THREE WEEKS IN THAILAND
BANGKOK
4 Feb 01 Sunday
The time thing is hard to get a grip on. My plane left Boston at 8:30 Sunday morning. It’s supposed to be about 27 hours for the whole trip, about six hours of that layover time. That part worked out fine, exactly according to schedule, but by the time I got to Bangkok, even though I knew it was 11:30PM there and therefore 11:30AM in Boston, I couldn’t have said what time it felt like. I just knew I’d been traveling a very long time, and it was suddenly 11:30PM, the 5th of February, Monday.
Anyway, there was plenty of room on the plane to Tokyo for stretching out over seats, but I was too wound up to sleep. Mostly read a mediocre thriller called Numbered Account. Probably perfect for the situation. Spent some time on New York Times crossword puzzle, but the more tired I got, the less appealing that became. None of the movies seemed worth the effort. Sushi was on the menu, along with some sort of Japanese beef and noodle dish. Not bad.
5 Feb 01 Monday
Day really started for me in Tokyo Narita airport at two in the afternoon and ended after midnight in the Bamboo Bar at The Oriental hotel. Met up with Gregg in Tokyo and he got me into the United Airlines special persons lounge where we visited and snacked and drank beer until our flight was called. Narita Airport is clean and efficient, might as well still be in the states, and I only started to feel like I was somewhere else when we boarded the flight to Bangkok. Passengers almost all Asian. Plane packed. Heard no English except on PA system, and that was hard to decipher. Woman next to me had two front teeth missing, couldn’t figure out how to get her tray set up (in her defense, we were on the first row, so it wasn’t obvious), and she kept rubbing her legs as if she needed to improve her circulation.
David’s plane was a little late coming into Bangkok, but we found each other in baggage claim with no problem and then found the man with the orange jacket from The Oriental. The first shock, after the heat, was driving on the left side of the road, which I never got used to. None of us did. We were always looking the wrong way before we crossed a road, trying to get into the wrong side of a van, wondering why a passenger instead of the driver was driving, and so on.
The Oriental driver spoke a little English, enough to mention at one point our proximity to Patpong, the sex district, and to go through the routine of asking us how long we were staying, what we planned to do, and so on, and then of course he volunteered his services and gave us his driver number.
First “wahs” (hands together under chin as if in prayer, accompanied by a little bow) were from door people at the Oriental. An army of smiling faces greeted us and ushered us to reception, where we received the apparently now obligatory at fine hotels welcome juice, the Thai twist being a pink flower on the tray, and then a porter showed us the rooms while lackeys lugged our bags up.
The idea of the rooms at The Oriental is to make them look modern in a colonial sort of way. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Hard to tell which should come first since the blending is so seamless, so maybe the point is that you can take your pick. And it’s true, or was for me, that I had to remind myself that I was actually in an air conditioned high rise. Wooden blinds between the bathroom and bedroom; teak furniture; colors mostly emerald green and a creamy white. A bowl of tropical fruit. Stationery on the desk with my name on it, a souvenir. A view of the river.
The Bamboo Bar had an above average jazz combo playing old standards, but they were too loud for conversation, so we took our second beers outside. Not much action in the bar, but did see first middle-aged foreign gentleman making an ass of himself: guy at the bar telling the combo after every number that they were geniuses and being more than a little animated while they played. The combo leader was gracious of course. Everyone in Thailand, I soon learned, is polite and accommodating, so much so that it’s hard for The Oriental to stand out in that regard.
6 Feb 0. Tuesday
Buffet breakfast on the river at the Oriental, our first real look at Bangkok. Still pleasant enough outside, though I wouldn’t call it cool. The city uses the Chao Phraya River, no doubt about that. It’s always full of water taxis, several different kinds, most of which are more like buses, and long tails with diesel engines for taking smaller groups of tourists around. The river is also used for hauling freight. Both mornings we saw a long train of black barges, a floating freight train, being pulled by a tug boat. Each barge had a little house on top, as if someone lived there.
Breakfast was an international buffet, what else, and a good one. Five kinds of juices, ten kinds of bread and rolls, dim sum, tailor made omelets, fruit galore, rice porridge, three or four eastern dishes, mostly noodles, cold cuts and cheese for Europeans, and more. All of it done well and accompanied by excellent table service from a hierarchy of waiters.
After breakfast, I approached the concierge about train tickets and got my first taste of how difficult it can be to mingle the rarefied air of The Oriental with more pedestrian tastes. We wanted to stop at two major archaeological sites on the way and see the countryside, but unless we took the non-stop sleeper, the concierge didn’t think the train was “for gentlemen.” Our schedule was impractical, he thought, since the train only stopped for a minute or two at each station, and he suggested that we hire a car after tactfully implying that it would be undignified for gentlemen to haul their luggage off and on in such a short a time. And of course the trains at the times we wanted weren’t all air conditioned, might not have the best seats, etc. Nonetheless, I finally prevailed upon him to get us tickets at the times we wanted, and he came through.
Finally, it was time to do some sightseeing, and rather than hire a private taxi to show us around, as might have been more appropriate to where we were staying, we took a public water taxi to see the Grand Palace, a feat that proved surprisingly easy thanks to the fact that the woman ticket taker at the public dock near The Oriental spoke some English. Actually, she was a change maker, and she told us exactly how much it would be (8 baht each/20 cents), and that someone on the boat would come around and take the money.
That turned out to be a young woman with a two foot long wooden tube that held tickets and change. She shook it like a percussion instrument, took our money, and gave us a ticket. It was a great way to see Bangkok for the first time. We passed the 260 foot high, tiled Wat Arun, actually “ceramic shards,” all the high rise hotels, and got our first glimpse of how people lived on the river. Since all the signs at the docks are in both Thai and English, we had no trouble getting off at the right spot.
First stop was Wat Phra Kaeo, built in 1782 after the Burmese destroyed Ayuthalla, the former capital. The first thing you see when you walk in through the narrow entrance is a Buddha with offerings scattered all over the alter, flowers and food and incense, and people kneeling in front of it. Wax drippings. Burnt down incense. Old food. Kind of a mess, but impressive too, as the first time I’d seen public devotion to a Buddha.
We went directly to the Bot (temple) of the Emerald Buddha, the image only two feet high but highly revered by the Thais, took our shoes off, filed in with an army of other foreigners and quite a few Thai as well, and it was difficult to not immediately compare the Bot with a cathedral. Murals and ornate decoration cover the walls and ceiling, and the little Emerald Buddha is encased high on the back wall, like a tiny Jesus. The routine is to sit on the floor for a moment to contemplate the murals and the Emerald Buddha.
The Wat Phra Kaeo and the Grand Palace provide a good introduction to Thailand’s heritage in that they suddenly immerse you in the art and architecture of chedis, prangs, chao fas, and so on, which made me wonder about the reaction of the first westerners in Siam, the Portuguese in the early 16th Century. In one way, it must have been like landing on another planet, akin to the Spanish encounter with the Aztecs, but at the same time, there were similarities to the western cultures of the time. Side by side, the king and the church shared the old city, the dual center of power, earthly and spiritual. And size and the display of wealth mattered. High ceilings, grand halls, precious metals and jewels, all clearly designed to inspire obedience and reverence.
