Sukhothai

Sukhothai is a city in Northern Thailand, which I went to after visiting Chiang Mai. While Sukhothai and Chiang Mai both have a lot of old temples, for a tourist that's about as far as the relationship goes. Chiang Mai is a large vibrant city, with a large amount of attractions – actually, for most tourists, the nearby trekking is the highlight. Sukhothai is a one-horse provincial city that happens to be built next to the ruins of the ancient Thai capital and its numerous stone temples.

But that's not to denigrate these ruins – they date back seven hundred years, and in terms of beauty, convenience, and general pleasantness, if not scale, I ended up appreciating these ruins more than those of Angkor Wat, in Cambodia. The comparison isn't specious – I can't claim anthropological expertise, but many of the temples were built in the same time frame, at a time when the Khmer culture, from its capital in Angkor, dominated South-East Asian culture.

I don't want to delve too much into Thai history, I'll just attach a few of favorite pictures:









What also made my visit interesting was that I visited during a large festival, where people from all over Thailand flooded into the city, and at night the ruins were lit up. I found all the celebrations very underwhelming, honestly, but it contributed to a festival-type atmosphere.

I ended up staying in a very nice, low-key guest house called “No. 4 Guest House,” for the grand total of about $6 per night. I grabbed the last room, and I was afterwards told by another guest that it was the only place in town with rooms left - I guess I narrowly avoided disaster! Despite being not too far off the main road, there were a number of rural Thai-style houses nearby, and it was overlooking farmland - temporarily flooded, I'd guess for the production of rice.

Chiang Mai

Thailand falls outside of the scope of this blog, in that it's not actually a part of Shanghai. But on the other hand, proximity to South East Asia is one of the best parts of living in China. It's convenient to travel to, it's extremely cheap, and there's really a wide variety of attractions. I'll have a few posts concerning Thailand and Cambodia over the coming months, and I had a few posts about Bangkok, a couple years ago.

First I'll mention the city of Chiang Mai, in Northern Thailand, about a hundred miles from Yunnan and the southern border of China. Chiang Mai is a city of 1.3 million people that extends on and on, but the city center has something of the feel of a small city, only there's hundreds of ancient temples. I'm a big Buddhist religion nut, just walking around looking at the temples was so interesting:



Thai Buddhism is of a different variety than Northeastern Asia, and the temples are much more interesting (and even, mysterious) than the temples of China, which are the ugliest and most uninteresting temples in Asia - to be fair, Chinese temples usually don't get government funding or official encouragement, and were actively destroyed during the Cultural Revolution only 35 years ago. In Thai temples, there's many more statues, decorations are much more intricate, there's more worshipers, and there's iconography and interesting practices I tantalizingly only half-understand, like these ropes tying together the Buddhas.



While I found the temples to be the highlight, and also the most fun to photograph, Chiang Mai is simply a pleasant city to be. I could easily imagine spending an entire vacation there. People are friendly, the weather's beautiful, tourist infrastructure and foreigner-oriented businesses are extensive but easy to get away from, and there's a lot of different sites and activities. There's a lot of interesting markets, I tried a very fun one-day Thai cooking school, also there's popular treks around the area, often multi-day excursions amongst hill tribes. While I had to leave the longer treks for a future visit, I took a one-day trek where, amongst other things, I went around the Thai countryside on an elephant.



I didn't run across any Thai restaurants that I would call excellent, but there was a whole lot of very good, very cheap street food. Here's a typical bowl of Chicken Pad Thai, it's available just about anywhere in Chiang Mai, or really any Thai city:



There's a large Chinese presence throughout Thailand, although it's diluted by being several generations removed from any large wave of immigration. Still, particularly in Bangkok and Northern China, it was normal to see houses and stores with Chinese decorations, most commonly these talismans:



If I have complaints about Thailand, one would be that I was stranded there, by myself, by the infamous airport protests, and the second would be that it's so convenient, fun, and inexpensive to visit, I find myself measuring trips within China against just going to visit Thailand. Really, it's generally cheaper to go to Bangkok than to Sichuan.

One Day in Bangkok - Some Temples

This will be my final look at Bangkok - at least for now. Against expectations I really enjoyed my short time in the city, and I definitely hope to go back sooner rather than later.

I'm the one person in Asia who keeps visiting Buddhist temples and just never gets tired of it. I'll keep things to a minimum and focus on some favorite pictures. First of all, Thailand's largest temple is the Wat Pho, which contains a gold-plated, 150 foot long, reclining Buddha. It's housed inside a large wooden building, which isn't large enough to give any real perspective on the Buddha, and has a large wooden panel in the center. So it can only be seen right at its enormous head, or right at its enormous feet. Here, I took a picture at the second option.



One thing I find interesting about Buddhist temples is that they often have the same architectural and iconic conceits, but the design and usage of these conceits vary wildly between different sects and different regions. For instance the single, solitary stupa, which is at the center of traditional Buddhist temples, evolved into both the familiar pagoda, and the Thai chedi, there's a number of them scattered about:



They're decorated with layered enamel. Some other areas of the wat were similarly, whimsically decorated:



Finally, here's a shrine, from the same compound. It's all gold and crystal:



At the foot of the shrine is where the offerings are placed, although in this case it's just symbolic:



This is a wat I was very impressed by, it was also located in a fun area to wander around. It was dominated by a monumentally labyrinthine chedi.



