out the bubbles in a couple of small villages, which made me an insta-attraction to small children.)

Meanwhile, I walked and I walked, it being yet another pleasant February evening in Thailand, and I stumbled upon the real market, the one chock full of locals and unidentifiable vegetables. Delighted (mostly with myself, no doubt, for achieving the discovery) I wandered through, self-consciously smiling at everyone I passed because, indeed, they all stared at me, being the only farang in the ‘hood. It’s funny, by the by: in such places, when you meet another fish out of water just like yourself, you either greet each other ecstatically, immediately share your hard-earned info on, say, the best-kept secret guest house in Bangkok, learn that your maternal grandfathers were both Irish, and mayhap end up traveling together for six weeks – or, you immediately pretend you don’t notice each other or, you did but hey, we’re all just people here and anyway you’re messing with the tableau, dude.

Where was I? Well, the walk being the point. It was fully dark by now but I was enjoying the air and the quiet, low-key atmosphere after the relative bustle of Chiang Mai, so I kept on, knowing perfectly well where I was in relation to my lodgings. When it finally became time to turn around, lest I walk all the way to the wilds of Burma in my enthusiasm, I chose a parallel street for a new view and I walked just as heartily in the other direction. And I walked. And I walked. And long after it seemed that things should start getting familiarish, they didn’t. Huh, I thought. But I kept on walking, certain that something would soon make sense. Slowly, new thoughts began to form. Thoughts like: Hmm, I guess I should have written down the hotel name on a little slip of paper or a matchbook or anything really and stuck it in my pocket. And: Gosh, I guess my little book with all the phone numbers of my local contacts on it are back in my room, isn’t it? Just little niggling things like that. Finally I thought, ah ha! The temple! Just look for the temple. Well, if you’re not already laughing to death, let me explain. At this point I had only been in Thailand ten days or so. A few months later, hot and tired and dusty as I was, I would have recognized the folly in getting my bearings from a temple, because there are only about nine thousand of them in each small to middling sized town. So I found the temple! And then I found it again! And so on. What to do – short of getting a taxi and asking for a drive-by tour of every temple in town?

Well, the moral of this story is not what you might think, i.e. always carry a map or the business card of your hotel with you when you go out for a solo walk in a strange town. It is this: trust your instincts! Because I know I have a good sense of direction; what I apparently don’t have, or didn’t that time, is a sense of how much ground I actually cover. Just when I was on the exhausted, edge of panic verge of dust-streaked tears, I came to a corner and there was the temple. Let me rephrase that: The Temple. And I was home, the end.

The Walk: who knows?

*Lao Tzu, apropos of not much