Hoi An

In Hoi An I discovered one of my new favourite things: spirals of incense hanging from the ceiling.

I first saw these in the Fukien Assembly Hall, built by the Fukien Chinese living in Hoi An – an important trading town – in the 17th Century. The Cantonese Assembly Hall also contained them, big ones alongside tiny ones. At first I thought they came in many sizes, but quickly realised these were probably the ones that had mostly burnt away. (The floor of a temple I visited today, in Ho Chi Minh City, was covered in stubs of ash from the spirals.) The assembly halls are really beautiful, with red and gold and offering-covered shrines to figures like Thien Hau, goddess of the sea and protector of sailors, and Quan Cong, a Han Chinese General. At one, electric candles sat beside the incense and fruit. In the Trieu Chau Assembly Hall, the shrine is surrounded by detailed wood carving.

The roofs of these buildings are detailed with dragons, soldiers and ornamental finials; on one, lightbulbs hung from the corners like bells. In the courtyard of the Cantonese Assembly Hall is another dragon, in a pool with fish, covered in tile-mosaic with rice bowls for eyes.

The central streets of Hoi An are lined with yellow buildings, the colour fading and peeling quite attractively. Combined with bright flowers and a blue sky, it sometimes looked quite Mediterranean. Most of these buildings are commercial: souvenir shops, restaurants and the ubiquitous tailors, offering made-to-measure suits and dresses and shoes. I refrained. The volume of motorbike horns is low; the peace is more noticeably interrupted by the dumpling stalls, wheeled from street to street, playing loud pop music. I’m pretty sure one was playing N*Sync. A mixed market hogged several streets, covering them with low tarpaulin requiring tall people to duck. Meat was laid out on a mat on the ground next to a souvenir stall. Quite an odd juxtaposition, especially as most markets keep fruit/veg, meat and assorted non-foods separate.

At night, the town (away from the restaurants) goes even quieter, except for the same Western classical music emerging from closed buildings many streets apart. The riverfront is covered in lanterns. At one restaurant, a tiny lizard waited on the lantern for insects, but Hoi An wasn’t especially plagued.

45 km west of Hoi An is My Son, a major site of Champa ruins. I arrived on a tour bus at the best area of the site along with several thousand other tourists, so that my first impression was of brick ruins among hordes of white-shirt-clad people. Eventually they dispersed; I later returned to the first site and wandered around it with only two girls taking photos of themselves for company. In many places, plants are creeping onto the ruins, whether it’s bamboo growing from a temple roof or a tree trailing roots down the back of a rather shapeless lump of old, brown bricks. I chanced upon a set of ruins undergoing restoration. Bamboo poles held up a stele covered in the Chams’ Sanskrit-looking script. Men worked at blocks of brick – I couldn’t see what they were doing – while a Western woman sat with several Vietnamese colleagues, discussing paper plans. I got shooed away from this area. Further down a shady stone path (quite welcome shade, given the heat and high humidity) I found a grassy hill with bricks poking from it. Sometimes it was quite hard to envisage the former buildings, except for the excellent first area.

On the way between My Son and Hoi An, I saw bright red chillis laid out to dry on the concrete-covered ground in front of people’s houses.

Back in Hoi An, I ate yet more of a local speciality I enjoyed immensely: White Rose dumplings, with a tiny bit of meat in the centre and the wrap-bit folding outwards like rose petals, covered in crispy things and accompanied by a sweet dip.

I ate these three times. OM NOM.

Hanoi to Danang

HANOI

I’m sure my words of Hanoi would be more enthusiastic if I hadn’t been subdued, physically and emotionally, from a nasty stomach infection I think I got from spectacularly tasteless street-food in Luang Prabang. (Tip: Never eat at a street restaurant frequented only by Westerners. Even if it doesn’t make you vomit spectacularly, the food won’t be worth the tiny pricetag. Foolish me, not paying attention to the customers til I sat down with my bowl of food.) Fortunately I’d opted to fly into Hanoi, a quick and painless form of travel.

My first impression, the next morning: Red flags and banyan aerial roots over a pavement covered in motorbikes.

That Top Gear episode didn’t lie about the quantity of motorbikes. The method for crossing the road is to walk right out, steady pace, consistent direction, while approximately 50,000 motorbikes avoid you. It’s… fun. Yes. Motorbike taxis wait on every corner but I didn’t try one til later in the country.

Along the outside wall of the Temple of Literature – an old kind of university – pavement barbers were set up alongisde the metal-workers: a mirror on the wall, with a small shelf of necessary items, and a chair where a man sat getting his hair cut. The Temple itself is impressive, very Chinese-influenced, and in one courtyard are stelae on the backs of stone turtles. The stelae, in the old modified-Chinese script, list the names of successful students from centuries ago (1442 to 1779).

