Something's Fishy in Singapore

Holy system shock!

Let me tell you, coming from Sri Lanka to Singapore is about the craziest transition you can make. Sri Lanka, though beautiful, it still pretty solidly in the third world. Singapore, on the other hand, it easily one of the most technologically advanced places on earth.


I honestly didn’t know what to expect from Singapore. I knew it was going to be modern – you can hardly read anything about the place without knowing that, but what I found was really something else entirely. Every experience you have here – from landing in the airport (super modern, sleek, beautiful, efficient), to taking your first subway ride (easily the fastest, cleanest, most useable public transportation I’ve ever seen), to being able to connect to the massive, fast, free public wifi network nearly anywhere in the city, to walking through the well-planned parks and natural spaces – screams that this city is trying really hard to be an example of what a modern city should be.

The entire City State (it is both a city and a country) is built on an island (and neighboring archipelago) about three times the size of Washington D.C. It really is just one big city, even though about half of the land is set aside for parks and public spaces. The downtown business hub felt like someone took the chaos and financial imperative of Wall Street, the sparkling-clean sidewalks of downtown Portland, the coffee shop density of Sarajevo (read: every second shop on the ground level), and the strange, introverted genteel of most SE Asian countries and shook it all together: definitely a very unique place.





Probably the thing that impressed me most about Singapore was the public transportation. Coming from the perspective of someone who’s studied public transportation systems quite a bit, often in the context of how poorly designed and planned-out public transportation in the US is, Singapore was a serious eye-opener. The Singapore subway is perfect. It’s fast; you can get pretty much anywhere in the city in half an hour, and most places quite a bit quicker. It’s affordable; it cost about a dollar per ride, which is pricier than lots of public systems I’ve seen, but the purchasing power of you average Singaporean is much higher than the average global citizen as well. It’s everywhere; I don’t think it’s possible to be anywhere in the main part of the city and be more than a couple of blocks away from a station. It’s got a great supporting system; buses service most stations and take people to stops between them. And most importantly, it’s USED; people actually use it. A lot. And no wonder, it’s great. I was in public transportation heaven while I was there.

Despite the subway, however, once the engineer and tech-geek in me calmed down a bit I couldn’t shake a strange feeling I got in Singapore. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until I had dinner with a Stanford friend, Patricia, who is now working in the much-talked-about Biopolis (a supposed modern marvel of biology and medical research and development). Patricia has a lot of experience with the Singaporean business world, specifically with the more entrepreneurial side of it, and she pointed out that, like most heavily autocratic societies, Singapore hasn’t learned how to harness the power of the individual creativity yet. Basically, the Singaporean government, which plays a big part in peoples’ lives (you can’t even chew gum in Singapore), has mandated that Singapore should be a hub for future technologies. The bricks and mortar of that (like good public systems) are something that the government has excelled in, but the soul of it is still missing. You can’t force people to be creative; you have to let it happen. So when you have a big government project like the Biopolis, which is supposed to house start-ups that will bring Singapore to the forefront of biological R&D in the 21st century, but you price the floorspace so that only big, established firms can afford to be there, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. I think the metaphor can be extended beyond the Biopolis; Singaporeans seem to be on the forefront when it comes to the material, but they have a long way to go until their culture (and government) matches a lot of the western world in term of openness and, generally, strength of individual purpose.

Anywhoo, even with the strange vibes I really enjoyed my time in Singapore. I spent most of my days wandering the city and catching up on current events back in the States, and trying to figure out how I was going to survive my next adventure: Japan! Looking forward to the chaos of that. Keep an eye out for that update!

-Clay

Sun and Scuba in Sri Lanka

After the chaos of Vietnam, and Cambodia and Thailand before that, I was ready to take a little time and relax. Luckily for me, I had my next destination in store: Sri Lanka. After a brief layover in Bangkok out of Hanoi, which found me stuffing my face with Thai food one last time until I had a stomach ache (totally worth it), I flew into Colombo on the west coast of Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka, even after having been places like the DRC, put me on edge a little bit. Up until recently, the country was in the grip of a 26-year civil war between the national government and the Tamil rebel group, who wanted to divide the country along tenuous ethnic lines. It was a messy conflict, and rather than ending peacefully, it ended with blood when the government finally defeated the Tamil Tigers (the insurgent armed group) in 2009. Like all conflicts that end with violence, the defeated party was not necessarily cowed, and tensions have run high ever since, although outright conflict has been very rare. Even though the country has seen extraordinary economic growth since the peace accords, antiquated trade laws and unnecessary protectionism (no doubt remnant from the civil war) are still stifling a lot of progress.

