On towards Bangkok

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Rain. Pregnant drops crashing to earth to keep Sri Lanka green and buzzing with life. Constant rain for the last 12 hours to make my final tuk tuk ride, this time to the airport, a damp rush through the water-filled potholes and over-gushing gutters. My driver was a quarter of an hour late, and I was five minutes down the road with damp knees before he apologetically found me. I had regretted talking the price down from 100 to 80 rupees the evening before, after all I was relying on him to pick me up at 5am in all that rain. What was an extra $2 to me in that situation?

Flight to BKK was only three-and-a-half hours, and took me well into the second half of my trip. The first half (if you haven't been paying attention) took me from London, through France, Italy, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Turkey, Iran and UAE. Sri Lanka was a convenient middle-stop, in the absence of India (delays in getting a visa) and Pakistan (err...a bit iffy at the moment). The second half, subject to whimsical changes in plans, would see me travel by train through Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, then ferry to Indonesia, more trains and ferries, before a short flight to Darwin and thousands of kms of road trips from the far north to the very south east corner of Australia - almost the furthest part of the world from my starting point. (Sorry, Tasmania, NZ and Antarctica - I'll visit you later.)

Bangkok airport was all shiny glass and steel - a great contrast to Colombo's faded concrete. And back to the warm dry weather. I had been reading Laurence Durrell's Alexandrian Quartet (very slowly, soaking up each phrase) during quiet moments of my travelling, and finished it in Unawatuna. Imagine my surprise when someone looking exactly like I had imagined Clea, the subject of the final volume, turned up with her backpack on my airport bus. I told her this, about which she was pleased, but she had no idea about the book or the author. She, the backpacker, not the fictional character, had just that morning taken leave of a ten day retreat in a Buddhist temple, and couldn't praise her experience highly enough. In fact, as we explored Bangkok together, she could speak of little else, and started to lose her voice through so much talking.

The retreat was based on mindfulness, the notion of focusing your mind on thoughts coming into your mind, acknowledging them then letting them drift away. The practice apparently involved her walking slowly and sitting crosslegged for hours on end, on very little sleep and after eating very little. It doesn't sound that appealing, but I was interested. I did have exactly ten days extra free until the flight I had booked from Bali to Darwin, owing to the absence of an Indian experience. Maybe it was something I should do?

Clea's first act in Bangkok was to eat sweetcorn kernals covered on cream, from a stall at the train station, to make up for the fasting in the temple. While she ate she showed me her guide book for the course, and I refrained from pointing out to her the squashed ant just where it said about never destroying a living creature. After a meal at a pavement cafe in China Town I joined her for an hour-long foot massage, in a quite respectable venue, which was delicious. I then stayed in a quite luxurious hotel, complete with swimming pool, but by European standards cheap.

Sunday 8 November

The next morning I checked my dates, and various train schedules, and yes: attending a retreat for ten days looked possible if the temple was prepared to receive me at short notice. I did need to get a 12 hour train north to Chiang Mai to get to the temple, and this proved difficult, as the trains for some reason were all full for the next couple of days. So another night of luxury, before a possible ten days of hard beds and deprivation. And I was running behind on my blog - no internet during the retreat apparently! I booked a flight to Chiang Mai to save time - only an hour as opposed to 12.

I caught a tuk tuk to the MBK shopping centre, and was surprised at how little the journey was going to cost (10 baht). Then I found out that part of the deal was that on the way I stop and look at some shops, from which the driver would get a voucher, because he brought a tourist there. It sounded like a good deal for the driver, and I had some spare time, so I obliged. I had an interesting experience learning about suits from a tailor's shop, and think next time I'm in town I'll have a few made, but not this time. Next was a jewellery and handicraft shop, where I spoke to the staff about my trip, and about how they found life in Bangkok. If I had bought something the driver would have got more vouchers (I think that's how it works), but I didn't. In the shopping centre I found a shop that stocked embroided flags for sewing onto backpacks, so I was able to buy flags for seven of the countries I had visited. That more than made up for the heavy rain that began to fall, obviously following me from Sri Lanka.

