My Thai

We arrived safe and sound in Bangkok a few days ago and have been thoroughly enjoying Thai hospitality ever since. The people here are so friendly and open, it’s easy to see why so many foreigners decide to settle here and live out their years on the beach. We spent our first few days in Bangkok, which is a huge, sprawling city, and rather difficult to navigate owing to the impossible traffic and indistinct neighborhoods. We finally got the hang of it right as we were leaving, so perhaps the next time we pass through we’ll feel like experts.

Once we’d arrived at our hostel, we decided to get online and check email. Literally one second after I clicked on the free wi-fi network detected by our laptop, the screen shuttered, a red skull appeared as the desktop, and a message popped up requesting that we reload Windows from a CD. What the hell?!? A red skull. It was such a cliché, our computer instantly hacked and destroyed by a laughing red skull, just like in a cheesy movie scene.

We both had a momentary panic, and then Ben, who had had the foresight to actually bring along the backup CDs that no one ever thinks they’ll need, pulled them out and started reloading our computer’s entire brain. It took hours, but piece by piece we overwrote the hard drive and reinstalled everything we’d had on it. Luckily we hadn’t been storing photos on the computer, so we didn’t lose anything important except for an afternoon in Bangkok.

Once we’d recovered from the stress of nursing our precious laptop back to health, we set out to look for dinner and explore Khao San, well known as the backpacker ghetto. The one strip teems with tanned westerners, tattoo parlors, Pad Thai street carts, used book shops, and bars, one of which was showing the Tour de France live, so at Ben’s insistence we stopped there and had a drink. The street food in Bangkok is absolutely amazing in its variety and quality, and we’ve restricted most of our meals to what can be found cooking on the sidewalk for about $0.30. After dinner, we found a blues bar playing decent live music, had a couple glasses of wine, and headed to bed.

The next day we went to the train station to try to figure out how to get to the beaches down south. Trying to save money, we tried taking the bus, which of course we boarded in the wrong direction, depending on the non-English-speaking onboard fare collector to sort us out. The correct bus eventually got us there, and once we’d arrived at the train station, in typical Thai fashion, an extremely friendly woman helped us immediately, explaining the train schedule and prices and connecting us with a tourist office that did all the work for us, seemingly for no commission! Oh, if only we’d had such help in India! We got ourselves booked in for the next day, and then explored a bit of New Bangkok, full of traffic, shiny shopping malls, and the ubiquitous street food. One thing I’ve fallen in love with is Thai writing - I can’t decipher a word, of course, but the loops and curls of the alphabet are so beautiful, I just love looking at all the signs.

While in the area, we stopped by the Jim Thompson house, now a museum but formerly the home of an American CIA agent who became a champion of Thai silk and disappeared mysteriously in Malaysia in 1967. The house is known to be an example of Thai architecture, all dark teak wood and steeply pitched roofs, and it contains Thompson’s collection of Asian art, including dozens of Buddhas. I learned that Buddha can never be depicted showing any evidence of muscle or bone, presumably to portray him as more divine than human, which explained to me while he always looks a bit pudgy. Also on the compound is a spirit house, one of which appears outside almost every home in Thailand, a mini house where the spirits get stopped before they can enter the actual home and where Thais leave offerings of food, water, and flowers to keep the spirits happy. I find the style of Buddhism here so interesting, combining textbook, Chinese-style Buddhism with ancient Thai traditional beliefs involving spirits, amulets, and astrology. We explored the several rooms and lush gardens of the Thompson house, browsed the gorgeous silk accessories at the luxury gift shop, and took off.

For our evening’s entertainment, I decided a trip to Bangkok’s Red Light District would be a must - it’s what Bangkok is famous for, after all. The Patpong area has the reputation of containing the most interesting debauchery, so we asked a cab to take us there. About an hour later, the taxi dropped us off on a very dark street and told us we had arrived. It didn’t look right, but we believed him, hopped out, and began to wander through a sleepy residential neighborhood. We walked around in circles and asked the few open shopkeepers for directions, which they tried to give us but we clearly failed to comprehend. We passed by armed guards protecting some kind of military installation, and when they unbelievably let us pass through we continued through the silent streets, cursing our cab driver and certain we were nowhere near the red lights and sex shows. Finally we reached civilization in the form of a strip mall and gas station, and found another cab who agreed to take us to our destination. We have no idea where we’d been exploring for the previous hour, but at the end of the second ride we were unmistakably in Hookerville.