Nevertheless, Sri Lanka has a lot of natural beauty to offer. If I was staying for two weeks, I would have made an effort to get into the central district, where rainforests and elephants abound, but as it was I only had a week to spend, and I knew exactly how I wanted to spend it: scuba diving.

I wanted to get a diving (PADI) certificate before I got to the Philippines and Australia, because I knew I would want to do some diving there. Sri Lanka is famous for great scuba diving, since it has two separate monsoon seasons which guarantee good diving on either the east or the west coasts. For me, in September, the diving was to be found on the east coast. Unfortunately, that involved an excruciatingly slow train ride (13 hours to go 250ish kilometers). Fortunately, September is not a huge tourist season, and it felt like at times that I had the entire east coast to myself.

I shared my beach view with the cows, but you can't beat the location

Trincomalee, the town from which I dove, is right on the beach, and I was able to find a room right on the beach for practically nothing, right down the beach from the resort (which had rooms for significantly more than “practically nothing”, which I didn’t want to pay) where I was going to take my lessons and get my PADI certificate. As it turned out, I was the only client for the course that week, so I basically got private lessons from John, a British dive instructor who had been in Trincomalee for a couple years.

My days in Sri Lanka, though few, were really amazing. I would wake up every morning and walk right out of my room into the clean ocean to take my bath, have breakfast, head down to the resort for morning lessons and afternoon dives, then back to the room to rest and read and relax. Truly inspiring, but it did mean that I didn’t get much time to see the rest of Sri Lanka or spend much time with Sri Lankan people. I guess I’ll just have to leave that on the list for the future. I passed my PADI with flying colors (John thought I was a PADI spy since I picked up on it so fast), and all too soon I found myself on a bus (WAY faster than the train) back to Colombo to fly to Singapore. Stay tuned for that update!

-Clay

Communism In Vietnam: Would You Like Fries With That?

I think the best advice I’ve received during my entire trip so far was from a local shopkeeper in Siam Reap, Cambodia, who taught me how to cross a street in Asia. Now, I like to consider myself a particularly street-wise person, especially after so many months traveling to reinforce good habits with regards to people and environment, and generally being self-aware. That being said, I was completely unprepared to cross a street in this part of the world, simply because streets here are unlike any other street in the world.

To give you an idea as to what traffic in this part of the world is like, you need to first understand that in Vietnam a person’s most prized possession is their motor bike. To that end, some people save for years to be able to afford a basic one as a symbol of personal success, and once they have one they sacrifice mightily to ride it everywhere. The result, of course, is that Vietnamese cities are FILLED with motor bikes; hundreds of thousands of them, moving through streets like a massive school of migrating fish with little regard for traffic laws or, seemingly, personal safety.

In order to survive crossing the street in such a place, my shopkeeper friend had simple but irreplaceable advice that probably saved my life more than once: “Don’t run, don’t stop”. The theory is that, due to the fact that crosswalks mean nothing and no one obeys traffic laws, you’ll always have to deal with motorbikes while crossing the street. If they can predict your motion, they can move around you. If you start moving irregularly, trying to make a break for it or stopping, or trying to turn your street crossing into a real-life game of frogger with painful consequences, bad things will happen. Doing this takes a bit of false confidence when you’re faced with a massive sea of oncoming motorbikes, but it actually works. To give you an idea what this actually looks like in practice, I found a video of a foreigner crossing the street in Hanoi. This isn’t an exaggeration – it actually was like this often, especially during the afternoons. Notice his good form (don't run, don't stop).

