Ugh

Our next stop was Phitsanulok, which sounded much better in the guide book than it actually was.  When we arrived after the hour-long bus ride, we checked into the “Guest House Hotell” and set out in the blistering heat to look for a bookstore that we never found; have lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant, where I accidentally ate some kind of dried, shaved pork (weird); walk around some more in search of the Buddha casting factory, which we never found, and the bird park, which we also never found.  Phitsanulok didn’t do a very good job with their tourism industry; we couldn’t find a map anywhere!  We did go to Wat Phra Si Ratana, a famous temple, but I think we’d had our fill of wats by that point.  After dinner, we walked by all the street vendors selling food beneath a full moon, which was very bright for a city sky.

The following day was actually even worse.  We took a tuk tuk to the bus station; the tuk tuk was a carriage hooked on to a bike.  Not a motorbike—just a bike.  There was barely enough room for the two of us in the carriage, and our backpacks hung precariously from an S-hook on the back of the carriage.  We had breakfast at the bus station and got on a late morning bus to Udan Thani.  This is my number one recommendation to anyone traveling to Udan Thani: get there early so you can catch the next bus.  We failed to do this.  We therefore had to spend the night in Udan Thani.

Why wouldn’t you want to spend the night in Udan Thani, you ask?  Though the town is a transportation hub, with three major bus stations, it is also the capital of sex tourism.  Therefore, everywhere you look, there are fat, old, white men—the ones who wear white socks with sandals and have giant beer bellies—walking around with beautiful young Thai women.  It was utterly depressing.  Every place in that town was shady.  We even had trouble finding places to eat.  We also had trouble finding a place to stay.  A young man took us around the city in his tuk tuk, which was motorbike driven, to hotel after hotel, looking for a place we could stay, his brakes squealing like a dying animal the whole time.  Finally, we found a place that had room.  It was expensive for what it was.  It was the first place we stayed that had a squat toilet; the sink didn’t have a drain, so when you ran water, it just ran straight to the floor and drained from there; there was a cockroach in the bathroom; and the sheets on the beds had clearly never been changed.  Not wanting to spend any time in that room, we left for dinner and then walked around a night market, which was more like a mall.  It was an equally depressing place because tons of puppies were locked away in small cages, waiting to be sold.  When it was time to sleep, we walked back to our room.  Malone and I shared what looked like the cleaner bed and we spent what was probably the worst night of the trip.

Our third miserable day started early in the morning when we got on a bus to Vientiane, Laos.  On our way to the border, the bus stopped along the side of the road; somebody took our backpacks out of the storage area of the bus, and a man pointed at us through the window and told us to get off.  Confused, we got off, and a tuk tuk driver took us to a building where we could get our Laos visas.  The problem with this was that we were pretty sure we could get our visas at the border, just as we had when we arrived in Thailand.  However, we had been kicked off the bus, didn’t know where we were in relation to the border, and didn’t really know how to ask.  We sat there, aware that we were being ripped off, and handed over our passports to the woman behind the desk, who filled our a few forms for us and charged us between seventy and eighty dollars for the process.  Two women then got into the tuk tuk with us, which took us to the border, and we felt our stomachs sink when they marched us up to the “Visa Upon Arrival” sign and handed us $36 each—the cost of the Laos visa.  That’s right—we paid almost $80 for a $36 visa and a $1 bus ride across the Friendship Bridge between Thailand and Laos.  We were angry, so angry—but there was nothing we could do at that point.  The Lao official at the counter lightened the mood a little by making fun of us for what had happened.  I bet he sees it all the time.  We learned our lesson, though, and wouldn’t be fooled again, though the Thai people would try to do the same at the Cambodian border and at the Malaysian border—and get this—the Malaysian visa is free!

