Traveling from Chiang Rai by local buses, we spent the night in a primitive bungalow about 5 miles off the main road at the foot of a steep green mountain that towers about 4000 feet above the valley floor. It is the end of the dry season and extremely hot and humid (and buggy too). Our room has a fan but when the electricity went off it became unbearable in the room at night. There is an impressive Buddhist temple complex not far from our place that we walked to in the late afternoon.
The next day we took two buses to get to the small town of Pai, where we plan to spend a week before heading for Bangkok and flying to Germany. Pai lies in a wide mountain valley at about 2,500 feet elevation; there is a small Muslim community and many foreign tourists here. It is kind of a bohemian place with art, music and crafts for sale and many restaurants have menus in English and cater to Western food tastes. The weather is extremely hot and humid, but we have a nice simple room with air conditioning centrally located yet tucked away down a quiet ally. We have rented a motorbike for a week that we use to take daily excursions into the mountains. Yesterday there was a brief thunderstorm and last night we finally got a good rain (May is the beginning of the Monsoon season), so on my walk/jog this morning, it seemed that plants, trees and rice fields were slightly greener.
On the bus ride up to Pai, I sat across from an aging anarchist named Willow. He is 78 years old but in great condition and we had an interesting conversation. He has lived here for many years and is married to an Aka (hill tribe) woman. They have children and a coffee farm and a store. He was telling me that his wife has no formal education but speaks many languages and that the Aka consider themselves neither Thai nor Burmese, but just Aka. Willow considers our public educational system very oppressive and said it functions to control the kids and condition them to be good worker bees, accept authority and accept an inhumane system. I told him that he was oversimplifying a very complex issue, that to some extent I agreed with his criticisms especially with the "No Child Left Behind" educational policies carried out in the U.S. However, I tried to make the case that public education deserves to be supported because it offers opportunities for disadvantaged kids still could be progressive and promote real democracy; I argued that public education can be an important tool for societal reform and the empowerment of the working class. He gave me a look like I was out of my mind.
Willow also believes that there is absolutely no difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties which is an overstatement although the Democrats are also very connected to big business, particularly finance, insurance, real estate and technology interests. I finally told him that nobody has a monopoly on the truth, which is very complex, and that both our views might have validity to a certain extent depending on how you are looking at it.
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