Unfortunately, our Red Light adventures didn’t turn out to be as exciting as we’d hoped. Rather than flamboyant lady-boys wandering the streets, there were instead a bunch of Western families(!) and groups of bored-looking prostitutes lining the walkways. We browsed the counterfeit branded accessories and Bangkok T-shirts while hawkers tried to convince us to go to a “show“. Finally, we realized that despite Ben’s having lived in Amsterdam for 6 months and my having been to several Mexican border towns over the years, neither one of us had ever been to such a show and maybe it was time to remedy that. We relented to one of the hawkers and lasted about 5 minutes inside the nightclub before deciding it was definitely not our scene, although we were impressed by the balloon popping abilities of the girl onstage. Rather than calling the night a total loss we watched a truly terrible band sing out of tune dance hits before heading home.

In an effort to sneak in some culture that didn’t involve the sex trade, the next morning we got up and walked straight to Wat Pho, a Buddhist Temple famous for its huge reclining Buddha. The temple buildings were gorgeous, topped with steeply tapered spires covered with painted tiles and gold plating. There are several small buildings that comprise the temple, the main central one containing an enormous gilt shrine covered in Buddhas large and small and ringed with flower garlands. We took in the sight and scents and wandered around the gardens for a little while, donating a few Baht and signing a tile that will be used in renovations, forever leaving our stamp on Wat Pho. Then we finished up our tour at the reclining Buddha, a massive gold figure lying serenely on his side, with mother of pearl swirling designs on the bottoms of his feet. The sculpture is 43 meters from head to toe, dwarfing all who come to see him, and yet his reclined position makes the figure familiar and comforting, rather than imposing. It’s a beautiful, peaceful religious sight.

That evening, it was time to leave Bangkok, so we began the journey to our beach paradise, which involved:

1) A cab to the train station
2) An overnight train to Surat Thani
3) A bus to Don Sak
4) A ferry to Thong Sala pier on Ko Pha-Ngan
5) A sawngthaew (a kind of pick-up truck taxi) to Ao Chalok Lam
6) A long tail boat to Hat Khuat, a.k.a Bottle Beach…

where we are now. 19 hours total, but well worth the trip! Traffic and bars have been replaced with sand and palm trees, and as Ben will post about next, we have finally learned how to relax. Ahhhhh.

Tie one on, in the Fong, Hong Kong

Rarely will our strategy of interspersing the more difficult countries with more familiar surroundings pay off better than it did when we arrived in Hong Kong last Wednesday. After the dust and dirt of India, Hong Kong’s gleaming new airport and futuristic shuttle train were as refreshing as a cold shower and the difference between the two countries belied our short flight. Yet again we were to be spoilt by the weather during our time in Hong Kong and while residents would tell us the city is often shrouded in a dense fog we enjoyed blue skies from the moment we touched down. As we sped into town we marveled at the busy waterways and high rise buildings clustered into the foothills of the mountains which rose up on all sides.

We were lucky enough to be hosted in Hong Kong by our very good friend Kate who many of you will remember from our wedding. Her apartment building was right on the waterfront with views of Victoria harbor but a short distance to the west of the ‘Central district’ where many expats live and work. We both noticed on the drive across town that the buildings in the surrounding area (while still exclusively high-rise), were much more varied than in other parts of the city and, although it shouldn’t have surprised us, at street level reflected the island’s overwhelmingly Chinese population. The pungent smell of dried seafood was strong even in the taxi and we saw groups of men playing cards on every corner.

Hong Kong allegedly has a fairly serious air pollution problem but after running through the downtown gridlock of Mumbai the humid air felt cool and fresh and so, after a short stroll around the area to get our bearings, I decided to try a run up through town towards Victoria Peak. It soon became apparent however, that after the first couple of blocks the thin strip of built up land that borders the harbor is dizzyingly vertical - often the sidewalks were abandoned in favor of concrete staircases and roads were built as tight hairpins to give cars any chance of making progress. For 25 minutes or so I shuffled up and down trying to find my way through to the park which always seemed to begin the other side of a last impenetrable line of tower blocks but eventually, with the help of a clearly amused security guard, I found a path and began climbing through the dense forest.

