General – Page 2 – Late Entry

April 3, 2018

A side of Vietnam

I didn’t go anywhere other than Thailand when I visited Southeast Asia last year, and although Thailand is a rich and varied place with a lot of things to sea within its borders, I wanted to get out and explore a little more this time. As it happens, I did a bad job of that, but where I did get to go this time around was Vietnam.

My friend Maxx, who lives in Bangkok, also wanted to go and because I had to leave Thailand after 30 days anyway under the terms of the visa exemption I arrived under, we scheduled a week in Hoi An, just south of Da Nang, in early February.

As it happens, although Da Nang is well known for its beaches (it was where the famous China Beach of Vietnam War lore was located), February is a terrible time to visit them. It was 50-70 degrees Fahrenheit during our visit, and the ocean there was pretty frigid. We went to the beach two days, and into the water once, and only very briefly at that.

Hoi An is about an hour south of Da Nang (by bus–more on that in a moment) and it was picturesque and lovely despite the occasional showers and chilly weather. A trading village dating to the 15th Century, the central area of the city has been remarkably well-preserved, comprising today a UNESCO Heritage Site.

While it’s picturesque and quaint, today it’s also a tourist town of the first order. I was a little taken aback by the aggressive street vendors, who I have read about but not heretofore experienced first hand. In Thailand, I’m insulated from such episodes by often having Monica with me and going to mostly local places–outside of that, I have a few words of Thai that quickly short-circuit most sales pitches. But this is how these folks make a living in Hoi An and they weren’t interested in “no” for an answer.

Fortunately, I have a pretty decent “don’t mess with me” face and was accompanied by a first-rate decoy in the form of Maxx. Not nearly as hard-hearted as I am, he was almost instantly pegged as the the more susceptible target and drew most of the attention from the hustlers when we were out and about together.

A lot of what they sell in Hoi An are clothes. Apparently, the local tailors are well-known for their wares, and the inexpensive local labor costs convince a lot of tourists to commission some new suits while they are in town. I can’t say that the styles worked for me, but then, I’m not a very stylish guy.

Of course, any place you have a lot of clothing stores, you have a big demand for mannequins. The mannequin factory appears to either be located next to or possibly within a historic temple. Freshly painted mannequins haunt the streets out front, glowing in the sun and horrifying passers-by.

As with any Asian town or city, the streets themselves provide all the entertainment you could ever need. While it’s just daily life for the folks of Hoi An, little vignettes were a constant source of amazement or amusement… such as the somewhat impractical habit of carrying about live poultry in plastic bags.

This hapless goose kept poking his head out for a last look around on his way home to the fryer…

Our hotel room looked out over the Thu Bon River. It was a great little place with a friendly front desk staff and free bike loans. We roamed all over town on the creaky old bikes, threading our way through crowds and getting honked at constantly by the local drivers.

The Vietnamese love them some horns. One lonely car can be driving down an empty road and the driver will lay on the horn like they were stuck in the middle of a New York City traffic jam. Of course, most of the traffic is motorcycles and scooters rather than cars, and some of them are pretty beat up–no lights, no mirrors, questionable brakes–but every single one of them has a fully-functioning horn.

They aren’t honking mad, however–as in Thailand, honking serves as a “hey, I’m here, watch out!” signal rather than a “get out of the way, moron!” call. The big difference is that they just do it more here than in Thailand. Like, constantly.

On the plus side, they’ve invented some extremely melodic horns for the purpose.

That was our bus back to Da Nang. It even had a custom “dial-a-horn” option to select different tones and notes, presumably to convey different messages.

I thought Thai motorcyclists were impressive in terms of audacity and carrying capacity, but they’ve got nothing on the Vietnamese. We saw everything from refrigerators to fruit trees being carted around on the back of motorbikes.

This isn’t even close to total carrying capacity for a scooter, it’s just about average. Four-door sedans? Who needs ’em!

There are also more bicycles, which makes it easier and safer to ride on the roads. On the whole, the Vietnamese just seemed more sane and rule-abiding than the Thais. Riding in traffic felt adventurous rather than suicidal, as it seems in Thailand.

Riding the bus, on the other hand, required nerves of steel. It’s not unusual to have to board a Thai bus in motion, but they at least slow down. With the Da Nang bus, little old ladies had to sprint alongside and make a leap for the doors to get on… frequently weighed down by large boxes and bags, since the bus also seems to be a freight moving system. Sometimes the boxes would just get on by themselves, collected by someone else later along the route.

Live poultry, fortunately, were relegated to the cargo compartment below.

It was also the only bus ride I have ever taken where we had to pull into a gas station and fuel up along the route. At least you get to see exactly where your fare is going–right from you to the ticket-taker to the gas station attendant. Transparency in transit services!

We had a good view from our balcony of an island in the middle of the river where what looked like a massive theater set was under construction. In the evenings, the sound of rehearsals came across the water in between the rhythmic thumping of diesels from tour and fishing boats.

I halfway want to go back to catch the show, whatever show it turns out to be, when they are ready. It’s probably Hamilton.

On the other side of the river, past the island, there’s a renowned woodworker’s village. That’s where they do a lot of the boatbuilding and maintenance and Maxx and I biked over one day to check it out.

I’m not sure what the yard fees are but I bet they paid extra for that snazzy paint job.

The local waterfront is slightly underdeveloped as well, but there’s a robust fishing industry. We took a boat tour up and down the river a bit and passed all manner of craft large and small either fishing the river or heading out to open water to do the same.

I wouldn’t want to tie up here, but I guess you take what you can get.

Through the whole trip, I kept waiting for that moment to come when it would hit me: it’s Vietnam, man, you know, like Vietnam. Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Apocalypse Now Vietnam… the napalm-blasted, Agent Orange-dusted scene of America’s last big foreign debacle before the current one.

I’ve been steeped in Vietnam War movies since I was a kid; various relatives and older acquaintances had served there, been wounded, lost friends. It’s a big psychic stain on the country, even though it was all over before I was old enough to know about it. I expected I’d feel something when I went there.

But there was nothing.

Although the effects on both countries are dark and unavoidable, it wasn’t my generation’s war. My generation, fortunately, didn’t really have a war. A few contemporaries served in the Gulf War, and some of them ended up in Iraq or Afghanistan as they were called up for duty after 9/11. But on the whole, the long war of Vietnam belonged to my parent’s generation, and the even longer GWOT to the Millenials who came after me.

As we were waiting for our plane back to Bangkok, I looked out across the tarmac at Da Nang International toward a series of revetments that probably at one time sheltered American helicopters and fighter-bombers. Not far from here, a friend of the family slogged ashore in 1965 with the first American ground force committed to combat in the war.

He later became a highly decorated Dust Off pilot, but what I remember most vividly are his stories about how to hit it off best in a Vietnamese house of ill repute (I learned later they are called “tea houses” here, which made sense as the ubiquitous Thai “massage parlor” was nowhere in evidence): ignore the girls and go chat up the mama san first, she’ll make sure you are taken care of later on.

I didn’t try out this advice.

So Vietnam is just another Asian country to me. Thailand’s Mexico, as Maxx put it, somewhere curious and inexpensive and foreign. I felt like the tourist I was.

March 10, 2018

The Old Neighborhood

A month (actually, nearly three months now… two since I started writing this!) goes by pretty quickly when you’re keeping busy, and I guess I have been. Mostly I just have my head down working, although there have been a few side trips that I will write about when I find the time. But I was wondering if I would find Bangkok more or less distracting this time around, and the answer, it seems, is that it’s pretty much the same as it was before.

