Hello everyone, thanks for all the comments and advice re Australia - really appreciated. I've just found out that they've approved my visa application - which is very good news.
This next entry is out of chronological order - I'm still working out what to say about leaving Malaysia and my few days in Bangkok. Hope you don't mind - will post the previous entry (as it were) up soon. Right now have done two days of my yoga course - it isn't easy. In fact excrutiatingly painful might be a good description. Fortunately there are no classes tomorrow, so resting and spending the day getting some more cooking lessons from Yui.

NB Please don't take anything the shaman says to heart.

My VIP bus to Changmai, already stuffed full upstairs, crammed me and about ten others in the small downstairs bit. We slotted in odd chairs and around a table, with no legroom and with the windows blacked out. We had a reeking toilet cubicle behind us, the pile of rucksacks ahead of us. The friendly group already set up in our little mobile dungeon invited me to join their card game, but my mind was taken up being stunned at what the next twelve hours would be like. I've definitely lost any sense of romance about difficult bus journeys - especially when it's a bus set up for tourists.
But the "greatest days of your life" part of backpacking, the whole "having a good laugh about this stuff is a sure way to defeat it" thing won out. The two Israeli travellers passed around the stickers they had made up for their trip: "Ealon and Elad doing Thailand", the Japanese guy turned out to be a dj and played his mix tapes of old school hip hop on quiet walkman speakers, I set up a couple of incense cones on the table to help burn away the smell of the toilet. Two Israeli girls joined us from upstairs, squeezing in, and somehow that seemed to create more room. They had just arrived in Thailand, and one asked me, "You're not Israeli, how did you get on the bus? Everyone upstairs is - it's like being on a school trip". She began quizzing me, "Should I go here, is the three day jeep trip good, is the full moon party a good experience - I want to go, but..."? The bus was largely populated by Israelis apparently because it was part of a tour company that took people from the International Traveller Connection (an Israeli friendly guesthouse on Khao San) to a three day jeep trip that, I was told, everyone in Israel who has been to Thailand says, "You MUST do"! I gave her my standard mini speech about "work out what you want to do for yourself" - but she shook her head and explained mournfully, "I'm very dependent".

We all slept as well as we could. In the grey morning, the doors of the bus opened, and in the drizzle, an absurdly grinning Thai woman gave us all orders to get in different minibuses to the guesthouse. The two Israeli girls told her, "We are three" - I had been adopted. We sat in one mini bus and a somewhat greasy Thai man, with hair on the verge of a comb-over rapidly bantered with us: "Three Israelis - Shalom, shalom, shalom"! I gave him a weary expression, as I explained I was English. "Ah, two Israelis, good good, where you from"?

"Tel Aviv", they told him.

"Good, good, I am from Jerusalem" - and so he went on. The girls were at least entertained by this patter - I just laughed to be back in Chiang Mai and its tourist web.

We got to the hostel, huge confusion - the girls were booked into that jeep tour, so had to move to the nearby guesthouse that ran the tour. They wanted me to come with them, and as the place we were in right now didn't look great, I agreed. The girls got into a van to take them the 300 metres to this new guesthouse; as I got up, the same comb-over "shalom" guy stood close to me. "You can come back here after you've seen that place, it's no good", he sneered dismissively: "Full of Israelis". Oh, how skin deep a few of these Thai smiles are...

Their guesthouse turned out to be loud and crowded, and I had no desire to be the one man in the house not doing the fabled jeep trip, so eventually just went back to mr comb-over's place. A couple of hours later, I returned to the two girls' hostel to look for them. A very old Western man wearing only small purple shorts, with a wrinkled belly and little hair, was wandering around the open-to-the-air reception area. I couldn't see which room my friends had booked into, so sat down with the intention of waiting for a while to see if they'd appear. Thus began my encounter with the shaman.

My t-shirt saying "Don't follow me, I'm lost too" has a great ability to attract people I don't want to talk to. I'm thinking of posting it home. The old guy in shorts exclaimed, ""Don't follow me, I'm lost too" - Well, I'M not lost, why are you lost"? I gave him a pained expression, sat down at a table and got out a couple of books to read. He followed me. "Books, books, clearly you're a man who wants information, not knowledge". He asked, "Where are you from"?

