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Published: October 1st 2009
Thailand 1: Basking in the Beauty of King Bumipol’s Thailand
Another day, another blog. It’s a bit hard for me to write a very upbeat and happy blog at the moment since I’ve had to put my beautiful girlfriend on a plane to Germany a few days ago and am now going it alone in the massive country-continent of Australia. So if this blog is slightly less engaging than usual, please understand. I’ll give an update on my continued existence as a backpacker in Oz in an separate post soon, but for now I’ll pick up where I left off last time.
After a long but interesting train trip on the third class train from Aranyaprathet, we arrived at long last in the city of cities in South-East Asia: Bangkok. Like with many places we visited we weren’t sure what to expect since some people love it and some people hate it, but we found that we actually quite liked it. It’s massive but at the same time quite manageable since the areas of interest to travelers are not that big and everyone speaks good English.
The main concentration of backpackers and holidayers alike can be found around
Kao San Road, made famous by the movie ‘The Beach’, based on Alex Garland’s book with the same title. If you go there expecting the type of surroundings and goings on that the movie depicts or that you’ve no doubt read and heard about from other people -ping-pong shows, drinking snake blood, etc- you’ll be either delighted or disappointed as it’s not really anything like that. It’s mostly a collection of hotels, bars and restaurants intermixed with lots and lots of shops and street vendors selling anything from t-shirts and hats to forged university degrees and dreadlocks. The area is actually quite a bit bigger than just the street itself, extending a few blocks to either side and as usual, this is where you’ll find the nicer places to stay and eat. During our first visit we stayed a kilometer or so north of Kao San Road, in one of the small streets off Samsem road, not wanting to be in the middle of the craziness that we might find. Following our tried and true formula of finding a place for one night and then getting a better place the next day we checked into a hotel, grabbed a bite
to eat at one of the street stalls (a nice Thai curry, of course) and went to bed.
Finding a nice place the next day proved to be a bit of a mission. Accommodation in Bangkok is among the worst and most overpriced that we’ve come across. Either the room is horrible and the bed is reasonable or, more often, the room is decent but the bed is just a thin piece of foam covering some planks. Anything remotely resembling a proper room usually has a price tag nearing $20 a night. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth we finally found a reasonable place where we ended up staying for the next few nights.
Apart from all the carnal pleasures, Bangkok also promises to offer some of the best shopping anywhere in the world and on that score it definitely delivers. I don’t know how many malls there are, but ‘very, very many’ is an understatement. Most of the bigger ones are in roughly a 4km radius of Siam Square in the center of town and that part of the city is basically a collection of huge malls interspersed with smaller shops, cinemas and restaurants. Along one
side alone is the Siam Center, connected to Siam Paragon which in turn sits next to Central Plaza, which is the largest mall in South-East Asia. Walking from one side to the other just along the street will take about 10-15 minutes and each of these are as deep again as they are wide and around 7-8 stories high. I was actually expecting quite a lot from the shopping in Bangkok after hearing so many stories of how cheap it all was and so it was a bit of a disappointment to find that mostly they are just normal shops, selling official brand clothing and products for low, but not ridiculously cheap, prices. Even after scouring some of the older and dodgier malls, I’d have to say that you’re better off buying your imitation Louis Vuitton bags in Vietnam or Cambodia. But it’s the sheer range of items that are on offer that make it great. You can pretty much buy any kind of dress or shirt you like, the variety is endless. And that’s not counting the weekend markets which are held to the north of the city center. To me, this was as close to hell as I
ever want to get; over 10.000 closely packed stalls in stuffy buildings and under tarps with tens of thousands of people crowding through the narrow spaces between the goods. But they do probably sell anything ever conceived of by man. The food in Bangkok is also great. All the malls have excellent and affordable food-courts where you’re likely to pay between $1 and $2 for a main course and the streets are lined with food stalls selling pretty much anything. You can get a great Pad Thai (typical Thai stir-fried noodles, generally with tofu, egg and chicken) for anything from 25 Baht ($0.75) or select several pre-cooked dishes such as curries from a great selection of ready-made goods for a bit more. Again, apart from the papaya salads and some of the curries, the food was really not always all that spicy, even when we ate in places where not too many tourists eat. But then we are pretty hard-core by now when it comes to that.
So anyway, after some shopping, some more shopping, a visit to the chiropractor, a movie (the new Harry Potter, which I’m not too sure about), buying a laptop and eating a lot
of great food it was once more time to move on. We took a night train to the north-west of Thailand, to Chiang Mai. Trains in Thailand are a beautiful thing. Although not really cheap, they are very comfortable and generally run on time. The night trains are especially nice as you get a bunk bed which is long enough even for me to fully stretch out in. A curtain seals you off from the outside world so you’re nestled comfortably in your own little cocoon. The toilets are cleaning regularly and there’s even a restaurant car if you fancy some food or a drink.