Reclining Buddhas represent the moment of Buddha’s enlightenment, and the one at Wat Pho, our next stop that morning, is 150 feet long. It fills the whole building (wihan), and it would be easy for an uninformed westerner to think of it as caged or in a casket. I remember reading somewhere a lament that Michelangelo’s David is enclosed in a hall now as opposed to outside in a public square, and I had the same reaction to many of the Buddha’s we saw in temples.
For lunch we took a taxi to a place Gregg suggested, gleaned from his guidebook I think. It was on the river in front of a water taxi dock, as plain as it could possibly be, metal tables and chairs, the perfect place it turned out for an introduction to everyday Thai cuisine. We had pork fried rice, a shrimp curry soup, and a chicken dish I can’t remember.
After lunch, we walked down Khao San Road, which was nearby, and saw all the college kids and twenty something backpackers looking for adventure and each other. Strangest scene was a bar where a dozen or so young westerners sat like zombies in front of a TV watching a Mel Gibson movie. Upcoming times and attractions were conspicuously posted, so I guess it’s a favorite pastime. I never saw so many healthy looking blonde people in one place in my life as on that street, except on a college campus. Every other shop was an Internet Cafe, and the rest were pizza and hamburger joints.
Took a boat back down the river to Chinatown and started feeling the heat and the jet lag. The street we walked down was full of gold jewelry stores, all with bright red and gold decor, and the sidewalk was suffocatingly packed with people. We couldn’t find an air conditioned place for a cold drink, which became a priority pretty quickly, so we gave up and hailed a taxi, which did and didn’t improve matters. It was air conditioned, but the ride proved to be a disaster. The driver drove like a bat out of hell in bumper to bumper traffic, weaving through motorcycles and tuk-tuks, and he had no idea where we’d told him to go. I didn’t think he was going the right way, but reason seemed to suggest that I was wrong: after all, it was my first day in Bangkok and we’d told him to go to the most famous hotel in town. How could he not know where it was? But when we saw the Grand Palace and realized we were closer to where we’d been that morning than The Oriental, which is the other way down the river, we started frantically trying to make him understand.
Meanwhile, he’d nearly hit a pedestrian, really nearly hit one, not just the usual close call, and had come close numerous times to head on collisions while on the wrong side of the street. Dave was in the front seat, no doubt grinding his teeth, definitely wearing his seat belt. We showed the driver the map. We said “Oriental” as slowly and clearly as we could, in a variety of accents, pointed to places on the map, and drew maps in the air, and he finally understand, but I have no idea why or exactly when, and we weren’t sure he really understood until we actually pulled into the hotel, although I knew by then that we’d at least come to the right part of town.
The fare came to two dollars, which we paid without complaint. We’d been in the taxi at least an hour.
That evening the management hosted one of those cocktails parties for guests that presumably, like the drinks at check-in, are obligatory at fine hotels. At least they’ve been a feature of my limited experience in such places. Someone in the managerial ranks greeted us at the door, which must be a pretty horrible job. He was a pudgy German with a mustache, very cordial, but his eyes did look a little glazed to me, although that might have simply been a recognition of how unimportant I was. There was a lot of good food: sushi, dim sum, satay, and other Thai specialties. We made that dinner and had our nightcap beer, which quickly became customary, at the bar in Lord Jim’s, the seafood restaurant of the hotel.
7 Feb 01 Wednesday
Breakfast again at the buffet on the river, and then we hired a long tail for a three hour cruise of the canals. The woman at the public dock near the Oriental fixed us up. For those who don’t know, long tails are shaped kind of like canoes but have more pointed ends, are covered, and are run by a huge diesel engine that stays completely out of the water. It is attached to a rudder, and the boatman steers by moving both rudder and engine back and forth.
Officially, we were to stop at the Snake Farm, Flower Farm, and the tiled Wat, but we skipped the Snake Farm and the other two weren’t nearly as interesting as just seeing life on the river. All the houses, invariably scrap lumber walls with tin roofs, came right up to the water, or the water came right up to them, lapping up on little docks that seemed to serve as kitchens and decks. Lots of plants, birds in cages, sleeping dogs, woks with unwashed breakfast dishes nearby. Palm trees everywhere, mangos, papayas, bananas and coconuts hanging off of many of them. Shirtless old men reading newspapers on decks. A young woman fishing with a cane pole from her dock. Two women in white robes bathing in the river. Groups of pre-school aged kids in uniforms waving at us and shouting “Hallo! Hallo!” Little grocery stores facing the water. Old man paddling a tiny canoe. Women selling gee-gaws to tourists from rowboats, many wearing straw hats and balancing baskets at the end of a pole that rested on their shoulders. Now and then we’d see a fish, maybe catfish, break the water, and once we saw a woman and her kids feeding a group of them. They leaped out of the water, furiously fighting for the food.
We were in for a rude shock when we got back to The Oriental at around noon. The first sign that there was a problem was when I was questioned by a doorman as I approached the entrance to the lobby. Was I a guest? What was my room number? I explained that we’d checked out that morning and had come back to pick up our luggage, and he let us pass. We were hot and tired after the three hour boat trip, and the plan was to sit down in the lobby for a minute and rest and get cool before taking off for our new, and cheaper, hotel, but we’d just barely sat down when we were questioned again.
I had noticed that everyone in the lobby looked Arab, and all of them were sitting around stiffly, but I didn’t dwell on it or connect it with the bum’s rush we were getting from the hotel staff. Actually, I was concentrating on the army of greeters that faced the door somewhat like a school of fish, and in particular a westerner who made me think of LeCarre’s novel The Night Porter. Late fifties or early sixties, tallish, slender, short gray hair, excellent posture, hands clasped behind his back, vaguely athletic, impeccably dressed. The only western greeter and the only one wearing a business suit rather than a uniform.
Within five minutes, two people had approached us with questions that were clearly designed to hurry us up. Finally, we gave up on being left alone, and Gregg asked to talk to a manager to complain. The explanation came quickly. The Prime Minister of Bahrain was in the lobby, and all those solemn looking Arabs were part of the group, and everything was tense and high security. We got an apology, and the manager personally accompanied us out to get our cab, explaining and apologizing the whole way. Even the concierge who’d gotten our train tickets showed up to inquire if everything was satisfactory.
Which wouldn’t have made for a bad exit, except that we weren’t exactly leaving in style. In the first place, there really wasn’t enough room for the three of us and our luggage in one small taxi, so we all had to scrunch up in the back seat, which was especially excruciating after being asked by the doorman if we were leaving by private car or hired limousine, a public taxi not even a choice, and on top of that having to tell him we were going to another hotel rather than to the airport, a hotel I felt sure he knew was not world class.
