Story Number One

Once upon a time, an expat teacher lived in a condo on a swanky condo street. There weren’t many access points to public transport because everyone else drove in expensive cars. So the expat teacher had to climb 67 concrete stairs from the bus stop to reach the swanky condo street. The last of the 67 concrete stairs rose out of a fetid puddle of stagnant jungle water that never seemed to dry up.  Every day the expat teacher saw something interesting at the fetid puddle of stagnant jungle water at the base of the last of the 67 concrete steps leading to the swanky condo street. In the fetid puddle she had seen toads, mice, dragonflies, giant land snails, mosquito larvae of a frightening size, wriggling worms, tadpoles, and once, a baby snake.

One sunny weekend day, the expat teacher noticed an iridescent turquoise flash. It was a Common Bluebottle butterfly. She fumbled for her camera and knelt at the edge of the fetid puddle which had once again yielded up its bounty to the delight of the expat teacher.

THE END

Story Number Two

Once upon a time in a condo on a swanky condo street lived a distinctly unswanky expat teacher and her two expat teacher roommates. One night when all three were about to settle in for a short night’s rest before waking up in the godless hours before dawn, the expat teacher was roused by someone shouting her name.

“Graaaaaaaaaaaace?!?! There’s a huge moth in my room!”

The expat teacher was conveniently just passing by her roommate’s bedroom had narrowly missed being brained by the door as her roommate rocketed out of her room. Her roommate stood in a cold sweat, suddenly still and silent, and mutely pointed at her curtains. The expat teacher locked eyes with the giant brown moth sitting on the curtains. She strode into the room, emanating a mysterious magnetic power. The moth took flight; the roommate whimpered from the hallway as it flew straight at the expat teacher and landed like a brooch on her chest and trembled there.

The expat teacher walked with silent assurance out of her roommate’s bedroom, past the stunned roommate in the hall, and into her own bedroom … and then darted for her camera. The moth-spell broken, the winged monster flew wildly at the ceiling light, stunning itself and falling behind the door where the expat teacher immediately began a photoshoot. The roommate poked her head into the bedroom: “Should I … uh … leave you two alone?”

THE END

Story Number Three

Once upon a time, on a swanky condo street, an expat teacher was just returning to her bedroom from the front door where she had been releasing an enormous moth back into the balmy tropical night. Just as she was passing her roommate’s room, she was startled by a piercing shriek from within, “GRAAAAAAACE! There’s another bug in my room!”

The expat teacher burst into the room, brandishing her camera still warm from the moth’s photoshoot. The roommate was standing in a corner pointing at the curtain. A small praying mantis stood on the curtain with cocked head, trying to kill everything with its furious praying mantis gaze. The expat teacher sprang into action, trying to make her camera go into macro mode with sheer will alone (and failing.) She pursued the mantis from curtain to wall to window, never managing to take a decent picture.

The little praying mantis – as proud as any of its kind – flew into the ceiling light in one last defiant kamakazi gesture, killing itself just to spite the expat teacher. Its small green body joined its brethren in the domed white tomb. It had won.

THE END

Story Number Four

Once upon a time, in the campus of a girls’ primary school in Singapore was a blue railing. It divided the road from the sidewalk and was usually bereft of life. One morning though, the Wednesday sun rose to illuminate a terrible and wonderful sight: two piles of red Singapore ants, all spindly legs and antennaes and beady black ant eyes. They didn’t move. They weren’t feeding. They simply sat in a still pile about four ants deep.

An expat teacher stood at the blue railing, blowing hard at the ant pile. Some students stood a few metres behind her, horrified. Slowly the ants started moving but they didn’t go anywhere, the just started moving their limbs around. Three hours later, they were still there. Four hours later, they were gone. What were the ants doing? By what fell means will they achieve their sinister goals? Were they ants at all? We may never know.

THE END

Story Number Five

Once upon a time, a woman went for a hike and saw a one-legged cricket trying to sing. It was heart-breaking.

THE END

How it felt:

Mostly blindingly bright. Partially embarrassing. Also involved some delicious food (as usual.)

Welcome to the White Temple

On our first full day in Chiang Rai, Gianpiero and I decided to go find the glittering white building we’d seen on the bus on the way into Chiang Rai. We found out from the friendly staff at Akha River House that it was called the “White Temple”.  I suddenly heard the voice of my coworker, Sakinah: “Grace. If you go to Chiang Rai, you must must see the White Temple.”

In the morning we met at the big table by the river for breakfasts of our choice (yogurt and muesli for GP, rice porridge for me.) It was so! cold! I had trouble sleeping the night before because it must have been less than 10°C  and I was pitifully unprepared for anything lower than 18°C. In the wee hours I had to get up and  jump  around in my room to warm up, put on every single article of clothing I had packed (a pair of thin cotton pants, three t-shirts, a thin cardigan, a sarong, and a blessed, blessed thick pair of hiking socks,) and then cocoon myself tightly in the blankets which I had folded in half to double them.

When I left my room to brush my teeth I could see my breath! This is Thailand!

Our planned early departure was delayed because we started talking to Nika who was also staying at the River House. Nika is a New Yorker who’s been living in Thailand for a while now, although it seems she’s been living pretty much everywhere else too (lucky!) She had been up the mountain to stay with the Akha tribe and couldn’t say enough great things about the place. Also she’s just wildly interesting. Seriously, the stories this woman tells!

By 10:30 we were streaking south down the highway, sun already high in the clear winter sky, my sarong whipping and snapping behind us, feeling secure above our full tank of gas.  Not only was the weather warming up, but I got to play navigatrix.  (I had three different maps and consulted them frequently with great difficultly due to the wind. I love being navigatrix.) Really, there aren’t many feelings nicer than riding on the back of a motorbike on a sunny Southeast Asian day.

Thirty minutes outside of Chiang Rai Gianpiero started asking me if I was sure we were on the right track. Yes, of course we are. There’s no way we could have made a wrong turn because there were no turns. Forty minutes outside of Chiang Rai he insisted we pull over and find out where we were. There were no signs, no towns, just a few buildings on either side of the highway, so I had to approach a man near his truck.

“<Sorry! Hello!>” I brandished the wind-crumpled map with my shiniest hapless tourist smile. “Uh…Wat Rong Khun?”
“Aaaaah!” his face broke into a huge smile. He pointed west with the universal sound/gesture that means undoubtably “really really really far away.”

I returned to Gianpiero sitting all cool and collected on the motorbike with low-hanging head. I had failed.  I was so embarrassed. Gianpiero sportingly teased me for the rest of our time in Thailand but was kind enough not to look too smug.

We have arrived!

An hour later, we pulled into a gravel lot across from the glittering Wat Rong Khun. It was even whiter and sparklier up close, mainly because the temple was surrounded by a shallow pond which not only reflected the temple, but reflected the sun onto the temple’s mirrored tiles. And it wasn’t only punishingly bright to look at; the grounds were covered in momento mori and graphic depictions of Buddhist hell.

Your head will be used as a planter!

This guy will take you out.

I'm not sure what's happening here, but it looks uncomfortable.

Everything was ceramic-white and/or painted with a pearly, opalescent paint and/or inlayed with mirrored tiles. The architecture itself is very Thai — delicate swooping roofs and ornate curlicues attached to everything.

Ornate.

If cigarette smoke looked like this ...

Two different roof silhouettes.

Monks walking into the koi pond building. This building was the pearliest of all.

The temple itself was really interesting. The interior was almost bereft of the usual fancy accoutrements of a temple, but the entire back wall was painted with the strangest mural I could imagine in a holy place.  The mural depicted a few demons of in huge dimensions overlaid by a post-apocalyptic landscape and everywhere in this flaming hellhole were popculture icons. Seriously. You can spot everyone from Doraemon to Superman to Darth Vader to Keanu Reeves of as Neo in The Matrix (although I approve of Keanu being in a place of worship.) Photography is not allowed inside the temple, so you’ll have to use your imaginations.