I have run, off and on, for 18 years now and as Megan will testify am prone to get stroppy if I’m unable to get out on the road for more than a couple of days at the most. In all the tens of thousands of miles that that time equates to there are only a handful of runs which I still remember distinctly. For the beauty of the scenery I’ll never forget the Tour des Dents de Midi in Switzerland or the Motatapu Icebreaker in New Zealand. For other reasons I’ll always have a soft spot for the Sodbury Slog, the Col d’Aubisque and perhaps a few more. To that short list I can now add that first run up Victoria Peak. From the moment I entered the park the sounds of the city, already little more than a murmur, died away completely and the only sounds were of my breathing and the occasional trickle of a nearby stream. Although there was no respite from the gradient, any suggestion of heading back was hushed by occasional but spectacular views of the island’s coast through breaks in the foliage.

These were just preludes however for the panorama from the peak itself which to my endorphin soaked brain was startlingly beautiful. From the plaza which marks the top of the famous cable car run, the whole of Hong Kong from the Center over Victoria Harbor to the most distant areas of Kowloon on the mainland was laid out like a scale model with the silent progress of ferries and container vessels the only visible sign of life. As if to put on a show for me the waning sun, which had disappeared behind a headland, cast the entire city in a vivid orange light with the last direct rays just catching the tops of the city’s many famous skyscrapers. Needless to say I didn’t have the camera with me but we hiked up together the next evening and caught the cable car back down to town:

Thanks to Kate we got to spend that second evening enjoying the quintessential Hong Kong experience - touring Victoria Harbor on a junk. Much as in Dubai we quickly forgot that we were supposed to be backpackers as the huge wooden boat and two staff arrived to ferry the three of us and a bottle of champagne around for the whole evening! Relaxing on the deck beds we took in the lights of the harbor and then spent an hour negotiating our way through the wakes of enormous container vessels to make it to a nearby island for a seafood dinner. While we are used to seeing ‘live’ crabs and lobsters sullenly blowing bubbles from the bottom of their tanks at restaurants in New York, the displays here were something else. Enormous shrimp fought to climb over the edge of their baskets, crabs snapped angrily at waiters as they tried to tie them up and even the cockles and mussels were trying to slime their way to freedom.

We did some more island hopping the next day and visited a Buddhist monastery overseen by the biggest (counting the lotus mount), seated, brass Buddha in Asia. Despite the somewhat specific distinction the complex and particularly the mountaintop setting was very serene and quite beautiful.

After getting our cultural fix we devoted most of the rest of our stay to the more traditional expat activities of eating and drinking in which we were assisted by the happy coincidence that Kate’s birthday and the annual Fong district beer festival both fell on our penultimate night. For the second time on this trip we ended up partying to the early hours to the sounds of a Filipino covers band though sadly didn’t quite make it through till the 5am putine stop.

Dim sum seemed the perfect antidote to the next day’s grogginess so we headed to the former City Hall for a huge buffet. On the way we were amazed to see thousands of the city’s Filipino housemaids enjoying their weekly day off by congregating under the downtown flyovers for communal picnics. While having a maid is common in Hong Kong as it was in Dubai it was startlingly to see just how many people are actually employed this way.

The infusion of dumplings and diet coke was so restorative that we decided to take the star ferry over to Kowloon for our final afternoon and explore some of the traditional Chinese markets. The atmosphere on this side of the water was very different from Hong Kong island with most of the less formal markets offering fake versions of the goods available for many times the price in the luxury stores only a short distance away. We also noticed that most of the hotels proudly advertised nightly and hourly rates lending the area a slightly seedy but more interesting feel. Eventually however the heat and the effects of the night before took their toll and not even tentacles on sticks could keep us from a well-earned DVD night before our morning flight to Bangkok.

Mum-Bye!

Approaching the end of our time in India, we realized that we were beginning to miss it, and so we wanted to wring the most out of our final two days. We had only spent a day and a half in Mumbai at the beginning of our Indian adventure, so we tried to see as much of the city as possible before flying away.

