Universal Camping

This past weekend marked the end of my third week of teaching, so of course all of us English teachers decided to get out of town. On Friday at about 3:00pm, the Sub Director of the school waltzed into the English department office and asked if any of us could stick around to teach on Saturday. Psh, yeah right. Though we were not traveling together, literally every English teacher besides just one was planning to leave town within the next two hours. That one guy got screwed. The rest of us hopped on buses and split town. 

My old friend Chelsea and my new friends Mel, Leah, Mimi and I decided to go camping for the weekend. We took a four hour bus ride to Chiang Mai, slept in a less than comfortable but more than affordable hostel Friday night, and met up with four of Mel & Chelsea’s English teacher friends who teach in Chiang Mai and Lampang on Saturday morning. The group of nine of us headed to the top of the tallest mountain in Thailand to get our foreign camping on. After a few glitches in transportation and some hours of fumbling to find accommodations, we finally found a campground to stay at for the night. Three more girls joined our group (friends of friends of friends), making our grand total for the trip twelve farangs. We rented four tents, twelve sleeping bags, twelve sleeping mats, and got ready for a good time. 

At first glance, camping seems to be pretty universal. The moment we found the campground, I felt like I was at home. Not San Ramon home, but camping home. There was a wooden welcome station, tall pine tree-type trees, a road that wound throughout the campground, less than luxurious bathrooms, and tents everywhere. That was the first difference between American camping and Thai camping, the tents being everywhere. There aren’t really campsites, but rather it’s a fairly flat area spotted with trees and you can put your tents anywhere you want. We made kind of a half-circle village out of our four tents and then set up our mats and a few towels outside to mimic a campfire pit. We couldn’t have an actual campfire because we didn’t have anything to separate the flames from the ground, but this wasn’t a problem because the campground had floodlights on all night. It was like nature illuminated with street lamps. Around our makeshift campfire, we played games and swapped stories and slipped into our own little camping world. Another difference from the kind of camping I’m used to was that this place had a convenience store/shack. This place was a saving grace. We didn’t think ahead enough to plan out food, so we all ate snacks from the shack for dinner Saturday night. You could also rent comforters from the store, which seemed random, but turned out very necessary because it actually got cold up there. I never thought I would get chilly in Thailand, but sure enough I had to pull my sleeping bag up over my head that night to fend off my shivering. That store also had the best morning surprise to complete any camper’s experience: hot chocolate. It was one of the most satisfying cups of cocoa I’ve ever indulged in. At random points during the weekend, we would look at each other and acknowledge, in a bit of awe, that we were actually camping in Thailand. 

After a not so great night of sleep, but an overall fantastic experience, we packed up and returned our rented items. Then another adventure began: getting off the mountain. If you think about it, it’s really not common to go camping without a personal form of transportation. In the states, you’d never take a taxi out to a campground. But in Thailand, we had no other choice. We had to take two songtaos up the mountain, and that was uncommon. So on the way back down we had a wee bit of trouble finding rides. We had such trouble that we resorted to hitch-hiking. It started out as a joke, but once a pickup truck filled with a Thai family on a day trip pulled over, they became our real solution. The family was so kind and more than willing to help us out, so we packed nine of us (the other three girls had their own motorbikes and had already left our gang) into their truck bed. Their only request: don’t crush their freshly bought mountain vegetables. All nine of us and our backpacks were very careful to squish into each other without squashing the veggies. Several minutes into the crammed ride, the family pulled off down a side road in order to do some sight-seeing. We weren’t in a huge rush and they invited us to join with encouragements of allowing them “just few minutes” to look around. We wound up in a beautiful garden where a wedding photo shoot was taking place. It was gorgeous and very random. Afterward the family packed back into the cab and us farangs into the bed of the truck. Once we reached a bus stop, we ended our time with the friendliest family ever by taking group photos, as per their request. It was an unpredictable way to end an unpredictable weekend, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way...well, maybe I could’ve done without the permanently wind-blown hair after the truck ride down the mountain.