Patrick and Mary Go Round

We returned to Chiang Mai after spending Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning at the International Meditation Center just outside of town. What an incredible experience! The retreat was led by several student monks who study at Chiang Mai University (CMU) together with a master of meditation monk, who seems to be ranking monk on all things Buddhist. In addition to meditation, the center has a good size dining hall (large enough for maybe 150 people), double occupancy, single sex dorm rooms complete with fan and private baths. The whole compound is a smooth operation and the grounds are immaculately maintained. The all-vegetarian meals are prepared by a small staff of former Burmese refugees who are staying at the center during the ongoing humanitarian crisis.

There were 36 beginners at the retreat and we were all required to wear white during our stay (a tradition passed down from the Buddha). We learned about several schools/techniques and were able to practice sitting, lying down and walking meditation. Each style seemed challenging at first, but we both started to catch the hang of them - with some practice and more training. Interestingly, several techniques are similar to yoga, what with the concentration on breathing, staying focussed and being relaxed, keeping your posture straight and visualizing on any pains that arise. Then, there were lots of things that were pretty unique, like the no talking bit. Yeah, we had total silence throughout the experience — unless you were one of the 6 chicks from the UK to whom the rules seemed to not apply. Regardless, I found it very interesting how little you really NEED to say to people in order for them to know what you’re thinking. Further, total silence can do wonders to shut out alot of the background thoughts and focus your mind on the task at hand — very cool to try sometime.

Here’s our class of rookies with the master (center), flanked by his students:

Mary is down in the bottom left and I’m two rows behind her on my tiptoes.

We got a beginners lecture on Buddhism, the teachings of the Buddha and some insight into the monks’ customs and traditions. Towards the end of the retreat, we broke into small group sessions and had the opportunity to ask whatever we wanted about meditation practice, the lives of the monks or even about haircuts and robe colors. It was a great experience and we’d highly recommend MonkChat, if you ever find yourself in Chiang Mai.

Up next, we’ll head into Laos tomorrow, making it only the second land-based border crossing of the trip (first being from Ecuador to Peru way back in October). All the other crossings have been at airports, but it feels like no big deal at all. We could see the lights on in Laos from our hotel in Chiang Khong. So tomorrow, we’ll load into the ferry, hit the customs and immigrations on both banks before jumping on the slow boat towards Luang Prubang. The slow boat is exactly what it sounds like — a lazy cruise down the Mae Kong river for 2 days. We should arrive in Luang Prubang at around 6PM on Sunday evening, where we plan to explore for a few days before bussing on towards Vang Vieng.

Thailand, what a place!

We’re on the bus on our way out of Pai (pronounced Pie), en route to return to Chiang Mai. The little hippy town was great for many reasons – not the least of which being a break from the Thai heat/humidity. Pai is about a 3 hours ride northwest of Chiang Mai and is higher up into the mountains, thereby cooler. We took a private mini-bus and thought we would arrive in style. Instead, the hair-pin mountain roads left us both a bit wracked, bounced and turned. In contrast, today’s bus seems much cooler and has half the people, allowing us to spread out a bit.

Pai is spectacular in every sense. We seemed to have arrived at just the right time of year – cool at night (maybe 65 degrees F) and just crowded enough for some nightlife. We read that Pai was good for hanging out next to the river, elephant trekking and some free hikes to nearby waterfalls. This is exactly what we did: on day one, we scouted the town for the good eats and stopped into The Witching Well for great sammies. Day two, we walked out of town up into the hills in seek of a waterfall (slash) old-style swimmin’ hole. However, yesterday was the most incredible of our adventures in Pai, possibly in all of Thailand.

