Month: March 2010

Ayutthaya, Thailand (March 2010)

| kiell

Ayutthaya, not too far north of Bangkok, is a city built on the ruins of the former capital of Thailand–it was one of the most powerful and prosperous cities in Southeast Asia from the 1300s to the 1700s, and had a population of over a million near the end of its heyday. It was sacked in 1767 by the Burmese, and never recovered; the damage was bad enough that the Thai moved their capital to Bangkok.

We took the train to Ayutthaya from Bangkok, which was a great deal (tickets were 15 Thai Baht apiece, about 50 cents at the current exchange rates), and gave us the opportunity to see Bangkok with a very different perspective than we had had before. The train took us through more industrial areas of the city, past the old Don Meuang airport (the international hub until it was replaced by the shiny, modern Suvarnabhumi Airport) as well as miles of shanty towns built on the side of the railroad tracks, modest homes with families and kids and dogs, built from bamboo sticks, 2x4s, cinderblocks and corrugated metal, and past farms running controlled burns on the fields to prepare for the new crops.

On our first night in the city, we signed up for a ferry tour of a few ruins sites on the outside of the river (Ayutthaya is in the Chao Phraya river valley, and the main part of the city is surrounded on all sides by river, which was nice because it made it hard to get too lost). We went to a few wats (temples) that were kept in good shape, including Wat Phananchoeng, which is home to a what is supposedly Thailand’s largest Buddha image–this was one of the first actual wats we had been in since we got to Thailand, and it was beautiful and impressive. The next day we rented one-speed bikes to meander around the city, which was really pleasant and relaxing, and the weather was great. We spent the whole day visiting different wats throughout the city and exploring these crumbled and burned fascinating ruins. It was a very intense experience to be standing on the site of what must have been a very bloody and violent attack on an ancient superpower, one that effectively ended an entire kingdom.

One of the most interesting things about this city was that the ruins are interspersed throughout the city–we’d be biking past houses in a residential area, and come upon a clearing with the ruins of a wat, followed by a 7 Eleven and food carts. Some were in better shape, and while many were cordoned off into parks others had become a part of the urban landscape in the area, with kids in school uniforms playing around them.

We biked around U-Thong Road, the “frontage road” that ran around the city inside of the river’s boundaries, and got to explore a covered market in an extensive alley system (much larger than it looked from the tiny entrance we found), narrow little aisles filled with toys, clothing and shoes, produce, every cut of meat you could imagine (including a whole pig head), live eels trying to escape their confines, stands with hot coals and frying pans and noodles. We bought a pair of sandals for Daniel, and had the unique experience of trying very hard to communicate with someone who didn’t speak any English at all (you kind of forget about that staying in the more touristed areas), and the only Thai I’ve really figured out for sure is “hello” and “thank you”– the Thai phrasebook I have is nice, but I really haven’t gotten my brain all the way around the tonal language idea. In the rare case that I am able to get out an intelligible sentence a Thai person might understand, any follow-up questions are useless and I feel like a hard-headed American.

We stayed at a guesthouse called Tony’s Place on Naresuan Road Soi 1, a sweet little raised wooden structure painted sea-foam green like plenty of the guesthouses in Bangkok. It had a shower and toilet in the room, as well as an electrical outlet, which we came to miss in KhaoSan, and there was a restaurant on the main deck. We had some good food there–wide rice noodles with seafood, pineapple fried rice, and delicious fresh watermelon and pineapple shakes. Overall, it was great–check out the photos we took from the ruins!

Getting visas in Bangkok (March 2010)

| kiell

On our second full day in Bangkok, we got up early in the morning to go to the Chinese Embassy on the other side of the city to apply for visas. The guidebook listed the hours as 9am-11:30, so we left fairly early, caught a taxi, and showed the driver the address in the book. The taxi driver ended up getting pretty lost and, after stopping at a bathroom, pulled over by a pay phone, took our guidebook, and called the embassy to see where it actually was (pretty far behind us). The guidebook’s listed address was the same as on the embassy website, but it didn’t mention which soi (sidestreet) the embassy was on (it’s on Ratchadaphisek soi 3, if you’re looking for it, not soi 57!), and we arrived at the embassy around 11:45. We were frustrated, the taxi driver was frustrated, we were late, and we couldn’t tell which building the embassy was actually in, as it wasn’t marked.

We finally got up to the office around noon, hoping that they had after-lunch hours which weren’t listed. As we were walking to the door, a man walking out with a briefcase pointed to the hours listed on the door, and said that we would have to come back after the weekend to apply for a visa (which was a little confusing, since we hadn’t realized that it was Friday). He said he could process the visa for us though, which in retrospect was probably a poor choice; we were worried about not having enough time to get the visas we needed while in Bangkok though, and he offered same day processing for that afternoon. We agreed, and followed him outside where he helped us hurriedly fill out the forms, and charged us an excessive fee per visa.

