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~ Family
Thais ~
November 6 through November 12, 2000
$1 U.S. = 42 Thai Baht
(Remember to click on the thumbnails for
enlargements of the photos)
Bangkok, Thailand
November 6 through November 12, 2000
(ccl) Sitting here with Wiley on the
balcony of our hotel in Bangkok, it occurs to me that we have been on
the road for over ten months, and that we are less than three months away
from pulling into the station and raising our lap bars, thus ending this
ride. Hard to believe...it seems like last week when we waved goodbye
to Cristin and Harry as we entered the International Concourse at Hartsfield-Atlanta
Airport. Time flies: the understatement of the century.
We didn't get out of Kathmandu early,
as we had planned. We spent our extra two days there visiting the nearby
city of Patan, which had an amazing area full of temples and monuments, just
like Kathmandu, and one of the best museums we've seen in Asia. One of the
highlights of our visit to Patan was the Golden Temple, an incredibly
beautiful and peaceful Buddhist temple in the heart of Patan, made out of copper
and gold. Wiley got this incredible photo of a little monk lighting oil
lamps. He was chanting to Buddha as he happily went about his work. 
Despite the fact that we've been
doing this for ten months, we still seem to be unable to leave a country without
some stress and heart palpitations. Leaving Kathmandu, we were at the
airport at the appointed three hours before flight time, but after scanning our
bags through the x-ray machine and getting in line to check in, I realized that
we had not purchased the required exit tax stamps, and rushed to get in line at
the bank to buy them. Having only 2100 rupees (we needed 2200, 1100 each),
I rushed back to Wiley to see if he had any rupees left. No luck. A
girl from Germany was standing close by, heard our plight, and gladly let us
have the hundred rupees we needed. We chatted with her later and found out
that she was working her way around the world, volunteering at various
organizations along the way. It seems that everywhere we go we meet people
who are trying to make a difference in the world.
We finally landed in Bangkok at
around 2:00 P.M., local time. We had made arrangements via email with the
hotel manager to be picked up at the airport, so we emerged from the customs
area looking for someone holding a sign with our names. To our surprise,
we saw Wiley's sister Lele, and her friend Krista Baker, waiting to meet
us. Wiley's parents had donated their timeshare to us for the trip, so we
had free accommodations for a week in the town of Ratchaburi, about two hours
outside of Bangkok.
Arriving in Bangkok, I realized how long it had been since we had spent time in
a truly modern city. Not since Madrid, way back in April, had we been in a
first-world capital. Bangkok is a stunningly efficient, dazzlingly clean,
and terribly friendly place. Centuries-old, yet impeccably Buddhist
temples stand proudly in the shadows of enormous, glittering skyscrapers.
The aroma of delicious food permeates the air, whether from exotic and expensive
restaurants or from a little lady with a wok and fresh ingredients, cooking on
the sidewalk. Beautiful young women clad in Ally McBeal-short skirts and
gleaming, jet-black hair zip by, calmly balanced sidesaddle on the backs of
speeding motorcycle taxis. The signs of affluence are everywhere, from the
late-model BMW's and Mercedes in the street to the credit-card sized phones the
teenaged school kids chatter into. However, if Bangkok has a black eye, it
must be its horrendous traffic. Although not chaotic (Lele might have a
different opinion - we found Bangkok drivers to be almost mundane in their level
of civility, after months of risking life and limb in cities like Cairo and
Bombay) and not particularly dangerous, like many cities we've visited, the
traffic is persistent and apparently never-ending. We were stuck in
traffic jams at 10:00 in the morning and 10:00 at night. Typically, it
took twice as long to get somewhere as you had imagined it would.
About halfway through our week there
we discovered the new Skytrain system, a spotlessly clean, noiseless, and
smooth-running elevated train system that opened about a year ago. The
people of Bangkok have yet to fully embrace the system, as it currently only
services a bare-bones route, so we usually had plenty of room on the
comfortable, air-conditioned cars. Often, we could get to our destination
on the Skytrain, or we could at least get close enough to take a quick "tuk-tuk"
ride (three-wheeled scooter cabs like the ones we risked life and limb in while
in India and Nepal, but infinitely cleaner and in much better condition) from
the train to wherever we were going. Whenever the three of us stood in a
Skytrain station staring at the city map in a quandary, someone came up and
politely asked if they could be of assistance. Thailand is predominantly
(95%) Buddhist, and Buddhists believe in the concept of karma.
Karma is the concept of getting back what you give, similar to the phrase from
the Bible that states, "as ye sow, so shall ye reap". Buddhists
believe that the acts that you perform during this lifetime that help other
beings will create good karma, thus facilitating your reincarnation as a higher
being. Conversely, bad thoughts or actions create bad karma, and
ultimately slow your progression towards enlightenment. I don't know if
the Thais are trying to enhance their karma by being friendly to foreigners, but
they do seem to be willing to go out of their way to help.