It's hard to absorb all the details, this is a blow up of some cool demon-looking guys, standing side by side in a circle around the chedi.



Bangkok seemed a very religious city. Buddhism wasn't limited to these larger temples, which could possibly be seen as a historical relic. Just walking down the street, it was common to see people with small Buddhist artifacts. Here's a corner shrine, right in the center of a really tony shopping district:



It was really busy due to an annual remembrance. I wish I could remember the exact story, something strange about a bank building with bad luck...anyway across the street at night, the other places that were open were large outdoor beer halls, they had really bad bands playing and seemed to be relatively popular places for young wealthy Thai kids to go. Next to the beer halls were small shrines, people walking by (including some of the partiers) would make a small offering and prayer:



I found it interesting that even though Bangkok is thoroughly Buddhist, the Buddhism often included elements of Hinduism. Maybe it's a no-no in the more orthodox temples, but walking down the street I often came across takes on the Hindu god Ganesh:



I also came across other religion's temples, purely as a guess they were built to serve Bangkok's often long-time immigrant communities of Indians and Westerners, along those lines there were Chinese-style Buddhist temples. There were also occasional Hindu temples, mosques, and this small but large-steepled riverside Christian church:

One Day in Bangkok - The Grand Palace

This update will have some more pictures from a stop in Bangkok. Specifically, the Grand Palace, one of the tourist highlights of the city. It's the former primary residence of the royal family.



This is the rather spectacular view I had from my approach. Strangely, I was followed by a few touts, trying to sell me pants! I was wearing shorts, which isn't allowed inside the palace. I ignored them of course, ultimately there's a service near the entrance that lends visitors a free pair of purple sweat pants.

There's a Buddhist temple integrated with the palace grounds. The Buddhist areas are unbelievably grand and ornate, gilded in gold and with detailed statues and carvings all around. It contains an Emerald Buddha which is supposedly the national symbol of Thailand, although I admit I didn't pay much attention about it when I was there,and pictures aren't allowed. Here's a picture of the surroundings:



And here's a large stupa in the center of the structure:



There's also a number of impressive statues. Tibetan Buddhism is a form of Hinayana Buddhism, which nominally is monk-based with less mysticism than Chinese Buddhism, but also incorporates a lot of gods from Hinduism. Honestly a lot of it is a mystery to me, but these statues definitely look Hindu-ish to me.



And this is one of many of similar figures, standing side-by-side:



There were also murals along the wall, depicting moments of religious import, they were getting restored when I was there.



The Palace structure wasn't as impressive. The buildings were in a European style, big wooden caverns with Thai-styled roofs on top. The insides had small museum displays, such as a collection of old Thai weapons.



While I'm at it, the strangest thing about Thailand is the hero-worship of the king. I can't claim to be expert, but what I know: He's made himself one of the richest people in the world, off the resources of a rather small third world nation. And while he's constitutionally not allowed to meddle with politics, he's been closely associated with the recent military coup. Pointing this out is illegal though - criticizing the king is a criminal offense, even by innuendo.



It gets a lot more strange than that. His picture is everywhere around Bangkok, there's no getting around it. Supposedly, most of Thailand wears yellow on Mondays, it's the official color of his reign. The English-language events magazine I read gushed on and on about his skills as a pop musician, of all things, and it was just one of several king-themed articles. People I talked to even casually, in non-king contexts, would volunteer that they really loved the king.

One Day in Bangkok - Chao Phraya River

I've had a lot of posts about India. That wasn't the end of the trip though. I had a connecting flight in Thailand, so I opted to drop by and check out the city for a day and a half. I loved it, and thought it was amazingly photogenic, despite the intermittent gloomy skies. I'll have a few posts about what I saw there.

This first post is about the Chao Phraya River. It winds its way through Bangkok, acting as a tourist, historic, religious, and commercial center to the city. There's a series of river taxis, which are full of tourists, working class, and a few Buddhist monks (who get free transport). There's also private tourist boats, large and small, here's a small one:



There's about fifteen stops along the river, it's a pretty convenient system. The inconvenience is that the boats are few and far between. I waited more than twenty minutes, it wouldn't be so bad except for the hot sun coming out, while I waited on the pier. This station has a little roof, they aren't all so Thai looking. I expect the nice new building gets a nice new station:



I don't know about tides, or what's normal, but some of the stations I used were flooded. There was a pathway of sandbags to cross, which kept my feet partially dry. Some of the houses I passed by were similar, with their ground level half-flooded. I saw people standing out back of their houses, hanging clothes or whatever, in six inches of water!



I walked alongside the river for a while - in fairness, only a very few houses were flooded like this. It was mostly older style of houses, nothing fancy, I found the area very charming.



Here's another picture of that:



I mentioned the Buddhist monks get free transportation on the river taxis. That especially comes into play because of all the large old Buddhist temples alongside the river. I'll have more to say about that later, these temples are among the most amazing I've ever seen, and there's one after the other. In the meantime, check out both the beautiful high-roofed temple in the background, and the cargo ship in the foreground:



Obviously the boats aren't very big, and lot of the bridges across the river have a very, very low clearing. But the sheer quantity of the boats is dizzying, the immediate reaction is wondering how they go more than five minutes without crashing into each other.