The Royal Palace's Temple Spires
The flight from Siem Reap to Bangkok on a very noisy plane was mercifully short. We were nervous about customs; we didn't have an onward ticket from Thailand, as was the official requirement, and we didn't want to go through the same sort of scandal we'd endured in Indonesia. But we had no problems, and we soon found ourselves comfortably slouching on the airport bus as we made our way to the infamous Khao San Road.
Khao San Road is pretty much backpacker headquarters of the world. Packed into one rather lengthy block, and a few narrow offshooting alleys, is everything a backpacker could (theoretically) ever desire: body piercings and tattoos, plane tickets, sunglasses, silver trinkets, wooden trinkets, massages, massage classes, organized tours, baggy hippy pants, skimpy hippy shirts, pirated music CDs, hair beading, braiding, and dreadlocking, incense and incense holders, fake designer anything, and a whole bunch of bars and restaurants including, of course, a faux English Pub. Navigating this cacophony of capitalism are hordes of travellers, of every cut and colour. Anything goes: multiple piercings, women without bras, men wearing skirts -- after the rather conservative atmosphere that pervades the rest of southeast Asia, this was a rather pleasant culture shock.
The next day we set out exploring. Bangkok was hot -- a muggy, oppressive kind of hot -- with temperatures in the upper 30's celsius (around 100F). We'd been steadily adjusting to the heat as we travelled, but this was getting a bit out of hand. Still, we stuck it out and did our bit as sightseers. We took the express boat along the river, watched the garbage float by, and admired the shiny gold-accented roofs of Bangkok's many wats (temples). We disembarked in the "downtown" area (not that Bangkok has anything even remotely resembling a central core) and started walking. We were looking for some specific shops, and didn't find them, and in the process we managed to walk several kilometers in the midday heat. Finally, we took a break for lunch. I had a beef curry, and it was really, really spicy. It was about as hot as I could stand, and I generally enjoy spicy food. It left me sweaty and numb, but it was pretty tasty.
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Following lunch we took the Skytrain (although they stole the name from Vancouver, I have to admit theirs is better) back to the river and then took the boat back the way we'd come. We got off before Khao San Road, though, and explored the Royal Palace and a few famous wats.
The Royal Palace was beautiful and jam-packed full of tourists. It had a Disneyland feel to it -- everything was bright and colourful and extraordinary clean. The monuments and buildings were fabulous -- all inlaid with gold and coloured glass that sparkled in the sunlight. Inside the main temple was Thailand's holiest relic: The Emerald Buddha (it's actually made out of jasper, not emerald). The inside of the temple was ornate, red and gold, and the Emerald Buddha was surrounded by other golden statues of the Buddha. I didn't get any good pictures.
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We continued on from the temple and towards the main part of the Royal Palace. The buildings were all impressively royal, and beautifully constructed with golden roofs and many ornaments. We wandered the grounds a bit, wilting in the heat, then walked down the road to Wat Po.
Wat Po is the home of the Giant Reclining Buddha. This statue is just as named -- it is a giant statue of the Buddha lying down, maybe 150 feet long, completely covered in gold, housed inside a tight columned building that further accentuates its size. We paid our respects and walked outside to catch a tuk-tuk home.
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A tuk-tuk is Thailand's answer to the cyclo or becak. It is a three-wheeled converted scooter, with a two-seater covered bench on the back. They're quite comfortable to sit in, but actually riding in one is another story altogether. They're fast and agile, and the drivers take every advantage they can of those two traits. They're effective but not for the faint of heart -- especially if your driver catches sight of some open road.
We caught a taxi out to the stadium to catch some Thai Kickboxing. We bought medium-priced tickets -- not the expensive ring-side seats, and not the standing-only fights-in-the-stands cheap seats. It turned out that the only people who buy the medium-priced seats are other westerners. We sat in a sparse set of wooden bleachers under weakly glaring flourescent lights and watched the action. To our left were the cheap seats -- fully packed with several hundred Thai men, all standing.
