One night in Bangkok

Really I spent three nights in Bangkok, but no one wrote a song titled Three Nights in Bangkok.

Chiang Mai was a pleasant vacation to end the trip.  Besides reading poolside and my one bike ride, I also attended a cooking class one day.  Both the ingredients and the techniques are quite different, and in the class, you have to make your own curry paste with a mortar and pestle.

On my last night in Chiang Mai, I had dinner with Mike and Barbara Ullman and their friends who live here.  Another small world story.

Then it was on to Bangkok for my final three days.   On Sunday I went to the huge weekend market in the morning, and then did a bike tour.  Although Bangkok is a huge city, there are back alleyways, canals, and paths everywhere.  We rode through the back alleys of Chinatown (the second largest in the world after San Francisco) and then took a canal boat ride followed by more biking along the canals.

On Monday I visited the Royal Palace and several temples and pagodas.  I took one more picture of me with the (born on) Monday Buddha.  I have learned on this trip that you can never have too many buddhas.

Bangkok is known for its street food, but it was too daunting for me.  There are street restaurants and kiosks everywhere, but I can't tell what most of the foods are, much less how to eat them.  So this morning I signed up for a street food tour.   I was the only one on the tour, so I have a wonderful guide all to myself, and I stopped at every kiosk to ask her what the unidentifiable foods were.  All I can say is ... they eat a lot of strange foods here.  I'm sorry I didn't take this tour first so I could have tried more foods on my own.  She also told me where the best pad thai in Bangkok is, so on my last night here, that is what I had for dinner.

I visited one museum in the afternoon and then decided to walk to the pad thai restaurant.  I can't understand anything that is being said, but I think I found the demonstrations.  I saw tent cities in a few locations, a parade of protesters, and some speakers.  I think the demonstrations are an ongoing thing, so no one seems to be very worked up about them.

In Bangkok, I was hot and uncomfortable.  Since I have a really high tolerance for heat, I think it must be really miserable here.

I am flying out tonight at midnight, so this may be my last post.  I have an eleven hour layover in Tokyo tomorrow and hope to spend half the day sightseeing, but I'll be home before I could post anything, so that seems a bit silly.  At least the weather in Tokyo is cooperating; it is not freezing cold.  Now I just have to see if I can get out of the airport, change money, get into the city, not get lost, and get back to the airport.

And that's it for Southeast Asia 2013 - 2014.

Look right

Now I know why all the cars in Burma have the steering wheel on the right even though they drive on the right.  They are acquiring used cars in Thailand where they do drive on the left.  I am now "on vacation" in Chiang Mai, a very pleasant city in northern Thailand.  There are, of course, several temples to see here (they call a temple a wat in Thailand), but mostly Chiang Mai is a center for outdoor activities:  elephant riding, visiting tigers, trekking to native villages, zip lining.  So I am enjoying my favorite outdoor activity:  sitting poolside in my resort hotel and reading books.  My main goal for the week is to not kill myself crossing the street.  So every time I step off a curb, I say out loud, "look right," like a toddler who has to narrate his activities.  Then I sneak a glance back to the left because I can't quite believe that everyone drives on the wrong side of the road.

On Tuesday I tore myself away from the pool long enough to take a bike ride to the sights of Chiang Mai.  I thought I should at least take one day to see the city and orient myself.  Again, my main goal was not to kill myself while riding on the left.  Thailand has more cars than the other places I have been in Southeast Asia, so it was a bit tricky.

My tour was with a company called Mountain Biking Chiang Mai.  It turns out that the tallest mountain in Thailand, over 7,500 feet, is outside of town.  This company drives everyone to the top, drops them off with their bikes, and picks up the pieces at the bottom.  So everyone is getting knee pads and helmets and gloves.  We ask what we need for the city tour and they say, try to stay awake.  Hmm ... even the company was not excited about my tour.  There were just two of us, a Dutch man and me, with the guide.  The Dutch man thought the tour included local villages and the guide was bored with temples, so after a few perfunctory stops at temples in town, we went off script and on a lovely ride outside of town to a lake.

