Vientiane is a Village

You don’t have to go far to find the village at the heart of Laos’s capital city. Within walking distance of our hotel, cooking fires spiraled smoke from behind countless homes. The temples I saw during a short run in the direction of the airport looked to me like real working religious communities, being swept by regular monks. These were not the kind of shrines that attract tourists or that house senior clergy.

Our group had arrived for a small-town event, a friendly soccer match between counterparts from the same organization. The hosts in Vientiane had lured us Bangkok folk north with the promise of a big post-game feast. True to their word, they roasted two buffaloes to feed the many players and spectators.

That morning, before crossing the Mekong and entering Laos, we’d wandered among local specialties at the morning market in Nong Khai, the Thai town closest to Vientiane. I skipped buying chicken fetuses (still half in the shell, feathers still wet), but happily breakfasted on Vietnamese baguettes (Hanoi is the same distance from Nong Khai as Bangkok is).

Next to the market is a handsome temple known as Wat Pochai. The painted scenes of daily life inside it seemingly cover every Thai and Lao custom. Quite a lot of prime wall space is dedicated to a Loch Ness-like phenomenon near Nong Khai known as the Naga fireballs.

These weird glowing orbs pop up from the middle of the river (or is it just beyond?) every full moon night in October. Some skeptics insist that the fireballs are not really projectiles from a serpent’s mouth, but rather methane gas escaping from the river bottom. But try telling that to the 200,000 spectators who show up to watch.

Likewise, I knew better than to press too hard for details about the healing balms and oils that were being sold outside the temple. Based on smell alone, these products told me they would remedy whatever ailments resulted from our soccer match. I took advantage of a buy-two-bottles-get-one-free offer.

As it turned out, our hotel in Vientiane was across the street from a massage shop. It appeared to be closed on the morning after the game, but a teammate inquired whether the opening time posted on the door was really the opening time. A few minutes later, three of us from the Bangkok squad were flattened out on adjoining mattresses. The hands that kneaded out our aches and pains felt as if they’d been strengthened in the village.

Nakhon Si Thammarat is Nifty

What I’ll remember longest from staying three days at a wildlife conservation center down south are the swatting, flirting, pajama-clad Thai middle schoolers. Pre-adolescents seem to play in a primal way, no matter what country they come from.

This group of 20 or so had come for a weekend camp of the get-to-know-nature variety.

My friends and I had flown to Nakhon Si Thammarat from Bangkok to enjoy a lovely government-run patch of forest facing the Gulf of Thailand. We also hoped to spot two unique local species: crab-eating monkeys and pink dolphins.

Dinner for overnight guests at the center was served at long picnic tables under a shelter. The kids switched places throughout the meal, as if sitting next to a new person somehow provided them with purer, healthier oxygen. Their banter wafted over to us.

Suddenly they leapt up as one, called by some unseen force. Later we saw that the counselors had harnessed their creaturely natures and were leading them in songs and games about the importance of preserving wilderness.

We joined in on the tail end of their gymnastics, then retired to our quiet bungalows for some adult conversation. Electricity flows to this remote spot, but not television or mobile phone signals, so talking to each other was our only entertainment option. A nice change from Bangkok life.

The next morning a local fisherman toured us along the coast in search of the monkeys and dolphins. We spotted both, about five minutes apart, just at the time we were tempted to turn back because the scenery was beginning to get monotonous. Our excitement, to an outside observer, probably looked like we were back in middle school.

Saraburi is State-of-the-Art

After I told the bus driver the name of the famous, ancient wat I was planning to visit in Saraburi Province, he told me to keep my eye out for a grand archway. Buddhist temples here generally announce themselves with an arch on the main road, even if they’re set way back and out of sight.

Soon I spotted the place. It was clear from the entrance that just because it was old didn’t mean the place was out of date. Not only was the temple’s name proclaimed in large letters, but also—if you look closely at the picture you’ll see it below—the address of its website appeared prominently.

Wat Phra Buddha Bat indeed felt modern and hip. It’s been rebuilt several times in the nearly 400 years since a hunter found a footprint in limestone that was thought to have been left by the Buddha himself. In the meantime it seems to have become a popular place for young men to enter the monkhood, which most Thai men do, even if only for a short period. The three-month Buddhist lent that began recently is a common time of year to undergo this rite of passage.

So the wat was packed with two or three hundred teenagers and 20-somethings. I showed up just before noon, as they were filing out of a huge meeting hall, having just finished their final meal of the day. Their alms bowls were already washed, and they had a short break before afternoon studies began. A few brave ones stopped to chat with me as I sat at a table with my journal.

This little glimpse of temple life was great fun for me. The castle-like structure that houses the footprint itself was impressive, but somehow less special than watching the comings and goings of Buddhism in the 21^st century.

Kanchanaburi is Calm

Back when I first lived in Thailand, my old friends Hose and Vinnie passed though the country and we made a hilarious trip to the land of waterfalls and death railways known as Kanchanaburi. As I recall, we had adventurous plans on striking out for the province. Instead, we spent most of our time at one restaurant on an island in the middle of the River Kwai, re-living our school days. We had plenty of stories to last us, and the food was excellent.

