Category: Thailand

Posted on

Alone and Uncertain

Chiang Mai, Thailand

I have been trying and failing to find the thoughtful thing to say, so never mind. I will simply fill you in on where I’ve been, where I’m going, and what it has been like so far.

Little towns up the middle

After Ayutthaya, which a friend drove me to from Bangkok, I moved on to Lopburi, a small city known for its troop of monkeys who dominate a temple near the train station and wreak havoc over a small part of the town. I took the train, strapping on the full pack for the first time, though I could probably just have easily rolled it (it has wheels). Riding the train in Thailand is easy: stationmasters tell you which train to get on, and conductors tell you where to get off. I made friends with some Chinese exchange students during the ride.

In Lopburi, I learned what it is like to have a monkey on your back, and it’s not good. The monkeys were rather terrifying, and I made friends with a Belgian couple at the temple who were doing the same thing as me: trying to take pictures while avoiding actual monkey contact. We ended up inside the temple, which has cage doors to keep the monkeys out, when a sudden downpour trapped us. We then wandered the town in the rain and went back to the only really social guesthouse in town, NooM, where I was staying. There I met a Ukrainian-American who’d been teaching in Korea for four years, and his Chinese girlfriend, and also an English guy covered in tattoos who is about my age, made a pilgrimage to Seattle when he was 17, and actually knows the band Hater.

Daniel, the Englishman, turned out to be good company, though he’s a bit of a loner and sorting out some personal tragedies. He’d been in Dharamsala for the past several months, so we shared a lot of India horror stories. We spent the day together in Lopburi, and then took the same train (different cars) up to Phitsanulok, which is where you transfer if you’re going to Sukhothai, a major site for Thai ruins. Despite going from train to tuk-tuk to bus to tuk-tuk again, the whole process was fairly smooth. No one seemed interested in ripping us off, and people were helpful in getting us to where we needed to be.

Sukhothai was a delight. I stayed in a gorgeous hotel (Daniel did a cheaper guesthouse), and the ruins were spectacular, and we spent the day riding around them on bikes. It was no surprise that the site was well maintained and impressive. What was surprising were our interactions with the locals. In front of Wat Si Chum, we stopped for drink coconuts. What could have been a spot of tourist hassle was anything but. The old woman with the gold teeth who sold us the coconuts, at a fair price, was thrilled to speak to us and kept asking if we understood her English, which I mostly did. She ushered us to a shaded platform to sit on, and then cut our coconuts open and scooped out the meat for us. Then I mosied over to a display of paintings and other art by a local artist, an effeminate guy who said he did his art “with a friend,” a ladyboy who later showed up on a motorcycle. I bought a painting at the reasonable price of B400, a half Buddha painted on cloth.

Later, after a long ride around the national park section of the area, all forest and crumbling wats, we headed to a pack of mostly identical little eateries near the park entrance. We picked one more or less at random, and it turned out to be a winner: the cute mom waitress was flirty and funny, and her mother or mother-in-law was hilarious, coming over to box and arm wrestle with me. And the iced coffee and noodles were great, and so was the hot coffee Daniel had. What could have been boring, shitty in-the-park food was great and fun. And then later, outside the park, we ate at the place next to Daniel’s guesthouse, and I had the local style of noodles, with palm sugar, and some fried pumpkin, and that too was delicious.

There was also the charm of bumping into the same little set of fellow travelers. On the bus we found a French girl we’d met the night before (I saw her again in Chiang Mai), and then found the Belgian couple at Daniel’s guesthouse, and later I spotted the Dutch software engineer who’d come and chatted with us back in Lopburi.

Chiang Mai surprise

I had the thought that I was already finding Thailand charming, and I hadn’t yet been to any of the bits of it people really love: the beaches, the islands, Chiang Mai, Pai. I had high hopes for Chiang Mai, where I would meet an old friend from Google. Instead, it has turned out to be the first place in Thailand I don’t much like.