When we announced our intention to
take this trip, Lele quickly spoke up and vowed that she would be happy to take
care of our beloved cats while we were gone. Shortly thereafter, she also
told us that she intended to meet us somewhere along the way. Wiley's
parents volunteered the timeshare, and Lele settled on Thailand. She came
bearing gifts, including another shipment from amazon.com, vitamins, clothes,
and homemade fudge sent by my mother. Plus, both sets of parents sent money
for us to have a nice meal out together, which was wonderful. I guess no
matter how old you get, your parents always want to be sure you're well
fed.
We were prepared for an onslaught of
tourist activity once the wheels touched the runway in Bangkok. When
you're traveling for thirteen months, and someone comes halfway around the world
to see you for a week, you know they're going to have an agenda. That was
fine with us. It was nice to let someone else run the show for a while,
and Lele did an admirable job. She had thoroughly researched the city, and
knew what we had to see and do, and where we had to eat. Our first stop
was Wat Pho, resting place of the Reclining Buddha, a huge gold-covered image of
the Buddha in a reclining pose. When the Buddha is seen in this position
it means that his is close to achieving nirvana, or enlightenment.
Sometimes it means he is close to death. The image was stunning, and huge,
as it took nearly ten minutes to walk around the entire figure. 
"Wat" means "temple" in Thai, and the temples we have seen
in Thailand are like nothing we've ever seen before. They are typically
white-washed plaster, with incredibly ornate, pagoda-like roofs which are
decorated with mirrors and stunning colored glass. The glass and mirrors
reflect the intense sunlight and make for a spectacle at mid-day. I never
tired of passing the same temple again and again and admiring the beautiful
colors and patterns emanated by the sun striking it.
Our first morning in Thailand I awoke
to the awful realization that the computer might possibly be broken again.
I took it out to put the previous day's pictures on the hard drive, pushed the
"on" button, and got nothing. Repeated attempts to elicit some
life from this infernal machine produced nothing, and the oaths I uttered would
have made my great Uncle Gid, who served as a sailor in the Merchant Marines, proud. Eventually I
discovered that there was a small piece of plastic that had become dislodged
from the latch that the top closed on, which made the computer "think"
(I use this word cautiously) that it was on standby. I remembered with
dread the moment that Wiley and I sat on a bench at the Ellora caves in
India. We had just left an impaired computer with Nilesh Shah for repair,
Wiley had broken out from neck to knee with a voracious rash, and suddenly our
camera had stopped working. I asked Wiley, tearfully, if "the wheels
had come off", a term I used to use in the software business when a project
was headed straight for the flames of hell. More proof that it's time for
me to get out of the computer business. But after a few minutes of
fiddling it finally hummed confidently into life, acting as though nothing had
ever happened.
Maybe you've heard about the floating markets of Thailand. They're
amazing. Entire communities live in neat little houses on stilts and
surrounded by coconut palms, bougainvillea, and jasmine vines. In the
past, the people who lived in these communities traded wares on the water,
selling fruits, vegetables, and goods from small flat-bottomed boats., Now
the markets are full of tourists, gawking at the locals. The canals are
packed with long-tailed boats powered by Nissan diesel car engines, and the
waves rock violently against the sides of the canals. But it's still very
cool to see how business has been done in these areas for many years.
Typically the vendors selling the wares are women, and they could be selling
anything from fresh fried bananas to hats from their boats. The most
interesting boats are the ones where people were cooking up Thai delicacies,
right on their boats. We tasted delicious, exotic fruits, like pomelos,
which are huge, sweet cousins to the grapefruit, and rambutan, small fruits that
are similar to grapes when the furry outer skin is peeled away. 
Every good tourist knows that it's
not just about seeing the sights, it's about experiencing the culture as
well. Lele had read about Thai boxing, known as "muay thai".
It's like nothing you've ever seen, with pretty much any type of hit to the body
being legal. At the beginning of each match the fighters came out and
strutted around the ring, wearing garlands of flowers around their heads.
They each went through some pretty elaborate calisthenics, no doubt designed to
impress and intimidate their opponent. The fighters used their feet,
knees, and elbows, in addition to their hands, on which they wore boxing
gloves. The referee only stepped in to separate the two fighters when they
seemed to be hanging onto each other for too long. The program listed seven or eight pairs of boxers, along with
their weights. I think I outweighed nearly all of them. The less
experienced fighters seemed to favor a movement that involved bringing their
knees up in an attempt to jab their opponent's side, and the more experienced
fighters used full contact kicks and brutal punches to the head. The best part of the whole experience was that the crowd was
overwhelmingly made up of Thai people, and they relished the event. The
betting got furious in the final round of each of the matches, and the crowd
became increasingly vocal as each blow was landed.