This past weekend included a national holiday on Monday for the Queen’s birthday. I decided to head back to Kanchanaburi to see what I’d missed. A work friend wanted to go too. His sister has a place there. He’d never visited it before.

We traveled in his car. Neither of us had any goals. The air was clean and the mountains were tall and we drove at normal speeds along the pleasantly winding roads, stopping whenever we felt hungry.

Near our breakfast spot, elephants crossed the road three times, led by their mahouts. A couple hours later, we each had a bowl of noodles near a lovely seven-tiered waterfall, where loads of other Bangkok tourists had come to picnic. Two or three meals after that, we found ourselves at the edge of a small town square, watching teenagers circle slowly on their motorcycles, flirting furiously while pretending to do evening errands for their families.

In lots of ways this trip was just as slow and uneventful as my earlier one. I thought about something Thailand had taught me back then. At the waterfall, a few young monks were using one of the small falls as a slide. Dressed in their orange robes, they climbed it again and again, inventing new ways to slip down it each time.

On my earlier trip, we had shared a train compartment with some older monks. All of them were smoking cigarettes, in spite of what we were sure were rules prohibiting monks from such behavior, especially on public transportation. To this day, Hose and Vinnie jokingly urge me to beware of corrupt monks on trains.

What struck me again is that most monks are in fact just regular guys. Buddhism, at least as it’s practiced in this country, doesn’t seem to worry itself too much with the sacred. Surely, rituals and rules are central, but so, it seems, are walkmen and Marlboros and the occasional afternoon spent playing in the water, with no goals other than seeing what evolves.

Chantaburi is Filling

A bunch of us took what in college we would have called a roadtrip to an eastern Thai province, where the specialty is tree fruit. As we would have said during college, we grubbed.

Morning, noon, and night, the menu called for durian, rambutan, and mangosteen. These delicacies have a relatively short season, so you have to get them while the getting is good.

A friend from work has a friend who has an orchard, so we went straight to the source and dove in. All of our senses quickly overloaded.

It rained quite hard. We watched the downpour from beneath a classic Thai-style house, built on stilts. The “ceiling” above us was just high enough to accommodate the cab of a pickup truck. We stooped. Diesel oil mixed with fresh-picked fruit to create an odd fragrance. The durian tasted like cake frosting.

After dark, we clubbed. Unintelligible lyrics pulsed in time with some cleverly wired spotlights. The projectors were mounted on spinning, twisting gyroscopes. Nobody danced—today’s Thai hipsters prefer standing at tall tables, shimmying slightly, pretending they can hear each other. Rather than talking, I found it easier to send text messages to the people across from me.

Prices in the provinces were only half what we pay in Bangkok, so it was easy to eat pretty much continuously. Sleep was the only thing we didn’t get enough of. But hey, what are roadtrips for?

Beijing is Picturesque

To my Western ear, the names of the city’s major attractions often sound hard to take seriously: the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the Hall of Supreme Harmony (not to be confused with the halls of Central Harmony and Preserving Harmony).

I mean, some of these classical superlatives you’d swear came straight out of National Lampoon, or some similar attempt to spoof Chinese culture. I am not making up the following labels on the various halls and sub-palaces that I passed during my wanderings around the Imperial Palace and the Summer Palace:

Literary Profundity

Beneficent Causation

Mental Cultivation

Eternal Safety

Tranquil Longevity

Reason Enhancement

Scrupulous Behavior

Proper Places and the Cultivation of Things

Earthly Tranquility

Heavenly Purity

Character Cultivation

Lasting Brilliance

Accumulated Refinement

Veranda for Rest Quiet

Eternal Peace

Endless Mists and Clouds

Chamber for Reading the Classics

Jade Islet in Spring Shade

Studio of Painted Boat

I saw no sign of plazas or monuments named after people. However, each sign did contain a modern twist. In small letters at the bottom were the words, “made possible by the American Express Company.”

Beijing is Patriotic

Saying that this could be the Chinese century has become a cliché, but the people there did strike me as no nonsense and all business as they leap forward. I was impressed by the resolute expressions on even the uniformed workers along the roads who are paid to hold signs reminding drivers to slow down. They stared at me as though the success of China, Inc. depended on them.

Throughout most of my lifetime, it’s been true to say that the country’s best years happened long ago. Even now, the tour buses seem never to unload in front of anything built since the late 1700s. Foreign visitors seeing only those spectacular (though somehow also quaint) attractions might reasonably conclude that China hasn’t had much to brag about in the meantime.

But when those same foreigners stop to look at who else is getting off tour buses, they realize that their fellow sightseers are now likely to be from inside the country, and that these domestic vacationers are not only doing lots of bragging, they have money in their pockets to back it up.

Patriotic tour packages are apparently now all the rage. Wherever I strolled as a tourist, I was surrounded by large herds of Chinese. They were shepherded along by guides jabbering away on portable microphones, and carrying tall, uniquely-colored pennants, the better to keep their charges in line.