The fights began, and for the most part they weren't that interesting. The fighters weren't particularly talented, and it was hard to follow the monotonous action -- they would generally get tangled up and then try to knee each other in the kidneys. That would last for a while, the ref would pull them apart, and then they'd start all over again. There were no spectacular kicks, only one bout ended in a knockout, and even that one seemed more accidental than anything. The most interesting part of the night was the crowd. As the fight progressed through its five rounds, they would become more and more animated. They'd yell something like "Ole!" with each blow (or attempted blow) that their favourite boxer made. Looking back through the chainlink fence that separated us, I could see them bouncing and swaying with the boxers, and each blow would seem to physically strike them in unison.
We were close to Bangkok's seedy Patpong district, and we decided to give it a look. Patpong street is a single block of uninterrupted go-go bars, where scantily dressed girls coerce you into buying many overpriced beers. Above street level the bars are even more risque, and infamously unspeakable rites take place. The street itself is crowded with the usual herd of vendors selling t-shirts and cheap jewelery. Touts worked the steady parade of tourists. They held beat-up laminated sheets describing an astounding array of sex acts. "Pussy show!" they'd say to me. "Ping pong balls! Free look! Bananas! Birthday candles! Chopsticks! Balloons! Flying motorcycle lesbian show!" For the most part I just pointed at Kate and said, "ask her", or "talk to the boss". This pretty much shut them up every time. We took a tuk-tuk home, flying through the empty late-night streets at hypersonic speed.
The next day Kate undertook some strenuous shopping, and I excused myself to undertake some strenuous relaxation on my own. I wandered the streets aimlessly, just going where my instincts led me -- a rare pleasure when you're travelling with a partner. I found a simple wat and lit some incense sticks and a candle. I walked further, past grocery stores and jewelery stores and repair shops, until I reached the wide grassy lawn that faces the Royal Palace. The sky was blue, the sun was shining, a light wind stirred the air. There were kites for sale; I bought one.
Mine was a green-and-orange snake with a long tail. I found a shady place to sit, untied the line, and let the kite drift up into the sky. Some children soon found me, and I let them fly the kite on my behalf while I relaxed in the shade. After a while they turned bratty, though, so I shoo'd them away and enjoyed some quality time, just me and my flying machine, dancing like a single flame high up in the sky.
We took the overnight train to Chiang Mai, revelling in the luxury of a private first-class cabin. The Thai trains don't have the gentle steady rhythm of their Vietnamese counterparts, though, so despite the cushy mattress and soft blankets I had a hard time sleeping.
Chiang Mai was hotter then Bangkok. Temperatures approached 40 degrees celsius (more than 100F). This was the hottest weather I'd ever experienced in my life. It was, nonetheless, surprisingly bearable. We sweated a lot, sure, but we'd been sweating a lot for the past six months.
Chiang Mai is a tourist town. It's a center for trekking among the hilltribes and buying handicrafts. We came here because we supposed we should; we wanted to see Thailand, and this was a popular part of it, so we hopped on the train and arrived. But we spent the day thinking about trekking and found the whole thing just plain unappealing -- hours of marching in relentless heat; sleeping on hard bamboo mattresses; rafting in suspicious waters. It would be a great adventure, sure, but Kate and I were winding down. We just weren't in an adventurous mood. We decided to book our trek later.
We escaped the heat in Chiang Mai's giant mall and caught a movie (The Gift -- pretty good). From there we caught a truck up the mountain to Doi Suthep, a temple with a great view over Chiang Mai (except, of course, for the hazy polluted air). The air at the temple was noticeably cooler, and the temple itself was beautiful, with golden buddhas, intricate carvings, giant chedis and chanting monks. We bought bells to hang from the eaves; they would ring a prayer on our behalf every time the wind blew. We relaxed some more, then caught a truck back into town.
The next day we took a cooking class. It was a good one, with plenty of hands-on time for everyone. We cooked six different Thai dishes, and everything tasted great. I was a little disappointed with the level of instruction, though -- I've become pretty sophisticated as far as cooking classes go, and I now look for more in the way of theory and less in the way of practice. Following a recipe is easy -- I want to know why the recipe works.
