Lost

I like getting lost. I often do it intentionally just for the sake of exploration. I think this spirit is a natural by-product of my abhorrence of staying in the local Hilton and touring within the cocoon of an air-conditioned tour bus.

Driving around the Chiang Mai area in my rent-a-jeep I didn’t intentionally get lost, but I made nearly as many wrong turns as I did right ones. This usually had little more effect than a few minutes’ delay, but on my two trips to the small airstrip near Lamphun to arrange a flight, my navigation errors were considerable.

The website of the Chiang Mai Flying Club gives pretty good directions for getting there from Chiang Mai, but when I went there the first time I was on the other side of town and didn’t want to take such a long way to get there. “I’ll find it from here,” I told myself. After all, I also have the GPS coordinates. How could I go wrong?

The tree-lined highway I chose wound through many small villages and was a beautiful drive, if a bit slow. Once I reached the town of Lamphun, all I had left to navigate with was my GPS, which has no geographic database for this area at all. But I had an arrow pointing to my destination, so how could I go wrong?

I got within a half mile of the airstrip with little trouble on a small paved road passing through some newly planted rice paddies, which were quite scenic. I tried to enlist the aid of some guys trying to fix an old car on the roadside, but they weren’t aware of any airstrip in the neighborhood and told me the airport was up in Chiang Mai. I eventually came to a narrow dirt road that, according to my GPS, appeared to lead straight to the small airstrip. My jeep had 4-wheel drive, so how could I go wrong?

Traversing this narrow, wet road was quite slow and when I got about a half mile in I came across two large trucks, one which had slipped off the road and was listing severely in the ditch, and the other with a cable trying to rescue the first. This rendered the road impassable and I had to go back down the road in reverse, there being no place at all to turn around. Maybe something could go wrong.

After making a nice box around my destination, I determined that there was simply no entry from this close. I saw a few large buildings off in the distance and worked my way to the larger road that went past them. Finally I found a landmark which had been mentioned in the website directions and drove the last mile to the airport. Just as I’d predicted, nothing went wrong.

On the day I arranged to actually make a flight around Chiang Mai, I decided to take the long drive up to Thailand’s highest mountaintop in the morning. More on that trip in a separate entry, but again there were no directions on how to get to the airstrip from that side. But I’d already been there once, I remembered to bring the GPS, and I can read signs. How could anything go wrong?

I didn’t even get out a map. That would be too easy and counter to my chromosomial makeup. Had I consulted a map, I wouldn’t have taken the first road that purported to take me to Lamphun. And I would have missed out again. This little road wound through some great little villages and was the closest I came to the old Thailand I knew before. It was a fantastic road, probably not even on the tourist map I had with me. But the GPS got me in trouble again. The road started taking me away from my destination, so I turned onto another road that clearly was going my way. With such technology how could anything go wrong?

This was the day before “khao phansa”, the beginning of Buddhist Lent. On this day there are many candle processions to the local temples. I ran right into the beginning of one such procession and had to wind in and around traffic and the beautifully adorned “floats” that were beginning to get organized. About 5km later, I decided I’d made a mistake and made a u-turn. When I got back to the procession, it had begun. The spaces previously used to pass traffic had been filled with groups of identically clad women, so the road was now one-lane for the length of the procession, about one kilometer. A thunderstorm was passing over and everyone was getting soaked, but didn’t seem to mind. I tried to snap a couple pictures as I passed, but it didn’t work out too well. At the head of the parade was a single young woman adorned in a beautiful Thai silk traditional costume. Clearly she was chosen for her beauty and I later wished I had stopped the car, walked back, and taken a decent picture of her and the procession behind her. How often does one bump into a small-town religious procession?

I soon learned that I’d turned off the road about 100 meters too soon. Had I waited that 100 meters, I’d have found the familiar road I’d been on days earlier and gone quickly to the airstrip. But once again, just as I’d predicted, nothing went wrong.

I like being lost.