Not even close, as it turned out. The Grand China Princess has seen better days, but unfortunately my Frommer doesn’t know that. The price was about half what I expected, and the rooms looked like it. They were reasonably clean but very worn and drab, brown carpet with stains on it, minimal modern furniture, all in all second class, which actually was okay, since we were catching a train at seven the next morning.
Intrepidly, we took a taxi to an Indian restaurant I found in Frommers, and even with the name, the Himali Cha Cha, and the address written in Thai, we had a hard time finding it. To give the taxi driver his due, though, it wasn’t on the main street, and the only way we found it was to let the taxi go and walk around until we stumbled on it down a side street. According to Frommer, the owner and chef was “on Lord Mountbatten’s staff in India,” but Gregg’s Fodor informed us that he’s been dead since 1998, which is when I took the time to discover that the 2000 Frommer was last updated in 1996.
But back to the Indian restaurant, which turned out to be good despite the absence of the old man. We were the only customers, maybe because it was already the middle of the afternoon, and a young man, no doubt the son or grandson of the old soldier, not only waited on us but decided for us what we were going to eat: four or five different nans, two different kinds of samosa, three kinds of fruit and milk drinks, a green and a red curry with mutton and pork, I forget which was which, a bowl of yogurt, lentils, rice, and I think a chicken tikki. Needless to say, we had plenty, and we were reminded that as hot as Thai food is, Indian is hotter, but we finished every dish, enjoying every bite through our tears, and drank lots of water.
After a rest back at the hotel, we met for our nightly beer in a revolving restaurant on the top floor of the hotel, which had probably been quite the thing back when the Grand China Princess was in its heyday. And then we went to Patpong, the unanimous decision being that we couldn’t visit Bangkok without at least taking a look at the famous sex district. Before we went, Gregg cautioned us that there was now a gay street, and as luck would have it, we stumbled down that one first, a mistake that was obvious immediately. As we made our getaway, a hustler at the entrance to the street wanted to know what kind of boys we liked.
One problem with getting around there is that a night market has developed around the two main streets that have sex shows, and the sidewalks between the stalls are jammed with tourists. That night it was made worse by a crippled man who was crawling in the middle of the sidewalk. He was dragging himself down the center of the pavement, one hand holding a sandwich, as tourists tried to get by without stepping on him.
In the sex show parts of the streets, it was less packed with tourists, which made the whole scene a little but not a lot more bearable. About every five feet somebody wanted to know what we wanted and promised we could have anything we could think of, and plenty of girls who looked like they’d do just about anything hung out around the entrances to the bars and at outside beer joints. Through the open doors of the clubs, girls in bikinis danced on stages, which I presume was only to entice us inside. It didn’t, though. We were quickly in the mood for a quiet, air-conditioned beer, which proved hard to find. The first place we tried was an Irish Pub that had a Thai faux-Beatles Band, and two probably English working girl types at the bar singing along to “I Saw Her Standing There.” That might have been okay, but it was much too loud. Not far from there, though, we found a little hole in the wall with nothing but jazz in the background for music, and the beer was reasonably cold, and the air conditioning worked, and both the owner and the waitress were typically very nice and attentive.
ON THE ROAD TO CHIANG MAI
8 Feb 01 Thursday
Up at five to catch the train to Ayuthalla. According to Frommer, friendly English speaking persons with badges who really work for the railroad will greet you at the station and offer to help, but we encountered no such persons. Another minus for Frommer, but it was not all that difficult to figure things out, which amounted only to finding the right track and waiting. I did ask someone who sort of spoke English for information, but I forget now what I wanted to know. Everything was posted in English on a big board, and the tracks were clearly marked.
David took a picture of a group of people sitting in a circle, one of them drinking rice whiskey from a bottle, their stuff, including a couple of dogs, in cardboard boxes and burlap bags. When the guy with the bottle noticed, he offered David a swig, which he politely declined. Friendly but persistent about the drink.
Momentary confusion when the train pulled in about finding the right car, but soon cleared up. Not air conditioned, which wasn’t so bad that early in the morning, and the car wasn’t near full. The problem was figuring out where to get off. It looked like all the signs were in English as well as Thai, but I decided not to count on that being the case at every station. And the train was scheduled to stop at Ayuthalla for only a minute, so we had to be ready. We all had a suitcase as well as a small bag or two. So I counted the stops, which wasn’t fail safe because even though I had two schedules, I wasn’t entirely sure which train we were on. After a few stops, though, the pattern fit one of the trains on the schedule, so I had a pretty good idea of what the stop would be before Ayuthalla, and when we’d get there.
As it turned out, by the time we approached our station, we had plenty of help. I’d asked the conductor when he punched our tickets and was reasonably sure he understood, plus the guy sitting in front of us apparently knew English and had overheard our angst. So both he and the conductor and a couple of other people I hadn’t talked to at all got up as we approached our stop and told us this was it and urged us to come up with our luggage and be ready to get off. We kind of tumbled off, as I recall, but made it with plenty of time to spare before the train left the station.
Every train station in Thailand, it seems, has a cloak room where you can leave your luggage for a small fee. The one in Ayuthalla was well-guarded by official looking, uniformed men who managed to be both efficient and friendly. Everyone in Thailand is friendly.
We had to catch a ferry across to the main part of the town, without the help of signs or anyone who knew English it turned out, and luckily the boat we hopped on turned out to be the ferry. It took about a minute to get across the river and cost one baht for each of us, or less than three cents. Once across, though, things didn’t look right. The guidebooks and maps led me to believe that most of the ruins were concentrated in a downtown section and close enough to each other for walking, but we found no downtown area. So we started walking towards where according to the maps a central area should have been, but it started raining (the only time we ever saw rain), and a tuk-tuk (a pickup with the bed covered and a bench down either side) came up and the driver offered us a tour of the sights. We told him to take us to a hotel that on the map looked centrally located, figuring we’d regroup there and have breakfast, and when he dropped us off, he said he’d come back later and see if we wanted the tour.
After breakfast, since the hotel seemed not to be near anything, we decided to at least start with a driver and see what happened. The original driver never came back, or we missed him, so we got the concierge at the hotel to get us another one.
Ayuthalla was the capital of Thailand until the Burmese sacked it in 1767, and Europeans were apparently very impressed by it, both in regard to its size and its beauty. It’s still impressive, although I have to admit that my memory of our tour of the ruins, and of those the next day in Sukothai, has become to some extent a blur. I plead fatigue and the heat in part, and confusion over the fact that we could never figure out why we couldn’t walk the tour in Ayuthalla, a notion we hung on to longer than we should have, but it’s also true that ignorance breeds indifference, and I may not have a very high ruins threshold. My knowledge of what I was seeing was confined to what I could remember from reading the guidebooks, which at best was sketchy.
