Greetings from Isaan (9)

The road from the Inquisitor's house to the center of the village is exactly one kilometer long and full of bends. In a straight line it would be about half, but it is probably an ancient natural walkway that grew into a street. In the first short part there are another five houses and then you come between the rice fields. However, trees regularly stand in the way of a mechanical harvest, but they do provide a good shady spot for manual work.

The only interruption is a piece of land belonging to poa Soong. Your eye immediately falls on a high wooden structure with a metal roof where hay is kept dry. A little deeper is a cute little hut, on stilts, even with a terrace - this is where poa Soong regularly sleeps when he thinks he gets too many assignments from his spouse. The whole thing is even nicer because there is a small shallow pool surrounded by shady trees in which kwaai's regularly take a mud bath. Chickens walk relaxed between them to scrape together their food. Often the whole place is a gathering place where people like to sit together in the shade of the mango trees.

The first house on the east side of the village is that of 'chang' Mai, the carpenter. And he likes dogs – his, six of them, usually lie in the street in a pack, talking until someone passes. Depending on whether they recognize the person in question, they either stay down, come off wagging their tails, or growl aggressively. The Inquisitor gets them wagging after him, because when he came to live here in the beginning he always made sure to have dry dog ​​biscuits in his pockets. Now that is no longer necessary, he is part of the community and many dogs still come to get a cookie. Not a dog that is aggressive towards The Inquisitor anymore.

Successively you get the houses of poa Soong, pao Saam, liefje-lief's mother and of Keim with his family. On the other side are the houses of Poa Deing and Mei Ploi. All open buildings with many trees in between, the gardens enclosed with bamboo fencing, necessary to keep the countless buffaloes out of the vegetable gardens. Except for the headmaster's house, which is more 'modern' and built in stone and with a very large flower garden, the hobby of his wife.

This will take you to the 'crossroads' in the middle of the village. Value state, the village warehouse. Adjoining a stone building with a completely open front and the floor of which is about five feet above the street, all important meetings are held here. On the second corner of the crossroads is the village shop, on the other corner is the house of Et, the village manager. The fourth corner is just an open field where people often keep tambuns, then grow rice, then grow melons again.

Straight on it goes over a long macadam road, you are immediately in open nature, no house to be seen for the first four kilometers. Lined with trees behind which lie fields, forests and unemployed rice fields, but in some places the ground has just been plowed, it releases a wonderful scent. People will probably grow something other than rice here.

A little further there is a small rubber plantation, De Inquisitor estimates about two thousand trees. A man and a woman are working there. They manually clean the white mass in the receptacles and then remove the rubber. Then they cut out the groove in the tree trunk a little further. They have to do that every bee, twice a day De Inquisitor was once told, in the morning and in the evening. What a chore.

And so you arrive at another building, low-rise this time. It is the pigsty of, appropriately, poa Mu. A playful figure who immediately starts to roar when De Inquisitor passes and then suddenly raises a piglet. Fifteen hundred baht! he shouts. As if The Inquisitor will immediately buy that piglet… . Poa Mu starts to laugh, invites for a drink, but The Inquisitor prefers to let the lao kao pass him by. But the pigsty is very neat, bricked and with a draining concrete floor, easy for cleaning. He's working on that now, boy, this smell is less pleasant.

At the end of the macadam road, buildings suddenly appear again. This is the next hamlet that is part of our village. First, an almost dilapidated building. It is an old school, in urgent need of renovation. With a rusted roof made of corrugated steel plates, something must be done when it rains, what a noise that will make. Scottish and crooked windows and doors that no longer close. School desks that are so rickety that only one child is allowed to sit on each desk, says the teacher, who is happy to give De Inquisitor a tour. A blackboard that once was black but now has a worn wood color. But the children themselves don't let it get to their hearts, they shout outside, it's playtime.

Then a number of houses, ramshackle, old. Between which there are an incredible number of banana trees that they apparently prefer to the ubiquitous mango trees here. An Isaan style water tower: a wooden picket fence in dire need of repair with a large barrel above where green moss is predominant due to the leaks. On the other side of the street is a water reservoir, which they completely upgraded last year, dug deeper, planted trees and placed a bamboo fence around it. Yet there are some people quietly fishing with a line, elders who gather their own food but are no longer able to go far into the fields and forests.
Then there will be a wooden bridge where you turn right to a larger street, a as they say here, an asphalt road.

This connecting road is of excellent quality despite hardly any traffic. Just a few farm carts, overloaded with wood. Here and there are abandoned mopeds and tricycles, you have to guess where the owners are. They can't be far because everywhere the keys are still in the ignition.