The temple won’t be completed for a few decades, but there are lots of things to see in the meantime.  The designer of the temple even hangs around and autographs pamphlets. He seems to be some sort of Thai celebrity. Some of his other works are displayed in another building and visitors can buy prints. His paintings are mostly pretty trippy in a new-age Thai kind of way. I’m sure they’re very popular with tourists.

The temple from behind.

The side of the temple.

It was a strange place to visit. On one hand, it’s a major tourist attraction equipped with a few restaurants, a cafe, and a few gift shops; on the other hand, it was a peaceful place of worship. On one hand, Westerners jabbering with delighted surprise at Keanu Reeves; on the other hand, an immensely old monk sitting deathly still in the centre of the temple. On one hand, entire clans of be(sun)spectacled, camera-slinging tourists frantically trying to organize group photos; on the other hand, the tourist clans bowing to pray.

It kind of reminded me of the Philippines where the precious town cathedral’s altar revered by all  also doubles as a stray dog rendezvous point. It’s something Alice and I talked about a lot in Korea; maybe Asians aren’t as picky about separating realms of their lives as Westerners. We noticed that Korean teachers were interacted with their students in ways that we sometimes found shockingly intimate.  I think especially North Americans tend to compartmentalize our lives. Thoughts?

I'm posting this extremely unflattering picture to illustrate the dichotomy of "heavenly" and "dirty backpacker".

After a quick lunch at one of the restaurants, we went back to Chiang Rai (I navigated perfectly this time.) We had planned to go up to the Akha Mountain House but turned out we didn’t have enough time because we were both going to Bangkok in two days.

I spent the afternoon wandering the wats of the city (many.) I encountered lots of other interesting things: a high school marching band with gorgeous brand new silver-plated instruments, parks filled with exercise clothing-clad ladies doing energetic dance aerobics, local people lined up to buy coats and sweaters. Turns out it was a freak cold front and I wasn’t the only one caught unprepared.

At night, I rejoined GP and we went back to the foodcourt and ordered the clay hotpot. Gianpiero was really excited about it.

Et voila!

NOM NOM NOM

We ate this!

We ate two servings of beef, a serving of chicken, and I think we tried a serving of pork. The beef was best. Both being huge food nerds, we created competition of who could make the most delicious soup using the raw ingredients we were given. Competition was fierce especially because I had to prove myself a competent person after the navigating fiasco of the morning. We each won once.

People. Chilling.

After dinner we wandered lazily around the night market, idly eyeing goods. It was getting cold again, so I bought a hideous $3 sweatshirt that says hilarious things about fruit in amazing Engrish that deserves its own post. We wanted sticky rice with mango, but none was to be found. Instead we found a lady selling dango with different toppings and I had the pleasure of initiating another friend into the mysterious world of rice cakes. Yummmmmm!

We went back to the hotel and I asked for two extra blankets. I slept cozy and warm in my socks, sweatshirt, and smothered in blankets.

How it felt:

***Yet again, all photos in this post are from Gianpiero. Thank you, Gianpiero!***

I had missed carefree travel so much. I didn’t fully realize how much I missed it until the morning of my third day in Chiang Mai.

I woke in my green bed. I stretched. I decided I was still full. I stretched again then I got dressed and went downstairs. A pyjama-clad Nine gave me a cup of coffee. The dog came over and sat beside my leg. I scratched his head and he wagged his tail.

I wandered into the city and realized that I was cold for the first time in a long time – over six months! I wrapped my shawl around me tighter and walked a little faster. I didn’t stop walking for 2 hours except once to buy some handmade mulberry paper for a certain mulberry paper-lover. It was 8:30 when I got back to the Green Tulip. The dog was chasing pigeons on the sidewalk.

I met a man named Max on the stairs who I had talked to briefly the day before. He is a folk artist/geologist/mountaineer and has been … everywhere. It’s a surprisingly happy thing for me to meet someone who has been to your hometown while you’re travelling thousands of kilometres away from that hometown. Not only had he been to my humble London, Ontario, but he’d been to Labrador of all places, and the Yukon. Not to mention hiking the scariest peaks of South America alone to have conversations with the hardy and hospitable people of those mountains. He was in Chiang Mai getting dental implants. Lord. Max gets up early to follow the monks around on their pre-dawn city walk. He watches them watching the city.

I put all my belongings into my backpack and came downstairs again. Gianpiero was sitting at a table with coffee and a guide book. We had decided to travel to Chiang Rai together to see what there was to see. We said goodbye to Nine, Stella, the dog, and the boy who made the coffee and crawled into a truck taxi to go to the bus station.

Buses from Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai run every hour or so through a number of bus companies and tickets cost a couple dollars. There are two bus terminals, and the company we chose was leaving through the newer one. We killed the 45 minutes before our bus by buying snacky foods for the 3 hour trip. I got fried dried banana chips; GP bought sesame snaps.

The bus was air conditioned,comfortable, and quiet. Across the aisle from us, a small boy of 5 or so grinned at me fearlessly from behind his sleeping mother. We began a game of peek-a-boo in earnest. He positively squealed with joy every time I hid or reappeared until his mother woke up and gave him a smack for being so noisy. He just giggled and hugged her and tried to engage her in the game too. What a sweet kid. I pretended to sleep so as not to get him in more trouble.

Bus

We had a pit stop halfway to Chiang Mai. The small boy from the bus saw me as I was waiting for a toilet stall and actually ran to me and pressed his face into my pant leg. Everyone in the washroom laughed, including his mother.

Just before we got into the city, we saw a glitteringly white building. “What is that?” we exclaimed. “We need to get to that!”

After a short while of indecision and hot wandering in the city, we finally got ourselves rooms at the Akha River House. It’s about a km north of the city centre (totally walkable) which means it’s also far from the (pretty disgusting) backpacker digs. Apparently there are some decent places to stay right in the city, but the ones that still had rooms were so gross that even my past super-cheap-Euro-trip incarnation would’ve passed up on them.

The River House, though, was lovely and had large grounds by the river. I got a double room with shared bathroom for 200B  a night and GP paid a little more for a private bathroom. Almost all the employees are Akha – a distinct ethnic group of Northern Thailand – and full of interesting conversation. They had a wide variety of breakfast food too including my favourite: rice porridge Thai-style with lots of garlic and vegetables. And coffee! At night, they built a fire by the river to stave off the terrible, terrible cold. It dropped to around 6°C in the nights, a temperature for which I was unprepared.

After settling in, GP and I rented a motorbike. After seeing that glitteringly white wat on the bus this conversation ensued:
“…Gianpiero?”
“Yes?”
“Can you drive a motorbike?”
“…Yes.”
“Great! Let’s rent a motorbike!”
“…Ok.”
Hooray for Gianpiero! I can’t really drive  a motorbike myself; at least, not with any degree of trust. I declared my role: navigatrix.

We scooted into town and parked near the nasty dorms we had seen earlier, ate a gross meal at one of the super-touristy restaurants along the road out of desperate hunger, and walked to Chiang Rai’s Wat Chet Yot.

Wat Chet Yao's guardian handrail dragon says: BLAAAAAARRRREEGHHHH!

There was a large white stupa behind the main temple where two sets of stairs lead to the top. I’d never been on top of a stupa before and rushed forward only to have my way blocked by a terrible sign: “NO WOMAN UPSTAIRS”

Curses!

Fortunately, GP is a dude, and he went up and took pictures of what he saw:

The lion-dragon has something against womankind maybe.

They want to keep lovely sunset views from the ladies?

We then went back to the bus station area where every night there is an extensive night market.We tried some “Chiang Rai coffee” (which turned out to be Chiang Mai coffee) at a guidebook-recommended coffee shop. Honestly the coffee at the Green Tulip is better – but I recognise that I’m laughably enamoured with the place and so am biased.

The night market seems to be divided: a part for tourists; and a part for locals. The goods are mostly for the tourists: “silver” jewelry, hill tribe headdresses, wooden carvings, etc. There’s also an ornate stage by some expensive tourist-directed restaurants where cover musicians playing Thai instruments sing nightly.