Tiananmen Square fills every morning and evening with proud Chinese wanting to see an honor guard raise and lower the national flag. The people walking beside me at the Summer Palace had their shoulders thrown back. I couldn’t help contrasting the feeling of purpose with the last few years’ news from the United States, with its stutter-stepping over Iraq, and its red-state-blue-state divisions.

There’s only one direction and one color in Beijing. For better or worse, the entire enterprise seems to know where it’s going.

Beijing is Determined

I had heard about dust storms coating Beijing with a thin layer of yellow grime. People had told me that Chinese often spit on the sidewalk. As our plane landed, my British seatmate pointed out the window at the grey morning and said, “See, the pollution here makes you think you’re walking around in a black-and-white film.”

Yet the stories all turned out to be wrong. Or at least they weren’t true this past week. It was a fine time to visit China.

The sun warmed and brightened everything—by mid-afternoon, I was peeling off my sweater. The tourist spots, anticipating next year’s Olympic Games, all seemed to have just been washed and painted. In the air were the smell of fresh cut grass and the “snow” from shedding poplars.

No matter where I went, in fact, trees were nearby. Greening campaigns have resulted in row after row of closely spaced trees, planted in part to reduce the effects of increasingly frequent sandstorms in the city. Seeing them on my way in from the airport was another reminder that the Chinese make no little plans. When they want to do something, they really do it. Big tree farms, grand boulevards, imperial palaces: everything is on a much grander scale than I’m used to.

It’s been that way for some time. While clambering along a lonely stretch of the great wall, I kept thinking about how remarkable it was that successive administrations continued to fund such a kooky project. They no doubt had many chances to say “OK, that’s good enough,” or “we don’t really need to protect that province,” but apparently they never did.

As we drove out of town toward our hike, the friend I was visiting remarked that the highway we were on had been completed only a few weeks earlier. After we turned off toward the hills, he noticed a few places where shortcuts had been built since the last time he had gone that way. At several intersections, he pointed out men standing next to large earth moving equipment. “Those guys and their machines are for hire,” he explained, as casually as if they were parked there selling ice cream.

A few hours later, returning to the freeway, we joked to each other, “Was this road here this morning?”

Koh Si Chang is a Lotus

Platforms for natural gas exploration dot the Gulf of Thailand along the eastern seaboard. Enormous tankers anchor offshore, making for vistas that resemble Texas more than Thailand. It has become an awkward place to put an island.

But Koh Si Chang makes for a lovely daytrip or overnight, despite the busy industrial harbor it helps shelter. The hour’s ferry ride snakes through freighters flying flags from around the world. On arriving, passengers step onto a pier lined with markets (all those superships have to get their fresh vegetables and beer from somewhere). Up the hill, a Chinese temple looms. There’s not a beach in sight.

I visited on a weekday at the tail end of Chinese New Year. The temple seemed a timely place to begin a tour. Volunteers at the top of the serpent staircase offered me several opportunities to accumulate merit and good luck in the coming year. My small donations also earned me various scrolls and the reading of my name over a loudspeaker.

Having gotten my future sorted out, I settled into appreciating the present. The seaward side of the island was much emptier than the side with the ferry landing. I had the place to myself, aside from a young couple in full wedding gear who were taking pictures with a handsome boardwalk and the beautiful open ocean as a backdrop. I spent nearly an hour prowling the headland.

Such views were apparently what drew a few generations of Thai kings to the island, back in the 1800s when they would sail down the river from Bangkok, and then out into the gulf. Today, their former palace grounds make for nice strolling. They include a hillside stupa where King Rama V liked to meditate. It’s still a good place to contemplate life, for being beach-free also means that the island is jet-ski-free.

In fact, as I ferried back to real life at the end of a long travel day, my attitude was so altered that I took no notice of the floating factories on either side of the boat. Koh Si Chang is like the lotus flower that blossoms out of the mud, rising above defilement and suffering.

Lopburi is Lucky

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But that adage doesn’t always apply to travel.

Mostly because I didn’t really know where I was heading, I ended up spending a dandy day at Wat Khao Wong Phrachan in Lopburi province. I never would have never found (or even attempted) the place had I brought a guidebook along.

Most people go to Lopburi, about three hours north of Bangkok by train, to see the monkeys. The Khmer-style ruins in the center of town are crawling with the tame little critters. Before I left home, I glanced at a Lopburi website, which briefly listed a temple about 25 kilometers from the city, “surrounded by shady trees and beautiful views of nature,” near the province’s highest mountain.

What the site didn’t say was that “near” the mountain really means “at the top of a flight of about 3,000 steps.” Even after hopping off a local bus and riding the final few kilometers by motorcycle taxi, I still didn’t realize that visiting the temple would involve any climbing. At right is the view looking back from the halfway mark.

Luckily some entrepreneurs sell water along the way. The mountain was one of those whose summit looks closer than it really is. See for yourself: can you spot the temple up top in this picture? Happily, the 360-degree view, and the pleasant breeze, was a fine reward for the sweat required to reach the highest point.

And when I finally got back to the main road, it turned out that my motorcycle man doubled as a seller of banana fritters, making the unplanned day that much sweeter.