Nonetheless, the size alone of the temples and the Buddhas is impressive, and unlike those we saw in Bangkok, many were outside and surrounded by large and well-tended grounds. It was not hard to imagine them as magnificent sites in a great city, but I think the strongest impression I had was of their strangeness. There’s something odd about seeing an image like the Buddha that is currently revered and yet so remote from one’s own experience. A westerner, even one with little or no religious conviction, must have some gut emotional reaction to a scene of the crucifixion, even if it’s negative, but a huge, serene, inscrutably smiling Buddha, white as snow and draped in bright yellow, elicits a no more authentic response than would an invented idol in a science fiction movie: strange but strangely without meaning.
At one point, we visited a wat that was so jammed with people that we could barely get in. I think it was Wat Panan Choeng, site of Thailand’s largest ancient Buddha image. One problem with getting in was trying to get around a booth that sold lotus buds, for offerings, and gold leaf, which is a way of “making merit.” You put a piece on a Buddha image in order to improve your chances of being reincarnated in a higher form. Another reason it was congested was that there was some sort of ceremony going on in the room where the Buddha was; a monk with a microphone was saying something we of course couldn’t understand.
After being hauled from one end of the town to the other without seeing anything that resembled a center, we finally gave up on finding one and took a tuk-tuk to a restaurant on the river: prawn in garlic; thai fried rice; chicken curry. For the first time, we noticed that most people automatically ordered steamed rice with the meal, and that many tables had bottles of whiskey sitting on them, along with a bucket of ice. We only got one prawn, but it was about the size of a crawdad. We also practiced eating the Thai way: use the fork to rake the food onto a soup spoon. And there was a dog in the restaurant, a white Lhassa Apso, sitting on its own chair and staring intently at every bite its owner took, and getting its share.
We were back on the train at 4:30 for a five and a half hour ride. Still not air-conditioned, but that wasn’t so bad. The problem was that after the long day of sightseeing, during which we were either walking in the sun or riding in the back of a pick-up, the train seats started to get pretty uncomfortable, and I was sitting next to one of the few fat men in Thailand. He seemed like a nice guy, had two little kids he had to watch after, but he didn’t have much sense of space. Vendors came through the car regularly with buckets full of soda water, mineral water, beer, and pints of Thai whiskey. They also had meat on a stick. Saw lots of rice fields. They use flags on bamboo poles to scare away birds. Walk behind tillers that work the mud were the only machinery I saw. Mostly saw weed choppers with hoes. And many teak houses on stilts.
This time we had getting off the train down to a science, but then I made a big mistake. We were approached by a tuk-tuk driver before we even got to the main part of the station, and a train employee in uniform vouched for him and urged us to go with him. The hotel was only a block and half from the train station, but I wasn’t sure if it was really walkable with our luggage, and when I told him how close the hotel was, either he didn’t understand or didn’t seem to mind. I couldn’t tell which, and I wasn’t absolutely sure he knew which hotel we wanted to go to. There are two Amarin hotels in Phitsanoluk, and I said the name of the one we wanted about ten times, and he always seemed to say the name of the other one back, with a big smile as if he understood perfectly, which was so ridiculous that I was reluctant to believe it. Later in the trip, I began to realize that the languages are so different that misunderstandings of that kind are more the rule than the exception.
To get to his tuk-tuk we had to walk across several railroad tracks to a dark, dead end street, clearly his way of getting an edge on the drivers at the station. He had his dog tied up in the back, and his wife was there too, and after getting us settled in the back, they all piled in the front and away we went. To the wrong hotel, of course, which was several miles outside of town, and all we could do was sit there and steam. I wasn’t about to bang on the back window and create more confusion. I’d already said the name of the hotel until I was blue in the face. It seemed best to pay him off once we got to the other hotel and figure it out from there. Which we did. And while I was paying him, David accidentally made a loud noise with the tailgate of the pickup, and the driver laughed nervously, which was the closest we came on the whole trip to any sort of unpleasantness. I think the driver made an honest mistake, and it only cost us a couple of bucks, but I wasn’t feeling too kindly towards him at the time.
None of the hotel staff, however, knew enough English to understand the mistake, until finally the doorman sort of understood and volunteered the hotel van, even before knowing that where we wanted to go was the other Amarin. There was obviously something about the way we pronounced “Nakorn” that didn’t register. But we accepted the offer, of course, and finally wound up, as originally planned, two blocks from the train station.
There was some confusion over the reservations, which I never understood, but they had plenty of rooms. Plain, definitely budget, but clean and cool and just fine. In fact, after the long day, my room felt like paradise. It was late, but once everything was settled and okay, we decided to have our customary nightcap beer and snacks in the bar just off the lobby. We hadn’t eaten supper, and we found out that when you order a spring roll in Thailand, you order an order of them, which in this case was about six. So we had eighteen spring rolls, and we ate most of them.
There was only a handful of people in the bar, but they had live music: a keyboard, a guitar, and a couple of young women singers. I think it was sort of a semi-karaoke, though it was hard to tell exactly how much music was coming out of the keyboard. The singers even did wardrobe changes and alternated between Thai sounding songs with pleasantly exotic melodies, and Western pop, often reading the English lyrics from songbooks.
9 Feb 01 Friday
Slept like a rock until six. At first I thought it was much earlier, that I’d only just closed my eyes, but I felt completely refreshed, and we caught up on a lot of chores that morning. We changed our train tickets to what we hoped was going to be an air conditioned car, called Roy and advised him of our whereabouts, and went to a travel agent and arranged for a tour, in an air conditioned van, of Sukothai, which is less than an hour’s drive from Phitsanoluk.
The bellman actually walked with us to the travel agent to make sure we didn’t get lost. He got a nice tip, of course, but I still thought that was extraordinary.
To my untrained eye the difference between Sukothai and Ayuthalla architecture is lost, but Sukothai, which arose as a state in the 13th Century, is supposed to be the pinnacle of Thai culture. It only lasted as a power for a century and a half, but it’s credited with establishing the Thai brand of Buddhism and with setting a high standard for the arts.
We first toured a museum and saw many, many Buddhas. The most frequent pose in Thailand, apparently, is a sitting position that symbolizes the moment when the Buddha resisted the temptations of Mara, the Earth goddess, which is not something you’d know just from looking at the images. All I see, even after knowing the significance of the pose, is serenity, which may be just as well since I’ve never been inclined towards, or even had much patience with, ascetic philosophies. And that may help explain my lack of enthusiasm in general.
We ate lunch at a little roadside stand. Noodles and chicken with cilantro; fried rice with chilis and pork; sticky rice with bacon rinds. Everyone seemed not just pleased but excited about our eating there. The bill was added up by the waitress in her head and came to about three dollars for all four of us, driver included. The driver stopped on the way back so that we could buy beer, and we bought him a coke. We found out that a rule of the road is that you pass a car whenever you want and trust that the oncoming car will take advantage of the pullover lane to get out of the way. It worked on that trip, thankfully. Exceptions, in regard to oncoming vehicles, seem to be buses, which are apparently less likely to pull over. And of course you have to make sure there are no motorcycles hogging the pullover lane.