No visit to Thailand is complete
without at least one Thai massage, and after having one you're hooked, and
you've got to have more. Upon entering the massage salon, you're escorted
into a room with several twin-sized beds separated by a curtain, much like the emergency
rooms in hospitals across the U.S. Once you get undressed, an extremely small Thai
woman enters the space, and proceeds to twist and turn your body in ways you've
never dreamed possible. My favorite position was when I was on my stomach,
and she was sitting between my legs behind me. She grasped my hands and
pulled until my torso came off the bed, and I resembled the hood ornament on a
Rolls-Royce. She cracked my back, my neck, my toes, and my fingers, and I
felt loose as a goose when I walked out of there. One of the best things
about a Thai massage is that no oil is used, so we were all relaxed and still
looking good and ready for a nice dinner at the Shangri-La Hotel just down the
street. We tried to eat at the Oriental Hotel, a five-star Bangkok landmark, but
were turned away because Wiley had on sandals, and displayed no visible evidence
of even owning a sports coat, much less wearing one at the time. 
You can't have a satisfactory
vacation without at least a hint of adventure, we don't think Lele was
disappointed. That night we took the train back to Ratchaburi as we had
the night before, and called the hotel to ask for a pickup at the train
station. The hotel was a 30 minute drive from the train station, and there
were no cabs to speak of in Ratchaburi, a town of less than 30,000 people.
On this night, we arrived at the station at around 12:45 A.M., and Lele got on
the phone to call the hotel. We soon realized that communication was next
to impossible, as whoever was manning the desk that night spoke no
English. Wiley bravely got on the phone and attempted to say "railway
station" in Thai, but we think that the only thing that was communicated
was that we were at the railway station, and that we'd see him in the
morning. By this time it was well on the way to being 1:30, so we walked
dejectedly down the streets of the small town, which was surprisingly active for
a Wednesday night. We parked ourselves across the street from a karaoke
bar, where a girl sang the latest hits in a bikini to an audience of zero.
I sat with my head firmly entrenched in my palm, wondering which drunken driver
we were going to be forced to take a ride with, when a very nice man stopped to
ask where we were going. He said he couldn't take us all the way to the
hotel, as it was 40 kilometers outside of town, but he would take us to a
hotel. Exhausted, we checked in and crashed until 7:00 A.M., when we got
up and phoned the manager of the hotel to come and get us. We had time
before he arrived to have a delicious breakfast of deep-fried shrimp and joke,
a cereal made of rice and flavored with bean sprouts, egg, and cilantro.
We were quite the oddity in the small town of Ratchaburi. Parents stopped
by our table to feed their children a quick, hot breakfast before school, and we
smiled and greeted all of them. McDonald's executives would have been
fascinated to watch the goings-on there, as busy drivers, both on scooters and
in cars, pulled up to the curb and had their "usual" handed to them by
the vendors, allowing them to speed on their way in no time, proving why the Egg
McMuffin will never outsell the local product in these parts of the world.
Spending the night out is normally
adventurous, but we had a Thai cooking class scheduled for the next day, and we
were all somewhat less than alert. But we rallied, and made our way back
into town, after showers and a little breakfast. Our destination: The
Modern Woman Cooking Institute, which, thankfully, did not discriminate on the
basis of sex, so Wiley was welcome along with me and Lele. We had a great
experience there, as the three of us were the only students in the class, and we
all got to have intense hands-on experience. First we made deep-friend
pork spring rolls, with a great radish/chili dipping sauce. Then we made
soup with coconut milk, chicken, and a ginger-like vegetable called "galanga".
We made the coconut milk from scratch by adding hot water to a huge bowl of
grated coconut, then squeezed the milk from the coconut by hand. Thai food
is very fragrant, rife with spices and herbs, and the flavors are
intense. Everything is made from scratch, and the results are really fresh dishes that taste totally unique. Our main course was the
national dish of Thailand, Pad Thai. Each of us got to fix our own dish,
straining and sweating over the fiery-hot wok. Pad Thai is assembled by
first cooking garlic and shallots in oil, then adding pork and shrimp.
Rice noodles and water is then added and the noodles are cooked until tender,
and then a tamarind sauce is spooned in. The final few steps are to add
pickled turnips, bean sprouts, tofu, seasonings, and chives, and then a raw egg
is quickly scrambled into the whole mix. It's pretty harrowing, furiously
stirring what's cooking in the wok while reaching all around you to add a pinch
of this and a dash of that. The result is delicious, and we
were all exceptional students, if I do say so myself. I've included a
recipe for Tom Kha Kai, which is the soup we made in class, in recipes.