That night I visited the water puppet theatre. The puppets, which act out rural scenes and folklore on the surface of a small pool, are controlled by poles running horizontally under the water; the puppeteers are in the water behind screens. Rural scenes include: rice farming (complete with a puppet for planted rice), fishing, duck farming (long trails of ducklings behind a mother duck!) and chasing away foxes (which are yellow with thin black tails, body-slammed to death by the people-puppets), catching frogs, children playing. A folkloric scene depicted the legendary return of 15th C Emperor Le Thai To’s charmed sword, a contributing factor in his army’s victory over the invading Ming Chinese, to a golden turtle residing in Hoan Kiem Lake. The four sacred animals of Vietnam also danced: dragons (one shooting fire), turtles, unicorns and phoenixes (which mated, producing a puppet-egg).

I popped in, another day, to the Museum of Vietnamese History, dating from the pre-historic to the end of French colonialism. Relatively little detail was provided in English, but plenty of pretty artifacts entertained me: ceremonial metal drums, cabinets with amazingly detailed mother-of-pearl inlay, paintings to illustrate various events like the repulsion of Mongolian invaders, old coins.

HUE

I rented a bicycle in Vietnam’s former capital and visited two tombs of the Nguyen dynasty: the tomb of Khai Dinh and the tomb of Tu Duc. Getting around by bicycle was tiring and hot, but a fantastic way to see some of the town and countryside in-between the main sights. The main road of Hue was fun, especially at junctions – Davy Jones flashed into my head, saying, “Do you fe-ar death?” – but I survived and got out to the countryside, where I passed temples, cemeteries with graves ranging from stone circles in the grass and pine needles to miniature pagodas with offerings of joss sticks and flowers, saw rice and herbs laid out in the road, and a street selling joss sticks in many bright colours (some, on another street, laid out in the road like the herbs).

The tomb of Khai Dinh was built of concrete, yet it’s quite beautiful. The tombs are big complexes, echoing the palaces of life, with stone mandarins and animals in the courtyard. The building that contains the Emperor’s body is, on the inside, covered in gaudy tiles.

The tomb of Tu Duc is far bigger, bits of it in excellent repair while overgrown stone walls fill other areas (with a clothes-line tucked in one corner), and the complex contains the tombs of his Empress and adopted son. Some of these are crumbling and decaying quite beautifully, with details like so:

I also visited the former Imperial City, containing some stunning roof-details and gates – and, remarkably to me, it’s half old architecture and half building site, as ruined buildings are being reconstructed. One pond contained rock features with tiny shrines and bridges and trees on them, and I saw what looked like statues in mis-shaped red phone boxes.

Most importantly, gates:

DANANG

On the train to Danang a grieving Buddhist tried to convert me, recommending a visit to a mountain temple and then requesting my email address so he could send me Buddhist music/mantras – all so I’d understand and change my atheist ways. Very bizarre and annoying. All I wanted to do was read my book and admire the beautiful scenery on the way out of Hue and along the coast.

Danang offered nothing of interest besides a museum of Cham sculpture. The Kingdom of Champa existed in central Vietnam until the 15th C, and left behind some impressive architecture. Two days later I visited the ruins at My Son; in Danang’s museum I saw many of the most beautiful pieces which had been removed from that site and others. Hindu gods and goddesses, garuda, lions, podiums with decorative features that looked like several dozen breasts, absolutely amazing altars.

In the morning, I got a local bus – used by a woman with chickens in a basket, among other less interesting people – to Hoi An.

Sapa

Sapa is a town in the mountains at the north of Vietnam, where rice terraces are cut tens, up to a hundred high, into the slopes and valleys. Black Hmong and Red Dzao women walk into town with baskets on their back full of wares to sell at market – or they walk between field and village, carrying corn leaves for the buffalo.

The market, I discovered on my second day, is quite an experience.

Sure, there are stalls – I can barely remember what they sold – as soon as you set foot in the square, hilltribe women approach with silver earrings and bracelets, beautifully embroidered belts, purses, bags, clothes. I bought silver earrings and suddenly five more women clustered around me, pulling items from their baskets and lowering the prices. When I’d bought enough, I fled. An old woman followed me over a wall and into another part of the market, miming tears at my refusal to buy from her. At the top of some steps, another woman appeared with an intriguing little musical instrument. I fled, with more purchases, to the information centre (where, it being May 7th, I went straight to BBC News for election results – sigh – and today I found out that we have an interesting coalition government).

I should add that I completely enjoyed that mobile bombardment of market.

I came to Sapa with an interest in the hilltribes, so on the first day got myself on a trek and homestay with Zah, a young Black Hmong woman, as my guide. We walked along a stone and dirt path between rice paddies, corn fields, villages.

Black Hmong women wear black velvet knee-length shorts and black velvet wrapped around their lower legs, tied with embroidered ribbon, to protect against the sun and insects. The indigo-dark jacket – worn, in Zah’s case, over a long-sleeved Western t-shirt – is beautifully embroidered on the sleeves. Clothes take months to finish. Men tend to wear Western clothes nowadays, although some wear simple indigo-dark trousers and shirts. I never did get an explanation for why the genders wear such different clothes.