From the bus station in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, we found ourselves in another sketchy situation.  We tried to arrange a mini-bus ride to Vang Vieng, and we followed around a couple of men who kept arguing with each other and handing each other money, until finally one of them took us to his mini-van.  Somewhat terrified, wondering where we would be taken, we finally relaxed (though Malone got super car sick) and eventually arrived in Vang Vieng, where we were taken to a somewhat pricey bungalow that afforded a beautiful sunset view.  The peacefulness of the Nam Song River and the beauty of the sunset between the limestone karst mountains relaxed us and prepared us to enjoy a beautiful place in the coming days.

Ancient Ruins and Noodle Soup

The following day in Sukhothai was one of the best days of the trip. It was also one of the hottest. After a breakfast of pineapple pancakes and fruit salad, I walked to the post office to mail Sam’s birthday present to Vermont and a post-surgery feel-good letter to Scott. Even though it was still early—before eleven—the sun was beating down on me and I could not stop sweating. On the way to the post office, I passed a parade of sorts, with Chinese dragons, people in costume, a marching band, and a small float that looked very tacky compared to the floats at the Flower Festival in Chiang Mai.

After I walked the hot sidewalk back to the hostel, Malone and I gathered our things and walked down the block to catch a bus to the Sukhothai Historical Park. The bus was more like a giant pick-up truck, with two bleacher-like wooden benches lining the two sides and one running down the middle. The vehicle was open, to let the hot air blow through.

At the park, we rented bicycles for 30 baht each (about one US dollar). Somehow, but unintentionally, we entered the park without paying and began to bike around. We first reached the largest ruin: Wat Mahathat. We took our first pictures of the ancient stupas of crumbling brick and the giant Buddha statues that sat so nobly and serenely in front of them. We could see Wat Sa Si and Wat Tra Phang Ngoen across the water, in the distance. The latter looked particularly beautiful, with a pure white Buddha sitting regally in front of a muted mountainscape.

We left the main part of the park on our bikes to go to Wat Si Chum. We rode past trees with bright orange blossoms that fell to the ground and spread there like a monk’s robes; brilliant green rice paddies; a mote-like creek that encircled part of the park; barking dogs; dried grasses in the heat; views of mountains. We paid 110 baht to go into this part of the park and stopped at an elaborately carved ebony stupa near ruins that must have been consumed by fire at one point: Wat Phra Phai Luang. At the entrance to Wat Si Chum, Thai school children were excited to practice their English on us, each one of them yelling “Hello!” with big smiles on their faces, then running away to giggle with each other. I bought a bottle of ice cold water before heading inside Wat Si Chum, where the biggest Buddha we’d seen sat with one gold hand cupping its right knee, staring fixedly out into space. It was nearly impossible to capture the whole statue in my camera lens.

After paying a second entrance fee of 110 baht at the third part of the park, we rode our bikes to Wat Saphan Hin, which sat high on a hill overlooking fields and the other ruins of the park. We climbed a path made of stone to the top, where one Buddha stood with its hand raised to the light and a smaller Buddha sat before it, both gazing out at the view. We lit incense and gazed outward with the Buddhas.

After climbing back down, we continued riding our bikes around the park, finding ourselves in an odd situation where we bought a Coke out of an old woman’s bedroom, and then riding past more ruins, the wats all reduced to crumbled brick walls and stupas. When we reached the road that surrounds the main part of the park, we stopped for the best lunch that we had the entire trip, and it wasn’t just because we were so hot, hungry, and tired from biking. Malone ordered pad Thai; I had an ice cold mango shake and a vegetable and noodle soup.  I still crave the combination of crushed peanuts, cilantro, and scallions when I think about that bowl of soup. We ate in the shade while a puppy nibbled at our toes.

We rode our bikes back to the main part of the park, this time paying the 110 baht entrance fee, and headed along a path shaded by trees in the late afternoon light. We visited Wat Si Sawai, where small Buddhas were tucked into the roots of a tree and a flock of pigeons swooped over the tallest stupa and perched there. We relaxed in the shade along an old brick wall, next to the creek where a small turtle came up to breathe and a heron perched in a tree that shone with golden green afternoon light.

 

 

All in all, it was a perfect day. We returned our bikes and took the bus back to our hostel, where we showered and relaxed for the night and enjoyed a small dinner at a coffee shop a few buildings down. The beauty of the day in Sukhothai would carry us through the next three somewhat-miserable days.