It turns out that the guide, Jay, is a sponsored rider in biking events.  Last week there was a race up the mountain, and he won it, riding forty five kilometers with 6,500 feet of elevation gain in two and a half hours.  Interestingly, the race was not publicized outside of the biking world, so the bikers had to ride around cars and buses on the single road up the mountain.  Eventually, the cars and buses got stopped by the bike traffic and tourists who had gone up for the view got stuck in a jam for hours.  Just another day in Thailand.

Like my son, Steve, Jay trains before work every day and again after work, since the ride he took with us was hardly a workout for him.  Unlike my son, Steve, Jay has no discernible personality, so while the ride was lovely, there wasn't much guiding.  Jay is 28 and unmarried, in large part because, in his own words, his bike is his girlfriend.  She's probably talks as much as he does.  No complaints.  It was a nice ride in rolling countryside on a hot, sunny day to a lake.  We ate lunch at the lake in a restaurant where the tables are in individual cabanas on the water.  And I took my obligatory Claremonster Racing in Thailand picture in front of the Buddha for people who were born on a Monday (which I was).  I also realized that although I rode in both places, I forgot to take pictures of Claremonster Racing in Laos and Claremonster Racing in Myanmar.  I'm debating between going back and Photoshop.

Myanmar sights and oddities

We spent a second day seeing the sights of Mandalay by boat and horse cart.  We visited a beautiful 200 year old monastery made of carved teak wood, built on teak pillars.  But I have to say that the monks there are not very egalitarian.

We also went to an elite modern monastery.  In general, any boy who wants to be a monk can do so, but at this monastery, the boys have to be referred by their teachers.  They study Buddhist texts in the original Pali language but no secular studies (kind of like a yeshivah).  Because they study so much, the boys do not have to go out every day for food.  Instead, the monastery provides some meals.  We were there in the late afternoon and a man was stir frying in the biggest wok I have ever seen with a paddle the size of a boat oar.  Also, there were piles of sliced vegetables that I knew would drive Joe crazy.

From Mandalay we flew to Inle Lake, a huge lake known for its floating gardens and the fishermen's distinctive style of rowing.  They need two hands for fishing, so they row with one leg while perched on the other.

I had already seen a lot of floating villages which usually means houses built on stilts or sometimes houses on pontoons.  But at Inle Lake there are real floating gardens.  There is some plant that has large balls filled with air.  They put down a bamboo frame and cover it with these plants.  Then they can put soil on top of that and grow plants.  The gardens are solid enough for people to walk on.  I saw this but don't believe it.  Also, you wonder where some of the English names come from.

From Inle Lake we flew back to Yangon for one more day to walk around and see the colonial architecture.  It was a very packed nine days in Myanmar.  Here are a few more random things that I saw.

Yangon taxis.  The driver on the right is resting in the passenger's seat.

Me at Bagan

Village children

How you get oil from peanuts.

The final word from the monks.

The road to Mandalay

Today we took the road to Mandalay, but on Sunday we flew to Bagan - at 5:45 AM no less.  We arrived before 7 and after a quick stop at the local market, started visiting temples.  There are temples and stupas everywhere!  At Angkor Wat, the ruins are spread out over hundreds of kilometers, but here, in a very small area, are more than 2000 temples, some incredible and some tiny.  Some with ancient Buddhas and some with original frescoes.  It was just unbelievable.





It turns out that a lot of these temples were in ruins, both from age and earthquakes.  Bagan has dozens of small earthquakes each year and had a major one in 1975.  Against the advice of archaeologists and Unesco, the military government over the last thirty years rebuilt many of the temples which were in ruins.  Because of that no-no, Unesco will not declare the area a World Heritage Site.  Nonetheless, it is pretty incredible to see.

A few people had booked a balloon flight over Bagan at sunrise on Monday and they said it was even more incredible from the air.  A few other hearty souls went to one of the temples to watch the sunrise.  I slept till an almost civilized hour.  Then we went for a bike ride to a local village and to visit a few of the less visited temples.  The village was interesting but the ride was pretty much a disaster.  One of the men was very unsteady and slow, we went on sandy paths that were hard for everyone, and three people got flat tires.  We spent a lot of time standing in the hot sun waiting for people.  There was actually a bike repair outside the last temple, but by then the guide had given up and called for our bus.  Five of us rode on to lunch and the rest were happy to go by bus.  We had free time after lunch, so I took my bike and rode the entire loop again.  It is amazing to ride by all of the temples.  Both days we went to a temple in the evening to watch the sunset, an activity I am more than willing to participate in.

