Dawn of Happiness
8 - 10 Jan, Ian
I've been keen for us to try Thai cooking so that
the girls would become more comfortable with it, and on Sunday we did. Nui took
the four of us to a restaurant in Trang just before the lunch crowd arrived and
we took turns in cooking spicy Tam Yam soup, green curry, morning glory in black
bean sauce and bananas in coconut milk. We peeled, sliced and smashed through a
wide array of fresh local produce and cooked it up on a stove with kick-ass hobs
fired by gas canisters. The morning glory dish was the most dramatic,
flambéing in a huge fireball up to the steel hood of the stove; apart from
the chef/tutor, only I got to do this and I feared for my eyebrows. As I hoped,
the girls couldn't wait to eat what we'd cooked and they do indeed now seem
keener to try the Thai meal options rather than fried
chicken.
From Trang we took a minibus to the airport at Krabi, which has the air of belonging to the diorama of a model railway. Expecting to be on an insect-scale plane with few other passengers, I was surprised to find myself waiting with a room-full of other westerners for a Thai Airlines Airbus to Bangkok. It seems that most tourists disperse out to the southern beaches, zipping invisibly through the rest of the south, and congregate for an hour at Krabi airport as a standard node on the way in and out of the country.
The train journey north the next day from Bangkok to Phitsanolok also brought us into contact with many more westerners than we're used to seeing here: on the train down to Nakhon Si Thammarat we'd seen none. The Phitsanolok train was smarter than the NST train and the views out of the window were brighter since there are few rubber plantations in this region; but smarter is not necessarily more comfortable and brighter is not necessarily more interesting, and I preferred the romance of the NST train.
From Phitsanolok station we went to an old temple: it dated back to 1357, though its age was belied by the sense of continuous use, which like all of the wats we've visited is evident to this day. As usual, there were plenty of opportunities to enhance our luck. A monk playfully flicked holy water at us as we walked past, arcing it accurately over the head of the devout who kneeled in front of him. Paula and the girls tried making a wish while lifting a heavy model elephant: you try with one finger hooked into a ring at the top, and if you can heave it up on your first attempt but not on your second your wish will be granted. All of the girls claimed success, although since no jumbo pack of Oreos awaited us in the van I'm not sure whether to believe them. The most common try for luck (apart from the rows of lotto stalls outside) was to shake paddle-shaped splints from a cup that contained a large bunch of them. You did this until one shuffled out on its own (more than one and you start again) and then the number on the splint corresponds to a number on a stand of printed predictions that you pick up elsewhere in the temple. We all had a go. At the time of writing Nui has read through them but only yet ventured a translation of Zoe's and mine. It seems that mine was exceptionally lucky (all good things happen, I become very happy, bad things happen to any who try to stand in my way...). I always seem to appear fortunate with this type of thing: I was born on a Sunday on a propitious cusp of Pisces and Aries in the Chinese year of the dragon, and whenever I've read my tarot it has been promising. But even more than dismissing these portents as hokey I worry that their hubristic proclamations of good luck will provoke the gods to defy them: if I'm going to be told this stuff I'd prefer it to be in the faintest whisper.
Outside the wat there were some particularly exotic food stalls, including one that offered bags of frog skins; apparently they crisp up tastily, like salmon skin in sushi I guess.
Nui tells us very proudly that our tour avoids the main tourist routes (so what are we missing?) and instead brings us into contact with ordinary Thai people to show us how they live. It's true. From the luck top-up at the wat we went directly to a typical Thai house, which was, enterprisingly enough, the family home of one of the tour firm's drivers. And it was very interesting. It looked like many other houses that we speed past, being built of wood on concrete stilts. The stilts have the dual benefits of protecting the house from floods and of offering a cool area to live in in the daytime. The upstairs is used only in the evening and at night. The king, who counts for a lot here, has encouraged the rural population to enjoy the land rather than depopulating the countryside and flocking to the cities. He's also advised them to apportion their land in the ratios 30:30:30:10 for rice:garden:ponds:house, and the home we visited was in keeping with this. The ponds provide them with fish, which they catch using traps that they make from bamboo, and also with fish sauce, which is made by stacking fish in pots with lots of salt and leaving it for about a year. The garden is equally productive: we saw chillies, lemon grass, limes, guava, mangoes, papaya, bananas, jack fruit, plums, tamarind, and bergamot from which they make oil to clean the floor. I haven't figured out for sure who sows and reaps the huge fields of rice when the driver is driving but I can guess.
We poked around the upstairs of the house, too. Inside it's about 20 metres by 30 metres and is completely undivided apart from small cubicles for a loo and a shower. The floor is of polished wood and at night they bring out bedding and they all sleep on it. There were eight people in this family, and they can get much bigger as extended families often live together in the same undivided style. Since there are no walls, beds or tables - everything happens on the floor - there's a nice spacey feel. Photographs of the king and queen and the revered former king Rama 5 are prominent, as is the Lord Buddha and the Buddhist calendar, which marks out the holy days - in the countryside these are observed. A small urn sits on top of the highest cabinet, containing some of the ashes of someone in the family - I knew from my summer jobs in the death business that the urn wasn't big enough to hold the ashes of a complete corpse.
While we stalked around their home with Nui the family chatted downstairs, good engineering enabling them to lazily rock their baby in a bamboo swing with a vigour bordering on violence. After we'd looked around they offered us jack fruit and seemed at ease while I quickly exhausted my Thai vocab. I like the idea that the person opening up his home was one of the operator's drivers - it gave him some connection to us and so less made it less intrusive or voyeuristic, and I think that he felt this too.
Then we arrived in Sukhothai, which means Dawn of Happiness. It's charming here, probably my favourite destination in Thailand so far. In the town the markets seem a touch more lively and interesting than others, and there's a square containing a complex of buildings, most of them crumbling, that seem to house a school for young Buddhist monks.
In the middle of it all there's a fabulous old Merc, still in use I'm sure, garaged between the shrine where those seeking merit go to pay their respects while a monk chants over them and a couple of melancholy monkeys in a dilapidated cage.
Our guest house is the nicest place that we've stayed in in Thailand, with chic rooms and an agreeable setting. It's simple, and simple is often better. (It's always true in software, and one of my favourite chess books, by Michael Stean, was called Simple Chess. I lent it to a promising player in our school team, knowing him to be an inveterate thief - which is why I couldn't lend it to you.)
For the past couple of evenings Nui has taken us to a particular restaurant because she likes the food, there's a pleasant ambience and it's apparently the only place in town with mozzie-repelling air-con. It's also a magnet for westerners, and if we didn't have Nui to question on every topic we'd probably have befriended some of them. The hotel is also full of westerners, and here they're mostly French. This, we've learned, is because the owner is French, explaining, to rest on a stereotype, the stylishness.
Not all tourists here are delightful. Today we visited the beautiful old town, which is packed full of wats. The best way to tour around it is by bicycle and the relatively small band of visitors touring round today virtually all, like us, chose this way to do it. It's flat and quiet and great for the girls, and it was fun for us too. At the first wat that we came to the girls lit some incense sticks and presented them respectfully to the Buddha in the way that they've learned here. While they were doing this a party of Americans started calling out and whistling at them from across a lotus-covered pond to get out of the way of their photographs. If you never knew individual Americans you might well hate them all (and I'm sure the same is true of Brits, French and others, though not of Thais). Paula yelled angrily back at them to wait. As we were leaving the wat I went over to the spot where the Americans had all gathered to see if it was worth taking a snap there myself. It was a poor place to take a photo from, having nothing more to recommend it than immediate proximity to where their bus (for they alone did not cycle) had spit them out.
As well as the wats the old town houses a museum, and we were taken around it by yet another guide, who stayed with us for the morning. I don't know why we needed another one - Nui seemed to know it all - but she was nice to have around for a few hours. In a display describing the evolution of the Thai alphabet, which only acquired written form just before 1300 AD, I learned that there are 26 vowels, not 22 as I wrote the other day. I asked the new guide to read out the first six letters, and to me they were indistinguishable. Laughing, she told me the Thai for, "Who sells chicken eggs?": she swears that it's composed of different words but to my ear it was kai kai kai kai. As usual, there were also plenty of Buddhas and I'm enjoying becoming familiar with their attitudes and styles. My favourite pose is the most common: Buddha subduing Mara. With his right hand across his lap, palm facing up in meditation the left hand points down at the ground indicating his struggle with evil (Mara). The story goes that a goddess sprung up from the ground and wrung out her long wet hair to form a moat that prevented Mara getting near the Buddha. I also like the rarer Stop the Ocean pose, in which the Buddha has his two hands vertical facing away from him.
The new guide also told me, and I quote, "95% of Thai people believe in the Buddhism from long, long ago - not changed". I believe that this was very political, since Buddhists in other eastern countries follow a more full-on form of the religion that has evolved since the time of Gautama to encompass more aspects of life ("the greater vehicle", it's known as, contrasted to the Buddhism-lite or "lesser vehicle" practised here).
Unusually we took lunch at one of the plush hotels that we've so far avoided. I had a salad that was a variant of one that I'd first sampled from a small stall near Khao Luang waterfall. A pile of fresh ingredients including some smallish dark grey crabs are crushed with a mortar and pestle and served up with raw greens. The pieces of crab, which are torn into the mix by the chef, are taken into your mouth whole and you work the salty meat out and then pull out the shell. The hotel was fine but I preferred the less velour-laden place where we're staying.