The modern world has come to Sapa and the surrounding villages, in pieces: many people own mobile phones, modern watches; Zah spends evenings in cafes in Sapa with friends and likes to keep her nails clean from indigo-stains; traditionally girls marry young, at 14 or 15, and have their first baby a few years later, but Zah intends to wait until 25 to marry and only have two children; a motorbike met us on the stony hillside path, bearing a small coolbox of sugar-ice lollies for 1,000 dong; Zah has travelled to Hanoi, Halong Bay and China, dressed as a Westerner because the Vietnamese make mewing noises and call her “little cat” if she’s wearing Hmong clothes, and she wants to go to Laos because the visa is free for Vietnamese. Still, she helps her mother in their rice paddies, and passes time embroidering for her clothes. She never went to school, instead tending buffalo, helping with her baby nephews/nieces, but she speaks Hmong, Vietnamese, excellent English learnt from tourists and bits of other languages too. Education is no requirement for an intelligent, interesting person. The houses are very simple, wood and bits of corrugated iron, with dirt floors, and sweetcorn – the second major crop – might hang from the ceiling to dry. Chickens run freely outside, kept for meat not eggs, so they’re often followed by large numbers of chicks. (They stupidly plucked at empty rice stalks left out drying to make mattresses.) On the first day’s walking, we met a Hmong man and his daughter walking a buffalo 45km from purchase-point to their village, without water. They quite happily stopped the man on the motorcycle with sugar-ice lollies. We earlier passed a stream with a small offering, placed by a shaman, to the mountain’s spirit.

I find myself quite intrigued by the way this part of the world is modernising. In A Dragon Apparent, travel writing by Norman Lewis in the 1950s, he predicts the doom of Western homogeniety in this region – but it’s far more complex than that. The concept of a modern person who is also a rice farmer, for instance, is quite at odds with Western expectations. Makes me think of Geoff Ryman’s Air, an excellent fictional approach to this issue.

The homestay was with a small Red Dzao family in a house obviously built for foreign visitors: plenty of beds, a modern (squat) toilet (I saw no toilet in the Black Hmong house, the next day). It was also their house, with a fire in one room and a range of black pots. I helped prepare bamboo shoots for dinner, snapping off the tops and peeling off the outer layers. Quite a bit larger than the bamboo shoots in our garden. (I wonder if our bamboo is edible. Mmm.) The Red Dzao girl, who spent several hours in the afternoon embroidering yellow pine tree motifs into a rectangle of fabric that Red Dzao women wear over their backside and the backs of their upper-thighs like a decorative, mis-placed apron, sliced off thin strips from the top of each peeled shoot. Zah cooked beef and pork dishes, and home-made chips. After dinner, Zah and I got medicinal baths: hot, hot water in wooden tubs usually used for indigo. It felt like sitting in a giant cup of tea. The herbs, cooked for over an hour, de-stress and generally improve the health of the bather. I found it quite relaxing, if too hot for the climate.

A highlight of the second day was leaving the main path and walking along the edge of rice paddies: that built-up barrier of dirt and stone, sometimes quite slippery.

Another highlight was lunch, in a Black Hmong house, where puppies played on the dirt floor (dogs are kept for selling or put to work, or eaten) among over half a dozen children ranging in age from toddlers to 19 (and she had a year-old child of her own). I sat on a miniscule wooden stool common to Black Hmong and Red Dzao houses. As in the homestay, I was offered rice wine in a little cup, which I drank a little more of than intended. The mother kept refilling my cup. Zah declined an entire bowl (historically, cups weren’t used in this area, only bowls for drinking).

I gleaned other interesting details from talking to Zah:
- Pregnant girls/women shouldn’t eat twinned-yolk eggs, unless they want twin babies.
- If someone dies, animals are sacrificed for a big feast. This is the only time a buffalo is killed. For children only pigs or chicken will suffice. The dead are buried.
- Indigo dye is made from a green-leafed plant, cut and mixed with ash.
- Goats are kept for meat, not milk (the Hmong don’t like milk). We passed three children playing in the water channel that carries water down the hillside to various paddies, keeping themselves cool and entertained while they watch the goats.
- Red Dazo women cover their hair with red headscarves or large, turban-like scarf arrangements, and shave the front of their hair and eyebrows when they’re married.

Occasionally, along the roadside, bamboo tubes stick out from the bank. Cold, delicious water pours out of them. I refilled my water bottle at several. Villagers walk up to these tubes to collect water, or construct greater lengths of bamboo tubing to bring it to them.

By the time we returned to Sapa, I was a bit sunburnt. Zah returned to her village and I ventured into the market; after that, I spent about 24 hours on trains getting to Hue, via Hanoi.

Halong Bay

I’d read a lot of horror stories about Halong Bay tour operators – over-charging for basic tours, changing itinerary, etc – and, after some thought, I opted for the cheapest tour I could find. I figured that if I paid $15 and actually got to see the bay, I’d get good value for money. I wound up in a large group with an itinerary that differed from what the booking agent insisted – and I had a wonderful time.

The bay is beautiful, as anyone who’s seen pictures (or that Top Gear episode) knows. Legend tells of an enormous beast thrashing to the depths, carving out the bay and leaving many hundreds of jungle-covered karst rocks scattered behind. Haze turned distant rocks into pale blue silhouettes.

