Thailand - Trekking Week

A bit of a misnomer! More like a "Trekking Couple of Days - For a Couple of Hours a Day When we Could Persuade Our Guides That We Really Liked Walking & We'd Rather Not Sit About, We're Not Too Old, Thank You Very Much".

We think there were a mixture of motives for the battle of wills that we had with our guides & Rangers (we had 2 of each, just for the 2 of us!) to actually take us for more than a stroll. There's the Thai desire to look after "ferang" (foreigners) often in an over-protective way. They want to save you from trouble even when, if they'd thought to ask you, they'd find that you are actively seeking a bit of bother - like walking! We don't think they quite got the idea of exercise anyway. Our protectors would much rather have spent their days sleeping in a hammock than leading us up a hillside & "elderly people" are not expected to be active, so all in all things didn't go according to plan, as far as we were concerned!

Expected Programme for Tuesday :
9:00 Leave for Taperngkee Waterfall
11:00 Arrive at Waterfall, relax, swim, walk around
12:00 Lunch
13:00 Start trekking from Waterfall
15:00 Arrive at 2nd camp

We were told that we would be walking 6.7kms to the waterfall, leaving from our 1st campsite in Phutoei National Park.

Actual programme for Tuesday:
9:35 Left camp in van
10:20 Dropped in forest
10:35 Reached Waterfall! Asked if we wanted lunch & a swim. Hardly ready for lunch after breakfast only a couple of hours before & a 15 minute walk. Hardly ready for swim either & would have been difficult in 2 feet of water in small pool! Said "No!" to both.
10:50 Left Waterfall
11:40 Stopped at stream. Asked if wanted lunch. Said "No!". They had lunch.
12:15 Started trekking again
13:00 Reached village. Stopped for coffee.
13:50 Left village.
14:00 Reached camp. Ate lunch. Put up tent. Discussed trekking! Agreed we would do the 2 - 3 hour walk to another waterfall this afternoon,which had been scheduled for following morning.
15:30 Left for waterfall
15:50 Reached waterfall !!!!!!!!!!!!! Rendered speechless!!!!!!! Asked if we wanted to swim, said "Not likely"when discovered that buffalo used it as their toilet flush.........

We gave up the ghost for the day after that........

We did feel that we had a decent amount of walking on our 2nd day, having insisted that we would head up the nearest hill, whether they came too or not & were rewarded with a hell of a climb but also panoramic views as far as the Burmese border. The afternoon walk to 3 caves, which they told us were 500 metres away, turned out to be substantially more & was also satisfying. They frustrated us again on the 3rd day by driving us down the road to our starting point & then telling us that everyone else walked down, took one & a half hours & found it hard work - weren't we lucky to have a van? Answer "No (for the 1000th time), we like walking !" Puzzled, slightly crestfallen faces looked back at us!

We gave up finally & gave ourselves over to lazing about for the next 2 or 3 days, as was planned for us. We were in an idyllic spot camping by the Lumtaphern Dam, with mountainous views & utter peace.

And yes, you did read correctly - we did put up our own tents & we did sleep in them on the hard ground for 4 nights!!

(We even liked it!)

Thailand - Cultural Week

The programme for this week took us to Ayutthaya (a UNESCO World Heritage site) where we learned more about Thai history amongst the ruins of Thailand's former capital. The Burmese destroyed it in the 17 th C CE, the culmination of a long series of battles & wars between Thailand & Burma. The stories of rape & pillage by the Burmese still seem to rankle in the Thai psyche.

The city had covered a huge area, with so many temples that the gilt decoration was said to dazzle up to 3 miles away. There were 1 million people living there in 1685, mainly on house boats on the 140 km network of waterways. The heart of the city was a 4km wide island where the Lopburi, Pasak & Chao Praya rivers meet. When the city was abandoned, the architects of the new capital of Bangkok replicated Ayutthaya's layout in every possible way We wandered through the ruins, which were tilted at odd angles due to a subsequent earthquake, trying to imagine how it looked in its heyday. The strangest sight was the serene head of a stone Buddha nestled firmly in the grip of the roots of a bodhi tree - very appropriate since the Buddha himself found enlightenment under just such a tree.

We also visited the palace complex of Bang Pa In, about 20 kms away, which was originally occupied in the 17th C CE, abandoned a century later & then reoccupied in the 19th C CE. It's a fascinating mix of European, Thai & Chinese architecture, set in pristine landscaped parklands. The most stunning & gorgeous building is the Palace of Heavenly Light, a fantastic red & gold mansion which was presented, with all its contents, to Rama V by the Bangkok Chines Chamber of Commerce in 1899.