That needs to be qualified a bit. It’s still pleasant, with lots of beautiful temples and good food and no major hassles. But there’s something about the expat culture here — a colonial vibe, perhaps, and maybe too many white men who’ve come searching for a place that they can live their lives without the rigors of feminism — that rubs me the wrong way. And something too about the sheer scale of the tourism here, the way that the old city is dominated by backpackers and other travelers. There were plenty of us in Bangkok too, but Bangkok is too big to be about us. Here the farang come and settle and buy property and own bars, and there’s something off. It’s hard to put my finger on it.

Loneliness and uncertainty

I have also come face to face with loneliness here. Daniel went his way, and I was on my own in a biggish city. I spent some time with my old Google friend, and with the French girl and her little French group, and I made a two-hour friendship with a Canadian woman and had a random dinner with some Japanese women I met while waiting for a table at a restaurant. But I’ve come to realize that once I’m on my own again, I get nervous. I get weird. I get depressed.

I have also come up against my fear of discomfort and uncertainty. I worry about picking the right hotel, booking ahead, making the right plans.

I don’t want to overstate any of this. I am on an extended vacation in a beautiful place. The other day I was feeling lousy, but then I went out to walk around, and I watched a monk giving hammer dulcimer lessons to kids, and then I passed a barbecue in the park and some random guy insisted on giving me a hunk of fried chicken. It was delicious. Thailand is like that.

But part of what I’m doing here is getting to know myself. And if you want to bring out your neuroses, spending some time alone on the road will usually do the trick. For me, it’s fear of discomfort and fear of loneliness.

For the loneliness, I’ve started meditating again. The feeling comes in an intense blast, but it usually passes. The meditation helps with recognizing that it will pass, not getting caught up in it.

I am also going to Pai — and for the fear of discomfort and uncertainty, I’m going without any hotel booked. I will get there and I will look around. And I will be OK.

I think.

I am also hoping that Pai will be a good place to meet people and get into some activities, like rafting or trekking. I am hoping that it will not be a tourist nightmare.

(And there’s that fear again.)

See you soon!

Posted on

Days Off

Ayutthaya, Thailand

Today I took the day off from traveling. I ate breakfast at the hotel, called friends and family, spent a few hours catching up with people I care about and just talking through my experiences so far. I went and saw exactly zero tourist sights.

When you’re traveling for long stretches, it’s important to remember that you get days off — time to rest, relax, do not much of anything. I’m sunburned, my legs are a bit sore from lots of cycling, I’m a little bit losing my voice. I’ve been running pretty full-tilt since I got to Asia, and it felt good to take a day just to relax as I might at home.

In the afternoon I went down to the pool, chatted for a while with a German guy (named Stefan, inevitably) and an English couple with a two-year-old, and then I befriended a French Swiss guy who met up with me for dinner. We watched a tremendous thunderstorm together, then went out for a walk around the block, found the local department store, and bought ourselves cycling shirts for 99 baht. Then we sat out at a cafe and listened to some aging Thai rockers bang out classic rock covers — “Sultans of Swing,” “Hotel California,” “Cocaine” — with middling competence while we drank fruit shakes. It was nice. It was easy. I didn’t really have to try very hard.

Traveling for months can get lonely, but I am starting to adjust to the reality of what travel is like now, rather than hanging on to old ideas from my distant past. First of all, I’m just a lot more mature than I was when I traveled in India years ago — more comfortable with myself alone, and also more comfortable talking to strangers. Second, technology has put my friends and family much closer than they were, and I am starting to make use of it.

I had a good day off. Tomorrow I’m headed to my next destination, Lopburi, city of monkeys!

Posted on

Not India

Ayutthaya, Thailand

An important fact about Thailand is that it is not India.

My first travel abroad was to India, and it’s the only place (well, plus Nepal) where I’ve done extended backpacking. I now realize that the Indian experience is where a lot of my travel apprehension is coming from.

