Our virtually empty, comfortable, double decker bus was one hour late, leaving us time to write and send out last minute postcards from Cambodia. Four hours later we arrived at a sketchy border town to process our free 15 day visas and continued onto Bangkok for another 4 hours in a minivan. Our lunch stop confirmed that we had reached modern Thailand, with a giant 7-11, a Shell station, larger than life golden framed portraits of the King and Queen, spicy street food (thank Buddha) and a new confusing currency ($1USD=30Baht).
Bangkok boasts 7.5 million people, maybe triple that amount in cars and tuktuks and in our opinion quadruple that amount in beauty in every sense. Our five sense are inundated by beautiful-shimmering-golden-wats, mouthwatering cuisine, incense mixed with exhaust, techno-over street stall vendor advertising-over Buddhist chimes and our relentless perspiration. Bangkok even has four major red light districts. The minivan dropped us off on Khao San street, the backpackers' district, where we ended up staying for our final four glorious nights together. In this time our pillows have suffered our tears of loss while our bodies have suffered the hottest, must humid and sweatiest capital in the world.
Banglamphu where Khao San is located, is littered with street food stalls, cheap fashion, tuktuks, bars and tourists in every form imaginable. The tuktuk drivers will counter your offer to pay 80 Baht for a ride with "20 Baht and one stop!" One stop means a visit to a factory jewelry or other scheming shop where they will force you to buy things you don't want. Fortunately we never fell for this, but it did provoke some incredulous laughs. Our first evening in Bangkok was ample time to get our bearings in our new neighborhood, window shop, eat delicious Thai food and make plans with two fun Germans to have drinks later on. To our shock we got stood up. How dare they! But we still had a fabulous time sharing a bucket of mystery drink, taking silly photos and appreciating our very own homegrown Starbuck's coffee.
Waking early on Sunday in our stiflingly hot "fan (if it deserves to even be called that) room", we ventured to the weekend market. Immediately we were intercepted by two American School students who endearingly interviewed us, photos and all, for their English class assignment. We continued through the massive market of clothing, antiques, food, books and more realizing that there were many more Thai than fa-rang (western tourists). Lisa shopped her way through the market while Gabi ate her way through the market (mostly in ice creams) leaving us both exhausted. We headed in a luxurious air conditioned taxi to a place we were told Gabi could purchase a new digital camera (an unexpected expense) after hers' broke in Cambodia.
The shopping center was intimidating. We entered on floor one of seven and immediately encountered a "celebrity superstar" singing pop amidst faux smoke to a massive crowd of Thai fanatics. We made out way up the seven floors of congested electronic shops and shopaholics, entering several shops on each floor to inquire about the perfect purchase for Gabi. By floor seven we had found our match and they even gave us each a bag of free popcorn. We a gracious smile and a high-five, we accepted our highly deserved edible reward, while Gabi dropped a lot of bones on her first digital camera in five years.
With impressive stamina for sightseeing and ample appetites, we continued into China Town. We were confronted, as expected, by many new foods. we saw 'Birds' Nest', 'Shark Fins', and we tried large black scorpions, long legged grasshopper, larvae and tiny fried frogs. To our surprise, we almost ordered seconds of the scorpion. The claws were the crispiest part. Instead we went onto try many other snacks including delectable chicken and pork skewers in peanut sauce and Gabi's fave mezcla of a cooling sweet drink with beans, corn, rice, jello seaweed and mango. Before heading home we explored a Chinese temple and public hospital late night. We celebrated over a bottle of wine and five-rounds of intense Yahtzee.
Again drenched in our own sweat, we awoke to a cold shower and an ambitious day of sightseeing. Our first stop was the Wat Phra Kaew (aka the temple of the Emerald Buddha) and the Grand Palace. After meeting two German guys in line, we decided to give Germany a second chance and hired a guide together at a discounted price. The services included fashionable skin covering attire. The grounds were constructed in 1782 and to this day represent more than two hundred years of one royal dynasty and continue to be a sacred pilgrimage for Buddhists.
We were blown away by the bling and the beauty and our photos cannot give it justice (especially since we could not take photos inside of any temples, understandably). Everything that looks gold is in fact at least gold plated with 24kts. The highly revered Thai King Rama IX and Queen Sirikit do not live on these grounds unless there is a special occasion, allowing for daily visitors, to our benefit. Royal Heads of State who visit Bangkok get to stay on these gorgeous religious grounds in the Guest House, but of course the elected U.S. President is not one of these fortunate visitors (instead he gets the entirety of a 5-star hotel).
The temple housing the Emerald Buddha is covered in shimmering gold and multicolored glass tiles along with antique porcelain and lacquer art. The Emerald Buddha has three wardrobes throughout the year, commemorating the different seasons of hot, cold and rainy. Before entering the temple, you must remove your shes (as in all Hindu and Buddhist temples) and you can opt to be blessed three times on the forehead by a lotus flower dipped in holy water. We were also given gold flecks to wear on our foreheads like bindis. Inside the temple, tourists and Buddhist Thai visitors alike respectfully practice silence in reverence to the Emerald magnificence. We both made our prayers and bowed three times to Buddha with such ease and compassion that our new German friends thought we were both practicing Buddhists. Outside of the temple an intimidating row of Garutas (demon birds) protect the temple from evil spirits.
Our animated guide took us to an impressively detailed walls surrounding the temple and Grand Palace portraying the Ramayana in lacquer art. He acted out some of the scenes to our (and his own) amusement. The wall even included some bandaged up Thai boxing monkeys. We continued to the coronation hall and then onto the Royal Palace, where we took ridiculous photos on the lawn. The tour ended with huge shared smiles between our toothless endearing guide and us, as a guide friend of his looked on saying "he is a good man, he is a wonderful guide".
Having befriended the Germans, we continued on together to eat and sight see, where we introduced them to a backpackers' budget lunch, aka street-food. Lisa had the best Pad Thai of her life among our other delicious snacks. We visited the ginormous reclining golden Buddha, 46m long and 15m high, which illustrates the passing of Buddha into Nirvana (the Buddha's death). This Buddha, with his ornately engraved foot soles, hardly fit in his home of Wat Pho. We jointly purchased a bucket of 108 coins, symbolizing 108 japa beads of prayer, an auspicious number in Hinduism. We took turns dropping the coins each alternating into the 108 vases but lost our count and were one coin short at the end of our religious endeavor. We venerated ourselves by visiting and praying to no less than 394 magnificent Buddha images inside of the rest of this Wat. On our way out we saw statues of Yogis mastering challenging meditation poses. We each commemorated this experience with three hittings of the gong accompanying our prayers.
We continued onto Wat Arun, a temple renamed for the Indian God of Dawn, Aruna. We arrived by a short ferry over the Mae Man Chao Phraya River to this religious sight to find a loudspeaker of tasteful Thai pop playing. We climbed up a few stupas and entered temples, visiting a Buddha footprint, lighting incense and hitting gongs along the way in prayer. The final climb was up a steep staircase ascending the largest stupa which resulted in 360 degree views of Bangkok.
Having visited the three major religious sights in Bangkok, the four of us celebrated with several rounds of beers along the river. The waitress, proud of having grown her hair out for about 30 years at the age of 44, was excited to instigate many photos with the German men.
We continued onto our Backpackers' turf for more beer, slushies, dancing and a grand introduction to insect cuisine for the Germans.
After a late start we headed to the Siam Square, a five-star shopping mall filled with Versace and Bulgari and the out-of-our-budget Ocean World Aquarium, the largest aquarium in SE Asia. We walked along the SkyTrain line to the National Stadium to the Bangkok Center for the Arts. There we enjoyed free art exhibits and "food art" of ice cream inspired by local street foods.
A few blocks away we visited the Jim Thompson House Museum made completely of gorgeous teak wood. We explored the gardens and art exhibitions of this entrepreneurial, former CIA director, and personal art collector, with the guidance of an elegant, adorable, tiny Thai guide with her very own invented singsong English accent. Thompson created the international appetite for Thai silk, having started by sending samples to the international fashion houses in Milan, London and Paris. Thompson's tastefully decorated house is along a river canal in Bangkok, adding to its' charm, along with the lush garden and koi fish.
With only hours left together at this point, we are enjoying a 2 liter bottle of wine and a bottle of champagne will celebrate the completion of this blog and photo posting. As our tears continue to flow we have future plans to look forward to. Lisa will begin two days of travel tomorrow night (Thursday, Sept. 8) via Seoul and San Francisco to Mexico City. She is excited to see her friends on Friday night in Mexico City for a welcome home/going away/b-day party for a group of people. In true Gabi fashion, against her budget, Gab has extended her travel through Sept. 30 to tour Thailand. Lisa is jealous yet feels entitled with responsibility. Maybe she and Gabi could have shared a bit of their burdens (responsibility vs. irresponsibility).
In three months we have accomplished more than we are capable of sharing in a blog. We'll just mention a few landmarks. Today we reached 77 bottles of wine consumed, 1 bottle of champagne, and a lot of bottles of SE Asian beers. We have slept all over the place including 10 guesthouses, 1 home stay and 1 boat in Vietnam, 10 guesthouses, 1 border crossing and 1 home stay in Laos, 9 guesthouses in Cambodia, 1 guesthouse in Thailand and a few overnight buses in between. That's a total of laying our heads at 30 guesthouses, 1 border, 1 boat, 2 home stays and many buses.
We deserve a massage and a comfy air conditioned bed. We've documented our excursions with 24 blog posts, receiving over 700 unique hits from our fabulous fans and a whopping 1,496 photos. We've also dominated an extensive number of wats and new friends encountered which we cannot begin to count. Our laughs, frustrations, surprises, and bowl discomforts are also innumerable. Yet after all of our adventures, it still feels like we were only planning our trip haphazardly yesterday amongst our busy lives which we will soon return.
Thank you for checking out our adventures for the past three months. Your dedication and enthusiastic feedback has inspired us to keep writing. Travelling for three months together has been an invaluable and inspirational experience which will remain a significant part of us. After we depart tomorrow we anticipate outbursts in our sleep of deprivation and daytime outbursts of laughter in nostalgia. Although this is last blog posting to Girl Talk, Gabi will keep in contact via email about her solo adventures with photos posted to the album linked here. Lisa will not bore you with her everyday life in Mexico City. We love SE Asia, we love our current state of unemployment and most of all we love each other.
We continued onto our Backpackers' turf for more beer, slushies, dancing and a grand introduction to insect cuisine for the Germans.