On Friday we moved into Bangkok, as
our week at the Ratchaburi Country Club had come to an end. We went to a
festival of Thai culture at Wat Arun, which is a beautiful Buddhist temple
complex built in the early 19th century. In those days, ships that called
on Bangkok used old Chinese porcelain as ballast. For some reason, the
architects of the temple decided to make use of this beautiful garbage, and
embedded both broken and unbroken plates in various patterns into the plaster
exterior of the building. The temple was dramatically lit for the
festival, and we were probably luckier to see it at night than during the
day. The festival that was going on featured several different plays
involving elaborate costumes and props, traditional Thai music, and a puppet
show, which was apparently hilarious but also completely in Thai. We
enjoyed walking amongst the locals and gazing up at the full moon and the
porcelain-encrusted prang (temple tower). 
Our final temple visit in Bangkok was
to Wat Traimit, familiarly known as the temple of the Golden Buddha. I've
experienced what I call "Cathedral Fatigue" in many parts of the world
- with churches in England, cathedrals in Italy, mosques in Egypt, and temples
in India. After a while, visiting ANOTHER house of worship can get
old. Each is beautiful and amazing in it's own way, but when the day is
over, it's another house of worship, and if you've already seen several in a
particular country, they begin to look the same. But we had to go to Wat
Traimit to see the five-and-a-half ton Buddha made of solid gold there.
Surely, this has to be the largest solid gold statue anywhere in the world,
although I haven't read anything to that affect. The really amazing thing
about the Buddha is that no one knew it was made of gold until the 1960's, when
a crane dropped the statue while moving it to a new building. The plaster
exterior cracked, and some came off, revealing the lustrous gold
underneath. Historians speculate that the statue was covered in plaster by
monks to protect the statue from marauding Burmese (the Thais and the Burmese
have a long history of hating each other, apparently) during an invasion many
hundreds of years ago. Today the image of Lord Buddha gleams contentedly
from its resting place at Wat Traimit, and many faithful Buddhists come there to
offer lotus buds at the feet of the statue.
We decided to celebrate a holiday for
each night that we spent with Lele, since we are missing all of the major
holiday celebrations with family this year. The first night we celebrated
Thanksgiving, and we each talked about what we were thankful for. We then
celebrated Christmas, and on our final night together, we celebrated the new
year. It was completely appropriate, because it coincided with the Thai
festival of Loi Krathong. During this festival, held on the full moon of
November, people set small "boats", made of banana leaves, orchids,
marigolds, and incense and candles, afloat on the river. It is believed
that the tradition began in the 17th century when the beautiful daughter of a
Buddhist priest set afloat a small boat with offerings for the river
goddess. The festival gradually grew in popularity, and the focus has
changed somewhat from festival revelers asking for forgiveness for past
transgressions to them asking for good luck and blessings in their pursuits in
the coming year. We celebrated with the locals at a restaurant right on
the Chao Phraya River. After dinner we each took our little floats down to
the water, where local boys held onto the side of the piers and graciously
offered to set the krathongs afloat. We lit the candles and incense, and
sent our little floats out on the waters. Before leaving the restaurant,
we had each written a small note to send away with our krathong. The
contents of each person's note were private, but mine thanked God for this
amazing time that I have had to travel the world and meet its people, to get to
know my husband better, and to clear my mind and learn more about myself. 
That night we traveled out to the
airport to spend the night with Lele and help her get on her flight, which was
at 6:00 the next morning. Lele is perfectly capable of getting on an
international flight by herself, but we had a "few" things to send
home with her, so we had promised at the beginning of the week to get her as far
as the check-in counter with the humongous bag we had packed to the gills with
Nepalese souvenirs. After three hours of sleep, we boarded the hotel's
shuttle bus for the quick trip to the airport, said a tearful goodbye, and put
Lele on her way to 36 long hours in the air.
After returning to the hotel for the
other half of our night's sleep, we got up and went back into Bangkok, back to
the hotel where we had spent Friday night. We only spent one more night in
the city, just long enough to buy bus tickets south to the island of Phuket, and
get incredible forty-five minute foot massages (you could quickly get spoiled in
this country). Bus travel in Thailand is far superior to any other we have
experienced, with nearly fully reclining seats, bathrooms on board, and beverage
service. We went straight through from Bangkok to Phuket overnight, with
only a 20 minute stop for dinner (included in the price of the ticket).
After a rigorous week of Bangkok sight-seeing, plus the frantic pace we kept up
in Nepal, we were looking forward to some relaxing times on the gorgeous beaches
of southern Thailand.
Click
here to continue in Thailand with "The Beach"
Email us
at christieandwiley@longsstrangetrip.com
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