We set out on the day with some coffee and bagels before Mary took a 2.5 hour yoga class (including plenty of meditation, too). After lunch, we headed over to Thom’s Elephant Camp to ride and play with the elephants. Pompaem was our gentle beast who carried us down to the river. Bath time!!! The elephants loved playing in the river and we learned several new things about these ancient creatures: First, a long trunk is very useful for many things, including use as a super long snorkel, dine-and-dash grass-grabber and fire hose. Results of our water fight with Pompaem and her buddy Tut Dao — Humans: 0, Elephants: 1. After bath time, we continued downstream and returned to Thom’s to snack on the entirety of several banana trees. Thom’s shoots video of your ride (with pictures, too) and offers to sell you a DVD for $17… of course, you HAVE to buy it and hope that it comes out well. Regardless of the price tag, how many videos do you have of an elephant dumping you off its back into a river? We know own one. After the elephant ride and snack time, we soaked up the sunset in Thom’s hot tubs. To recover from our magical experience, we applied a few Singha beers and some cakes from a bakery in town… should we have held out for Pie in Pai?

This afternoon, we’re headed to a Buddhist Meditation Retreat on the campus of Chiang Mai University where we’ll learn about the religion and chat with student/novice monks. I’m not sure if the camera will be allowed in, but we are very excited about getting new, all white suits for the retreat and the possibility of breaking it down with some real life Thais. Send us your questions about Buddhism and we’ll try to send back any answers that we find.

Well, we have just been quite delinquent in getting our blog posts written. We feel guilty about it and want to do better. I think we’re traveling at a bit of a break neck speed right now, and the blog suffers for it. We realize that we are now well over the hump and are trying to fit in as much as possible.

So, to recap on the happenings in Chiang Mai… Everyone recommended this place – the second largest city in Bangkok and the cultural capitol of the north. We stayed in a great spot – Gap’s House (the original, “the one by the temple”), where they had a good rate, with a full breakfast included, free internet, and a pretty garden setting. The staff was a bit unfriendly, but there was an awesome extra vegetarian buffet that cost $2.50 and was quite different from the dishes we had been eating.

We checked out a full day Thai cooking class, a required part of visiting Chiang Mai. We went through the Thai Farm Cooking School, which was unique because we cooked on a sustainable farm that produced most of the food we used in the class. We got a tour through the farm of a lot of the plants used in the dishes – like chili basil, thai parsley, lemon grass, and thai ginger. Our fabulous teacher, Nice, taught us how to make typical dishes like green curry, coconut milk soup, chicken and basil, chicken with cashew, pad thai, spring rolls, bananas in coconut milk, and pumpkin in coconut milk. It’s making me hungry to remember it all.

Patrick and Mary cooking it up!

The next day we braved the Thai streets, including the “super highway”, by moped and sped out of the city to check out Wat Phra That Doi Suthep that sits on the top of a mountain overlooking Chiang Mai and is the most important buddhist temple in northern Thailand. Even monks were visiting the temple from all over Thailand, taking pictures of this most symbolic place with their digital cameras. We met one when we pulled over our moped on the way up the mountain for a rest and the monk caught us as he walked down the mountain. He had all kinds of questions about the United States, is Oregon pronounced Oreg-ON or Oreg-EN, what is the biggest state, what is the smallest state, what do we think of Obama, and how about that Foreign Minister lady? He just chuckled after each of our responses, offering no commentary of his own, and moved onto the next question. The temple was beautiful, but the haze that seems to hang over the entire country of Thailand from morning til night prevented us from seeing much of the city below. The moped ride oscillated between enjoyable as we went down the curves of the mountain road, to terrifying as Patrick learned to make turns and I tried to (not always gently) remind him to stay in the LEFT lane.

Hmmm, so then the next day we took off on a full-day organized tour, which is fun to do every once in a while, because you see a lot more in a day and have someone else worrying about all the transportation (it’s sort of like the staying in on a Saturday afternoon to watch a marathon of Top Model kind of travel – you feel a little guilty about it at the end, but not enough to keep you from doing it again). Anyway, we checked out some great places, like National Park Doi Inthanop and the tallest peak in Thailand (only about 2565 meters or 8200 feet), where a holiday honoring the last king of the Lanna Kingdom in Northern Thailand (who has his remains on top of the mountain) just happened to be taking place. Lots of local people had come to the mountain top to pay their respects and were delivering huge quantities of food to a group of monks who had gathered there. We learned that because the buddhist monks are so sedentary here, basically meditating for the majority of the day, they eat their last meal of the day by 11:30 am and don’t eat again for the rest of the day. I’m told it’s not so bad and that I would get used to it in about a month, but I’m not sure I’d like to find out. We also visited hill tribe villages of the Hmong and Karen people in the national park. Hill tribe villages are a massive tourist attraction in northern Thailand, and I’m still contemplating what the deal with this is – a “human zoo” is the best phrase I have heard thus far to describe this kind of tourism. I went to the zoo.

