Forget Buddha
15 - 20 Jan, Ian
First, let me thank Mike for identifying the
armadillo-like creature I described last time as a pangolin, John for a
definitive attribution of the Rusking/Morris quote to William Morris and Ray for
providing reasons why you might want to buy a (Canon) digital SLR - I'll forward
to anyone interested. We're all learning
together...
At the end of the last blog we'd arrived at Chiang Mai, which is Thailand's second largest city. While not being on the scale of Bangkok, it's still a shock to pull into such a busy place after passing time in remote places. Apart from the heavy traffic - when trying to cross the road Zoe said it was like a tsunami, which is a good analogy that an adult might not get away with here - and the density of buildings the first difference you notice is the number of westerners. We were booked into a very pleasant guest house that has been open only a few months. At any visit to the bar/restaurant terrace a Lonely Planet, either in French or English, was out on most tables.
The other phenomenon that I'd not noticed even in Bangkok is the very large number of European guys (they seemed to be mainly English) with Thai girlfriends. (Strangely, I haven't yet seen a single case of the reverse pairing.) The other day Zoe and I were having lunch and there was one such couple on the next table, who were there when we arrived and still there when we left. Throughout the entire time the guy, who was in my line of sight directly behind Zoe, didn't look at the girl once and not one word was exchanged between them. When she went to the loo the proprietress came over and asked him something about their relationship and kept talking to him until he couldn't lose himself in his Heineken and fags any longer. He initially looked defensive and hostile - "she's just a friend, not my girlfriend" (yeah, right) - but softened up a little as she kept on. When his friend returned to the table, by which time the proprietress had moved on, he resumed his stoney silence.
The item that I've been trying unsuccessfully to buy in a Buddha. Just a standard bronze one of the Lord Buddha subduing Mara in the Sukhothai fashion: the most common pose, the most popular style. On Monday we took a trip up to a renowned wat - the Wat Phatrat Doi Suthep - which many many people visit, approaching up a steep flight of steps, which generate the same foreboding as Uma Thurman must have felt on her way up see the kung fu master. Nui thought that we'd be able to buy my Buddha there, and after we'd toured round we tried the places inside and outside the temple that looked promising. While I had thought that they might not have one that I especially liked I wasn't prepared to find that they'd actually sold out of them all. Must have been a run on Buddhas I guess.
My favourite part of the wat was again a detail of the mural, which, like the stations of the cross in Catholic churches, depicted the life of the Lord Buddha in sequence around the perimeter. There were two sections that I especially liked. The first showed Gautama fleeing his old life by night with horses racing through the sky as if in the film Hero. The second detail, and my favourite, was an illustration of the goddess risen from the ground who had just wrung her hair out to create a protective river against the forces of Mara.
Incidentally, I am missing something from home now: movies. I want a Kill Bill night (1 & 2 in a double-header) and to see Lantana, The Maltese Falcon, A Zed and Two Noughts, Kissing Jessica Stein, anything early by Jean-Luc Godard, Diva...
Before the wat we visited another Hmong village, though this was completely different from the one we'd stayed in a week before. For a start, on the approach it revealed itself as a maze of ugly corrugated tin. We pulled up into a row of taxi vans that ferried the residents of the Chiang Mai area up for the entertainment and shopping opportunities. Many of these visitors hired Hmong costume to traipse round in, although since it was ceremonial dress the Hmong themselves could not be seen in it. There was a pleasant garden area where the visitors in their fancy dress photographed each other, and this included a few beds of poppies. The night before I'd been chatting to one of my friends who told me that when he'd been in the area he'd tried opium, but now the poppies are decorative. A few years ago the government stamped out the opium trade through the simple expedient of shooting dead a couple of thousand people who ran it. This severity sounds Bush-like, apart from the scale of it (killing in thousands rather than hundreds of thousands) and the significant difference that it actually achieved something.
On the way back into Chiang Mai we learned the most reliable way to get bad food in Thailand: order something Western. We've tried a couple more times since and it's a sure-fire way to have a disappointing meal, which is otherwise hard to do here. Previously, only Nan had provided anything other than great cuisine, and this also had been non-Thai.
In the evening we said our good-byes to Nui, who was palpably excited to be getting a couple of days with her boyfriend between tours - he does the same job so they''re usually apart.
