Ursus Travel Origins: Part 4: Thailand Chapter 1 - Psychedelic Siamese Dream

Before you read this. This was around April 2010 when I was in my 20's. I don't condone drug use but I also don't regret anything. I probably wouldn't make the same decisions today... but I'm 43. I think these types of things are for your 20's. Also, I studied Anthropology and human beings have been expanding their consciousness with psychedelics since we were another species of Homos. Psychedelic therapy is also just now beginning to be explored in mainstream medicine. I actually wrote my thesis in university on this topic. Without further ado...

I’m not even sure where to begin on Thailand. Trying to explain Thailand to someone who’s never lived there is like trying to explain mathematics to a squirrel. Passing through these places as a tourist is one thing, but living there is a whole different ball game.

After leaving Guangzhou, China, and arriving in Thailand, I was told to go to a resort in the city of Kanchanaburi. The resort where we were doing our Thai culture training was on the River Kwai. You may know it from an old movie called Bridge Over the River Kwai. In the movie, British soldiers captured by Japanese occupiers during World War II are forced to build a bridge over this river. Well, my resort was on that river. It was kind of crazy that all of this was being paid for by my new company. I hadn’t had this kind of reception in any of the places I’d lived before. All I knew was that I loved Thailand from the little bit I’d already experienced.

The River Kwai from behind the resort where I was staying for my Thai culture and customs class.

I had always dreamed of living there ever since I studied for my TEFL certificate in Guadalajara, which allowed me to teach English to speakers of other languages. I kept in contact with my Canadian coworkers from the job in South Korea, and they were all supremely jealous that I ended up in Thailand. It was kind of a dream come true, and I remember it feeling magical at the time. Everything felt surreal. At the end of the week, after we had all passed the course, we were given our placements. I discovered I was going to a town called Ratchaburi, which wasn’t that far from Kanchanaburi. If you’re in Bangkok and you head south toward the beaches and islands, Ratchaburi is about two hours west by train. And if you want to get to the beach from Ratchaburi, you can reach a lovely beach called Hua Hin in about two hours. Ratchaburi is famous for it's dragon jars which can be seen all over the city. It is also home to one of the famous floating markets Aphawa. There is Ratchaburi province and then Ratchaburi the city. I lived in the city of Ratchaburi.

Me in Hua Hin on one of the many weekends I spent there while teaching in Thailand.

Visa Run Rite of Passage... Welcome to SE Asia.

After getting your placement, you try to find the other people heading to the same town. This is when I met Andrew. I’m not even sure where to begin on Andrew. An extremely all-American former male model from the San Francisco Bay Area who had also lived in Hawaii, studied acting, and was not gay but extremely gay-friendly — which, by the way, I did not know at first, so I was very reserved around him in the beginning. Once we received our placements, we were given packages full of paperwork that we were to take on a visa run.

Visa runs are a rite of passage for English teachers in Thailand. When you get a job teaching English, your company gives you special papers that you then have to take out of the country in order to apply for a working visa on foreign soil. Your options at that time were Vientiane, Laos; Phnom Penh, Cambodia; or Georgetown, Malaysia. Andrew and I decided to head back to Bangkok and take the overnight train to Laos. Overnight trains are trains with individual beds.

Trains in Thailand are something else entirely. Every train has a café car where you can order beer, smoke, and generally enjoy yourself, and once the sun goes down, the café car turns into something resembling a disco. There are booths with tables and a waiter who will bring you beers, drinks, bottles of liquor — whatever you like. After a certain number of drinks, people start playing music and singing along to songs. Some trains even have a disco ball and colored lights. Imagine a train car full of drunk twenty-something tourists with their arms around each other’s shoulders, belting out Oasis and Creedence Clearwater Revival. That’s the café car on a train in Thailand. It’s been a few years since I’ve been back, but I sincerely hope this hasn’t changed, because it was an absolute blast.