After a rest, we met for a beer in the lobby semi-karaoke bar and decided to try one of the floating restaurants for dinner. When we asked someone at the desk to write the name in Thai for us, having learned finally that you can’t be too careful when taking taxis and tuk-tuks, they volunteered the van again, so we got taken to the restaurant and picked up. The place we went to had its share of tourists, but it had more Thais, and the setting couldn’t have been nicer. We found a table right on the water and it was much cooler than in Bangkok. Perfect weather in fact. We had a hot and sour shrimp soup, a pork curry, and a chicken dish in coconut milk. Also on the menu were hot towels and three brands of cigarettes.
10 Feb 01 Saturday
We checked out of the hotel, left our bags in the cloak room of the train station, and walked to the Sgt. Maj. Thavee Folk Museum. Free admission, a labor of love by an artist who specializes in sculpting Buddhas and who has made it a personal mission to collect and preserve “the old ways” in Thailand. Many old photos and facts about history of Phitsanoluk. Old wooden machines for squeezing sugar cane; ox carts; a detailed, pictured explanation of growing rice; color photos of an ox getting castrated with a block of wood, which we tried not to dwell on; scarecrows and those flags on poles in the rice fields.
We never got everything exactly right on the trains. We bought a bunch of food from a 7-11 for the trip, but the air conditioned train, it turned out, had an attendant that served meals, and no vendors, even for drinks, allowed. We didn’t go hungry, but we wasted the food we bought and couldn’t buy beer. Two Germans on the train were better prught a bunch of food from a 7-11 for the trip, but the air co court/cafeteria like place near the Night Market. You buy tickets, go up to little booths to get what you want, then sit down at white plastic tables and chairs. We left the choices to Laddawan. There was Thai dancing on a nearby stage while we ate, and later we walked next door to see amateur Thai boxing. Very amateur. The boxers are mostly very young teenagers, and the matches, although entertaining, look like they might be partly choreographed. Before each match one of the boxers dances to Thai boxing music. After each match, the boxers come around passing the hat and bowing and “wah-ing.” Unfortunately, we got there too late for the transvestite review.
CHIANG MAI
11 Feb 01 Sunday
A day of rest, finally. Decided to move to River View starting tomorrow, a little more expensive but nicer. Spent most of the morning deciding to move and arranging it, then had lunch at food court because it seemed easy: little sardine-like fish, breaded and deep fried; chicken curry soup; dumplings of some sort; pad thai; sticky rice. Roy picked us up early in afternoon and we went out to see his house. He lives just outside of town in a compound of new white stucco and red tiled roof houses that are apparently mostly owned by expatriates like himself. Very impressive, and even more so considering the price.
Roy and Laddawan took us to a place on the river for dinner: hot seafood soup; whole fish; 2 kinds of fish patties; a vegetable dish; steamed rice; seafood salad; fruit plate. At this point, I was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the cuisine. Liking everything but starting to wonder what exactly it was, feeling the need to impose some order on all the new culinary sensations.
We ate early so that we could get back to the Night Bazaar for the transvestite revue. They were dressed up convincingly, and all were properly slim and tall, and the dancing was okay for what it was, but the lip synching, to “Let Us Entertain You” and “Endless Love” was pretty bad.
12 Feb 01 Monday
We walked to our new rooms at the River View. It has a pleasant garden with shoulder to shoulder potted plants, ceramic statuettes, a little pavilion with a view of the river. It’s owned by a Chinese couple. He reads the paper all day and talks on his cell phone. She’s always working. Cooking, sewing, paperwork in her office. They have a car collection: Bentleys and Rolls Royces and Jaguars; and cabinets full of porcelain figures and dishes, some for sale.
After checking in, we walked to the Old Town. Tha Phae street is like a main drag with a little of everything on it: tour guides, tourist shops with jewelry, linens, bronze figures, etc., convenience stores, cafes, banks, book stores, guest houses. And there’s a couple of wats on the way. We went into one and bought some caged birds and let them go, another way of “making merit.”Just before the Tha Phae Gate the cafes start having a western flavor. Pizza, cheeseburgers, tacos. One place turned out to have great fruit drinks. My favorite was watermelon. The gate is mostly a reconstruction and the wall around it goes for only about a block. Inside the wall it gets even more touristy. Lots of bars with western names. We stumbled upon a cooking school and got some information, ate at a place just inside the wall, and I think we ordered separately for once and each got noodle dishes. At this point we were feeling stuffed and trying to figure out how to make at least one meal a day a light one.
Spent a lot of the afternoon talking about and planning trips outside the city and up north. Decided to give the driver Roy recommended a try by getting him to take us to Doi Inthanon, the highest mountain in Thailand.
For dinner, went to Riverside with Roy and Laddawan, a huge bustling place with two bands. We got more food than we could eat and I tried a little Thai whiskey. Dishes about the same as night before but also had chicken wrapped in banana leaves.
13 Feb 01 Tuesday
Went to Doi Inthanon. Started at the summit and worked our way down. Turned out that Kul, our driver, doesn’t speak much English, which made it hard to vary the tour, make on the spot suggestions or changes, and we finally just decided to let him have his way.
Across the road from the summit is a nature trail, and we tried to summon up some interest in the identification of the plants, per the signs along the way, but it was less than thrilling. I vaguely remember seeing some red flowers growing from the branches of trees, but mostly I wondered what it would be like to be a soldier or an indigenous person walking through the forest. It was fairly dense, but I don’t think it qualified as a jungle. Then we saw the twin chedis built on the occasion of the King’s 60th birthday, just down from the summit, overlooking a valley. They look modern, pastel yellows and purples, kind of like something you might see on StarTrek, and we got the impression that the ashes of the king and queen will be deposited there, though I haven’t read that since. Next we stopped at a waterfall, which was pretty good because you could get right up near it and feel the spray, and finally we visited a tribal village, probably a Karen, though not sure. Didn’t see many people. Our driver said they were out working in the fields. The houses, though, looked pretty substantial, like fairly large summer cabins at a beach on the Cape. We stopped somewhere in there at a roadside place for lunch, but I didn’t write down what we ate. I just remember that there was some confusion at first because it looked like there were four different stands, but it turned out that you could order from any or all.
Dead tired when we got back and ate at food court and went to bed.
14 Feb 01 Wednesday
Just coming and going from River View could be interesting. To get there from anywhere it’s necessary to walk down an alley past a woman selling sausage from a cart, then an enclosed yard that is always full of women and kids busy at something, never could figure out what, then a vacant lot full of dogs, and finally a couple of residences behind concrete walls and iron gates.
We started at the flower market, which was a madhouse, maybe in part because it was Valentine’s Day, though hard to tell. It was on both sides of a street that had bumper to bumper traffic, plus there were vans delivering flowers double parked all up and down the road. A mess. Then we walked through the food market and saw the usual stuff: dozens of varieties of fish and shellfish, tons of dried chiles, strange fruits and vegetables, and then we found another market that specializes in packaged spices and curries.