I got a condo in the same building I was in last year, so everything is almost freakishly familiar. I hadn’t forgotten much–the lady on the corner with the delicious chicken on a stick, the one-dollar bag of croissants and my favorite Vanilla Cereal at Big C, the way you’re expected to mash the door close button on the elevator incessantly, the way to ask the clerk at the 7-11 to nuke your burger-in-a-bag for you.

I even remembered what little of the language I had memorized… yes, no, thank you, sorry, never mind, pork, chicken, etc… although from the giggles I get anytime I say those things near Thai people I infer that my pronunciation is still atrocious.

There’s new things to experience, of course…

But my feet find their own way around, to the gym, to the pool, to the BTS station, to the bus stop. I have a new route, down the road to Monica’s new condo, walking past the now fully constructed and functional International School that I watched being built last year. More buildings are going up down that street now, low-rise condos lining the khlong, part of a continuing building boom in the little T77 community here.

I still haven’t found out what T77 means.

I have realized why I like this spot so much, though. It’s not exactly a gated community, nor is it entirely planned–there are little chunks of property in the development that seem to be privately owned, with traditional neighborhood houses or small businesses in them. But the area is slightly segregated, sitting on a peninsula formed between the khlong and an expressway, and vehicle access is limited. That makes it a lot more peaceful than just about anywhere else in Bangkok. The modern Habito mall across the street is full of all the modern shops and conveniences you could ask for. You needn’t ever venture out if you prefer not to.

I ran into an expat at the gym and he had noticed it as well. Outside, the frenetic activity of a global megacity. Inside, a quiet, lush oasis in which to relax and recharge.

But at the same time, half a block away, crossing below the expressway, you’re right in the impenetrable heart of the city, a soi lined with food and mystery (and sometimes mystery foods!). A public washing machine sits in the entry to a massage parlor. A dark hallway disappears into an apparently endless building. Through an open door, you might see a factory floor in full swing or a family sitting down to dinner, all on the same block. There’s the suggestion that every door, every alley, every hallway, holds a microcosm of the human experience that you could spend a lifetime diving into and learning about.

Multiply it all by the nearly 1 million rai that Bangkok covers and it boggles the mind. Still. I noted in my post about Bangkok living last year that the city is “…fascinating, and perhaps endlessly so.”

So far, that’s still proving correct.

I also posted a picture last time highlighting a local neighborhood concern, stray cats:

There’s nothing more Thai than a brazen disregard for posted notices–although the notice is aimed at farang.

The picture was taken at the exit of the Thong Lo BTS station, which isn’t really my neighborhood, but I happened to stop there to go to a specific restaurant last week (Beccofino, which was excellent, if you happen to be in the neighborhood).

As I’m walking down the steps, I see this at the exact same spot:

The cats clearly won that battle!

March 8, 2018

Storm Over Bangkok

Note: I thought I had published this, from Day One of this trip, but apparently it didn’t post. So, out of order and sans-pictures, here it is.

I woke up to flickers on the wall of the bedroom, jagged flashes darting through the gaps at the edges of the heavy, dark curtains stretching across the full-length window that makes up one wall. A low and intermittent rumble that had convinced my still-sleeping brain that it was train traffic, which would have been the most likely source of such noise if I were slumbering in Seattle still, suddenly made a different sort of sense. A bright, sharp flare was punctuated with a loud, sharp crack.

It was morning in Bangkok.

I got up and opened all the windows and the deck slider in the condo, taking advantage of nature’s air conditioning. The temperature dropped five degrees as the dense rain closed in, cloaking the buildings of On Nut like a heavy Seattle fog.

It was a long way from the milky blue sky that had greeted me when I stepped off the plane the day before, feeling the thick, fetid Bangkok air leaking in through the gaps between the jetway and the big 777 and smelling the unique tang of vegetation, sewage, and delectable food cooking that stamps the city indelibly into your olfactory records.

My flights from Vancouver had gone reasonably well, as well as such extended overseas cruising ever does go in my experience. I’d drawn the short straw of seating assignments, next to another big farang instead of one of the hundreds of diminutive Asians on the plane. I flew EVA this time, transferring through Taipei to avoid the unpleasantness I will forever associate with the Beijing airport and with China generally. In terms of seating and service, it was no better and no worse than Air China from last year… although on the Taipei-Bangkok leg I was greeted with the delightful prospect of a flight attendant whose name tag proudly proclaimed her to be “Lemon Li.” It made me smile every time she walked past.

So did the inventive in-flight safety video.

Taipei was indeed a better layover and transfer point than Beijing. It was moderately inefficient and chaotic but without the oppressive, bureaucratic, Big Brotherishness incorporated into the experience. The weather was essentially identical to what I’d left behind in Seattle: upper forties and rain. I didn’t bother to change.

That left me in long sleeves and long pants when I got off the plane in Bangkok four hours later, but by then I was too tired to think about changing.

My friend Maxx, who has been living in Bangkok for the past year, met me at the airport. He’s not nearly as tan as he should be after a year in the tropics. But otherwise, he appeared happy and in good health.

My first stop at the airport was a cellular company booth, where I got a local tourist SIM card for 30 days for service. After the polite young man at the booth activated it and installed it in my phone, a flood of communiques from my AirBnb host arrived. I had been having trouble getting ahold of him (he’s located in Singapore; I have the idea that this condo is but one of a far-flung empire of Asian rentals he manages), but he reassured me that all was well and that he’d left the keys for me at the juristic office at the condo. The previous tenant, he noted vaguely, had possible damaged the couch; he would take care of it later.

If this had been my first visit, I would have had no clue what a juristic office was or how to find it, but since this was the same building I stayed in here last year, I knew exactly where to go. The building discourages AirBnb uses (although the sign technically says “short-stay” rentals… I think two months probably isn’t outside the letter of the law) so I also knew to be discreet about what I told them. It’s all nodded and winked at, but the forms must be observed.

When I checked in, though, there was more bad news–the electric bill hadn’t been paid and the electricity had been turned off. (also some good news, though; my friend Monica, who lives nearby, had left me a small care package at the office on her way to work that morning, with some snacks to tide me over until I could make it to a store.)

This, of course, meant no air conditioning, which is a no-go in Thailand for a farang. So I texted the owner again to hassle him about it, and also sent him pictures of the other damage–scarred up walls, busted cupboard doors, a broken coffee table, and a crushed couch. I don’t even know how you do that to a couch.

It was such a long list that I didn’t even bother to confront him with the fact that the place was advertised as having a laptop-friendly workspace, but in fact (even assuming the couch to be in good working order) didn’t have anywhere to sit and work.

These are not things you want to deal with after spending more than 24 straight hours in transit, so Maxx and I repaired across the compound to Tom n Toms coffee shop in Habito Mall–air conditioning and smoothies to soothe the weary traveler.

Eventually, I got too tired to wait for the owner’s text, and Maxx had to get to work, so I went back to the condo and took a shower in the dark (cold, but I wanted it cold anyway in the sweltering condo!) and laid down to rest.

Fortunately, the lights came on after an hour or so and I turned on the AC. Blissful mechanically chilled air cascaded out and I lay down again. I fell asleep and missed Monica’s texts when she got home from work. But something woke me up a little later, around 8, and she stays up late, so I got up and wandered over to check out her new place.

Last year, she was renting a condo in the Base Park West, the mirror building to where I was (and am) staying at the Base Park East. But she had already put money down on a place in the newest building being built in the complex (just on the opposite side of East, alongside the klong), and this fall she finally moved in.

I was surprised when I walked over to it. It had been a construction site the year before, so it was no surprise that it was finished, but the surrounding areas, which had just been big green swaths of unreclaimed swamp, were now also brand new buildings or new construction sites. The company that owns the complex had been busy. A new school was right across the road, and a bunch of restaurants and shops had sprung up.