I got them mad Akha styyyylllllezzz

Far more interestingly, in my opinion, is the yellow-seated food court further east of the bus station. I think I ended up there all three nights of my Chiang Rai stay and each time it was abuzz and busy with mostly locals.  That first night, we sat down in front of the stage in the food court watching some cute young Thais dancing Thai dances.

The locals part of the night market selling yarn for knitting hats and scarves. (It was truly cold.)

Gianpiero noticed that many people around us were gathered around clay pots over coals and were busily stirring and adding food. He wanted a picture but didn’t want to bother any of the people. No problem! I grabbed his camera and approached the lady sitting alone with a clay pot directly in front of us.

I knew three phrases in Thai at this point: “thank you”, “sorry”, “hello.” I also knew that women generally end sentences with ka while men end sentences in khrap. I smiled at the lady in an apologetically friendly way and said in Thai:

“Hello ka. Sorry ka,” then brandishing Gianpiero’s camera, I mimed taking a picture and pointed at the clay pot steaming merrily over the coals. She nodded happily and smiled back at me with double my smile power (Thais really know how to smile.) I took a few pictures then used my third phrase, “Thank you ka!” and returned triumphantly to our table.

Behold! My spoils!

Five minutes later, three young women joined the lady who seemed to tell them what had just happened. They all laughed, then went and got two more bowls and insisted that we join them at their meal. Yes, please!

I was so so so delighted. The clay pot turned out to be hot pot and was filled with delicious spicy meat broth to which our new friends added some vegetables, and various types of meat. Using their limited English vocabularies, phone dictionaries, and charades, we were able to learn more about each other. The younger women were sisters, and the older woman was their neighbour — all are Chiang Rai natives. The youngest was the most enthusiastic about trying English and the two of us had a loud and merry game of “point to an object and say it in your language and then the other tries to imitate the word.”  We are now facebook friends (obvi.)

"Eat more, eat more!"

As the night wore on, and their bottle of whiskey emptied (those women drink!) the one who was introduced to me as “Elephant” fetched more food court dishes including a big plate of fried silkworm larva. Oh silkworms larvae, you bring me back to my Korean days and the deceptively nice-smelling stewed silkworms (번데기) they sold in ice cream cones along the street. I always liked the smell, but never had the guts to try them alone (Alice refused to touch them. Maybe it had something to do with a 번데기-auntie stewing them right under her window so that her entire apartment was often filled with silkworm-smell in the cold months.) These were fried though, and admittedly looked pretty tasty.

Eenie-meenie-minie mo...

I choose you, silkworm larva!

They were good! Kind of nutty-tasting (as well as oily...)

We left the ladies to their whiskey and insects. They refused any offers of monetary contribution to the meal which made me vow — in a moment of full bellied warm-fuzzies — to pass the favour on to tourists in my own city of residence (wherever that may be) someday.

BONUS PICTURE: sweet and crispy egg pancakes spread with sugary egg cream and topped with shredded egg yolk. “Would you like some egg on your egg and egg?”

Any extra egg?

How it felt:

…I didn’t eat again for 24 hours.

An accurate depiction of how it felt. (Clockwise from the shallots: cilantro root, Thai garlic, ginseng, kafir lime peel, lemongrass, turmeric, galangal, and fish paste in the centre.)

Chiang Mai Day Two

***All photos in this post are by the heroic Gianpiero. Thank you, GP!!***

I ate breakfast. What a huge mistake.

Stephanie, Gianpiero, and I paid our “discount price” to Nine and piled into a truck-taxi where we met a couple from the UK who were on a honeymoon sort of trip around the world.  They had roadtripped across America and got married in Vegas. So badass. We were shortly thereafter joined by four Utah natives (3 sisters and a husband) also staying at the Green Tulip. We were all giddy with the promise of cooking and eating delicious food all day long. Once we were all in, the truck drove us to a wet market, much like the one Gianpiero and I had visited the day before.

To market, to market, to buy a fat ... bunch of lemongrass?

At the market, an adorable Thai lady gave us the low-down on Thai ingredients and taught us how to choose good specimens for cooking. A lot of the ingredients are the same as Cambodian cuisine. I did a cooking class in Phnom Pehn back in June, so I looked smart because I could name many ingredients. My favourites: kafir lime leaf, cilantro root, baby thai eggplant, and lemon basil (mmmm…)

She let us wander around the market for a while, and Stephanie noted that there was a shockingly large amount of pork crackly. Maybe Chiang Mai Mueng is famous for pork crackly? It smelled so! good!

CRACKLE! CRACKLE! PORK CRACKLE!

Apparently, Gianpiero spent this time taking lots of pictures of delicious produce some of which I will now share with you. Don’t salivate too hard, dear readers.

Typiecal Thai ingredients.

Another type of eggplant. They look like grapes, eh?

These are actually called ear mushrooms. Still salivating? (You should be.)

Beautiful!

Gorgeous: purple and white eggplants, and on the left from the top: a type of bitter gourd, ocra, and MYSTERY!

Turmeric, ginseng, and galangal.

Mmmmm!!! Kafir lime leaf and lemongrass. Yes yes yes!

For my carnivorous friends: sausage. Want.

On our way out of the market we saw a white dog with blue pen eyebrows drawn on its face. Apparently it’s “a thing”.  It surprised and delighted me.

We drove about half an hour out of the city into the lovely, sunny countryside where the cooking school is located. We were met by jolly Nancy who was both hilarious and really good at making delicious food. Secret Nancy tip of the day: “move your body!” Apparently, stirring is not effective stirring unless your hips are also gyrating.

She gave us beverages, and let us choose 7 dishes each to learn to make including a soup, an appetizer, a noodle dish, a stir fry dish, curry paste, a curry, and a dessert.  I chose to make spicy basil soup, papaya salad (som tam), drunken noodles (pad khee mao, no alcohol involved,) cashew nut chicken (kai pat med ma maung),  penang/phanang curry, and sticky rice with young coconut. *eyes roll back in bliss*

Nancy's capable hands and delicious ingredients.

Ingredients for different curries. (Mine had peanuts!)

We went out to a table outside with wooden chopping boards and cleavers covered with tiny dishes of different ingredients while Nancy managed to teach us all (with all our different dishes) at the same time. Just beside the table was a set of gas stoves and woks, each with a set of glass jars filled with salt, palm sugar, palm oil, and fish sauce. We made one or two dishes at a time, then went back into the house to eat. Repeat. We became fuller and lazier as the day wore on.

Green curry: final product.

The curry paste involved a lot of manual labour. We had to manually pound the ingredients into a fine paste using a mortar and pestle. It took the better part of half an hour. It was really satisfying but there may have been longing talk of food processors.

Freshly pounded green curry paste with other ingredients going into the curry.

Nancy teaching us the stir fry dishes. See how attentive I am?

The best part was eating and getting to try everyone’s dishes. Particularly good: GP’s coconut chicken soup (omg), Stephanie’s red curry with pineapple (srsly), and all desserts. I could only manage to eat a single half-forkful of my som tam because we made appetizers last and I was just ridiculously full.

The papaya salad no one could bear to eat.

Sticky rice with mango *dies*

The famous coconut chicken soup with ... something else.

Before the last few dishes, we were led to a little gazebo-type structure where adorable lady from the market handed us each a chunk of carrot and informed us that she would be instructing us in the ancient Thai art of vegetable carving. We lolled about agreeably, everyone too full to do much else.

Step one: cut a circle into the centre of your carrot, 1cm in diameter. We went to it with all the lazy determination of a toddler: tongues sticking out the sides of mouths, self-deprecating humour all around. Stephanie turned to me, “I think I made my circle too big.” It was … almost the entire carrot in diameter. She decided to start again and picked up one of two extra carrot chunks.

Step two: cut 8 radiating lines from the centre of your carrot. Stephanie turns to me again, “I think I did it again.” The circle was even bigger this time. She picked up the last carrot chunk.

Step three: cut the petals around the radiating lines to form a flower. Adorable lady (whose name means “banana” in Thai – SO CUTE!) showed us her finished product. It was beautiful. We looked at our crooked and hideous carrot flowers in glee. Stephanie finished her flower.

