Bangkok!
I never thought I would be so refreshed by the wave of humidity that condensed around us like a sweaty fog the instant we stepped off the plane – but after that week of life and death and rebirth in the Himalayas, that humidity carried the sensual promises I craved: Beaches. Massages. Coconuts. Bananas. Sunshine. Nothing. I needed to do nothing – not move, not think, not do. All my efforts and making our trip into some thing I needed to “do” – some mission or task or goal I needed to complete or accomplish or achieve in order to justify my taking this trip at all – had melted away like an ice cube in the Bangkok heat. Enough nonsense. I didn’t, and don’t, need to DO anything to be a beautiful human – we are, after all, human BEINGS, not human DOINGS!
And Thailand was exactly where we wanted to Be. This was Aphyna’s home turf now – she’s the one that travelled here twice before already. And even though only a few of those days were in Bangkok (the rest spent on the islands in the gulf of Thailand, where we would be heading in a short week’s time), she still somehow managed to steer us straight as an arrow (ok, maybe we turned around a few times, but no more than twice!) to the perfect guest house, where an A/C room had our names on it. We hadn’t had an AC room since our first 3 days in India – and boy, was it a treat. The relief I felt every time I walked into that room and stripped off my sweat-streaked clothes from my sticky body and flopped onto the bed defies logic and reason. It was heavenly.
It took as a few days to get up to Bangkok speed. Everything felt so new! So Fresh! So Exciting!! So CLEAN! Even compared to Nepal, which is at least 10 times cleaner and more organized than India, Thailand was like stepping into the future – a world where people obey traffic laws, queue up in orderly lines, and throw their trash in marked bins! But that was just the beginning – Bangkok really was just what we needed.
Three things really stick with me about the week we spent in Bangkok:
First – and this is almost always the first for me – was the Food. In India I wouldn’t buy food from a street cart unless I was nearing starvation. But in Thailand, the whole cleanliness thing applies to everything, including the street food! And the street vendors were everywhere. We spent the first night wandering up and down the street gawking at every single one; we were inundated with signs for everything from Coconut Ice Cream to Mango Sticky Rice to Grilled Corn to Pad Thai to every kind of grilled unidentifiable meat product to some kind of dried flattened squid (never had the courage to try that one). And we tried everything that wasn’t meat (or squids or bugs) and wasn’t tied down.
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| So many fruits!! Those crazy spiky-dragon-egg-looking pink ones are Dragonfruit, one of many fruits that seem straight out of a fairy tale |
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| Go-to Bangkok Breakfast - fruit and sticky rice! |
One notable favorite had to be the stand all the way at the end of the road, where the tourists usually tended to turn around, but the Thai people flocked liked honeybees – always the sign of something special, when the locals are eating it. This one stand was covered in overflowing bowls and piles and bags of completely foreign substances. One looked like little black beans in coconut milk – and when I asked, that turned out to be exactly what is was. There were grilled bananas, coconut meat cooked in sweetened coconut milk, little tapioca jellies, peanuts, and countless other items that I could never describe properly because they were baffling to me – I have no idea what they were! And when I asked, over half of them were completely unstranslatable! The owners would just talk to each other in Thai for a few seconds, turn back to me, and shrug helplessly. AWESOME!! Ok, but here’s the best part – it turns out, what you do is you pick 3 items from heaps and piles and bowls, then they add a scoop of coconut milk and a scoop of sugar syrup, and then a big scoop of shaved ice, and what do you have? THAI ICE CREAM! Brilliant. Stunning. Super sweet. Soul-ticklingly sweet. We had one almost every night.
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| Just look at this stall - not an English letter to be found, but so colorful!! |
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| We had no idea what we were eating, but it was an instant favorite |
We fell into an eating schedule pretty smoothly – every morning, we’d buy fruit from the little fruit carts (where fruits are kept on ice and cut up to order), along with a plate of mango sticky rice (cubes of mango over a special sweet, chewy rice, all drizzled with thick sweetened coconut milk). Then for lunch and dinner, we hit the Thai food HARD. Good Lord, Thai food is amazing. We could barely believe it after our experience in Nepal with generally bland and uninspired culinary offerings – Thai food obliterated those memories with a gushing waterfall of Green Curry!! And for dessert? Street Carts always had the answer. Coconut ice cream, sweetened sticky rice and banana, or just slices of guava or pineapple if we were feeling healthy and/or guilty about something from the day’s activities! Life was good. And it was only getting better.
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| Thai food = amazing. Papaya Salad, Pad See Ew, and Green Curry; total cost, $6. |
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| Coconut ice cream served in a coconut bowl - classy! |
Second: the Massages. We needed massages, very badly. And Bangkok is the place to get them. For usually about 200 Baht per hour (about $6), you could have your choice of physical manipulations from a vast menu of Thai specialties performed on your choice of body part(s). From manicures and pedicures to foot massages to shoulder and neck oil rubdowns to full body traditional Thai-style massages, everything was available – right there on the street. You couldn’t walk 10 meters without a Thai lady offering you a massage, and all you had to do was plop down on one of the line of recliners sitting and waiting for your tired, massage-needing butt.