Besides getting really good at crossing the street, Vietnam taught me a lot and surprised me even more. Being an outsider, I expected to find Vietnam to be the repressed, communist society it appears on paper. In actuality, communism is thin veneer on top of what is actually a raging capitalist machine. “The Dragon is Rising,” as they say in Vietnam about their own country, and it really is – the country is one of the fastest growing economies in Asia, and is positioning itself to be a leader in technology and innovation. I think the most telling single vision I had about just where the state of Vietnam is right now happened in Saigon (called Ho Chi Minh City by the government), my first stop in Vietnam from Cambodia, where I went to see the People’s Committee Building, which is ostensibly the heart of communism in southern Vietnam. Literally right across the street was a series of high end western shops like Burberry and Calvin Klein. Within a block of the building were two mega malls that would have given any mall in the States a run for its money.

Here you can see both the People’s Building and Burberry. They don’t even try to hide the capitalism anymore.

Indeed, the people in Vietnam have nearly complete economic freedom. I say “nearly” because there are still moments of almost comical showmanship by the communist government in an attempt to remain relevant. In Hanoi, the capital in the north, Karen (a traveling friend who I met a few days before) and I watched the street food vendor across the street from the one we were squatting at while eating dinner get “shut down” by a police raid for not having the right license. In what could have been taken straight out of a Bond movie parody, a covered army vehicle squealed up, and a number of armed military men jumped out. Immediately the men started picking up all the chairs and tables (which, as is the style, are just tiny plastic things you squat on/next to) and throwing them in the back of the van. The leader began speaking quietly with the owner, shaking his head and pointing, and then, just like that, they squealed away.

You might imagine that the people who were eating at the street food stall would have been alarmed or frightened by the event (as Karen and I, even safely at a distance, were), but no. The people, in an almost bored fashion, just stood up from their tables and chairs and let them be taken. They didn’t even stop eating, instead just choosing to hold the trays between a group of people while they continued on with their conversations, chaos and armed military men raging around them. Within two minutes of the van driving off, the owner produced a new cache of chairs a tables; a second set kept, apparently, exactly for this eventuality. We later learned that the shop owner would go to the communist police station the next day and buy back all the confiscated furniture for about five cents per piece. Little shows like this are evidently quite common occurrences, and the people stoically accept them as a price for the economic prosperity they are all quite acutely experiencing. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” as the saying goes, and the people (rightly) associate the rising tide in Vietnam with generally sensible and successful policies their government is enacting. Even so, the question remained with me for my entire trip in Vietnam: how long can a people put up with so much economic freedom, but so little political freedom?

Besides the cities of Saigon and Hanoi, I had the extraordinary privilege to see some of the natural wonders of Vietnam. Truly, this country is one of the most beautiful on earth, and I hope one day to be able to come back and see more. My first incredible stop to this end was Ha Long Bay, to the northeast of Hanoi.

Formed when a limestone mountain range sank partially into the ocean, Ha Long Bay covers a massive area, and literally thousands of tiny, picturesque sandstone islands spring up throughout the bay, creating a vista that you wouldn’t believe. I spent two days on a boat traveling through the bay with some other travelers from Hanoi, and it was such an incredible way to experience the area. The second night we spent the night on a private island and had the chance to swim, rock climb, and even wakeboard.

I never thought I’d get to wakeboard on this trip, and definitely not in such an amazing locale. Admittedly it was a very touristy thing to do, but sue me, it was fucking awesome.

The other place I got to visit was Ninh Binh, a rice-growing area to the southeast of Hanoi. Like Ha Long Bay, the area is punctuated by limestone mountains, but instead of rising from the sea, they rice from fluorescent green rice paddies.

The countryside here is almost too big to take in at once. The only way to really experience it is to just sit still and look for a while and really soak it in. Karen and I took a little river boat ride through some caves on our first rainy morning there, and after that spent our time exploring a couple local temples and taking a motor-bike tour. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves here.

I was sad to leave Vietnam after Ninh Binh. Vitenam broke all my expectations. The people were mostly happy and excited about their country’s future – they felt relatively free, and have managed to keep a lot of their culture and heritage intact in the face of modernization. Their society is becoming more and more liberated – couples canoodle in the park and eat icecream cones. In fact, walking along the lake in Hanoi in the evening reminded me more of Paris than of Bangkok or Phnom Phen. The country has extraordinary natural resources that they seem to genuinely respect and want to protect. It’s not all rainbows and butterflies; there’s still a lot of work (and reform) to do before it can be considered a truly free place, but of all the places I’ve been, the Vietnamese seem most eager and willing (and capable) of meeting that challenge.

From Hanoi I fly to Bangkok for a short visit before heading off to Sri Lanka for a week of diving!

Much Love,

Clay

Indiana Jones Called, He Wants His Temples Back (Cambodia)

Good temple exploring music

Get ready for some updates, people! My Asian adventures have been going non-stop, and I’ve been in a bit of a blog funk, but recent… shall we say… pestering… from my mom convinced me that I should get back on the bus, so to speak, and catch up.

When last we met, I was just getting ready to leave Thailand after an amazing week with Jess. From Bangkok, I hopped on a bus to Cambodia, which is about a four hour drive to the east. As with most border crossings in the region, you have to take it in two parts – one to the border, where you walk across, and then hop on another bus on the far side. This border in particular is known for the huge number of scams tourists encounter just trying to get across. Luckily I was well prepared for it, and was able to spot the “Fake Border” scam, the “Get your Visa Here!” scam, the “Get your Required Immunization Record Certificate Here!” scam, the “The Border’s Closed for Lunch – Why Don’t You Eat Here!” scam, and a few others. Heck, even when I did make it to the right office to get the right visa, the person who handled my visa started telling me that he’s a tuk-tuk driver in Siam Reap, and would I be interested in a tour guide tomorrow on his off day? Definitely the most shameless scammers I’ve encountered so far – luckily they are the exception and not the rule when it comes to locals in the area, and a little preparation goes a long way.

Another couple hours past the border with Thailand is Siam Reap, a provincial town that’s seen a lot of development in the last few years. The main attraction near Siam Reap is what remains of a massive Khmer civilization – a series of ruins known as the Angkor Complex.

Billed as the 8th wonder of the world, the Angkor Complex, with the main temple of Angkor Wat, and the main town area of Angkor Thom, are really something to behold. I spent four days in Siam Reap exploring the temples each day, and I still felt like I could have spent more time. To get around, I rented a pedal-bike from a local shop, and each day I would make the 10km bikeride to the temples and back, through some pretty amazing scenery. On my first day, I spent the entire afternoon at Angkor Wat.

Angkor Wat was built by King Suryavarman II in the 12th century AD, as a temple to worship the Hindu god Vishnu. In the years since, much of the Hindu influence has been replaced or transformed into Buddhist images (it was easier to renovate than rebuild, apparently). One clear remnant of the Hindu past however, and certainly one of the best reasons to visit Angkor Wat, lay in the incredibly detailed bas-relief carvings that cover over 600 meters of exterior wall space. Each of the four sides of the temple, on the first level, is split in two (around an entrance to the upper levels in the middle of the wall). That creates 8 spaces for 8 different massive stone panels that are each carved to tell a story. All but one of the reliefs tells a story from Hindu mythology, with the final one showing the procession of Suryavarman II to the site of Angkor Wat. My favorite, by far, was the panel that told the story of The Churning of the Sea of Milk.

In this relief, Vishnu appears as his divine form and as his turtle avatar. The naga is wrapped around the mountain (behind Vishnu) and extends tens of meters to the left and right, where there are gods and demons carved holding the body and tail of the naga. Tiny sprites are born from the chaos and fly above the scene.

In the story of The Churning of the Sea of Milk, the devas (demi-gods), after a series of events that has left them powerless and at the mercy of their nemeses the asuras (demons), convince the asuras to join them in the creation of the elixir of immortality. With the collaboration of the god Vishnu, they take the giant naga (a many headed snake) named Vasuki , and wrap it around Mount Mandara. Together, they take turns pulling back and forth on the naga, rotating the mountain (which is supported by Vishnuu as his turtle avatar) and churning the celestial elixir of the heavens. After a thousand years, the elixir of life is created, but the gods go back on their promise to share it with the demons, and take it all for themselves. Bad juju results. The bas is so detailed and so huge that it’s impossible to appreciate in pictures, but it was really a highlight of my travels in Asia to see with my own eyes.