Before she left Nui recommended another place to try for a Buddha, and Zoe and I went along to look the next day. Mysteriously, it turned out to be a food market. On the way back we stumbled across an antique shop that had the perfect piece. When I asked for the price I was quoted 25,000 Bhat, which dropped to 20,000 - but this is about £300, which is ten times what Nui indicated as a maximum and far more than I'm prepared to shell out.
We had a few days on our own in the guest house in Chiang Mai and on Wednesday Paula booked us on a mountain bike trip, since we'd all enjoyed our little cycling experience so much in Sukhothai. It transpired that we were on our own since the other people who booked that day all wanted to do more hard-core biking than we were after. So we had our own group leader - a young German guy with excellent English called Marco - and we set off with a Thai driver in our van to the jungle. We parked next to a lake and started along a gravel road, presently arriving at a small track that led into the jungle proper. It was immediately apparent that Zoe, who had not been well for a day or so, was not at all herself. Normally, she's very intrepid but as we cycled along she looked out of sorts and wasn't racing along at the front as we might expect her to. After cycling some way in and crossing a couple of creeks we decided to turn round and find an easier track for the rest of the day. As soon as we arrived back on the gravel track Zoe pulled over and vomited copiously. Marco looked on helplessly and Heidi examined some butterflies that had been collected by a student who happened to be taking a phone break in the same place. We set off again, and returned to the van to have fruit and water before deciding to take a gravel road that apparently led, after 8 k.m., to the restaurant where we were due to stop for lunch. The driver, luckily as it turned out, crawled behind us in the van. We hadn't been going too long when I decided to take advantage of the slow pace to get some snaps. I took my little Nikon out of my pocket and turned around to photo Zoe, who was bringing up the rear. I'd declined the offer of knee and elbow pads, telling Heidi, who disliked her pads and questioned the unfairness of it, that unlike her I was old enough to make my own choices. I clearly remember thinking that with the camera in my right hand if I had to slow or stop I'd only have the use of my left hand, and that using only the front brake would be a potential hazard. And so it was. Miraculously, the camera didn't break, though I really didn't care about it at the time. I had a deep cut just below my knee and another just below my elbow. The driver sprang out of the van and started to pack the leg wound with vegetation from the side of the road, which I got Paula to remove so that we could use steristrips. When Marco, who was in something of a panic, discovered that his First Aid kit didn't include steristrips the grassy stuff went back on. The kit did, though, have some all purpose stuff that came in two bottles - like Araldite - and that mixed into traffic light colours; it seemed very effective. The leg seemed to merit a few stitches but as we were on the way to the hospital Paula and I decided that we'd be happier hitting a pharmacy and patching it up ourselves. If steristrips didn't work we learned when I stabbed my hand with a Leatherman knife a couple of years ago that Superglue does the trick; but the strips held it. Paula had her own adventure getting the medical supplies: one of the guys from the guest house took her speeding through the mad streets of Chiang Mai on the back of his motorbike.
I've had a couple of slow days since then, doing little more exciting on Wednesday afternoon and then Thursday than The Guardian crossword. Chiang Mai is the first place we've been since we left home that you can get English newspapers on the day of issue, which is impressive since we're 7 hours ahead. In a practice I assume to be legal they print the papers locally on ordinary printer paper. The Guardian was the first cryptic crossword that I realised that I could finish - this was twenty years ago, sitting around the kitchen table at university with my friend Helen, who is now married to my friend Steve (they were dating then) and living in Chicago. One of the key pleasures of being grown up has been finding that there are useful and interesting skills that you can acquire into adulthood: handling a car that's lost traction; getting a new job; SCUBA diving; dressing a wound...
Zoe and I tried again for a Buddha buy last night, limping around the night bazaar in Chiang Mai with a trekking pole, again without luck. Even as I formulated my wish for one of the things I suspected that it might turn into a Buddhist exercise: all suffering is caused by striving, and to be released from it you need to let go of any desires or images of how your life should be. Getting hung up on the Buddha might stop me obtaining good energy from it. In truth, though, I'm not a Buddhist. There are many appealing features of Buddhism: its godlessness, its lack of zealotry, the peaceful and happy nature of the Buddhist Thai people. But I don't believe in reincarnation, I'm not certain that striving to find yourself or pursue goals is bad, and I don't revere the monastic life. So I should forget the Buddha both because I respect his teachings and because I don't.
Last night we met our new guide. His name is Mike, he's from near Durham and he'll be taking us around and then into Laos. Being English, Mike gives us a different perspective from Nui. He has a Thai girlfriend and I'm guessing that they have more to say to each other than the sad couple we saw over lunch the other day. For a start, he speaks the language. Thailand is not a country like the US or the UK that naturally assimilates foreigners. The brother of Mike's girlfriend, for example, gets on well with him but has told him that he's not happy to see his sister dating a farang (a word that seems to approximate to gaucho). And being hill tribe people even the girlfriend and her family are not regarded as fully Thai by most of the country. The Thai people, Mike tells us, are very proud, and judging from the ubiquitous flags they're very patriotic. The flag tells its own story of the country. There is a wide horizontal blue band across the centre that represents the king, who is adored in the country. Above and below this are narrower white bands, representing Buddhism. And above/below these, at the top and bottom edges of the flag, are red bands symbolising the "bravehearts" who sometimes have to fight to defend the country. So it's a sweet, simple, right-wing picture of statehood.
Before taking this job Mike had travelled the world for a couple of years. We've enjoyed swapping stories with him about it. He's easy-going and has a nice sense of humour.
Today we drove up to Chiang Kong in the north of Thailand. Between Libong island in the south and here we've gained about 13 degrees of latitude: this is about the same as the difference between Land's End and the Shetland Islands, or between the top of Florida and the bottom of Maine. On the journey up from Chiang Mai we stopped off at a place where as well as getting a cup of the locally-grown coffee (which is pretty good) you can boil quail eggs to eat in hot springs - they made a nice snack. We also pulled into a shop that implausibly specialised in cashew nuts. Packs of around a dozen different flavours were arranged with art-gallery care. Our last stop was at a wat-in-progress, which is being bank-rolled by a prominent Thai artist. Disney-like in white with mirror tiles, it looked more like an oversize wedding cake than a temple. Snobbily (for someone from Wolverhampton), I couldn't shake off the sense that it was arriviste.
We've checked into another guest house for a couple of nights. Being in rural Thailand again it's much more basic than the last place. There we'd had an ADSL link in the room, which meant that we could listen to the World Service and Radio 4. Here we're back to GPRS at best, so you can expect to see the odd blog photo taking a few days to come on line. Our room faces onto the Mekong River, which marks the border with Laos. Across the river there's a hotel that has a disco - This Is Thailand again.
At the end of the last blog we'd arrived at Chiang Mai, which is Thailand's second largest city. While not being on the scale of Bangkok, it's still a shock to pull into such a busy place after passing time in remote places. Apart from the heavy traffic - when trying to cross the road Zoe said it was like a tsunami, which is a good analogy that an adult might not get away with here - and the density of buildings the first difference you notice is the number of westerners. We were booked into a very pleasant guest house that has been open only a few months. At any visit to the bar/restaurant terrace a Lonely Planet, either in French or English, was out on most tables.
The other phenomenon that I'd not noticed even in Bangkok is the very large number of European guys (they seemed to be mainly English) with Thai girlfriends. (Strangely, I haven't yet seen a single case of the reverse pairing.) The other day Zoe and I were having lunch and there was one such couple on the next table, who were there when we arrived and still there when we left. Throughout the entire time the guy, who was in my line of sight directly behind Zoe, didn't look at the girl once and not one word was exchanged between them. When she went to the loo the proprietress came over and asked him something about their relationship and kept talking to him until he couldn't lose himself in his Heineken and fags any longer. He initially looked defensive and hostile - "she's just a friend, not my girlfriend" (yeah, right) - but softened up a little as she kept on. When his friend returned to the table, by which time the proprietress had moved on, he resumed his stoney silence.
The item that I've been trying unsuccessfully to buy in a Buddha. Just a standard bronze one of the Lord Buddha subduing Mara in the Sukhothai fashion: the most common pose, the most popular style. On Monday we took a trip up to a renowned wat - the Wat Phatrat Doi Suthep - which many many people visit, approaching up a steep flight of steps, which generate the same foreboding as Uma Thurman must have felt on her way up see the kung fu master. Nui thought that we'd be able to buy my Buddha there, and after we'd toured round we tried the places inside and outside the temple that looked promising. While I had thought that they might not have one that I especially liked I wasn't prepared to find that they'd actually sold out of them all. Must have been a run on Buddhas I guess.
