Sawasdee from Thailand!
Trip Start
Mar 21, 2006
1
45
55
Trip End
Oct 05, 2008
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Chiang Mai,
Thailand
Monday, August 18, 2008
I have nearly been in Thailand one week and so far it has been a wonderful time.
I arrived to Bangkok very early last Tuesday morning so it was nice to have a familiar face and friend to hang with later that day. One of my fellow PCV from the Philippines, Dave Ambush was there on the tail end of his bike trip across SE Asia. So we spent the day together wandering the endless roads of shopping stalls on the famous Khao San Road in the heart of Bangkok! All the opportunities to buy things everywhere was quite overwhelming but it was good window shopping for my final days there in October. I do plan on doing some shopping! There are endless rows of Buddha carvings, flowing fishermen pants, enough hemp to clothe all hippies in the world and you can get nicely tailored suits made as well.
I was expecting Bangkok to be as dirty and difficult to navigate as Manila but I was wrong. Thailand is so much more developed then the Philippines and because of this there is tons of infrastructure set up for tourist. It was easy to get an honest taxi from the airport and just about every other shop around Khao San Road is tourist centers where you can buy any tickets you want to get you to your next destination. Which I did, Ambush and I hung out for most of the day and I caught a night train north to Chiang Mai that evening.
It was really fun to ride a train; it reminded me of backpacking trough Europe in 2004. While the sleeper bed was not the most comfortable it did the job and 16 hours later (long, long ride) I arrived to what the lonely planet describes as a Bohemian center Chiang Mai. This buzzing town with many cafes and enough tourist bars to keep you out very late each night (which I did not partake in) is sort of the gate way to the beautiful villages and mountains further north. Chiang Mai is known as an academic town with many universities and it is easy to get around town with most attractions located near the old ruins of the moat. Which are ruins from nearly 700 years ago when the locals built a wall to defend the city from Burmese invaders.
My first full day here I visited one of the over 300 Wat (temples) in the city, Chiang Mai has nearly as many Wats as Bangkok. Wat Doi Suthep is placed on top of the mountain it is named after and has quite a view of Chiang Mai town once you reach the top (300 plus stairs later). According to legend the temple was first established around 1383 and since then has added many shrines and chedis and has become a very sacred place for Thais and visitors in Chiang Mai. The temple was constructed after a monk had a dream where god told him to go to Pang Cha and look for a relic. The monk ventured out and did find a relic that he claimed to be a shoulder bone of Buddha's. With the permission of the King at the time, the monk Sumanathera took the relic to what is now Lamphun, in northern Thailand. The relic apparently split in two, one piece was the same size; the other was smaller than the original. The smaller piece of the relic was enshrined at a temple in Suandok. The other piece was placed by the King on the back of a white elephant which was released in the jungle. The elephant is said to have climbed up Doi Suthep, at the time called Doi Aoy Chang (Sugar Elephant Mountain), trumpeted three times before dying at the site. It was interpreted as a sign and the King ordered the construction of a temple at the site. This is one of the many reasons why the elephant is such a sacred and important symbol to Buddhist in Thailand.
Wat Doi Suthep was beautiful but it still continues to amaze me that the monks can constantly be in such calming peace when there are so many loud tourist and visitors around. The monks here are amazing!
The next day I took a Thai cooking class which was so much fun! Not only did we receive a cook book with the course but we spent the first hour at the market walking around learning about all the local Thai veggies and ingredients and buying what we needed for the course. Then we drove about 20 mins outside of the city to a beautiful compound with gardens and started cooking! We each had our own cooking station and after watching the instructors make a dish it was our turn. We learned to make, big flat stir fried noodles, red curry, spicy chicken cashew stir fry, banana coconut cream dessert and my favorite new dish a spicy tiger prawn salad. By the end of the class we were all stuffed with delicious Thai food and learned that cooking Thai is really not that difficult! We had quite an international course, people from Spain, Germany, Scotland, Canada, Switzerland, Australia and three couples from the US all on their honeymoon. It was fun to swap travel stories as we all enjoyed our spicy Thai food.
I spent the last two days visiting a PCV Garrett at his site. His site is about five hours northwest of Chiang Mai in a beautiful small very rural village called Baan Mai. The drive getting there reminded me of the epic journey on a jeepney many of us took to Sagada the last two Thanksgivings in the Philippines. In fact Garrets site looks so much like the Cordillera with pine forest all around I nearly had to pinch myself that I was not back at my site in Tublay! Besides the fact that Thai was being spoken all around me and I could not read any of the signs on the road, it could have been the Cordillera Mountains. It was a windy and very slick muddy trip getting up there in a packed yellow truck (similar to a jeepney, but smaller). So I was gald to finally arrive at Garrett's massive beautiful pine wood home. I think it must be the largest home any PCV lives in, he has two spare bed rooms, two toliets and great hammock spots on his porch for reading and enjoying the sounds of nature all around.
He lives in a village made up of the Karen Tribe who are ethnically Burmese but migrated to these mountains generations ago. They are all primarily subsistence farmers and because of a strong missionary presence in Burma are all Christians. Garrett and I had many good conversations about how the missionary presence in their lives has feed them many lies and is quite off putting. He has heard Karen people there say that farangs (Thai word of foreigner) have bigger brains then they do! Can you even believe that! While there is nothing wrong with a spiritual life, it is so sad to see how missionary work strips people of their culture and traditions.
Garrett is a very integrated PCV and speaks Thai fluently and has wonderful relationships with the villagers he lives and works with. He is helping the women in the village process a spicy chili paste they all eat and find markets for their beautiful weaving products. His site is basically the "image of Peace Corps," dirt roads leading into the village, only Thai and Karen spoken by most people and beautiful mountains all around. The first night after we ate dinner at that the only place other then cooking at his house to get food in the village, we headed a few houses down and Garrett taught his informal English class to some of the local women and children. It was so fun to see how eager they were to learn from him and also great that he was speaking in Thai to them and they would answer in English. It is much better to learn a foreign language when the mode of instruction is in your native tongue.
Yesterday after a brief trip to the hospital so Garrett could get an infected toe cleaned up ( just the day in the life of a PCV) we wandered around his village and being that it was Sunday and church was just getting out I got to see the beautiful woven clothes of the locals. The Karen women wear long beautiful skirts and the men where woven pull over style shirts with slacks. I am again amazed at all the similarities between indigenous and ethnic tribes from all over the world. We had a relaxing day hanging out in his sleepy little village and it was so fun to connect with another PCV and see how they live at their site. Similar to my situation in Tublay Garrett kept saying how lucky he was to be "on top of the mountain" as they say, and that he really would not be happy anywhere else! His village really is a beautiful place and I am so glad I got to see it!
I arrived back to Chiang Mai this afternoon, with a brief lunch stop in a hippie tourist town called Pai. There are organic farms and cafes all around the town and I enjoyed a delicious homemade veggie burger while I looked out on the mountains and sat near the River Pai. Tomorrow I fly to Luang Prabang in Lao and will spend about 5 days there before I connect with a fellow Philippines PCV (Ian) further south in Lao.
I will end my entry with a wonderful happening that occurred early this morning (6:45 am) as I waited for the only ride out of the village to Pai. The wife of the truck driver (beautiful Karen woman with baby wrapped on her back) as we were leaving this morning we exchanged smiles and a greeting and she proceeded to give me a massive bag of freshly harvested passion fruits! Though we could not speak the same language the kindness of giving and receiving was exchanged beyond language and cultural barriers! I have been enjoying the delicious passion fruits the entire day!
Next entry from Lao!
All my love,
Sherry