Monday 9

I made series of short phone calls to the temple, getting a bad line, hearing that the monk I spoke to had to leave to take a class, then I ran out of change. I hoped that I could really just turn up and start the retreat, but would have liked some reassurance that this would be ok. In the monk's broken English it did sound like it could work, and I told him I would be there about 6pm.

Before catching the train to the airport I made a quick return trip to the MBK centre to try to find a covering bag for my backpack - to save money on all the plastic wrap I was paying for each time I flew. I hailed a tuk tuk - or rather he virtually abducted me - and was offered an even lower rate than before. I thought 10 pence for the journey was too good to be true, and it was. After I got on board the driver immediatley did a u-turn across the busy road and pulled up outside a shop. "You go in and I get voucher!" I was pushed for time so I didn't want to play that game that morning. When it was clear he wasn't budging I leapt out of the tuk tuk and hailed another for a sensible price. I didn't even look to see what the shop sold - I'm hoping now it wasn't backpack covers, as I couldn't find one in the big shopping centre.

I walked to the train station from the hotel, where I had been told I could catch a bus to the domestic airport, Don Muang. Even better, I caught a train there, which took 40 minutes and cost 5 baht - the same as my aborted strings-attached tuk tuk ride. I'm not sure how the train could have been so cheap.

From Chiang Mai airport I told the world of my retreat plans via email, facebook and this blog, which you may have seen. I tried in vain to find a tuk tuk or a taxi, but there seemed to be none. This was totally different from Bangkok, where you can't move for both species of transport. I walked up the road to try to circumvent the growing queue of travellers wanting a taxi, and eventually found what I took to be the city's only tuk tuk. The driver only spoke one word of English, and I only had a translation of the address of the temple, so it took a good ten minutes of phone calls from his mobile for us to get going. In order to help, I thought, I showed his a picture of a monk on my phone, that I had taken on the train journey to the airport. We only stopped once for directions on the half-hour tuk tuk journey. The man the driver asked to help find our way was watering his garden. He asked me where I was from, and both he and the driver were delighted I said Australia. That was the one word of English the driver had, and he used it non-stop for the rest of the trip. Once we arrived at the temple the driver made the international gesture for 'camera' and started to walk off with it, very generously to find the monk in the picture I had shown him!

I found the non-photographed monk I had spoken to on the phone soon enough. He was talking to five young foreigners who were all clad in white, in an office separated from me by a big sliding glass door. He indicated for me to sit down outside. This I did, and started immediately to try to be meditative. Phra Guy was an interesting monk. He was decked out in the customary orange hessian robe, all bundled up over one shoulder and around the waist, leaving the other shoulder bare. His unique addition to this ensemble was a surgical mask - although he rarely placed this across his mouth, prefering it to dangle from one ear. He seemed to be experiencing flu-like symptoms.

I found his English difficult to understand - which is an observation, not a criticism; my Thai is as bad as my Croation/Monte Negran/Akbanian/Turkish/Arabic. I also found him a little camp and not a little stroppy. I was in luck, however, as the five he had been speaking to had only recently arrived too, and we were all to attend our opening ceremony together that evening, and begin our instruction straightaway. When Phra Guy told me this I expressed concern that I didn't have any white kit (compulsory for all the students, as well as the nuns - strikingly different from the bright oranges and caramels of the monks). "Listen to teacher! I will get to that" she snapped.

In the whirlwind of my tour of the temple and the half-a-dozen things I was given or promised, and the various donations which he asked for (from the course booklet to window cleaner) he leant me some white trousers and shirts from the office supply. Putting them on I couldn't help myself but practice a few forward defensive strokes. Actually at times the fifty or so students, mostly young Thai women for some reason, gave the whole place the feeling of it being like the tea interval at a mixed-sex cricket carnival.

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Comments

[Scott Moncrieff]

Which Temple in Chiang Mai was it - we were there only a month ago?

[Noz]

Temple
It was Wat Rampoeng Tapotharam. And the Karma bit was from the My Name is Earl scriptures...