Stephanie's try one, two, and three next to Banana's work of art. We were almost peeing with laughter.

The groups' carrots. Mine is top left. So proud. (It's really HARD TO DO!)

After trying to eat our appetizers, Nancy printed off a little cooking class certificate and gave each of us a cook book.

We win at cooking! Front R-L: Anna of UK, GP, Kelly from Utah, her two sisters, Nancy Back R-L: Kelly's husband, me, Stephanie, Richard of UK

BONUS FOOD PHOTOS: 

Dessert from the walking market the day before. Trust me, I didn’t eat again until noon the next day.

Sticky rice desserts. Mmmm!

Coconut on the outside, coconut on the inside.

I spent the lunar new year in Singapore despite having a 4-day weekend. I’m trying to save money for a big trip.  really, REALLY big trip (more on this later.) Roomie Rebecca and I headed down to Chinatown (where else!?) on the day before New Year’s Eve.

Where I went:

How it felt:

Major sales at the decoration store.

A lion dance marionette.

Calculating discounts.

Taking a break.

Watching the festivities.

Singing Carmen's Habanera in Mandarin with a life-sized puppet of a Chinese belly dancer.

Selling plants for the new year.

Huat la!

Charms.

Too much red to handle?

My new year friend.

Closed for the holidays.

Flower seller

Special good luck boughs.

Don't get carried away. (Oh no! Was that a pun too?)

Buddha's hands.

More decoration stores.

Lovely colours.

How it felt:

One important detail on the Jaya that I failed to post: my brand new camera broke then miraculously came back to life after four days (the entire dive trip.) The only problem with its resurrection is that the LCD screen refused to work and my camera does not have a viewfinder. Also it only turned on 30% of the time. Also the flash suddenly wouldn’t work. And then sometimes it couldn’t turn off.

Essentially, it was the worst camera ever but I was so relieved that it had come back to life that I didn’t notice this for another few weeks.  I’m still reeling from the shock of it. (Cam update: got a new one.)

Because there was no way of telling if it was actually taking any pictures besides listening very, very carefully for a tiny shutter click, I was really excited to get home and go through what I hoped was a memory card full of blindly-taken photographs.

Lo: FEAST YOUR EYES ON THESE MIRACLES! Among the many pictures of my face looking concernedly into the lens and horrendously tilted and artlessly off-centre shots, some of them actually turned out! A few even turned out the way I imagined they would. Another skill I will add to my MANTA QUEEN resume. They’ll want me for sure now.

When the Jaya returned to Khao Lak, I was reluctant to leave my new friends. Anneke ended up inviting me to stay in her posh rented bungalow at Phu Khao Lak. I was especially happy to accept her kind offer considering my body seemed to have swapped my usual (and suspiciously absent) seasickness for a new and terrible landsickness. The world was spinning wildly and I didn’t relish the thought of a 15 minute walk to my dingy, empty dorm room at Tiffany’s Cafe. Phu Khao Lak is very nice. It built bungalow-rooms on an old palm plantation and even has a pretty little pool.

The stage. You can just make out a be-tututed child behind the sea salt smudge on my lens.

The town was celebrating the beginning of the high season and had set up a party of tents consisting of food stalls and stages along the main stretch. We saw some bizarre performances, particularly, four-year-old girls dressed in fishnets and tutus dancing inappropriately to Thai pop, and a man and woman singing in Thai so convincingly that everyone was very surprised when we found that two tall, alabaster-skinned farang of Nordic origin were the singers. The local high school even had a tent where teens were carving watermelons into floral bouquets and entreating passers-by to “Please, enter tent. Welcome very much!” in adorable, giggling English.

I booked myself a flight to Chiang Mai for the next day, feeling very fancy-free indeed on my first unplanned trip then Maria, Kathryn, George, Anneke and I walked away from the noise and bustle to eat at Maria’s friend’s restaurant.  My favourite was the massaman curry and the gorgeous, melt-in-mouth roast fish. Kathryn successfully identified it (I forget…) We talked about how it’s kind of a turn-off to eat whole roast fish after having spent five days swimming around with its cousins.  Similarly, I feel guilty about eating octopus and squid because they are so amazing. I tend not to eat cuttlefish — it’s like when I was faced with the opportunity to try dog in Bohol and Korea and I couldn’t do it because I felt like other dogs might somehow know and be upset. (Rationally, I know that this is bananas.)

The next day Kathryn, George and I saw Anneke off which was sad and I spent my last day in the south wandering the beach and drinking coconut water. Also: I saw a grasshopper larger than I could have ever imagined.

Khao Lak Beach

It was too high up for me to put in my hand as a size comparison, but trust me when I say that it could probably have torn my thumb off. It was easily as long as a tube of toothpaste.

In the late afternoon, I returned to Wicked Divers where a taxi was picking me up to bring me to the Phuket Airport. I was happy to see Colin who was leaving that evening for the next Jaya tour and Kathryn and George even passed by before I left.

The taxi driver was around my age and we had a warm conversation about why Thais look so young — because they smile all the time because they aren’t burdened with problems because they share all their problems with their friends. He said that farang (non-Thais) don’t share their problems because they don’t like opening up. I disagreed with him: this particular farang won’t often share problems with her friends because she doesn’t want  to burden them unnecessarily. Taxi Driver said that if he kept problems from his friends, they would ask, “Why not? Don’t you love me anymore?” We spent a good 5 minutes in silence, each thinking our friend-thoughts but he was full of interesting talk and we ended up talking the entire hour drive.

CHIANG MAI DAY ONE

The plane landed in Chiang Mai at around 10pm. I asked my flat-rate taxi driver to take me to Green Tulip House to find one of the managers, Nine, waiting up for me. I chose Green Tulip because it had a super high rating on Trip Advisor and it did not disappoint. I cannot recommend it strongly enough. If you go to Chiang Mai, stay at Green Tulip House. My room was just a simple fan room, but it was quiet and immaculately clean, as were the shared bathrooms. On the top floor there is a sun deck and an adorable stone garden with reclining chairs and a nice view of Chaing Mai city. Fruit and toast breakfast is included, and best of all, the staff is wonderful in all sorts of ways. Also, there’s a dog.

I'm a messy person; I don't apologise for any aesthetic displeasure caused by viewing my unmade bed strew with travel debris. The lime green sheets solidified my love of Green Tulip. Also: they were CLEAN!

The next morning, when I came down for breakfast at around 8 the seating area was still empty.  Nine was up though and fussed over me until I was settled in an appropriate seat with an appropriate amount of Chaing Mai travel books to look through. Breakfast  was a plate of fruit and coffee. They also brought me bonus toast and orange juice for unknown reasons and I took it to be a good omen. Good vibes abound in Chiang Mai; I don’t know if it’s the cool mountain weather, or the inordinate number of temples in the city but everyone I’ve ever talked to about Thailand has raved about Chiang Mai.

My good times started immediately. I struck up a conversation with a girl who turned out to be my new role model. Stephanie from Australia went on an 8-week trip to Europe a few years ago, got to Turkey, realized it was just starting to get really interesting, and then phoned home to tell them not to wait up for her. She spent the next EIGHTEEN MONTHS travelling down into the Middle East, hitting up such amazing places as Syria, Afghanistan, and Iran. Her stories! Are! Unbelievable!

Stephanie was in Chiang Mai finishing up some papers for uni before her beach vacay in Bali. While we were talking, Nine came over and said in her forward way, “Tomorrow, you do cooking class.”
Stephanie replied, “Right! Sure!”
Nine turned to me, “You too.”
“A cooking class?”
“Yes, Thai cooking class. You do it tomorrow. Whole day. I give you discount.
“Ok!”

And suddenly, my tomorrow was filled with food and good company! Chiang Mai, ahoy!

WAAAAAAAAAAT!!!!

Before we continue, I want it to be known (especially by Nada) that the pun in the title of this post was unintentional.

I left Stephanie to her work, and headed out to explore the ubiquitous Thai wats that I had yet to see.  On my way out, I bumped into another traveller who had come in on the same Phuket flight as myself and whom I’d met the night before. We were both headed to do some wat-seeing and very organically became travel buddies.

