The time I got absurdly healthy in Pai

Andy Hill

I once spent several days with a woman in the idyllic, bohemian environs of Pai in northern Thailand, scrubbing the toxins from my blood, and the bitterness from my soul.

It was time for a change. It had been a great past several months, and I wouldn’t have taken a single second of it back, but my body was absolutely destroyed. I was grizzled, addled, bamboozled. I might as well have been shot out of a cannon.

I was cursed with the ability to somehow keep it going, able to wake up and begin knocking back rotgut whiskey, read seven books, write ten stories, meet five new friends, smoke two packs of cigarettes, and get five hours of sleep before getting up to do it all over again, every single day.

However, I knew it was time to flush out the system, to reset the dials, to find out what it was like to have a normal human being’s nervous system again, if only just for a little while.

These were my physiological concerns when I arrived in the small, verdant, tranquil, and bohemian town of Pai in northern Thailand. And, I couldn’t have been in a better place to get back up in the saddle of the healthy horse.

I was with a woman I’d just met a few days earlier in Bangkok, and she was just as keen as I to detoxify herself, although unlike me her sweat didn’t smell of toxic waste, and her daily hygienic practices were at a more sophisticated echelon than mine.

The night we got in, we found a small, bustling teahouse/cafe/library along one of the main roads, and binged on salads with brown rice, tofu, chilies, almonds, steamed leafy greens and flax seeds. We drank a pot each of a tea which proposed to make our livers like new, and went for a long, refreshing walk in the brisk, revivifying, nearly alpine air.

That night we gave each other brutal massages in order to free all of the toxins in our muscles, and I showed her how to do some intensive yogic breathing exercises that I’d picked up years before.

The next day, after a breakfast of yogurt, fruit and granola, while sauntering through the town we found a place with a sweat room where you could sit for an hour and sweat your loins out while breathing in a cornucopia of traditional healing herbs.

Next up it was a trip on a motorbike down to some hot springs, where we relaxed, thought healthy thoughts, and soaked up what we assured each other were some seriously detoxifying minerals in the water.

Cruising around rice paddies, through farms, over rivers and throughout one another’s life stories, I began to realize that my emotional centers seemed to be detoxing as well, to my shock and surprise.

I hadn’t felt anything like that in years. I thought to myself “Jesus- I think I might be in love with this woman!”

That night we attended a free meditation session and returned to our room to examine one another’s natal charts. What I longed to divine in the compatabilities therein somehow came true, because that was two years ago, and we’ve been together ever since.