At the time we assumed he was a visa clerk at the embassy, since he was leaving around closing time with a briefcase full of applications and even had a business card for himself as the “Assistant Chairman for the Chinese People Association (Thailand)”, but after looking back it’s more likely he ran a visa service for tourists like us, and charged us what he thought we’d be willing to pay. We didn’t actually have enough cash to complete the transaction that day, so we ended up coming back on Monday (after a stressful weekend of speculation as to whether or not we would ever see our passports again) to pick up our passports at the visa application center. The good news was we got our passports back with shiny new Chinese visas; the bad news is that we paid probably 2000 baht extra for each.

Getting our Chinese visas was not the highlight of the trip, but we ended up being luckier with the Indian ones. After leaving on Monday with our passports, we caught a bus down Ratchadaphisek to Sukhumvit to catch a second bus back to the KhaoSan area. As it turns out, the Indian embassy is near Sukhumvit, and since we had gone to the the Chinese embassy early in the morning we decided it couldn’t hurt to stop by and see what we needed to do. When we found the embassy there was a line out the door to get in, but apparently this wasn’t where you applied for a visa anyway; the guard at the door showed us a map, which had the visa application center about 1km away on Sukhumvit.

After getting slightly lost, we eventually found the building (Glashaus, on Sukhumvit soi 25) and made our way to the 15th floor. The guard at the door checked our bags and waved us through, where an English-speaking clerk explained to us that Indian visas for non-Thai residents take 5 working days to process, with no expedited service available. If we had waited until the next day to get our visas we would have been without our passports for the whole week and weekend, but since we were there on Monday we could get things finished up by Friday (a good thing especially, since we were hoping to be out of Bangkok by the weekend to avoid the protests scheduled for Sunday). We filled out the applications and submitted our information, paid what still seemed like too much due to the added fees for our US passports and the visa processing center, and left feeling poor, but more comfortable than last time since the person we gave all our money and passports to was actually sitting behind a desk. Tuesday we left Bangkok for Ayutthaya, the city built on the ruins of the former capital of Thailand–but that story is for the next post.

On Friday we returned and picked up our passports, feeling better about our experiences after listening to other people in the waiting room who had more problems (including the woman who had a ticket to fly to India the next day and was just submitting her passport, and the man who was leaving that afternoon and wanted to collect his passport before the official time). It feels pretty good to have our passports back and have the major work we had to do for the rest of our trip taken care of!

Bangkok Diaries (March 2010)

| kiell

We arrived in Bangkok late at night on March 3rd, caught a taxi straight to our guesthouse, and despite having gained six waking hours that day had a rather difficult time sleeping due to jet lag, techno bumping late into the night, and an unfortunately-placed air conditioner that dripped directly on our faces all night long. In the morning the area was much more bright and beautiful–hot pink and purple taxis, lush green leaves spilling out of guesthouse verandas, and yellow flags in rows fluttering over the streets.

We’ve been staying on Soi Rambutri, a prettier, quieter street by Thanon KhaoSan, Bankgok’s backpacker ghetto filled with the worst of the West–loud, sweaty, sunburned tourists showing fleshy patches of skin, hairy legs and bare shoulders. The whole neighborhood is narrow alley/streets filled with weaving cars, trucks, stinky tuk-tuks, loud motorbikes and plenty of pedestrians maneuvering over the red tiled pavement. The smaller streets don’t seem to have clearly-defined priorities: that is, Soi Rambutri might be a pedestrian thoroughfare until a motorbike comes barreling down it bobbing around the tourists and Thais alike, and taxis will sometimes drive straight at you and turn off or slow down at the last moment, or crawl past you so closely that you have to keep track of exactly where all of your toes are.

On KhaoSan you can buy anything you want–there are street food vendors everywhere (selling pad thai, rice dishes, grilled meat on sticks, papaya on ice, a plastic bag full of something to drink, sticky rice with mango, armies of sun-dried squid, a fish skewered through the face) clothing vendors (thai fisher pants, knockoff Armani suits, shoes and flipflops, oft-misspelled english joke t-shirts), stalls to buy tours to anywhere in Thailand and Cambodia, and plenty of aggressive taxi drivers and even more aggressive tuk-tuk drivers to get you where you want to go, for a price. You can also get Thai massage and fish massage (putting your feet in a tank where fish nibble your toes) while watching stray mangy dogs who seem very good natured for how hungry they must be amble by. We’ve passed by monks in gold-orange robes, a man with no legs scooting around on a skateboard, and kids swimming in the polluted offshoots of the Chao Phraya river. The air is warm and very humid, filled with contrasting smells of delicious grilled foods, cigarettes, car exhaust, raw sewage and incense.