Ayutthaya has traditionally been associated with elephant training (originally for warfare) & we went to see the elephant village on the edge of town. There we saw young boys using elephants as a diving board in the river, met some month-old elephant calves, their mothers & assorted friends & family. Finally we had dinner on a terrace overlooking the Chao Praya river.

At the heart of Thai culture is Buddhism, so inevitably the week included insights into the monkhood, a 200,000 strong body dedicated to showing by example how to live the Middle Way. We got up at 5 a.m. to participate in giving food to the local monks on their daily alms round. This practice is seen as an opportunity for the donor to gain merit. It is not to be thought of as a benefit to the receivers & one should never entertain thoughts that the monks are begging!

Our education continued with an overnight stay at the Wat Songhipong, near the town of Sonburi. It wasn't the most beautiful temple - in fact, it was positively run down & had a very plain hall for worship. The only thing of note was the glass case containing the skeleton of the present abbot's father, who had also been a monk! That's one of the surprising things that we discovered - a male can become a monk at any time in his life & is not precluded from so doing by being married & having children already. Men can also go on to be husbands & fathers after they have been a monk too. Being a monk is not necessarily for life & most Thai men have been ordained as monks at some stage. You can be a monk for as little as a day& it still gains merit! We witnessed the ordination of a young married man of 24, with a small daughter, who was going to lead the monastic life for 3 months. (We shouldn't be surprised since the Buddha himself was married & had a child before he gave up everything in search of the path to enlightenment & the end of suffering.)

We were kindly invited to join in the celebrations surrounding the ordination by the novice monk's family. We all traipsed off to another temple nearby, which was more aesthetically pleasing, to watch a service which was a strange mix of formal & informal. The family were all dressed in their workaday clothes & lounged about on the temple floor & steps chatting, some even on their mobile phones, while chanting & formalities proceeded. All the monks, even the most venerable, stopped at regular intervals to sook up their Pepsis through straws from the bottles! At one stage, all the men present, including Howard, were required to shuffle forward on their knees to present gifts to the monks, the gifts being plastic pails full of packets of soap powder, sponges, towels, cloths, tinned foods, biscuits, airmail letters & other such practical stuff. These pails are on sale everywhere particularly near temples. There must be millions of them! Not very eco-friendly - we don't think they are biodegradable & they are all wrapped up in vast amounts of cellophane & ribbons. It somehow seemed incongruous to see such ordinary, everyday offerings in such an ornate & exotic setting. In India & Thailand it has made us smile every time we've seen fantastically ornamental shrines bedecked with cans of fizzy drinks, tins of tomatoes, packets of crisps, bottles of sauce & the like.

Apart from the happy accident of witnessing the ceremony, we were generally disappointed with our temple stay. There was a lot of hanging about doing nothing, both with no purpose & in learning to do sitting & walking meditation. We did have an audience with the abbot but that was a little frustrating. We would ask a question through our translator, listen to the abbot speak in Thai for at least 5 minutes & then get the translation "Must try to do good in your life to a drain peace, no desire"! Sometimes we got answers to questions that we didn't ask, so we think much was lost in translation both ways. None of it led to the spiritual experience which we had hoped for. The abbot was very congenial though. He spoke little English & we spoke little Thai but he was just back from a month of training monks in Germany & was thrilled to discover that we could understand his pidgin German. He would suddenly burst out with "Wie gehts?" or "Es is gut, es is gut, ja? Speak German!" at odd moments.

The other disconcerting German intervention which really ensured that it was a less than spiritual experience, was to discover that another of Greenway's guides was an ex-member of a Bangkok gang who was proud to display his SS tattoo & declaim that Hitler was a great leader! There was a group of young medical students from the USA there with us at that point, several of whom were Jewish, & you can imagine the shock & offense that we all felt. It was not a pleasant incident!

We were at Wat Songhipong at the start of the festival to celebrate the Buddha's birth, death & enlightenment but apart from the fact that the locals brought alms to the monks rather than the monks going out to receive them, there were few signs of any special activities. We did end the day, however, back at the Temple of the Reclining Buddha, where we participated in a triple perambulation around the enormous statue following a company of monks to the rhythm of hypnotic chanting. (Most of these monks were young boys. We were told that young criminal offenders or even those that are felt to be going off the rails & keeping bad company are sent to monasteries very often, to get them back on the straight & narrow.) On this occasion we did feel part of a joyful atmosphere & came away feeling uplifted.

