A Handful of Wats

Posted on 23 April 201423 April 2014 by Dan Visel

We’re back in Bangkok and everyone is fine, the city is hotter than ever. Maybe it will rain soon? By going to India, we missed Songkran, the holiday where everyone dumps buckets of water over each other for a week in the hope that this will bring the rain. It has not thus far.

I’ve resumed my attempt to visit everything there is to see in the city, in particular the enormous number of wats. There doesn’t seem to be a particularly good guide to these; there’s plenty of information online, but it’s often of questionable validity especially when you start getting to the more minor wats.

Today, three wats which I visited while going to the electronics supply district where I was going for parts to improve the water pump. The first two are on different sides of the canal marking the border of Rattanakosin, the royal island – the pig shrine, seen previously, separates them.

Wat Ratchabophit was Rama V’s first wat, made in 1869. It has funny European door guards, suggesting the new openness of the country under the reigns of Rama IV and Rama V:

Also it has faux-Gothic memorials to the royal family:

And immediately adjacent more Khmer-looking ones:

Somewhere in here are the remains of the father, mother, and older sister of the current king (and the previous king, his older brother), but I couldn’t find them.

The wat proper is beautifully detailed and enormous:

Also it has some royal elephants with blankets made of flowers:

Across the canal is the similarly named Wat Ratchapradit. What’s most notable about Wat Ratchapradit, built by Rama IV, is the chedi, which is covered in tiled gray marble:

The guardians here are more traditional and Chinese:

It’s a pleasant enough wat, but Rama V clearly outdid his father with Wat Ratchabophit.

I don’t know how we managed to miss the fact that there’s a crocodile wat near the river in Chinatown until now, but there you go. It’s called Wat Chakrawat. It’s a big complex, but one of the smaller buildings has a pair of ponds in the back with two fairly large crocodiles in them. This is not explained anywhere; the wat just has some crocodiles. Actually, it seemed to have four crocodiles, but one was stuffed and one was just a skull. These are displayed above the two crocodile enclosures, perhaps to remind them of their own mortality. In this picture, you can see the skull in the middle, the stuffed crocodile on the right, and the smaller live crocodile in the background, in the process of slowly going out the door:

And here is the larger crocodile, kept behind some chicken wire:

The internet suggests that the original crocodile who lived here (maybe the stuffed one?) had been menacing bathers in the Chao Praya so the monks moved him to the wat. Maybe the monks were bored and wanted a pet. A crocodile is not a good pet.

The Darjeeling Natural History Museum

Posted on 16 April 201418 April 2014 by Dan Visel

The Darjeeling Natural History Museum has arguably seen better days. Here are some of the animals.

What There Is to Do in Brunei

Posted on 28 February 201428 February 2014 by Dan Visel

We went to Brunei last weekend, or, more specifically, the capital, Bandar Seri Begawan. Brunei is a tiny county on the island of Borneo. You may be wondering: what is there to do in Brunei? Here is a helpfully numbered list, maybe with pictures.

Don’t litter. Here is the thing about BSB: it’s really clean! Bangkok is basically constructed entirely of impacted trash, sometimes put together fetchingly, as is the case with Wat Arun. There is basically no trash in Brunei, which is because there are signs everywhere threatening a $1000 fine (that’s around $750 in U.S. dollars, but still) for your first offense littering. We were very careful not to litter.
Drink Kickapoo Joy Juice. Kickapoo Joy Juice (see previously) appears to be Brunei’s national drink, so we had some more. There’s also a fine drink that has a rhinoceros on the can which I can only hope is not made of rhinoceroses. If you find this drink and your Malay is solid enough that you can ascertain that it is not made of rhinoceroses, you should try it, as it is delicious.
Be careful what you say. Brunei is in the midst of changes, as the Sultan, faced with pressure from the lack of oil revenue, has decided to institute Sharia law, which takes hold in a month. The big excitement when we were there was that the limb-chopping machine had just arrived, which I guess you need to have is you’re going to punish thieves in a modern manner. The Borneo Bulletin on the day we arrived announced that certain words were forbidden to non-Muslims:

We were careful not to say any of them. The Borneo Bulletin, by the way, is an astonishing publication.
Eat delicious food. Brunei is full of delicious food. We ate a lot of it. I didn’t take any pictures of it.
Visit the stilt village.. BSB is a modern city, but most of the people in it live in a village across the river constructed on stilts, called Kampong Ayer. You can get a motorboat for $1 who will ferry you across the river and you can wander around the village. It’s supposedly been in the same place for 900 years, though most of the houses are newer. Here’s one edge of it, looking back across the river to the main city:
Attempt to visit the mosque. They have a fine mosque, which has its own lagoon and an enormous decorative boat in it:

Unfortunately we first tried to visit on Friday, when the mosque is not open to non-worshippers, and then we tried to visit on Sunday, when the Sultan was attending special services to prepare for National Day, which was on Sunday. So we couldn’t go in. The mosque looks very nice from outside, and it lights up green at night. We did our best.
Admire the fish. The food courts have large numbers of live fish for the hungry visitor to admire. These ones – I think they’re snakeheads? – were the best:
Attempt to see the monkeys and crocodiles. You can get a boat to take you down river to see the colonies of proboscis monkeys and crocodiles that live there. The boats are small and fast so this is pretty exciting:

That said, you will note that there are no pictures of proboscis monkeys or crocodiles here. I did see one crocodile – a big one! – but he went underwater as soon as I saw him. Our poor guide kept stopping our boat at the places in the swamps where the monkeys live:

He would expertly call the monkeys – I wish I’d recorded his hooting, it sounded extremely authentic – but the monkeys did not seem to want to be bothered. Perhaps this is because every other tourist to Brunei is also in a boat going to see the monkeys, and the novelty has worn off for them. Who could blame them? That said, the river was extremely pleasant. We did see some water monitors, so it wasn’t a complete write-off. Also that crocodile.
Visit the Royal Regalia Building. The Royal Regalia Building is a museum consisting of all the things that have been given to the Sultan, as well as the various paraphernalia involved in being in charge of a small state – swords, coaches, umbrellas. They don’t let you take photos in there, so you can’t see what we saw. The best thing they have there is a display of how the agreement with the British that made Brunei a country was done – they have the actual table and pictures of the people involved, and if you press the right buttons their faces light up. It is maybe an underwhelming museum.
Other monkeys. We did see a monkey at the market, and some up in the jungle when we climbed a hill behind our hotel. They were not proboscis monkeys, so we were a little disappointed in them. But still: monkeys.
Inspect the cats. Brunei is full of cats. Some of them live in the stilt village:

In general, they are friendlier than the cats of Bangkok.

So yes. That’s what there is to do in Brunei. I hope this list has been helpful to you.

Further Adventures in Khao Yai

Posted on 10 February 20149 June 2014 by Dan Visel

Okay, we’re back from Khao Yai. Khao Yai is a national park that’s to the northeast of Bangkok (see this helpful map). It’s mountainous and still full of jungle. As is customary when we leave Bangkok, I forgot to take any photos, especially good ones. But here is some of what happened.

The national park is big and full of a lot of things, though we didn’t see many of them. First we went on a little trail that had fine lookouts over a vertiginous drop:

Then we had lunch at a place which had a nice sign reading “Khao Yai Welfare” which I failed to photograph. We were visited by this garbage deer who was busying herself eating the welfare refuse:

Shortly after this picture was taken, all the dishes did fall off the bench and the staff shooed the deer away, though she didn’t go very far. The deer are extremely large, more like low-slung elk than white-tailed deer. Maybe this is what happens when deer are fed on meat scraps. They don’t seem like deer that one would want to trifle with.

