To really appreciate a life of living in hotels and eating all
your meals in restaurants, perhaps you have to give it all up for a bit. And so
we did. Having met a couple in a restaurant in Koh Tao who had a boy who was: a)
2 ½ , b) English, and c) obsessed with Hotwheels cars (HotwheelsTM
is a brand of replica toys, made in a factory in Malaysia, and is presumably what
Max dreams of when he smiles in his sleep. We have been rerouting approximately
a quarter of all our spending money to this subsidiary of Mattel). It turned
out that the family was on a holiday away from a perma culture farm north of
Chiang Mai. If you know as much about perma culture farms as we did, then you
can imagine it was a steep learning curve.
“Isn’t perma culture something to do with fish poo?” Kate
asked earnestly. The couple, to their great credit didn’t dismiss us as idiots,
and said we should come and find out for ourselves.
So, apart from impressing everyone with our fish poo
knowledge, the flow of information on the farm was entirely in our direction.
As it turns out, perma culture is a holistic agricultural way of living that is
as sustainable as is humanly possible.
We were welcomed into the friendly community, and Max soon
made his presence felt. We were lodged in an open adobe mud hut, with a high
bed, territorial spiders and a mosquito net which we came to depend on with our
very lives. The days would begin with some sort of wholesome activity before
Max awoke, followed by communal breakfast, morning meeting, 3 hours of work (hacking
weeds , building bamboo bridges, composting, hacking weeds, planting, hacking
weeds etc.), communal lunch, afternoon languor, communal dinner, communal
chilli ginger wine drinking, followed by the early non-communal bed. By nine
o’clock, the common spaces would be long-deserted. We figured this reflected wholesome
early-rising, living off the land in the rhythms of nature. As it turns out,
everyone skedaddled to bed in the evening partly to avoid being mugged by the mosquitoes,
but mostly to watch episodes of Game of Thrones on laptops.
In keeping with our travels thus far, the perma culture
environment was littered with infant hazards. By the second day, we had
encountered 4 scorpions, two of which were in our room. They say the small ones
are deadlier, but why take chances? Our kill-on-sight tactic was met with
gasping horror at the breakfast table, by some of the more compassionate
members of the community. By week two, Max was well trained in spotting and
announcing scorpions.
The toilets were either a dry compost long-drop loo, or a
worm-based ‘rocket toilet’ that was brimful of writhing maggots. Max, who is
very much in the throes of a strong toilet fixation, thought them the most
exciting environment he’d ever set foot in. I mean that literally, since at one
point he lost his footing and plunged into the cavern of humanure, his toes
inches away from faecal contact). The maggots in the rocket toilet, which were
enough to keep even the hardy Kate Clark away, held Max in thrall. Anyone
nearby would overhear Max from the toilet: “Worms like my poo? They love it? They LOVE
it?? They want some more? OK, there you go, wormies. What might they say? They
might say YUMMY!? HMMM!” and so on.
For a resoundingly healthful environment, the farm was host
to a legion of ailments. The volunteers looked like they’d been shipped in from
the triages of the Crimea . The axiom in this
sort of tropical, non-chemical-soap environment is that a paper cut can kill
you in days. The medical corner was relabelled the ‘amputation station’, complete
with red-painted axe. Kate and Max would perch on stools everyday and apply
tinctures and dressings, cooing excitedly as the peroxide or surgical alcohol
did its work.
Max and his 2 ½ year old buddy brought havoc to the place,
careering about, beefing over Hotwheels all day. At one point a suspicious calm
descended, and Max was found to have a scorching temperature. When he was
clocking a consistent 39.5° all day, and all the advice featuring turmeric and
camomile was falling on fallow ground, we borrowed a truck to take him to a
slick hospital instead. Predictably, the doctor filled our arms with as much
hardcore non-EU regulated antibiotics as we could carry/pay for. Max recovered
his normal body temperature, appetite, feistiness and vehicular obsession in
under an hour.
The end of our stay deserved a break from the general
abstemiousness, and we drank beer around the campfire on our last night. The
next morning, all but one of the long-term workers had left for another project
in town, leaving the place to a handful of newcomers. As we shuffled about,
trying to pack up and to tidy the unwholesome chaos, I heard a familiar yet
unexpected sound drawing near. What sounded like fifty Thai school children approaching
unannounced turned out to be, in fact, fifty Thai school children approaching
unannounced. The cultural differences between east and west can be hard to anticipate;
nevertheless, I suspected that the sight of a bunch of groggy hippies mooching
about, half-dressed, in a beery mess would confirm only the lowest of
expectations. Nick, the only experienced worker on site, dashed off to find a
shirt in the lost property. Moments later, haphazardly dressed, we stood in
front of the assembled children and teachers, grimacing. I noticed sweat
beading on Nick’s face.
“Holy shit Ben, I think they want a fucking English lesson.
Don’t leave me here.”
“No way, Nick. I’ve got you.”
I wondered whether I could contribute something about fish
poo, but just then, as luck would have it, I heard a shrill and familiar cry from
Kate from the direction of the adobe huts. “There’s a poisonous snake under the
bed!” I exited sweatily and found Max and Kate in a flurry of excitement,
pointing at the stripey, angry-looking, Z-shaped snake in the corner of our
room. Max, showing his usual lack of natural concern towards deadly creatures,
asked if he could eat it.
I rejoined Nick, who was fielding questions from the group.
There were some pauses big enough to drive a truck into. At this suitable
moment, to universal relief, Max propelled himself into the situation, which
provoked every man woman and child to start filming on their phones. After a
quick and appalled tour of the toilets, the school party left, showering us in
what were seemingly heartfelt offers to take Max home on a long-term basis.
Nick looked a little harried, “What a cluster fuck!”
Living close to the earth, doing some work, cooking and
cleaning for the first time since leaving Goa
was a great experience. In almost a month, we bought virtually nothing, used
hardly anything, threw hardly anything away and very rarely travelled anywhere.
For a change, our ecological footprint was scarcely visible. It was a fine,
hearty feeling, and will be a handy juxtaposition to going to Bangkok ,
and then back to London .
We had an inspiring and educational time spent with some amazing people, and we
left with honest dirt under our fingernails and lists of resolutions for our
life back home.
