Off the Couch and On the Road

The following morning we left for a 6-hour bus ride to Chiang Khong, where we would spend a night before crossing the border into Laos. The bus trip was broken into a few 2-hour trips and we stopped for lunch at another temple (can’t remember where it was or what it was called, but it was dubbed the ‘tacky temple’ and looked like something the white witch would live in within Narnia).

We arrived in Chiang Khong late afternoon, the town of which was really only one street filled with guesthouses, and spent the afternoon playing cards and going through the differences in Laos culture. We ate a local restaurant, where a Thai man and his 4 year-old daughter sang Eric Clapton with black hats flashing with red and green lights in a voice reminicent of Elvis with a Thai accent. We wanted to get up and start singing too, but that damn 4 year-old was holding onto that mic tighter than a Pamela Anderson t-shirt. Ah well, Karaoke would have to wait.

-Sarah

Trains are ok. They really are. But when they try to be something they’re not (ie. a bed) they ultimately suck. They really do. Sleeping on that carriage was like laying in half a single bed with a bunch of kids on Ritalin jumping up and down on either side. So I spent at least 10 hours laying awake trying not to throw up. The Thai whisky and beer probably didn’t help either.

We were actually right next to what was the ‘disco carriage’ on the train, which played Venga Boys and YMCA while serving beer in 1.6 litre bottles. So we were kept entertained until about 10pm when we all tried to fall asleep, failing miserably.

We arrived at Chiang Mai in northern Thailand at about 8am and felt much better after a big breakfast. Technically we could do whatever we wanted today, but it was a unanimous decision led by a whole-hearted whisky toast the night before, that we would ride elephants before we left Thailand.

Sakai arranged the transport and a guide, and we were so excited we could barely contain ourselved the whole way there. And they were gorgeous. It was two people per elephant, so Kate and Ihopped onto the back of one armed with a bunch of bananas for bribery purposes and set off on the track.

Except this elephant didn’t want to follow it’s handler on the track, did it. So we hung precariously to the seat with a small chain holding us in while it ignored the handler and kind of plodded along some unknown path into the bush. Which was kind of funny, and out Thai handler giggled and kept shaking his head. Trust me to choose the rogue elephant.

Once we had run out of bananas though, our cute little elephant seemed to get quite angry, and snorted at us while whipping our feet with it’s ears. Now, I have health insurance, but I doubted at that frantic moment whether it covered loss and damage due to ‘elephant on a rampage’. It set off into a jog (do elephants jog?) and came up to a tree-house filled with buckets of bananas. The Thai handler was yelling at this stage, hitting the elephant with a kind of pick (and still giggling) while trying to catch us up to everyone else, who’s elephants were quite demure in comparison, riding in a long straight line further down the track.

Our elephant trumpeted in anger, tossed aside a few of the buckets with it’s trunk, stole sevaral large bunches of bananas, and stormed off, leaving our guide 2 storeys up in a tree platform, still giggling, and us screaming with terror and laughing hysterically down the mountain. By ourselves. With no handler and a rogue elephant. God it was fun.

After our elephant adventure, we changed and head off to the Chiang Mai women’s prison. Their rehabilitation program is one of the most respected in Thailand and involved teaching the women(amongst other things) to practise Thai massage so they could earn a living after they are released. And apparently their massages were the best kept secret in Thailand, so we checked it out. And it was the best massage ever. Amazing. The girls giggled, laughed and talked so much that we wondered how any of them could commit a crime, and asked Sakai what they were in for. Apparently for some it’s prostitution, other for saying a bad word against the King (even stepping on a flyaway Baht note is punishable with a jail term, as you are stepping on the King’s head). But we decided they were all lovely and left the jail feeling stretched and relaxed. And kind of glad we weren’t wearing yellow so they didn’t confuse us for prisoners and let us leave.

The early evening was spent at Wat Phrathat on the mountain of Doi Suthep. According to legend, holy relics discovered during the reign of King Kuena (1355-1385) were placed in a howdah on the back of a white elephant, which carried t5hem up the mountain before dropping dead from fatigue. The king built the temple to store the remains and the site has since been expanded to include a monastery where monks and nuns live and work on either side of the temple (at the top of 300-odd stairs which killed our nicely massaged legs). Monks are the highest level of person in Thailand, even higher than the royal family, and every make is encouraged to become a monk at some point in their life. There were small boys there on a school holiday program (getting it over and done with early, I guess) and we were lucky enough to be able to kneel before a monk and have white string tied to our wrists (right for men, left for women) as good luck and a wish for happiness.As he was tying the string, he was smiling and mumbling what sounded to me like “happy-happy-lucky-lucky-best-wishes-to-you-happy-happy-lucky-lucky”. It may have been more serious and complex than that, but I doubt it.