After lunch we visited a couple more wats - one with a huge speaking Buddha (it's a trick, not a miracle), another up a hill with a view - and a few more stalls - notably a lady-boy type painting pretty door guards and an old woman making mobiles from palm sugar paper.
Considering that we could call anyone from anywhere with a crystal clear phone signal and I can post these blogs and get email using ADSL over ethernet 30 yards from our lodgings it's an oddly different world.
From Trang we took a minibus to the airport at Krabi, which has the air of belonging to the diorama of a model railway. Expecting to be on an insect-scale plane with few other passengers, I was surprised to find myself waiting with a room-full of other westerners for a Thai Airlines Airbus to Bangkok. It seems that most tourists disperse out to the southern beaches, zipping invisibly through the rest of the south, and congregate for an hour at Krabi airport as a standard node on the way in and out of the country.
The train journey north the next day from Bangkok to Phitsanolok also brought us into contact with many more westerners than we're used to seeing here: on the train down to Nakhon Si Thammarat we'd seen none. The Phitsanolok train was smarter than the NST train and the views out of the window were brighter since there are few rubber plantations in this region; but smarter is not necessarily more comfortable and brighter is not necessarily more interesting, and I preferred the romance of the NST train.
From Phitsanolok station we went to an old temple: it dated back to 1357, though its age was belied by the sense of continuous use, which like all of the wats we've visited is evident to this day. As usual, there were plenty of opportunities to enhance our luck. A monk playfully flicked holy water at us as we walked past, arcing it accurately over the head of the devout who kneeled in front of him. Paula and the girls tried making a wish while lifting a heavy model elephant: you try with one finger hooked into a ring at the top, and if you can heave it up on your first attempt but not on your second your wish will be granted. All of the girls claimed success, although since no jumbo pack of Oreos awaited us in the van I'm not sure whether to believe them. The most common try for luck (apart from the rows of lotto stalls outside) was to shake paddle-shaped splints from a cup that contained a large bunch of them. You did this until one shuffled out on its own (more than one and you start again) and then the number on the splint corresponds to a number on a stand of printed predictions that you pick up elsewhere in the temple. We all had a go. At the time of writing Nui has read through them but only yet ventured a translation of Zoe's and mine. It seems that mine was exceptionally lucky (all good things happen, I become very happy, bad things happen to any who try to stand in my way...). I always seem to appear fortunate with this type of thing: I was born on a Sunday on a propitious cusp of Pisces and Aries in the Chinese year of the dragon, and whenever I've read my tarot it has been promising. But even more than dismissing these portents as hokey I worry that their hubristic proclamations of good luck will provoke the gods to defy them: if I'm going to be told this stuff I'd prefer it to be in the faintest whisper.
Outside the wat there were some particularly exotic food stalls, including one that offered bags of frog skins; apparently they crisp up tastily, like salmon skin in sushi I guess.
Nui tells us very proudly that our tour avoids the main tourist routes (so what are we missing?) and instead brings us into contact with ordinary Thai people to show us how they live. It's true. From the luck top-up at the wat we went directly to a typical Thai house, which was, enterprisingly enough, the family home of one of the tour firm's drivers. And it was very interesting. It looked like many other houses that we speed past, being built of wood on concrete stilts. The stilts have the dual benefits of protecting the house from floods and of offering a cool area to live in in the daytime. The upstairs is used only in the evening and at night. The king, who counts for a lot here, has encouraged the rural population to enjoy the land rather than depopulating the countryside and flocking to the cities. He's also advised them to apportion their land in the ratios 30:30:30:10 for rice:garden:ponds:house, and the home we visited was in keeping with this. The ponds provide them with fish, which they catch using traps that they make from bamboo, and also with fish sauce, which is made by stacking fish in pots with lots of salt and leaving it for about a year. The garden is equally productive: we saw chillies, lemon grass, limes, guava, mangoes, papaya, bananas, jack fruit, plums, tamarind, and bergamot from which they make oil to clean the floor. I haven't figured out for sure who sows and reaps the huge fields of rice when the driver is driving but I can guess.
We poked around the upstairs of the house, too. Inside it's about 20 metres by 30 metres and is completely undivided apart from small cubicles for a loo and a shower. The floor is of polished wood and at night they bring out bedding and they all sleep on it. There were eight people in this family, and they can get much bigger as extended families often live together in the same undivided style. Since there are no walls, beds or tables - everything happens on the floor - there's a nice spacey feel. Photographs of the king and queen and the revered former king Rama 5 are prominent, as is the Lord Buddha and the Buddhist calendar, which marks out the holy days - in the countryside these are observed. A small urn sits on top of the highest cabinet, containing some of the ashes of someone in the family - I knew from my summer jobs in the death business that the urn wasn't big enough to hold the ashes of a complete corpse.
