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Published: April 20th 2009
If you're wondering why the blog has been so quiet lately, I can assure that it's
not because we've been kidnapped by red-shirted Thaksin supporters or by Somali pirates, and it's not because we've been too busy and I've had no time to write. I've been doing almost nothing at all. I have never been so lazy and done so little on vacation - but I guess that's why some people go on vacation to begin with.
With Songkran over, Chiang Mai returned to business as usual as Thailand's second-largest city. We spent several days doing almost nothing at all - we slept in, read books (well, I did), did homework finally (well, Jaz did), and visited a lot with the owners and various other guests and people who stopped by to eat or have a beer. We had some really interesting conversations with Australians about the state of social programs, healthcare, gay marriage, the media, and law enforcement in our respective countries. (They are far more evolved than we are in most respects, which may not surprise you.) I spent time organizing and uploading photos to our online albums, and started but never finished several blog entries about days
that I hadn't yet written about during our time in Siem Reap. (Are people still interested in hearing about things that happened two or three weeks ago, or is the appeal of the blog that it's almost in real time? Let me know, and it will influence whether I ever get around to posting those entries.) Jaz spent a fair amount of time studying Khmer and plotting various aspects of her return to Cambodia, which we miss terribly.
We didn't put ourselves in complete lock-down at the guesthouse though. We made a few trips out to various markets: Wororot Market, where local people shop for food and clothing, was full of all kinds of unidentifiable foodstuffs, along with lots of good fruit and other interesting sights. The Night Bazaar is an nightly extravaganza of street stalls and outdoor malls selling clothing, souvenirs, handicrafts, luggage, sculpture, and everything else you might imagine. The Saturday and Sunday walking markets are 1-kilometer stretches of stalls selling the same type of merchandise as the Night Bazaar, along with lots and lots of food. We had a foot massage or two, and sampled a variety of street foods, but nothing too crazy. In addition,
I went for an excursion one day to the Chiang Mai Zoo and
Wat Doi Suthep, an elaborate temple complex located high on a hill outside the city.
Figuring out the transportation to get there was interesting; in fact, I hadn't planned to actually visit the zoo, but it just kind of worked out that way. The advice I got at the guesthouse about going to Doi Suthep was to take a tuktuk to the zoo, where there would be songthaews (red pick-up trucks that function as shuttle buses) waiting to take people to Doi Suthep. So I headed out walking, just to see more of the neighborhood, and eventually flagged down a tuktuk. (How odd that here you have to actively seek out a tuktuk, as opposed to Siem Reap where you had to say "No thanks" every 45 seconds to refuse their offers.) The tuktuk driver understandably thought I wanted to go
to the zoo, so he delivered me inside the gates to the admission booth, rather than dropping me out where the songthaews were lined up along the road. Having come this far, I decided $3 was not too much to spend to see what a
Thai zoo looked like, so I bought my ticket and went in.
I would have to say that the Chiang Mai Zoo is no better or worse than most zoos I've visited. It's similar to the San Diego Zoo in that it's built on steep hills and valleys, so getting from one exhibit to another is a major hike. I probably spent more time admiring the kids and families there than I did the animals, and there were a couple of interesting and memorable moments:
As I approached the koala exhibit, a convoy of police and military vehicles sped into the area and out jumped dozens of uniformed officers of various kinds. They stood at attention and saluted as a cream-colored Mercedes sedan pulled in, and ran to open the door for what I presume was a very young member of the Royal family and his nurse. (And when I say "nurse," she was dressed as a real live starched white-uniformed nurse, circa 1957, cap and all.) She carried the Royal Toddler into the koala exhibit, surrounded by a crowd of men in uniform, as a team of more uniformed officers held the commoners at a distance. Ten
minutes later, they emerged and got back in the car and drove away, as did all the official vehicles, and then we were allowed to enter. (After seeing the exhibit, I could see why they didn't stay long.)
As I was leaving the zoo, a long line of young monks were on their way in, probably 40-50 of them at least, with grown-up monks leading the way. They were well-behaved and lined up in an orderly fashion, but I certainly wouldn't describe them as looking solemn. They looked like a bunch of well-behaved boys dressed in saffron robes on a field trip to the zoo. But you sure don't see that at home in Vermont- not the monks, the robes, nor the zoo. And not so much the "well-behaved boys" either.
Finally I made it to the spot along the road where the songthaews line up for customers, and made it clear where I wanted to go. I was invited to sit and wait on a bench until there were enough customers for it be a worthwhile trip, which ended up taking about a half hour. At that point, six Thai people, two Canadian girls and I climbed
into the back of the truck and it took off up the hill. It stopped briefly just around the first corner for the Thais to get out and pay their respects at a small temple at the base of the hill. One of the Canadian girls remarked, "I could have
walked here!" Her friend pointed out that this wasn't the final destination.