Kate and I returned home feeling stuffed and content, and relaxed in our air-conditioned room. A few hours later we ventured out for a late snack before bed, and that was a big, big mistake.
Around 1am we woke up at the same time, and both of us felt rather bloated. A few minutes later, I ran into the bathroom and vomited rather thunderously. I barely had time to flush before Kate elbowed me out of the way and did the same. The game had begun.
The game is simple: whoever vomits the most is both winner and loser. The other person is just the loser.
After our initial exchange, Kate was the next to score. I quickly followed, and we were tied again at 2 each. Kate then executed a brilliant natural hat-trick, for a 5-2 lead, before I could respond to make it 5-3. It was then 5-4 for Kate, then 6-4. Finally, I managed to catch up. I produced an incredibly violent burst to make it 6-5 (by then, I was coming up with nothing but flat coke and a whole lot of empty retching). I looked in the mirror, and the strain of my expulsions had burst hundreds of blood vessels around my eyes, leaving me with a constellation of little bloody flecks. An hour or so later, I managed to score a final time. The game ended with us tied at six apiece.
Our trials were not over, however. We did not throw up again, but we were still sick. Our backs ached, our stomachs ached, our skin ached. Everything ached. I was so sore, I could not lie still. Kate was so sore, she couldn't move. Eventually, we discovered the miracle relief of tiger balm, and managed to catch a few hours' sleep. We ate dry white bread and Pretz sticks. In the early evening, we finally felt well enough to shamble down the street to the internet cafe, send a few fishing-for-sympathy emails back home, then shamble back to our familiar, tiger-balm-stained bedsheets, to lie and wait for health to return.
The next day was spent feeling marginally better, and we discovered that a miracle had occured while we were entombed in our room. The rain had come; the hot weather had broken. The air was now a pleasantly cool 30 degrees celsius. We enjoyed a rather slow stroll in the brisk air. We ate plain rice and caught a movie (The Mexican -- pretty good). We spent the afternoon at "The Pub", drinking tea and tomato juice. The Pub was voted one of the world's ten best bars in the eighties, but its glory days were long gone. Feeling improved, we spent the night walking the crowded streets of Chiang Mai's tourist bazaar, passing up on rows and rows of the same entertainingly useless crap.
Unless you've got a lot of time, or a lot of money, and a lot of energy, you're going to take pre-packaged tours when you're travelling. It doesn't matter if you're a fresh young backpacker or a blue-haired senior -- tours are, for the most part, the cheapest and most convenient way to see a lot of the world.
Any place that becomes a popular destination will become rife with tours. A successful tour operator's format will become copied, and soon there will be a half-dozen or more vendors all selling what appear to be, on the surface, exactly the same thing. In effect, the tours become commoditized. They all look the same, they all cost the same, and choosing a good one becomes a matter of chance.
Another problem with tours is that repeat customers are not a concern. The operator has your money; he or she doesn't really care too much about your enjoyment beyond that. The guide will deliver what was promised, and nothing more. Kate and I have taken a lot of tours while we've been travelling (ranging in duration from less than a day to three full days) and it's been a rare occurence to find a guide or company that was really interested in impressing us. People didn't seem to take pride in their work. This was a huge source of frustration.
In the end, perhaps the problem is not the commoditization of the tours -- it's the commoditization of me.
As you might guess from my lengthy preamble, Kate and I took a disappointing tour while in Chiang Mai. Instead of a three-day trek in the mountains -- for which we just couldn't generate the requisite enthusiasm -- we opted for the everything-in-a-day tour.
We started with an elephant ride. It's a gimmick, really, but a few minutes on an elephant can be entertaining. After a half an hour, though, the novelty wore off for me. At the end of our hour-long ride, I'd had enough of our lurching, rolling, I'd-rather-walk-and-it'd-be-faster-anyway mount.
We proceeded on to the trekking portion of our day. We walked for about half an hour through the jungle. It was hot, of course, and the path was moderately steep, so we all broke out in a sweat. Our guide entertained us with leaf tricks -- making some pop in his fingers, blowing bubbles with others, and crumbling up another species until the bright green leaf magically turned red.