Enter Gianpiero.

Gianpiero and I ended up travelling together for over a week and if I could recommend people as travel partners in the same way I can recommend guest houses, I would do so with many a superlative and hyperbole. He had just finished a PhD in microbiology in Utrecht and was on a 2 month Asian adventure. Ah! I hear you say, but “Gianpiero” is not really a Dutch name. And you’re right, he grew up in Sicilian village, population 300. He remembers when they installed hot running water into his house. He used to work the fields with his father. And he ended up in Utrecht with a PhD in microbiology. And he thought his stories weren’t very interesting!

We spent the entire day wandering the streets of old Chiang Mai. The walled city is full to bursting with temples and stupas. You’d have a hard time finding a place to stand that isn’t within sight of one. We couldn’t travel from one guidebook-recommended wat to another without finding three or four or five smaller temples along the way. It’s nuts. In a great way.

(Some of the following photos are GP’s, and are marked as such. Thanks, Gianpiero!)

I would like to remind you at this point that all these photos were taken blind. I expect you to be duly impressed.

Stop number one was Wat Phra Singh, a previous home of the famous “Emerald Buddha” and the most famous of Chiang Mai’s wats just a 5 minute walk from the Green Tulip. It was a nice introduction to wat-seeing. Wat Phra Singh is a wonderland of sloped roofs covered in gold filigree and painted mirror tiles and Estruscan-smiling figures and fantastic beasts (like naga!) all set upon a backdrop of a deep burgundy paint.

A copy of the Emerald Buddha in a building separate from the largest temple.

A detail on the ...plinth(?) of the copy of the Emerald Buddha.

The prayerful.

The buildings of the wat are surrounded by lovely treed pathways punctuated by large stone urns housing lotus plants and occaissionally, a bit of advice.

A meditation park-garden in the grounds. You can see a man tutoring a little boy in Buddhist teachings at the stone table. There are sayings on all the trees. My favourite one said, "Today is better than two tomorrows."

Behind the main temple is a great white stupa. When I was there, there were people cranking a wheel which pulleyed up a small cylindrical vessel to the dome of the stupa. When it hit the stupa, it broke open and spilled water onto it. When it did, people cheered. I still don’t know what it meant: can anyone shed some light on this?

A couple about to crank the water up onto the stupa. (GP)

A place for prayer outside the stupa. The wheel for the water-breaking is on the far end.

Background music of Wat Phra Singh: bells.

I think I mentioned in a post about Cambodia that I was fairly obsessed with Thai aesthetics when I was a kid because of King and I. I felt the same feeling of dream-fulfillment looking at the Lanna architecture and painting that I did from watching Cambodian dance.

I remember looking at this gorgeous painting on the inside of a window shutter and having one of those, "OMG I'm in THAILAND!" moments.

One of the more serious characters in Wat Phra Singh.

The walls of one building are covered in unbelievably detailed painted murals. They were done sometime in the 19th century by an ethnic Chinese painter (or so I read … somewhere…) and depict the daily life of people in Lanna. The faces and gestures of the little figures were endlessly fascinating to me. I spent a long time nose-to-wall, frequently taking out my poor camera and forcing it to take pictures of my favourite bits.

Now be a good human, and do as you're told.

They're totally just having a regular conversation. Awesome.

FORBIDDEN ROMANCE! I just know it.

Look at all the different faces. They all have their individual lives going on. Whole little worlds.

Shirtless chores. The best kind of chores. I think they're collecting flowers to make tea.

These men are wearing different outfits than the Lanna people and they have very distinct facial hair. Where could they be from?

From Wat Phra Singh, we turned down Ratchadamnoen - one of the main avenues in the walled cities – and had a look at every wat along the way. It’s all one golden blur to me now, and even that day I couldn’t keep track of which temples we visited and where they were and what they looked like. Here’s a smattering of images from the ones in which my camera would turn on.

A very Hindu-looking blue deity.

A temple.

A particularly lovely buddha. (GP)

I don't know what it means, but it's pretty. (GP)

I took special joy looking at the guardians of the different temples. I like the beasts that seem to be a mixture of a few animals or the beasts that aren’t native to Thailand so the artists’ renditions of them are skewed. It’s like looking at medieval European depictions of lions and elephants: close, but so very far.

The guardian lion-dragons have bum holes! Some of them are also daintily seated on little stools. Maybe the idea is they're supposed to be scary on from the front, and if you make it past their fearsome faces you ... get ... to see ... nevermind.

A particularly ornate handrail dragon. They're not supposed to be handrails. It's just how I think of them.

A shiny gold handrail dragon. Now pay attention to his "body" ... (GP)

... it's not its body at all! It's A SECOND DRAGON REGURGITATING THE FIRST LEAVING VISITORS IN DOUBT AS TO WHETHER THE FIRST WILL ALSO START VOMITING OTHER SHINY GOLD DRAGONS! (GP)

An unintentionally adorable lion-dragon-teddy bear. (GP)

A scary many-headed naga at Chedi Luang.

Some notable temples were Chedi Luang, a crumbling and moss-covered monolith; and my favourite (so far), Wat Phan Tao. Wat Phan Tao is just north of Chedi Luang and is made of dark finished teak wood and isn’t as covered in gold and mirrors as the other temples. It reminded me of the unpainted Korean Buddhist temple in Jisan that I loved so much.  Inside the main prayer temple were hundreds of round pots for donations, and a little corridor of banners hanging from the ceiling behind the big buddha. Tiny bells were tied to the tassels of the banners so that it sounded gorgeous too. A special place.

Chedi Luang. It's a good thing I haven't been to Angkor Wat yet, because looking at this was enough to awaken my inner Indiana. (GP)

Inside Wat Phan Tao. (GP)

Offering bowls (?) in Wat Phan Tao. Look at that dark wood! (GP)

The banners of the North Thai Zodiac in Wat Phan Tao. The zodiac is the same as the Chinese one but the year of the pig is replaced with an elephant, and the new year starts in the fifth lunar month.

It wasn’t until later in the afternoon that my new travel buddy and I started feeling hungry, and at that point I was delighted to find out that foremost among his many excellent travel buddy qualities is his love of food and eating. Hooray! We found a little noodle place before we went to find something marked on our map as “Sunday Walking Market”.

Delicious! (GP)

We couldn’t find the market, so we walked along the east canal of the old city, finding a wet market and an archaeological dig of part of the old wall along the way. Eventually we found our way back to Ratchadamnoen Road and sat down for a coffee. An hour later, we looked up and realized that the walking market had materialized around us as we chatted. It stretched the entire distance of Ratchadamnoen Road and spilled over into neighbouring streets too.

Stalls and Thai flag at Tha Pae gate.

There were stalls for everything: from the ambiguously “ethnic” gifts (coconut purses, anything gecko-shaped, bone earrings, sarongs), to Thai art of all price ranges, to Thai pop culture items, to handmade Indie goods made by the university students, and everything inbetween. And let us not forget the food stalls! Heaven!

Early on in the market. As the evening wore on, suddenly the streets became flooded with tourists from Bangkok who were in Chiang Mai because of a long weekend. It was so crowded that we were often in gridlock for minutes at a time. On foot!

We braved the street one last time for dinner just as the crowds were the thickest and managed to find a tiny table in a very noisy, busy, chaotic restaurant (good sign.) We ordered whatever caught our fancy: fried dried pork, Chinese cabbage with soy sauce and garlic, morning glory made Thai-style with lots of chili, and the most delicious tom yam soup I’d ever tasted.

Mmmmmmmm

When we finally returned to our guest house, I wanted to ask Nine if Gianpiero could also do the cooking class, but she found him first and invited/told him to join too.

That was a really monster post, but to be fair, it was something of a monster day too. What a day. Wat a day. (I’m sorry!)

A map is more unreal ...

How it felt:

...than where you've been...

... and how you feel.