In Chiang Mai we went with one of the people offering accommodation at the station, always a good way to get a free ride into town even if you decide not to take them up on their offer. However the hotel was very nice, new, clean and offered free wireless which was perfect considering we now had use of a laptop again. Chiang Mai offers loads of activities as it’s the main hub for backpackers in the north. One of the more popular pastimes is trekking in the hills to visit the famous long-neck
tribes, the weird people who stretch out their necks by fitting more and more metal rings around them. There are a few reasons why I’m opposed to this (the trekking, not the neck-stretching, although that’s also slightly misguided of course). The first and perhaps least important is that they’re not actually Thai people at all, they’re refugees from Myanmar (Burma) who were driven out of their own lands by a genocidal Islamic government. The more important one however is that the whole thing is a load of commercialized crap, a show put on for tourists. With the increase of tourism, most of these villages were basically created for the trekking groups. So you walk through the blistering tropical heat for half a day to arrive at your scheduled time slot in a village. The locals peel themselves from their TVs, put on some traditional clothes and do a little dance, let you pay to take a few pictures before retreating again to await the next group of stupid tourists looking for an ‘authentic tribal experience’. Combine this with the pretty steep prices and this was an easy ‘no’ for me.
What we did want to do was a Thai
cooking class. There are many on offer but we went with one that came highly recommended both on the internet and in the lonely planet. For 900 Baht, around $25, you’re picked up from the hotel, brought to a local market where your instructor explains all about the different vegetables and ingredients and their various uses before going back to the school to cook five different dishes. We had a nice small group of only six people and a lovely instructor and enjoyed the day very much. We were taught how to make a curry paste -my main reason for wanting to do the course- as well as soup, spring rolls, traditional Thai papaya salad, various stir-fry dishes and sticky coconut rice for desert. Of course you also get to eat everything you prepare so by the end of the day we were well-fed and very happy. This also turned out to be the only day it was bad weather with lots of rain and slightly lower temperatures so it was a perfect day to be in the kitchen.
We spent the next two days on a scooter touring the area which was great after having spent so much
time in cities and without our own transportation over the past weeks. North Thailand really is very beautiful with lots of hills covered in dense rainforest and not too many people around to spoil it all. The roads are also very good and not busy so it’s perfect even for beginning scooter drivers.
About two hours to the north-east of Chiang Mai by way of a windy, steep, mountain road lies the village of Pai. This is an old hippy hangout and although I think most of the old hippies have either moved on, died, or are spending their days in an institution trapped in the jaws of their last bad acid trip, it’s still very laid-back and easy going. Most of the backpackers here are of the dread-locked vegetarian variety but even so it’s a very nice place to spend a few days. Again there is plenty on offer, from trekking to rafting to elephant riding but you can also just relax by one of the many waterfalls or hot springs and drink in the amazing scenery. Lots of resorts are popping up around town though, so I’m not sure how much longer the serenity will last. Anyway
we rented another scooter (the cheapest yet at less than $3 a day) and just drove around for two days, enjoying the peace and quiet. On the third day we once more bit the financial bullet and did something we’d been looking forward to: an elephant ride.
Chiang Mai and Pai offer some of the best options for elephant riding in Thailand. They’ve got reserves, Mahut (elephant rider) training camps and the more basic elephant riding operations, among many others. Although we would’ve loved to do the full-day Mahut course in one of the reserves, 160 euros was a bit outside our budget so we opted instead for a 2-hour ride at Thom’s Elephant Camp. This is a small operation with four elephants. You can choose either a one hour or two hour tour, or even a half-day trip. For the one hour you can choose between going to the rainforest or the river, in the two hour trip both are included. If you can’t afford the two hour trip, I can highly recommend choosing the river option; the why will become clear from my story.
After meeting the elephants and feeding them some corn, it was time
to mount the one we’d be taking. We’d be riding bareback which, although somewhat uncomfortable to the untrained backside after about an hour, is of course much cooler than sitting on one of those stupid elephant chairs. Elephants are slightly higher than horses so mounting them unaided is impossible. Luckily, the elephant is more than happy to help you by boosting you up onto its back with its front leg while you hold onto its ear. Within a few minutes we were up and ready to go explore the rainforest of north Thailand on the back of our huge all terrain vehicle. Elephants are pretty intelligent and as such can be trained very well, but at the same time this usually also means they are strong willed and somewhat stubborn and single minded in their pursuit of happiness. Happiness for an elephant seems to entail food, food and food with a side order of food, interspersed with lots of pooping. These Indian elephants, although much smaller than their African cousins, still weigh well over three tones and need upwards of 300kg of food a day. Basically all they do is eat, all day long, which inevitably leads to lots of
pooping as well. Since the rainforest offers plenty of food, the elephant is perfectly happy to just amble along, stopping every few meters to tear down some more greens with its trunk and stuff them in its mouth. The Mahut who accompanied us had to continually prod her along, both verbally and occasionally with a tap of a stick, to keep her moving. But at the end of the day, when a 3000kg animal decides to do something, or not do something, there’s only so much you can do.