As amazing as Angkor Wat was, I found the rest of the Complex to be equally interesting and beautiful. I spent most of my next couple days exploring Angkor Thom, which is the massive civilian area north of Angkor Wat, and the surrounding ruins and temples.

If any of this looks familiar, maybe it's because Tomb Raider was filmed here...

Interestingly, most of Angkor Thom was built under the rule of the successor to Suryavarman II, who was Buddhist and not Hindu. The Buddhist symbolism is very clear in the architecture here, and the result is no less extraordinary.

Since I was visiting the area in the off-season, one thing that made exploring the ruins both rewarding and challenging was the unbelievable amount of rain. Boy, when they say rainy season here they mean it! There were many times when it was raining so hard that I was frightened to take my camera out of my bag (which I had covered in plastic) because I thought it would be instantly destroyed by water damage. I did get a couple hours here and there with no rain, during which I was extra prolific with my photography, but the majority of the time I spent throughout my time in the Angkor Complex I was soaking wet in ankle deep rainwater. Actually, however much it sucked, it was equally awesome. I was often the only person exploring any given ruin (read: only person crazy enough to be outside), and since the rain wasn’t cold I was comfortable in it after a fashion. To be alone in these amazing temples, with rain pounding all around me, soaked through but happy – I felt like I was Indiana Jones discovering this place for the first time. It was definitely give-and-take, but I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything.

Siam Reap basically turned into a swimming pool during the rains. I had to bike through this flood coming back from the temples one night - terrifying nightmares of hidden potholes followed.

After Siam Reap, I took a bus 6 hours to the south, to the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Phen. My first night there, I had the good fortune to be able to meet up with John Thomas, a fellow Earth-Systems major at Stanford, who was working in Cambodia on a project he started back on The Farm with a group of other students in a class called “Design for Extreme Affordability”, which focuses on creating practical solutions for problems in the developing world. John’s team was working on a sort of half-toilet for rural areas and separates urine and allows for it to be used as a fertilizer (saving money and the environment). Very cool project, and John was getting ready to pass the torch and head back to New York, so I got to crash in on his farewell dinner. It was definitely a treat to see a familiar face in Cambodia, and to hear a bit about some really cool projects happening in the Cambodian countryside.

I didn’t actually do much sightseeing while I was in Phnom Phen, because I had some business to take care of, including getting Visa pages added to my passport (running out of pages in my passport – how cool of a problem is that?), and getting my visa for Vietnam, which can’t be obtained at the border like with most countries. I did manage to make it out to S-21, the prison/torture facility that served as the center for evil during the bloody 3 year, 8 month reign of the Khmer Rouge, during which time over 2 million intellectuals, artists, scientists, businessmen and helpless civilians were killed under Pol Pot’s scheme to turn Cambodia into an agrarian utopia. Cambodia completes my modern-day genocide trifecta (along with Bosnia and Rwanda), and like both of those places before, the memorials to the victims were haunting and real. It really does place an entire society in a different context when you think what some of their older citizens have had to endure.

Anyways, once I had the bureaucratic things behind me, I was anxious to move onto Vietnam, so I got on a bus and made for the border. That update’s just around the corner!

Clay

Swimming with Elephants and Cuddling with Baby Tigers (Thailand)

Jess, I can’t stop listening to it!

Okay, okay, Mom, I’m updating my blog already. I have to say this will be one of my favorite weeks to share with everyone, since it was one of my favorite weeks on the trip so far.

I flew into Bangkok a couple days ahead of my planned reunion with Jessica Hinojosa (Jess, aka Shakes), one of my besties from Camp Kesem and Summer-On-Campus 2010.

Jess, for those of you unfortunate enough not to know her

Jess and I had been planning on meeting in Thailand since way before my trip started. She would be on her way to India to begin a few weeks there leading a trip full of geo-nerds around the Himalayas, and I would be just about in the right part of the world for a reunion. Perfect.