The first three kilometers you stay between the trees that provide wonderful shade. And lots of tropical greenery, exuberantly large palms, many waterholes in which beautiful pink lotus flowers are tempting. You often see snakes meandering across the road here, not alarmed at all, they disappear neatly back into the green on the other side. After the shady part there will be rice fields.
This is still our village, yes, our village because it consists of five hamlets and together a fairly large area. And on this south side you can irrigate the rice fields through canals. They are smaller fields in terms of surface area, but they harvest here twice a year, and at the moment, where everything is barren and brown on our side, it is an abundance of fresh green reflecting in the water. Nice to see, the endearing scarecrows straight out of a cartoon, a few ladies with typical cone hats weeding weeds, a buffalo standing in water up to his waist. This is the real Thailand!

And at the end of this road, De Inquisitor knows a nice little shop, still very typical in the living room of an elderly lady who probably runs it more for the company than for the earnings. Cozy to sit too, if you are willing to satisfy the woman's curiosity, her mouth does not stop for a minute. And she doesn't care if you understood or not, if you answer or not.

If you turn right at that shop you will come to a worse one . The cars that pass throw up clouds of red dust, not so nice for the countless moped riders and a lone cyclist. For a while, the street parallels an irrigation channel that is currently full of fast-flowing water. The differences in level are dealt with fairly primitively: a dike with a grid that collects waste and wood. And people have hung a bamboo trap on every dike. Just check and sure enough, there is fish in it regularly. Evening meals for the local residents, great, no one steals someone else's fish. A lot of greenery flourishes in symbiosis around those channels. Tall trees with beautiful plants in between, for which a lot of money is paid in Europe. If you look closely you will also see huge cobwebs hanging, impressive anyway. Ant nests in the trees. An incredibly large bee nest. And really, hardly any waste as you normally see a lot. This road leads, among other things, to a Buddhist temple and is therefore cleaned almost daily, and the closer you get to the temple, the more flowers you see. These are either planted or are often in self-produced wooden containers, imaginatively decorated.

Halfway through you can go through a nice red earth towards the village of De Inquisitor. Fortunately, this road is not much used by motorized traffic, it is quiet. Between the rice fields that are dry and barren here again despite last week's three-day rainfall. No one in the fields, of course, but a little further is a shrimp farm. Disturbing blue because of the blue fabric used to shield against birds and other animals. But also fascinating, that wobbling thing in the water, it's a dozen separate ponds according to the size of the . And everywhere those praised windmills that throw up the water to provide it with oxygen.

And then suddenly the houses appear out of nowhere. Our village is really picturesque, it could be included in the list of cultural heritage with a few interventions. With a few exceptions, they are all still made of wood, traditionally built on stilts. Over the years, the herder has sagged somewhat, somewhat warped. The doors and shutters open so that you can shamelessly look inside at the cozy mess everywhere. Or oh so inviting: sleeping people in a hammock.

Diligent housewives cooking or doing the laundry, because they all do that without exception in their open kitchen, a ailing washing machine with cold water, the waste water just runs into the gardens. People who take care of their vegetables or flowers. And always a lot of green, lots of trees. Mango trees that have now finished flowering and bear clusters full of small green balls. All those balls will fall off except the strongest one, which will stick and grow into a delicious mango fruit.

It's nice to know everything and everyone around you, and that everyone knows you. You are part of the community, you will always be farang, but you are accepted. The shyness is gone, there is mutual respect. A greeting here, a smile there, a chat over there.
And today they all have to laugh. That farang anyway. The questions come: where have you been, what have you done? But also so welcoming. Come on, have a drink. Sit down in the shade for a while. There is even offered, that fast Thai soup with fresh ingredients.

The Inquisitor doesn't realize he looks lousy. Because he has just completed a twenty-kilometer bike ride. Started at a blissful twenty three degrees, arrived at thirty plus. Full of red dust sticking to his sweaty face and clothes. Even Sweetheart, normally quite a tough aunt, felt a little sorry for her farang when he came home.

This morning De Inquisitor was waved off by an uncomprehending sweetheart. Like every Isaaner, love-sweet thinks it's just stupid that someone just voluntarily takes the bike while you have motorized gear. An old bicycle poked out The Inquisitor's eyes. It had been rusting somewhere in the back of the garden for years, tires as flat as a fig, brakes that barely work and a body of indefinable color from years of dust collecting on it. Chinese made and therefore very uncomfortable. With a much too small comb wheel at the back so that it looks like you are constantly tackling a first category climb.

But it was fun. Especially in the evening, after the joint shower. Because honey-dear had to laugh even harder. Despite the red dust being washed away, the red color remained. The Inquisitor, as always, had neglected to use sunscreen….

The bicycle goes back to the garden. Maybe next year, Thailand is too hot to cycle, for sure!