Once our overnight train from Aurangabad brought us back into Mumbai, we settled in and started strolling the bazaars. There are three major bazaars strung together in the middle of the city, the first of which is the Chor Bazaar, which is best known for its antiques. We enjoyed poking among the dusty curios, but caught on to the fact that the second best feature of the bazaar is metal working goods, which proved far more interesting. Every kind of tool, screw, and piece necessary to build a car or house can be found in those streets, making a 10-block hardware store out of the stroll, which Ben really loved.

The next bazaar, beginning a few blocks south, is the Zaveri, home exclusively to jewelry, much more fun for me! The Indians tend toward shiny gold and huge, ornate, bib-like necklaces, so I didn’t find anything to bring home, but I loved looking around. The final bazaar is the huge, covered Crawford Market, which began years ago in a beautiful European building with workers’ scenes covering the doorways, and now sprawls through several blocks in every direction. The stalls contain all kinds of household goods from vegetables to fly-covered hunks of meat to cleaning fluid to pets (puppies!). We spent a lot of time looking everything over, especially the puppies, before heading out to dinner.

Most casual restaurants in India don’t serve alcohol, so after dinner we decided to stop by a slightly nicer place to have a couple drinks. It cracked us up as the waiters brought about six different food courses to be enjoyed with our beers, all free - the Indian hospitality at its finest. We could have skipped dinner altogether and had the freebies instead, but it just showed us another cultural quirk unique to India, or perhaps Mumbai.

The next morning, after we hopped into a cab, I commented that I was surprised that we hadn’t yet been involved in an accident, since traffic in India is so fast, crowded, and chaotic. Of course, about 2 minutes later, we were rear-ended by another taxi and I was cursing myself for saying anything about it. It turned out to be a minor fender-bender, and a reminder to keep such thoughts to myself!

Our cab was taking us to a tour of the Dharavi slum, something we had been reluctant to undertake for fear of exploiting the residents and treating them like zoo animals. However, under the reassurance of some other travelers, we decided to join a nonprofit tour group and give it a shot. The organization that arranges the tours runs a slum school with the proceeds, and forbids photography (these photos are from their website), which made us feel a bit more optimistic about the whole experience, and it turned out the be the right decision. We were absolutely amazed at the amount of industry contained in the slum, and the optimistic pride in the residents. Dharavi is home to one million people, and its industries earn over $665 million per year. In Mumbai, 55% of the residents live in slums, taking up only about 7% of the land, so the kind of life we saw is a simple fact for so many people. The homes were very simple, tiny concrete huts, and the lanes were dirty and only about the width of Ben’s shoulders - we would never have found our way through without the guides. People live and work within the small spaces, recycling plastic and aluminum bottles and cans, making mud pottery for transporting water, sewing T-shirts and working with leather. The next time I see “Made in India” on one of my shirts, I will think of Dharavi slum! It’s easy to feel sorry for people living in such a cramped, ramshackle place, but the impressions I got were the opposite - the residents we met were happy, and proud to be neither homeless nor unemployed. There are many definitions of poverty, and these people didn’t seem interested in applying one to themselves. They were too busy working hard and getting on with their lives. Of course, for all the inspiring spirit, we saw a man walking through a horrible, sewage-filled river collecting bottles to recycle, and I was reminded that this still isn’t a dream job for most people. Altogether, the tour was an absolutely fascinating window into Mumbai life.

To cap off our time in India, we ended up at a beautiful, fancy dinner to get a taste of high-end Indian food. It was absolutely amazing! We had followed a vegetarian diet for the preceding three weeks, on the advice of our guidebook and other travelers who blame meat from cheap (dirty) restaurants as the most common reason people get sick in India - avoiding it could be why we stayed healthy, but we can’t be sure. Anyway, at Khyber, we indulged in delicious meat and fish, and had about 5 servers just for our table. It was such a treat, and a glimpse into how the Indians not from Dharavi slum live.

Our experience in India was so fascinating and interesting, and something I will never forget. We have since moved on to Hong Kong and Bangkok (sorry we are falling behind with the blogging!) and are still having an amazing time, but India has stayed in my thoughts, as I’m sure it will continue to.