Imagine: fresh, cool ocean-borne breezes gently ruffling your hair as the sun melts into the dusky clouds and stains the entire sky an ember orange.  And imagine the sky is bigger and rounder and more complete than you’ve ever seen before — a whole and crystalline dome sealing you underneath. Imagine the light quiet of the open sea interrupted only by the lullaby creakings of wood and rope. Imagine the movement of the ocean surface in your legs and in your guts and in your shoulders. Imagine the bleaching winter sun of the Andaman Sea and the perfect bliss of shade.

Imagine waking in the predawn green almost-light and squinting at the horizon, sleepy and relaxed. Imagine the sweetness of being aboard the only ship you can see, and the still-sleepy excitement of gearing up for the first dive of the day, the sun just peeking over the ocean as you prepare to drop in.

Now imagine breaking the surface tension of the ocean top like a knife as you fall, heavy with equipment and excitement, into the blue. Imagine exhaling and drifting deeper and deeper — look around: first the hazy colours of deep water, then it dissolves and there are underwater cliffs, boulders as big as houses, caverns; and everywhere coral forests, armies of fish — whole bouquets of fish. Yellow, white, blue, red, green, purple, black. Imagine the sound of your breathing as you move like a slow ghost through the coral cities. Here an octopus dancing its angry, colourful skin-flashing dance; here an impossibly small porcelain crab going about its mysterious business among the undulating anemone.  Imagine a cat-sized puffer fish and its bulbous cow eyes, passing you with its waddling swim. Imagine a lionfish in full and deliberate sail, fluttering in the current like a proud and stately banner. Imagine drifting along upside down, eyeball-to-eyeball with a half-curious, half-defensive cuttlefish. Imagine imagining it’s smiling at you. Imagine what it feels like to fly (underwater. Upside-down.)

If cuttlefish could be housetrained (and breathed air) I would willingly become the cuttlefish equivalent of a cat lady. All cuttlefish all over my house, all making W-shaped eyes at visitors, all changing colours and showing angry tentacles and all taking up available seating and refusing to give it up..

A gorgeous orange coral.

Puuuuuuuuuffer

Imagine returning to the strange surface and bobbing, salty and happy, lounging with arms wide and face to the sun, talking too loudly with your dive buddies about what it’s like underwater. The sunshine and the sky feel suddenly new as you soak up the warmth of the air. Imagine clambering back onto the rocking, creaking ship and peeling off your wetsuit as you stumble with the motion of the ship. Imagine fried bananas with sugar waiting in the shade  - and hot chocolate.

Imagine the last dive of the day and the clean, clean, clean feeling of finally being able to shower the salt off of your body, out of your hair. Imagine playing dice and card games on a rocking, creaking boat — a tiny spark of light among black ocean, black island, black bowl sky. And imagine lying on your back on the sundeck at night with the sky full of stars and a nearly-full moon staring down at you framed by the rigging and masts.

Imagine days full and long: up with the sun, into the sea, storytelling with fellow travellers, reading, sleeping in the belly of a ship, rocking and rocking.

And that, sirs and madams, is how it felt to be on the Jaya.

The Beginning

We met at the Wicked Diveshop in Khao Lak in the late afternoon of December 4, and drove in taxi convoy to the harbour about a 30 min drive south of town.  At the harbour, we clambered through another boat to get onto the Jaya. I chose her from among the enormous fleet of Similan live-aboards largely because of how pretty she looked online (also because Wicked Divers is seriously eco-conscious.) There were 11 guests including myself, 3 dive guides/divemasters, 2 cooks, and 4 crew members.

On the way to the harbour, out the back of the taxi.

Our most excellent guides: Scott, Amanda, and Colin.

My stomach was put to the test immediately. We set off for the Similans as the sun set and docked after midnight. The wind and waves were … bracing, and I offered my thanks to the god of scopolamine. Despite my body being repeatedly thrown into the wall of my bunk by the force of the waves, I remained miraculously unaffected and even managed a full night of sleep.

The next morning, I emerged just before wake-up call to find the Jaya anchored among islands 3 and 4 of the Similans. The Similan islands! The number one destination of the countless scuba magazine articles I read at Chapters during my breaks of my brief Starbucks career back in my hometown of London, Ontario. Effing finally!

After a small meal, we geared up with great gusto, ready to begin our diving adventure.  I was lucky enough to be diving with 1) another Canadian named David 2) my dive buddy Jens, a taciturn giant and 3) Roman, an experienced Swiss diver (“When I started diving, we just put on a jacket and carried our tanks under our arms”) to whom all of the underwater pictures in this post belong. Guiding us was the super-chill Colin. The other divegroup consisted of my bunkmate, Anneke-of-the-many-stories, Kathryn the Insanely Accurate and Detailed Fish Identifier, and George the Gamesmaster. Kathryn and George are cycling around South-East Asia. Amazing. There was also Maria a divermaster living in Khao Lak, and Libby who is an instructor and also happens to be conversant in Auslan.

A few of these, of course.

An example of some of the prettier, larger fish. These guys are the adorably named Oriental Sweetlips.

Our first few dives were lovely and warmed us up for what was to be a great trip.

Koh Bon

Koh Bon was the hook upon which I hung my hopes. To be honest, I was in the Similans to fulfill a childhood dream: to swim with manta rays. Koh Bon in particular has many many sightings. I was a little early in the season, but I had a good feeling. The mantas knew I was coming. They would find me underwater and we would frolic together and then they would take me on their great winged backs and I would fulfill my destiny as MANTA QUEEN!

Colin was kind and told me not to get my hopes up. I just crossed my fingers and giant-strode into the ocean.

The site is amazing: huge cliffs of the island harbour a mottled coral bottom. We followed an arm of the wall out towards the open blue and down to about 30 m when suddenly the current kicked in and both visibility and temperature went down drastically. We looked at each other, surprised and excited, facing into the current and finning actively to keep ourselves stationary. I had a blast dealing with my first strongish current out there on that arm, watching the thermocline coming towards us with shimmering menace, feeling seriously badass. Eventually Colin brought us to the harboured area where Amanda had said octopus were putting on mating displays.

Almost immediately we spotted a large octopus with large angry eyes displaying on a piece of coral. They always look so stern and comically angry to me. We hovered at a respectful distance to watch him while he glared at us and showed off a bit. He flowed in the magnificent way that octopus move from coral to coral, fanning out his tentacles and changing shape. Each time he moved, he smoothly and almost magically changed colour and skin texture: from palest beige to dark, dark purple, to mottled greens and browns. Then he posed for a few seconds before moving again to the next coral, always looking supremely disinterested in the parrotfish who seemed to take great offense to his flowing around and who kept darting and feinting around him.

One of the gorgeous octopus we saw at Koh Bon putting on a great display.

The crevices between the walls were filled with enormous, fluid schools of tiny, transparent glassfish. Hundreds and thousands of them: and as it got later in the day big oceanic fish came to hunt them in terrifying displays of movement. One fish would dart into the mass and the entire 5-metre-long school would all move in unison. It was so awesome.

I got even more excited to see another octopus doing much the same thing not far away. When I got a little closer, another octopus appeared out of nowhere and they had some sort of secret antagonistic octopus event with bristling skin and flashing eyes and just as suddenly the smaller one was gone again. I love cephalopods so much.

Which didn’t quite make up for the fact that when the dinghy picked us up, the other dive group already inside yelling about seeing a manta ray. A MANTA RAY THAT I DID NOT SEE! A MANTA RAY THAT WAS JUST A FEW DOZEN METRES FROM WHERE WE DECIDED TO TURN AROUND AND GO BACK! A MANTA RAY! It was not the right time to come into my inheritance as MANTA QUEEN, obviously.

*shrug* Just another excuse to keep diving. I will not rest until I swim with a manta ray. A big one. With enormous bus-sized wings. And it lets me ride on its back and we become best friends.  *sigh*

Getting picked up in the dinghy. My dive group mates were very gentlemanly and always insisted I go first. (Honestly, I really appreciated this during the wavier dives.)

After a dive - passing up our weight belts and flippers.