After that we went to attempt to find a waterfall because that is what you do in Khao Yai. Along the trail were threatening signs like this:

But we did not see any crocodiles, maybe because there is only one of them. Khao Yai is also full of wild elephants; we didn’t see any of them either. We did see signs of them:

There were fresher signs of them, but I have your delicate sensibilities in mind, dear reader. What we’d forgotten in all of this, of course, was that it was the dry season and not the wet season, so that the waterfalls were not so much waterfalls as small trickles:

They were still very pleasant. Probably in the wet season the river would have deluged the path and the crocodile would have eaten us.

At the trail head we were confronted with inscrutable pictograms:

And a relative of the previous garbage deer, this one who seemed to have developed a taste for campers, or at least tents:

[videojs mp4=”http://www.weareinbangkok.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/garbage-deer.mov” width=”640″ height=”360″]

At this point, we decided to leave for our own safety. Back at the resort, Harriet demonstrated some promise in pig-training:

Also we saw this fine lizard:

Some other things happened, who can even remember. The area around Khao Yai is chock-full of faux-Italian villages for some reason, which basically seem to exist so that Thai tourists can take pictures of each other in them. This sounds like it would be entertaining but it is not. Basically it’s like this:

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After that we went to the Chokchai Cowboy Farm which is basically false advertising as though don’t grow any cowboys there. But Harriet got to ride a pony:

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So it wasn’t entirely a waste. And after that we went home, the end.

Paddle-Boating with Water Monitors

Posted on 18 January 20149 June 2014 by Dan Visel

The ongoing protests have maybe been obscuring what this blog is really about, which is of course monitor lizards. The protesters have given up their senseless occupation of the zoo, so on Thursday we went to see how things were there: much the same as ever.

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The Chatrium Is Infested With Lizards

Posted on 20 November 2013 by Dan Visel

Not entirely, yet, but there were two lizards in the lobby this morning, hiding behind an extremely loud painting. These are house geckos, Hemidactylus garnotii; the Thai name is the onomatopoetic จิ้งจก, pronounced jing jok.

At the Mae Nak shrine

Posted on 4 October 201310 October 2013 by Dan Visel

Today we went to the shrine of Mae Nak, Bangkok’s most popular ghost. She was a lady who lived in the neighborhood of Phra Khanong (then a village, I expect) under the reign of Rama IV; her husband Mak (in some accounts he’s “Chum”) went off to war and took a long time to get back, during which time Mae Nak died giving birth to their child. But she kept up appearances and did not tell Mak when he returned that she was dead. They lived happily until one night while she was cooking dinner she dropped a lime and stretched her arm down to the ground to get it at which point Mak/Chum (who may have suffered a head injury during the war) caught on and ran to the sacred grounds of Wat Mahabut to escape from his ghost-wife. This made Mae Nak angry and she proceeded to terrorize the neighborhood until she is subdued by famous monk Somdej Toh, at which point, I think, she becomes an ex-ghost.

Mae Nak is extremely popular, and there have been a huge number of dramatizations of her story, listed here. Many of these can be seen on YouTube; this one is a tad melodramatic, but it does have high reptile content and the subtitles aren’t as poetic as this one.

Her shrine is at Wat Mahabut, where Mak fled; there’s a small statue of her and her ghost-baby:

I don’t know why she appears to have two babies here. Maybe the one on the left is a doll? Her fuzzy appearance is because she’s covered in little sheets of gold leaf which have been gilded on her; while we were there, the shrine was being vacuumed and the air was full of tiny motes of gold.

She’s surrounded by things that she’s been given by her devotees (a lot of clothing; some other toys for the baby) and portraits that have been painted or drawn of her, none, disappointingly, of her extensible arms. Picture-taking didn’t seem polite (though it wasn’t specifically forbidden) so these photos aren’t as good as they might be.

Because there’s only so much room inside, there’s a secondary shrine out back:

I don’t know exactly who this man is.