While we stalked around their home with Nui the family chatted downstairs, good engineering enabling them to lazily rock their baby in a bamboo swing with a vigour bordering on violence. After we'd looked around they offered us jack fruit and seemed at ease while I quickly exhausted my Thai vocab. I like the idea that the person opening up his home was one of the operator's drivers - it gave him some connection to us and so less made it less intrusive or voyeuristic, and I think that he felt this too.
Then we arrived in Sukhothai, which means Dawn of Happiness. It's charming here, probably my favourite destination in Thailand so far. In the town the markets seem a touch more lively and interesting than others, and there's a square containing a complex of buildings, most of them crumbling, that seem to house a school for young Buddhist monks.
In the middle of it all there's a fabulous old Merc, still in use I'm sure, garaged between the shrine where those seeking merit go to pay their respects while a monk chants over them and a couple of melancholy monkeys in a dilapidated cage.
Our guest house is the nicest place that we've stayed in in Thailand, with chic rooms and an agreeable setting. It's simple, and simple is often better. (It's always true in software, and one of my favourite chess books, by Michael Stean, was called Simple Chess. I lent it to a promising player in our school team, knowing him to be an inveterate thief - which is why I couldn't lend it to you.)
For the past couple of evenings Nui has taken us to a particular restaurant because she likes the food, there's a pleasant ambience and it's apparently the only place in town with mozzie-repelling air-con. It's also a magnet for westerners, and if we didn't have Nui to question on every topic we'd probably have befriended some of them. The hotel is also full of westerners, and here they're mostly French. This, we've learned, is because the owner is French, explaining, to rest on a stereotype, the stylishness.
Not all tourists here are delightful. Today we visited the beautiful old town, which is packed full of wats. The best way to tour around it is by bicycle and the relatively small band of visitors touring round today virtually all, like us, chose this way to do it. It's flat and quiet and great for the girls, and it was fun for us too. At the first wat that we came to the girls lit some incense sticks and presented them respectfully to the Buddha in the way that they've learned here. While they were doing this a party of Americans started calling out and whistling at them from across a lotus-covered pond to get out of the way of their photographs. If you never knew individual Americans you might well hate them all (and I'm sure the same is true of Brits, French and others, though not of Thais). Paula yelled angrily back at them to wait. As we were leaving the wat I went over to the spot where the Americans had all gathered to see if it was worth taking a snap there myself. It was a poor place to take a photo from, having nothing more to recommend it than immediate proximity to where their bus (for they alone did not cycle) had spit them out.
As well as the wats the old town houses a museum, and we were taken around it by yet another guide, who stayed with us for the morning. I don't know why we needed another one - Nui seemed to know it all - but she was nice to have around for a few hours. In a display describing the evolution of the Thai alphabet, which only acquired written form just before 1300 AD, I learned that there are 26 vowels, not 22 as I wrote the other day. I asked the new guide to read out the first six letters, and to me they were indistinguishable. Laughing, she told me the Thai for, "Who sells chicken eggs?": she swears that it's composed of different words but to my ear it was kai kai kai kai. As usual, there were also plenty of Buddhas and I'm enjoying becoming familiar with their attitudes and styles. My favourite pose is the most common: Buddha subduing Mara. With his right hand across his lap, palm facing up in meditation the left hand points down at the ground indicating his struggle with evil (Mara). The story goes that a goddess sprung up from the ground and wrung out her long wet hair to form a moat that prevented Mara getting near the Buddha. I also like the rarer Stop the Ocean pose, in which the Buddha has his two hands vertical facing away from him.
The new guide also told me, and I quote, "95% of Thai people believe in the Buddhism from long, long ago - not changed". I believe that this was very political, since Buddhists in other eastern countries follow a more full-on form of the religion that has evolved since the time of Gautama to encompass more aspects of life ("the greater vehicle", it's known as, contrasted to the Buddhism-lite or "lesser vehicle" practised here).
Unusually we took lunch at one of the plush hotels that we've so far avoided. I had a salad that was a variant of one that I'd first sampled from a small stall near Khao Luang waterfall. A pile of fresh ingredients including some smallish dark grey crabs are crushed with a mortar and pestle and served up with raw greens. The pieces of crab, which are torn into the mix by the chef, are taken into your mouth whole and you work the salty meat out and then pull out the shell. The hotel was fine but I preferred the less velour-laden place where we're staying.
After lunch we visited a couple more wats - one with a huge speaking Buddha (it's a trick, not a miracle), another up a hill with a view - and a few more stalls - notably a lady-boy type painting pretty door guards and an old woman making mobiles from palm sugar paper.
Considering that we could call anyone from anywhere with a crystal clear phone signal and I can post these blogs and get email using ADSL over ethernet 30 yards from our lodgings it's an oddly different world.
Posted: Wed - January 11, 2006 at 05:46 PM
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Published On: Jan 11, 2006 05:47 PM
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Published On: Jan 11, 2006 05:47 PM