The new condos were low-rise and built around a pool and garden that give the place a much quieter aspect then the Base buildings. Monica says she likes it, but she’s still getting settled in. I spent many hours over the summer texting with her about painting and other minor mechanical duties concordant with homeownership. So I had been anxious to see the place in person, and it didn’t disappoint.

With Monica, it’s hard to tell what is simply post-move-in organizational issues and what is the natural state of disarray she is willing to countenance in her personal space. But beneath the debris, I liked the new fixtures, design, and subtle improvements on the older buildings–strip lighting in closets and cupboards, a fold-away table built in to the kitchen island, windows for the deck that could be closed against the noise and heat, a storage closet with a door off one end for the air-conditioning equipment and washing machine.

Mostly Monica told me what she didn’t like about it, though, and when I asked her if she was happy there, she had trouble answering. She wants to stay and make it her home, she said. But clearly it wasn’t there just yet.

I wasn’t sure what time I left but I had no trouble getting to sleep when I stumbled back to my own condo. At least, until the thunderstorm started.

Now, it’s just raining, and I am strongly considering using the umbrella provided here in the condo to make a trip over to Big C to go shopping. In Seattle, of course, it’s considered a sign of ill-breeding to use an umbrella, so I am strongly conditioned against it. But it’s madness to wear a rain jacket, or any sort of jacket, here in this heat. So maybe I’ll swallow my pride, go work at Tom n Tom’s for a bit, and then make the trek to the store.

January 26, 2018

Cycling Through the Green Lung

Bangkok is having a cold snap right about now–lows in the upper sixties, highs around eighty–which make it far more tolerable to explore on foot than usual. Or, as I found Saturday, by bike.

Across the Chao Praya, trapped in a looping bight of the river, a chunk of the city has been preserved, at least in part, as the sort of sparsely inhabited, foliage bedecked marshland that the entire area must have been circa 1782 when King Rama I wandered along and declared it the seat of empire.

It took a more recent king, King Bhumibol, to act to preserve the land. Alongside a city that is permanently under construction and ever-encroaching into the flat, rice-growing farmlands around it, it must have taken a kingly act of willpower and political gravitas to pull it off, but Bhumibol seems to have been just that sort of monarch. In 2016, shortly after his death, the military government announced a plan to safeguard the area, called Bang Krachao or “The Green Lung.”

The Green Lung is an island now, cut across at the narrowest part of its base with a canal (technically five islands–smaller canals chop it apart above the main canal) to shorten the trip upriver for vessels that can navigate it. It’s connected there by bridges to the greater Bangkok regional transit grid, but it is served by only a single main road along the axis and you can tell from the name of that road–Phetchahung Alley–that it’s not exactly a high-capacity thoroughfare.

So ferries serve to carry tourists and locals alike back and forth to Bang Krachao. Because the ferries are small and the roads narrow throughout the peninsula, bikes and motorbikes are the favored means of transportation. Which means that instead of car ferries, there are motorcycle ferries!

My entire luggage allotment for this trip was a 25 liter bag so obviously I don’t have a bike handy, but it’s possible to rent them near the ferry landings. My friend Monica has a fold-away Dahon Mariner that fits neatly into the trunk of her Toyota Vios.

After the usual white-knuckle ride to the ferry terminal (since the ferry terminal has no parking, Monica entered into some impenetrable but apparently commonplace deal with a gentleman standing the parking lot of an adjacent temple, where a funeral was being held and a spare parking space would apparently not be missed) we hopped right on to the ferry… along with twenty or so other passengers and about a half dozen motorcycles, gunned across a sheet metal ramp that is dropped across to the deck from the dock.

For both people and motorcycles it’s a quick trip across the river, the ferry pilot playing Frogger with the long barges bringing rice down from the Thai heartland and the pocket-sized LNG freighters ducking in and out of the nearby refinery.

I don’t know if it’s coincidence or a practical outcome of the religion-inducing ferry rides, but there was another temple at the landing on the island when we got off the boat. In the shade of the trees outside the temple, stacks of rusty, dusty, single-speed old bikes stand ready for both locals and tourists to rent out. Each have a handy basket on the front for snacks, drinks, or cell phones.

It’s only 50 baht, or just $1.50, to rent a bike for the afternoon there, but then, the bike is only worth about $0.25. After a moderately reassuring brake check and a few tentative laps I picked out what appeared to be the most robust of the lot, good old number 57. The chain felt like it was going to jump off anytime I put any real kick to the pedals, so I pedaled as gingerly as possible.

Although there aren’t a lot of cars on Bang Krachao, the Thai approach to driving carries over to motorbiking and cycling alike. No helmets are worn, no traffic rules are observed, texting and cellular conversations while driving are encouraged, and speeds are whatever you can muster up along the occasional straightaway.

Surprisingly, I didn’t have any trouble keeping to the left on the narrow roads, maybe because I was on a bike instead of in a car. I followed Monica up the road, a smoothly paved path that was about a car and a half wide, and lined on both sides with the usual assortment of shops, restaurants, cafes, and, of course, more temples.

Although Monica had been to Bang Krachao before, her sense of direction makes following her blindly a risky proposition, so I tried to keep track of where we were as we pedaled along. There is some signage in English, at least to indicate the popular tourist destinations, and I stopped every now and again to check my phone. Apple Maps are marginal at best even in the first world and almost utterly useless outside of major Western cities, but the compass feature on my iPhone was helpful when put together with the (also utterly awful but at least including local features) map provided by the bike rental place.

So after not terribly long and without too many wrong turns we found ourselves at the Siamese Fighting Fish Gallery, deep in the heart of the jungle.

There weren’t any actual fights there, which was fine by me, but simply jar after jar of delightfully colorful and oddly proportioned fish. The jars were separated by small slips of cardboard–apparently, the fish get pretty riled up if they can see their neighbor through the glass.

The more interesting thing to me than the actual fish (and there were a lot of fish there) were the grounds on which the gallery resided. Thai property rights and management have always been mysterious to me, but the parcel seemed to be centered around a large, placid lake edged with manicured grass and a handful of outbuildings of various eras and conditions. A rusting backhoe was parked on the lawn, weeds growing up through the machinery.

The whole place looked like a KOA that wasn’t getting much business (although there were a row of tents pitched toward the back that looked as if they might have been either really cheap AirBnb accommodations or really expensive eco-adventure rentals). A set of changing rooms was marked as being off-limits. Nearby, a stylish, glass-walled pavilion looked like it might have been supposed to be a cafe. Part of it seemed to have once been a Flintstone’s-themed outdoor restaurant. Having once run into a Donald Duck statue in a wat, it wasn’t all that surprising to find Dino hanging out in the jungle, but it made me intensely curious what the story was.

I never found out though, as we hit the road again heading for a park area in the heart of the island called the Sri Nakhon Khuean Khan Park and Botanical Garden.

Although the park isn’t very large, as botanical gardens go, it sort of bleeds over into the otherwise undeveloped area around it and so it seems pretty huge. The trails are more rough but a few lakes make it a lovely stop and a large viewing tower takes you up to the level of the tree canopy to get a closer look at the vegetation and birds.

Honestly, I wish I had more time and had looked around more, but I was distracted by the prospect of my front wheel parting ways with the rest of the bike if I hit a rock in the trail at the wrong angle, so I focused more on the pedaling than my surroundings. We did a circuit of one of the lakes then angled out onto the main road again to loop back toward the ferry landing.

We got jammed up behind another group of cyclists at one point, and Monica, deploying her finely-honed Thai-driving skills, blasted right through them at the first opportunity without incident. With my clunkier machine and frailer nerves, I found myself stuck behind the slowest and clunkiest member of the pack, until we were both several curves behind everyone else. Whereupon the girl, for a girl it was, promptly lost control and steered herself right off the edge of the road.