Nor am I sure about this plaster rabbit and chicken.

Though possibly these real chickens might be explained? The shrine is surrounded by stalls selling small fish, turtles, and frogs that can be released into the canal behind the wat to make merit – you can see one on the left in this picture – maybe releasing a chicken makes you a lot of merit. Or maybe they just live at the wat, like the dogs and cats.

There were plenty of little turtles and fish to inspect. I thought about buying some to set them loose, though it seems ethically (and ecologically) a little murky; downstream, local children seemed to be using nets to recapture some of the released.

The woman overseeing this pool of catfish and turtles (not quite visible) is not Mae Nak; she appears to be Guan Yin, the Chinese bodhisattva whose shrine near Wat Prayun we bumbled through yesterday.

At the canal, of course, there were catfish to be fed, so we fed them for a while.

Feeding the turtles at Wat Prayun

Posted on 4 October 201310 October 2013 by Dan Visel

Yesterday we went to Wat Prayun (properly Wat Prayurawongsawas Waraviharn), which is on the other side of the river – you see it just after Memorial Bridge and before Wat Arun. It’s not really on most tourist routes, but it’s been recently renovated, and it’s not very hard to get to, so we took the express boat to the bridge and walked across.

The white chedi is really nice, though I didn’t get any good pictures of it, partly because it was a gray day. Also we were quickly detoured into Turtle Mountain, a garden that’s part of the complex which is full of turtles, which have been released to make merit. (Some information on the turtles can be found here.) It’s a peaceful place early in the morning:

And it’s full of turtles, both big and small. Some of them have clearly lived there a long time:

And some are fresh and new:

(This particular baby turtle, unfortunately, may have come to a bad end. Harriet decided to put it in the water, where it appeared to have been immediately eaten by a catfish.)

The garden is full of turtles, both in the water and on land, and they seem to generally be pretty happy.

A monk gave Harriet another tiny turtle, not knowing about the fate of the last one:

For a small donation, you can get a little bowl of cut-up fishballs and a pointed stick which you can use to feed the turtles.

Not all of the turtles are interested in being fed this way – some are shy – but those that aren’t are maniacal about fishballs:

We spent a great deal of time feeding the turtles. Many of the turtles are extremely fat.

After a while, I convinced Harriet that we should look at the rest of the wat, and we climbed the stairs inside the chedi:

The interior is stark and nice:

Wat Prayun maybe deserves more attention than as just a place to feed turtles: there are many interesting things there, and it’s a beautiful structure in general. There’s a tiny museum with Buddha figures found during the recent reconstruction; it was also Thailand’s first public library.

The neighborhood’s interesting as well. Just past Wat Prayun, there’s the Portuguese church, Santa Cruz, which has been there for a long time, though the current church only dates from 1916 and isn’t that impressive. There are still the remnants of a very old Portuguese community; we went to a bakery and had their traditional cakes (khanom farang kudichin), which are, honestly, not very good.

We spent a lot of time getting lost in the twisty streets around here, looking for an old Chinese shrine, which we eventually found. Google Maps says the name of this is
Kian Un Keng, though I don’t know how accurate that is:

This is not what we first saw, because we managed to come in through the back door, which is considerably less grand, though you do find the toilets much faster. Either because of this behavior or the way Harriet was dressed, some of the worshipers decided that we must be French and were astounded when we were not. Then there was a lot of confusion because we couldn’t get out the back door and thought that we would be trapped in here forever; eventually, we realized that you could go from the front directly to the river, which would have been a much simpler way to get there from the beginning.

Catching up

Posted on 27 September 201310 October 2013 by Dan Visel

Here are a bunch of pictures that I should have put up earlier. Most of the pictures that I take are of monitor lizards and/or catfish, and presumably you don’t want to see more of those.

Here is a shrine of zebras, somewhere in a rainy part of Chinatown: