Thailand Travels, Day 4-5

Chitraroff Blog Thai Entry

Bangkok, Thailand, Day 4-5

Tuesday, 11/22

"Sang Tau”  Taxi truck with two benches

“Taow rai” How much is this?

“Hong nam yoo tee nai”  Where is the toilet?

Well, it was exciting to move out of Bangkok for some more rural action.  I have to admit that we were pleasantly surprised in Bangkok for how friendly the residents were and how safe we felt while walking around the city.  Prior to leaving, we had this vision of danger, corruption, violence and chaos.  We really didn’t find any of that through our traverse of the city.  It was more interesting than others suggested.  With traveling its always good to take peoples warning and recommendations with a grain of salt and just see it for yourself and make your own impressions, instead.

We opted to take a domestic flight from Bangkok (central Thailand) to Chiang Mai (northern Thailand) instead of the all-day overland train ride.  Our flight was only an hour, so it was very easy.  We stayed at a hostel but had a private room to house us all.  The best thing about our hostel, TCH house, was that it was situated on the main street where the Sunday night market occurred.  Now, we’ve been to some night markets before, but nothing even came close to the Chiang Mai market.  It seemed like the entire Old City was filled with vendors and the streets were packed.  In about 2-3 hours time, we took care of most of our Christmas shopping.  We found so many handmade items in the 100-300 $BAT range ($3-10 US).  The problem is that now we have to stuff those items in our already bulging backpacks.  

Besides sampling food from the many street vendors, Kahlo located THE vendor of desire...the frozen flat plate ice cream curls “  “.  The boys had watched YouTube videos of these vendors months before our departure and it was one of our missions to locate them.  The mixing method is similar to ColdStone creamery but the final product were these ice cream curls scraped off this frozen plate.  I had blueberries mixed with vanilla ice cream...yum!

If you’ve ever travelled to Guatemala, then Chiang Mai is a spitting image of Panajachel and Lake Atitlan.  It is a very hip town with coffee houses, yoga studios, thai massages, and artisan vendors.   There’s definitely a young, early 20’s college town vibe but not a lot of late night partying.

One of our highlights in Chiang Mai was a visit to “The Faces” cafe and museum that contained all of these terracotta statues, masks and artwork.  The pieces were assembled under this canopy of lush vegetation that had a jungle-like feel to it.  Chiang has a lot of temples “WAT”, but the most dramatic one that we visited was a very rustic one with incredible grounds and housed Thai monks studying their craft.

From Chiang, we took a Sang Tau up into the highlands of Mae Wang where we will stay at the Elephant sanctuary.  When we arrived the change in weather was immediately apparent and for once we needed our long sleeves and long pants. From the road we had to cross a suspension bridge over the river to get to Chai Lai Orchid.  Immediately, they handed us ice cold coconuts to drink.  Once finished, we walked over to the elephants and fed them the coconuts.  They had no problem crushing and eating them with their massive mouth and jaws.  We were amazed at the force they exerted to crush the coconuts.  

We decided to join a Thai cooking class for our evening meal, so we traveled into a local and authentic vegetable and meat market in Mae Wang to get supplies with one of our hosts.  When we returned they set us up in this outdoor kitchen in the jungle.  They let each of us prepare our own dish and we cooked and ate sauteed morning glories, Thai green curry soup, Thai mango chicken, and mango sticky rice for dessert.  We were all so stuffed from our feast that we fell into a deep food coma shortly afterwards.  The family continued to sleep and I woke back up at 9pm to finish my book, The Revenant.

The next morning we woke up at Chai Lai Orchid, had an incredible breakfast, and embarked on an ethnobotany hike up to the Mae Wang waterfall.  Our guide, Sing, was a local native and a total comedian. He showed us the local plants including the sensitive plant, a plant that turned our hands bright red when crushed, one that produced soap bubbles and another that smelled like farts.  We crested past the waterfall and continued up to a swim hole on the river where we floated down a rock slide and where they prepared lunch for us.   

We finished the hike, then the family hopped in the back of a pickup truck and drove to the put-in for our bamboo raft trip.  They loaded up 3 of us per raft and the guide use a long bamboo pole to navigate the twists and turns of the river.  We had a few close calls as the 25’ rafts side swiped rocks and dipped into the vegetation along the banks of the river.  We continued floating past elephants bathing on the river and they dropped us right at our riverside accommodations at Chai Lai.  

Our adventures continued to the next stage as we fed the local elephants sugar cane then boarded them bare back style for a walk through the jungle.  Going downhill for me was extremely stressful as I felt myself come close to going over the bars as my legs came out from behind the elephants ears.  Our guides used only voice commands to direct the elephants to stay on the trail.  Leslie was absolutely in a state of bliss as her lifelong dream of riding elephants came into fruition.  One of the highlights for me was bathing and scrubbing the baby elephants in the river and then being lifted up by their strong tusk and head.

The evening came to a wonderful close as we enjoyed Thai food prepared from the kitchen while engaging in great conversation with travelers from all over the United States.  We finished off a couple of bottles of Thai rum with our fellow travelers and laughed into the night from everyone’s funny stories.

Thailand Travels, Day 3

Chitraroff Blog Thai Entry

Bangkok, Thailand, Day 3

Sunday, 11/20

“Pom ben kroo wityasa”  I’m a science teacher.

“Nang piya bahn patung khan”  I’m a OBGYN nurse.

“Di-Ma”  Good

“Mai-Di” Not Good

“Arroy-Mahk”  Tasty

“Soo-Jahwd” Awesome

Wow, what an incredible day we had today.  Upon exiting the hotel at 6:30 this morning I could instantly tell it was Saturday because there were vendor stalls everywhere, the streets were already bustling with activity and there was lots of noise.  We had an early start so I went to the closest vendor and bought some pastries (triangular filo pastry with chicken and sauce inside, and steamed buns with minced pork like Dim-Sum style).  

We met our cycling guides in the lobby of our hotel at 7am.  There names are “Andy” and “Top”.  We boarded a super styled-out van with an insane sound system and headed out of Bangkok for about a 1.5 hour drive.  Our first stop of the day was a remote floating market called Thaka.  The floating markets are historical markets where the vendors bring their goods from the surrounding environment via water canals.  The vendors each have these long boats filled with fruits, vegetables, spices, meat, and cooking apparatus to make food on the spot.  Today, we will visit 3 floating markets but this first one was our favorite because it wasn’t crowded and it was the most traditional (only human powered boats, not motor powered).  

We sampled a little bit of every type of food offering that was available, but by far our favorite were these little half-hemisphere baked meat pies made on an Ebelskiver cast iron pan called “Kanhomkok”.  They had some made with cracked little quail eggs and others made with a rice flour batter topped with shrimp, ham and other types of vegetables.  The outsides were toasty and the insides were so flavorful and delicious.  Kanhomkok is definitely a dish we will learn to prepare at home.  

As part of our tour, we boarded a long boat and paddled through the canals to a coconut plantation.  Their business here was all about extracting the sugary coconut milk from the coconut flowers. The job of collecting coconut nectar is probably the most labor intensive job I’ve ever seen.  He climbs over 100 coconut trees 2x every day, collects the nectar, then slices 1 cm off the end of the flower to stimulate the flow.  Once the nectar is collected, the wife boils it in these large baskets which then crystallizes into a sugar, then the coconut sugar is pressed into molds and sold at the market.  The guide whispered to me that they have a black market of making coconut hooch.  They package it in plastic water bottles and bury it on the property, selling it on the sly because it is illegal.  I tried to get a bottle of the booze but was politely rejected.

Our bike tour started from the market and we rode about 24 miles through the coconut plantation countryside.  Riding that far in high humidity without a chamois proved a bit troublesome to the nether regions.  Can you say, “Swamp Crotch”?  Ooooh, that ‘s disgusting!  I know, I know. “Kor toht” (excuse me, sorry) I think our pace of riding surprised the guides and the boys kept pushing to go faster.  After our first stop, they commented that we need to ride slower for the rest of the tour...we smiled.  The rest of our bike ride included a stop at more floating markets, a tour of a coconut processing facility, a lunch stop at a riverside restaurant and a visit to a 300 year old Buddhist temple.  The Buddhist temple was enshrouded in climbing vines and featured a sitting Buddha that you could walk around and apply gold foil to. Outside the temple, there was a traditional Thai ensemble playing music on unique instruments that we’ve never seen before.  

The lunch stop was definitely a highlight because they served a 5 course spread of amazing Thai food including a chicken curry dish that would blow your socks off.  “arroy-mahk”  I guess that curry is not really a staple of central Thailand but more common in Northern Thailand.  Riding the next 5 miles proved a bit difficult as we were pedaling with bloated bellies.

Traveling through the countryside was reminiscent of being in Latin America with the familiar smells, the burning coconut palms and husks, the lame and scruffy dogs and the partially constructed houses with raw rebar reaching skyward.   It was a very nice respite from the bustling activity of downtown Bangkok. After we boarded a ferry to visit our last floating market we found a nice tea house along the river and ordered some Thai Iced teas and just watched the world go by.  The one thing that surprised me is that the long boats here had exposed V8 engines with extremely long drive shafts that reached into the water.  Apparently, Thailand does not have the same smog requirements as does California because the engines roared to life and spewed black smoke into the sky.

Our trip back to Bangkok took us about 2 hours due to heavy Saturday traffic.  After arriving at our hotel room and putting down a cold one, I fell fast asleep.  In fact, everyone was pretty wiped and we fell asleep by 8:00 fed by a couple of bananas that were left overs from our tour.  

Tomorrow, we fly from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. The following day we will then shuttle to Chai Lai Orchid where we will interact with the elephants.

“sa-wat-dee krub” (goodbye),

~The Chitraroff Family

Thailand Travels Day 2

Chitraroff Blog Thai Entry

Bangkok, Thailand, Day 2

Saturday, 11/19

“pom ben kroo”  I am a teacher.

“no tai mai jai”    I don’t speak Thai.

“korp kun krub”  Thank you.    (Leslie says, “korp kun ka” because she is female).

After our sleep to shake off jet lag, our first order of business was to find breakfast.  Bodhi wanted to have a traditional american breakfast offered by our hotel, but the rest of us had other plans.  So, we spent our morning wandering around the market closest to our hotel.  After wading through massive amounts of clothing vendors (hundreds of stalls selling the exact same thing), we finally rounded a corner and found the food vendors.  We came across five empty chairs in front of a very friendly couple and ordered 5 bowls of noodles.  You could either get them “dry” with no broth or “wet” with broth.  The “dry” portion was akin to chow mien and the “wet” portion was like Vietnamese Pho.  So, we ordered 2 dry, 3 wet.  The broth was so savory and Leslie and I kicked it up a notch with some Thai spices.  It all was delicious and we fed our family of 5 for about 250 bat ($7.14).

The food vendors realized that we were having difficulty expressing numbers beyond 10, so Kahlo got a quick lesson on how to organize higher numbers.  They found a scrap of paper and quickly sketched out how to pronounce numbers beyond 10.  They were very willing to teach us despite our inability to pronunciate properly.  We are learning very, very slowly.

After breakfast we boarded a tuk-tuk (motorcycle with seating for 2).  We crammed all 5 of us into a space designed for 2-3 people.  Yes, there are benefits to being small.  A tuk-tuk ride is an experience like no other.  With minimal traffic laws, it is pretty much a free-for-all on the roads.  Cars, taxis, scooters, motorcycles, tuk-tuks, cyclists and pedestrians are all simultaneously navigating this matrix of chaos.  And remarkably, we haven’t seen an accident yet.  Plus, there is a considerable amount of politeness with very little horn honking amongst the drivers.  The tuk-tuk driver took us to Wat Pho (a Buddhist temple that houses the largest reclining Buddha which was 46m long and 15m high).  That’s about 120 feet long!  

Wat Pho was built in the 1600’s, so it is mind blowing to walk amongst structures that have been in existence for over 400 years.  I know for Europe travelers this is common place, but I’ve never been to Europe so I am impressed, nonetheless (hey that rhymes!).  There must be over 1000’s Buddha statues of all sizes within these grounds with each one being unique in its shape, facial expression, size and gilding (outer coating). In each temple, we are required to remove our shoes and hats and women have to cover their legs down to their knees and both genders must cover their shoulders.  There were female tourists walking around in these bright, green robes who did not have proper covering.  Leslie did her homework and was prepared...that’s my girl!

We walked across the street to the Ministry of Defense which houses the Royal Temple and the Royal Park.  The Thai king who reigned for 70 years just passed away. So, to honor him they were giving away free food and drink outside the Royal Temple. So, we graciously accepted and ended up getting a free lunch of rice and pork, water and green tea.  There is a free lunch, after all!   We were “all templed out” at this point so we wandered around a bit, then found some really fun exercise equipment to play on in the Royal Park and entertained ourselves for about an hour while challenging each other to complete different tasks.  Leslie did 10 spins on this rotating disk, no hands!

We were all pretty tired at this point, so we hopped on another tuk-tuk with a very friendly driver who wanted to know all about us.  He had 4 children with his daughter of 21 years being the oldest.  He was trying to set up Kahlo with his daughter with just the right amount of humor with the proposal.  But, she already had a baby.  After some trouble deciphering his English after awhile, we finally figured out that he was saying “Trump” and “Clinton”.  Apparently, we figured out he was a Trump supporter after showing us the thumbs up sign and a big smile while saying “Tramp” repeatedly.  We were amazed that he even followed the US elections. 

Back at the hotel, we went for a swim, had some cool beverages, and then got ready to head to Chinatown for the night market.  After another harrowing Tuk Tuk ride, we came across the very happening scene of the night market.  We pretty much sampled most of the fare along this 4 block stretch.  There were lines of people waiting to eat at the street vendor carts.  We ate fried dough balls, sectioned pomegranate, thai basil sausage, egg rolls, roasted animal hearts and bbq’d kidney.  There was a vendor selling fried insects and larva of all varieties, but we politely declined.  We will ease into that one a bit...maybe later :).  One of the most entertaining parts of our night was watching the street chefs prepare their food with such speed, agility, and flair.  There were massive flames shooting up the sides of woks everywhere! We will be taking a Thai cooking class together when we head north to Chiang Mai.

The tuk tuk ride home was super fun.  The driver had mounted a blue tooth speaker, so Kahlo hooked him up with his best jams and we cruised back to our hotel with LED lights flashing and some reggae music blaring into the Bangkok night.  

Tomorrow, we will embark on a 20 mile bicycle tour from the farmlands outside of Bangkok and into the city with many stop along the way including one at the floating markets.  Until then, blessings to all of our friends and loved ones.

~The Chitraroff Family

“Lah Gorn Krub”  Goodbye.

Thailand Travels Day 1

Chitraroff Blog Thai Entry

Bangkok, Thailand, Day 1

Friday, 11/18

Hello (sa-wat-dee krub),

Well, we survived the 17 hour plane flight from LAX to Beijing to Bangkok.  The strangest thing is that we started our journey at 8:30 Wednesday morning and we arrived at our hotel in Bangkok at 3:00 am Friday morning. We lost an entire day due to the time zones alone.  Luckily, we get that day back upon our return to America.

Our China air plane flight from LAX to Beijing was a 12 hour leg.  Luckily, each seat had private  video screens with movies, TV shows, games and my favorite, an onboard navigation system that gave us all of the details of our flight.  This kept the boys entertained nicely.  

Leslie and I were amazed that our journey took us right past our meeting place of Arcata, CA along the west coast, across the Pacific Northwest and towards Alaska, Russia and beyond.  For some reason, we thought that we would be heading towards Hawaii. My science mind was excited to see all of the specs of our flight like elevation, cruising temperature and flight speed. 

Luckily, the seat layout was such that I could do some laps around the plane every couple of hours to relieve the dead leg syndrome from sitting on my butt so long.  I also had the opportunity to finish a borrowed book from a friend titled, “Survival of the Sickest”.  It was an enlightening book.  

Our in-flight experience had one special highlight for me.  The beverage cart had free beer which I took advantage of every time that cart rolled down my aisle.  Can you believe it...FREE BEER on a flight!  It seems like we were fed every couple of hours, so nobody really got hungry, except for Bodhi who complained that the meat and rice dish was rivaled wet cat food.  Of course, I am an “opportunivore” so I ate every time there was food in front of me. 

Our connecting flight in Beijing China was the most stressful event in our journey.  We had to pass through customs and through security again in addition to changing to a terminal that was 1/2 mile away.  Customs was slow and security was even slower.  They went through our backpacks throroughly and demanded that we give them our back up power supply units for phone charging because they exceeded the 100mv requirement. We made it through security with only 10 minutes to spare to catch our connecting flight which was 1/2 mile away, so we ran!   We felt like we were in the Amazing race, with all of our backpacks jostling about sprinting towards the terminal unaware if our connecting flight had already left or not.  Fortunately, we arrived huffing and puffing with the knowledge that our flight was 15 minutes late...GASP! The air quality was so horrendous (thick of burning smoke) that Leslie had a major coughing spasm after our sprinting event.   We still had to take a bus out to the tarmac to load up the stairs into our plane. 

The flight from Beijing to Bangkok was only 5 hours, so our total flight time was 17 hours.   Most of us slept on the last leg, so it passed quickly.  We arrived in Bangkok and it was about 1:00 a.m.  We caught a taxi to our hotel in Bangkok which only took about 45 minutes.  I cannot express to you how wonderful it felt to get horizontal on a comfy bed after that journey.  We crashed out!

Tomorrow would be an open day to explore the bustling city of Bangkok.  Hopefully, we will encounter some unique Bangkok sights, smells and adventures. 

Goodbye (Lah gorn krub) and thank you (Korp kun krub).

Much Love,

~The Chitraroff Family

Preparations for Thailand

Well, the time has finally come to embark on our first adventure to Southeast Asia. I have to give kudos to my beautiful wife who arranged pretty much every single detail of this trip. I am stoked to say that she put together a dream trip with plenty of adventure. She also found some incredible places for us to say that would cost a small fortune in America.

As far as I can tell, the part of our trip that appears most enchanting will be our time spent in Northern Thailand at Chai Lai Orchids, an elephant sanctuary and eco tourism type of place that is in the jungles near Chiang Mai.  We are hoping to encounter some spontaneous and unexpected travel bliss along the way.

The aspect of travel that gives us the most anxiety is two-fold...the language barrier and the length of the plane flight. We have a Thai phrase book to help out with the language. The 17 hour plane flight poses the biggest challenge for our sanity, however. We have some good reading and music. We're hoping to have the luxury of wandering around the plane every couple of hours to get some blood flow to the glutes.

With prayer, proper planning, a spontaneous and a gracious spirit, we are hoping that the doors of travel open up lots of oportunity for adventure and joy.

...stay tuned for future blogging.

~Blessings,
The Chitraroff Family.