My favourite part of the wat was again a detail of the mural, which, like the stations of the cross in Catholic churches, depicted the life of the Lord Buddha in sequence around the perimeter. There were two sections that I especially liked. The first showed Gautama fleeing his old life by night with horses racing through the sky as if in the film Hero. The second detail, and my favourite, was an illustration of the goddess risen from the ground who had just wrung her hair out to create a protective river against the forces of Mara.
Incidentally, I am missing something from home now: movies. I want a Kill Bill night (1 & 2 in a double-header) and to see Lantana, The Maltese Falcon, A Zed and Two Noughts, Kissing Jessica Stein, anything early by Jean-Luc Godard, Diva...
Before the wat we visited another Hmong village, though this was completely different from the one we'd stayed in a week before. For a start, on the approach it revealed itself as a maze of ugly corrugated tin. We pulled up into a row of taxi vans that ferried the residents of the Chiang Mai area up for the entertainment and shopping opportunities. Many of these visitors hired Hmong costume to traipse round in, although since it was ceremonial dress the Hmong themselves could not be seen in it. There was a pleasant garden area where the visitors in their fancy dress photographed each other, and this included a few beds of poppies. The night before I'd been chatting to one of my friends who told me that when he'd been in the area he'd tried opium, but now the poppies are decorative. A few years ago the government stamped out the opium trade through the simple expedient of shooting dead a couple of thousand people who ran it. This severity sounds Bush-like, apart from the scale of it (killing in thousands rather than hundreds of thousands) and the significant difference that it actually achieved something.
On the way back into Chiang Mai we learned the most reliable way to get bad food in Thailand: order something Western. We've tried a couple more times since and it's a sure-fire way to have a disappointing meal, which is otherwise hard to do here. Previously, only Nan had provided anything other than great cuisine, and this also had been non-Thai.
In the evening we said our good-byes to Nui, who was palpably excited to be getting a couple of days with her boyfriend between tours - he does the same job so they''re usually apart.
Before she left Nui recommended another place to try for a Buddha, and Zoe and I went along to look the next day. Mysteriously, it turned out to be a food market. On the way back we stumbled across an antique shop that had the perfect piece. When I asked for the price I was quoted 25,000 Bhat, which dropped to 20,000 - but this is about £300, which is ten times what Nui indicated as a maximum and far more than I'm prepared to shell out.
We had a few days on our own in the guest house in Chiang Mai and on Wednesday Paula booked us on a mountain bike trip, since we'd all enjoyed our little cycling experience so much in Sukhothai. It transpired that we were on our own since the other people who booked that day all wanted to do more hard-core biking than we were after. So we had our own group leader - a young German guy with excellent English called Marco - and we set off with a Thai driver in our van to the jungle. We parked next to a lake and started along a gravel road, presently arriving at a small track that led into the jungle proper. It was immediately apparent that Zoe, who had not been well for a day or so, was not at all herself. Normally, she's very intrepid but as we cycled along she looked out of sorts and wasn't racing along at the front as we might expect her to. After cycling some way in and crossing a couple of creeks we decided to turn round and find an easier track for the rest of the day. As soon as we arrived back on the gravel track Zoe pulled over and vomited copiously. Marco looked on helplessly and Heidi examined some butterflies that had been collected by a student who happened to be taking a phone break in the same place. We set off again, and returned to the van to have fruit and water before deciding to take a gravel road that apparently led, after 8 k.m., to the restaurant where we were due to stop for lunch. The driver, luckily as it turned out, crawled behind us in the van. We hadn't been going too long when I decided to take advantage of the slow pace to get some snaps. I took my little Nikon out of my pocket and turned around to photo Zoe, who was bringing up the rear. I'd declined the offer of knee and elbow pads, telling Heidi, who disliked her pads and questioned the unfairness of it, that unlike her I was old enough to make my own choices. I clearly remember thinking that with the camera in my right hand if I had to slow or stop I'd only have the use of my left hand, and that using only the front brake would be a potential hazard. And so it was. Miraculously, the camera didn't break, though I really didn't care about it at the time. I had a deep cut just below my knee and another just below my elbow. The driver sprang out of the van and started to pack the leg wound with vegetation from the side of the road, which I got Paula to remove so that we could use steristrips. When Marco, who was in something of a panic, discovered that his First Aid kit didn't include steristrips the grassy stuff went back on. The kit did, though, have some all purpose stuff that came in two bottles - like Araldite - and that mixed into traffic light colours; it seemed very effective. The leg seemed to merit a few stitches but as we were on the way to the hospital Paula and I decided that we'd be happier hitting a pharmacy and patching it up ourselves. If steristrips didn't work we learned when I stabbed my hand with a Leatherman knife a couple of years ago that Superglue does the trick; but the strips held it. Paula had her own adventure getting the medical supplies: one of the guys from the guest house took her speeding through the mad streets of Chiang Mai on the back of his motorbike.