If the string fell off within three days, we had to hang it from a tree or something higher than us, or we could keep it on for as long as we wanted. It wasn’t a touristy area of the temple and in fact very few people ever have that experience. I personally am keeping mine on until everyone asks me where I got the string and what it is for, so I can casually drop in that a Buddist monk in Thailand blessed me with luck and happiness. Very casually. Nothing to it really. Just a good contact, you know how it is.

We watched the chanting of the monks and nuns at 6pm and walked back down the stairs to fresh strawberries and dinner at a local seafood restaurant, whose main selling point on all it’s signage was fried chicken. Of course.

-Sarah

Bangkok is full of contradictions. It’s street stalls next to skyscraper malls, traffic with no obvious rules yet an undercurrent of order that allows you to walk out in front of it and have traffic swerve neatly around you. Very neatly. So neatly in fact that I often waited for a Thai local to cross first and kind of hurried off beside them. And it was fascinating and scary all at once.

We left first thing and walked down to the Nae Nam Chao Phraya (river) to catch a boat down the back canals (Khlongs) of Bangkok, seeing the parts of the old city unaffected by modern life. Except for Coke and Pepsi, naturally.

Kids swimming in the brown water would wave madly and everyone always had a smile as we sailed past, their back doors not much higher than the waterline. We pulled up at the pier just outsideWat Pho, hosting the largest and most holy Buddha in Thailand.The Golden Buddha is so big they actually built the temple around him, but there are hundreds of other Buddhas and statues built to honour various royals right throughout the site.

Our tour guide was great, I didn’t remember any of it, but the entire temple was magnificent. And you have to give credit to Buddism. Our guide showd us Chinese and Hindu statues, telling us that “Buddism is very flexible, we welcome everybody”. In fact, it is not a religion but a philosophy, has no unique creed, no single authority and no single sacred book, which is pretty awesome, especially when they’re so damn happy all the time. They even call the toilet “the happy room”, due to the state one is usually in when they exit 🙂

We had some free time in the afternoon to go to the mall and find the bits and pieces we needed before we left the city, including a good bottle of Thai whisky to help us get through the 15-hour train trip to Chiang Mai.

-Sarah

After trying to sleep through a 4 hour animated discussion between my hostel roomates about what I like to call “The British Backpackers Guide to Bangkok’s Ping-Pong Girls”, I gave up and resigned not to do very much on my first day in Bangkok. I found an street stall selling iced coffee and decided things were looking up if I could find coffee in Indochina (the recipe – a large cup full of ice, mix the espresso with sweetened condensed milk, sugar and a white powdery substance and pour over ice. I obviously need to find an appreciation for tea).

In the afternoon, I caught a metered taxi (lesson learned) to the hotel where I would meet my tour group, and slept for the remainder of the afternoon in air-conditioned bliss. My tour turned out to be a pretty cool group of 7 mostly-British gap year students, with a few Aussies and a Swiss added in for good measure. Our group leader Sakai was a cool Aussie guy who moved to Cambodia to become a monk and spent 8 months in a vow of silence, amongst other awesome travel adventures.

We all ate dinner at a local semi-street restaurant where the food was good and cheap, skipped the touristy bars with overpriced drinks and karaoke, and headed for a 7-11 for cheap beer, joining thousands of others sitting on Khao San’s roadside people-watching until we could barely manage to keep our eyes open and returned to our hotel for a good night’s sleep.

-Sarah

The last few weeks in Sydney seemed a blur of shopping, packing, goodbyes and trying to watch as many Grey’s Anatomy episodes as possible (I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone, but ohmygod Meredith??!!). In the midst of all that I somehow managed to get myself organised and on the plane, arriving in Bangkok late last night, to the delight of the taxi touts at the airport, just hanging out for a naieve, tired Aussie girl to come stumbling bleary-eyed across their path.

Ok, I know you’re supposed to find the metered taxis, and I’m absoloutly sure I was ripped off. But it was at least 3am Sydney-time and equivalent to the cost of an airport taxi in Sydney, so I thought of it as kind of an advance payment on my Karma for this trip, and Buddha and I called it even.

-Sarah