Some sort of thick grass broke the fall and kept her out of the muck, but the hefty rental bike kept going. She was trying to hold onto it and the edge edge of the road and not having much luck.

I summoned whatever ancient impulses of chivalry were required to suppress my utter certainty that a herd of cobras was surely lounging just past the side of the pavement and reached down to haul her up, then the bike.

“Korp kun ka,” she said, and I offered “Mai Pen Rai” in return and then took advantage of the opportunity to get back on the road ahead of her and make up some time.

Everyone was waiting at the next intersection, and while the girl filled in her companions on the excitement, Monica and I took off up the road at our own pace once again.

We swept through the narrow green isles of musty, tangy jungle, passed by bikers on coughing old scooters and modern Kawasakis, stinking of exhaust. Cyclists meander casually along the edges on antique, rusting bicycles, squeaking and squealing as their GPS-enabled smartphones whisper directions to them from the baskets. We pass ancient homes with solar arrays on the rooftops and nameless shacks sinking slowly into the swampy mire, right next door to sleek modern homes rising on piers from the primordial ooze. Wireless enabled cameras survey the road, relaying crisp HD imagery of sleeping dogs, wandering pigs, and other traffic back to the Ministry of Transport. Monks in bright orange robes perched serenely next to larger-than-life advertisements for high-speed cellular data plans.

This is the future I was promised by Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson. This is the cutting edge put to ancient and tribal purposes, the street finding its own uses for technology. I’m in a cyberpunk novel, on the original set of Blade Runner.

All along the main road, narrow, raised concrete paths lead off into the foliage and swampland. A few of them have some rusty handrails along the sides, but for the most part you are expected to exercise prudence and take some personal responsibility for not plummeting off into the slime ten or twelve feet below.

At one of these intersections, Monica stopped and turned and gave me one of her Monica looks.

I only felt confident taking a photo along a section with rails, but that’s not typical of the raised sidewalks in Bang Krachao.

“Promise me you won’t fall off,” she said, as if I could offer any such assurance even if I’d been on a mechanically-sound bike. But she didn’t wait, but just headed off along the sidewalk, and I was left to follow and hope she knew where she was going.

It was a more peaceful ride than out on the main drag, although negotiating 90 degree corners without plunging over the side required dredging up some long-forgotten biking skills. Passing the occasional local or tourist heading the other direction also required some smiles and balance.

The narrow walkways are the only route to many homes and business in Bang Krachao, though, so from time to time you are bound to encounter folks pulling large carts full of supplies, or pushing wheelbarrows with groceries in them. You slow to their pace for a while until you can convince them to let you inch past or there’s a branch in the trail network.

We finished up the day with a drink at the Bangkok Treehouse, an eco-tourist destination along the shores of the Chao Praya. The lower level is all bike parking; from the rooftop deck, a fine view of the river with a cool glass of crushed ice with mint and lime offers a relaxing perspective on the vessel traffic that you can’t experience on the water itself. Across the river, Bangkok hustles and smokes at its natural pace. But for a while, if you glance behind you into the still-calm forest, you can get a sense of how it all once must have been.

January 9, 2018

BKK Again

The rain and wind and fog spritzing the train windows told me that it was the perfect day to be leaving Seattle.

The train might not have been the perfect way to do it, however. I like a nice train ride and I like Vancouver BC, which was the train’s destination, but my ultimate destination was Bangkok, and a midnight flight after a long day shuffling around on Amtrak and SkyTrain to get to YVR was starting to seem like a mis-step, even if it saved me a couple hundred bucks on airfare.

I knew almost as soon as I got back from Thailand last winter that I was going to go back again this year. I had a fantastic time there and could see no upside to sitting around on a chilly, damp boat for four or five months waiting for the mild spring winds to return to Puget Sound again.

My only regret is that I didn’t book the ticket for November instead of waiting for January–two significant Puget Sound snowfalls and a lot of rain, wind, and ice drove it home for me between Halloween and New Year and I was more than ready to be gone again by the time January rolled around.

I hadn’t gotten in much sailing over the summer anyway, which made boat living even less appealing than usual. Juggling several different real estate transactions had kept me tied alongside but for one daysail on Zia (and that out on a Sound covered in smoke from the fires that burned inland for most of the summer season). I made some good trips on other people’s boats but it wasn’t the lazy summer sailing season on the Salish Sea that I had looked forward to.

I’m looking forward to that again next summer, and hopefully it will be realized this time, but in the immediate future, I’m looking forward to sunshine and swimming and delicious, cheap street food in enchanting soi’s and alleys. There are temples to see and rivers to tour.

At the same time, I’m worried that this year won’t live up to last year. Maybe it was all just new and amazing the first time, and I’ll be less enthralled this time around.

I haven’t heard back from my AirBnb host for a couple of days, either, which doesn’t ease my mind about whether or not I’ll even have a place to stay when I get there.

I am one-bagging it again, cramming three or four months worth of traveling into a waterproof 25ish-liter bag, the same one I cart around Seattle from day to day. I feel like I’ve got my packing list optimized this time–the bag is less full and lighter than last year, even though I’m carrying some extras for friends with me this time around.

I’ve been looking forward to what I found to be a period of clarity and productivity that I experienced there last year, but maybe that was a moment of unique time and space, too. I have more to be distracted by there now–my friend Maxx moved to Bangkok last year, and I’ve been in touch with my friend Monica there ever since I left… I booked a condo again in the building next to hers, so I’ll probably see her quite a lot again.

None of these things are anything to complain about–in fact, they make it even more enjoyable–but the distractions I have been confounded with here in Seattle may not be as far removed from Bangkok as I remember from last year.

It won’t just be Thailand this time around, either. Maxx and I have already booked a short trip to Vietnam (he hasn’t visited it yet, either). And I haven’t booked a return ticket yet–I plan for at least two months in Bangkok, but I’m also thinking I’ll spend at least one more month somewhere else in Southeast Asia. Vietnam if it’s amazing, perhaps; Taiwan or Malaysia, maybe.

And for some bizarre reason, I’ve been fixated for the past few months on an entirely un-Asian detour: a walking tour of the West Highland Way in Scotland. It’s not exactly on the direct route home, but then, since I’m already halfway around the world, it’s not really out of the way, either. Spring is supposed to be a great time for the hike. So I may come home via Europe.

It’s a long itinerary, even if it’s not exactly settled, and you’d think I’d be more excited than I am at the moment. Whether it’s just feeling worn down from the past month of getting things ready for me to be gone (and I am only hoping that all that actually happened–I can’t help but feel that much was missed in the run-up to my departure) or something more foreboding, I’m mostly just hoping to get this leg of the trip out of the way and to try to regroup when I arrive.

Preferably in the pool.

June 3, 2017

The Sights

I’m back in the United States but I had some mostly written but un-posted entries left over; I’ll post them now that I have some time to put them together.

I hadn’t gotten all gung-ho about rushing out to see all the tourist sights around Bangkok both because I figured I would have plenty of time to see them and because I have a self-imposed schedule to keep up with; weekdays, I am writing or working on other projects for most of the day.

It turns out to be just as well that I waited, since I’ve gotten to go see them now with a local, which turns the whole experience into something slightly less touristy and more culturally interesting. Not that the various temples, attractions, and neighborhoods are not in themselves interesting and full of the rich history of the region, but with Monica along I get a whole other subtext laid over the experience, the inside baseball perspective on both shrines and tourists that is missing from most of the official tours.

Thai Coast Guard Headquarters? Quite a variety of watercraft!

It’s never a good sign when your boat is met by a guy waiting with a portable bilge pump. Good thing the Coast Guard was nearby!

