The Lucky Traveler
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Buddhist Temple
Hey y'all,
So I'm in Thailand.
After 2 days of exhausting travel, this trip is already off to an incredible start. Except for the Tantra workshop that starts today, I came here with no plans and no itinerary, just freewheeling it as I go along.
It's one thing to do that on home ground where I speak the language with my own vehicle to get around. It's another to do that on the other side of the world when I've never been to SE Asia before.
For a change, Facebook actually served its original purpose of connecting people to each other. I know Kip from my time in Alaska, and I haven't seen him in over 10 years.
Anyway, he saw my posts about traveling to Chiang Mai - and since he is conveniently in Chiang Mai - he reached out via FB I spent my first night in Thailand wandering around the night market with Kip and 2 new Alaskan friends - Angela and Nate, who are both taking 2 week Thai massage courses.
We ate a yummy vegan (you would have loved this, Sabby!) Thai dinner on wood plates (they even had wood straws) in a hole-in-the-wall gem of a place.
What do we eat?
I may even take a cooking class there when I'm done with my Taoist and Tantra Sex, Energy, and Ecstatic Love workshop.
Anyway, Kip and Angela are going to Laos on a Mekong River trip after she's done, and I've already been invited to join them. They mentioned interest in hearing all about this workshop, especially after I read to them the course descriptions.
Of course, I'll join them because the timing is perfect and because I can, and I'm here to have spontaneous adventures.
These are the advantages of traveling solo with no itinerary.
And I'd be an idiot not to.
Kip is one of those people that you hear about before you meet him. He's a legend among his friends. He works out of Anchorage now, but was part of a gorgeously wonderful group out of Skagway when I met him.
The people who called Skagway home were unbelievably warm and friendly, not to mention incredible fun. The year round population there is maybe 300 people in the winter, but it goes way up to more than 1500 when the summer people come back. Many of the summer people travel like lunatics in the winter before coming to Skagway to work for the summer - and they come back every year and some eventually settle down there.
My first impression of that town was pretty vivid. A group of us from Juneau went to Skagway for a weekend of partying someplace that wasn't Juneau. The main drag of Skagway looks like a movie set of the mining days and the wild West or Wild Alaskan days.
But Mo's was the local bar that was too plain to draw in the tourists. This is where the locals went when they were done entertaining the tourist fantasy of the last Frontier.
So we hung out at Mo's and watched the locals as they let their hair down and came out of character to be themselves, drinking and smoking, etc.
Then "Get Together" by the Youngbloods comes on over the sound system and magic happened. The locals all stopped their conversations, started bopping their heads back and forth to the music, and with happy, smiling faces, sung the refrain:
"Come on, people now,
Smile on your brother,
Everybody get together,
And try to love one another
Right now."
And they did that with every refrain. It was surreal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRbTvoxRNxM
Alaskans are amazing people, and some of the strongest souls I've ever known I know from my time there. However, they are not warm and fuzzy. Skagway is the outlier.
I don't know if Kip was at Mo’s that night, but he and his posse would have fit right in with bopping heads, smiling faces, and singing voices.
I didn't meet him until a few years later when one of his friends, Paul, was in my Tlingit Culture and History class and became one of my friends. His Skagway friends came to see him often in Juneau, so his friends became my friends, and that was how I got to know just how awesome Skagway folks were - and I'm sure still are.
Paul and friends had done some pretty impressive travels, but they all claimed to revere Kip as The Man when it came to high adventure. And they were only half joking.
He was not what I expected when I met him. I was expecting somebody more studly and less odd, but Kip was as awesome and joyful and free and larger-than-life as his friends described him.
He still is.
If you can imagine a Generation X Dean Moriarty of On the Road - much healthier, less drug-addled, but with the same high energy who has been everywhere, that gives a pretty accurate image of Kip. He really is a restless soul with a gypsy heart, who never met a stranger and is in constant motion.
This man has been EVERYWHERE