"England".

He began to tell me about myself: "So, you're a British Jew, and -"

"Hang on", I felt I had to interject, "I'm not actually Jewish". [This isn't strictly true. My mother's family are non practicing Jews, but, given that I really have no knowledge of anything Jewish, I don't really see how I can consider myself Jewish, any more than I can consider myself particularly Scottish because of my father]. "Ok, ok", he went on unfazed, giving his opinion of my academic book learning and intellectualism as a mental dead end. It was "BULLSHIT"!

I responded quietly, somewhat pissed off, "You seem to know a lot about me, having just met me". "Indeed I do, and after just a few seconds", he smiled as if to say: yes, this is an unlikely feat - but then, I am an amazing person. I looked at him with tired incredulity.

He paused, and his voice narrowed thoughtfully, "I suppose you've never met a shaman before..."?

It was a good line. I gave him another pained look, but agreed I might not have. He was, he explained, a shaman, a white wizard, in tune with the universe, a Jewish Australian who had found his paradise here in the "Buddha land" of Chiang Mai. I enjoyed his company a lot, even though it was already clear this was going to be a monologue rather than a discussion. To describe our conversation over the next hour, as I waited in increasing pessismism for the girls to appear, would not do it justice - it would sound ridiculous, and I don't want to ridicule what was a soaring, barely linked together ramble on: sexual magic, America the great satan, "good" white orgasms and "evil" black orgasms, upper class British orgies, how the recent King Arthur film summed up everything wrong with Catholicism and America, the evils of the British Empire (this was at some length), the anti semitism of Australia and Britain, the sexual repression of Islam and Christianity, Russia being the centre of shamanism, multi orgasmic women, and the frequent emails he was writing to Thailand's PM, urging Thaksin to introduce electric cars to Thailand. The shaman had a great gift to launch himself from topic to topic, interspersed with off-hand comments on his own powers. He compared himself at different times to Shah Jahan, the builder of the Taj Mahal, Napoleon, and to both assassinated Kennedies; he had just written letters to the Pope and many other world leaders on the evils of the United States; he quoted theories of the "fully actualised human" and said - "I am one".
He began then on his view of what Jewishness was: Jews did not kill their children. This was literal (or, this is my understanding of his argument) in the case of Abraham, and metaphorical in the sense of how societies grew powerful: by sending their children to war or molding them into predators. The Jews never did this, they never killed, and so they died, "died in their millions, each generation". This was the secret of Jewish civilisation and wisdom, which predated all others by thousands of years.
But the Israelis, he went on, had lost all idea of this - they believed in "strength" and sending their children to fight wars. At quite high volume and not a little spit, he went on about how young Israelis had no clue, had no clue what Jewishness was and were just travelling to have a good time - "THEY KNOW NO TORAH"!

The guesthouse reception area was, please understand, full of the same young Israelis, who gave the shaman and me increasingly dubious sidelong glances and slowly moved away from us. Those nearby that were able to handle this topic then gave up and left once the shaman started talking about giving Thai girls orgasms.

Jews, to continue his explanations, didn't take false comfort in some angelic afterlife, or meditate their desires away, they rejoiced in life at the same time as they mourned death. Their was nothing beyond this world, but life itself was to rejoiced in.
He asked me what my ethinicity was, I told him my father was a Scot and my mother non practicing Jewish - wondering how he'd react. He exclaimed with loud ectasy: "Ahh! THAT'S why you're here, you've got the ancient wisdom inside of you, passed down in the unconscious. You're not half Jewish, who cares who your father was, you're WHOLE Jewish".

I felt the bit about the ancient wisdom was a nice thing to say.

There was so much more Adam the shaman propounded to me, such as about female Thai sexuality, or the evils of American culture - but think I need to stop recounting now. If you meet me and we have some time free, just ask me to explain further.

Best wishes,

Daniel, 21 August 2004, Chiang Mai