We decanted into a small blue boat to motor through a tunnel in the side of a karst, under little stalactites and multi-lingual graffiti (some written acrobatically or from the back of boats with very little clearance) to the hollow interior.

What interested me the most, after the Top Gear episode about Vietnam, was the small number of floating villages in the bay: wooden constructions where people are born, live and die without setting foot on land. The booking agent insisted that on the 1-day tour I wouldn’t see one. Filthy lies.

The 9 squares contain fish, some impressively large, held in by netting. Sub-divisions of crates in the centre square hold various shellfish. Poor crabs are tied to the netting. A little house sits in the corner of the floating property, washing hung out alongside, a few men sitting around a table with drinks for sale.

Meanwhile, women in little boats full of fruit in small boxes pulled alongside the village, calling out to the tourists. I don’t know if they live in the floating village and collect their wares from shore, or live ashore and come out each day to trade with tourists and locals.

In the small blue boat, later, we motored around more of the village, passing many houses with dogs and children wandering around the decking, adults sitting in the shade. Through a doorway I glimpsed a TV. One building said ‘SACOMBANK’ on the roof. At the building where we returned to our bigger boat, two cats sat on shoes, attached to the wall by string. In many ways it looked like a Vietnamese village on land, except for it obviously not being among rice fields and the occasional graveyards.

I found the village quite fascinating.

We also visited a cave, which was a quite different experience to the village and to the caves I saw in Australia: greeted as we approached by loudpseakers playing music and exhorting us not to smoke/drink/eat/allow our children to do any of these, and an array of world flags above boards proclaiming the site’s UNESCO World Heritage status. “Like Disneyland,” muttered one of the Aussies. Inside, the cave was lit by disco-coloured lights, contained artificial water fountains, stalactites chopped up the form a banister, and a dragon-shaped rock had helpful red lights to indicate the eyes. All quite amusing. It was also an impressively vast cave.

The booking agent had said we’d visit two caves, but exchanging one for a chance to see the floating village in a bit of detail suited my interests. A fantastic 4 hours or so on the water.

Laos

I’ve spent the last three days partly or wholly devoted to long bus journeys, so I am quite glad that today’s boring task is only moving from this slightly overpriced guesthouse to a hostel. After 8 hours on winding mountain roads yesterday, even I was beginning to feel motion sick. My long, overnight bus ride to Hanoi is going to be delightful, I fear, but at least when I get to Vietnam I can use trains.

All these buses have enabled me to see a few places in Laos in a very short time.

VIENTIANE

Coming to this capital city from Bangkok is quite a shock, especially on a Sunday when it feels like 10 cars are using the city’s main avenue – French-style, broad, with central lamps and rows of trees, and a big colonial building at one end facing the very Lao Patuxai, often described as their version of L’Arc de Triomphe because it’s a big victory arch surrounded by a roundabout. I doubt L’Arc de Triomphe has a market inside, selling many items familiar to me from Thailand and some not. Most obviously different was the extensive silver jewellery and the communist flag appearing occasionally. The city is entirely low-rise, its buildings a mixture of old French colonial – many quite beautifully dilapidated – and modern Asian/generic, its signs offering a Lao Paris hotel experience or fine wines or massages or Lao handicrafts. Beautiful temples lurk among this show of lingering French culture. The roof ornamentation of one peeked above a handicraft shop displaying beautiful carvings, and I ducked down a side street to find: stupa lined up against the courtyard walls, a bare-roofed temple with small naga stairs and gold-and-pastel-hued images on the front of it, and two small wooden cages containing offerings and New Year (same as Songkran) flags.

I ate dinner that evening at one of many restaurants set up each day like street vendors overlooking the Mekong, where tractors had recently been working. Laap is a Lao dish, meat and mint and heat, very delicious, especially when served with sticky rice.

The second day in Vientiane involved some boring run-arounds to get anti-malarial tablets and find out bus times, but I managed in the morning to visit one of the most beautiful temples I’ve seen: That Luang. The focus is a vast, golden reliquary, which is certainly impressive, and I got to walk around a bit of its exterior. The beautiful part is the central building of the adjacent temple. It’s open on three sides with an expansive ceiling, covered in bright, wonderful paintings that spill out a little to the exterior.

I spent quite a lot of time wandering around with my head tilted up.

VANG VIENG

The less said about the town of Vang Vieng, the better. It’s a horrendous tourist pit, full of clone restaurants with mostly Western menus, guesthouses, internet shops and agencies selling bus tickets. Apparently a lot of menu items can be made “happy”, but I declined in favour of a tasty ginger pork dish. I sat on cushions on a raised platform with a low table, quite comfortable, until the Family Guy playing on a big TV drove me out. (Restaurants either played Family Guy or Friends. It’s disconcerting and a bit sad to be walking around in Asia and hear snippets of American TV, especially when Lao soap operas are so much funnier.) At night it’s party central.

The reason I visited is that Vang Vieng is in a beautiful part of the country and you can rent the inner tube of a giant tyre to float down the river. When the view is of karst structures rising above the flat river where, after the bars ran out, Lao people waded or paddled out to fish, it’s quite possible to tolerate the town for under 24 hours. Manoeuvering the tube over tiny rapids was also pretty fun.