We walked to Tha Phae Gate again and up Ratchamanka Road, which is much less congested than the main drag. Not much tourist action at all. Passed a school, all the kids in uniform, and saw a young street vendor selling eggs of some sort to the kids through the bars that encircle the playground. Have no idea what they are. We were looking for Ta-Krite, a restaurant recommended by Frommers, to compare it to Aroon Rai, which we’d passed earlier. Couldn’t find it, so we walked back to Aroon Rai, which is across from the moat around the Old Town. Just a bare bones place that specializes in Northern Thai cuisine, especially a yellow chicken curry called khao soi. Saw the water beetles there, but didn’t try any.
Bought a good phrase book in the afternoon, as prep for trip up north with the not very fluent in English Kul.
Roy came in alone, and we wanted to go to a place to eat called, I’m embarrassed to say, Once Upon a Time, but we couldn’t find it, so we wound up at The Antique House, which was fine.
THE NORTHERN BORDER
15 Feb 01 Thursday
Gregg took the lead in planning this, so I’m having to consult the guidebooks to reconstruct it. I had only a vague idea of where we were during the trip itself, but the general idea was to make a circle by taking the scenic route up on Thursday, spending that night and Friday night at the border, and then coming back Saturday on the main road through Chiang Rai. It worked out pretty well.
By the way, the day before there’d been an “incident” between Thailand and Burma. A stray Burmese mortar shell had hit a building in Thailand, killing two people.
The first stop, not more than twenty or so miles from Chiang Mai, was Doi Chiang Doi, the attraction being a network of caves. In front of the entrance is a clear pond full of huge goldfish, and you can buy food for 5 baht and watch them splash around and fight for it. There’s a path lit by fluorescent lights that passes several Buddhist shrines, but we hired a guide with a Coleman lantern to take us into more remote areas, where we saw plenty of bats and often had to crawl from one space to another.
We reached Fang around noon. There was supposed to be a market there where hill tribes gather, but we never found it. We went to three markets, but they were just ordinary small town markets. The little restaurant that Kul took us to was dirt cheap and good. We would never have found it, since you have to go through a little grocery into a garden in the back. The owner came back and turned on a fan for us.
Next stop was the white Buddha in Tha Ton. It sits high on the edge of a hill and looks out over a village in a valley with the Kok River running through it. It almost looked like a scene out of Tolkien, a tropical Tolkien with palm trees. You look down at a village of teak houses along the winding river, and that particular afternoon both the sight and the village below seemed almost deserted. A monk approached us, no doubt wanting to practice his English, and asked all the usual questions. Turned out he was 19, came from Laos, and had been a monk since he was 10. Made me want to know more, but I didn’t want to pry, my guess being that his childhood was less than ideal. He said he planned on remaining a monk for the rest of his life.
In the late afternoon, as we neared Mae Salong, the road became all twists and turns, and we began to see young women coming home from the fields with hoes slung over their shoulders, all wearing scarves on their heads. The landscape was mostly forest, but crops grew on every flat surface, cabbage now, the guide books say, instead of opium. Also saw groups of school children, all in uniform and carrying colorful purse-like bags, often beaded. And men carrying hundred pound bags of rice on their backs with the help of a wooden yoke across their shoulders.
Mae Salong was founded by the Nationalist Chinese army after their defeat by the communists. The Thais, and probably the CIA, let them stay and deal in opium in return for suppressing communism among the hill tribes. All the signs in the area are in Chinese. Just before dark, on the outskirts of town, we stopped at market stalls that ran along both sides of the road and had our first hill tribe encounter. Akha women wanting to have their picture taken for a fee. They are the ones dressed in black and red with ornate silver headdresses. They had few if any teeth, or black teeth, giggled a lot, and were aggressive about the pictures. The place had a kind of dusty frontier/flea market feel about it. Small fires burning here and there; groups of soldiers standing around. The usual silver trinkets for sale, and Chinese teas and herbs. Tea samples from gallon jars, some with bones or reptiles floating in them.
The rooms at the Imperial Golden Triangle Resort had a view of the Mekong River with Laos on the right bank and Burma on the left. On the Burmese side, the huge new resort casino, white stucco with a red tile roof. We had beer and dinner outside at the hotel restaurant. We were the only ones eating outside. Inside was Thai folk dancing and a buffet, but it was very tour bus touristy, so we stayed away.
16 Feb 01 Friday
First thing we took an hour boat ride, in a long tail, up the Mekong past the Burmese casino, which looked deserted, and stopped briefly in a designated Laos shopping area. The Laos side is completely undeveloped. On the Thai side you see the new hotels, but in Laos all you see is people doing laundry in the river. The guards at the shopping area in Laos are friendly and smiled for pictures. Gregg and David sent postcards. They sell you stamps and have a mailbox. Offered us samples of Laos whiskey, which we declined. Like the tea from the day before, it had lizards and snakes in the bottles.
Next stop was the Opium museum. Saw lots of fancy opium pipes and other paraphernÛÛ–‚ ÷‚4–‚ ÷‚4’d been eager to check out, turned out to be a pizza parlor.
17 Feb 01 Saturday
We headed strait for Chiang Rai, stopped briefly in a gift shop, then had lunch at a nice simple little place overlooking a pond.
Back in Chiang Mai, we went to Sankaphaeng Road, a five mile stretch of tourist shopping. Stopped at places for umbrellas, celadon, furniture, lacquer, and jewelry. In most cases, the stores are set up to first show you how the stuff is made, then you’re escorted, always by an attractive young woman, to the showroom, and they often hover. Each of us had our own young woman guide at the jewelry store, and I even got an assistant manager when I acted like I was serious about buying a sapphire. They gave me a card and told me they’d come pick me up at my hotel if I wanted to come back.
Late in the afternoon we headed for the cock fights. To find it, Kul had to ask a couple of people on the way, and we drove down narrow roads through a working class neighborhood. We parked in a vacant lot. Everyone stared at us when we first walked up, which was understandable since we were the only foreigners there. But the looks were friendly, as we should have known they’d be, this being Thailand.
There were two rings under a big tent with open sides. A little ring where a small group just stood around and looked over shoulders, and the main one with bleachers. Off to one side was a row of vendors selling beer and whiskey and home made pad thai. There was also an area for working on the roosters. Saw one’s chest being sewed up, but mostly they burned some kind of herb and put the smoke under their noses and maybe over what might have been wounds. It was hard to tell exactly what they were doing. They also tied up their mouths, though not sure why since it seems like pecking would be as bad as biting.