We arrived in Vientiane the next morning — hungover, dehydrated, and looking like absolute hell. Not only that, but the sun, the humidity, and the heat made you want to lie down and die. We went directly to the Thai Embassy, took a number, and waited our turn to hand in our visa paperwork. Once your paperwork is submitted, they tell you to come back the next day to pick up your passport, which you have to leave with them overnight. So naturally, we went out again.

I remember waking up the next day and heading back to the Thai Embassy, where there was no shade and they made us wait outside in the blazing sun — two days running, two days hungover. I’m standing there with Andrew and a few other people from the same company when I suddenly get lightheaded, my palms go sweaty, I get cold chills, and I realize I’m badly dehydrated and about to faint. They had to carry me to a shaded area. A Laotian woman brought over a bottle of Gatorade and a large bottle of water and told me to sip slowly. I had people fanning me as I lay on a wooden bench. It was mortifying. After about thirty minutes, I started feeling like a human being again. I got up and was given permission by the authorities to wait in the shade until my name was called.

Andrew and I in a town near Burma/Myanmar called Suan Phueng

Have you had any of the tea?

Now here’s where the story gets interesting. After picking up our visas, we realized we didn’t actually have to start work for two weeks. Two weeks of free time in Southeast Asia. We’re in Laos — what are we going to do?

While waiting in line, we met some other travelers who mentioned they were heading to a place called Vang Vieng. Vang Vieng is a town on a river in the middle of the jungle that had basically built itself around partying — at least it had during that era. I think the authorities eventually had to crack down because so many tourists were dying, and after you read what comes next, you’ll understand why.

Andrew and I headed to Vang Vieng in a van — one of those old Volkswagen-style vans packed with backpackers, including a contingent of Euro hippies who smelled like they had a complicated relationship with soap. On that van, we met a young woman from Salt Lake City, Utah, who was Mormon and proceeded to tell us one of the more extraordinary stories I’ve ever heard. She had been kicked out of her university in her very last semester — the one before graduation — because she had gone to a party, had too much to drink, and passed out on a bed. Now, the passing out on a bed at a party wasn’t what got her expelled. What got her expelled was the gay guy — also at the party, also drunk — who had passed out next to her, and a classmate who took a photo of the two of them and sent it to the university. The gay guy was in the closet, because if you’re Mormon and gay, excommunication is on the table, so that argument wasn’t available to either of them. The university expelled her and wouldn’t let her transfer her credits. For reasons I still don’t fully understand — probably because Andrew is one of those people who befriends everyone within a five-minute radius — we decided to share a hotel room with this girl to save money. Andrew and I would share one bed; she would take the other.

In Vang Vieng, the main activity is tubing. You go to the river, rent an inner tube, and float downstream through the jungle. Along the banks are countless bamboo bars built on stilts over the water. You paddle your tube over, climb up a bamboo ladder, have a drink, and float on your merry way. Andrew and I pulled up to one of these bars and while waiting for our drinks, the bartender casually mentioned that he had magic mushrooms and could make us a shake. We looked at each other. We immediately said yes at the same time. The guy assured us he’d only put a little in — just enough for a light, calming body high. And he was right. It was gentle and lovely, something close to what people nowadays call microdosing.

So there we were, floating down the river on a beautiful afternoon, slightly high on mushrooms, the jungle canopy overhead, wondering how on earth we got so lucky. It was also floating down that river, mildly altered, that I came out to Andrew. Not knowing how he’d react, I braced myself — only for him to say, “Oh great, I grew up in San Francisco. My mother used to send me to church with lesbian nuns. You don’t have to worry about that with me. And don’t worry about the bed situation — I’m not going to ‘catch gay’ by sharing a bed with a gay guy. Really, it’s not a problem.” Growing up in the South, I had learned to be very careful about who I shared that information with. It was an enormous relief to meet someone who had absolutely no qualms about it. I’ve always had a feeling in the back of my head that I grew up on the wrong coast — but I don’t regret growing up in Atlanta at all, because it made me who I am.

