Thailand: Dec 29 - Jan 2
Travelog
- 12/30 Grand Palace in heat and humidity
- 12/31 Ruins of Historic Ayutthaya (all day)
- 1/1 Canal boat tour (morning)
- 1/1 Evening at Wat Pho (temple of the reclining Buddha)
- 1/2 Travel 100 miles to the ship! (Laem Chebang Shipyard)
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We stayed four nights in a charming little guest house in the old quarter of Bangkok. There are only 3 rooms and our group stayed in all of them. Everybody takes off shoes at the door and stores them in a wooden cubby with numbered drawers. The house is more than 100 years old, full of ornate woodwork. The food and hospitality were just wonderful! We were all deeply fatigued from our flights and yet so relieved to have this cozy home away from home for our stay in Bangkok.
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| The shoe cabinet |
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| Breakfast for six |
On December 30 we woke to a lovely home-cooked breakfast and then walked about a mile to the Grand Palace on the Chao Phaya River through busy streets and over canal bridges. The heat and humidity were terribly oppressive, especially combined with jet lag. All of us were feeling older than our considerable years. The Grand Palace is a gigantic sprawling complex of temples with spectacular religious iconography and architecture. Color and shapes and crowds and smells.
One of our group suddenly succumbed to the heat and passed out on the pavement! Medical staff came and rescued her in a stretcher/wheelchair and we all joined her in an air-conditioned medical center for a couple of hours. We got to see parts of the Grand Palace that tourists usually don’t visit. After that we took a Grab (Uber equivalent) back to the guest house and relaxed for the rest of the afternoon.
In the evening, I took a taxi back to the airport to retrieve my kindle, which I foolishly left on the plane. Turkish Airlines emailed to let me know it had been found and how to get it back. Driving through the city at night reveals a dramatic contrast between sparkling luxury high-rise apartments and poorly lit slums.
Ruins of Historic Ayutthaya
On December 31, we took an all-day bus trip the ruins of the historical capital of Ayutthaya, about 90 minutes north of the city. We visited a series of ruined temples (Wats). There are so many Wats in Thailand — MegaWats even! Ayutthaya was the Thai capital from 1351 - 1767 capital under 30 kings of 5 dynasties until it was destroyed by an invading Burmese army.
The brick ruins are remarkable: pagodas and stupas in a variety of styles: Thai but also Angkor (Cambodian) and Sri Lankan. Very heavy monsoon flooding in 2011 flooded the island of Ayutthaya for so long that many ruined pagodas that had stood for nearly 700 years began to lean like the tower of Pisa.
Many/most of the Buddhas in the temples have been headless since heavy looting associated with the Burmese invasion and its aftermath in the 18th Century (about the time of the American Revolution). One sculptural Buddha head is completely overgrown and embedded in the roots of a tree!
Most of the ruined pagodas and stupas have no interior. They are built over and house “relics.” These are typically cremated remains. All across south and Southeast Asia, stupas are supposed to hold relics of The Buddha himself, but after more than 2000 years they are “running out of Lord Buddha.” So the stupas more frequently house relics of members of the royal family.
At the last temple ruins we visited in Ayutthaya, there was an incredible reclining Buddha 42 meters long (136 feet)! These amazing sculptures represent the last moments of the life of the historic Buddha, immediately before he died. With his disciples gathered round, he lay down and smiled. The smiling resting figure represents the happiness of achieving release from the cycle of birth and death. This particular reclining Buddha dates from the late 14th Century and is built of brick covered by plaster and just recently repainted. In contrast to Christian calendar which dates from the birth of Jesus, years in the Buddhist Era are counted from the passing of Gautama Buddha around 543 BCE. It’s now the year 2568 BE.
We returned to Bangkok in late afternoon and met other Fort Collins folks for a fantastic dinner at a Thai restaurant right around the corner from our guest house. The restaurant is owned by the sister of our host. Our party of 10 celebrated yet another birthday among us.
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| Fantastic Thai dinner on New Year's Eve |
We had originally planned to attend the New Year’s Eve countdown and fireworks on the river bank in our neighborhood. This year’s celebration was canceled due to the recent death of the Queen Mother. She died in October at the age of 93 and the nation is still in mourning. A few went into the city center to party but most just celebrated as elders — we went to bed early.
Rice Agriculture
On our bus ride back to Bangkok along the Chao Phraya River, we passed many Jujube (red dates) and spectacular Yellow Trumpet trees. The bright yellow clusters of flowers are an emblem of Thailand. There were also enormous areas of rice paddies at all different stages of cultivation.
Rice cultivation is an incredible way to feed huge numbers of people with relatively small amounts of land. Human and rice culture coevolved in this part of the world. People have completely commandeered the seasonal growth and harvest of rice plants by manipulating the hydrologic cycle. This requires a phenomenal amount of labor to build flat paddies surrounded by berms and systems of canals and ditches to manage irrigation, drainage, planting, and harvest.
Rice seedlings are grown in very dense mats in flooded paddies. The density of plants in the nurseries would stunt the growth of the young plants so once started, laborers must hand pluck bunches of the seedlings and replant the rice in sparse rows. This is backbreaking labor performed bent double in a wide stance in knee-deep water. The standing water serves as a kind of mulch that discourages weeds and allows the growing rice to thrive. When the rice is mature, the paddy is drained and laborers return to the fields a third time to harvest the grain.
In Southeast Asia, the annual monsoon would normally produce a single rice crop each year, with planting and growth during the warm rainy season and harvest at the beginning of the hot dry season. The use of enormous pools of communal labor allows repeated flooding, planting, replanting, drainage, and harvest that artificially boosts productivity to two or even three crops per year in the same field.
Truly, rice cultivation takes a village! There are no family rice farmers. Village life is organized around providing the immense amount of labor required to build and maintain paddies, control flooding and drainage, plant and replant and harvest the crop. This cultural practice has been perfected over millennia. It is associated with caloric abundance and communal values of organized cooperation.
By contrast, wheat can be planted and harvested by a single family during the summer season, with field going dormant during winter. Cultures depending on wheat cultivation by family farmers promote the ideal of “rugged individualism” which is the antithesis of the communal labor required to grow rice. But wheat can only provide 20%-30% of the calories per acre compared to rice, so wheat-growing cultures also tend to live on the edge of scarcity.
New Year’s Day: Canal longboats & Wat Pho
On the morning of New Year’s Day, we ate a big breakfast prepared lovingly by our host and then walked through holiday chaos and big crowds to the Chao Phraya River. We boarded a motorized longboat for a 2-hour tour around the canal system that threads all through Bangkok.
This close to the sea, the River itself experiences powerful tides. Passing from the river into the canal system requires passing through locks that prevent tidal flooding of the much lower-lying neighborhoods we traveled through on our tour.
Traveling the canals gave us a very different picture of Bangkok than the stately and formal neighborhood around the guest house. A riotous mix of affluence and poverty is interwoven all through the city. There are stretches of grand homes and temples and other stretches of low slums without electricity.
We passed an enormous golden Buddha statue, 75 meters tall (almost 250 feet). Some religious sites had saffron robes hanging to dry on railings facing the canal. We saw several floating markets and some of the tour group disembarked to buy souvenirs at a little shop with its own dock.
Afterward, we had a long hot walk back to the guest house that left us all feeling old and exhausted. We showered and rested a bit and then our host served us a beautiful afternoon tea. Then we took a nap in the air-conditioned home and waited for the hot sun to sink toward the west.
At 5 PM we went out again to find that even though the air was still super hot and humid, the long shadows felt much cooler than the full sun of mid-day. We took a Grab (Uber equivalent) to Wat Pho, the temple of the Reclining Buddha.
Bangkok was founded around the time of the American Revolution following the destruction of the old capital of Ayutthaya in 1767. The city was built on the same plan as the old capital, and even many of the place names were copied from the original. The Reclining Buddha we visited on New Year’s Day recalls the one we saw the previous day in the ruins of Ayutthaya, but this one is enclosed in a gorgeous ornate hall. Like the other, it represents the happiness one strives for as a result of casting aside the circle of life and death.
Wat Pho is just spectacular. I found it much more beautiful and impressive than the Grand Palace. Gorgeous religious iconography and temple architecture, with thousands of Buddha statues and many sculptural vignettes featuring both real and mythical animals. We walked through at the Golden Hour of sunset and the rising of the nearly-full Moon. The colors were extra-vivid.
After lingering through the sunset hour at Wat Pho, we walked to the bank of the Chao Phraya River and joined hundreds of others viewing the lights coming up on the spectacular Wat Arun across the water. Magical!
We walked home through the dark still-hot streets, went to our room and repacked our luggage. Tomorrow morning we will ride 100 miles to the Laem Chabang Shipyards and board our ship!
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