Article: Girl Scout Camp Didn’t Prepare Me For This

I have been on a lot of crappy dirt roads before. I have also been on a lot of roads that are too narrow and on cliffs. However, just last week I finally experienced the incredible combination of these two, with a strong dose of downpour to make things worse. I’m not generally afraid of heights but I am afraid of sliding in the mud off of a cliff. This occurrence nearly happened several times on my way out to a village near the border of Myanmar.

Apparently at random parts of the road some villagers get together and decide to pave a ten by ten square. I guess this is like the concept of an add-a-pearl necklace where you buy what you can afford and string it together for a final product. It will be lovely when there are enough of these concrete squares to warrant the use of the word “road” (I currently consider what we drove on to be ‘a place that happened to not have trees’). I would have welcomed some concrete around the sharp muddy curves on the cliffs-- the one place I didn’t welcome it was about a mile from the village we were staying in because it meant that we couldn’t drive and instead had to walk. What’s best is that the concrete was wet so we couldn’t walk on it and there was a maximum of five inches of earth between the end of the concrete and the beginning of the cliff. Thankfully I had always been good at the balance beam in Phys Ed but it is quite a bit more difficult when carrying gear because the closest store is three hours down the mountain.

A long trek that included walking on a log across a stream (I’ve always wanted to do that, just not while carrying two backpacks) brought us to a steep hill atop which lay the house where we were staying. It was entirely wood and on stilts and looked comfortable enough. However, the shower on stilts should not be entered by anyone with a fear of heights. There were inch wide spaces between the boards and if you looked down while showering it could make you woozy. You were never really sure where the ground was as the jungle growth was thick.

People are pretty meticulous about their bathing so despite my predilection for the ‘antibacterial lotion’ bath in situations like these, I needed to actually get myself wet. The water was freezing and not always particularly clean-looking. It required significant psyching myself up to actually stick my head under the cold water. There was certainly no ‘wash rinse repeat’. I guess I should have appreciated the fact that this was the first time I was actually cold in this country.

After the shower, when it was dark out and I’d washed off my insect repellant, was a perilous time as I ran back to the house frantically slapping away mosquitoes. The malaria threat is high so mosquito nets are essential and require a little getting used to. Hanging the nets from cords on the ceiling you create a little space just big enough to sleep under if you don’t roll around. But getting in and out of that space without letting any of the blood sucking vectors inside your safe-zone can be challenging. It involves lots of swatting and inspecting every inch of you and then quickly diving under and tucking the nets beneath you. As a coworker who used to work in malaria epidemiology explained “if there’s a space or a hole in your net, the mosquitoes will find it and not because they’re smart, but because they’re too dumb to ever give up.”

I spent the entire night awake listening to the rain and dreading what it was doing to the roads we’d have to travel the next day.

Throughout my stay in the village I did a pretty good job being “Rugged Laura”. I didn’t jump when I saw the biggest spider I’ve ever seen in my life (zoos included) in the bathroom. I didn’t have qualms with the fact that there was no refrigeration yet we seemed to eat pork every day. I didn’t even mind soaking in caustic insect repellant and boiling water in order to brush my teeth. I was pretty proud of myself. Then, on my last day on the way out of the village, my ‘tough girl’ image was shattered.

I slid on my backside all the way down a muddy hill. My flip-flops died an immediate death. Flip-flops are the only practical thing to wear in most situations in Thailand since it rains without notice and shoes are taken off frequently to be polite. However, I found the situation where they are not appropriate-- muddy, hilly, rural villages. Cleats would have been a better choice of footwear. Ultimately my flip’s inadequacy sent them to the grave as their lack of traction caused the fall that did them in. My pants died a slower death. The fall left a solid mud stain on my rear so that everyone in the village who hadn’t gotten to witness my fall could see the evidence as I walked by. Once I was home, I maintained hope that the pants could be resurrected and washed them four times. It was not to be. Sine I didn’t take any pictures on this trip, I guess my permanently muddy-assed jeans are my souvenir.