We got out of the river, showered, and went to dinner with the Mormon girl, whose story continued to get more and more surreal with every hour. During dinner, some other travelers told us about a place called Bucket Bar. These kinds of places are hard to explain if you haven’t been to Southeast Asia, but the general concept is this: the staff are all Europeans traveling the world on what appears to be an unlimited budget. It’s always someone from the Netherlands or Scandinavia who’s been traveling for a year and a half and is on sabbatical, and you can’t help but wonder — who is paying for this? I assume it’s some combination of government support and accumulated unemployment benefits, but I’ve never gotten a straight answer. You almost never met Americans at these places — we’re talking around 2010, when we were still crawling out of a financial crisis. Europeans always seemed to have these long sabbaticals and endless travel funds, and I have never understood it. I still don’t.

The infamous Bucket Bar. Sorry, this is the only photo I could find.

The bar was a bamboo platform built out over part of the river, strung up with Christmas lights and disco lights, with a DJ and your typical Southeast Asian hippie furniture — cushions, swings, hammocks — alongside a proper dance floor pumping electronic music. We got to talking with a couple of British girls who informed us that this bar sold mushroom tea. Now, our earlier mushroom experience had been pleasant and calm — almost like taking a muscle relaxer on a river in the jungle. So we figured, sure, mushroom tea sounds lovely. Andrew and I stumbled to the bar and ordered two cups.

Inside Bucket Bar

What do you mean you had one cup each?

The mushroom tea looked like black Guinness, smelled horrible, and tasted like death. We sat down and attempted to sip it slowly. We eventually decided the only way it was going down was all at once, so we both threw it back, tossed our cups, and rejoined the party.

About twenty minutes later, we ran into the same British girls. The first thing out of their mouths: “Did you have the tea?” We told them yes — one each. The look on their faces is something I will never forget. It was horror. Pure horror.

“What do you mean, one each?”

“I had a cup and Andrew had a cup.”

“A full cup?”

“…Yes.”

“Oh my God. You do realize one cup is enough for about four people, right?”

It was right around this moment that the DJ’s music began to take on a visual dimension in my mind — geometric figures emerging from the speakers like living shapes. My palms went sweaty. I knew something significant was about to happen.

Andrew and I found a place to sit and tried to think through our options rationally, which was becoming increasingly difficult. We were about to trip our faces off, and there was absolutely nothing we could do to stop it. It had been in our systems too long. Do we stay and ride it out surrounded by Euro hippies and pounding electronic music? Do we leave? I lasted maybe ten minutes before I knew I had to go. Being a quiet, introverted, introspective person, I knew I was going to go very deep inside myself, and I absolutely did not want to do that in public, surrounded by people whose hygiene I found questionable, with music that was now actively irritating me on a molecular level.

Andrew decided to stay, which if you know Andrew makes complete sense. I, on the other hand, needed to get out of there immediately.

The only problem: nobody had told me that after midnight in this small town in Laos, they turn off the electricity. I’m fully in the grip of the trip at this point, so turning back wasn’t an option — it would have been worse. I had to walk to the hotel through pitch-black darkness. There was no moon that night. My only light was the screen of my little Nokia phone.

I still don’t know how I found the hotel. But I found it. And to my absolute horror, all the lights were off and the shutters were pulled down. I sat outside on a small concrete table in total darkness, tripping on four doses of mushrooms, wondering what in God’s name I was going to do. Interestingly, I began to see in the dark. The hotel was on the outskirts of town on an unpaved road. I could hear insects singing all around me and feel mosquitoes having a feast on my arms. This was not good.

I did what has always saved me in genuinely bad situations: I meditated. Sit back, breathe deeply into the stomach, watch the breath, and just calm the hell down, Derrick.

After about forty-five minutes of sitting outside in the psychedelic darkness, a light appeared across the street. A man was using his phone’s flashlight to dig something out of his motorcycle. I worked up the courage to walk over and ask for help. He spoke English. The first thing he told me was, “You just ring the bell right here.”

There had been a buzzer next to my head the entire time.

