Exploring beautiful Thailand

Sawadikaaaaaaa! (pressing my palms together and bowing my head, just like the Thai people greet eachother)

I’ve just crossed the Thai-Lao border after being two weeks in Thailand. I am travelling for one and a half months now and I’ve already crossed four borders by now! Sounds like a lot, but I still have two and a half months to go. Right now I am sitting in a little restaurant next to the busstation, trying to entertain myself for 5.5 hours. There is a little girl that lives here showing me all here stuffed animals. Kids always have an universal language. That’s what I like about them. I seem to be the only tourist around here, everyone is taking the slowboat. I just took the fastest route, which is by bus. I booked a ‘tour’ to get me from Chiang Rai, Thailand to Luang Prabang, Laos. So they picked me up at six in the morning with the minivan and we crossed the border together. After that, we stopped at some place where a Lao guy from the tourcompany explained us how the journey was going to be: ‘They might have explained it already in Thailand, but that’s all bullshit.’ And when a girl wanted to ask something: ‘Dont worry, it’s going to be ok. Just relax, take a chill pill.’  This guy spoke English a little bit too well. It was a fun group with a Colombian girl and a Spanish guy amongst them, but unfortunately they are all taking the slowboat on the Mekong – it takes about two days and you get a beautiful scenery. But well, let’s hope there’s a nice view from the bus as well :D I got here at 10.30 and there are two daily buses leaving at 10.00 and 16.00 pm… So yeah that sucks a little bit. I will arrive early in the morning in Luang Prabang. It seems to be a very nice city, so I am pretty excited! 

Bangkok

Two weeks ago I said farewell to Myanmar and to Jolien. My ‘solo’ journey would start in Bangkok! After the nice temperature in Myamar, the warmth and humidity hit me pretty hard! I stayed near Khao San Road (the famous backpackers street in BKK) and I didn’t find the people that nice, because they are very used to tourist around here. So my first impressions weren’t that positive. It was a pretty big contrast from where I had just came from. But I liked the atmosphere at Khao San Road at night. Everyone was having fun, drinking a beer or getting a Thai massage. The first day I got out in the afternoon and walked through a parc near the Grand Palace. There was some kind of Buddhist festival going on, with people selling books and music albums. When I sat down on a bench to take some rest, a Thai man came up to me and started chitchatting with me in his best Engish. When he left, he gave me his Buddha poster! Although it’s now folded in my backpack, I thought this was a very special gesture. After a while I met an Indonesian group of girls (with a baby) waiting outside the Grand Palace and I joined them to go to see the Sleeping (Reclining) Buddha in Wat Pho. Omg this Buddha was enermous!! Those Indonesian girls where pretty crazy but fun and we took a lot of pictures (one of them was a big fan of the selfiestick…)! My next morning I started very ‘flashpacking’, I went to have a breakfast buffet at a very nice hotel in BKK (thanks D.A.D). I could really use it after three weeks of Myanmar! In Thailand you can actually get quite a lot of Western food, but this breakfast was pretty amazing. They had everything you can ever imagine when having a breakfast. This hotel was close to Siam Square, a shopping mall area. I went to the Siam Paragon – it was pretty impressive. It was maybe not as big as the Costanera Centre in Santiago (for my Chilean friends), but it was very modern with a big cinema and a very luxury food area. Fun fact: the Thai people really love their King and his family. There are big photos of his family all over the country. I have the feeling I now them personally. Funny culture… I’m trying to picture how it would be seeing Willem Alexander and his family when riding on the highway. After the shopping mall I went to see the Grand Palace. This was the day I introduced the ‘don’t do anything other than eat or sit between 12 and 15 pm’ – rule. I got there at 13 pm and it was packed with Chinese tourists with their umbrellas and cameras. After seeing the holy Emerald Buddha, I just took a little nap in some corner and luckily I felt less grumpy after this. I guess there are not a lot of people who can say they slept at the Grand Palace. Afterwads i took the boat to Wat Arun (another famous temple, don’t ask me why) and I made some Chinese friends. Individually they can be really nice, but in groups they just don’t know any personal space and they can be very noisy. So these two sisters seemed to be really into me and we went to get some dinner together. It was very funny, because they actually didn’t speak any English, but it’s amazing how far you can get with Google Translate. After a delicious Pad Thai, I even got one of them to download Whatsapp (which is banned in China, just like Facebook). And now she is sending me random translated messages all the time. My next stop was Kanchanburi – a three hour ride from Bangkok.

Kanchanaburi

When people ask me where I have been in Thailand, most of them have no idea what Kanchanburi is. It’s not on the standard path everyone does, so I am happy I went there actually! People go here to visit the ‘Death Railway’ or the Birmese railway. In WOII the Japanase wanted to construct a railway from Burma (Myanmar) to Thailand for their supplies. So they forced thousands of prisoners of war to work for them and a lot of them were killed under the unbearable circumstances – even 3000 Dutch soldiers died, I never knew this. It’s crazy to think they did this kind of labour in this extreme climate. I sometimes think this heat is going to kill me and I’m not even doing any manual labour. The town Kanchanburi is known for the bridge that is located here , it got famous by the novel and the movie ‘the Bridge on the River Kwai’. I did a tour where we also went to the Erawan Waterfalls (7 in total), one of the most beautiful in Asia.. they say. We walked for some time in this national parc and then took a dive in one of the waterfall! This was incredibly refreshing, except for the fact that the fish were trying to bite you all the time. We also took a train ride on the railway where we had an amazing view over the river. Some part of the railway is still functioning. It’s crazy to realize how this railway was constructed. My accommodation here was lovely, it felt like a was in the middle of the jungle with my little hut standing on poles in the water. But it was just down the main road.

Ayutthaya + Sukhothai

After Kanchanaburi I went up north to Ayutthaya, a city with a historical parc where there a lot of ruines. It’s very impressive to think these ruines have been standing here for hundreds of years. And it’s even more impressive that you can just walk around and touch everything if you’d like. This is not allowed of course, but there don’t really seem to be any guards. In Europe everything would probably  be behind glass. One of the most famous places here is the ‘Buddha in tree’. It’s a Buddha head that fell of a statue a couple of hundreds of years ago and all the roots have been growing around it over the years. Now it’s just smiling at us. In the parc you can take an elephant ride. I rented a bicycle to see the ruines, so at one point I passed an elephant walking one metre next to me. They are kind of slow animals haha. They also have a small circus here where they let them do some tricks and you can pose for a picture with them. I don’t know how they treat them here.. but i had a whole different experience in Chiang Mai. 

My next city was Sukothai. I stayed here a bit longer than Ayutthaya, because the historical parc was bigger. These ruines were also very impressive! And the Buddha’s are soooo big. I went with two German girls and we also visited the parc at sunset. This was very nice and we stumbled upon a group of Thai girls practicing their traditional dancing. Apparently they had some kind of show in the evening. It looked very beautiful with the sunset and temples behind them.

Chiang Mai

My bus ride to Chiang Mai was a bit longer than I had expected so I was veeery hungry. I met the same German girls at the hostel I stayed and we went together to the nightmarket and had some dinner. The nightmarket here is quite big and they sell very nice things. Unfortunately that’s all there was in the area of my hostel so the next day I changed to another one that was in the Old City. This hostel was not really cosy, but the area was very nice. It was in an alley with a lot of restaurants and other hostels, so there was a nice atmosphere. In Chiang Mai I really didn’t feel like doing touristy things ever again in my life, so I mostly chilled and had food. I did visit two temples. At one of them the adoloscent munks where trying to hang up some nice decorative flags above their buddha. One of them was even sitting in the tree and trying to hang them. It was nice to see their teameffort! The next day i visited the ‘Elephant Jungle Sanctuary’. It was so special to be able to stand next to the elephants and touch and feed them. Normally you would just see them from a distance in a zoo. I think they are amazing creatures and they really don’t do you any harm. They just want to eat (250 kilo's a day!). These elephants were saved form riding camps across the whole country where they were treated badly most of the time. This sancatuary is a ‘no riding camp’. You could really see that the elephants had a lot of freedom, they are allowed to walk in a big area in the jungle / camp. There even was a little elephant that was 5 years old!! She was very playful. When we went into the river to bathe them, she was very happy and went all the way down in the water with her head. It was a wonderful day!

Chiang Rai

In Chiang Rai (three hours from Chiang Mai), you could really feel a big change in temperature, because it was higher up in the mountains. It was so nice to not be sweating for once! I even saw some rain for the first time since I’ve been travelling. The hostel I stayed in, was one of the best I’ve ever seen for this kind of price. Here I would meet an American girl that I already had met before in Kanchanaburi. We had a nice dorm, so early in the morning we went with some girls to visit the famous White Temple. Well, I have visited a lot temples by now, but this one was like nothing I've ever seen before. It was like a house from Disneyland, painted in white with some silver shiny mirrors. It’s actually a very new one (compared to the ones I have seen), it opened in 1997. When you approach the temple you need to cross a bridge with hundres of outreaching hands underneath it.. It represents ‘hell’ and when you enter the temple you have reached ‘heaven’. The most interesting thing here were actually the wall paintings in front of the Buddha. They had painted different characters from movies in reddish colors (it also looks like hell), like Indiana Jones, Batman, Hello Kitty (!), Minions, Elvis Presley.. Apparently you think these are your ‘heroes’ , but only Buddha is your real saviour. Interesting theory. This day we also went to see the Black House, an open air museum with a lot of interesting sculptures, art and architecture. It was mostly animal bones and some alligator skins and long tables (just look at the pictures).. it kinda felt like I had stepped into an episode of Game Thrones. When we got back to the hostel, I met an other girl that I had already seen before! She was staying in the same dorm. For the ones who read my previous blog: she’s the friend of the university friend I came across in Myanmar. Small world!!

This was my last day in Thailand and I’ll probably meet some people in Laos that I’ve met before because a lot them are taking the same route. After Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia I will visit some islands in the south so I am not done with Thailand just yet!!

Thanks for reading my blog and I hope everyone is doing great on the other side of the world :)

Lots of loooveeee xxxxxxxxx