More Wats Than Any Lightbulb

Hi All!

I got my first opportunity to play tour guide over Christmas vacation. Actually, I was really just playing tourist, mostly, since I had yet to see a lot of the sites myself. My good friend, Leslie, travelled down from her teaching post in China in search of some of Thailand's sunshine. She brought with her a teaching buddy, Becky, and her daughters flew over from the States to join the party. Of course, if you've already read my posting about Christmas in Bangkok, you've already heard about them. But that was just focusing on holiday cheer; this post is to share our traveling adventures. The five us really made a fabulous touring team -- we each have very distinct personalities, but we really seemed to compliment and balance each other throughout our journey. Together, it seemed, we could tackle anything (except maybe that one hike that I let the rest of them finish without me -- oh well).

The first few days we spent in Bangkok itself. I finally made it to the number one main tourist site in Bangkok, the Grand Palace, the grounds of which was once the Bangkok address for the royal family, but now used mostly for ceremonial purposes and mostly open to the public. There was one very nice building, beyond some fences where we commoners weren't allowed that is apperently the royal guest house, where visiting heads of state get to stay when they're in town. I'm telling you, the place sure beats any fancy hotel. I'd already visited several Wats, or templels, since coming to Thailand, and as they all seem to follow similar designs, they do have a tendency to blur together a little bit so that a visitor might start to suffer from Wat fatigue. I wasn't necessarily all that excited about going to the Grand Palace (which I guess is why I hadn't been there yet), but felt it was my tour-guidely duty to see that my guests got to see it, as all the tour books list it at the top of the "must see" list. Now that I've been, I can't believe it took me so long to get there. This is no ordinary Wat. The grounds of the palace and it's temple epitomize "ornate." With gilded roofs and intricate designs worked in little mirrored tiles, the place actually glitters under the Bangkok sun. The intricacies of the detailed decorations really make it hard to absorb all at once. I'm definitely going to have to visit again.

Of course, it wouldn't be a trip to Bangkok if I hadn't introduced them to this city's notorious traffic, something I was unable to avoid no matter how I tried. Given the vast and spralling nature of this city and the unpredictability of its traffic, we didn't always get to as many sites as we anticipated on any given day, so it's a good thing we were such a laid-back group and got along so well when there were five of us crammed into a single taxi, sometimes for more than an hour at a time.

Still, we managed to experience a fair sampling of the more enjoyable side of Bangkok as well. More than once we were all lined up, five in a row, getting hour-long massages. We started out with foot massages, my favorite. The Thai foot massage is really misnamed, but I suppose it would be a bit tongue-tangling to try calling it an all-your-outer-extremities massage. While you sit back in a recliner with your feet up on a foot stool, a very kind person starts with your feet and your legs, but by the end of your sixty minutes, they have typically also attended to your hands and arms, your scalp and temples, neck and back. Ahh... But wait there's more. Also while they were here, all five of us lined up on mattresses on the floor for our first traditional Thai massage. The best way to describe the experience isn't really my own -- one of the tour books I read described the traditional massage as a cross between an assisted yoga session and a visit to a Chiropractor. It made me think of the stretching portion of a workout, except someone else is stretching your body for you. As I was being worked on, I kept thinking about those assorted positions that P.E. teachers and trainers have concocted over the years for us to twist our bodies into in order to stretch our muscles. Except it turns out their are plenty of muscles you just can't stretch all on your own. That's where these girls come in. To be honest, it's not exactly the delightfully relaxing experience that comes to mind when I think of massage. There were times I had to seriously work at not yelping out in pain (since all the other gals were enduring their contortions so quietly, I didn't want to be the one to break the silence). Still, when it's all done, you do feel relaxed -- kind of like that wonderfully noodly feeling you get after a really good workout, only you weren't the one exercising your muscles. Someone else was doing it for you.

And of course, one of my favorite aspects of Bangkok, an area in which I did feel I had some whisper of guidance to share, was taking my guests to all my favorite restaurants. We visited the Suan Lum Night Bazaar, where I introduced them to Mango sticky rice after some heavy-duty bargain-hunting in the market. We had lunch at my favorite neighborhood place called the Bali Garden, which, besides fabulous food, features the best outhouse I've ever used. We dined at Cabbages & Condoms, a Bangkok landmark restaurant opperated by a non-profit public-aid organization that got its start making family planning accessible to Thai families. We enjoyed a fabulous meal on board a river cruise that included a sampling of traditional Thai dishes, along with performances of traditional dance. And for Christmas Eve we opted for the traditional Christmas buffet with all the trimming at the Bourbon Street Bar and Grill. Unfortunately, they simply weren't here for enough meals to get to all my favorite restaurants. There's just too many.