The best bang for your buck in the sightseeing department is along the big curve of the Chao Phraya river, the Mother Water of Kings that is Bangkok’s reason for being. As a small village controlling the mouth of the main drainage basin of the kingdom, Bangkok was destined for greater things, and as they came to it over the centuries, most of them came along the course of the river.

So the Grand Palace, many important temples, historic customs houses, and ancient neighborhoods continue to dominate the narrow shores of the Chao Phraya. Modern rail transport doesn’t penetrate to those neighborhoods, but the ancient waterway still provides access to anyone daring enough to hop an express boat.

It’s a quick walk from the BTS station at Saphin Taksin to Sathon Central Pier beneath the King Taksin Bridge. Dodge a few hucksters and you can either grab a tour boat or get aboard some variety of water taxi… colorfully delineated with flags marking the route served.

The boat operators move with a purpose and in a cloud of black smoke, you’re churning water heading upriver before you know it. All around are strange and wondrous craft plying their trades–boxy ferries adorned with advertising, flashy neon cruise boats serving hotels and tourists, grimy ferries shepherding barge-trains down to the see, sleek long-tails carrying private passengers along, their helmsmen getting a workout shifting around the whole engine to steer with.

For whatever reason, one of the usual docks was out of service and instead of going directly to Wat Pho, we had to debark on the other side of the river at Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn… although, for much of modern Bangkok, it’s on the side of the sunset as the population has gradually spilled east of the river.

The temple was largely covered in scaffolding and inaccessible, but the intricate detail of the exterior was still on display.

You have to pay to enter Wat Arun and most of the other attractions, and here Monica became incensed, because I had to pay, but she, as a Thai, did not. Whether she was upset because it was a double standard or because it was an OBVIOUS double standard, I’m not sure… the distinction being, I suppose, the potential loss of face being a local representative in the company of one being ripped off when he realizes he is being ripped off.

But, in point of fact, I didn’t feel ripped off and I think the system makes perfect sense. After all, these remain holy sites for most of the local population. Yet the traffic and resulting upkeep requirements cost money. The farangs coming in are creating most of the traffic and have most of the money–it only makes sense to charge them while allowing the locals to make their venerations as they have done for generations.

I suppose this does disservice to those touring Buddhists who get hit with the charges, but it’s a simple system that seems to work.

We grabbed a ferry across to the east side again and entered the labyrinthine precincts of Wat Pho.

The status of Thai Kings as partly divine causes a blending of religious with political history, and Wat Pho was erected by Rama I, whose ashes are still enshrined there. Later kings continued to expand the temple buildings there, causing their own ashes to be entombed there, giving the place a slightly Valley of the Kings feeling, with many similar buildings erected in slightly different styles as were dictated by the era in which they were built.

One of the many Chinese ballast statues.

The many Chinese statues around the various temple complexes come as some surprise, but show the deep influence China has had on the Kingdom down through the centuries. The story behind them, however, is even more surprising: they were brought here originally, according to various tour guides, as ballast aboard Chinese ships.

So, sometime in the earlier 1800s, a bosun’s mate in London is standing on the quay saying, “Eh, Geordie! Chuck another few bits of rock down in the hold, will you? We can still make the morning tide.”

And in Shanghai, the same day: “Jian! We are still light… run over to the honorable Master Li’s shop and commission two more statues! Let’s get a lion and a fierce warrior this time. Hurry! We should be able to sail by the next full moon!”

Which might explain why Western ships reached China first rather than vice versa.

Anyway, Wat Pho was founded as a place of education and remains as one today, teaching practitioners from around the world the arts of Thai traditional medicine and massage. Various inscriptions and illustrations around the grounds illustrate the pressure points used in the techniques.

The reputation of the temples as a center for enlightenment and education has rubbed off on the general neighborhood as well, which still includes a well-respected university.

And, continuing the blending of religion and government, Wat Pho is right next to the Grand Palace.

We had to go through a security checkpoint to get anywhere near the Grand Palace, and the streets were utterly empty by Bangkok standards.

“Take a picture,” said Monica. “You’ll never see it like this again.”

Which would be fortunate, in fact, because the reason for the security was the presence of the ashes of the late king, ensconced in the Royal Urn for his subjects to pay respect to during the one-year mourning period.

Tourist traffic has been heavily restricted and the palace hours shortened to cope with the Thai mourners. On the north side of the palace, we encountered a stream of them leaving. The lines can last three hours or more, for a brief second or two at the urn. Yet the urge is strong. Monica is waiting for a friend who is coming to town next month and will go then.

Unfortunately, this also means I didn’t ever get in to see the Grand Palace or the fabled Emerald Buddha that resides within. Another time, perhaps.

Instead, we returned to the river and crossed again to a market on the west bank. It was in the middle of shutting down for the evening but there was still food, which we ate on a plaza overlooking the stream and watched the boats going by.

The river is surprisingly narrow, but teems with boat traffic. Although not quite as chaotic as the streets of Bangkok, it would be enough to give me an ulcer if I were trying to navigate upriver in Zia.

There was a little confusion as to where to catch the ferry back downriver again, so we crossed yet again to the east bank, then had to hustle on foot because the dock we were at was not a stop for the last boat… which we would have to catch.

It turned out that Wat Arun glittered as easily at sunset as at dawn.

At night, the long upstream/downstream ferries (cross-river ferries are short and stubby) don’t have to fight for dock space as much as during the day but they do have another problem–the helmsman at the bow can’t see back to where the gangway is where the docking is happening.

So the deckhand at the stern uses whistle signals to guide them in. Between the signals and judicious use of spring lines, they are as adept at bringing the boats in at night as during the day.

March 15, 2017

The Little Temple With The Big Name

Was Phra That Doi Suthep is perched up on a mountain overlooking Chiang Mai and the valley it sits in and would be a fantastic vantage point even if it wasn’t also a sacred site in the history of Thai buddhism. Taken together, those factors pretty much make it a must-see stop for visitors to Chiang Mai.

Of course “perched on a mountain” and “visitor” leads to the question of transportation, since it’s not a quick walk even if the heat index were manageable, which it’s not. Getting a lift up the hill is the only sane way to the temples, and there is a predictably Thai solution to the problem.

Public transportation in Chiang Mai consists largely of a fleet of multi-colored little Toyota pickups, referred to generically as songthaew (“two benches” which accurately describes how the beds are outfitted) which cruise around semi-randomly. If you want to go somewhere, you flag down a songthaew (for destinations within or close to the city, a red one–called “rot dang” or “red truck”), tell the driver where you are heading, and if he feels like going that way and you can agree on a price, you hop in the back.

One wonders if the Buddha is so adorned to disguise severe injuries suffered in the climactic ride up the mountain in the back of a rot-dang.

They pack in ten folks (all heading more or less the same direction) which is not problem if the folks are Thai, but a tight squeeze for people built on a Western frame, such as myself.

Demand is such to go up the mountain to Wat Phra That Doi Suthep (I’m just going to start typing “Doi Suthep” because it’s a lot easier; that’s the name of the mountain itself) that there are a number of designated stops around town where you can go to be matched with like-minded people for the ride up. The rates are fixed from those points, so they wait until they can fill a truck before they send you on your way.

I wandered to the nearest of these stops early in the day and managed to get a seat right at the back door of the truck (they have canopies over the bed, a concession to both the rainy season and the difficulty of keeping drunk tourists contained in the back of the truck in Thai traffic).

The ride quickly turned into a nausea-inducing machine as the driver stormed up the hairpin curves ascending out of the city. One poor Chinese girl near the front of the truck got dry heaves. None of us in the back looked too healthy by the time we arrived, I don’t think.

Fortunately, the distance up the hill is relatively short and as we spilled out of the back of the songthaew, the cooler temperature and fresher air breathed new life into us. Which was important, because the next challenge is getting up the stairs.