We met up with our new buddies from Alabama – Nick and Leslie – that night for some jenga and bar hopping in Chiang Mai. You could spend a lot of baht in that town. They’re off to Laos now, so we hope to get some scoop from them on places we’ll be soon.

Now we have arrived in Pai, about 3 hours to the west into the mountains from Chiang Mai. It’s sort of a hippy traveler enclave over top of a pre-exisiting small Thai town based around the Pai River. It’s not particularly impressive for any cultural reason (it lacks a proper night market that makes this country amazing), but it is quickly becoming my favorite spot thus far in Thailand for appreciating the outdoors here. It’s one of those towns that we love where you can do lot of outdoors stuff on your own or for pretty cheap. It’s also the coolest place we’ve been here – in fact, I think it’s possible to stop sweating entirely here except for the requisite 1 pm to 3 pm timeframe.

Today, we did a 10 km walk up into the hills to check out one of the waterfalls in the area – the Ma Paeng waterfall – walking through several small villages, including a Chinese village and a Lisu village (hill tribe community). We started out early to try to evade the onset of heat, and arrived by late morning. The water was really refreshing, and we hung out for a while appreciating the skills of a group of local boys sliding straight down the waterfall’s rock faces and into the water. Fortunately, none of the foreigners felt confident enough in their skills to follow suit. The 10 km walk back to Pai was a bit hellish given that it was afternoon by this point, but we stopped off in the Chinese village for a while to enjoy some delicious noodle soup, water and beer, which fixed us up pretty well for the way home.

Now, just composing this from the front deck on our $8.50 a night bungalow (Family House – good spot near the river), and listening to the evening chanting of the buddhists at a temple down the road and the insects in the trees. This, too, can be yours…

We’ve arrived in Chiang Mai and are immediately relieved to have outrun the heat. On our first night in town, it’s been a comfortable temp since the sun went down (maybe 70 degrees Fehrenheit). The overnight train from Bangkok provided introduction to an American couple, Leslie and Nick, from Alabama. After settling into to our respective hostels (we’re camped out at Gap’s House using the free WiFi), all four of us met up for some laughs, a drink and trip to the night market — a crazy place on this Monday evening. The night market was packed full of (just as everyone had forewarned) every and anything a materialist could possibly desire. Mary managed to haggle down for a reasonably priced blue skirt, but I was too freaked out to make any offers on anything.

We spent a few hours this afternoon setting up some activities here in Chiang Mai. Tomorrow, we’ll take an all day Thai cooking class that starts with a market tour at 8:30AM and will take us to a working farm to learn about Thai ingredients. We’re also looking at brochures for trekking companies to find some bamboo rafting, elephant riding and hiking to the highest peak in Thailand type of trek… still mulling all the ideas. Next Tuesday evening (not tomorrow), we’re hoping to spend the night at a Buddhist meditation center, learning about the religion and the role of monks in Thai society. These monks also offer workshop sessions, aptly named Monk Chat, which appear to be an hour long Q&A with monks studying in Chiang Mai.

More stories about each plan as they develop…

We left Ranong yesterday afternoon to catch Train #86 in Chumphon, which arrived safely in Bangkok main train terminal at around 6:30 AM, this morning. Per recommendations from Austin friends, Lili and Aaron, we scored 2 berth seats in the Air-Con, Second Class cabin. The beds were extremely comfortable and we were excited with how nice the experience went. When we were able to calm down, we both slept really soundly — Mary on the bottom (read: darker/roomier) bunk and me up topside. We both really look forward to tomorrow’s longer adventures on the overnight train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai!

Also, I’ve added a Google Map of our Geo Feed, which is a mash-up of Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, BlogLoc.com and a service called GeoUpdater. Check out the pinpoints of where we’ve been thus far on the journey.