And this morning we were on the road to Mandalay.  The road, frankly, was not very interesting, but so far, Mandalay is.  We visited the 150 year old palace of the last kings, decorated in beautiful carved teak.  Then we went to the Kuthadow Pagoda which is said to house the world largest book.  The tripitaka, which can loosely be called the Scriptures of Buddhism, is engraved on 729 marble pages, each housed in one of the 729 little mini-pagodas around the main pagoda.



Finally we went for our nightly sunset viewing on top of Mandalay Hill.  A single hill rises in the middle of a flat plain.  You can see the city to the south, the river flowing by, and lush farmland, with the outlines of mountains in the distance.

At the Kuthadow Pagoda, we met two Burmese women who had traveled over a thousand kilometers to view the sites of Mandalay, and they asked us to take a picture with them.  So I gave my camera to the guide as well.

On Mandalay Hill three young monks, ages 14 and 15, struck up a conversation with me.  They said they walk to Mandalay Hill every night, a walk which takes an hour each way, to practice their English.  I am always happy to oblige people who want to practice English because I get to ask all kinds of nosy questions in my sincere effort to help them improve their English.

Tomorrow we are off again at 7:30 for what sounds like another full day.  At least in Mandalay, unlike Bagan, there is internet.  Slow, but it mostly works.  That is actually pretty amazing in a country where three quarters of the population lacks electricity and most villages have no running water.  The repressive military government finally opened up (maybe, somewhat) in 2010, and they are really trying to modernize and be attractive to tourists, but the infrastructure is extremely poor.  They have a long way to go, both to join the 21st Century and to have real democracy.

Yangon

I arrived on Friday in Myanmar, formerly Burma, where I am in Yangon, formerly Rangoon.  Yangon is also formerly the capital of Burma but Naypyidaw is now the capital.  I couldn't figure out why the flight here from Bangkok is less than an hour but it is two hours going back.  Ya gotta think outside the box.  The answer is ... Myanmar is in a different time zone - one that is a half hour behind Thailand - and off by half an hour from the rest of the time zones in the world.

There are some other odd things in Myanmar.  For example, they drive on the right side of the road, but most of the cars, trucks, and buses have their steering wheels on the right side.  Apparently they used to drive on the left but the generals changed that around twenty years ago, which leads to two interesting thoughts.  First, in twenty years couldn't they have found some left side drive cars and buses?  Second, I wonder how the change went on implementation day?  Because it is hard to drive on the right from the right side, our tour bus has an assistant who sits in the front left and helps the driver.

When I was walking around yesterday, I saw a bicycle with a sidecar.  The bike was the kind I had as a kid - thin tires and three gears.  We called it an English racer.  The sidecar looked homemade, with two wheels in back.  A man was pedaling and a woman was sitting in the sidecar with a sun umbrella.  That's love, I thought.  Then I saw a few more of these bikes.  Finally today when I was walking around, I realized that they are Burmese taxis.  Instead of a rickshaw with the driver in front or back, one person can sit next to the driver.

While walking around I stopped in a park for a little while to rest.  I saw a woman in a yellow wedding dress and thought it was a bride and groom taking photos as I had seen in Vietnam.  But everyone in the park got up to watch and were taking pictures as well.  I think it was a commercial photo shoot.  Check out her shoes. One other thing that has surprised me is how many Moslems I have seen in Yangon.

Burma is known as the country of pagodas, but unlike most of the ones I have seen in other countries, the pagodas here are both richly made and historically significant.  Last night on my own and tonight with my tour group I went to the incredible Shwedegon Pagoda, the highlight of Yangon.  The main tower, which is over 300 feet tall, is gold plated and adorned with diamonds and jewels.  There are dozens of smaller temples and stupas around the main tower; apparently you can never have too many Buddhas.  Ornate does not begin to describe Shwedegon.  The most impressive thing is ... this temple is over 2600 years old.  Deep inside the main tower are eight hairs of Gautama (Siddhartha) Buddha.  That beats the pieces of the true cross in St. Peters by about 900 years.



