Bringing you up to date... Almost (Bangkok)

I tried to type something here yesterday and the sheer size of the task scared me away. Over two weeks without an typing will result in an economical entry but I will endeavour to mention most events transpired.

Way back to Bangkok
Bangkok itself isn't particularly memorable; we visited the Grand Palace, two of the thousands of wats; basically shrines/temples, the Tiger Temple, a floating market, the Snake museum and several bars. Bangkok was also where I saw Chelsea lift the F.A. Cup the scummers.

The Grand Palace was large, with lots of fancy architecture; mostly Wats and a gun museum. It looked nice but other than that I cannot really get that excited about it which is a shame as a lot of people there did. Because of the sheer number of Wats in Bangkok- and Thailand as a whole -they just blend into the landscape as a row of terraced houses do in Britain. A pointed fact being that British houses aren't gold plated and made from tiny mosaics of tile and mirror can be stated by Wat-lovers but I just tired of them. And now for the contradiction: Wat Po. This was good; a huge golden reclining Buddha lies chilling out as a steady stream of tourists whirl by trying to fit the entire guy into a 35mm shot.

The Grand Palace


To escape Bangkok we enrolled on a day long excursion to Kanchanaburi, 35km from Burma, to visit the floating, seemingly recession hit, market, the death railway bridge, the Tiger Temple and a Snake Museum.

Envisage a market, any market; think people shouting, low prices and an eclectic mix of both the old and the economically challenged. Next add one part Thailand, one part canal, stalls transformed into long boats, most, if not all that is sold is fruit and the cliental become a bunch of tourists there to gawp and spend either 50p on Dragon Fruit or 5 minutes arguing it's price before buggering off: You have the floating market. Okay, i'm being a bit negative on the old girl, she did provide an insight on how some Thai's probably once traded and made a living (about 50 years ago) but the exuberant foreign crowd made this little more than a exhibition. I did go four yards out of my way to purchase a mango and 'put something back' but it was quite a poor showing. Most of the purchasing power sourced either Sterling, Euros or Dollars. In fact, we managed to count, excluding the traders, maybe ten Thai's.

Floating Market


After the market we visited the snake museum at which we saw 'man hold cobra', 'cobra sharp TEETH, look AT the poison', 'watch as Mongoose fight the Cobra, LOOK AT THE MONGOOSE! Cobra can die in 5 minutes and Mongoose always winner' and of course the famous 'man who take on three snake AT THE SAME TIME'. The M.C. added to the entertainment here, he spoke good English but had a habit of littering his announcements with inappropriate over emphasisations. Watching a mongoose beat a Cobra in a fight was impressive, I never would have thought it. Later came the 'man who take on leaping snake; snake can leap 3 metres', perhaps purposefully the performer decided to slip over while spinning the snake and tossed it in our direction resulting a mass exodus of the front rows as the snake attempted to hurdle the small 3ft wall.

Stoopid Cobra Man


We took a brief detour to the death railway bridge; 258miles of railway between Bangkok, Thailand and Rangoon, Burma, was built by the Imperial Japanese Empire during World War II, to support its forces in the Burma campaign. Constructed by Prisoners of War (POWs) the name comes from the staggering number of deaths during the project: 116,000. It was simple a bridge and there wasn't really much of the history available to explain the devastation of the project. I did however find this humourous artwork on the museum wall:



Artwork in the Death Railway Museum.


Next stop was the Tiger Temple, here the Tigers are serene with the bliss of morphine and other opiates, sorry, I mean, er... [sic]

Next stop was the Tiger Temple, here the Tigers have, over the years, lived in peaceful co-existance with Buddhist monks. The lifestyle at Wat Pha Luang Ta Bua (yes it's another Wat) has calmed the Tigers as they too experience the benefits of the monks' tranquil teachings, restricting chains and allow tourists to gaze into their distantly glazed calm eyes. As the Tigers were being walked back to their cages, ah the cage: Standardised peaceful buddhist co-existance, one broke free and made a runner for the cages. As expected everyone shit themselves, "Stand still and tiger will not hurt you" were the calming words from a trainer. Yeah right, I thought, a huge cat is coming at me, 'I think i'll stand still'. Anyways, they caught him and chained him and humiliated him by allow us tourists to take turns walking him back.

Chiang Mai
Moving north we made Chiang Mai our next destination, here we took a day long Thai cooking course and pushed ourselves to some kind of limit with a three day jungle trek. The cooking course was great; every dish I cooked I ate so was stuffed. I can't wait to get home and try the recipes out.

Jungle trekking was also great fun. I was initially reluctant to take part: Climbing and Descending through dense jungle in 35^oC heat sounded painful; it was, but it was also extremely rewarding when we reached our destination. oh, and the beer: I've never worked harder for a ice cold beer than I did during these three days.

The first day consisted of an hour long Elephant ride during which the Elephant made damn sure we knew who was boss by spraying us with water every time we ventured close to rivers. I never really appreciated the size of these magnificent animals until, when asked to climb onboard, I had to walk on, and across, her head, then shoulder-blades before taking my seat in the cage.



Time to cool down


We were blesed with a friendly group of people to trek with and on the first evening we had several beers and generally talked a lot of shit. Day two was a solid six hours of walking with a one hour swimming break at a waterfall. Again, followed by beers. Day three saw us abandon our walking shoes (after two hours) and pad up for white-water rafting. As the 'captain' explained the instructions I was distracted by two mating Elephants in the distance. The instructions kept coming and so did the Elephant until eventually both went silent and where the Elephant disembarked we, on the contrary, boarded our vessel. The monsoon rains hadn't yet hit so the river wasn't too deep and it made for a pretty unadventurous course but it was still fun, swimming in the 3ft deep water was the best part.



White-water rafting.


Our next stop is Laos, and as mentioned in my previous post we were transported to their yesterday on the slowest, most uncomfortable boat that could have been designed. We arrived in Luang Prabang on Thursday 31st and after forty-five minutes of looking for a room, in the baking heat, carrying 20kgs, we found one. Amazingly we met up with the Irish lads from Kuala Lumpur before we set sail (tourist trails are exactly that!) and have been hanging out in rather un-Irish style the last couple of nights: Sober. OK, that brings the blog up to date. Hopefully I won't get so far behind again, though I know this to be a Fallacy.