Bangkok is a really amazing and surprising city. Thai culture, being predominantly Buddhist rather than Muslim, is a lot more liberal than what I saw in Malaysia. Buddhist philosophy, after all, is all about personal enlightenment, and only through that does it touch on societal norms. In contrast, Muslim philosophy (and Christian for that matter) often preaches how societies should act and how certain groups should be treated. The “live and let live” philosophy has created in Thailand a people who are extremely tolerant of differences. You only need to see a massive troupe of cross-dressers marching down a street, laughing and joking with the street vendors in a relatively provincial town, to understand that this country definitely has a different concept of what’s okay. The downside, of course, is that it’s also created a culture rife with excesses – sexual excesses in particular. Being a white male in Bangkok can be alarming sometimes, since you’re basically constantly rebuffing offers for ‘ping pong’ shows (live sex shows) and massages (not the innocent kind).I couldn’t walk down a street without being offered sex at every street corner, it seemed. Also unfortunately, the reason why a person like me gets so many lurid offers is because I’m part of a demographic (while male aged 20+) that has made the sex trade in Thailand so successful. It was common (after a week, unremarkable) to see an older white man walking down the street hand-in-hand with a young attractive Thai woman. The transparency of the situation made it so much more repulsive.

But despite all that, Bangkok has so much to appreciate. First and foremost, for me, was the food. I already knew I liked Thai food from going to Thai restaurants often in the States, but oh lord. The real thing is so much better. Being surrounded by amazing, cheap, easy-to-get-to Thai food put me in heaven the whole time I was in Thailand. And did I mention the Thai Iced Coffees? UGH, get me back there.

The day Jess got into Bangkok we hit the ground running and went on a tour of the temple district, near the Royal Palace.

A Buddhist temple along the river

Wat Po, home of the amazing (-ly large) reclining Buddha

The reclining Buddha's feet. Inlaid mother-of-pearl.

Sunrise Temple. Steep Stairs!

Dress properly! Men: no pants. Women: like vampires.

Reunited at last!

Being the travel-robot that I am, I didn’t appreciate until later how much of a trooper Jess was that day. Getting in at 6am after two days of travel straight into a long day of sightseeing – what a champ! We ended the day with a visit to a very trendy rooftop bar, where we had massive cocktails and cheers-ed to the upcoming week.

We got out of Bangkok early the next day, because we knew our time was short. We took a bus south to an island called Ko Chang

Ko Chang was a great, relaxing way to start our week. We spent our first afternoon there exploring the beach and nearby beachside bars.

The next morning we got a late start, which thwarted our plans to go snorkeling in the archipelago to the south of Ko Chang, but lucky for us it opened up the opportunity to go and visit an elephant sanctuary in the middle of the island.

We signed up for a two-hour trek with an elephant, and his handler. The elephant we got, “Rambo”, was by far the biggest at the camp. I swear to god he was at 11 feet tall to his head, and later research revealed he would have weighed around 14,000 pounds. Despite his size, he was obviously a very gentle animal at heart. Our ride included a 30-minute trek out to a deep pool in a nearby jungle stream, an hour-long swim session with Rambo, and 30 minutes back. It was… well, I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

He loooved to be scrubbed and washed. He basically just leaned up against this rock and dozed while I scrubbed him

This was definitely one of my highlights to my entire trip. Swimming with Rambo, just me, Jess, and his handler all alone in the middle of the jungle, in the fresh cold water… really amazing. Did you know elephants have the biggest cerebral cortex (the part of the brain responsible for cognitive processing) of any animal on earth? Rambo definitely knew what was going on - you could see his intelligence behind his eyes.