We rang the buzzer. The hotel owner appeared in his pajamas, led me to my room, and told me not to worry about it. I walked in thinking the intensity of the experience couldn’t possibly get any more intense.

I was wrong. I was just getting started.

The Mormon girl and Andrew were still out somewhere, and I had six or seven hours ahead of me to make peace with myself and the universe. I decided to strip down and take a cold shower — and by cold shower, I mean a pipe that dripped cold water on my body. I felt like I was overheating, so I grabbed every water bottle in the room and drank them all. No matter how much water I drank, it wasn’t enough. Finally, I lay down on the bed and went back to meditation. That’s when the visuals began in earnest.

He looks off putting but he's really a nice guy. Very grounded. He's "the remover of obstacles"

Have you ever gotten so high you talked to Jesus and pals?

There's a Miley Cyrus song called "I Got so High that I Saw Jesus". Well, I can now say that I have too. What followed is difficult to describe without sounding completely unhinged, but here it is: I lay on that bed and watched Chinese dragons with golden flaming tails circle the room. I saw river creatures that had attached themselves to my energy field. I watched angels descend and remove them. I watched the walls breathe. Then I saw myself being torn apart and put into a cauldron and cooked down into a cosmic goo. This angelic light being creature poured me (the cosmic goo) out and I was made into a new me. I remember thinking, is this really what they mean by being born again?

And then I traveled somewhere else entirely — another dimension, or whatever you want to call it — where I met Ganesh, and an energy being that identified itself as the Christ consciousness, who told me that everything was going to be okay. I know how this sounds. I know it’s exactly the kind of thing you’d roll your eyes at. But it’s what I saw.

I was in an emerald city that glowed like white marble — except the marble emitted its own light. Yes, I know I sound like Dorothy and this sounds so cliche but it was the most beautiful structure I have ever seen in my life, in this dimension or any other. I sat with Ganesh and what appeared to be Jesus, asking them whether any of this was real. They always answered the same way: Well, what is real? ´They assured me I wasn’t going to be punished, that I hadn’t done anything wrong, and — for what it’s worth — that yes, Jesus and Hindu gods do in fact hang out together and have no issues with each other whatsoever. They also told me I would never be punished or judged for being gay and to not worry about it ever again. They told me it was a waste of my energy and stifles my life's purpose. Some people will always be assholes. Just ignore them. They are on their own path. Being gay was written into my life's plan.

After about four or five hours of this, Andrew finally stumbled into the room and collapsed on the bed. The Mormon girl was nowhere to be found. Andrew looked at me and said, “Tonight was a test from God in keeping your cool and not freaking the f*** out.” I agreed completely. We were both still tripping when we lay down and attempted to sleep.

The next morning, we woke up to no Mormon girl, missing cash, and my iPod Touch — which was a thing back then — gone. Along with it: all of Mormon girl’s belongings. Which made us wonder — was her entire story fabricated and she was a skilled con artist, or was she a genuinely desperate girl whose story was true but who decided to steal our money to survive? Mormon girl, if you’re out there and somehow reading this — which you’re almost certainly not — boo on you.

That morning we packed up, headed back to the capital, and bought tickets for the day train back to Bangkok. We needed to get to Ratchaburi and find a place to live. At some point during our psychedelic adventure in Laos, we had decided to be roommates.

I consider Andrew to be one of those people I was simply meant to meet. Someone who falls into your life at exactly the right moment, after exactly the right amount of chaos. The coup in Honduras. The worker exploitation in South Korea. The pollution in China. It hadn’t all been for nothing. I knew I was meant to be in that place, at that time, and to meet that person — not just Andrew, but all the people I encountered during that chapter in Thailand. It felt like magic. It felt like it was meant to be. It’s something I still can’t fully explain, and I’ve stopped trying.

By the way, apart from ayahuasca for healing insight, I haven't done any psychedelic drugs since that night in Vang Vien.

This was a typical three day weekend for me when I lived in Thailand

To be conitnued...