I didn’t count them, but yes, there are a lot. Cool handrails, though.

A bit of background as to why the long truck ride and stairs are involved:

The monastery was founded by King Keu Naone in 1383 to enshrine a bit of bone said to be the from the shoulder of the Buddha. The foundation story is one of the most remarkable in a region where nearly every temple has an extraordinarily meaningful and involved tale to its establishment. The bone shard was brought to Chiang Mai by a wandering monk, whereupon (and there is probably a long story detailing this incident, I simply haven’t heard it) it broke into two pieces.

At the place where it broke, the King established the temple of Wat Suan Dok, which is just outside the old city, a bit north of the current airport, and enshrined one of the pieces.

The other piece, apparently in line with the custom at the time, was fastened reverently onto the back of a sacred white elephant, which was then allowed to wander the jungles until the end of its days. Where it died, Wat Phra That Doi Suthep was established.

That elephant had apparently only recently been reincarnated from a cat or a monkey or something (I’m making this part up), because it scaled a pretty impressive mountain on its dying legs and collapsed for all eternity at a suspiciously scenic place overlooking the valley below.

This abbreviated version of the story leaves out the supernatural powers of the relic, the symbolic trumpeting of the dying elephant, and the vision that possessed the monk to search out the shoulder bone of the Buddha in the first place.

It’s the shoulder of the crop-burning season and smoke settles in the valley below.

Anyway, the climbing prowess of the elephant means that the approaches to its final resting place require some energy and lung capacity. Today, 306 (or 309, depending on the source or where you start counting, I guess–I didn’t bother) stairs lead from the roadway up to the wat, a climb that would be oppressive further down the hill, but isn’t particularly taxing in the higher, cooler climate.

The temptation to ring the bells is strong despite signs advising not to.

The temple has a meditation center and healthy population of nuns and monks, and presumably they get about the business of worshipping in the less public places or in the evenings, because by day the place is overrun with tourists.

Nonetheless, it manages to be quiet, beautiful, and contemplative. Decorated with ornate carvings, gorgeous statuary, and an impressive golden spire, Doi Suthep is worth the trip. You imagine that elephant, the monk with the relic, and old King Keu Naone must be well-pleased with themselves in their current incarnations.

I spent a restful couple of hours on the mountain top, partly contemplating the story of the temple, the grand (if smokey) vistas, and other fine philosophical subjects suitable to holy places, but mostly dreading the prospect of the ride back down to town.

The little Toyota rot-dang hadn’t been able to get up a good head of steam charging up those curves; going down, I feared, was going to really test the limits of the driver’s skill and the g-loads on the balding tires.

I dithered amongst the stalls of the vendors set up at the base of the stairs and tried to pick a sensible-looking driver out from the pack, but in the end just got in the queue and left my fate to Buddha.

He smiled that day (as on most days); after jamming the ten of us into the back of the rot-dang, we pulled out onto the road and immediately got stuck behind a big, lumbering tour bus that was inching down through the curves at almost a walking pace.

Although this occasioned our driver to swing out into blind corners from time to time in vain attempts to pass, it made for a leisurely and entirely un-nauseating ride back down to Chiang Mai. The donation I’d left at the temple, apparently, had earned a little serenity.

February 26, 2017

Walking on Broken Glass

Chiang Mai and I got off on the wrong foot.

Doing dishes in my AirBnb condo, I bumped a plate that was drying, which knocked over a glass mug, and both of them exploded spectacularly across the hardwood floor. I promptly began to clean up the glass with the bottom of my bare feet–you don’t wear shoes in a Thai house–a process that has continued (despite much sweeping and mopping) for much of the week.

It was only one metaphor among many that came to mind during my one week stay.

The largest city in northern Thailand, Chiang Mai has an international reputation as the hub of international digital nomadism.

The neighbors have rabbits on the balcony. They look pretty miserable, even for rabbits.

Digital nomadery is a phenomenon that has largely emerged in parallel with the rise and spread of the Internet, which has enabled folks with jobs that don’t require being in a particular physical location to perform them from pretty much anywhere. Although this has made for a lot of disruption as companies in high-cost countries have realized they can now hire staff in low-cost countries without dealing with all that pesky immigration business, it has also worked in reverse: knowledge workers in high-cost countries have realized they can improve their quality of life and indulge in a sort of permanent vacation by traveling to the low-cost regions of the world.

Chiang Mai is the poster child for digital nomad destinations. Low cost of living, moderate climate, many Western amenities, and rock solid Internet access made it a prime destination for early waves of nomads.

Now, the whole scene is a little sick of itself, having hit a tipping point recently where almost as many foreigners are here selling other foreigners on the wonder and freedom of the digital nomad lifestyle as there are actually living that lifestyle. But there are still a lot of expats here with the tourists, some of them actually doing real work and enjoying life.

It’s a strange combination of noisy and quiet. The condo building I am in is older and looks vaguely run down, a reminder of more optimistic days. Half the lights are kept off, most of the commercial spaces are abandoned, and flower pots sit empty on every floor.

And cows and chickens on the other side of the building. This ain’t Bangkok anymore.

Yet there are always noises from adjoining apartments, coming through the paper thin walls.

The town, too, is like that. It is overrun with tourists and expats, but there is little of the street market liveliness of Bangkok, and the place seems to shut down at 8 pm (apart from the night market, near the river). The area where I am staying, Nimman, is supposedly the hub of a thriving expat scene, but it must be happening in bars and coworking spaces out of my view.

Everything here just seems a little tired and run down.

I’m having trouble figuring out if I really don’t like it that much or if I am just missing Bangkok.

As long as I’m here, though, in addition to doing my own semi-digital nomading, I thought I’d check out the sights.

I started with the old city (“Chiang Mai” actually means “new city,” which it was, when it was established in 1296), a square chunk carved out of the modern city by an ancient moat and fragments of the original city walls. It’s not unlike many European cities in that respect, and like them, there is as much modernity inside the “old city” as out.

The moat around the old city is both scenic and cool.

It does seem like the narrow, twisting alleys there are the center of the granola-chomping, coffee-swilling, Western backpacker element in town. There are dozens of hostels and a coffee shop on the ground floor of each of them, clouds of incense drifting out and tattoo and pseudo-spiritual trinket shops to either side. A few temples round it off as the complete tourist precinct.

Just the other side of the old city is the strip of shops and open lots that host the night market. As a rule, most Thai towns seem to have one or more of these, and I hadn’t gone to any yet–they’re most about buying stuff, and what am I going to buy? I came with a full backpack.

But I did decide (probably too late) to pick up a couple of new shirts, better suited to weather and circumstances than what I bought. We’ll see if I can actually fit them into my pack…. Anyway, leaving in the dead of winter, I had to pack clothes to do double duty, which meant a lot of synthetics. Cotton, of course, is preferable in this environment. I got some really good, lightweight but sturdy pants at REI before I left to maintain propriety when visiting temples, but I figured a decent cotton polo shirt would be better than the dark synthetic stuff I’d packed.

Unfortunately, it’s all but impossible to find any sort of shirt in a tourist market here that isn’t a counterfeit knock-off of some name brand. Indeed, buying those cheap knock-offs is the primary point of visiting those markets for many people. But I just wanted a plain old generic shirt, preferring not to encourage counterfeiting.

After spending a couple hours walking the market, though, I gave up. I’m now the proud owner of:

1 poorly-fitting black (ostensible) Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirt
1 poorly-made white (ostensible) Ralph Lauren Polo shirt, with an embarrassingly bad replica of the Polo logo on it

All this was in service of the next day’s expedition up the mountain to Wat Phra That Doi Suthep… the subject of our next blog entry.