So far, the city is a lot to take in; we’re currently north of Bangkok in Ayutthaya, the town built atop the ruins of Thailand’s former capital in the 14th-18th centuries. Next blog post: our adventure getting a Chinese visa in Bangkok!

Arthur’s Pass, New Zealand (February 2010)

| mradyfist

Our last trip in New Zealand was to Arthur’s Pass, a small town located in the middle of the impressive Southern Alps. We left Christchurch early Friday morning, and on the bus ride after passing by many cattle, llama and ostrich farms, were able to get our first good view of the mountain range with the sun coming over the ridge. We arrived at about 10am, and after having a quick cappuccino (drip coffee is pretty uncommon in New Zealand, most people drink instant coffee at home and espresso drinks are the norm at cafes, to our tongues’ delight and our wallets’ dismay), we walked to the visitor’s center down the pass road.

Originally we had intended to camp at one of the huts that are a part of the country’s extensive camping system, but the trailheads to both of the closest hut paths were at least 15 kilometers in either direction–and that was before beginning your ascent into the mountain to hike to the hut. Not having a car and not being very experienced mountain trampers (ahem–not experienced at all), we decided to camp at the flat, open site between the main road and the train tracks, which left a little to be desired and made us marvel at how great Minnesota’s state park system is.

We set up the mini tent in the softest spot we could find and in no time we became acquainted with the Kea that live in the park– the world’s only alpine parrot, which can only be found in NZ’s south island. They have dark green feathers mostly, apart from their brilliant fiery orange underwing feathers, and a long, loud call. The Kea are smart, strong, and comically brave and inquisitive–they have been known to destroy tents with their hooked beaks merely out of curiosity, according to the signs in the information center. A little Kea and a big, fat, disheveled-looking Kea landed at our site, and the smaller one jumped up on Daniel’s bag and stuck his face right in, emerging with a toilet paper prize. Before leaving for a hike, we Kea-proofed our tent as best we could (we were rewarded with only a smallish hole in our water bag).

We hiked for hours both of the days we spent in Arthur’s Pass. On our first day, we tried what we thought was the shortest-looking hike, the Avalanche Peak trail. In raw distance it was probably fairly short, but we never made it to the end; a serious trail in New Zealand is much more vertical than horizontal. We turned back before it was too late, and returned to ground level to enjoy some of the “flatter” hikes out to the Devil’s Punchbowl and Bridal Veil Falls, both of which were beautiful.

Day two was much more exhausting. We decided to attempt Avalanche Peak again, only this time along the more reasonable Scott Track–where we could have descended from the peak if we had made it all the way up the Avalanche Peak trail. The overall amount of climb and estimated time was the same though, 1000m of altitude gain to the top, and a 4-hour trek one way. The first half of the hike, from 700m altitude where the road lay to the bushline at approximately 1300m, took us through narrow avalanche paths of fallen rock, over natural stairways of exposed root systems of beech trees overgrown with plush moss, across waterfall-fed streams and under some dangling feathery lichens that seemed to be right out of the pages of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax. When we got to the bushline, where the trees and plants receded behind us the farther we hiked, the wind kicked up and the hike became a little more challenging. We scrambled over rocky paths on narrow-ish ridges with a precipitous drop in either direction, and we climbed high enough to be level with the line of snow on a nearby ridge. After a few false sightings of the peak (we could see it and it was so close, but then coming over the ridge would reveal more, steeper path) and coming to a point where the path looked much more daunting, we decided to have a snack and head back down: another four hours or so, which gave us an awesome view of a waterfall across the road, possibly one we had hiked to the day before, with a brilliant rainbow in its mist. We camped again that night and slept a little better having left our bags with our non valuable stuff in the shelter nearby, which made it possible to actually lie down in a straight line, sort of.

The next day we wandered around on the main road for a bit, and found some nice tourists from London who had rented a camper van who gave us a ride back into Christchurch. We stayed at Foley Towers, a sweet little garden-y backpacker with awesome rooms and staff (and also lots of little references to the show Fawlty Towers, which was amusing). We flew up to Auckland and had two relaxing nights with Nicole playing Zioncheck (Daniel’s family’s traditional Thanksgiving marathon card game) and Shanghai (Nicole’s family’s version of a similar game), and got to see the city Auckland at dusk with the streetlights coming on from the top of Mount Eden, where the air smelled like honey and we were surrounded by huffing and puffing mountain joggers. We took the bus to the airport on Wednesday afternoon, and began our journey to what was the first city entirely new to the both of us.