Jumping from beachtown to beachtown has given us a spectacular opportunity to taste the flavors of Southern Thailand and the Indian Ocean. We flew Thai Airways from Bangkok to Phuket to spend three days exploring the island’s beaches. Next stop was Krabi town, a riverside fishing village well-suited to ferry visitors to nearby beaches and limestone rock faces. Compared to Phuket, Ao Phra Nang was slightly less crowded, considerably shadier and provided a cool vantage point for watching local rock climbers shimmy up negatively-sloped crags.

While swimming in the cove’s gloriously bath-warm waters, a jellyfish seems to have mosied up to Mary’s thigh and gave her a nasty sting. The burning was bearable, but we checked-in with the Thai pharmacists to discuss remedy options. After describing the Jellyfish to the pharmacy staff, they nodded knowingly and said: “Ohh, you mean a Jerryfish?” We’ve been repeating this to eachother for days and smiling. We bought some cream and got the fleshy part of an aloe plant, which combined to soothe the burning and now have the sting under control.

From Krabi, we took the advice of Julie and David, from Washington state, and rode up to Ranong. On the 9:30 ferry to Ko Phayam, we met Julius and Natalie – Germans staying just down the beach. There are no cars on the island and the ‘road’ is smaller than many walking trails back home. A motor bike ride to the other side of the island meant stowing our backpacks between the moped driver and the handle bars. Our drivers appeared to be hugging our bags and the bags seemed to be navigating. We checked into our bungalow and already anticipate a great deal of trouble once it’s time to leave paradise. The island, only reachable by ferry and speedboat, has no electricity and is extremely tranquillo. We live right on the beach and have been lulled by the crashing waves for the last 24 hours. It’s spectacularly mellow here and the guidebooks have been spot-on about the prices, thus far. Our beach front, private room, private bath bungalow costs US$11/night – why would we ever leave?

From the beach, we plan to ferry back to Ranong on Friday, hop a bus to Chumphon and take the overnight train to Bangkok. We’ve planned a one night layover in Bangkok and will train up to Chang Mai on Sunday evening (all seats are 2nd class Air-Con). Only a few days left of beach-bumming before we head to the north for some (hopefully) elephant trekking, cooking classes, Thai boxing and then onward to Loas.

One thing that’s certain, Thailand has been getting us pumped for a great summer at Seneca Lake.

We’ve been in Thailand now for about a week, and have been feeling the pressure daily to get a blog post up but things have just been coming at us so fast that we haven’t gotten a moment to really reflect yet. Here’s a try…

Flight - totally crazy. We left New York City, flew directly up over Canada to the Arctic, crossed over the Arctic to Siberia, down over Russia and China to Hong Kong in 16 hours. It was light when we started the plane ride, then it got dark, then light again, and then dark again - all in the same 16 hours! Then another couple hours to Bangkok, and just like that you too can be in Asia.

Bangkok - wow, what a city. I think you could spend weeks there and still not be satisfied. I’ll admit that I was quite nervous about arriving to this massive city of 10 million people in the middle of the night, but we had a good, and even relaxing time there recovering from the jet lag. We stayed at Sivalai Place - a very clean, quiet, and friendly place just outside the chaos of the downtown and backpackers haven of the Koh San Road. It was the perfect place to recover from the jet lag (ie. be up, for hours, in the middle of the night for four nights in a row) and we would HIGHLY reccommend it to anyone arriving from a long plane ride to Bankok.

I’ll just get our activities in Bankok out there - checked out the amazing temples of Wat Arun (Temple of the Dawn) and Wat Pho (Temple of the Reclining Buddha); rode on river boats; followed our friend Matt’s advice and ate only in places packed with Thais with much, often spicy, success; checked out a floating market where you take a boat through canals to check out the goods; went to the Temple of the Tiger, where we hung with the monks and played with the tigers (more like gingerly placed a hand on one to snap a photo and then scurried away). We’ll swing back through Bangkok again, maybe even a couple times.

Temple of the Reclining Buddha: That is one relaxed Buddha!