The remains of the city walls still line the moat interior in places.

February 21, 2017

A Short Hike

My original plan for getting from Bangkok to Chiang Mai involved a relaxing and scenic overnight train ride through the open Thai countryside and up into the northern mountains.

As exciting as that prospect was, getting sick pretty much put an end to it. There aren’t really any reliable ways to buy train tickets online here so I had planned to just take a day and head down to the station to get things booked. Since the train fills up quickly–or at least the air conditioned sleeper cabins which I was set on do–I wanted to both get the ticket early and give myself time to still book a flight if the train was already booked up.

But I was out of action with the flu during the window I had to make that happen. So I shrugged, booked a plane ticket, and resolved to make the train trip another time.

The only problem with this was that I had left a one night hole in my accommodations bookings… which would have been spent on the train. Now, I had to find somewhere else to sleep, and since I booked the flight the same day as my condo started in Chiang Mai, it was going to have to be somewhere in Bangkok.

I figured somewhere near the airport would be cheap and easy, with an emphasis on cheap, so I got a room at the Rafael Mansion.

It was in the same neighborhood as the hotel I stayed at when I first arrived, so I was pretty comfortable with the area. It’s largely industrial apart from the hotels, but no one is staying there for the scenery. It’s just a place to get your head down before or after a late flight.

Something else that is missing is any nearby rail or subway line. Hotels either run their own shuttles or you take a cab. It’s not expensive, but there was another option I had been wanting to try since I got here, and this was the perfect opportunity: the Bangkok bus system.

I walked by Bangkok buses all the time but the system is famously obscure to Westerners: four or five (or six or seven, depending on the websites you read) different classes of buses, signage only in Thai, no English-language system maps worthy of the name, complex and impenetrable fare structures. The buses are dirt cheap compared to other transit options, but then, those options aren’t exactly expensive so it’s easy to avoid the bus entirely for most visitors.

Where can I get one of those cool Yanmar shirts? Long sleeves here aren’t appealing. Fellow bus-stop waiter is more acclimated than I am.

Buses are my primary means of transportation back home, though, so I had a perverse urge to try them here at least once. And Google Maps identified an air-conditioned route from the airport train line (which I would, together with BTS, take for most of the distance).

So, one stop before the airport, I hopped off the rail system and made my way down to street level to seek out the bus stop for the 553 on Lat Krabang Road.

Just getting from the train station to the road was a challenge, though. The airport expressway was in between, as was a canal. I walked through a parking lot beneath the elevated expressway until I got to the canal. There was a lower road bridge, but I didn’t see any sidewalk leading to it. Walking a Thai road without anywhere to jump to is sheer insanity, so I figured I’d have to backtrack to the train station and admit defeat by getting cab.

Then I saw a man on the road bridge, leaning out over the canal and looking down. Suicidal? Or had I missed something?

I backtracked to the end of the bridge. Sure enough–there was a sidewalk across the bridge… just no sidewalk to the bridge.

I bushwhacked as far as I could along the shoulder then took my chances on the busy road, waiting for a gap before hustling up to the start of the sidewalk and continuing across.

That obstacle overcome, the next presented itself: locating the bus stop. There are no signs. But I hoped there would at least be a bench or something, and there was, with a shade thoughtfully stretched over it and three people already waiting. I was glad to see that, because the bus won’t automatically stop (with as many people as are always on the sidewalk here, they’d never stop stopping)–you have to signal it. But waving, apparently, is inappropriate and possibly insulting, so a weird palm-down gesture is used, one that I had not mastered.

I was feeling pretty pleased with myself and figured I could overcome the final two obstacles of figuring out how to pay and when to get off, but as the minutes ticked by and no bus passed, I started to worry.

Google said every ten minutes, and there were three different buses that were supposed to serve that stop. There are different classes of bus, and I was looking for the blue and beige air-conditioned buses. Eventually, one of the ubiquitous red and white open buses came by, but no one signaled or got on, and the number on it wasn’t 553, so I didn’t think that was it.

But no 553 appeared, only red and white buses with 1013 on them. I saw a few blueish buses on the other side of the road, but they were all heading the wrong way.

Eventually, all the other people at the stop all trickled away and I started rethinking my options.

I could grab a cab–several swung in and gestured to me while I was waiting, on the probably accurate theory that no farang in his right mind could possibly be on the street in that neighborhood unless looking for a cab driver to rescue him. Or–I consulted my phone and checked the distance to the hotel. Only five miles… a quick stroll at home, but not nearly as trivial in the Bangkok heat on Bangkok sidewalks.

But I figured I could at least start in that direction. I had already been waiting an hour; if a bus came by along the way, swell. If I got overwhelmed by the heat, I’d duck into a 7/11 (three on every block!) and get a drink and something to eat. And if I tired out and there was still no bus, I could flag down one of the ubiquitous cabs.

So off I went, stumbling over broken cobblestone and sweating like a pig.

After I made the turn onto King Kaeo Road, though, I recognized all the various flaws in my logic.

One, the side of the road the hotel was on was opposite traffic. The road is large and divided and there’s no crossing it for miles at a stretch. So I wasn’t going to be able to catch a bus even if one eventually showed up. If I flagged down a cab, it would be going the wrong direction and have to go almost back to where I started to turn around.

Two, it was a largely industrial area, and there were no 7/11s to be found.

So it was a long, hot hike down to Soi 33, the alley leading off to the hotel. I did eventually find a 7/11 (I knew there had to be one) but there were also a few mom and pop street vendors selling food and water so I didn’t pass out.

When I showed up at the front desk, the girl there was appalled.

“Why you all…?” and she waved her hands up and down over her face, making the international sign for a raging waterfall.

“I had a little walk to get here,” I told her, smiling.

Fortunately, there was water in the room, but no food anywhere nearby. After the sun went down, I resolved to hike back to a Tesco Lotus mini-store at the head of the soi and get some dinner.

But on my way to the Tesco, suddenly I ran into a lot of traffic. For after-hours on a sleepy little soi dominated by container storage yards, it was unexpected.

Then I saw why–an empty dirt parking lot I had tramped through earlier in the day had magically been transformed into a night market.

So I had a good meal of some sort of delicious meat on a stick and some sweet crackers that I have learned to identify but still don’t know what they are made out of.

The hotel was supposed to have a shuttle service but it turned out that they didn’t; they would just call you a cab. I went ahead and scheduled one with the front desk for check-out time the next day, and I distinctly remember saying “noon” to avoid any potential confusion about AM/PM (although theoretically they use a 24-hour clock here, just as boaters do, in practice everyone I talk to seems to use 12-hour references… maybe because they think I expect it?).

So when the soft tapping at my door woke me up at midnight, I didn’t immediately make the connection. In fact, it was so soft I wasn’t even sure it was my door at first. The hotel was such that late night visitors to the neighbors would not be unexpected. But the tapping didn’t stop and I started to think maybe someone just had the wrong room. Or maybe it was a prelude to something nefarious… the doors had no deadbolts and the locks could easily be defeated. So I got up to peer out the peephole.

Whoever booked her for the night is in for a serious disappointment, was my first thought. Then I realized it was the night desk clerk, and what must have happened.

She was very apologetic, although I imagine she probably thought it was my fault. I wandered down in the morning to make sure they had re-scheduled one for noon again (although I was in no rush; my flight was later in the afternoon) and they had. Although “booked” has a somewhat transitive meaning here… when noon actually rolled around, the girl at the desk had to run out to the main road and actually flag a cab down because their usual service didn’t have anyone available. Which is just another example of how accommodating the Thai people are… I could (and would, had I known) have walked out to myself and flagged one down if I’d known. It makes me a little upset to read reviews that complain about staff here, which I think are mostly a result of miscommunication rather than indifference or neglect… I have yet to run into anyone who is less than friendly and helpful anywhere I have stayed. Just like in the U.S., they spend most of their time at the desk looking bored and staring at their phones, but as soon as they notice you, they are sunshine and smiles.