This morning I went for a walk through the markets to the Musmeah Yeshua synagogue.  I arrived at 9:20 to find that it was not yet open!  First time I ever made it to Shabbat services early.  Then I saw a sign on the door:  open 9:30 to 5:00 every day except Sunday.  Huh?  I waited and finally around 9:45, Moses Samuels, the caretaker, appeared.  The Sephardic synagogue was founded by Iraqi Jews and once had a thriving congregation when the British were here.  When the British left, so did most of the Jews.  There are only six families left, and Moses is not a young man.  I went upstairs to the women's balcony where I spent my entire childhood.  The streets around the synagogue are full of shops and most of those on the same street are paint and hardware stores.  There is a mosque on the same block.

Notice the paint cans in front of the store to the right

The view from the balcony

My days of going at my own easy pace are over, at least for this week.  I met up with my tour group this afternoon and we visited a few sights in Yangon.  Tomorrow we leave the hotel at 4:30 AM to catch a 5:45 flight to Bagan.  I sure hope there is a lot of bus time to catch up on my sleep.

Kuang Si waterfall

I had been trying all week to arrange a bike ride to one of the many waterfalls in the area.  In the end, no group was going, but the company that I liked offered me a bike and private guide for a reasonable price, so off I went yesterday.  The biggest waterfall here is Kuang Si which is a thirty five kilometer ride - each way.  I was pretty sure the round trip would be too hard for me if it was hilly, but with no group to slow down, I also knew I could wuss out and take a tuk-tuk back with the bikes.  Seemed like a no-lose situation to me.

The night before, I got together with Devin Mills again since he was leaving for Chiang Mai in the morning.  Devin and his friends had rented bikes and ridden to Kuang Si by themselves, but he is a lot younger than me.  I am happy to have a guide and mechanic with me.  Devin also told me that the waterfall is on three levels.  The walk to the first and middle levels is easy, but the walk to the top is very steep and slippery, and he implied that maybe I should not do it.  More on that later ...

My guide, Somhkit, was absolutely wonderful.  I was struggling on the hills, and he was helpful and encouraging.  One hill just went on forever.  Then on the other side it went down even steeper and longer.  The final approach to the waterfalls was another steep hill; I gave up and walked the bike.

Somhkit was the first private guide I had had in Laos, so I asked him all my questions about family, religion, education, politics, etc.  Among other things, he told me that Laos is a communist country.  How do they pick the leader, I asked.  He is elected by everyone over the age of eighteen.  Hmm ... I said.  That sounds like democracy.  What makes it communist?  He explained:  Everyone follows the same rules - the leaders and the people, everyone treats each other with respect, and there is no corruption.  So that makes them communist.  What about business?  Can anyone have any business they want?  Yes, but they are restricted by the rules that the communist government imposes.  Okay, I get it.  They elect the leader and they have a capitalist economic system, but they are communist.  Huh?

When we got to Kuang Si, Somhkit took me to eat at the guides' area rather than the tourist restaurant.  I love eating real food as long as I have a guide to tell me what to get and how to eat it.  I was feeling bad about how much I had struggled on the ride, so at lunch, I told Somhkit that I was a lot older than I look.   He asked how old I am (that is a non-offensive question in most countries) and when I told him, he went nuts.  I thought you were forty five, maybe fifty.  You are the oldest women I have ever guided.  Maybe the oldest of men and women.  After that, Somhkit was even more supportive and helpful.

We walked to the first and second levels of the waterfall.  Then he took me to the path to the top level.  I told him I heard the path was steep and slippery.  No problem, he said, you can do it, you are superwoman, it is only 500 meters.  I'm not sure why I listened to Somhkit rather than Devin whom I have known his entire life, but I guess flattery does work.   On the way up I started doubting my sanity again.  But it really wasn't that bad and we made it with only a couple of rest stops.  The top is kind of like the top of Nevada Falls.  I took off my shoes and waded across the pool, holding on to Somhkit's arm.  I don't know why I thought the path down on the other side would be easier.  It was steep and slippery.  Duh!  It was harder going down than up, but Somhkit held out his arm and I gripped his wrist for support.  Meanwhile, he is doing this whole thing - biking, climbing slippery trails - in flip flops.  And texting a friend, too, while we are walking.

Wearing Somhkit's "official" hat

A rest stop on the way up

The pools were incredibly green.  At the middle pool, there is a rope for jumping in.  You just have to wade across slippery rocks, climb wooden steps nailed on the trunk, reach out with a stick to pull in the rope, and then jump into freezing water.

