Thailand

Before I get started on Thailand I just want to say that from now on in the blog postings I will have all the writing first and then the pictures will follow.  WordPress is not an easy program to work with in that respect (at least not for me), and even with our friend Tim’s help and advice I am still challenged by it.  It has been taking me too long to get postings out and I’d like to try and get them out more frequently.  Here’s Thailand……….

 

Okay, so us and our friends Christine and Paul arrived in Bangkok on New Year’s Eve day at our lovely hotel on the river.  New Year’s Eve was quite spectacular especially since the hotel had it’s own amazing fireworks right on the river.  We were all awed by the light show – lots of oohs and ahhs.  I spent the time in Bangkok fighting a cold that finally caught up to me and it was quite nasty – don’t remember the last time I felt like that, so (and I know a number of you will laugh) I was not feeling much like drinking alcohol at all.

In Bangkok we visited one amazing temple and the grand palace, via the public and tourist boat system (the former being much more exciting for various reasons: 1) no English was spoken; 2) one nearly choked on the fumes every time the boat stopped at each stop; 3) standing room only with lots of sweaty bodies (ours included).  The temples in Thailand are amazing.  In Bangkok we just loved the reclining Buddha (just chillin’ out) but the crowds were absolutely crazy insane.  I can’t say I’ve ever experienced anything quite like it; okay, maybe at a rock concert in general admission when I was very young.  Apparently the first 6 days in January the Thai people take time off and it was obvious.  There were tourists and locals alike.

As mentioned in the previous blog posting, Christine and Paul left for Toronto, via Hong Kong, on January 3.  We had a great visit together!

Gary and I stayed on in Bangkok for one more day, which was great for helping recover from my cold (I was pretty much horizontal for a full day), before getting on yet another plane to fly to Chiang Mai, 700 km north of Bangkok (we had planned on taking the train but someone recommended we not do so – it takes appx. 9 hours by train and flying was around the same price and only 1 hour away).  We spent 6 days in Chiang Mai – a couple of those days put aside just for viewing the temples – it claims to have over 300 temples in the city.  And I’m sure that’s accurate.  They were really beautiful.  Lots of sparkly, shiny stuff!

We had a lovely visit from someone from my studio.  Karyn came to Thailand to meet her daughter, Adele, who had been traveling with the bike tour company she works with (she and the group she was with rode from Shanghai to Bangkok, approximately 7000 km).  We had a lovely dinner with them both in Chiang Mai and then a couple of days later spent the day with them.  We hired a driver and thought we would be creative in our itinerary (who wants to do all of the touristy stuff like visit elephants, tigers, monkeys (no monkeys for me) , zip line, bungee jump, etc.?  NOT US!)   So our poor driver was truly at a loss and had no idea where the caves that we wanted to visit were.  When we saw the road sign for them we were so excited, but not our driver.  The sign said 1.5 km, and every time we got to another cave sign it yet again said 1.5 km., but finally we saw the dirt road which apparently would get us there.  We don’t think our driver had ever driven off a paved road before, by his reaction.  Anyway, he was willing to try and went along a bit of the road but eventually we all suggested he wait for us there (we didn’t want to agitate him since he was driving us back) and we decided to walk and hope to see a sign.  Oh, we saw signs alright…………they looked to be about 30 years old.  But we kept trudging up the stairs, through the overgrown pathways.  Adele was “stoked” (her word), and finally, VOILA, a cave.  Thanks for your perseverance, Adele!  Gary walked through into it with his phone flashlight and we were all hopeful that he would come out through the other end, and so he did.  Adele and Gary decided to also take the other path further up to another cave but Karyn and I decided we’d seen enough and headed down.  On the way down we met a group of about 6 young Auzzie men.  Huh, we thought, we’ve already conquered the cave!  The Canadian flag is up.  When we finally made it to our driver I got the feeling that not only did he think we were crazy, he was also surprised to see us, without any bodily damage.

We then went further down the road to one of his tourist picks, the village of Karen tribes people (The Long Neck Tribe), but none of us could go into the village – first you had to pay $20/person, and then we felt we would just be invasive (after some research I learned that most of the money never makes its way directly to the tribe).  When we got back in the car our driver was really baffled this time.  We couldn’t imagine what was going through his mind.  For sure “these crazy, lunatic tourists.  They don’t want to go to any of the touristy things, not even a village that everyone is dying to go to, but they’ll visit a cave that no one has been to in decades” (and that he didn’t even know about).

Now, having said all that we did visit Doi Suthep Temple (The Temple on the Mountain) which is situated on one of the peaks 15 km west of Chiang Mai city centre, with great views, and lots of other crazy tourists visited here as well.

On our second day in Chiang Mai I came across a brochure for a spine/postural balance class using a stability ball, which was terrific.  It was a “beginner” class to learn the moves and then repeat it for 5 days so that your muscles could remember the movement of when your body was naturally centered (it was Yoga based but you wouldn’t really know it).  The Japanese man teaching the class was so good and sequenced the class in such a way that you could feel and understand how your spine could truly correct itself.  He had the best posture I’ve ever seen.  Karyn joined me the first day and then the second day her and Gary came as well.  For those who have done a stability ball class with me, that was baby stuff compared to what we did in Thailand.  A lot of the time was spent with our feet off the ground (or at least trying).  I couldn’t do most of the exercises very well (or at all), but it felt like I was retraining my body all over again from those teeny, tiny little stabilizer muscles that I used to talk about endlessly in my classes.  I went for 4 days and wished that I could continue.  Anyway, it got me thinking about work, sure, sure!  And I realized how much I miss teaching – REALLY!

The next day we took a bus to Chiang Rai, 3 1/2 hours from Chiang Mai.  The bus held a smattering of locals, tourists and a couple of monks – a very comfortable ride.  We had originally thought we would cross the Thai border into Laos from here and take the slow boat to Luang Prabang, Laos but we changed our minds and decided to return to Bangkok, spend a couple of days there and then fly back to Cambodia, Phnom Penh this time (we had already booked this flight before entering Thailand in order to have an exit ticket at customs).  We will fly to Laos after Cambodia.

In Chiang Rai, we used the time to relax and book a couple of flights and hotels (this is always very time consuming for us).  There are a lot of touristy things to do in Chiang Rai but the town itself is a bit lacking, except for the crazy Clock Tower.  We did visit one very touristy structure (temple) called Wat Rong Khun (The White Temple) that was designed/built by the same artist that did the Clock Tower.  The temple looked like a very elaborate gingerbread house sprayed with snow from a can.  It was really bizarre.