Temple of the Dawn

Patrick bonds with the tiger.

Then, much against all backpacker wisdom, we headed straight to Phuket - the famous island in the southern western coast of Thailand, that backpackers often shun due to it’s overbuilt beaches and large resorts. But we have lived to tell the tale that backpackers should not be afraid. We stayed off the beach in the actual town of Phuket, which has really beautiful architecture built by the wealthy merchants who first really started up this town and it has a really great cultured feeling. We’ve stayed in the Old Town Hostel, which is an awesome place for cheap right in the middle of things with a great little breakfast in the mornings. We’ve taken buses around the island to check out the beaches, including Hat Karon and Laem Singh. Laem Singh was a particularly beautiful little cove, that avoided some of the more scary, (ahem) older, Euro travelers/ex-pats on Hat Karon, due to the steep path to get there. We’re heading to a town called Krabi today, and plan to continue beaching it for the next week and hope that our skin adjusts (mine currently revolts at least once a day) and we can get used to the hot sun and hot, himd air.

Laem Singh Beach: Phuket

A few general and preliminary thoughts on Thailand:

1. Religion dominates: There are monks in orange robes everywhere and a temple every three to four minutes as one drives down the road. Almost every single house and structure has a shrine, that is continuously maintained by leaving food, fresh flowers, and burning incense at it. There is more overt religion here, than I have ever seen, anywhere else I’ve ever been.

Monks: They're everywhere!

2. Thais are really nice: So far, there is very little hustle here. Even when we haven’t been interested in something a person here is selling, they ask us what we are looking for and happily point us in the right direction. We don’t have to say no 50 times. This is a huge change from South America.
3. It’s safe!: Things just generally feel like you don’t have to constantly be on the look out that someone is trying to get you, even in a huge city like Bangkok. Also a change from South America.
4. This is a wealthy, developed country: So far, there have been practically no beggars. The monks walk around the streets at 6 am and people give them food, flowers, and incense, but that is a big part of the culture and religion here. I know that there is certainly poverty here, but it’s not like you leave the city and are in podunk country immediatly. There is a lot of development, even outside of the big cities.
5. People love the monarchy here: Pictures of the King and Queen literally everywhere - Long Live the King!
6. The food is amazing…and cheap: Last night we had dinner for $2 total - with an amazing bar-b-que pork dish, a vegetable dish with cabbage, onion, and egg, and rice. That is 2 to 3 times cheaper than where we’d been in South America, and 2 to 3 times better - more vegetables, better meat.
7. Thai is a really hard language: “Sawasdee kah” is “hello” - that’s a lot of syllables!
8. Meat on a stick: Everything I hoped it would be, and more.
9. Prevalence of iced coffee: A pleasant surprise.
10. Thais drive mopeds like crazy people: In the past two days, I have seen, with my own eyes, two moped accidents. In both cases, there were people not wearing helmets who took a digger. No one was really hurt in either accident - but put on a helmet for the love of buddha!

Photos are up on flickr!

The time has come — Patrick and I are shoving off once again, this time for South East Asia and India.  We are very thankful that Patrick has been able to totally recover from his pesky organ episode, and that our family and friends have been there for us in this unforeseen extended stay in Rochester.

In realizing it’s time to go, a most important question has popped up — what the heck time is it there?  Our flight leaves from JFK to Hongkong on Thursday at 1:30 pm, and after switching planes in Hong Kong, we’ll arrive in Bangkok at 11:55 pm on Friday night.  So how many hours will we be traveling for?

After consulting wikipedia’s world time zone map, we have learned that Bangkok (and the rest of Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam) are all 12 hours ahead of our time here in New York.  So, with some math, we figured out that when we arrive into Bangkok at 11:55 pm on Friday night, it will only be 11:55 am on Friday morning back home on the East Coast.  So a mere 24 hours of travel to get there, nothing we haven’t done before.

Then, to look ahead to April 9 when we fly into India, it looks like we will be just 10.5 hours ahead of the time here at home.  I’ve never heard of time zones changing on the half hour, so we will have to see that with our own eyes.

So it’s time to go, and good to know what time it is.