When we reached the village, it was a disappointment. It was just a random collection of huts and worn buildings. The central area was filled with tables of souvenirs. The villagers sold us soft drinks. There was none of the colour or spirit we'd appreciated in Sa Pa, Vietnam.
We returned to the road and climbed back into the bus, then headed out to a waterfall where we could have a swim. Recent rains made the path treacherous, though, and when we got to the bottom the water was brown with sediment. It wasn't even a very impressive waterfall to begin with. Our guide should have known this trip would be a waste of time, and should have substituted something more interesting. But like so many of the tourism people we had to deal with, he couldn't think out of the box.
We stopped for an unimpressive but adequate lunch, then rounded out our day with a ride on a bamboo raft down the river. The long, narrow rafts, constructed of about a dozen big pieces of bamboo, aren't the most stable way of getting downstream. Most of the raft tends to actually be underwater. Kate and I sat in the middle, with the guide poling the front of the long raft and another member of our tour poling the other end. The ride was actually quite pleasant, but we had to run the odd rapid and we got wet. It was interesting to see the jungle and the people who lived alongside the river, but couldn't they just use a canoe?
We'd come to Chiang Mai because it was on the map. It was a place to do stuff. Aside from the cooking classes, though, there wasn't much that held our interest. We did a bit of soul searching and realized we wanted to be on the beach. So we hopped on a plane and flew south.
We'd picked Ko Samui because it had a beach and was only a flight away from Chiang Mai. I read about it on the plane, though, and it didn't sound too impressive. Expensive resorts, go-go bars -- this was vacationland, expensive and empty. At the airport the information desk wasn't much help when it came to hotels. She couldn't make recommendations -- only point at brochures -- and they were all incredibly expensive. We finally caught the very overpriced minibus into town and began to walk along the beach, looking for a hotel. Some were full. The cheap ones were mosquito-infested plywood bungalows. The expensive ones weren't worth the expense. Several times I had the urge to remind the friendly desk clerk that this was Thailand, not the french Riviera. Hell, it wasn't even Cancun. Our bags were heavy, walking in the sand was difficult, and the odd bit of misinformation from the odd hotel employee did not brighten our moods. Finally we settled on a nice bungalow at the south end of the beach and collapsed into our overpriced air conditioned bed.
We spent a few days on the beach, relaxing, walking around, doing nothing. Culturally, Chaweng was vacant. Thai food was genuinely difficult to find. We did have a few highlights, though -- fresh seafood cooked for us on the beach, henna tattoos, and of course, the full-moon party.
The full-moon party happens about once a month (duh) on the next island over, Ko Pha Ngan. Big-hulled speed boats ferry party-goers over and dump them (literally) into the warm waters in front of the party beach. The beach itself is a half-kilometer of low tables, nightclubs, and pulsing, pounding speakers. Kate and I spent the night, until the wee hours of the morning, wandering from club to club. We danced and walked and walked and danced. I pounded Red Bull energy drinks to keep myself awake. There was plenty of music to choose from, and the sand in front of each nightclub was packed with dancers. It was a lot of fun, although not quite worthy of the spiritual mystique it had developed in my mind. We waded out to our boat around 4am, zoomed back across the bay, then took a truck through the sleeping streets of Chaweng back to our hotel. We walked down to the beach, pulled up some chairs, and watched the sun rise.
We were in southern Thailand. Yasothon, where we wanted to be, was in northeastern Thailand. Thus began our trek.
We walked from our hotel to the road, and took a taxi to the other side of the island. We climbed on a bus, and took the bus to the ferry. The ferry took us over to the mainland, and we climbed back on the bus. The bus took us to Surat Thani, and the bus had no air conditioning and it was really hot. We got on the train at Surat Thani, and went to sleep.
We woke up in Bangkok. We spent the day wandering around a bit and saw a movie. We spent extra and got incredible gold-class seating at the theatre, with actual la-Z-boy recliners. We returned to the train station, got on another train, and went to sleep.
We woke up in Ubon Ratchathani. We took a taxi to the bus station, and got on the next bus to Yasothon. In Yasothon we had no idea where we were, and a jewelery store owner showered kindness on us by driving us, for free, to a hotel. We checked in around noon, and promptly went to sleep.