Here’s an example. I’ve spent two days riding a rented bike all over Ayutthaya, one of the most famous and popular tourist spots in the country. Not once has a beggar approached me, and the most aggressive selling I’ve encountered came from a woman who waved some postcards at me. When I tried to buy a hat in front of the temple, the woman selling it quoted the price as a reasonable B200, and I sort of weakly attempted to haggle before paying full price. The prices for entry to monuments are clearly marked, and that’s what you pay.

None of this is true in India, or at least it wasn’t when I was there. If Ayutthaya were in India, each monument would have an army of aggressive beggars out front — children, cripples, old women — and an army of tuk-tuk drivers chasing after you, and a bunch of guides who keep trying to follow you around and get you to pay for their services. The entry price would be marked as, say, 200 rupees, and the guy would insist that the sign is out of date and you need to pay 500. And buying a hat? It would have gone like this:

Merchant: How much you like?

Me: No, just tell me a price.

Merchant: Anything you want.

Me: OK, thirty rupees?

Merchant: What! How can you say that! No, no! What talking about, thirty rupees?

Me: So how much then?

Merchant: You say good price.

Eventually the guy would either name an absurd price, or I’d just give up and walk away, feeling like we’d just had some kind of uncomfortable argument. The walking away might or might not bring the price down to something reasonable. There would be little chance that I could just buy a hat at a fair price without a whole psychodrama and a high risk of failure.

Thailand just isn’t like India that way. It’s not assaultive or confrontational. In fact, Thais seem to shy away from confrontation. They are polite. They don’t honk their horns, an oddity in Asia. They let me merge with traffic pretty easily on a bicycle. They take no for an answer. When I asked about a bus to Lopburi at my hotel, the manager said I should just take the train — there wasn’t even a thought about making the extra dollar by booking me on something I didn’t need.

I mentioned to my UN friend that I hadn’t yet worked out, in my few days in Bangkok, what drives Thai people, what motivates them. She said what drives them is sanook, a Thai word meaning something like fun or the good life. There’s maybe a Southern European quality to Thais that contrasts with the Northern European qualities of the more driven Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese, those cultures that absorbed Confucianism as an ethos. I think in the long run that I prefer life among the Confucians — I like the energy and ambition — but it’s comfortable here, and easy. It might be less so in some of the other countries of the region, or in other parts of Thailand. We will see. But so far, Thais have been kind and friendly and easygoing, and it’s a welcome relief from what I was braced to expect.

Scattered observations

If we assume that my trip to Southeast Asia will last 200 days — a big if — then already I’m about 6% done. I have been to two places, Bangkok and Ayutthaya. At my current rate, I would see maybe 40 places in all of my travel. Is that a lot? Not enough? I’ll probably pick up the pace a bit at times, but also probably wash out and stay for a while in other spots.

In Thailand, there’s a belief that when you build a house, you disturb the spirits that were living on the land, so you have to build a spirit house and each day give flower garlands and food to the spirits who live there. The spirit house shouldn’t fall within the shadow of the main house. You see these spirit houses everywhere, including one with a cross and a Virgin Mary statue at the ruins of the old Portuguese cathedral in Ayutthaya.

The Thai word for five is “hah,” similar to the Korean “o”. When Thais want to show that they’re laughing in a chat or a Facebook comment, they write “555.”

Thais drink root beer, or at least they sell the stuff here. A&W. I hear they have it in Indonesia too. If you order a soda in a cafe, you order by color, not flavor: red, orange, green. No one seems to know what green is.

Thais eat with a fork and spoon: fork in the left hand, used roughly how we might use a butter knife, spoon in the right hand as the eating utensil. Chopsticks come with noodles.

Posted on

Convergences

Ayutthaya, Thailand

I’ve arrived at Tony’s Place Bed and Breakfast in Ayutthaya, charming guesthouse in a sprawling house full of teakwood touches and Thai decor. I suppose it might have been trickier to get here had not one of my new Thai friends messaged me this morning to ask if I needed a ride to Victory Monument, where the vans for Ayutthaya depart, and then decided as we were driving that we might as well go all the way to Ayutthaya together and have dinner. I’d originally booked just two nights here, but it took me all of an hour to decide to add two more. Already I feel worlds away from the jittery madness of Bangkok and Sukhumvit. This feels like a vacation.

