traveldiary.stracke.us

After quite a few hotels in the last couple of weeks, the bed and breakfast scene has us again.
We are staying in a lovely place in the north of Thailand just outside of Chiang Mai. Aside from an elderly British gentleman, who is overwintering here, we are the only guests in this B&B of 12 rooms, thanks to the Tsunami. This place is over 1000 km away from where the Tsunami hit, but apparently everyone, who had reservations canceled anyway. It is a lovely place, that resembles a Spanish hacienda more than a Thai house. The proprietors are a British man and his Thai wife, who are bestowing all their attention upon us. Peppe, the lady has created delicious Thai meals and Peter, her husband is great for conversationalist about the ins and outs of Thai society.
Last night Peppe took us to her local Wat (temple), where they were having a 3 day fundraiser project for constructing a new Wat. It was quite the non tourist experience…
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Yes, you are reading this correctly. We visited an elephant camp and saw trained elephants kick the ball back and forth, dance to music, shake their rear ends and wildly rotating their trunks to the music. It almost looked like they were having fun to be a star.
The truly amazing thing was to see the elephants painting. The trainer gives the elephant the correct color paintbrush, and four animals were painting flowers with stems, leaves and blossoms right in front of our eyes. Another elephant was doing an impressionist type of painting. If you think this isn’t a big deal, just before we arrived, the elephants painted a record size canvas, which made it into the Guiness Book of World Records and sold to an American for 39, ooo USD. That should buy a lot of bananas and sugar cane, which is what we were feeding the elephants. Gabi has digital photos to prove that the Singha beer did not give me hallucinations!

We are currently in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and it is very hot again. There is a lack of street signs in English ( or Thai ) and we can not read the Thai alphabet. So we ended up having a car with driver every day. We picked up a driver in the street outside our hotel yesterday. Slight mistake ! The guy quoted us a price of 400 Baht ( 10 USD ) for the entire day. I had told him, that we wanted to see certain sights and were not interested in shopping. He still drove us to several ” local markets”, which turned out to be jewelry and handicraft factories. It was very educational to see the Thai people at work, but it was really not on our itinerary. We watched the local artists creating bamboo lacquered vases, dishes, and gift items.We saw one man paint a vase, taking about a week to finish the product.
It was also very interesting to see how the jewelry was hancrafted.
Our driver also drove way too fast and my complaining did not slow him down. We finally realized, that the fare was so cheap, because he gets up to 50% commission on the purchases from the stores. We did not buy a thing! We are on a budget and are living not too poorly. We survived the day and asked him to drive us back to the hotel. I fired him and we relaxed at the pool.
Today our hotel arranged a driver for us and so far he has been very polite and drives us to the places we actually want to go to!

2 days ago we took the Special Express Train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, in the mountainous northern part of Thailand. We covered the 600 km in 11 hours. Our train consisted of 3 railcars, each individually motorized. The whole train travel experience was very nice, compared to the dirt and chaos on the Indian trains. Clearly marked station platforms, trains and coach numbers made travel here a breeze.The windows were washed in Bangkok prior to our departure and again upon arrival in Chiang Mai. The coaches were super clean and the floor in our train was wet-mopped at least 5 times during the 11 hour journey.
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In the last few days, we have experienced so much, that I can not possibly be as wordy, as I usually am, even at the cheap internet rate of 1 Dollar an hr:lol:

Some of my fondest memories will be:

• The ferry boat rides up and down the Phraya River to get into the center of town.
• Removing our shoes at the temples and hoping we will find them again in thegroup of
  100’s.
• Black dirty feet, due to the previous point.
• Thai enjoying their meals in family street restaurant stalls
• The best pineapples ever bought from the same vendor,day in and day out.
• Incense burning sticks to commemorate Budda’s big day
• Little Thai children all dressed in their holiday best
• Great Chinese meal on the banks of the Phraya River here in Bangkok.
• Ornate temples, called Wats, all over the place. Our ferry stop was part of one.
• A monk making English conversation with me, while waiting for a ferry.

Today I read an interesting article in the Bangkok paper” The Nation” about tourist behavior right after the tsunami.
A British couple had barely escaped the tidal wave and moved to another hotel nearby. The guests of their new hotel had not witnessed the tidal wave and continued their Christmas holiday, as if nothing had happened. The only comments the survivors heard from the other guests were, how difficult it was now to get a table in the restaurant.
People were basically refusing to let the tidal wave ruin their vacation! On the other hand people in Europe or the US jumped on a plane, to come here and offer their help. I guess the closer you are to a disaster, the more you try to tune it out. As the article states : ” Having shelled out thousands to be on a beach a stone’s throw away, they were buggered if they were going to let a few tidal waves get in the way of their hard- earned break.”
The heading of this post is borrowed from TS Eliot.

Fewer people have to file income tax this year in Thailand. People earning less than Bt 100,000 do not have to file annual forms. So what does that really mean, well that would equate to 25,000 Dollars, but in real Thai purchasing power that is as least double, if not triple that amount… wow, can you imagine 75,000 and no taxes.

This was one of the headlines in yesterday’s Bangkok newspaper. It was saying, that 60-70% of Thai families no longer visited temples, they were not interested in days such as Maka Buddha Day, but rather wanted to celebrate Valentine’s Day, which really has no significance in this culture.
Yesterday morning , when we visited the temples on this holiest of days, there were many older people and some very young but the middle was definitely underrepresented. Is this not also a world phenomena? I was reading in a magazine, that even in Israel, the young Israelis would prefer a fun life, rather than war or so much religion.
Yesterday evening, at the fair type celebrations, surrounding the day, many young were seen, going on rides, at the carnival booths, and at the food vendors.
People in this society are worried about how to get the young to uphold moral principles.
One Prof. at the University, Dr Sombun Chitpong urges religious teachers not to stress so much what was right or wrong but rather to use reasoning. In Thai culture the former was the way of learning. She says”students should be asked, why they should not jump a red light. If their answer is because they fear the police, well then they have not been instilled with a moral sensibility.” I ask you then, how many of us have been instilled with this moral sensibility? I think the western culture must have lost that a long time ago, because how many of us would say, well the reason I stay under the speed limit is because it is right?:roll:

Yesterday was Maka Bucha or Buddha Day in Thailand.
The Kingdom of Thailand ( Head of State is King Bhumibol – Rama IX) has a population of 65 million. 75% are Thai, 11% Chinese and 3.5% Malay. Buddhism is practised by 95% of the people, while 4% are Muslim. We went to another “wat” or Buddha temple yesterday, this time to “Wat Po” with a huge reclining gold Buddha. The worshippers were burning incense candles and bringing flowers. It is also custom to buy and release fish, birds and turtles. The only problem is, that it is illegal to trade with live birds or turtles, since many of them die. According to the newspaper today, several hundred bird and turtle sellers were arrested all over Thailand yesterday.
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Macau, an “island” peninsula off mainland China shows how two very varied cultures can coexist and even blend. From Hong Kong, we took a turbojet boat to this SAR ( Special Administrative Region, as also Hong Kong is called) of China. Both have a 50 year promise from China to leave things as they are; what happens thereafter, who knows. But judging from the way mainland China is developing, there shouldn’t be any problems by that time.
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