We are in Myanmar, where there is not electricity all the time but there is, sometimes, the internet. Today we went to Kyaiktiyo to see a big golden rock, Harriet poured some kind of sweet noodle drink on my head, and we came back to Yangon. So we are having a fine time! We will have a fuller update at some point.
We went to Hong Kong again, and this time I took a few more pictures. We did not actually do very much in Hong Kong – mostly we had a lot of drama with telephones and the various ways in which they can go wrong – but we ate a lot of delicious food and wandered around.
The first place we went to was the Temple of Ten Thousand Buddhas, which you can learn about here. This was reasonably close to where we were staying, in Sha Tin, though that did not mean that it was easy for us to get there. We did have a nice walk along a canal. In Hong Kong, even the tree roots are orderly:
Eventually we made it to the mountain where the temple is and we started climbing up. The way is lined with statues of monks, each individually done:
I could easily add twenty pictures of monk-statues to this, but I will restrain myself:
They are fine-looking fellows.
Then after all of that, there’s a temple at the top, with more statues and fine views:
Also there are some rather perplexing statues, not really explained:
You’re not supposed to take pictures of the main shrine, but it does have a huge number of Buddhas in it:
After all of that, we went back down the hill.
After that we went to the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, which mostly seemed to have a very comprehensive exhibit on the life of Bruce Lee, which we were not allowed to photograph. Harriet learned a great deal about the life of Bruce Lee.
The next day we went and met our friends Jenny and Anthony and their children in Kowloon Park, which is very pleasant and will keep your children entertained all day. Here they are attempting to get bird flu from some sick pigeons:
Some time after that we spent a great deal of time attempting to meet up with my friend Jace for lunch, ending up going through a building structure that looked like this:
And later that night we wandered around looking for dinner and the children were very interested in a store selling dice:
And that’s what happened, mostly.
Koh Kret is an island in the Chao Praya north of Bangkok. Here is a map. It is technically part of Nonthaburi, which is the second-largest city in Thailand which you probably haven’t heard of because it is just north of Bangkok and functionally part of the same metropolis with the minor difference that they prefer bicycle tuk-tuks (called saamlo, สามล้อ) rather than motorized tuk-tuks. Also they like roosters a lot. Previously Harriet and I went there to eat durian because they have the best durian. Also we fed the catfish, as they have big catfish there.
Now. It is not hard to get to Nonthaburi. What you do is you get on the hotel boat to Saphan Taksin, then you get on the express boat going upriver and you get off at Nonthaburi, which is the last stop. This takes a while, but it’s a pleasant trip. When you get to Nonthaburi, there is supposed to be a longtail boat which you can ride for 100 baht to Koh Kret. But it turns out this longtail boat does not run on weekends, which, honestly, would seem to be when most people want to visit Koh Kret. Some enterprising fellows tried to sell us a private boat tour for a preposterous amount of money, which might have been tempting had we not just spent an hour in two other boats. So instead we got a taxi to a wat across from the island where there’s a ferry.
Here is the thing about taking taxis in Bangkok and, it turns out, Nonthaburi, when you are not Thai: there is a great deal of uncertainty involved. (Maybe there is uncertainty involved as well if you are Thai, I don’t know.) You get in a taxi and you tell the driver where you want to go and sometimes there’s confusion about what exactly it is that you’re saying but eventually there’s a lot of nodding and smiling and agreement, unless the taxi driver has decided that he doesn’t want to go to where he thinks you’re going, in which case you have to find another taxi. (Taxi drivers refusing to take you anywhere is technically illegal in Thailand, but so is, for instance, riding motorcycles on sidewalks.) There’s a further moment of doubt where you wait to see if the taxi driver will turn on the meter – the official rate for taxis is shamefully low, though that’s supposed to change in December, and often taxi drivers would like to bargain a rate for the distance, though they are disappointingly unambitious in the rates they’re trying to charge most of the time, unless it is raining in which case all rules go out the window. But once the meter is running and you are sitting in air-conditioned splendor in the back of the taxi you are still not entirely off the hook, because it’s hard to tell if the taxi driver is actually going where you want to go. About half the time, this is not the case. This is not generally out of malice – I don’t think that’s ever happened to us. But there are several reasons why a taxi driver might be going somewhere that is not where you thought you should be going. One is that taxi drivers work long hours and a large number of them are on terrifying chemical cocktails to keep them awake, which can lead to, among other things, not understanding where you said you wanted to go. Another is that Bangkok is laid out in an entirely counterintuitive way and the traffic is terrible, and often the shortest way to get north is to go south, east, and west first. And finally, the taxi driver may not have really understood what you said and is making his best guess about where you want to go based on his knowledge of where farangs go.
