February 26 - Mountain Pass - Part II

Continued from yesterday

Over the course of our elephant trek, I discern the following:

1) I am now part of an opium caravan;

2) My hosts/captors are a hill tribe of no nation that travels freely between Thailand, Burma, and China;

3) It is unlikely that I will make it to my original destination any time soon, and
4) I am surprisingly fine with this.
The elephants move very slowly and deliberately, the air up here is clear and clean, and my motion sickness is long gone. I have traded it for a lift from lawless drug runners and I feel like I have come ahead in the bargain.

My cell phone is gone, of course. Not that we would get a signal here anyway. I am not at all familiar with the jungle here, and my navigational skills are nonexistent. As escape is out of the question, I lean back and try to enjoy the ride.

We arrive at the drug runners' village shortly before dusk. There are bamboo and thatch huts, chickens running around, men and women smoking on hammocks. Three toddlers without pants play tag near a stack of AK47s.
After a meal of roots and grubs that is way better than it has any right to be, I am brought to the hut of the village/gang's chief, a weathered old man with teeth stained red from betel nut--at least I hope that's where the stains are from.

A portable generator is powering a Coca Cola vending machine. One of the chief's men opens it and hands a cold can of RC to me and one to the chief.

It quickly becomes evident that neither of us speaks the other's language, but he gets to the point rather quickly, motioning to a satellite dish and a 36-inch plasma TV and miming confusion.

Despite the impossibility of conventional conversation, we are able to make this agreement: I will use the English instruction manual they have to hook up their satellite dish in exchange for my freedom.

It takes a while.
Days first, and then weeks. The satellite dish is a remarkably complicated piece of equipment, and I'm no engineer, but I gradually chip away at it.
On a surprisingly positive note, throughout my time in the village, the chief and his gang are wonderful and I never once feel threatened. Nobody ever points a gun at me, nor am I ever tempted to run. And it's not just because I wouldn't know where to go. It's because I'm genuinely enjoying being here. During the days, I work on the satellite. In the evenings, I practice their language and learn the intricacies of their cooking. Sometimes we also play volleyball. With our feet!

After three weeks, we get the satellite system online, and to celebrate, we make it a real event and take the TV outside so that everyone can see it, and it's pretty fantastic: sitting Indian style under a canopy of verdant old growth jungle, lightening bugs twinkling all around us. We watch sports highlights, an episode of The Simpsons (dubbed in Chinese) and CNN. And it is during the news that a map of Thailand is shown and then moments later, a picture of me. There are interviews in Thai that some of the drug runners can follow, and interviews with Americans that I understand.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the news story about my disappearance/abduction kind of kills the mood a bit, and I hate that my new friends look so visibly guilty. I try to tell them it's OK and that I'm not upset, but it's hard, especially since I haven't made a ton of progress with their language.

It's clear, though, that they will be taking me back to familiarity the next day. When they load up the elephants the next morning, the whole village turns out to see me off. And I don't have much of a frame of reference as far as dealing with Southeast Asian drug runners is concerned, but I can't imagine meeting a kinder, gentler group of them. We exchange heartfelt goodbyes, and then a small band of us is on our way.

They drop me off a couple of kilometers from Sukhothai, my original destination all those weeks ago. Not wanting to be seen with me (for obvious reasons), they make a quick and anticlimactic exit. I watch them for as long as I can before they disappear completely into the trees and vines, and then I truly feel all alone.

I know I'll never have friends like the ones I made in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Jesus, does anyone?