The extreme customer service focus continued at the airport. In addition to a very easy passage through security, I got to spend most of my wait for the plane in a free economy-class lounge thoughtfully provided by Bangkok Airways. The price for the flight was only about $30, but there was free Internet, free food, free drink, cable TV, newspapers and other reading material. The lounge was busy but it was an incredible touch for economy class. Passing back through next weekend on my way to Krabi, I have a four-hour layover and fully intend to take advantage of it again.

February 20, 2017

Erawan Falls

A more pleasant trip out of Kanchanaburi than the Death Railway is the excursion to Erawan National Park.

Scattered across the Tenasserim Hills northwest of town, the park is best known for a series of pools and waterfalls, a seven-tiered confection of carved limestone bowls that feeds eventually down into the Khwae Yai.

The park is popular with tourists and locals along. During a holiday weekend, it was bound to be busy, so we got up and got on the road fairly early to make the 60 kilometer drive from Kanchanaburi.

The dry and dusty foothills along the Kwhae Yai.

I’d been primed for heavy jungle (again, perhaps influenced by “The Bridge on the River Kwai” which was actually filmed in Sri Lanka) but the forests were dry and dusty, closer to the great evergreen stands of Eastern Washington than the rainforests of Western Washington. And although the trees here are primarily deciduous, there were forest fire danger indicators along the roads that would not look out of place near Leavenworth or Winthrop. All they were missing was Smokey the Bear.

Also like the highways of eastern Washington, there were plenty of animal crossing warning signs, only the silhouettes on the signs were of elephants instead of deer. But, like the deer, the elephants were nowhere to be seen.

Traffic jammed up at the park entrance but before long we were winding our way up into the hills, which, despite their relatively low altitude, serve to block some of the monsoon rains and make the east side of the range so dry. Monica, a flat-lander from the rice bowl around Bangkok, kept asking me if she should shift into low gear as we climbed what must have been a five or ten percent grade.

Snakes sighted: almost one. This skin was in the parking area.

The Thai park rangers on duty were well-practiced at getting a lot of people into the park on such busy weekends and they quickly and efficiently directed us to parking after we’d entered the gates. There are concessions and bungalows near the entry, but no food or drink is allowed (in theory; more on the later) past the third pool so we just started up the trail.

It’s an easy walk to the first set of pools. They were already well-populated with families, an easy destination for anyone with small children or old folks along. Though broad, the falls at the low end are relatively unspectacular, but the pools are wide and inviting. If there is something that “The Bridge on the River Kwai” got right about the approaches to the bridge site, it is the lovely pools and waterfalls surrounded by forest and the sound of exotic birds.

The trail between each of the falls was hot but sitting beside or–better yet–in the stream itself was just about perfect.

The pools are home to tiny doctor fish which are known to cruise around and nibble at the succulent dead skin on people’s legs and toes. Sometimes they don’t stick to the dead stuff. Monica chirped as one of them took too big a chunk of her, but I was strangely unappetizing. Of course, I had my shoes on, but despite a crowd of fish hanging out around my legs, nobody took a bite.

“Too much hair,” Monica sniffed, pointing at my moderately hirsute calves. “They can’t get in.”

The falls were crowded all the way up (or as high as we went, which was somewhere between the 5th and 6th tiers) but there was always room to slip into the water and cool of for a while, watching kids splash and the elders wallow.

At the 4th tier, natural slides formed a popular attraction for the kids. A short climb up to a terrace led to a quick ride and a cool splash in the emerald pool at the base of the falls. I found myself wishing I had brought a waterproof phone case… I didn’t trust the ziplock I brought along to survive such a plunge.

Some of the tourists seemed like they were on a mission, charging hard up the trails to get to the fabled 7th fall (reputed to resemble the head of an elephant, explaining the name… Erawan being the mythical white, many-headed elephant ridden by the Hindu god Indra). But it’s the dry season and water levels are relatively low; each step up was less impressive than the last.

Not everyone was having a great day. At the checkpoint at the third falls where you are supposed to leave all food and drink (a measure to combat littering and monkey-feeding; we didn’t see any monkeys or litter, so it seems to work) a white guy got into a heated dispute with the park rangers.

It turns out that you CAN take bottled water higher up–only sensible in this climate–as long as you pay a deposit. For some reason, this discovery, made beneath the very sign claiming “No food or drink past this point!” incensed the farang beyond all reason.

He yelled at the bottle-deposit-taking ranger about how bloody inaccurate the signs were (he was, and I silently thanked god for this, British and not American) and then, perhaps launching in on his real issue, started blasting her for the dual rate structure for entry.

Like many Thai tourist attractions (or goods or services generally, in tourist areas), the park charges farang visitors more to get in than Thai people.

So far, this hasn’t bothered me at all–even though it costs more, it still doesn’t cost a lot, and I figure the tourists are both the ones creating most of the traffic and the ones with the most disposable income available to help pay for it, so why not charge us more? It would be a shame to price Thais out of their own parks and temples just to be “fair.”

This butterfly, apparently sensing a kindred spirit, formed a romantic attachment to my shoe.

This guy had had his fill of the practice, though, and possibly with good reason–he was a long-term expat, it turned out, with a Thai wife and two kids.

“I pay taxes and you charge me twice as much and the bloody signs still aren’t right!” he fumed. Then he launched into further excoriations in what Monica assured me was quite good Thai, but I could see from the expression on the ranger’s faces that they were unimpressed.

I didn’t think much more about it and we went on and enjoyed the rest of our day at the park. Then we ran into the farang again at our hotel–he and his family were staying there, too.

I don’t think he recognized us at all, since we had just been hanging around in the background, but we knew who he was immediately, and I started the eye-rolling immediately. I dread the reputation Westerners get as rich, entitled assholes, who expect to be accepted instantly into any foreign culture that they favor with a visit. The world has adapted to our norms remarkably over the past few centuries, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily appreciate it.

But at breakfast, around the pool, and elsewhere, the guy didn’t seem like a jerk… just an ordinary father, on vacation with his ordinary wife and kids. And so I started thinking about him, and the whole situation, more. And I think I changed my mind.

Not necessarily about the dual rates–I don’t see a way around that system that would both be fair to the Thais and allow tourists to do touristy stuff–or about the impossibility of ever truly fitting in to an insular culture you weren’t born into. You can’t make people like you; you can’t demand social inclusion. In fact, doing so usually just backfires.

The thing is, this is an old debate in the United States. And when I am there, I realized, I would be on the other side of it. If the entitled white British guy were, say, a Mexican immigrant who had similarly followed all the rules, paid his taxes, had kids and become a productive member of society, and storekeepers and public officials in the U.S. insisted on charging him twice as much and treating him as a second-class citizen, I would be incensed.

Maybe this simply betrays another unwarranted influx of Western values, but I decided the guy had a point. Maybe his Thai neighbors would never invite him to the BBQ, but if he moved here legally, contributes to society, and follows the rules, there’s no reason he should continue to be treated as a second class citizen.

I know there are plenty of people for whom there is absolutely no mechanism by which white people can be discriminated against (such is the vast level of power and privilege associated with that skin color), but if these heady principles cannot be applied to the situation and benefit of any given individual, regardless of race, color, or creed, I would submit that they are worthless as principles indeed.

Probably someone has done much deeper thinking than I have about the point at which appreciation of other cultures transcends into outright acceptance of racism and other abuses, but nothing has put it so clearly in perspective for me as this particular incident.