A Longboat and a Long Train Ride

During the 19th century, according to our already well-thumbed Lonely Planet, Bangkok could be heard called the "Venice of Asia." The multitude of smells wafting down the alley past our hostel aside, it was actually due to the city's rather extensive network of canals. While no longer a central route of movement, these canals still offer visitors a chance to travel the back neighborhoods of Bangkok in a less than typical manner.

"You! You! Sit middle of boat!"
This was the driver of the longboat we had just climbed into telling Matt that, for safety's sake, his butt really needed to be dead center. Jillian and I sat on the bench behind him, our centers of gravity forming an equilateral triangle of stability. Picture a 50-foot long canoe with an outboard motor. The driver sat perched in the back, steering us through the canals and narrowly past other longboats. All calls were close.

Passing into the canals from the main river

Inside the canals it was rather sleepy, with people going about their lives, albeit in plain view of us passers-by. The atmosphere was both urban and tropical; lived-in and wild with overgrowth. Some young monks standing on a protruding dock sold us a loaf of bread and told us to drop it over the side of the boat. We did. (Three second pause.) A 5x5 foot area was suddenly full of flopping, splashing catfish, emerging from the murky bottom to fight it out for human food.

And I never thought I'd hear this combination of words: "You want to buy a beer for the driver?" This from a woman who had paddled her little floating convenience store out to us later in the trip. Her trinkets were cheap, but her cooler of beer was appealing. After handing over three Changs, she asked about refreshing our guide. Well, we were going to tip him anyway...

Inside the canals

A fish feeding frenzy

Our driver, pre-beer

Then we headed north to Chiang Mai, a city renowned for its proximity to outdoor adventures. Despite being only a 300 mile trip from Bangkok, the train ride was scheduled to last a cool 14 hours. In reality it lasted 16 hours, which, for those of you keeping score at home, works out to a grueling pace of 18 mph. So we ordered a bucket of beer and passed the time watching the Thai countryside until dark, when we climbed into our tiny, pull down beds.

Aloha Mr. Hair

The Pacific Ocean is huge. It took us just under 16 hours to cross it in a plane, though I did have a TV screen embedded in the seat in front of me. This, I suppose, made my trip across the world's largest ocean easier than, say, Magellan's. But we compare ourselves to our contemporaries, so I felt some bratty jealousy when I walked through first class during deboarding. If economy class is comprised of vaguely reclining seats and business class contains lounge chairs, then first class passengers are situated in what can only be called cubicles. They have two seats! And there's an entire executive's desk where the tray table should be complete with a paperweight that reads "Person of the Year."

My brother, Matt, flew a different airline than Jillian and I, so we agreed to meet "somewhere" in the Bangkok airport. We also staged a small competition over who would enjoy the best movie viewing experience during the flight. I won going away, mostly because I was able to view two episodes of the original Star Trek.

After 24 hours of travel and the international dateline to really screw things up, we arrived to our hostel about as biologically confused as you can get: our bodies had no idea what time it was. Did I want a beer or an orange juice? Was I even hungry? And what's my name again? So we set out from the hostel, determined to power through until at least sunset.

The streets of Bangkok are swarming with tuk-tuks, a vehicle slightly more evolved than a riding lawn mower. It seats three and the drivers don't have the most sterling reputation for honesty in dealings with Westerners. In our hostel alone there were a dozen posted warnings about tuk-tuk scams, mostly involving driving unwitting passengers to ripoff jade markets instead of their preferred destination. As we strolled around the neighborhood near our hostel--a mix of historic sights, cheap food stalls, and transvestite prostitutes--a group of tuk-tuk drivers called out to us. Want a ride? No. Very cheap! I'm sure. Then one of them rubbed his hand across his chin, miming my beard, and called out, "Mr. Hair! Mr. Hair! Come on, Mr. Hair!" I guess he just didn't know the word and soon the entire row of drivers was at it, a chorus calling out for this Mr. Hair.

A tuk-tuk

Outside the National Museum

On Friday Matt and I wore matching purple medical scrubs. Not on purpose and not all day: when we visited the Royal Palace we discovered that pants are required. While Jillian was lent a cute red skirt that she briefly considered keeping in lieu of her $4 deposit, the brothers Kearney got to stroll the grounds in loud reminders to everyone that we didn't read the guidebook too closely.

The palace grounds, which also include one of the country's most precious temples, Wat Phra Kaew, was insanely beautiful and ornate. I say insane because I felt a mild madness overtaking me as I tried to prioritize my picture-taking. Literally every building on the grounds deserves to be photographed from all sides and many of the structures are very close together--I felt like a mouse walking though a maze where the walls are made of cheese.

Wat Phra Kaew

Preparing to enter and see the famous Emerald Buddha

One of the many golden Buddhas on the palace grounds

The palace, built in 1782, is a national treasure in Thailand, where reverance for the king is total. His oversized portraits line the city boulevards, his name graces so many parks and buildings, and there's a law against insulting him. I know what you're thinking, but Thailand is neither a dictatorship nor a personality cult. It's a functioning democracy and King Adulyadej is beloved like a father. His role, much like the palace, is mostly ceremonial.

After taking in the palace and a few more gorgeous temples, including Wat Pho which houses the largest Reclining Buddha in Thailand (coming in at 46 meters by 15 meters), in the heat and humidity of the day, we retired back to our hostel and some well-deserved Thai food dishes. Lots of rice, lots of noodles, and tons of spice.

As always, more pictures can be found by clicking on "Our Photos" on the right sidebar.

Time To Go

It's official: we're skipping Jillian's birthday this year. Oh, we'll celebrate her big 3-0 for sure, but thanks to some international dateline sleight-of-hand, there will be no January 13 for the Kearneys this year. Our flight to Bangkok leaves from Los Angeles just before midnight on January 12 and lands around noon on the 14th. I guess this means Jillian gets to be 29 for another year. And if she never turns 30, can she ever turn 31?

From Thailand we'll take a short flight up to Vietnam, a bus along the coast and on to Cambodia and back to Thailand, then flying to India and traveling overland to Nepal before coming home in early April. We hope to regularly update this blog with accounts and pictures of our adventures. Enjoy!

The itinerary:

Cubed

On most occasions Jillian and I are extremely light packers, the sort to carry a child-sized backpack for a weekend getaway or a trip to a friends' apartment. And that includes sleeping bags. This is mostly due to Jillian's ability to roll up a pair of underwear to the size of a highlighter and my willingness to make one tee shirt last an entire Thanksgiving weekend.

Our big failure on this front came during the trip home from Macedonia, but I kind of think this doesn't count since we were trying to bring back everything after two years. Still, we take great pride in our packing abilities and so we were determined to make everything fit in four, sub 50-pound suitcases. We didn't have a scale on hand to verify the weight of each bag, but rather we were left to guess based on how much our shoulders burned when we lifted one suitcase. And they did burn, which should have been our first clue that things were about to go terribly amiss.

The sky was still dark when we arrived at the Sofia, Bulgaria, airport and happily approached the unsmiling faces behind the desk at Czech Air. We were going home...what could possibly break the mood? Oh, perhaps four bags weighing 60, 62, 65, and 68 pounds and two check-in agents who pulled a -14 on the sympathy scale? Sorry, they said, those bags need to weigh less than 50 pounds each or we'll be confiscating your life savings. Jillian pleaded with them, explaining that we had just spent the last two years teaching English and generally saving children from the dregs of residual Communist thinking. And collecting bottles and jars of Macedonian treats.

[PICTURE OF TRAUMATIC EVENT NOT FOUND]

Then: 1) The pleading didn't work. 2) Jillian cried and cursed them out. 3) We opened every suitcase on the floor of the terminal and began throwing things out (clothes, books, jars of food, a make-up case, shoes). 4) I had a hard time getting these two women to even give us a trash bag in which to place all these perfectly good items. A security guard loitered in the area, watching us furiously stuff the trash bag full. When I asked him where I could throw the bag out, he told me to leave it there, sitting on the floor in the middle of the terminal. We were in a hurry, so we shuffled off, but I glanced back once and saw what was clearly a terrorist alert in the making: a giant, unattended package slumped on the polished floor in an increasingly crowded airport. Maybe it was the guard's first week on the job or perhaps he was waiting for us to climb the escalator before he loaded our stuff into his car.

For our approaching trip to Asia, not only are we committed to avoiding international incidents, but we also have our eyes set on light and efficient packing. Efficiency can be quite elusive when you're talking about backpacks--it always seems the item you need is buried at the bottom, thus requiring the removal of everything else, which in turn disrupts the careful folding and packing you just spent 15 minutes at the hostel accomplishing. The inevitable problem child is the sweatshirt--keep it near the top and you'll encounter record high temperatures; bury it and you'll soon have chattering teeth.

Well, some wiz solved this problem for us with the simple, miraculous Packing Cube. Seriously, this is the stuff of Jillian's dreams. I'm a bit surprised she didn't invent this herself. By packing all our items into these little mesh cubes and then stacking the cubes into our packs... compartmentalization! I fully expect these little wonders to come in quite handy during the trip. Want a shirt? Just pull out the shirt cube. Looking to switch out those sneakers for some flip-flops? Yeah, there's a footwear cube, too.

Packing: check!

For three months, that's everything...aren't those packing cubes so cute?