That is not me.  I am still moderately sane.

To go back to Luang Prabang, we put the bikes on a tuk-tuk and had the driver drop us off at the top of the killer hill.  For the first ten or fifteen kilometers I watched the road and thought, what a wuss - I could have ridden this.  Then we went up that hill and the tuk-tuk was struggling in second gear.  I would have died.  I had never looked back when we rode there in the morning, but from the top of the hill, there was a wonderful view of Luang Prabang in the distance.  We rode down the hill and ... it went on forever.  Now I know why I struggled so much.

When we got back to Luang Prabang, Somhkit took me on a tour of the city.  I think he felt bad that I had cut the ride short, but I was willing to call it a day the first time we passed his office.  Even with the tuk-tuk ride, it was a fifty kilometer day - the second longest ride of this trip - and a climb up a waterfall as well.  My legs are dead today.

Oh, Somhkit, who is 28, married, and has a one year old son, was a monk for six years starting when he was twelve.  He thinks everyone should be a monk twice in his life.

Today was my final day in Luang Prabang and I spent most of it reading at poolside and resting my aching body.  Tomorrow I leave for Bangkok, en route to Myanmar.

Luang Prabang

I can't say if all of Laos is like this, but Luang Prabang is so much less hectic and more mellow than Vietnam.  There are fewer people and, while this is still a tourist area, the Lao are not aggressive businessmen, even though Loang Prabang is reputed to have the best night market in Southeast Asia.

I had not seen much of the city before I left on my elephant excursion, so yesterday I took a bicycle from my hotel and drove all around, stopping at each significant temple, stupa, and museum.  I climbed a million steps to the stupa on top of the hill in the middle of town to get a great view of the area.  I loved the Royal Palace.  When you go to St. Petersburg, they ignore the entire Soviet era and tell the tourists all about the tsars and the unfortunate last one as if they loved them all.  Similarly here, they don't want to talk about the last fifty years.  The Royal Palace is where the kings lived in the first half of the twentieth century, but it was completely remodeled in the early 1960's.  So I'm looking at historical artifacts from my childhood.  In the Royal Garage are two unrestored Lincoln Continetals from the mid-60's (gift of the US government) along with a really beat up Citroen from the 40's and a 60's era Jeep that the royals liked to tool around in.

I was going to ride out to one of the many waterfalls in the area, but when the road turned to gravel, I decided that my one-speed bike and I were not going to make it up the final two miles.  Tomorrow I am going on a long bicycle excursion to the biggest waterfall here but I will have a good bike and a guide.

This morning I got up early to watch the monks' alms walk at 6:00 AM.  The monks here are not like Catholic monks.  It is not a lifetime commitment and it is very common for young boys to be monks for several years.  They go to school and work around the temple during the day.  They own nothing and when they are hungry, they go out into the community with their bowls and people feed them.  The monks, however, do not beg.  Rather, it is an honor for the people to give them food as they earn "merit."  Also the monks do not eat after about noon.  In most places the monks just walk into the village when they are hungry, but here in Luang Prabang, there is an alms' walk every morning at 6:00 AM.   People line up on the sidewalk as the monks walk by and put a little bit of rice or food in each monk's bowl.  There are warning to the tourists all over to respect the ceremony, but the Chinese and Japanese tourists are really annoying, getting into monk's faces to take pictures.  It is pretty impressive.





 Then I spent the day in a cooking school learning how to make Luang Prabang salad, chicken larp, feu khua ... the names just get weirder.  It is very pleasant and restful here.

Children of Ban Pak Ou

How do you make friends with kids when you cannot communicate verbally at all?

There was a tiny village next to the elephant camp with more little children than houses.  I wandered over during my few free hours to buy Diet Coke and tried to engage the children who were mostly laughing at me because I could not understand the simple things they said.  Then I figured it out.  One at a time, I took a picture of each child and showed it to them.  They laughed hysterically at each one.  On the second day, a few more children came up to me.  After I took their pictures, they took me to their schoolyard where we played tag (I can't catch a ten year old) and they taught be how to count to five.  They could count to ten in English, but five was more than I could learn at one time.

The children of Ban Pak Ou, with an adult or two.