You might think that these problems might be solved by pulling out Google Maps on a telephone, but that generally causes more trouble than it is worth, as taxi drivers generally cannot understand maps – Bangkok is not a city that has been served well by cartography, up to and including Google Maps – and what will happen is that the taxi driver will pull over and find other taxi drivers and confer with them about where it is that you possibly want to go, a discussion that very soon veers far away from your map and leads you back to where you started.
So. Getting from Nonthaburi to Koh Kret. We got in a taxi and I told the taxi driver the name of the wat where the ferry was, a name that Google transliterates as Wat Sanam Nua, and there was some back and forth where I explained we were going to Koh Kret – a popular destination in Nonthaburi, albeit not really that popular destination for non-Thai tourists – and he agreed to take us and seemed to understand where we were going, and all seemed well. Then he started suggesting that we might want to go to Wat Pho or Wat Phra Kaew, two wats commonly visited by tourists with small children, and we laughed that off and explained that no, we really did want to go to Wat Sanam Nua and Koh Kret. Meanwhile there was terrible traffic, and he was finding alternate routes. These alternate routes took us across the river, which generally is not what you want to do when the wat you want to go to is north of you on the same side, but not outside of the realm of possibility. Then we started going south on the wrong side of the river, which also seemed possible – the road we were on was faster than most – but soon it became clear that we were incontrovertibly going in the wrong direction, and were, in fact, closer to home than to Nonthaburi, at which point we pulled the driver over and explained again that we wanted to go to Wat Sanam Nua and Koh Kret and I handed him my phone, which he examined very carefully with a magnifying glass – in this case, this strategy worked, because the shape of Koh Kret is easily recognizable – and the taxi driver laughed and laughed and turned out to speak English, he thought we’d wanted to go to some other Wat Sanam Nua in Bangkok, and turned around and took us to the wat, which took about forty-five minutes. The moral of this story is that I cannot pronounce anything in Thai to save my life.
At the wat there was a ferry, which cost all of four baht for three people, which left immediately and then we were on Koh Kret. Koh Kret is an island bereft of cars which is pleasant to wander around and eat snacks; it’s a lot like Bang Krachao, to the south of us. Historically, it was inhabited by the Mon, who made pottery there and still do. We did not buy any pottery, but we had a fine time.
Okay, here are some pictures.
Here is Wat Sanam Nua, where we took the ferry from:
Here is northeast tip of Koh Kret, viewed from the ferry:
Here is Harriet doing a complicated dance with a leaf and a fan:
Here is an inlet and a small boat:
Here is an old kiln which has fallen into disuse:
A shrine in the market made of broken pottery:
Another shrine on one of the paths around the island:
A monkey and an elephant prostrate themselves before Buddha:
An enormous seated Buddha to the north of Koh Kret – I think this is Wat Bang Chak:
It’s a nice place. The next time we go there, we’ll just take a taxi from here.
We went to Koh Kret the other day and I finished a big slug of work so maybe I will write something about that some time. But! More immediately exciting than that was what happened when we arrived home. First there was an enormous moth in the shower, which I caught under a hat:
It was a surprisingly amiable creature:
Maybe some enterprising lepidopterist searching the internet for unidentified hawk moths can tell us what it is.
Then! When I was made to take the moth out to the balcony, it turned out that we now have a lizard living on the ceiling of the balcony:
I am not sure how a lizard gets to the fourteenth floor. But he’s been living here for a few days – he’s been squeaking at night.
The Chatrium is turning over a new leaf! Okay, that’s all for now.
It has been a while since we posted anything here, which is mostly my fault, because I neglect to take pictures of things and also because we neglect to do anything interesting. Yesterday we tried to go to the zoo at the top of a department store but that was closed because it was a Buddhist holiday, so I can’t really say anything about that. We did go to Hong Kong, and I mostly forgot to take any pictures, except for this, of a beach on Lamma Island:
We were staying on a houseboat, but it’s hard to get good pictures of a houseboat if you’re on it, so that’s what happened. Obviously we could have gotten pictures of it from the little sampan that took us to it, but we didn’t remember that. Next time. We’re going back next month, I think?