Although “Elephant Tourism” is big in Thailand, it unfortunately it has a dark side along with the amazing things it can provide. We didn’t know it going in, but we were lucky that we chose one of the better sanctuaries. The elephants at the place we went to, Ban Kwan Chang elephant refuge, were all formerly working elephants either in the logging industry or in the vile “elephant show” industry. In both cases, the elephants go through a “breaking” process called Phajaan, in which they are basically beaten into submission. When the elephants are too old to perform, they are often abandoned or sold to shady operations. At Ban Kwan Chang their lives are a lot better, even though as a result of the Phajaan the mahmout (handler) for Rambo still had to use a hook to correct his behavior sometimes. He was trained to respond to it, so it unfortunately becomes a necessary evil for the rest of his life (Phajaan trained elephants are very hard to retrain). The trick I guess is just to minimize the use of harsh corrections and to otherwise provide them with a good lifestyle, which judging by how much Rambo loved his swim and getting fed on the way back, I think Ban Kwan Chang did pretty well.

We ended a nearly perfect day perfectly by getting a massage on the beach and hitting a nearby bar for drinks and dinner.

Or next day was our last in Koh Chang, so we decided to hike our way to one of the major waterfalls on the island. Unfortunately, those pictures are still trapped in Jess’ camera, so you’ll just have to imagine it. Here are some key words to get your imagination going: perfect jungle waterfall. Got it? Thought so.

We wrapped up an amazing trip to Koh Chang with a great seafood meal on the southern tip of the island, before making our way back to the mainland and the nearby airport, to hop on a short flight to Chiang Mai, via BKK.

Chiang Mai is the adventure capital of Thailand. Located in the jungle-covered northern interior, it’s the perfect place to have some outdoor adventures. It’s also a university town, and the educational atmosphere extends to the populace in the form of various schools of all types – everything from cooking to kickboxing.

Our first morning in Chiang Mai we spent Temple-hopping.

The real highlight of the day, however, came in the afternoon when we went to visit Tiger Kingdom.

Yes, this is a place where they let you play with tigers. During the day, tigers, like most cats, are pretty sedate. Since these cats have been born and raised in captivity, they not only are used to, but expect lots of human contact every day. They are basically great big Labradors, including the part where they roll over and expect a belly rub. Besides being totally terrifying, it was really amazing to pet and be so close to such an incredible animal. Of course, Tiger Kingdom is also a good place to learn about the Asian Tiger, which is critically endangered.

The next day, we decided to get our learning on and took a full day cooking course. To say that I was excited about this would be a dramatic understatement. I’ve already described my love for Thai food, and the prospect of being able to cook it on my own back in the States, I’m pretty sure, would result in measurable increases in my everyday happiness. These photos, too, are unfortunately trapped on a camera in India somewhere, but I can assure you it was magical. We went to the market in the morning to learn about buying fresh ingredients, and then we cooked (and ate!) 7 courses throughout the morning and afternoon. We had a huge menu to choose from, and I chose to learn to make a starter (spring rolls), a soup dish (chicken coconut soup), a noodle dish (pad thai), a non-curry main (cashew chicken), a curry paste (red), a curry main (with chicken), and a dessert (sweet sticky rice with mango). On top of all that, we got a great big cookbook with all the recipes, including the ones we didn’t learn. This was such an awesome way to spend a day in Chiang Mai, and we left stuffed to the gills with food and knowledge.

The next day we woke up early and went up into the mountains near Chiang Mai to the Royal Palace and Wat Prahthat Doi Suteph, the mountain temple with the most holy chedi (tower-like centerpiece) in all of Thailand. Legend says that a white elephant bearing a unique image of the Buddha was set loose from a temple in Chiang Mai long ago, and the elephant wandered until it found the spot where Wat Prahthat Doi Suteph now stands, and died, leaving the Buddha there to stay. Both the palace and the temple were beautiful, but again the pictures are unavailable at the moment. Google it if you really need to know, but if you can imagine a beautiful mountain temple, complete with foggy clouds rolling over the terraces and the thick smell of incense everywhere, then you’re 90% of the way there.

We caught an overnight bus back to Bangkok that night, sad to leave Chiang Mai. Jess flew out the following day to start her adventures in India. I stuck around another day to visit my favorite street restaurant one more time (okay, two more times), where I finally got up the nerve to ask to watch them make the Pad Thai, since I had a grasp for the different flavors after my cooking class. They were happy to oblige, and I have some useful notes added to my cookbook now. The next day, I took a bus to Cambodia. That update’s coming soon!

LOVE lots,

Clay (and Jess)