Tears in Pai

The next day in Pai was an emotional one for me. It was one of my lower points on the trip. I was homesick for Scott and disappointed to find out that I wouldn’t be working with sea turtles again that summer. Calling my mom on her birthday just made me more homesick. When we took the motorbike outside of Pai that morning on our way to Huay Nam Dong National Park, the scariest part of the whole trip happened (at least it was the scariest part for me). We were driving up winding hills that curved back and forth as we gained elevation. I think both Malone and I knew it would happen, but there was nothing we could do about it. Up ahead, the bend was completely covered with pine needles. We skidded out on the needles and the motorbike fell onto its side, spilling us into the street. I sort of had to jump away from the bike so it wouldn’t crush me or so we wouldn’t crush each other. It hurt. We were so lucky that a truck or car had not been following us. I don’t even want to imagine what would have happened. As it was, Malone had a terribly bruised knee, and my knee and ankle were cut open and half of my big toenail had been scraped off by the pavement. We picked the bike up and kept going to the park, but as soon as we got there, I lost it. I cried because I was scared to get back on the motorbike to drive back, because I was homesick, and because my knee hurt. I guess I was just overwhelmed and needed to let it out. Unfortunately, my tears put a damper on the morning, and it was hard to enjoy the view of the park, though it was absolutely beautiful and the day was sunny and filled with color.



We hung around at the park for only a little while before we returned to Pai. I think we were both a little hesitant to explore the park on the bike, since many of the roads were unpaved and bumpy. And our legs hurt from the fall, so it wasn’t really worth finding any trails to walk on, either. So we went back to Pai, and I tried to relax with a hot shower and some downtime.

Another reason that my emotions were high was that Scott was worried about me. It made me anxious; I knew that if he was worried about me, it was possible that something could actually happen to me. I felt very vulnerable and very subject to injury, especially after the motorbike fall. At the night market in Pai a day or two before, I had seen a woman in a wheelchair being pushed around by a man who was singing into a microphone. They were collecting money. The woman had no legs. She had no arms either. One of her arms was missing after the elbow, but the other was missing even higher up than that. We would see many limbless people in northern Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia: results of the unexploded ordinances left by US soldiers during the Vietnam War. The US soldiers crossed into Laos and Cambodia without permission from those countries, and the landmines are still injuring and killing people today. It is the most heart-wrenching memory of my trip: that these innocent people—farmers, children, just people out walking in the woods—have lost their limbs and sometimes their livelihoods. I read somewhere about a flower that scientists had genetically engineered to detect landmines. The flowers are white, but when they detect the chemicals present in the landmines, they turn red. I imagine parents teaching their children to never go near those red flowers. It makes me want to cry.

I spent Valentine’s Day in Pai, and I don’t remember what we did. My journal just says “Another day in Pai,” and the rest of the text is just reflection. Perhaps it was a day of relaxation: reading, writing, enjoying food, the night market, the sunset, etc. Scott left a video on my Facebook wall of him singing “Half Moon” by Iron and Wine, and that song still brings back memories of being in northern Thailand without him and missing him like crazy. But on the 15th, Malone and I spent our last morning in Pai. It was time to move on. We had our last breakfast in Pai, bummed around near the bus station for a while, then took a mini-bus back to Chiang Mai.

Our stay in Chiang Mai was quick. We went back to the Little Bird Guest House, had some dinner, then went to the night market. I had left my sunglasses in the mini-bus, so I bought a pair at the market, as well as some gifts: silk change purses, a wooden bookmark with a metal engraving, a flower carved out of soap, a ceramic pipe, an alligator carved out of jade, an ink drawing of an elephant. The following morning, we packed our things again, had breakfast, and took a 5-hour bus ride south to Sukhothai, the ancient Thai capital. Our beds at the Garden House were as hard as the floor, and the air was hot and filled with mosquitoes. But we were moving forward with our travels after our long stay in Pai.