Train ing Day

Despite our wait on the Agra platform by the time we reached Delhi we had come to look forward to our train journeys. While the general sleeper and seated classes are the famously chaotic scrums of passengers, baggage, chai wallahs and snack sellers, the air conditioned classes had been cool oases of calm after the bustle and heat of the cities. Unfortunately the trip to our next stop, Amritsar, was to see us experience the other side of the system as we pushed our luck with the waiting lists and were left without reserved seats. With no other options we hauled our ever-growing mountain of luggage to Delhi Central station and threw ourselves on the mercy of an attendant who explained that the only way to get to Amritsar that night would be to cancel our tickets and exchange them for the dreaded sleeper class.

Reluctantly we agreed and headed to the platform where we sat on our bags and waited. For four hours. More seasoned travellers had brought bed rolls and picnics and even late in the evening the platform resembled a huge campsite strewn with sleeping old ladies, crawling toddlers, piles of freight and roving packs of monkeys.

When the train finally arrived just shy of midnight we took a deep breath and fought our way through the sweltering carriage to find our alotted cubicle, designed to sleep 6, already boasting a huge pile of bags, a group of eight friends and an overweight half-naked holy man snoring loudly in Megan's berth. The glassless windows provided plenty of grimy dust but did nothing to cool the carriage so sleep would be almost impossible but, after much comparing of tickets, we did manage to get seated and tried to doze.

We eventually reached Amritsar, the Sikh holy city and site of the famous Golden Temple, the next morning. One of the most endearing qualities of the Sikh faith (and we were to learn there are many) is the hospitality they show to strangers. At the Golden Temple this extends to providing free accommodation to anyone who wants it be they Indian pilgrims or curious backpackers. Sure enough, no sooner had we approached the Golden Temple looking a little lost and dishevelled, than we were cheerfully shepherded towards a hostel and given two beds that were ours for up to three nights completely free of charge! Unfortunately the room was stifling and when we realized the beds were just hard boards with a blanket spread across them we guiltily decided to "give the spaces to someone who really needed them" and, leaving a healthy donation to the temple, retreated to a nearby hotel.

We spent much of the next two days exploring the enormous white marble complex which surrounds the temple and houses a museum, a kitchen, offices and accommodation. With pilgrims arriving every day from all over India and the rest of the world the atmosphere is constantly festive and noisy to the point that it's hard to believe we were not witnessing an important celebration. Magnificently bearded old men wandered around with spears to keep the peace, youngsters bathed in the waters and families took part in complicated offering ceremonies or queued to walk out to the spectacularly ornate temple itself. An important tenet of the Sikh religion is equal treatment regardless of sex, caste or, for that matter, religion. Accordingly almost every aspect of the temple is open to anyone with an interest and it is all free; we ate a delicious meal in the huge communal dining hall, swam in the holy lake, explored the Sikhs' bloody history in the museum, posed for hundreds of family photos and generally had a great time.

The most enjoyable part of our visit however was the clear pride everyone took in explaining their culture to us. Everywhere we were went someone would offer to show us some new aspect of the complex and one particularly enthusiastic gentleman took us on a behind-the-scenes tour of the vast volunteer-run dining halls where we had previously eaten. Even in low season the kitchens make and serve 150,000 meals a day and the enormous chappatti machines and cauldrons of daal were an amazing sight.

On our second evening we crammed ourselves into a tiny van for the drive to Amritsar's other main draw - the Attari border crossing with Pakistan. I've no idea when or why the decision was made to turn the simple daily chore of closing a gate into a spectator sport, but the modest guard huts on both sides are now surrounded by huge grandstands which host a patriotic nightly carnival. The festivities began with groups of children and old ladies from the crowd taking it in turns to run or hobble up the short road to the border and back brandishing the Indian flag. After a while they were replaced by an inpromptu dance party soundtracked by Bollywood music blasting from hidden speakers and whoops of encouragement from the crowd. Throughout all of this we were glad to see (because you have to pick sides at things like this) the Pakistan side of the wall looked comparatively somber and while the two sets of guards shared similarly elaborate costumes the Pakistanis had conveniently chosen the "baddie palette" of black with red piping. After much shouting and frog marching from the guards (and a very quaint final handshake accross the border) the Indians appeared to have things sewn up but then, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, their captain got a little overenthusiastic in his pirouetting turns and ended up flat on his back covered in the flag!

