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).
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| I will call you Bitey. |
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.
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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.")
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| 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.
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