Richelieu Rock

The star dive site of the Similan live-aboard circuit is Richelieu Rock – famous for its lush and colourful flora and fauna. I wasn’t expecting too much. The Similan/Surin area was definitely affected by the bleaching and tsunami, but it really lived up to its reputation. It was so alive.

AND WE SAW SOME CUTTLEFISH!

At Richelieu Rock. I found three little morays swaying and peeking out of their crevices. They were so adorable I chased Roman to show him and he obligingly took a photo.

We were actually the first divers in the water for our Richelieu day. Amanda was astounded in the early morning to find that we were the ONLY boat at the site and we all hurried to get in before the others arrived. When we surfaced an hour later, there were already 10 other ships. Our second dive was very sunny and as a result the colours seemed even more vivid and bright. It was almost like being back at Sipadan (lord, what a special place.)

Mr. Scorpionfish. The Andaman Sea is crawling with these guys. Some are enormous. Some like to perch on pinnacles divers are most likely to grab or brush against like this one here. They're quite poisonous.

We saw some lovely things there: tiny moray eels gaping from their neighbouring homes, a yellow zebra seahorse swaying and camera-shy (they always look so bashful), rainbow-coloured scorpionfish, an eerie “flock” (?) of batfish by the buoyline, a sinister-looking great barracuda, a hunting long-nose emperor changed from its usual mottled-brown to a determined silver.

As always there was an inordinate number of glassfish, and the larger predator fish put on quite a show herding and hunting them: all flashing fins and glittering scales.  If you are ever in the area, GO. Go dive Richelieu. It is definitely worth it.

The seahorse at Richelieu Rock. Apparently he had a friend who was hiding just behind the purple rock there, but our dive group missed it. Doesn't matter; we saw THREE cuttlefish that dive.

A vertical lionfish. A different variety than the other picture posted.

One of the stunningly beautiful emperor angelfish juveniles we saw. Although I'd seen them in pictures, the first time I saw one underwater I was surprised at how beautiful they really are.

A couple of butterfly fish (I think), their anthius friend (I think) and me (confirmed). Although I may look as if I'm flailing, I like to think that Roman captured me in the midst of executing a complex and impressive somersault maneuver. Or something.

One of the many enormous wart slug nudibranchs we met.

Check out this fine ship

Oh hai there, Jaya. You are looking extra fine today, by the way.

Oh hai there, Captain. You are also looking extra fine today, sir. Thank you for keeping us alive and all.

Oh hai there, deck where we gear up. You are always looking fine, and you know that don't you, you saucy, saucy thing?

Oh hai my bunk. You are looking messily inviting, as usual. Oh also hai there favourite bra. You're the best. (Move along everyone, you're not going to find any "supportive" puns in this here blog.)

The Boon Sung Wreck

The last dive of the trip was my favourite besides Richelieu. I wasn’t expecting much to be honest: Amanda said it wasn’t much a wreck. Rather it was mostly broken-up metal wreckage. Visibility is usually poor, and the most commonly spotted fauna is lionfish and scorpionfish (seen enough of those already…) but it turned out to be a really exciting and stimulating dive.

The current was pretty strong as we descended, although it calmed a bit deeper than 10 m. Visibility was truly poor too, and everything seemed murky and green. Then suddenly we were encased in a translucent moving ribbon of juvenile baracuda. There must of been hundreds of them. Standing on terra firm, the sound of schools of fish doesn’t sound very exciting, but underwater it’s surprisingly overwhelming and you get to see why schooling is an effective predator-deterrent. Looking at and being near a large school of fish is disorienting and mesmerizing. They really do look like larger fish from far away, and when you find yourself inside a school sometimes it feels like there’s too much movement and eyes and fins and shapes and colours for your brain to function normally. I spent several happy minutes flipped on my back or upside down to complete my disorientation, and scaring fish with my hands and trying lazily to touch them (I knew I wouldn’t be able to…)

Teeming schools of juvenile baracuda. Some were only 15 or so cm long. Other schools consisted of bigger juveniles at 40 cm long.

Then there were the tiny white lionfish juveniles – perfectly formed, tiny and cute, but somehow more menacing than the adults. There were so many! We counted 6 on one coral-encrusted beam alone, all sitting in a row like peas in a pod.  Scorpionfish were just as abundant but unlike the other fish there, they were enormous! A foot and a half long at least! The puffers and porcupine fish too were scarily big and seemed to lurk in every nook and cranny. I like the way they stare at you with their big, stupid cow eyes.

Colin was determined to find a couple of bastard seahorses that are rumoured to hang out around 14 m (that is the legit name of the seahorses) and although we failed at finding them, the mission was fun to have. We did find some nudibranch eggs which are laid in a gauzy white spiral, and lovely white nudis themselves, as well as  … CUTTLEFISH!

Seriously, I’m starting to believe that cuttlefish are the answer to all my problems.

A ghostly juvenile lionfish.

Another feature star of this dive were the honeycomb moray eels. They are unbelievably beautiful.  I was stunned.

One of two drop-dead gorgeous honeycomb morays at the BoonSung Wreck. They absolutely shimmer and they have these wild ridges along their backs. So beautiful.

Reluctantly, but feeling completely satisfied and happy with the last dive, we ascended and did our last safety stop – this time for around 10 minutes. The current was strong again. I actually like the feeling of hanging onto a buoyline while the current banners your body out behind you and your regular purges a little and your mask fills a little from the force of the current. But you know … in moderation.

I grip the buoyline embarassingly tight while Colin manages to chill effortlessly.

Serious thanks to the competent and kind crew and guides of the Jaya, as well as my fellow-divers. You made my first live-aboard experience such a precious time. I hope I dive with you again someday.

With mantas, obviously.

Landed in Phuket Airport, and went straight to Khao Lak (purple circle).

How it felt:

Often when I set off alone on a (poorly planned) adventure I get the melancholies. Usually they set in a day or two before I leave and may linger for a while even after I arrive at my destination. Sometimes I even think longingly of home before I’ve left home.  And understand: I love travelling.  My theory is that the travel melancholies are the last vestiges of my earlier days of caution. Grace factoid: until just a few years ago I was a very, very careful person and to some degree I still retain that care, but through determination and enablement by some key, dangerous friends, I now consider myself to be a pretty laid-back lady. I am in my A-Game.

But Grace, said Careful Grace back in September after the Sipadan trip, finger hovering over AirAsia’s “Pay and Continue” button, are you laid-back enough to travel for a few weeks in Thailand without plans or friends or pre-booked domestic flights, or anything?
Oh lord, yes! Yes yes yes. Please yes, let’s go! replied A-Game Grace.

And I was off! Two and some weeks in Thailand followed by a week back in Bohol to spend Christmas with family. On Nov 30, I  returned to Singapore from a school choir trip to Shah Alam, Malaysia where I had a trial by fire first chaperone experience (the stress!!!) On Dec 1, I cleaned, packed, did some boring school stuff. On Dec 2, I tried cleaning again, gave up, taxied to the airport and flew to Phuket.

Research and planning I had done on Thailand before I got on the plane:
1. Against my better judgement, I booked an expensive 5 day live-aboard dive trip in the Andaman Sea leaving Khao Lak on Dec. 4. (I get violently seasick.)
2. I booked a flight from Singapore to Phuket, and from Bangkok to Tagbilaran, Bohol.
3. I downloaded the Thailand Lonely Planet onto my Kindle (but did not read it.)

On the plane, finally consulting my guidebook, I decided to go straight to Khao Lak and skip the insanity of Phuket because, quite frankly, four days of being mom/best friend to 30 tweens is enough insanity for a month, plzkthx. Safely on Thai land, cheapskate that I am, I shunned the $50 direct taxi ride to Khao Lak and instead took a bus to Phuket Town bus terminal, and then transferred to a local Khao Lak-bound bus. Money saved: approximately 42 SGD.  Travel time: approximately 5 hours (4 hours longer than the taxi.) Worth it? Yeah. The expense of travel is twofold: you need money and you need time. Which one is more valuable? I think time. What do you think?

School girl seen from the Phuket bus.

I was treated to a gorgeous sunset en route to Khao Lak and this is the best picture I was able to take of it. BUT I SAVED 40$!