The main arena was packed, but we managed to climb up at the back of the bleachers and stand on the top row for a good view of the action. The ring is about fifteen feet in diameter and has a concrete floor. The roosters are carried in all gussied up, neck feathers greased and spiked. No spurs, so each fight lasts several rounds of five or ten minutes each. Owners touch them all over, whisper to them, and then a gourd is struck, and they immediately face off. Heads go down in short jerks, lower and lower until one attacks, and the crowd roars. This goes on for several minutes, over and over again, and although both roosters slow down, it’s hard to tell for sure which one has the upper hand. For a while, the advantage seems to shift with every confrontation.
The betting was fast and furious and mostly a mystery to us, people holding up one or two fingers, but we speculated that they bet mainly on what will happen next rather than on the eventual winner. Bookies sit in the front row looking calm and prosperous, holding money and notepads, acknowledging bets with a smile and a nod of the head. Most of the crowd leaves after the first round. Why? I don’t know, but that’s why we speculated that the bets weren’t on who wins.
A referee pats the roosters gently to get them to engage if they start to seem reluctant. It’s also his job to smear the chicken shit with his shoe so that neither rooster slips, apparently. In the first fight, during the second or third round, one did finally give up, and the minute one turns and runs, it’s over. A huge cheer went up, and the loser tried to get out of the ring, but the crowd wouldn’t let him at first. Not sure why. Not much happened after he ran and pretty soon they stopped it. Neither rooster seemed very banged up. They attack more with their beaks than with claws, and usually go for behind the neck.
The owners of the winner hug each other, hug the rooster, and I saw no ill feeling from the losers. Just disappointment. No anger shown. And during the fight, the spectators and owners seemed to joke with each other.
Ate dinner at a place that had prawns swimming in tanks in the middle of the restaurant. I particularly liked the prawns with garlic. And on the way back, we stopped at an empty bar owned by a German, on a quiet side street, and sat at a table on the sidewalk and watched about a dozen big rats go after plastic bags of garbage in a pile across the street.
CHIANG MAI AGAIN
18 Feb 01 Sunday
Spent most of morning checking out a shopping area that was mostly closed. For lunch, we decided to check out Once Upon A Time, the place we hadn’t been able to find before. It turned out to be further than the guidebook said, and when we finally got hot and tired enough, we hailed a tuk-tuk and had him take us to the Westin. The concierge knew the restaurant, told us it had changed names, and gave us clear directions, a short walk. When we got there, though, we found out they don’t serve lunch, but luckily there was a nice looking place next door called The Garden. Husband is waiter; wife is cook. Tom yum soup, pad thai with deep-fried wonton noodles, a green curry with spare ribs, and fresh spring rolls. Nice view of river and plenty of fans to cool us off.
Gregg left for the airport at three.
Went back to no longer named Once Upon a Time for supper with Roy and Laddawan and friends of friends from Texas, Jo and Michael. Two tables were occupied with diners, but there was no sign of a waitress. Like a Bunuel movie. We just stood there in the middle of the restaurant for a long time, wondering how the people eating had gotten served, and they in turn looked back at us and sort of smiled. When Michael walked into a back room area looking for someone, I half expected him to find a casket with the owner in it (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), but I think the waitress just finally showed up. Anyway, the food was great, but I neglected to write down what we had. Getting lax. Went to food court briefly after dinner so that Jo and Michael could see the boxing.
19 Feb 01 Monday
Went to three jewelry stores before finding Shiraz Co., owned by Nasser Jafari, a tall slender man with a slow, careful, easy going manner. He has all his precious stones in little white packets and unloads them onto a tray one by one. He’s happy to answer any question and is a master at being helpful and informative without condescension. He’s the only one to have Sri Lanka sapphires, which I knew were what Karen wanted. The others, all Thai, were too dark.
Two of the other places we went to, like the Gems Gallery out on Sankaphaeng Road, had attractive young women doing the selling, and although there was no shortage of women at Shiraz, they probably weren’t there for their looks. In fact the one who first waited on us was a kindly middle-aged woman who seemed to have had a mild stroke. She ushered us into a kind of back room as soon as we mentioned sapphires, and two other women appeared, a teenage girl whose job was to bring us water, and a serious woman in her thirties who called Mr. Nasser on the phone and told us he’d be with us in a minute. Yet another woman, probably his wife or sister, showed up later, and she spoke excellent English, like Mr. Nasser himself. We were given glasses of water, and they all sat and stared at us patiently while we looked at the stones.
We had a four-thirty appointment at one of the jewelry stores we’d been to earlier, a place called Nova, owned by a Canadian, that specializes in custom silver jewelry. But he said he had some loose stones he’d show us that afternoon, so we took Jo and Michael along. They were cheap enough, but they all seemed a little too clear to me and not quite bright enough, and I thought the Canadian was a little vague on why they were so cheap.
On the way back to the hotel, we all stopped in to see Mr. Nasser again, and we went through the whole routine a second time, only now there were four of us foreigners in the room. Later, the consensus was that the sapphire I was looking at was a good stone at a good price, but it turned out that Karen decided she needed to see it.
Jo, Michael, David, and I ate dinner at a place with a barbecue pit in the middle of the table. As soon as you sit down, they come out with hot coals and lower them into the pit with tongs, stoking up your fire. You order types of meat or vegetables—pork, beef, squid, shrimp, liver, etc., and they bring them out on separate trays. You put them on a slotted grill, where they stick but don’t get stuck because of a piece of pork fat that’s placed at the top of the grill. Water in a tray around the bottom is for cooking vegetables.
20 Feb 01 Tuesday
The cooking school picked us up at the hotel. The drill is that you watch the dish being prepared by a cook who explains everything along the way, and then you try it yourself at your own wok station. You make several dishes, and then you sit down and eat what you’ve prepared. That day, between ten and four, believe it or not, we made hot and sour shrimp soup, green curry with chicken, thai style fish cakes (just watched), thai fried noodles, minced pork northern style, and water chestnuts with sugar syrup and coconut milk. The cooks were friendly and accomplished, but the attitude and joking was a little too much like theme park humor, and twenty students is too much for any kind of individual attention, which is needed for remembering some of the finer points. Still, it’s impossible not to learn a heck of a lot. That first day one of the highlights of the class was a review of ingredients. I didn’t know that three kinds of basil are used, nor did I know exactly what lemongrass is, nor exactly how fish sauce and shrimp paste is used.
For dinner, since we’d been eating all day, we weren’t too hungry, but as luck would have it, I’d read about a noodle place in a Lonely Planet cuisine and culture book. The book said the place had the best noodles with fish balls in town. Jo and Michael came with us. The tuk-tuk driver went to the wrong gate at first, apologized profusely, then made it his personal mission to find not just the right gate, which was as close as I thought he’d take us, but the place itself. And he waited until we made sure it was the right place.
The scene was confusing at first, since it looked like two places. An enclosed fast food type facade on one side, and a more typically Thai open to the street hole in the wall next door. But a hostess approached us, explained in good English that it was all the same place, and found us a table immediately on the hole in the wall side even though it was pretty full. The fish balls, like the fish cakes we’d had before, were a little rubbery, but evidently that’s how they’re supposed to be. Flavor good, though, and Jo and Michael, who hadn’t been eating all day, ordered a second dish.
We hit the Night Bazaar after dinner and Jo helped us find a shop where they sold real silk. All up and down the street at the night market, tuk-tuk drivers are parked bumper to bumper and some can be pretty aggressive about trying to get your business. A constant barrage of “Hallo” as you walk, and some have laminated sheets with photos of the sights. But it’s easier to walk through the tuk-tuk drivers than between the stalls, which is as congested with tourists as the Patpong market in Bangkok. To my shopping challenged eye, the merchandise looked about the same as in Mexico: whatever you could possibly make out of silver, ceramics, wood, or cloth. Little animal figures, big animal figures, cooking bowls, cooking utensils, chess sets, t-shirts and caps, a million Buddhas (sub Virgin of Guadalupe), etc. I’m a terrible consumer.
This must have been the night David and I went to a Blues Bar near the Tha Phae gate, where they were playing BB King on the stereo. About half and half Thais and westerners; everyone but us drinking whiskey, the bottle sitting on the table. Most of the place was more or less on the sidewalk; lots of people passing by. Not a bad scene. Chiang Mai would be a great place for low key urban living. Much less chaos than Bangkok or any really big city, but plenty of good places to eat, and probably some good book stores, my first two requirements. Warm climate the year around; easy to walk anywhere if you live in or near the Old Town. And if you don’t like walking, it’s hard to pay more than $2 for a tuk-tuk.
21 Feb 01 Wednesday
Cooking class again, this time out of town at the chef’s house. On the edge of a pretty fancy subdivision, and it looks like he’s got an acre or so of land. Enough for an excellent kitchen garden. He was all business and it was just like watching a cooking show on TV. The Thai Emeril. This time we made Panaeng Curry with Pork, Chiang Mai Curry with Chicken, Fried fish with chili and basil, sweet and sour vegetables, spicy glass noodle salad, and black sticky rice pudding.
The theme today was making curry pastes. Thai curries are a combination of dried and fresh ingredients that are beaten into a paste, and we spent fifteen minutes, each one of us, doing just that with a huge mortar and pestle. A little water can be added to get the right consistency.
That afternoon Roy and Laddawan left for Bangkok, and Jo and Michael went with us to Ta-Krite for supper, which according to one guidebook had transvestites waiters, but alas there were none, and no people either. Ate there anyway, then on to the Pub, billed by Newsweek in the eighties as one of the world’s best bars, but it was also deserted, their excuse being that it was too early. Not eleven yet. Had an interesting black and white photograph over the fireplace of a guy who looked like Neal Cassidy kneeling beside a freshly killed leopard. After leaving us there, our tuk-tuk drivers volunteered to come back for us in an hour, which they faithfully did.
22 Feb 01 Thursday
Last day for Jo and Michael. Visited with them while they finished breakfast, then walked up a street where there were some good shops. Time to think about shopping.
Turned out we’d already been to the elephant’s wat that Jo told us about, but we’d missed the elephants. Walked around wrong side. Impressively tall wat with half a dozen elephants restored. Apparently, there had originally been elephants all the way around the structure, which was something we’d seen with Buddhas at the ruins in Ayuthalla and Sukothai, and the replication of the images does have a certain impact.
Ate lunch at place where we’d had fruit drinks before, then went to mall, mainly to see what it was like. Like so many places in Thailand, the strange juxtaposition of things is what makes the deepest impression: houses for sale, displays with models, just inside the entrance; huge, empty restaurant featuring a Thai band, female singer doing “Rock around the Clock,” and a middle-aged westerner alone on the dance floor, doing the bop by himself; DQ, Dunkin Donuts, and something called Mr. Shake all side by side; hordes of teenagers everywhere, looking like teenagers from everywhere; the tile floor in need of repair, empty storefronts, one with wooden carousel animals jammed into the space.
In part because we could walk to it, David and I ate supper at an Indian restaurant. Not very crowded, but recommended by all the guidebooks. The hefty Indian owner helped us order, and at a table nearby his two hefty kids were doing homework, in Thai and in English. Very good and very, very hot.
Decided to check out the “beer bars” in basement of the Night Bazaar. Couldn’t find them at first. Turns out they are continuous on either side, kind of in the crawl space, and one side, as we noticed only after ordering a beer, was the gay side, and the other one, which we discovered later, was the whore side. All the bartenders on the gay side were cute little guys with high pitched voices wearing lipstick and see through t-shirts. That the other side was for whores didn’t become totally apparent until we got to the end, still with the idea that we’d go back and sit somewhere, but at the last bar we got stormed by women who seriously didn’t want us to leave. I’m afraid we disappointed them, although I had to wrench my arm away from one to make an exit. I was so surprised by the sudden aggression that I didn’t even have time to enjoy the attention.
Decided to try a place called the Harley Bar. Posters of customized cars and bikes on the walls; racing channel on TV. Turned out the waitresses didn’t mind sitting with you if you bought them a drink, but David and I just wanted to drink our beer and talk of course. We sat at the bar, and one of the waitresses squeezed between us to pour our first beer, but when we didn’t show any interest in getting to know her better, she quickly left us alone. And everybody was still friendly the whole time we were there, which might only happen in Thailand. Before we left, a guy came up to the curb with either a baby or a midget elephant, don’t know which, selling rides.
23 Feb 01 Friday
Killed morning shopping and had our first bad meal, lunch at the place where they had prawns swimming in the tank. Greasy noodles. Went to airport at three and caught plane to Bangkok at 4:15.
Had trouble contacting the Quality Suites van at Bangkok airport, so we took a taxi. Weren’t entirely sure driver understood where we wanted to go, but one problem was the accent on Quality. In Thai, I guess it’s QualiTY. The hotel didn’t have a bar, so we walked down the street a little ways and found a place that looked okay for a beer. The women were just a little too good looking, though, and I saw no female customers, and they really wanted us to eat—one girl even brought out a bag of frozen french fries, as evidence of ability to make western food, I guess—but we decided to walk back to a place we’d seen on the corner, that looked pretty crowded, always a good sign. Turned out their specialty was barbecued catfish, but they spoke no English and had a hard time finding an English language menu. By the time they found it, I’d pointed to a catfish, and to a small plate of little crabs, and everyone understands Singha Beer. Had to get permission from table next to us to walk over and point at a vegetable plate we wanted, and in the end, we actually got exactly what we ordered. Catfish was good about a foot a half long. Served on its side, split open, and when you’re finished with that side, you turn it over. The crabs you ate whole, after dipping in slightly sweet hot sauce. The hot sauce for the catfish had a licorice flavor to it; not my favorite, but I tried to ignore the licorice taste.
I enjoyed the scene. Open air, warm. Couples and families, one large group of men, all out for Friday night dinner. Very informal. The waiter, a teenager, was very amiable about the language problem. Really wanted to get it right.
24 Feb 01 Saturday
Caught plane back at 7:30 in the morning.
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