I laughed in the middle of the night when a thunderstorm drove party-goers screaming back across the rickety wooden bridge from the party island to their guesthouses.

One of the Germans I chatted to at my next destination said he’d met a traveller who was on his third week at Vang Vieng. I cannot understand that.

PHONSAVANH & THE PLAIN OF JARS

The next town I visited, Phonsavanh, is in one of the poorest regions of the country, so aside from guesthouses, tour agencies, basic restaurants and a small vegetable market there’s nothing to do. The Americans dropped more bombs than ever fell in WW2, or something equally disgusting, and UXO (unexploded ordnance) continues to affect people today – for instance, they can’t farm as extensively in this fertile region because digging up a new field could result in death or serious injury. There’s an organisation slowly clearing UXO from key areas, but they’ve quite a long way to go because about 30% of munitions didn’t explode.

The area’s also famous for the large stone jars lying around various hills and fields.

Legend tells of King Khoon Chuong and his troops from southern China, throwing a great party after a victory over Chao Angka and making the jars to brew outrageous quantities of lao-lao. More mundanely, the goods found inside some jars – tools, bronze ornaments and ceramic pieces – indicate that they may be 2,000-year-old funerary urns.

I arrived in the afternoon and, not wanting to linger in Phonsavanh for one of the organised tours beginning the next morning, I joined two German guys on a brief tour they’d arranged with some drivers. We went to 2 of the 3 jar sites open to the public. At Site 2, a few jars sit on two hills, while at Site 1 a lot more jars lie in a field beside a hill with some more on top. Site 1 also contains a few bomb craters and a cave, now a kind of memorial spot, where local people sheltered until bombs went through the ceiling and killed them.

LUANG PRABANG

A former Lao capital and quite a change to the impoverished rural areas: fancier buildings and temples, some very beautiful from my brief evening wanderings last night…

…and a night market for the tourists selling old Lao money in denominations of 1 and 10 (current exchange rate is 12,000 kip = 1 GBP), animals in jars and many fabrics. It got very samey within about four of the many stalls. I noticed a few unique items, such as the tortoise shells lying among clone purses and bags. An adjacent food market looked like a good place for dinner. Unlike the main night market, local people shopped there. I look forward to seeing more of the temples today and eating tasty food.

Of markets and trains

This post will have to be picture-free, for now, as the complementary internet I’m using in Vientiane, Laos, is quite slow. (More on Laos soon.) I’ll upload some at a later date. For now, a recounting of the adventures Tori and I embarked upon on Saturday in Thailand.

Our first train station, Wongwian Yai in Bangkok, came with a market: food stalls along the single platform. The train waited alongside. On the other side of the tracks, more stalls sold fresh fruits. As Tori finished her breakfast, a loud announcement summoned us onto the train.

The cool morning made its lack of aircon no trouble, and anyway the windows went almost all the way down. We went slowly out of Bangkok, past old-style teak houses, banana fields (some fruits nearly in arm reach of the window), temples, little ramshackle houses built among canals with little pot-covered bridges connecting them to land, until we reached a town where we needed to get a ferry across a river.

This required a wait: our ferry didn’t depart for an hour.

On the other shore, we found a beautiful blue train painted with white river scenes (this was not our train) and another hour-long wait. More confident in the truth of this timetable than the ferry’s, we set off exploring. We found: temples setting up for fairs, a graveyard at a Chinese temple, brightly painted houses built on shallow water alongside the tracks. An interesting old British guy who’d lived in SE Asia for large chunks of his life directed up to a cheap ice cream stand on the platform (where 4 bird cages hung beside our train, for no reason we could deduce). I am not convinced that pandan is a wise ice cream flavour.

The windows on this train didn’t open quite so far and the temperature had climbed. We dozed. When awake, I saw rice fields followed by salt flats, dotted with little wooden huts, and occasional temples with corrugated iron roofs.

Then we entered a town. Walls so close to the window I’d barely have to put out my hand to have it broken off. Except it wasn’t walls, a second later, but: awnings pulled back, glimpses of food wares on the ground, shoppers pressing themselves to the more recessed bits of wall. Samut Songkhram market, on active train tracks.

The train station was right after the market ended and we disembarked quickly. Yet, by the time we re-entered it, we couldn’t tell a train had passed through only minutes earlier. Tables right up to the tracks, baskets and trays leaning against them, one or two vendors re-arranging their goods to look better, people browsing the stalls as if they walked on pavement.

Mostly it’s a food market, with the usual Thai fruits, vegetables and meats, and some highlights: frogs on sticks, crabs still twitching, a variety of tiny aubergines. Chilli peppers lay on the tracks at intervals, dropped, seeds spilled like dirt.

We wandered off to find a cold drink and hurried back, wanting to see the train pass through, but arrived minutes after the train retraced its route. It was as if the train hadn’t passed, had instead been devoured by the market. Only a little bit disappointed – hard to be sad when there’s a market on train tracks – we sought out a songtaew to the town Amphawa.