To recap: walk, taxi, bus, ferry, bus, train, bangkok, train, taxi, bus, free ride, nap.
We woke up to find Yasothon's main street transformed into one long party zone. Stages had been set up with massive banks of speakers. The stages and speakers competed to be heard with ear-blowing results. Drunks Thais held microphones and sang along with Thai pop tunes in a rather inept fashion. As we walked along, everyone waved at us, inviting us on stage, and offered us drinks. We felt like we were famous. Everyone wanted to be our friend. We walked up and down the street, doing a bit of dancing, until finally the cacophony of competing speakers drove us back to our hotel room.
The next day was the parade. The stages were still there, and the noise had not abated. A long line of floats and dance troupes walked along between the speakers. Each dance troupe performed exactly the same dance, and the dance itself was pretty long and pretty repetitive, so we quickly tired of the parade. We followed one particular dance troupe, composed entirely of transvestites, along the parade route and watched them perform for some monks at one of the local temples. We were hoping they'd lead us to the park where the main event would take place, but we later discovered that the main event wasn't scheduled for the next day. The main event was the rockets.
The Yasothon festival is called Bun Bang Fai, or more commonly (among Westerners): the Rocket Festival. The rockets are launched into the sky in an attempt to convince the gods to bring on the rain. The theories behind this vary -- whether it's an actual war on the gods, or whether the rockets themselves are actually theological aphrodisiacs (rain comes about when the gods have sex, you see) no one knows. But the end result is quite impressive.
A muddy farmer's field at the south end of town was filled with people for the last day of the festival. At one end, several launching towers had been constructed. There were two for the big rockets and four for the smaller ones. When I mean small, I don't mean small: they were easily two or three meters long. And the big ones towered nine meters in the air. They were fashioned like giant bottle rockets, and the big ones must have easily weighed in at a few hundred pounds. The top is an eight-inch by five-foot PVC tube packed with gunpowder. The rest is a 30 foot bamboo pole. Kate and I lined up along the fence that was marked "Denger Zone" and waited for the launch.
A countdown, in Thai and English, sounded over the loudspeakers, barely audible over the stages that had been relocated and were still blaring Thai pop tunes. All eyes were on tower number two. The announced called out "fly!", and we waited. There was a delay, maybe a second, as the tension mounted, and then smoke began to stream out of the bottom of the massive engine pack. Then, boom! The rocket exploded in a huge shower of fire and smoke (which made the front page of the next day's Bangkok Post). We cheered and grinned at the thought of the catastrophes we'd get to witness that day -- but alas, most of the rockets actually flew into the air.
We stayed all day at the park, in the intense sun, watching the rockets go. The smaller rockets went up with a screaming roar, while the larger rockets made the ground shake. As the day went on the rockets got better and better -- the last few we saw flew straight and high, to great cheers from the crowds. Amidst all this were drunk Thais covered head-to-toe in mud. Even smaller rockets would sometimes go off in great barages. Sometimes the rockets would burst into flames in the sky, and sometimes they'd disappear in the clouds. Kate and I watched most of them from a vantage point with the "Denger Zone" -- the sign was just an unenforced suggestion. For our final rocket, I decided to get closer for a better view.
I walked up to within about 50 meters, until I was positioned behind the rocket crew and a few other observers. The countdown sounded, and nothing happened. They fiddled with things a bit, climbing up the tower to re-plug the rocket's ignitors. I could feel the intense sun roasting the back of my neck. Finally the countdown sounded again and I crouched on the hard brown dirt to watch. At "Fly!" there was again a delay, and then the smoke began to seep from the bottom. Then there was a roar -- an earsplitting, deafening shriek -- and smoke spewed from the bottom. The rocket had ignited, but it wasn't moving. Smoke continued to pour out, but the rocket was fastened to the platform. Sensing something was wrong, the people around me began to run away from the rocket, keeping their heads down, and I joined them. The noise at this range was incredible. Finally, the rocket managed to loosen itself from whatever held it down and it slowly lifted off the tower, into the sky, and away.
