Travel Notice #1
If there is the opportunity, we like returning to places that have caught our attention. In Battambang we went back to the bat caves for a second night just because it was such a spectacular sight. We wanted not only to experience it again but to lock it into our long-term memory. Similarly, we returned to Bayan at Angkor to look again at the detailed carved reliefs of everyday life from long ago. And we returned to the Arboretum in Chiang Mai for some birding. Of course, when you want to see everything, returning takes away from another experience. But as we travel we repeat to ourselves that we can never see everything. So while we appreciate sampling, repetition also has its merits.
Travel Notice #2
We are so aware of our status as “tourist” that we like to think we can break out of that by taking local transport. It is a fun (and often cheap) way to encounter the local people and also to figure out how this aspect of everyday life works for the locals. To an outsider, it may all look chaotic. But it all works, so using local transportation scratches the tourist veneer. It also satisfies our sense of adventure: it is about the journey rather than the destination.
We remember to our delight, and to our son’s dismay, our rides on the chicken buses in Guatemala. And as we have recounted in this blog, we rented scooters in Siem Reap, Battambang, and Chiang Mai. On one of those trips we had a fun encounter with some local women from whom we purchased petrol. I think they thought us a little crazy, but sign language and smiles count for a lot. When we returned to the Arboretum in Chiang Mai, we decided to try out the town’s fledgling bus system and it worked out just fine. On our way to our guest house in Bangkok, we crossed a canal and saw that it was being used by water buses. To avoid the ghastly traffic in Bangkok, you either take the metro (there are 3 separate systems) or take a boat. Our canal boat got us all the way to the main river for something around 30 cents (for the 2 of us!). Lastly, taking local transport offers up some wonderful visual and sound-scapes to take home. Here are some.
Click for video: Taking the water bus in Bangkok
(middle of the day when it was quieter)
Click for video:
Navigating traffic in Chiang Mai
(a dawdle compared to Bangkok)
Click for video: Scooter taxis in Bangkok
(didn’t quite have the nerve for this)
Travel Notice #3
If you are attempting to remove plastic from your everyday life, then you will have a real challenge in southeast Asia. In Cambodia, plastic trash was everywhere. It was better in Thailand, but still everything purchased came in plastic and was sometimes double or triple wrapped with plastic. The local markets are dependent on plastic bags, small and large, and it is hard to see how this will change anytime soon. Street food almost always comes in plastic bags: a vendor will scoop soup into a small plastic bag, rice into a second plastic bag, and skewers of meat into a third bag, then put them all in a large bag for you to carry. When you buy takeaway coffee, it comes in a styrofoam cup, which is then put in a plastic bag for you to carry! And of course drinking water comes in plastic bottles. There is seldom any place to fill up a reusable water bottle with safe water, so on a hot day, we can end up purchasing 4 or 5 bottles of liquid a piece! You get on the long-distance train or bus, and they hand you a small (free) bottle of water. Every local food stall sells bottled water. Thailand has more recycling bins around than Cambodia, but judging by the sheer amount of plastic on the sides of the roads and in the rivers and canals, recycling is still in its infancy. How this will change is hard to see given the dependency. Committing at home to not use plastic bags for our groceries seems like a drop in the proverbial ocean having seen what we have seen.
Travel Notice #4
This is a local bus seat reserved for the ubiquitous saffron-robed monk (not for a hospital patient) . . .
. . . but presumably there is no seat reserved for this “monk” (saffron clothing not withstanding!).
Travel Notice #5
And lastly to a sad thought. One evening in Chiang Mai we were walking back home down some back lanes and realized that both in Chiang Mai, as well as in Siem Reap, we have felt perfectly safe. We had also interviewed a prospective renter from China who was concerned for her safety in coming to the U.S. because of the lack of gun control laws in the USA. We felt a great sadness when we realized that we have felt safer from violence in every other country we have visited than we do back home in the U.S. And this is where we are returning in a couple of weeks. We expect a large dose of culture shock!
Green Edges 