UN connections

In other news, I had lunch today with Heike Alefsen, Senior Regional Human Rights Adviser, United Nations Development Group Asia-Pacific Secretariat, whom I met at the Halloween party at my hotel in Bangkok. It turns out Heike once worked under Kang Kyung-wha, an extraordinary woman who stood out as one of the most impressive and formidable of the many excellent diplomats I worked with at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations. I love these kinds of surprising convergences! Lunch was a delight, and I learned a great deal about Thailand and the region.

(We ate at a fancy buffet in Sukhumvit called Crave. There was dragonfruit.)

Posted on

A Week in Bangkok

Bangkok, Thailand

Bangkok is overwhelming.

Bangkok is like every Asian megacity I’ve ever been to, thrown into a blender that goes to eleven: tuk-tuks, touts, heat, shopping malls, temples, food stalls, traffic, backpacker districts, vast outdoor markets, crumbling old buildings. Hedonism, chaos, hustle.

I’m not going to attempt to explain Bangkok to you. Not on my sixth day. If you’ve been here, you have your own impression of the place, and if you haven’t, you still probably know that it’s full of temples and sex. The Internet is full of very good descriptions of both.

Instead, I’ll update you on how I’m doing and where I’m headed.

A week in Bangkok

I’ve been in Asia for pretty much exactly six days now, which isn’t long enough for that first phase of jet lag and emotional fragility to have passed. In that very short time, I’ve gone on several dates, attended a Halloween party full of expats and a language-exchange Meetup full of travelers, visited an impossible number of temples, gotten sunburned and dehydrated, eaten street food in Chinatown, gotten a massage (the real kind), and occasionally slept a little. I’ve been fortunate to connect as well with some locals.

I have a mild cold.

I’ve seen enough of Bangkok to recognize that it is vast and complex, with different sides. Around Sukhumvit is a major tourist district, also popular with expats, with lots of slick restaurants, rooftop bars, posh new malls, hotels, and sprawling areas for Arabs, Koreans, Japanese. There are tuk-tuks and touts everywhere, and the whole thing is more or less a red light district, where if you’re a white male foreigner you will inevitably have clumps of women or ladyboys calling to you to have a massage.

I’ve also been to the old part of the city and toured the vast temple complexes, seen streets lined with shops selling giant gold Buddhas — where do they all go? — ridden the express boats on the river and the SANSAB boats along the canals. The canals, in particular, give Bangkok a unique flavor, both as a means of transport that gets you around the impossible traffic, and as the backdrop for fascinating alleyways that are essentially an extension of people’s homes, especially across the river in the Thonburi district.

Moving on up

So Bangkok has been alternately exhausting, exhilarating, frustrating, lonely, social. I’ve been all over the place, basically — geographically and emotionally. I’m hoping things can settle into more of a flow as I move along.

Today I’m moving on to my next destination, Ayutthaya. I’ll go after I have lunch with a woman I met who works for the UN monitoring human rights in the region.

I’m nervous about the actual travel part of travel — more so than I need to be, I know. A Thai friend has offered to drive me to the Victory Monument, where you can pick up minivans to Ayutthaya, and I have a room booked on the other end, and all of my stuff is in my bag, so what’s the problem? I don’t know. I’m just nervous.

Part of it is the ongoing lack of sleep that will pass in a few more days. Part of it is the travel jitters I always get when I go into something unfamiliar. But I feel like I need a vacation from my vacation already. Bangkok is the kind of city where I push myself too hard to do everything, to keep going, to see what’s around the next corner. I’m hoping Ayutthaya will be a mellower place where I can spend a day or two doing nothing and not worrying about it. I need to remember, too, that I’m going to be at this for quite a while. I need to pace myself. Six months is a long time, and I’m only six days in.