Over the steepest canal bridges I’ve encountered, along a long accidental walking detour that let us view coaches with gaudy illustrations on their sides, through a temple, along narrow walkways between houses, a crowded market lane and up another steep bridge, to:

A floating market.

Long, narrow boats, equipped with all the pans and grills and ingredient-pots required for their menu item, tethered at the base of stone steps where customers sat on tiny plastic stools. Waitress-types organised the diners on the steps and passed requests onto the various boats. Meals were passed to the shore on long poles.

It was pretty traditional, selling many kinds of Thai food, instead of the farang-targeted floating markets in Bangkok. Because that’s the thing: Amphawa is a Thai tourist destination. The market along the shore sold many Thai sweets, t-shirts with Thai writing on them (instead of the offensive/”funny” ones for farang) and a very different set of toys/gifts to, say, the night bazaar in Chiang Mai. (Not a single wooden frog.) We ate on the steps by the floating market – scallops, fried squid-cakes, pad thai and orange iced tea – and watched boats full of monks or life-jacketed Thai tourists float past. One boat’s engine was painted with bright spots.

For a while afterwards we wandered along the shore-side market, seeing very few white faces. As the sun crept towards the horizon, we returned to a car park area where we’d seen orange Bangkok buses. Tori spoke to the driver of one: a privately hired bus for a Thai tour group, but he’d give us a ride back up to the city. They didn’t quite have enough real seats so I sat on a plastic chair beside Tori’s seat. Before too long, we were away.

This bus was so much fun. The Thais in the group wore matching shirts and clutched bags full of market goods. A big stack of bagged fruit lay at the front. Up the road towards Bangkok, the bus pulled over at a roadside market so they could buy big bags of salt, produced in the flats nearby. The orange sunset reflected stunningly in the flats as the tour group dispersed. A while later the driver rounded them up and we returned to the road. The group then conducted a raffle of amulets, with 4 or 5 to give away. A boy next to us cheered delightedly when he won one. I didn’t need to understand Thai to understand the part where a member of the group thanked the driver and organisers. (I’m starting to learn numbers, so when the raffler called out seat numbers I recognised a few. “Sip-song!” “Sip!”) Finally we got dropped off at a bus station where we caught a regular bus up towards Silom and, before it entered the soldier-occupied zone at night, jumped off to get a tuk-tuk in a different direction back to Tori’s house.

We spent over 12 hours on this adventure. Tiring but so, so worth it. Almost everywhere we turned, we found awesome things.

Vietnamese visa, plans, Chao Mae Tuptim shrine, night markets

I got my passport back from the Vietnamese embassy today, complete with full-page visa-sticker that lets me in for one month, commencing May 2nd. For the week before that, I’ll be in Laos; I’ve just booked a flight to Udon Thani, on the Thai side of the border, launching point for a popular land crossing over the Friendship Bridge, where I can acquire my Laos visa and get a taxi to Vientiane. After Vietnam I’ll go to Cambodia before returning to Thailand, hopefully to go somewhere fun with Tori on her meanly short half-term break. (Malaysia or India, fingers crossed.)

Excitement!

The Vietnam visa office is really boring: through a little side door, not the gate, along a corridor and into a plain room with metal chairs and a glass-fronted counter. The visa forms, uncomplicated photocopies, sit in a tray. I assume the rest of the embassy is more exciting, hidden away from tourists.

I’ve been avoiding the Silom-area redshirts since my Monday visit, after reports of bamboo stakes and a little bit more readiness to resort to violence from both sides, although so far there’s been none. Around what I’ve dubbed Embassy Central (a lot of them are walking distance from Phloen Chit skytrain station) are more redshirts, including a bamboo-and-tyres semi-blockade manned by a small number of guys. I walked unharmed through it to visit the Chao Mae Tuptim shrine – famous for its offerings of many hundred wooden/stone penises – after handing in my passport at the embassy yesterday. (Due to my usual last-minute conduct, I coughed up a bit extra to get the visa processed in 2 days, not 5.)

I took some pictures at the Chao Mae Tuptim shrine, but to keep this post work-safe I’ll just put links here to the images:

Picture 1 – The spirit house for Chao Mae Tuptim, tucked into a corner of the Swissôtel compound. The guards are happy to let visitors to the shrine past the barrier.

Picture 2 – Some of the penises stacked against the back wall. Mostly plain, with the odd decorated exception.

Picture 3 – Penises and figurines, a bit jumbled, covered in leaves. The slight dilapidation of the shrine adds to its beauty.

Picture 4 – This shrine certainly rewards a closer look, with all kinds of penises tucked away among the simpler ones. My favourites, not pictured, are penises with legs and, tucked underneath, a penis-and-balls of their own. A cat nibbled on fish bones among them, after earlier being draped across the front of the spirit house like an offering.

If you’re curious about why, exactly, this shrine is full of penises, I recommend reading this excellent article that details the author’s investigations after that same curiosity.

I then visited the Jim Thompson house, full of interesting artifacts collected by an expat in the 1950s and 1960s. I loved the 19thC Chinese mouse maze-house, in which mice played for children’s amusement or, painted, ran around subject to the placing of bets by adults. In the same room, porcelain deer heads hung over the door – a Chinese product for the European market. A gallery of old texts was also fantastic.

With Tori and alone, I’ve been to several night markets within walking distance:
• Lumphini, reminiscent of the Chiang Mai night bazaar in what it sells, with an old building and tree-shrine in the middle of the market.
• Klong Toei, a very local market, selling every part of various animals, where we saw pig heads lying under tables and a gigantic bag of cinnamon, and Tori bought curious pear-shaped gourds. Using our combined imaginative skills, we’ve dubbed them the “pear gourds”.
• The market just across the road from Tori’s sidestreet – she’s not sure of its name – a temporary set-up of stalls on uneven ground, with two lanes of many delicious foods. Tori got fried fish things, I got a curry with an egg on top. I’m happy that I can buy street food here and it normally won’t be too spicy-hot for me to eat (although there’s usually some pain).

On Saturday we’re going on an adventure, Charlie!

Some redshirt-related links

Via Tori and my own prodding of the internet:

→ #redshirts is the twitter hashtag.

→ Women Learning Thai has several good posts:
1. Signs of the Time, which translates many of the banners, t-shirts, signs and so on around the protests, with insights into some of the redshirts’ grievances and demands.
2. Ratchaprasong Resort, with photos and some commentary on another redshirt hotspot that, like Silom, looks mostly cheerful and peaceful.

→ From back in March, Gavin Gough photographs a big redshirt rally. Really great photos there.

→ Legal Nomads has some coverage, including celebrating Songkran in Bangkok, with pictures of waterfighting redshirts, and a post immediately after the 10th April violence. Good link lists. Legal Nomads is also on twitter, with great photos and updates.

→ Tori, in her The Streets of Bangkok guise, gives some little details.

→ The BBC is reporting pretty well, with this being their latest. It’s odd to see an article about the area I was wandering around in earlier!

A couple more pictures, taken after I left the coffee shop:

Still peaceful, although the sheer quantity of soldiers and riot police – present because the redshirts had intended to march, which never materialised – increasingly weighed on me. It’s unsettling, even though a lot of them lounged around, eating, and I saw more posing with Thai civilians for photos.

Redshirts in Bangkok

As many of you probably know, the protest group popularly called the redshirts has been out in the streets of Bangkok for over a month. Most of the time, encounters have been peaceful – with the big exception of May 10th, when at least 21 people died and hundreds were injured in a clash between redshirts and the army.

I can’t offer any analytical insight into the protests’ cause; I know painfully little about the grievances of the redshirts and the motivation of those who oppose them. I have, however, seen some of the redshirts. There’s a big camp around Silom, on the edge of Lumphini Park, an area Tori and I have passed through a few times. It’s the nearest metro and skytrain area, and the songtaew I take from near her house to get here stops right outside the redshirt camp.

The BBC seems to be reporting quite tamely and informatively, as is its fashion, but I don’t know what other world presses are saying. Several friends living or visiting here have received worried emails from friends abroad. (My parents are surprisingly quiet. Perhaps, as dad worried, the Icelandic ash has buried them Pompeii-like. Or my complete lack of incident when I visited during the 2008 protests has stemmed any concern.)

So I can only offer my view, which is purely as an onlooker. Visual, predominantly. (Even here, a little way up the road from their occupied junction, I can hear the redshirt loudspeakers.)

This is part of what it looks like today:

A lot of these people come from outside the city, so lack homes here. Hence the washing lines and people lying around and sleeping on mats.

There’s also a stall selling red shirts:

Here are some cheerful redshirts from the most recent Saturday:

So far the redshirts have smiled/waved (especially when we get cameras out), blanked us, or looked at us a bit oddly. I guess far fewer farang are going near the camps after the violence on the 10th. I’ve never felt unsafe passing through their camp – not that I linger too long, and I don’t intend to hang around at evening/nighttime, when clashes are more likely.

Today, after crossing the road from the camp, I found the Si Lom metro station entrance – open two days ago – closed off, and police with riot gear hanging around its base. Up on the walkway between the metro station and the Sala Daeng skytrain station are dozens of men in fatigues, with rifles. On the pavement at the skytrain station’s base are more fatigued men, with rifles and riot gear, and barbed wire forcing pedestrians onto the road in places. This is quite odd, to me. I’ll emphasise straight away that the situation here is still peaceful – the guys are sitting around looking hot and bored, except for the one who posed with a Thai civilian for a photo – but it’s an observant, waiting atmosphere. I hope it doesn’t turn into violence later. Not really for my sake – I reckon I can keep myself safe, and right now the street’s full of pedestrians and the Thai army/police don’t seem to have a history of just opening fire with bystanders everywhere, and I’ll be long gone by dusk or if everyone else starts clearing off – but for all the people involved.