The final destination was a 15-minute drive up a winding mountain highway, high into the hills above Chiang Mai. The air was slightly cooler, the breeze was blowing, and the morning's fog had burned off so the views were pretty clear. After climbing the 300 steps to the temple itself, there was plenty to see. The temple is huge, with many statues of Buddha, enormous bells, beautiful awning-like bougainvillea, and a variety of other Buddhist shrines and other things that I can't even describe with the proper terms. Everywhere one looked, there were people washing Buddhas, making offerings of flowers or money. One of my favorite things is seeing the offerings. People typically offer 20-
baht bills (about 60 cents), often clipped to a flower stem or laid in the hand or lap of a Buddha statue. Sometimes
you see 100-
baht bills, and sometimes you see odd things like bars of soap or small packages of prawn-flavored potato chips. They also sell pre-packaged gifts for the monks, which consist of a saffron-colored plastic bucket (like the kind you might take to the beach to play in the sand) filled with a variety of packaged food or personal care items, all carefully wrapped in cellophane like a Harry & David fruit basket.
The temple is thoughtful enough to provide some written guidelines for behavior (no inappropriate or immodest clothing, no public displays of affection, do not point your feet at Buddha, keep your head below that of a monk, take shoes off inside the temples, etc.) but there were plenty of things I didn't understand. Luckily, no one seemed to mind me watching quietly as I tried to figure it out. There were a few scantily-clad Western girls who hadn't paid attention to the dress code and were wrapped up in rental sarongs; at first I thought they were a scattered tour group in an odd kind of uniform...
And even Thai people seem to have some flexibility about some of the rules. I saw one young
teen boy, arranging flowers in a display of offerings while wearing a black T-shirt that said:
"God made grass. Man made booze. Who do you trust?" I have to wonder whether he had no idea what it said or just didn't care.
In any case, the temple complex was beautiful and interesting, even though I was unclear about a lot of what I was seeing. (Note to self: Next time, read more about Buddhism.) After an hour, I took the same songthaew back down the mountain and into town, getting back to the guesthouse to find that Jaz had finally tackled a big pile of her Spanish homework.
While the weather during Songkran wasn't as hot as I remembered from last year, every day since has been increasingly hotter and stickier. I think the heat has contributed to our lack of energy for getting out to do much, as has our sadness at leaving Siem Reap. We miss it terribly - did I already say that once? - and between leaving Siem Reap and Songkran being over, we feel a bit like our trip is done. Mission accomplished. Now we're biding our time until we come home.
And the more I try to write about how I feel about leaving Siem Reap and what the whole experience was for me, the more my mind goes blank and my attention wanders off the laptop screen and I find myself staring blankly into space or watching the lizard on the wall across from me. It's the same kind of attention-deficit/dissociation that overtakes me when I try to write job evaluations or anything else that I feel woefully inadequate to do. The thoughts and ideas are there, but I can't line them up in an orderly row and identify them. They just continue to ramble about in my head, randomly colliding with one another and defying all my attempts to sort them into neat categories. I've made dozens of false starts, writing a sentence or two, and then deleting it all when I realize that it doesn't make enough sense yet. Thesaurus.com can't help me, brainstorming my thoughts on paper doesn't work; words continue to fail me.
What will I say when I get home and people ask, "How was your trip?" First, I will say, "Read the blog!" assuming they want to know what I
did. But if
they've done that already and want to know how I would describe the whole experience, I will likely flail about and offer woefully inadequate terms like amazing, incredible, extraordinary, fascinating, awesome, magnificent, stunning, wondrous, and beyond all expectations. But how and why all those inadequate terms apply is more than I can yet put into words.
Rather than continue to struggle for words, or complain about how unsuccessful I am at it, I’ll go ahead and post this entry. If anyone would care to ask me anything specific about this trip, perhaps it will help me articulate my thoughts. If you’d still like to hear about the days I never blogged about (but actual interesting things happened), let me know that too.
I’ll be home in 48 hours or so, jet-lagged and disoriented and unaccustomed to the weather. I have every intention of posting at some point after that with my last thoughts and reflections, or at least an update on how our transition is going, but feel free to give me a poke if it seems to be taking me too long.
Thank you to all who’ve followed along. I have thoroughly enjoyed your emails and
messages and comments. And needless to say, I have enjoyed this entire experience in a way that I cannot articulate.
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Tom Whitney
non-member comment
tell three week-old stories
Shoot, I didn't know you still had 48 more hours; I thought you were home already. And there you are right in the middle of domestic tensions. Can't believe everything you see on CNN. On your long ride home or whenever, do try to resurrect those parts of the story that happened that you didn't tell yet, because you will lose them from your memory if you don't. In future years, I know from my own experience, you will look back on this and your last trip and prize every last word, every thought that you have written. The thoughts are fresh and recoverable now. Something that amazes me is how little attention you have shared with us about being nervous out there on the streets in that foreign land. Trusting Vermonters wandering through life. Have you run into rough folks? Seen any? Last chance for a few more panos. . . Love, Tom