Posted on

[¡viva méxico!]

So I’m not going to Thailand. Instead, through the magnanimous gesture of canceling my ticket, I brought peace to that country, and instead I’ll be heading to Mexico.

It was over Thanksgiving weekend that it became apparent Thailand wasn’t going to work out. The People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) protesters — who probably don’t think PAD Thai is a funny joke — were digging in at the airports they’d shut down a week earlier. Reports were saying it would take as much as a month to clear the backlog of stranded travelers. Then someone threw a grenade at the PAD protesters who were occupying Government House in Bangkok, wounding 51, and the PAD response was to give up the Government House occupation and focus on the airports. (If you missed all this, it’s because it happened at the same time as the Mumbai attacks, and American news networks, like the human nervous system, can only focus on one painful sensation at a time.)

This all seemed like the ideal situation to not visit. And so, on Monday morning, I canceled my ticket and ate the change fee. That night — daytime in Thailand — the Thai high court told the government to dissolve, which it did, and the protesters announced that they would give up their blockade of the airports.

Dandy.

In the meantime, however, I hatched a different plan. Forget Thailand. Forget Asia. Instead, I would fly to Arizona, meet up with my brother, a student at ASU, and drive down to Mexico. I talked it over with him, and he seemed to think it was a great idea. Then I asked him what his financial situation was, and how much he could contribute to the trip.

“I have thirty dollars.”

Ah. Okay. Well, I decided to go ahead anyway. I’ll basically pay for everything. It’ll still be cheaper than flying to Thailand. The plan, subject to change as always, is to fly in on Saturday, December 20; leave early Sunday morning and head east, crossing the border at Columbus, New Mexico, a tiny town whose principal claim to fame is having been sacked by Pancho Villa, and whose principal advantage as a crossing point is not being El Paso/Ciudad Juárez; drive south through Chihuahua and Torreón; and spend most of our times in the central highlands, around Guanajuato and Zacatecas and San Miguel de Allende.

I’ve never really traveled in Mexico before. I’ve crossed the border twice, once into the tiny village of Boquillas, and once to spend a grotesque evening on foot in Juárez, trying to ignore the taxi drivers who kept offering to take me to Pusi — that’s the name of the local ruins, apparently — and to find someplace reasonably non-disgusting in which to sip Tecate. The sum total of my Mexican experience, then, is the equivalent to an evening in Newark and an afternoon in Antler.
I’m excited to experience Mexico as a nation, a destination, a place separate from the United States. Latin America has never been the part of the world that has most grabbed my attention, and I don’t know that this trip will change that. But it will hopefull broaden my perspective and stimulate a new curiosity. I don’t expect this will be my last trip to Mexico.
Posted on

[chaos in mumbai]

So when the situation in Thailand went pear-shaped, I started looking at other places to go. One of those places was Mumbai.

Then, of course, Mumbai was struck by a horrific series of terrorist attacks, which are still unfolding. They’ve targeted places popular with Westerners, which means places I’ve been. I’ve met people and relaxed in the Taj Mahal Palace lobby, even bought a shirt there. I’ve caught trains at Shivaji Terminus.

And Leopold Café! Friggin’ Leopold’s! For a New York equivalent, it’s as if terrorists attacked not just the Waldorf-Astoria and Grand Central Station, but also Katz’s Delicatessen. It’s just wrong — and yes, I know that the whole thing is about as wrong as can be, but bringing Leopold’s into it is so dementedly off-script for this sort of thing. It’s horrible, and I’m sad.

Meanwhile, Thailand seems to be moving towards a confrontation with the protesters who have shut down the airports. Will I still be going there? We’ll see. If there’s not any actual fighting, and the airport is open, I probably will. And if things suddenly get nasty again? Well, “I was trapped in a foreign land by a military coup” would be the most interesting excuse I’d ever given for missing work.

We’ll see.

Update: A Mumbai Chabad House has been attacked as well, and there are hostages inside, and probably some people have already been murdered. Horrible.