Our cultural week concluded with a stay at a spa resort. It was really just a reasonable hotel with a swimming pool, small gym & a hut where massages & facials could supposedly be had (had there ever been anyone there!). It was pretty low-key but it was air conditioned, comfortable & relaxing. What more could we ask? An easy going experience, which probably sums up much of the Thai approach to life.

Karaoke

.......starring Howard & Band

Veg

Singburi Market

Some people will truly eat anything - but we're even less likely to now!!

The Lemon House

Welcome

Thailand - Introduction Week

Schedules of Gold Programme - The First 4 Weeks.

This will be exciting beginning of your even more exciting stay in Thailand.

During this period you will get to know the authentic Thailand.

This was the blurb from the front page of our programme of activities as issued by Greenstay Co. Ltd. We had an introduction week, a cultural week, a trekking week & a beach week all planned for us.

We were based at The Lemon House (no idea why it was called this - there were no lemons to be seen & the place was not painted yellow! The company also owned The Brown House & The Blue House which mysteriously didn't match their descriptions either) in a village near the town of Singburi, 140 kms north of Bangkok. We haven't managed to find out the name of the village yet, despite determined attempts! Our room was in a walled courtyard in pleasant gardens. Just across the road we could sit, trying to catch any hint of a breeze, at the side of a river - a rather muddy & cloudy river, as have been all the rivers we've seen in Thailand. The dead dog & plastic bags of rubbish we saw floating by might have something to do with it!

Our introduction week began with an informal welcome party where local children, dressed in traditional costumes, demonstrated Thai dancing & music, giggling at our efforts to join in. We walked around the village, pulling ourselves across the river on the walk-on, walk-off ferry to visit the local temple & school. The children & staff were all in uniform. We discovered that they all have a different uniform for each day of the week, including one day when the boys turn up in Scout uniform, while the girls wear a Red Cross uniform (staff too!).

We had Thai language, cooking & massage lessons. We went swimming & to a karaoke lounge. We watched palm fruit picking & made bracelets from coconut shell beads strung onto waxed coconut fibre.

We visited temples:

- Wat Phikun Thong, site of the largest seated Buddha statue in Thailand & a very spooky & lifelike waxwork image of a pre-eminent monk, Luang Phae, who died about 7 years ago. Locals bring in breakfast, lunch & dinner for him daily, in case he feels peckish, apparently! It was also the site of the most graphic paintings depicting the consequences of bad living. We hadn't previously associated Buddhism with notions of hell fires in the world to come, but these were dire warnings of never-ending torture & damnation. Good living was depicted as bringing the rewards of floating about on a heavenly cloud amongst gardens & angels - which looked rather bland!

- Wat Phra Non Chaksi Worawihan, home of another huge reclining Buddha statue, this time the biggest in Thailand.

- Monkey Temple, shrine of San Phra Kan, where monkeys swarmed all over the modern temple & the ruins of earlier Khmer temples dating from the 13th Buddhist century. (Thailand operates a calendar starting from the year 543 BCE when Buddha entered Nirvana/died. 2007 is the Thai year 2550.)

- Wat Phraputhabat, known as the AIDS Temple. The abbot here has instituted a programme of care for AIDS & HIV patients which is unique in Thailand. There is still a great deal of fear & misunderstanding of AIDS in the country. At Wat Phraputhabat those in the 1st stages of illness live in one room houses in the beautiful grounds below the hillside temple. They are encouraged to work - some have stalls on site selling various goods. For those in the terminal stages of the disease there is a ward devoted to their care. A forthright & practical set of guidelines indicated the emphasis on giving respect & good care to all the patients. The strangest experience there was our visit to the "Life Museum" which was a display of mummified bodies of victims of AIDS set alongside photos of them in life & biographies stating how they had contracted the disease. Children were infected by their mothers, women by their husbands & by paying clients, men by sex workers. There was even a lady boy infected as a result of being a sex worker. We had felt a bit squeamish about going in but found it poignant & moving. It was set up not so much as a salutary warning but more as an affirmation of the Buddhist emphasis on all life being a process of decay, which was an interesting insight in itself.

We were also introduced to Thai history, ate Thai food (including rice & veg for breakfast), visited a Thai market & a Thai shopping centre & had plenty of Thai free time. We think the introductions went well.

Jatujak Market

Reclining Buddha 1

Grand Palace