I've had a couple of slow days since then, doing little more exciting on Wednesday afternoon and then Thursday than The Guardian crossword. Chiang Mai is the first place we've been since we left home that you can get English newspapers on the day of issue, which is impressive since we're 7 hours ahead. In a practice I assume to be legal they print the papers locally on ordinary printer paper. The Guardian was the first cryptic crossword that I realised that I could finish - this was twenty years ago, sitting around the kitchen table at university with my friend Helen, who is now married to my friend Steve (they were dating then) and living in Chicago. One of the key pleasures of being grown up has been finding that there are useful and interesting skills that you can acquire into adulthood: handling a car that's lost traction; getting a new job; SCUBA diving; dressing a wound...
Zoe and I tried again for a Buddha buy last night, limping around the night bazaar in Chiang Mai with a trekking pole, again without luck. Even as I formulated my wish for one of the things I suspected that it might turn into a Buddhist exercise: all suffering is caused by striving, and to be released from it you need to let go of any desires or images of how your life should be. Getting hung up on the Buddha might stop me obtaining good energy from it. In truth, though, I'm not a Buddhist. There are many appealing features of Buddhism: its godlessness, its lack of zealotry, the peaceful and happy nature of the Buddhist Thai people. But I don't believe in reincarnation, I'm not certain that striving to find yourself or pursue goals is bad, and I don't revere the monastic life. So I should forget the Buddha both because I respect his teachings and because I don't.
Last night we met our new guide. His name is Mike, he's from near Durham and he'll be taking us around and then into Laos. Being English, Mike gives us a different perspective from Nui. He has a Thai girlfriend and I'm guessing that they have more to say to each other than the sad couple we saw over lunch the other day. For a start, he speaks the language. Thailand is not a country like the US or the UK that naturally assimilates foreigners. The brother of Mike's girlfriend, for example, gets on well with him but has told him that he's not happy to see his sister dating a farang (a word that seems to approximate to gaucho). And being hill tribe people even the girlfriend and her family are not regarded as fully Thai by most of the country. The Thai people, Mike tells us, are very proud, and judging from the ubiquitous flags they're very patriotic. The flag tells its own story of the country. There is a wide horizontal blue band across the centre that represents the king, who is adored in the country. Above and below this are narrower white bands, representing Buddhism. And above/below these, at the top and bottom edges of the flag, are red bands symbolising the "bravehearts" who sometimes have to fight to defend the country. So it's a sweet, simple, right-wing picture of statehood.
Before taking this job Mike had travelled the world for a couple of years. We've enjoyed swapping stories with him about it. He's easy-going and has a nice sense of humour.
Today we drove up to Chiang Kong in the north of Thailand. Between Libong island in the south and here we've gained about 13 degrees of latitude: this is about the same as the difference between Land's End and the Shetland Islands, or between the top of Florida and the bottom of Maine. On the journey up from Chiang Mai we stopped off at a place where as well as getting a cup of the locally-grown coffee (which is pretty good) you can boil quail eggs to eat in hot springs - they made a nice snack. We also pulled into a shop that implausibly specialised in cashew nuts. Packs of around a dozen different flavours were arranged with art-gallery care. Our last stop was at a wat-in-progress, which is being bank-rolled by a prominent Thai artist. Disney-like in white with mirror tiles, it looked more like an oversize wedding cake than a temple. Snobbily (for someone from Wolverhampton), I couldn't shake off the sense that it was arriviste.
We've checked into another guest house for a couple of nights. Being in rural Thailand again it's much more basic than the last place. There we'd had an ADSL link in the room, which meant that we could listen to the World Service and Radio 4. Here we're back to GPRS at best, so you can expect to see the odd blog photo taking a few days to come on line. Our room faces onto the Mekong River, which marks the border with Laos. Across the river there's a hotel that has a disco - This Is Thailand again.
Posted: Fri - January 20, 2006 at 10:49 PM
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Published On: Jan 21, 2006 08:06 AM
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Published On: Jan 21, 2006 08:06 AM