Blog: Southeast Asia

Day six of our Asia trip was the only one not scheduled in advance. On a recommendation from a friend, we signed up for a half day cooking class at Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School which was one of the highlights of the whole trip.

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For our second day in Chiang Mai, we went to the Chiang Dao elephant camp. This was definitely on the touristy side, but also a lot of fun. Each elephant has a mahout, or trainer, who works with the same elephant starting when the mahout and the elephant are both very young.

The day begins with an elephant show, where the mahouts demonstrate how elephents can push, pull, roll, and lift huge logs, which was how construction materials were transported and manipulated before trucks and forklifts. They also show off various tricks, such as starting the show with one elephant raising the flag on the flagpole, having the elephants pick up the mahout's hats off the ground and place them on their heads, and doing "elephant paintings" where the mahout holds a paintbrush in the elephant's trunk and the elephant waves it up and down or makes dots.

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In the hills of Thailand reside many ethnic minorities in small villages. These villages are poorer and less economically developed than the cities (something true in Western nations too, of course). Many of the male villagers farm for subsistence while the women make handcrafts to sell to tourists in markets down in the cities.

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After our disappointing second day in Bangkok, we flew to Chiang Mai and resumed having a wonderful time. We checked in to our extremely cute hotel, Yaangcome Village, then headed up the mountain to the temple of Wat Prathat Doi Suthep.

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The main religion of Southeast Asia is Theravada Buddhism. I have had some experience with Zen Buddhism, at least as it is practiced in the United States, but that much more closely resembles Western religions than the Thai Buddhism.

For example, Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship together at set times and in communities. The congregation is a major feature of the religious experience, and for many people is the primary draw, a social gathering with familiar faces. Not so in Thai Buddhist temples, where prayer is an individual activity. According to our tour guide, a person or a family may visit eight to ten temples on a Sunday, staying for only a few minutes each time. Each temple centers around a particular Buddha statue, each of which has its own distinctive draw—one may be especially large, another very old, or made of emerald, or in a reclining pose. Instead of visiting the same temple each week as in a congregation-based religion, Thai Buddhists will try to visit as many as possible of the hundreds of temples in their city.

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After seeing the Summer Palace, we took a long-tail boat up the Chao Phraya River toward the main city of Ayutthaya. The banks of the river are lined with houses, each with a boathouse. Some of the houses and boathouses are elaborate, others simple; some are immaculate, others run down. This river was a primary transportation link to and from Bangkok, and some people still use it to commute, avoiding the car traffic, though the houses now all have road access as well. As it was Sunday, many people were out on the riverfront eating, doing laundry, fishing, or swimming.

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Ayutthaya, about an hour's drive north of Bangkok, was Thailand's capital from 1350 to 1787, when Burmese invaders conquered it and killed the king. The Bang Pa In Summer Palace is a royal residence, originally used during the Ayutthaya Kingdom but then rebuilt in the 19th Century. Now it is mostly a tourist attraction, though occasional state dinners and similar events still take place there.

King Rama IV, who revived the Summer Palace, appreciated architecture from around the world, and so rather than following a single traditional style, the buildings reflect an eclectic variety of global styles, primarily European and Chinese (Thailand is about 30% Chinese, with good relations between the Chinese and Thai populations), as well as some small Thai buildings. The grounds are laid out with manicured gardens around an artificial lake.

Unlike many of the other tourist attractions we visited on our trip, most of the tourists at Bang Pa In were Thai students from nearby colleges. The most interesting part of the palace visit was the opportunity to anthropologically observe the Thai young people - their Hello Kitty umbrellas and Playboy tote bags which American women would never carry, or the way two female friends would hold hands while taking a picture.

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