A word here about Thai massage: it is not your typical massage. You aren’t getting rubbed – you are getting worked. Sometimes hard.. They will elbow you, knee you, stomp you, bend you, crack you, hit pressure points you didn’t even know you had with fingers stronger than you ever thought a human could have. It’s almost like a martial art, like Muay Thai for Life instead of Death. It’s a wild ride, and all you can do is surrender. And after it all, you feel incredible.
We didn’t go more than 2 days without getting one. We started with our feet, then our neck and shoulders, then we went for the full body. Unforgettable.
Third: the Temples. I’ve seen some temples in my day: India is full of them. I went to China and glimpsed some pretty vast and/or old and/or resplendent ones. But nothing could have prepared me for what I saw in Bangkok. Thai Buddhist temples are not just religious or spiritual centers, they’re cultural strongholds, pillars of community, offering housing, food, education, counseling, and of course: GIANT BUDDHA STATUES. Like, you don’t understand what I’m saying when I say Giant. Maybe these pictures will help; Maybe. But probably not. Because these Buddhas are SO HUGE, your jaw becomes unhinged; your heart starts to pound; your mind loses its grip on so-called “reality” (which did not contain Buddhas this huge and majestic outside of the “impossible” category); and your soul shakes free of its slumber and soars. I fluctuated between humility and awe and elation. We cried at Standing Buddha’s massive feet; we laughed at reclining Buddha’s massive shoulders; we filled our hearts with peace in front of meditating Buddha conquering the demon Maya.
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| Kneeling at the feet of Standing Buddha |
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| GIANT! |
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| Reclining Buddha - I couldn't get this look off of my face! |
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| Even the temple courtyards are adorned with Buddha statues - it was like a Buddha museum! |
At one temple we explored, we saw a ceremony taking place – it turned out to be an initiation ceremony for a new monk. You could tell how freshly his head had been shaved! When the ceremony ended we saw the family of the new monk congratulating him and posing for pictures – it was obviously a very joyous time for them. A friendly Thai man saw us watching and spoke with us for a few minutes, explaining that this was a very important moment in a young Thai man’s life. “Every Thai man becomes a monk before they start their own family. They learn how to control themselves, their emotions, their anger. I was a monk for 3 months before I met my wife. If my daughter wants to get married, I ask to see the man’s papers for proof that he was monk!” This completely changed my understanding of what it means to be a monk – I always imagined that anyone who wanted to experience the monastic life was making a lifelong commitment to renunciation, turning away from and stepping outside of the material world to explore the peaks, valleys, and vistas of the Inner depths of the Spiritual realm. But that’s wasn’t the point for the Thai people – the monastery was a totally accepted, and even socially encouraged and expected, community educational infrastructure.. It wasn’t just for “spiritual” people; they understood that every human being benefits from learning to sit in the stillness of silence, glimpsing the True Self behind all the noise and materialism of the ego world. With that experience, one can learn how to control their emotions, better understand themselves, and find an inner spiritual foundation on which to base their morals, their actions, their decisions, and their lives. Their experience in the monastery informed and defined the rest of their lives, even after they left. What a beautiful culture!!
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| Meditating in a shrine |
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| The monks wear beautiful orange robes; every Buddha statue is a little different! |
Maybe that explains why the Thai people are the friendliest people I’ve ever met. Their smiles are infectious, they’re always willing to stop what they’re doing and chat with you – they seemed to take a genuine interest in our well-being! We repeatedly found the kindness of strangers helping us discover unexpected adventures, like magical temples, inexplicably delicious foods, and fascinating insights into the Thai culture, human beings, and ourselves. What a life!
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| My friend Luang Pi that I met at the Golden Temple; he loved practicing his English, and we learned a lot about being a monk - like if he accidentally touches a woman (e.g. brushes against her on the bus), he has to go meditate in the jungle for 10 days to cleanse himself. |
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| I got to help move a brass buddha statue! It was HEAV-Y |
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| One Tuk-Tuk (mini auto-rickshaw taxi) driver took us to the pier to throw stale bread into the water and watch the fish DEVOUR it! We took a pretty crazy video of this, too. |
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| Need any eels? Probably for your frying pan, not your fishtank. |
The week flew by, but we couldn’t have enjoyed it more. We had originally planned on possibly doing some little day trips to tourist spots, but we discovered that we were having way too much fun to try to cram in anything else. Why not just enjoy what we already have?
But the day did finally come when we had to say goodbye to our little AC room and all our favorite street vendors, who we imagined might even recognize us by now – we were sad to leave it behind, but not TOO sad, because we knew what we had ahead of us: KOH PHANGAN, a magical little island in the gulf of Thailand, and our last stop on our epic international adventure!
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| This golden pagoda is said to house a holy relic from the saint that brought Buddhism to Thailand! |