Khao Lak is a strip-of-highway town dotted with German bakeries and tour agencies trying to get you to go to “James Bond Island” and “Elephant Camp BEST!” It also has the dark distinction of being the hardest-hit area during the 2004 Christmas Tsunami, but today it doesn’t bear many visible scars.  The accommodation is expensive and catered to older European couples/divers. Upon stumbling off my bus, I made a beeline to Tiffy’s Cafe, a German restaurant with a clean dorm room in the back. At 180B/night, it is without a doubt the cheapest bed in town. Check it!

And I had the room all to myself.

The next day, there was a slight blip at the diveshop when I admitted I had had childhood asthma and I was told I couldn’t go on the dive trip anymore due to so and so liabilities. I spent a helplessly preoccupied day alternately biking up and down the highway and sitting in German cafes to avoid the torrential rain with perma-sad puppy eyes, mourning what could have been a grand sea adventure. Yo ho ho, boo hoo hoo.

Typical view of my highway day.

Look at that rain! Whyyyyyyyyyy?!

During my bike ramblings, I visited Police Boat 813 which was carried more than 2km inland by the tsunami. It looked strangely everyday sitting in its grassy field so far from the ocean. I also spent some time in the internet cafe looking at images from just after the tsunami. I was shocked, especially by the images from this website. Besides the police boat and tsunami escape route signs, there isn’t much else around to remind short-term tourists of the disaster. Locals and expat lifers don’t talk about it; 4000 people died and everyone lost someone.

Tsunami escape route sign.

Police Boat 813

Flowers and candles for tsunami victims. They're building a memorial statue up the road, but for now, the boat is the most tangible piece of remembrance in Khao Lak.

These days, tourists (myself included) mainly come to Khao Lak for liveaboards to the Similan and Surin islands. Bored, in the evening I returned to my diveshop with desperate hope and to my delight, a dive medic told me I was ok to go on the trip after all. Sad puppy eyes disappeared instantly, I hugged everyone in the shop, and biked like a madwoman into the dark Thai night to go eat some food at the weekend market a few km up the highway.

Market TIME!

The ground was a mud slurry from the rain.

Drink stand

Flavoured powders at the same drink stand.

Fed up and happy, I stuck on my last scopolamine patch (a little patch that you stick behind your ear and which renders you immune to motion sickness for the next 3 days,) and passed out, ready for my grand sea adventure. Melancholies: DEFEATED!

The Other Thing that Happened to Me 

I got electrocuted! By my adaptor/iPod charger! Check out my entry and exit burns!

Entry...

Exit

I’m not at all sorry if you got grossed out.

“No! … mmm…. no. Mmmmm …. maybe.”

My mom moved to Cebu to take accounting at the university there when she 16 years old. Near the end of her first year, she and her friends went into the fields with food and drinks. They lay their blankets down in the shade of an enormous acacia tree and they had a picnic.  They were young and energetic; they laughed and joked, someone started singing, dancing may have ensued, and no one was louder than my mom.  It was dark by the time they packed up and went home.

My mother woke up the next day to find her bottom lip had swelled up to three times its normal size. She couldn’t open her mouth. She couldn’t eat. She could hardly fit a straw in her mouth to drink. She went to the doctor and they gave her medicine, but after three days, the lip only became more painful and more swollen.

Weakening, she went home to Tubigon. My lola (grandma) was a nurse, and she didn’t know what was wrong with her either so they called in a witch doctor. The witch doctor gave her medicine too, and it helped enough for my mom to be able to take some food. They soaked bread in milk and squeezed the milk into her mouth because that was the only way she could get any food.

Two weeks in, things were getting serious: my mother’s lip was still just as swollen as before, she still couldn’t eat and everyone was getting worried. I like to imagine my tiny teenaged mother lying on a rattan bed in the old house near the window surrounded by her small army of scabby cats and dogs and watched over by Catholic saint tokens and tiny bottles of holy water from this and that crying statue; witch doctors giving up, nurse friends of lola bringing mentholated oil, lola herself washing and rewashing everything my mother comes in contact with as if to cure her daughter by cleanliness alone, various ratty-looking kids climbing fences to stare at her mutant lip, neighbours’ whispered speculations about the local wak-wak families and their nasty curses. Someone finally remembered that my mother’s primary school principal claimed he had an encantado friend … invisible, of course.  In fact, my ma had come into contact with this encantado once before … long ago …

* flashback waves  and accompanying harp music *

Ling and I were sick when I was really little, maybe six years old. The quack doctor couldn’t help, and maybe we couldn’t find a real doctor. The principal of my school had a friend who is an encantado and he said he could help. 

We went to a small room and it was a little dark. We stood on one side of the room, the principal stood on the other. He said to us, “turn around and don’t look back no matter what you hear”. Then the door was closed and we turned around. We were alone – just Ling and me and maybe another sick kid and the principal. I heard him start talking to his friend, explaining our sickness. I was scared when another voice replied. 

While they were talking Leling wants to turn around and see. Before she can turn around, we hear, “Don’t turn around!” right in our ears! We were scared. Ling didn’t turn around. 

Later, we were healed.

This same man was now the superintendent of the entire island school board and he still had the same encantado friend. They managed to get an appointment with him to see if his friend could help heal my mother’s swollen lip.

They sat in an office and talked. Sometimes the superintendent addressed an invisible person who was walking around the room, sometimes he listened to that invisible person speaking inaudible words. According to the superintendent, the encantado friend told him that my mom had seriously pissed off some powerful encantado with her noisy sunset shenanigans. Rule number one of coexisting with encantado: do NOT disturb the peace at dusk near an acacia tree. My mom brought this upon herself, she was told. (She agreed.) Mr. Friendly Encantado agreed to travel to these entities to apologise on her behalf. In the meantime my mother was directed to apply some oil blessed by this encantado on her lip.

She went home and applied the oil.

The next morning, she woke up to find her lip had crusted over completely. It had turned into a nasty, full-lip scab. It was hard and painless, but she still couldn’t open it. She kept applying oil.

On the second day after meeting the superintendent, she woke and sat up in bed. She brought her hand to her lip, and it fell off in her hand.

Her entire scab-lip fell off!

Underneath was a new lip, soft and supple … and moveable! My ma could eat again! The only catch was that her new lip was not symmetrical; it was thicker on one side and a little crooked in outline.

To this day, my ma’s bottom lip is crooked.  She’ll show you. Just ask.

You should be having nightmares about acacia trees tonight.

Uncle Nene rarely understands me and but we enjoy our conversations anyway.  I asked him, “Uncle Nene, do you remember when the Japanese came?” This is what he replied:

Manong remembers segoro. But – ah – koan … Between Manong and me is two years. Between me and Tita Inday is two years. Between Leling and Etta is two years.  Between Inday and Leling is five years. I remember this and the reason. There was another baby in that five years but it was not … koan?

 (Koan is a word that means sort of “what” or “um”. Uncle Nene uses it a lot when he speaks English.)

The baby was not  - koan? –  was not good.  How can you say?  She bled lots of blood. We called the quack doctor and he caught the blood in a pan. Then there came something in the pan.

I said, “The baby?!”

No. Not the baby. Koan - round and bloody. Like a liver. Walay baby. There was no baby. The quack doctor knew it was a  - ay, koan! - a wak-wak. English is a witch. It was a witch inside of Mama. Maybe it want to kill her.

In Bohol, we believe that wak-wak can look at a woman with child and hurt her. We have a belief that the witch can curse you with eyes only. Perhaps this is how the witch came to be inside of Mama.

The quack doctor said we must take the witch and burn it so it will die. So my father made a fire behind the house and we burnt it. That is why there remains five years between Inday and Leling. I remember.

I said, “Do you believe it was a witch, Uncle Nene?”

What? Ay, ha ha, no. Ah, perhaps.

And this is exactly what my mother says when I ask her about her Bohol beliefs. This place is a different world altogether. It’s a little surreal. Stay tuned for more Stories from Tubigon, and my fabulous Thai adventures.

My mom and the old house.