Occupy Lopburi

I've left Sakon Nakhon to begin four months travelling through Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia (probably but not necessarily in that order). I've come up to the city of Chiang Mai in northwestern Thailand to celebrate Songkran, the Buddhist New Year celebrated with a massive water festival that takes over the country but is particularly dynamic in this city. I'm currently sitting in an internet cafe just down the street from my hostel. A black bobtail cat has settled on my lap and is complaining shrilly and nipping my fingers when I stop petting him, even though I've explained that I'm paying a dollar an hour to sit here and that it's only a matter of time before he sends me into a sneezing fit (it took 20 minutes). 

I will call you Bitey.

I came up here after bussing south from my “hometown” of Sakon Nakhon to Bangkok. I’m not a big fan of Bangkok- it’s fascinating and exciting, but also sweltering, filthy, noisy, crowded, and overwhelming (I don’t even like Manhattan that much for similar reasons). So I arrived, spent the night, and left the majority of my possession to (hopefully) collect dust in the storage room of a cheap hotel under the skytrain tracks. Accounts settled, I stuffed a backpack with six or seven changes of clothes and caught a cheap, open-air train north. As I sat on the train and watched the slums and cement of the city gradually and then completely give way to the vivid green of the countryside, I thought of a snake shedding its skin. 

Within two hours we were sailing a rattling vessel through the emerald sea of rice fields, flushing tall white birds from their stalking among the stalks.

These cheap trains are local, so they stop at quaint little railroad stations in small towns. 

Women with bags of iced coffee and noodles hop onto the train before it even stops moving. We- a Dutch girl named Annemarie who I met on the platform in Bangkok and I- watched the triangular transaction of a monk buying coffee. A female vendor handed the bag of sweet iced coffee to a male passenger, who gave it to the monk, took the monk’s money, and handed it to the woman. She made change and handed it to the passenger, who handed it to the monk, and everyone exchanged wais (bows) of varying depth. I clarified the purpose of the odd dance to Annemarie, who had only been in the country a few weeks: women cannot physically interact with monks outside of religious situations, not even to hand them objects.

Back out into the rice fields to watch small villages and the occasional splashy color of a local wat punctuate their otherwise interrupted green. 

It took about four hours to reach Lopburi. Lopburi is an unremarkable town with a few interesting ruins. For those of you making travel plans, it is a good day trip before moving on to Sukhothai. I didn't know that, so I took a dingy hotel room that smelled oddly of dog, dropped off my things, and started to explore.

The first ruin I stumbled across was Phra Narai Ratchaniwet, the palace of King Narai.

It's a little more recent than I really like my ruins, having been completed in 1677 and abandoned not much later by King Mongkut (fictionalized by Yul Brenner’s pectoral muscles in The King and I) before being restored in the late 19th century. 

Partly designed by French architects, the European aesthetic is very evident in the layout of the place and the building structures. It was quite a lovely place, but that mix of styles results in a sort of odd incoherence.

I did like the contrast of crumbling brick against the snowy white walls and massive burgundy doors:

I also enjoyed that the place was effectively deserted, at least by humans- there were plenty of dogs and pigeons. It felt like an ancient ghost town. 

After meandering around there for a while I went back out into the town in search of older ruins. One 11th century structure, Prang Khaek, perches on the island of a grassy roundabout with stream of traffic flowing around it. The modern town has grown to bustle around these ancient places. 

I would have liked to explore Prang Khaek a more closely, but I was prevented by squatters. Unlike Occupy Wall Street, these occupiers have no lofty (if jumbled) goals of social change in mind. Their demands are for mango and bananas.

Monkeys run this town. They're everywhere. And they're utterly fearless. 

I've mentioned before that I don't like monkeys. I think they're gross. And after visiting Lopburi, I'm convinced that they are not only gross, but are also the terrorists of the animal world. Even the locals seem intimidated by them. And they're aggressive- I was carrying a can of diet coke and one of them advanced on me, ready to grab it from my hand. I squealed like a child and tossed it away before he could. 

So I wasn't thrilled when I got to Prang Sam Yot, an impressive Hindu-turned-Buddhist temple, and found that it was monkey central. 

This 14-year-old with a big stick presented himself as my bodyguard, and showed me around while swinging a stick at the monkeys and practicing his English. ("Good Evening!" "Well, it's only 3 p.m., but well done anyway.")

See the people in the background feeding those horrible beasts? Awful.

 The ruins were worth seeing, even though I seem to have ended up with slightly fuzzy pictures because I felt vulnerable to the wild beasts around me while peering through a viewfinder.

Then my 14-year-old friend directed me to go inside the temple. "Mai ling, chai?" ("No monkey, yes?") "Mai ling, mai ling, mai pen rai." ("No monkeys, no problem.") 

He was right. There weren't any monkeys. Just rats. And bats. And nothing much more interesting than that, not that I would have taken a photo anyway, as the dimness would have set off the flash and upset the bats (I'm assuming). 

As I was exiting the temple, there was a medium sized monkey in the doorway, blocking the exit. I considered calling the 14-year-old for help, but then I remembered that I had helped raise a Rottweiler and posed for photos with tigers. So instead I squared my shoulders and clapped loudly and told him to "move it, buddy!” at which point he started screeching and threat-facing and leaping back and forth across the doorway. For the second time that day I squealed, stumbled back into the bat- and rat-infested temple, and cowered there until the teenage monkey-wrangler rescued me from an almost certain mauling and quarantine due to having contracted a monkey-borne death virus. So that was fun. 

Drained from this encounter, I went back to my dingy hotel room for a late nap, woke at 8 pm and went to find some dinner, only to find that the town had shut down. It was quiet and empty but for the monkeys, who watched me walk to 7/11 like creepy sentinels from their perches on the overhanging awnings. 

In the morning I went and bought a train ticket to Phitsanulok and a mango for breakfast, which I took inside the grounds of Wat Phra Si Ratana Mahathat, a gorgeous and blessedly monkey-free 12th century Khmer wat. 

Again, it was just me wandering around. There weren't even any dogs this time. Just me and the pigeons. 

Someone had been through and beheaded all the human figures, but I haven't been able to find any information on what malevolent invaders did that. Whoever they were, they were very thorough. There isn't a statue or carving with a head in the whole place (note: I’ve since learned that French explorers had a habit of lopping off the heads of statues for collecting and exhibiting. I’m not sure if that was the case here, but as the French were wandering around this area it seems like a good possibility.)  

I had a few hours to kill, so I climbed up about 15 feet to the shady doorway of the main temple and sat there catching some cool breezes, writing in my journal, eating my mango, and even reserved a room for the next leg of the trip.

It was a pleasant way to spend a morning.

Next: Phitsanulok and the ruins at Sukhothai.