So we made our way haltingly and with frequent toilet breaks through the hilly landscape around Pai. While the top speed of a walking elephant is not very impressive, its ability to travel along really any type of terrain definitely is. She had no problem walking down a very steep hill along a path that was barely wide enough to allow a person to walk there, without slipping or missing a step once. It’s truly impressive to experience just how well adapted these animals are to such a seemingly incompatible environment. After a while the Mahut let Janine sit on the elephant’s neck, by far the most comfortable and rewarding
place which also meant I could sit a bit more comfortably and stretch my cramping thighs. They filmed the whole thing, with the intention that we would spend another $20 buying the film and pictures. We had to think about it for a bit but at the end of the day, how many times are you going to ride an elephant, really? I’d like to put part of the video online but for now you’ll have to make do with the pictures.
After about an hour walking through the forest it was time for the fun bit, which I think both the elephant and the Mahut enjoyed the most. But then so did we, so it was all good. We waded into a fast flowing shallow river -again no problem at all for the elephant- where we were treated first to a very welcome shower before engaging in some elephant rodeo. The theory is simple, the elephant dips its head into the river, comes up and shakes its body and you try not to fall off. The first one caught Janine by surprise and she went tumbling into the river and was immediately swept away by the current. I
held on for one more go and then had to sit on the neck was well, where the head shaking is much more pronounced, so down I went too. It’s amazing how difficult it is to stand up in only waist-deep water when the bottom is slippery and the current is strong. We really had to swim towards the side and then turn around to let the water push us up, rather than over. Then the Mahut turned the elephant around and steered her back towards us so we could remount. I was first and it’s such an incredible sight to see this massive head coming straight towards you through the river, as if the water wasn’t moving at all, the huge dome of her head and flapping ears filling your entire vision while she looks at you with these watery, emotionless eyes. I mounted from the front, which means you grab hold of the top of the elephant’s head while she lifts you up with her trunk. Normally this is another trick since she sort of flings you up and you fall straight off again but I guess she took pity on me as I landed neatly on her
back. We then proceeded towards Janine, got her up and went through the whole thing again. This time the elephant seemed to get a bit more excited and after two unsuccessful attempts, she shook her head so violently that I went flying off again, soon followed by Janine. This was the end of the play session and the Mahut went on shore while Janine and I rode our elephant further downstream before clambering up a very steep and muddy slope, another impressive feat, and heading back to camp. Sore but very happy we dismounted and were treated to a blissful luxury: hot springs. After soaking in the hot water for a while we said goodbye to our elephant and made our way back to Pai.
We stayed for another two days during which I tried once again -a lot more successfully this time- to teach Janine how to ride a motorcycle. We also visited some of the other sights in the area, such as a canyon and another really nice waterfall and then went back to Chiang Mai, staying in the same hotel. As before, we made good use of the free wireless by downloading heaps of movies and
BBC documentaries to watch on the rest of our trips, often accompanied by a nice vodka-lime-sprite or similar mix drink.
From here we took a bus straight to the Thai-Laos border which of course turned out to be a bus that stopped a few km away from the border, forcing us to take a local tuk-tuk the rest of the way. Same Same, as they say in Asia. The border here is actually the Mekong River and you cross it in a ferry. Since we already had our Laos visa -we applied for it in Phnom Penh- the border crossing was easy enough and before we knew it we were greeted by a Laos customs official with a big smile and the words “Welcome to Laos!”. I never understood by customs officials have to be pricks and apparently neither do the officals of the People’s Republic of Laos.
All about our adventures in Laos in the next blog which I’ll put up some time in the next few days. Hope you enjoyed this little story again. All the best for now!
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Klaus
non-member comment
Have you left Aus??
Martin. it appears that you have left Aus. What happened to Frank's boat, which you faithfully promised to return to him in Sydney? That poor man helped you so much with your vehicle and also loaned you his boat to travel around Aus with. He was asking today if anyone had heard from you. If you have just left the country and dumped or sold his boat, then that is a real low act. You have betrayed his trust and generosity to you, if that is the case. Get in contact with him if you have the decency to do so.