All our rail tribulations to date threatened to pale into insignificance in the face of our next trip which needed to take us all the way back from Amritsar in the North to Aurangabad level with Mumbai. In other words 32 scheduled hours on a train. Thankfully there is little more to say about the trip as the surprisingly drab scenery lulled us into a stupor and the time passed relatively quickly. I'm not sure how much longer we could have stomached deep fried bread and mango juice but we're still healthy after three weeks so have no complaints.

We decided to make Aurangabad our penultimate stop primarily to explore the famous caves at Ajanta and Ellora. Constructed over a 900 year period beginning around 200 B.C. the two enormous complexes comprise temples, monasteries, meeting rooms and walkways and were all carved from the solid rock of two cliff faces by groups of travelling monks. They trace the whole history of Indian religious thought from Buddhism through Hinduism and Jainism and most are covered in spectacular carvings or paintings despicting the many gods and goddesses of those religions.

Probably the highlight of our two trips was the Kaisala complex or "cave 16" at Ellora. This astonishing temple was constructed by removing 3 million cubic feet of rock from the hillside to create a huge pit around an enormous block of rock. This was then carved into the world's largest monolithic structure - the temple itself. The amount of work that must have gone into the construction was awe inspiring and the legend is that it took ten generations of monks to complete the plans.

As we had a little time in Aurangabad and there was very little to do in the town itself we took advantage of the cooler post-monsoon afternoons to visit the area's only two other points of interest; the "mini Taj" and the Daulatabad fort. The mini-Taj, which our guidebook had described as "demonstrating the decline in Moghul architecture," was fascinating in how closely but completely it missed the mark when compared to the original in Agra. Awkwardly tall and lacking the symmetry of the real thing the whole effect is a little sad and you can only imagine that the queen in whose memory this was built would not have been best pleased - especially when they ran out of marble 4 feet of the ground and were forced to finish the rest in plaster!

The fort was much better and in contrast to the other forts we've visited which were really palace compounds, this felt like a proper medieval stronghold built on a vertiginous hillside and surrounded by defensive ramparts and moats. By far the biggest deterrent from Megan's point of view was climbing through several bat filled caves but we made it to the top and were rewarded with spectacular views of the area and the swirling monsoon clouds.

From here we head back to Mumbai for our flight to Hong Kong. We've been looking forward to returning to Mumbai for a while due in no small part to the fantastic book "Shantaram" which we're both working our way through. It's set in many of the places we visited last time but the author, a former armed robber and sometime member of Bombay's mafia has certainly given us a new way to look at them. Accordingly this is likely to be my last post from India and while there are certain things I won't be sorry to take a break from (curry and incessant requests for "one photosnap with me please?" being two that spring immediately to mind), there are many things which I will miss and more which we haven't even touched on this trip. For example we really haven't had the time to wrap our arms around the enormous economic changes that are transforming India even though evidence of the speed of this change is everywhere. In the US every second advert seems to be for car or life insurance but here they are all for broadband internet, mobile phones or higher education institutions - most including the promise of study or employment abroad. Whenever we have spoken with young middle class Indians they have invariably asked "how many days a week do you work?" or "how much do you earn?" with honest curiosity.

As much as it may be changing the country's history is also visible everywhere you look. The temples, forts and buildings from the Raj-era are of course very visible but there are less obvious legacies too. The local news and conversations with taxi drivers reveal that what at first glance would seem to be the happy secular melting pot intended by the retreating British is still understrung with religious tensions while the country's politics seems split between truly national parties and regional forces representing specific ethnic groups. On a lighter note the other British legacy, the English language, is still spoken everywhere though often in a comically formal way which would be more familiar to Victorians than it is to us. Signs in every station admonish passengers not to spit on the station "because it is a very bad habit" while drivers in Delhi are asked not to run red lights on pain of "suffering ambarassment"!

Even if we don't manage to spend three weeks again here for a while I am certain this will not be our last visit to this fascinating country.