Dela Frijoles: This Is How We Do It

I may have mentioned before that I come from a family of planners. My mom likes to have things set out and all the details dealt with before she goes anywhere and does anything. My brother is constantly making plans, writing lists and, I believe, knows where they are going for vacation in 2020 (he’d almost give my friend Planny McPlannerson a run for her money). I admire this quality. In fact, I tried for a very long time to be like this and develop this quality. The problem is, I think one of my lessons in this lifetime is to develop the opposite quality. Despite trying to come up with plans, there have been many times in my life in many different areas where I have been (and seem to constantly be) in limbo. Being married to B-Rod it is very difficult to have and make concrete plans. His job makes it difficult to do so, how we travel now makes it difficult and B-Rod’s aversion to having any kind of schedule also makes it quite difficult. So, we arrived in Bangkok once again with very few plans of what to do and where to go. Our standby flights went very smoothly. We received boarding passes immediately for both flights AND we were sitting together once again for both legs. This kind of luck just hasn’t happened before in our standby experience!

We arrived into Bangkok just after midnight, and made our way to a place to stay that we booked at the airport in Hong Kong. After sleeping in and feeling somewhat overwhelmed, we hit the streets to just wander and see what we could come up with. We headed to the river to discover a) we were there for the last day of the Loy Kathong festival which would happen that evening and b) an American ex-pat who was telling his friend that was visiting Bangkok about a really good tour that takes you in a loop along the canals of the city. We had planned to just ride the water taxis anyways, so off we went on the tour (thanks American ex-pat!)

Riding a tuk tuk on the streets of Bangkok . . . . I can't believe how easily we got here!

Past the Grand Palace on our boat tour. B-rod was fascinated with the Long boat we were on because ????? (because it is a crazy wooden boat with a giant turbo diesel truck engine mounted in a big cradle. Attached to the truck gearbox is a giant shaft with the prop, on the front end of the engine is a long tiller, and the guy has to wrestle the big engine up/down, side to side)

After our boat ride, we wandered around a bit and then decided to make our way to the train station to look into an overnight train that we were interested in taking to Chiang Mai. It would be about an hour walk, but that’s usually how we choose see the places we visit. It was super hot under the radiant sun, but we ended up going through an industrial area which was really cool . . . . . . We passed all manner of industrial shop and industrial retailer. Although it really just looked like any other street, the building were filled with machine shops, Scooter restoration shops, many super cool stainless steel fab shops, and a couple sweat-shop sewing machines. These are the belt driven sewing machines you see in every sweatshop image you've ever seen. There was a white dude there, likely buying 1000 machines to make Calvin Klein underwear for Costco.

This was a shop making Buddha bowls. They were made of 5 piece of steel welded together, the hand hammered for hours over a dolly. They were quiet beautiful, and when done, absolutely perfect. He even offered the hammer for me to give it a couple taps. I kindly declined.

Loy = to float, Kathong = a floating object made up of flowers, candles, incense, banana leaves. It’s a festival of light that happens on the full moon of the twelfth lunar month. It is half of the event that we had been hoping to see up in Chiang Mai when we were originally thinking about our trip to Thailand. I was super stoked to see that though we’d miss lanterns in the sky in Chiang Mai, we would get to see the candles on the river.

How We Do Loy Kathong

First, we make our way to the river where we had seen them setting up earlier in the day. We check out all the street food and get a bunch of stuff whether we know what they are or not.

Next, we somehow end up within an arms length of someone who appears to be super important in the country and find out later that it’s the deputy prime minister.

Third, we head to the river to check out the scene and ceremony.

The procedure was to purchase a Kathong . . . . .

Set it into a set up canal, while maybe praying or setting an intention into the kathong . . .

. . . then some men would gently scoop your kathong into the river where it would join the sea of lights.

Finally, we see what is happening and check out the events in the gardens and feel grateful that we got to be here to see and experience this festival.

I knew I wanted to go to an elephant sanctuary in Thailand, and I knew exactly the one I wanted to go to. It is up in Chiang Mai, but unfortunately those planners out there had the place booked for the next couple of months. They recently partnered and opened up a second location just outside of Kanchanaburi which is about 2.5 hours outside of Bangkok. Since it is newer and less known, it was wide open, so off we went.

How We Do Kanchanaburi and the Death Railway

First, we discover and get excited that there is a 3^rd class train that goes to Kanchanburi and we can just show up at the train station that morning to get tickets.

Train food? Of course we'll try it! Seller hop on to the train and sell food as they ride to the next stop. This was a fried egg over rice, with some mystery meat on the side. it was great! 60¢ if I recall.

Riding the rails and admiring the view

It wasn’t until later that we discovered (when chatting with an Australian lady at our guest house) that we missed the most incredible part of the train journey – the part that snakes through the valley, travels along the river and squeezes through 30m of deep rock cuttings which were dug by the allied POW in WWII, many of whom lost their lives. The one thing that made me feel slightly better about that is knowing that I probably did this portion when I travelled in Thailand with my parents many years ago, and I don’t really remember it!

Next, explore the streets by . . . . once again walking many miles.

We end up at a super weird “Jeath Museum” which we thought would be about the POW's and the building of the railway. There was some of that, though it could also have been described as "the museum with faded pictures that you can only know what they are because the description is slightly less faded, and miscellaneous dusty, rusty things." It was a huge and beautiful building, and a little confusing to navigate. Later on, we found out that the DEATH Railway Museum over by the War Cemetery was pretty incredible, had a detailed explanation and history AND pictures you could actually see.

Third, chill out for a bit on our deck with a pretty awesome view and watch the big Asian water monitor lizard that jumps off one of the neighboring decks.

Finally, head over to the food market at the bus station. B-Rod has a 'dog shit related accident/injury' along the way (you’ll have to ask him about that story) and we end up finally having our mind blown by Thai food (we didn’t think it would take this long)