Some of the armed guys:

I’m not sure how this is all going to resolve itself, really. In a week, the yellowshirts will join in. In a week or so, I’ll probably go to Cambodia; am waiting on Tori’s schedule to determine my plans and when we can do some bits of travel together. It affects me so little. My next blog post will probably be about a tree covered in dresses, for the spirit said to live inside the tree. I know so little – some Bangkok bloggers have gone talking to the redshirts, I’ll have to scrounge up links from Tori – and, if I chose, I could utterly ignore it, like a lot of farang do. But I know enough that I do wonder how this is going to resolve, as waiting for it to fizzle out hasn’t worked for anyone, opening fire doesn’t seem to be a popular or preferred method in this country (thankfully), and the Prime Minister shows no sign that I can see of bowing to the redshirts’ demands. More knowledgeable people can probably make guesses. I’ll just see what happens.

Songkran

“People are throwing water about!” complained a tourist in our hotel. “Water from the canal!”

Well, if you visit Chiang Mai during Songkran…

The Thai New Year falls in April, and is celebrated around the 13-15th with the festival of Songkran, a central activity of which is the days-long waterfight. In Chiang Mai, this centres around the square moat surrounding the old part of the city.

We bought little buckets with pink plastic-string attached to their handles, which is held onto while the bucket is thrown into the moat for a re-fill. Yes, the water is a bit dirty. No one cares. A road runs alongside the moat, with pavement in-between tarmac and water. Pick-up trucks, songtaew, tuk-tuks, motorbikes and boring cars inched slowly along it, with people on all but the latter joining in by some fashion: splashing or being splashed. People from the country come into the city on their pick-ups, with a barrel of water (often blocks of ice are added) and plastic bowls or pans to splash each other, motorcyclists, pedestrians and people who walk among the vehicles. Stalls sell buckets and a variety of water-pistols. We stood on the pavement and got thoroughly soaked, while returning the favour to countless passersby. The more traditional Songkran method is to pour water over each other’s shoulders, and I certainly got a lot of that. Pistol-fulls in the face, buckets over my head and general chaotic splashing all featured heavily too. Passing Thai men daubed our cheeks in white paint or powder: odd warpaint, an invitation to splash. At one point, an open-sided bus from the zoo drove past with people in panda suits. I ran out into the road to splash one of them. Elsewhere, at an intersection of two roads, not quite by the canal, speakers blared Western party music and the traffic moved especially slowly, giving it an odd outdoor club feel. Throughout the city’s major roads, people stood at the roadside to splash passersby. Tori and I visited Worarut market, near our hotel, and ran a gauntlet both ways. A fun, if cold, gauntlet. Lots of ice water.

I actually got my very first Songkran splash at Doi Suthep, the temple in nearby mountains that I adored on my last visit. In the hot season, it’s a very different place: lively, full of stalls and Songkran banners (featuring the Thai zodiac, identical to the Chinese except for the replacement of one animal with the elephant) and performances of traditional and hilltribe dances by children. I loved it as much as the quiet, drip-drop and bell-ringing place I saw in 2008.

Songkran in Chiang Mai:

Up at Doi Suthep:

It was such a fun way to see in the near year.

On the 13th, besides waterfighting, I saw the procession of the central Buddha images from each temple in the city. They varied hugely: a great gold Buddha on tiered stands covered in mirror-tiles, smaller wooden Buddha, one that looked jade, one with an elephant, some standalone and some in pagoda-like structures. The procession also included men and women and children in various traditional Thai and hilltribe outfits. The crowd here was tamer, concentrated on splashing each Buddha with jasmine-scented water bought in buckets or plastic bags. The water that runs off the Buddha is blessed, and is collected by the crowd to pour on each other. Tori and I splashed many on the way back to our hotel. When we went out later to Worarut market, they were still going past. Redshirts rode alongside, not causing any trouble – we’ve only seen them cheerful, waving – I suppose being confrontational by their mere presence in this important procession.

Trying to avoid Songkran is difficult, as we discovered on other days. The traffic jams make movement in a car painfully slow, while stepping onto the pavement means getting drenched. By nightfall it’s calmed down, with the night market its usual self, almost as if Songkran never happened.

For those who remain in the countryside, Songkran is conducted differently. Groups of people, young and adult, stand on the roadside with a hose constantly flowing, aimed at passing motorbikes and vehicles, used to fill a barrel which in turn supplies the bucket-fulls. Motorbikes just get a drenching. When a pick-up with a water-supplied group in it drives past, coming to or from Chiang Mai, a brief but enthusiastic fight ensues. Usually it’s a one-volley fight, but some drivers slow right down. Others cower and try to gesture for no water, please! This wish is generally granted for people on motorbikes, but not the pick-up truck groups.

Tori’s family has a house a short way out of Chiang Mai, so Tori, Penny and I went there for a day and a night. Tori and I spent several hours on the roadside with a friendly group, who offered us water for our buckets, drinking water and beer (Singh is vaguely palatable, Leo is not), drenching many people on passing vehicles, getting splashed regularly in return. Grins and laughter and “sawaa dee pe mai” all-round.

We returned to Chiang Mai on the 16th to find Songkran gone, not a single bucket or hose in sight except those being used for more mundane, everyday purposes.