The day after Christmas left the city to travel "up country." The tour books will tell you that traveling North along the route we took is like traveling back in time, as the ruins trace backwards from Bangkok the different centers of Thai government through the centuries. The sense of traveling back in time began before we ever saw our first ruin, just with the train ride itself. Over that next week we travelled by train to visit several small towns between Bangkok and Thailand's second biggest city, Chiang Mai. The train had a definite vintage feel to it, from the push-down windows that let the breezes in (and admittedly some ashes as well when you passed an area where someone was doing some burning) while you travelled through the rice fields, to the price of the fares, which ranged from about 50 cents the first one-hour leg of our journey to about $5 for the longest, 7-hour trip. Along this train trip, it really became amazingly apparent how hospitable the Thai people are to strangers. They could obviously see we were a group of foreign women and could presume (fairly accurately) that we didn't really know our way around, but all along the way there was always someone making sure we got on the right train and helping us find seats and making sure we got off at the right stops. Small kindnesses always overcame whatever language barriers there were.

The theme of our journey was definitely temples and ruins. We saw some Wats still in use, some that were hundreds of years old, and some that were thousands of years old. One of the highlights was in the town of Lopburi, where the local ruin has been taken over by a band of monkeys (tolerated by the locals because of the tourists they attract). Thanks to some sunflower seeds we were offering (and our glasses and jewelry they were trying to steal), we got some great pictures up-close with these energetic little hooligans. As I think I mentioned before, after a while all the Wats and ruins can start to blur together, as they look so much alike, so that after several days of more Wats and ruins, it can be hard to work up excitement for going to visit another one. Except, just as I was reaching that stage, the last one we visited, in Sukhothai (a UNESCO World Heritage site) turned out to be my favorite of the bunch (and the oldest). We actually opted to spend an extra day here so that we could spend more time. The ruins of the old city are spread out over this beautiful, flat, park-like setting. The second time we went back, we took picnic things and books/journals, and we rented bicycles and just hung out for several hours. It was delightful! Even though there is that certain all-looking-alike phenomena that happens after a while, that's not to say the Wats and ruins aren't awe-inspiring. All through this trip, these were the kinds of sights that made wish I was either a better writer, or a better photographer to try and capture the grandness of these ancient places.





We celebrated New Year up in Chiang Mai. For those of you who may have heard about the bombs that went off in Bangkok on New Year's Eve, I wasn't even in town -- didn't hear about it until the next day. The midnight celebrations in Chiang Mai, much like in the States, included crowds of people gathering together to count down and watch the fireworks go off. Unlike in the States, we were able to get much closer than fire-safety precautions would recommend to where they were actually setting off the fireworks, so it felt like they were exploding directly over our heads. My favorite aspect of the Thai celebrations would also, I'm sure, have gone against U.S. fire regulations, but it was truly spectacularly beautiful. People buy these large tissue-paper contraptions about the size of a tall kitchen garbage bag, suspended upside down over a flammable pellet of some sort, set the pellet aflame, wait for the air under the bag to heat and then make a wish and release them into the night sky like miniature hot air balloons. Hundreds, probably thousands, of these were set off that night, until the sky looked like there was a whole new series of constallations -- it was really very magical! We only saw two collide and set themselves on fire and crash.

On New Year's Day, I ended my vacation by taking an all-day Thai cooking class. I learned how to make red curry paste from scratch (there really is something very theraputic about pounding away with a mortar and pestle for twenty minutes), black stick-rice pudding, sweet & sour veggies, and about four other traditional Thai foods. And I put my wimpy spiceyness-tolerance to the test as we learned the differences between the different kinds of chilis used in Thai cooking. Note: after cutting chilis, one washing is not enough to make it safe to touch your face. The next day I headed home to get ready to return to real-life. But that's okay because now it's time to start planning my next vacation -- we also get a week off in February for Chinese New Year and a week in April for Thai New Year:-)