Page 61 - ELITE PLUS MAGAZINE VOL5

That morning in Lang Suan... We decided to pay no attention to the weather and before dusk foundourselves on an aimless course. Suddenly our guides couldn’t remember the way while the sun was leaving the sky and from that moment on we didn’t know where trekking through the jungle would lead us this time.Under drizzling rain and in the darkness enveloping the ridge, I felt as if I was going through a repeat of many episodes of my past life. Every- one had left it to me to decide, in a landscape that was new to me and on a path I had never trodden.When I had consulted with the Lang Suan guys about the way we would take for an easy jaunt, one of the decisions had been to take a trail we had never used but had been told existed and we would have to rely on guides from the Phato Watershed Conservation and Management (PWCM) Unit.We left the town of Lang Suan at ten in the morning. The vehicle went a little past Phato and turned left onto a red-earth track leading to a small village called Nai Yarn (“nai” in the name of villages around Phato means they are deep inside the valley). We had a boat waiting here to load victuals and gear before going upstream to the agreed resting place which we would reach no later than five in the afternoon.For all that, while most of us hastily piled up our gear in the boat to walk unencumbered, I was reluc- tant to do the same, perhaps out of the habit of a former jungle soldier who wherever he went would not part with the survival kit on his back, or maybe out of the instinct of a wounded animal that has been through too much to look at the world in a positive way – I didn’t know.I only knew that I wasn’t the only one to think like this and at leasttwo other friends decided to take everything with them. One was Ooan, who had warred in the jungle no less than anyone, except that he had fought on the opposite side; the other was Somphoat, a 14 October Thammasat student who had had to go and live in the jungle as well.Actually Somphoat wasn’t from Lang Suan, but when he learned that we would trek in the nearby jungle he drove from Phra Saeng district in Surat Thani province to join us. What impressed me most with him was that he still walked in the jungle the way the locals did: he used a fertilizer bag tied at the mouth instead of a backpack. In it were a cooking pot, dishes, rice, chilli, salt and dried fish, so that we could almost claim he was transporting a whole kitchen on his back.When most of the gear had been transferred to the boat, we were driven another four or five kilometres into the jungle until we reached Nai Pi village, right at the foot of the mountain. It was the last point where the vehicle could take us, after which we had to walk.As it was already noon, the guides from the PWCM unit told us to have lunch on the spot. They were worried that if we climbed on the ridge there would be no water, which would make cooking difficult. To be fair, it was a strong argument.But I refused, countering that the whole thing was neither here nor there. Since we had taken the trouble to come and trek in the jungle, eating out of wrapped food in the front yard of some people’s house was less than savoury. What I suggested was to climb to the ridge first and when we found a nice corner sit down to have lunch. As for water, no need to worry, some of us had taken flasks along and we would share them.After that we began to move and from that very minute I sensed thatsome things had changed...We walked across villagers’ fieldsfor a short while. A jungle trail took us on a steep slope before we could brace ourselves for it. It was of a kind that climbs hard and straight for the most part, instead of shifting to allow us to rest our legs a bit before going for a hard stiff climb.Walking up a mountain was nothing new for me, but climbing a steep ridge at an age two months short of fifty was something really new.Besides the backpack where I had put everything from clothes to hammock, I also had a camera bag with three lenses on my right shoulder, a gun with bullets strapped around my waist and a one-and- a-half-litre flask hanging from my left shoulder. All of this weighed no less than ten kilos that I had to lug along with me.And yes, as I plodded up, what I had to adjust most wasn’t my body but my mind, which had to accept that my body had now reached the point where it had begun to deteriorate. Not so many years ago I still could help friends by carrying their backpacks as we went uphill, and going back to the time when I was a strapping jungle fighter, a weight of more than twenty kilos was considered ordinary.But then again, in our group this time I surely wasn’t the only one for whom the pull of gravity had increased. The one who must be suffering more than me was Chalerm, who was pushing seventy. Even though he walked unencumbered, to climb such a mountain at his age you had to have a heart stronger than the average.Chalerm had been another one reluctant to put his backpack in the boat, but the much younger Jo, who hadn’t brought a backpack, refused to let him carry anything but his own weight, and seeing that my backpackElite+ 59