city of a thousand wats

Chiang Mai is known as the cultural center of Thailand, and if that means it has the most wats (Buddhist Temples), then this is very true. They are around every corner and you feel you are never more than a stone's throw away from one. Since we were about to go on our meditation retreat at one of the more famous wats up in the mountains outside of Chiang Mai, we thought we'd walk around the city and really take in the wats so we had some basis to compare the one at our meditation retreat to.

Aren't they beautiful? (And isn't it odd that Buddhists--or at least, monks--are supposed to clear their minds of material things, so really, shouldn't even be noticing what they look like? Hmmmm.)

andrew's birthday dinner

On Andrew's birthday the big things he wanted were particular meals, since he didn't feel he could fit another thing into his bag. For breakfast he had spring rolls and Pad Thai and for lunch he had Indian food. While those were good meals, he was saving the best for diner. Since Maggie isn't the biggest fan of sushi, we don't eat it all that much but for dinner on his Birthday, Andrew wanted a Sushi dinner.

Maggie found a Sushi place that was run by a Japanese guy who spent 10 years working in Chicago so the place was known for good American sushi opposed to Japanese Sushi (if you don't know the difference, just know there is a big one). Since Andrew loves American Sushi, that tickled him pink.

Our carriage to Andrew's feast--a tuk tuk. It's a little motorized golf cart sort of thing.

First round, the Caterpillar Roll

Round two, Windy City Roll

Both of them were delicious and Andrew left quite full and content. On arriving home Maggie offered up the icing on the cake (literally), a Pandan cake. By the end of the day, Andrew felt like he might need to be rolled to bed - possibly the definition of a "good day."

chiang mai street food

One night, we went to the Night Bazaar held on the weekends just outside of the old city of Chiang Mai. There are people there selling a little bit of everything (clothes, jewelry, handicrafts) but we pretty much went for the street food. We realized we hadn't taken many pictures of the street food around Thailand, and since it's pretty much been 80% of our diet here, we thought it was about time it made it into the blog.

Street food in Thailand covers the entire spectrum of Thai food. You got your standards such as Pad Thai (Andrew's favorite), every other imaginable type of noodle thing, spring rolls and noodle soups of many types.

Good ol' Pad Thai. A plate of it on the street costs between $0.75-$2, depending on the city.

The next big staple for street food is what we call "things on sticks." These are many and varied--we cannot say we have come even close to trying 1% of them. They are one of the more popular things at street markets because they are cheap and usually tasty, like the weird fried things of America's State Fairs (i.e. cookie dough, oreos, butter, etc.).

This lady had everything from squid to hotdogs to veggies. We had the kebabs in the upper right--delicious. Lots of the stalls are also vegetarian, and have "vegetarian protein" on sticks, which looks kind of like meat, but is a little scary.

Sometimes instead of sticks, it's on a string.

Tiny fried eggs are also very popular.

Markets are also good culture watching (much like people watching, but broader). You get to see great things like street musicians sitting straight down the center of the walking street, because that's the only space they can find, or like little kids doing karaoke, or like the below sign.

I don't know what they're selling and don't know if I want to.

pandan, how we love thee

While traveling around Thailand we have run into a new favorite treat of ours - Pandan. It comes in all shapes and sizes and is used much like chocolate in all sorts of sweets. Its taste is hard to describe-- it's not totally sweet. The closest we've come up with is that it tastes like a cross between green tea ice cream and coconut. It's made from a leaf called Pandan, and supposedly is a South East Asian staple.

Little Pandan cakes (think Little Debbie) have been a constant companion of ours when traveling or just hanging around our place. We first purchased them in Thong Sala because we thought it would be funny to try something different and it's been love every since. For Andrew's Birthday, he wanted a Pandan cake and Maggie was able to find him one in Chaing Mai... and it was delicious.

The bunny, squirrel, and deer medallions are a bonus

strange day in bangkok

We were leaving Bangkok for Chiang Mai on the night bus that left at 6:00pm, but we had to be out of our place at noon - so we had some time to kill. We did the normal tourist thing and walked up on down Khaosan Road, took a picture with Thai Ronald - but the whole street seemed more empty than it should be. We figured it was just because it was the middle of the day.

So we headed back to our place on Rambuttri Road to find a bar to hang out at until it was time to leave. This is when the fun started. We realized why Khaosan Road was so empty: the Thai Police were doing a sweep of the area with a 100+ cops looking for illegal street vendors. The cops poured down our street in cars, trucks and scooters, taking down any street vendor's shop that was still left and seizing all of their inventory. The restaurant we had frequented the last few days (that was quite established) was even torn down and hauled away.

 

As we sat at a bar watching all of this happen, we realized a cloud of smoke was slowly make its way toward us from the other end of the street. At first we thought something in the Wat (Buddhist Temple) on the other side of the street was on fire but it kept crawling closer and closer until we were right in the middle of it. This is when we realized the Wat was fogging for mosquitoes. Even the cops stopped what they were doing while the fog dissipated, and we spent a few minutes with our noses in our shirts. 

So what looked like it was going to be a boring few hours tuned into quite an eventful few hours which goes to show you never know what to expect when in Bangkok.

no sleep till bangkok... well maybe a little

We made the journey back to Bangkok from the beaches in the south--specifically from Ao Nang. It was a multi-legged journey that ended up taking us a total of 32 hours from Guest House to Guest House.

The first leg was a ride in the back of a truck (called a songthaew here--it's a truck with two benches in the back) from Ao Nang to the Krabi bus station which was around a half hour journey.

Thai bus stations are a tad different than an American bus station. As they would say "Same, Same... But Different."

Krabi bus station

Once at the bus station we got our sticker (Farang Badge) that lets everyone (who doesn't speak English) along the trek know where we are going so they can make sure we are on the right train, bus or boat. 

Getting a combo ticket like this (in our case, bus-->bus, but they can involve ferries, trains, etc) is a really popular way for farang (foreigners) to travel in SE Asia. It takes a lot of the planning and guesswork out of getting from place to place (for a price, of course, but sometimes it's worth it. Like here, we just took the bus part, and did the train ourselves.) These combo tickets are part group tour and part kindergarten field trip. Everyone on the same route gets the same color sticker, so the Thai bus drivers can go around the bus station and say, "You! There!" and hopefully, everyone gets to where they're going.

The bus took us back to the East Coast of Thailand to Thong Sala, where we had originally caught the night ferry to Koh Phangan, and where all the trains to the north stop. It was about a 3 hour journey with a stop in the middle of nowhere for about 6 of us to get off and climb into a minivan for the rest of the journey to the Thong Sala train station (since the rest of the 30 or so people on the bus--the ones with different colored stickers--were going to the islands, which is a completely different place many miles outside of the city).

Once we got to the train station and got our tickets we had 6 hours to kill before our train was supposed to leave. We passed the time with a few meals and some work before finding out that the train was delayed another 2 hours. So around 11:30pm we climbed onto the night train to Bangkok, which was supposed to be a 9 hour journey.

Bedtime in the upper bunk (photo taken from the opposite upper bunk)

After a fairly good night's sleep we awoke thinking we should be close to Bangkok... boy were we wrong. We were still nine hours away, because...we never really figured out why. So we had a whole day to kill on the train, and our laptops were dead at least half that time.

But hey, at least we weren't our seatmates across the aisle--they had a flight to catch that evening, and figured with the train getting in early in the morning, they'd be safe. Oops...

Really, though, the train was pretty nice. And we needed more practice sitting still and doing nothing anyway...

A shack with satellite out the window of the train

The lower bunks turn into two facing seats

beautiful phra nang beach

We'd been in a town called Ao Nang for a few days, which did have its plusses (we managed to negotiate a really nice room with AC and great internet for cheap! and monkeys!) but also had its minuses (very package-touristy=expensive and full of annoying touts trying to sell you things). We'd heard there was a beautiful beach just down the coast, which all the guidebooks called the rock climbing capital of Thailand for its dramatic limestone karsts rising out of the Andaman Sea. So we hopped on a boat (which was the only way to get there--no roads in or out) and headed to Railay.

Well, the books weren't wrong. Phra Nang, one of the beaches just off the main Railay beach, was one of the most beautiful beaches we'd ever seen.

The town itself...we didn't really like it. Bad juju, if you will. But we loved the beach. Maggie was so enchanted with it that after we went one afternoon, we planned to go again early the next morning when there weren't so many tourists around, and we managed to make it even after Maggie fell victim to food poisoning the night before. (Don't worry, I'm fine! -M)

We're glad we did go back, because we had the beach all to ourselves. 

That's Maggie, in the lower left

Beach of our own in the early morning

We took pictures on the beach, swam under the limestone formations, and even found a cave we could swim into (under the overhang in the photos--we couldn't swim with the camera, so no pictures of the cave while it was filled with water, but this is from near it, later, when the tide was out).

Low tide, from under the cliff

Water ran in streams off the top of the cliffs, so in little areas all around, you could swim under it, and if you looked up, you could watch the streams of individual huge droplets falling from hundreds of feet up to land all around you--it almost looked unreal. I (Maggie) called it fairy water, and of course I couldn't get a good picture.

Taking a swim, watching the fairy water

It was even kind of funny.

A fertility shrine in a cave on the beach. Guess how we knew what kind of shrine it was.

Too bad the town wasn't nicer--it was maybe our least favorite town, but most favorite beach.