And then Kim went off to Los Angeles to see a baby, and Harriet and I were left all alone, so we went to the beach. More particularly, we went to a place called Dolphin Bay, which is on the coast south of Hua Hin, about four hours from Bangkok. Dolphin Bay is a resort full of children mostly because it has a water slide, like so:
You can imagine. The children go up and down the slide all day. There are probably other things to do at Dolphin Bay but we mainly did that and Harriet is now reasonably good at going down water slides. There’s a beach, but we didn’t do very much swimming because the water was full of enormous jellyfish:
The jellyfish come in “clear” and “brown” varieties, of which this is the “clear,” bigger than the brown ones we saw in the water. I don’t know which if any of these are poisonous. If anyone wants to send us a field guide to jellyfish identification, maybe that would be useful? Probably there is an app for that. But even though they proudly declared the end of the rainy season last week, it has rained and rained this week, so we couldn’t have spent that much time on the beach even if the water hadn’t been full of jellyfish.
The other thing there is to do at Dolphin Bay is to take a boat and go to Monkey Island. “Monkey Island” is not a very Thai-sounding name, but does not tell me any better, so there you are. It’s the big seaward island to the southeast of Dolphin Bay. It is an island that is full of monkeys and does not seem to have any people. The local fishermen are happy to take you there. Our boat was dog-themed and showed the Thai flair for baroque wiring:
From a distance Monkey Island looks like this:
Forbidding! Then you get closer and it looks like this:
There is a beach that is full of monkeys:
Really full of monkeys:
The fishermen bring bags full of bananas and when the boat gets close you throw the bananas to the monkeys and the monkeys eat them. Inevitably there’s a lot of speculation about whether or not the monkeys can swim. Of course they can:
We were not eaten by that monkey: the fisherman threatened him with a monkey-stick and he jumped off the boat and swam back to shore. Then we went to another island, closer to shore, which didn’t seem to have a name, so I will call it Non-Monkey Island:
That name is not entirely correct, as this island seemed to be inhabited by precisely one monkey, who wondered if he might come on our boat:
No. This monkey seemed to have some kind of history with our fisherman: possibly he had been punished by being exiled from Monkey Island? It’s hard to say. Maybe he was a brave pioneer. One does wonder how the monkeys ended up on Monkey Island and (mostly) not on Non-Monkey Island; one wonders if the fishermen installed them there so that they might be able to ferry the tourists out to see them. Clearly what the monkeys should do is to go back to the mainland and invade Dolphin Bay which is full of food and also has a water slide. Go forth, brave monkeys:
More later, if anything ever happens to us.
Here Harriet demonstrates the proper technique for eating soup dumplings:
This phone is not very good at taking pictures, but you can kind of get a sense of how it looks when the rain’s coming in:
There are no longer protesters blocking the zoo. Here, a Malayan sun bear and a water monitor face off over a piece of bread someone threw them:
The bear won.
Having just returned from the U.S., we are more jetlagged than not, which means that everyone keels over at seven in the evening and is wide awake at 5 a.m. if not sooner. It’s basically a disaster. So this morning we went to go look at the squid market which is just north of us, on Charoen Krung soi 60. This is a late night affair, and even by six it’s shutting down. But there are still plenty of squid on display:
There are a few crabs and some prawns for good measure, but this street is almost entirely squid and octopus. A teuthologist would be astounded, or perhaps horrified, by the variety of squid that you can get here. Some appears to be frozen; most of it is displayed on ice.
The prices seem reasonable but we did not buy any squid. Next time we are up this early!
After a lot of trouble and an overnight stay at LAX that was basically the worst thing that’s happened to us since the railroad station in Siliguri, we are back in Bangkok, tired but happy. The Chatrium’s restaurants have clearly upped their game for the new year:
That does not say “Emptying Tasty Duck” as I first assumed. Somehow we have managed to go a full year without eating at this astonishing restaurant.
Also the rainy season is in full swing, and the Chao Praya is once again full of water hyacinth and garbage boats cleaning it up:
And this blog is renewing its commitment to documenting the reptiles of Bangkok, which is really what’s most important. This gecko was outside the 7/11:
