Thailand

Our time in Thailand was pretty uneventful, which was quite nice. We planned on doing a silent meditation retreat in North Thailand that I was sure was going to be fascinating to tell everyone about, but after reading some negative reviews the day before going, we backed out and ended up just hanging out in Chiangmai. Chiangmai introduced us to the foods of Thailand, but besides a short hike, most of the time we hung out in the room, avoiding the heat and trying to figure out the next legs of our trip.

After a little less than a week in Chiangmai we headed south to an island off the coast of Thailand called Koh Chang. Our time on the island ended up falling right in the middle of monsoon season, which meant that we got incredible deals on ocean front rooms, while having the beach nearly to ourselves in between the storms. It was fantastic, even the rain. It’s beautiful to watch a storm roll in over the ocean.

Our last week in Thailand we headed to Bangkok. We did some sightseeing and shopping while trying to figure out visas for the countries we are visiting next (as a side note, India is the country for which we’ve had the hardest time applying for a visa, so be sure to allow extra time to get that done if any of you plan on visiting! Many countries give visas on arrival, but India is not one of them for U.S. citizens). We spent a week in Bangkok before flying out to Nepal.

Since there isn’t as much to talk about in each of these cities as some of our previous posts, I’ve included our entire time in Thailand in this single blog :). Below are pictures and extra descriptions from each of the cities.

First, Chiangmai

Though we didn’t do the silent retreat in Chiangmai, we did research more about some meditation practices that we could start on our own. I’ve been pretty fascinated with the idea of meditation since reading a book called “10% Happier” by Dan Harris. “10% Happier” tells the journey of the author, a stressed out, over worked news reporter who reluctantly turned to meditation as a means of calm. After a lot of trial in spite of skepticism, he concludes that though he can’t scientifically prove it, he estimates that meditating has made him 10% happier.

I originally picked up his book because in my readings for social work I’d learned that the research on meditation is showing a shocking number of benefits. There are now meditation courses that people can take to reduce stress and increase happiness, and it’s not just some quirky gimmick, there are numbers to back it. Being somewhat of a skeptic myself, “10% Happier” helped normalize my thinking towards meditation. I heard the word “meditation” growing up in church, but I still mostly associated it with Eastern religions which I had not encountered much until traveling. It made meditation always seem a little mysterious to me, but as it turns out, meditation is basically just choosing to focus on the present – and there are some pretty concrete ways that you can go about doing that.

With all that in mind, since we skipped out on the retreat in Chiangmai, we recently started a 8 week online course on meditation that I’m super fascinated by so far. It has videos that teach you about why meditation is effective and audio clips that walk you through the actual meditation segments. The meditation segments themselves have you focus on something in the present – the sensations in your body, your breathing, actually tasting your food…So far the biggest difference I’ve noticed in myself is that I’ve gotten a little better at living in the moment. It seems that for me, forcing myself to focus on “in the moment” things (like breathing) for a small amount of time each day has helped me remember to do that same when I’m not meditating. For example, while sitting at the beach I remembered to listen to the waves, smell the salty air, and feel the ocean breeze as it wisped against my skin. It’s like, I never realized my mind spent so much time on the past (reminiscing) and future (planning what we need to do) until it was forced to see otherwise!

Anyway, I wouldn’t say meditation has been life changing yet, but I can clearly now see how it could be beneficial enough that I thought I’d mention it. I think the political climate in the States right now is just heavy enough that we could all use a little stress reduction 😂.

If any of that perks your interest and you want to be along for that journey with us, here is a link of the site/course we are using. (https://palousemindfulness.com) It’s free and the videos are interesting (and no one told me to say that). I’ll also add, that even as interested as I’ve been in it all, I’ve found meditating itself to be a little slow and painful. I usually find myself feeling restless and constantly wondering how much time is left 😂, but it’s been shocking to me how many benefits I’ve felt even in my restlessness 🤷‍♀️.

And now, back to Chiangmai – though I associate Chiangmai with meditation because we originally went there for that, these are pics of what we actually did/tried :):

Three Kings Monument – symbolizing an alliance of three kings and marking the center point for where the palaces used to stand.

The old city wall with tons of tourists taking photos. I actually took this to point out the girl with pigeons on her head. Every time we walked by someone was doing this 😂. Below is a zoomed in version 😂.

😂

One of the many temples. I never found out which one this was, but we walked by it nearly everyday.

Chaingmai has a night market open everyday of the week with souvenirs, clothes, and food, but on Sundays it becomes an enormous affair. I can’t tell you how many blocks it stretched because we got tired before we reached the end! In the food section we could get plates of pad Thai for 30 baht (less then $1), kebabs of peppers, onions, pineapple, and chicken for 10 baht (30 cents!), and fresh tropical fruit smoothies for just over $1. We snacked so much!

Duck noodle I got one night at the regular night market. Not as good as the famous duck we had in Hong Kong, but still delicious!

Performance at the regular night market.

Our passion fruit/mango fruit shake! We LOVE this mix!

Lantern booth at the Sunday Night Market

Trying to get a photo of the crowd. We were touching elbows most of the time!

Isn’t this wood beautiful? They said it was mango wood.

One day we took a hike up Doi Suthep, a small mountain near the local zoo with several Buddhist temples and lookout points. For this hike in particular we took a shared taxi halfway up the mountain and then hiked the rest of the way to the top. On the way back we hiked a little farther down than from where we started to catch another shared ride. In total we walked about ten miles. There were some beautiful views!

The view from the first look out – not too far from where we started. There are several villages located on the mountain.

Kirk, exploring around the lookout.

The path up to the second lookout.

View from the top.

Kirk beside/coming down from the lookout

After hiking to that viewpoint, we saw a sign pointing toward the highest point on the hike. Assuming it was also a viewpoint we headed up, only to find a sign marking the highest point 😂.

Much of the hike was on a road used by cars, but eventually we came to a place where cars were no longer allowed. The green moss and amber pine needles carpeting the asphalt continued all the way to the top. It was beautiful!

Most of the end of the hike looked like a jungle! The vines and trees were so big!

We eventually made it back down to one of the towns where we could catch a car back down. In that town was a temple with two very large Buddhas.

This one was particularly large.

And now, some Chiangmai foods 🙂

Chiangmai curry noodle (Kao soi) SO yummy! The sauce is thick and the toppings are fried – definitely too rich to eat a lot of it, but worth having if you find it on a menu! It comes with picked toppings on side which add an interesting flair 🤗.

Nam tuk, a noodle soup with a tasty broth – one of Kirk’s favorites.

Massaman curry, my new favorite curry, in a soupy form (it also comes stir fried)

Onto Koh Chang

When we arrived in Koh Chang, we had no hotel reserved. In low season, and especially when you are staying for an extended amount of time, you can often bargain for better deals than you can get online. We took a train, bus, taxi, ferry, and second taxi all the way from Chiangmai hoping this was true. Since we arrived late, our first night we booked a hotel nearest to where we were dropped off, but as luck would have it, the room we ended up staying in for the rest of our first week was just across the street, an apartment overlooking the sea at a hotel called Koh Chang Huts. Though we weren’t right on the water, the resort was built on cliffs that overlooked the sea, so we could watch the waves from our balcony and wonder down the several flights of stairs to a small rocky/cliff beach below.

About a half mile away from our hotel was “White Sand Beach” a beach with long stretches of white sand and plenty of beachfront restaurants where you have to “splurge” on dinner – about $6 per person (which really is splurging next to what we’ve been spending on meals!). This area is also where the night food market began, so we were in the perfect place to snatch up a container packed full of Thai food for around $1.50 and take it back to our room to binge watch Netflix (something we haven’t done since we left home!). At home, Thai restaurants are probably our most frequented eating places, so getting the real deal every night for so cheap was lovely!

Our second week in Koh Chang we decided we wanted to be closer to the actual water, so one day we rented a motorbike (for $5) and cruised around the island to see what we could find. Unknowingly, a tropical storm was nearby this day and we ended up getting drenched. Trying to make the most of our rental, we continued cruising around and came to a place called “Paradise Palms” that we’d read about online. It’s beachfront and owned by an Englishman named Mike who traveled the world for ten years with no money before eventually settling in Koh Chang with his now wife, Tara. He has some fascinating stories!

Below are some pictures from our time on Koh Chang.

Arriving on our ferry at Koh Chang Pier.

The balcony at our first room with an ocean view.

We saw some amazing things from this balcony!

One of the many sunsets we saw

One morning we woke up to a double rainbow! (Though the top of the double disappeared before I got a photo)

The very next morning we woke up to two water spouts over the sea! We watched as they appeared and disappeared several times.

Watching the rain come our way

Exploring the island we saw tons of beautiful beaches.

The cliff beach beside our first hotel

The beach in front of Maha Guesthouse – a place we almost stayed.

White Sand Beach

More of White Sand Beach

Walking back over a rocky beach with groceries to our second hotel.

A different day on White Sand Beach. This log washed up with these guys attached. You can’t tell from the picture, but they were still alive and opened and closed over and over as we watched.

A view out over the ocean we found during our motorcycle ride around the island. Not pictured: the incredibly loud frogs croaking all around.

The porch of our ocean front room at Paradise Palms

Standing on the porch looking to the left.

View to the right at sunset

View to the front during the day. The color of the water constantly changed with the sun/clouds.

The second time we rented a bike we spent a half day seeing the second half of the island. We saw lots of greenery and crops, as it was the less touristy side of the island. At one point we passed a sign pointing towards mangroves so we decided to go check them out.

The pictures don’t give a full description of what we drove up on. Here you see Kirk walking down what appears to be a stable platform overlooking the murky waters. In reality we pulled up to what appeared to be an abondoned tourist destination. Ransacked buildings filled with trash that were once ticket or information booths and bathrooms. Parts of the planking over the water was solid, but other parts were caved in and cracked. We walked carefully over small sections of it, but turned back before making to the part that, according to a graffitied sign, viewed out over the ocean.

It certainly still had a beauty about it! Those roots 😍!

A view we passed on the way back to the hotel.

One of our last nights on the island we decided to splurge on one of those $6 per person sunset beach dinners. It was gorgeous and tasty!

😍 It was even better in reality! They doubled stacked our chairs so that we didn’t sink too far in the sand :).

A view down the beach. All the restaurants put out beach tables at night.

It tasted better than it looks – I got a soft shell crab curry.

Kirk got what he’d been dreaming about – steamed sea bass with a lime chili herb sauce. That fish was huge!

Other foods we had on the island:

Tom Yum noodle soup. I love this stuff. It tastes different at every restaurant, sometimes creamy, sometimes brothy, sometimes limey, a bit spicy, but always tasty!

My true favorite. Egg noodle soup with pork. This broth was simple and delicious and the noodles were served just barely done- the perfect texture. Many things we’ve eaten on this trip are too rich to be everyday kind of dishes, but that one was light and delicious enough that I got it for lunch everyday for a solid week (then we switched hotels and it was no longer walking distance ☹️). A simple, delicious broth is hard to come by, but that side of the road booth with no name had it down pat!

If you find this cheese, buy it! Our first time we had it was in New Zealand when we got “adult lunchables” (fancy cheese, salami and whole grain crackers) to hike the Alpine Crossing. We picked the cheapest cheese they had available at the grocery store (seen above – comparable in price to Kraft cheese back home) and it beat some of the best fancy cheeses we’ve had at home. Sharp and crumbly is a legit description. We were stoked to find it again in Koh Chang and I leave a picture here so I don’t forget it in the future :)!

Finally, Bangkok

We stayed in Bangkok a week hoping to do a little site seeing and jewelry shopping. We’d heard that Bangkok is one of the most known places in the world for its jewelry, and I’m a pretty big fan of rustic looking silver pieces, so we scooped out quite a few places while there. As it turns out, Bangkok is most known for it’s wholesale silver shopping, it’s perfectly cut shimmering stones, and the gold shops in Chinatown. I don’t wear a lot of shiny pieces or gold, and when I say wholesale silver shops, I mean genuine wholesale – super cheap priced silver pieces in stores in which you have to buy very large quantities for them to even be willing to talk to you. If you want to open a jewelry shop or if you have very fine taste in jewelry, Bangkok is a perfect partner for you. If you just want a few silver pieces, you’ll likely have better luck elsewhere.

Even so, we still had a nice time in Bangkok walking around the city and eating. We ended up seeing some pretty large chunks of the city in our attempts to apply for Indian visas and as we sought out potential places to have Kirk’s phone fixed (FYI, from our experience, you cannot get a Motorola fixed in Asia. When Motorolas exist in a country here (which, in many countries, they don’t), the parts used here are not compatible with US phones 😬). Below are some photos of our timein Bangkok.

The “G” shaped building. No idea what this is used for, but I couldn’t help but admire it every time we passed by. Bangkok is humongous with plenty of fancy buildings, but this one certainly catches the eye!

View from the front

A canal near where we stayed

My favorite thing we experienced in Bangkok happened as we were exploring Chinatown in search of jewelry. We wandered down to a small jewelry shop next to the canal seen below, but as we neared the edge of the concrete we both noticed something humongous moving in the water. We stared and stared trying to make sense of it – “A gator in the city? No way, that doesn’t make any sense – but it moves like a gator.”

As it came closer the image became clear. It was a lizard, a kimono dragon to be exact, and she was about five feet long. We watched as she swam up the canal and crawled out of the water underneath the bridge where bones of her previous dinners awaited her. She was huge. The same size as one’s I’d seen at zoos, but I never realized I could possibly see one in the “wild” – the middle of an enormous city. We asked a local nearby about it and he informed us that there was also a baby living under there with her. They liked that she stayed around because she keeps the rat population down. Two construction men were napping under the bridge on the opposite side of the canal, clearly unconcerned. Personally I wouldn’t want any reptile of that size crawling by as I napped (if that tail hit me my brain would for sure translate it as “snake”), but she seemed well integrated into her home and community! We were intrigued!

The canal we watch her swim up

A pano of the bridge she crawled under. You can’t see either, but the construction men are sleeping on the left and she is on the right.

The best photo we got. Under the bridge with some of her previous kills in sight.

Right in the middle of the city. This is the bridge she was under.

I’m actually unsure what these next few photos are of, but they are monuments and represent some of the more traditional architecture you see around Thailand.

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Beautiful

Onto foods 🙂

Bangkok is the second place in our travels we’ve encountered a Dairy Queen, but it’s the first place we actually stopped for a treat. In Thailand, Dairy Queens have a soft serve flavor called Thai Milk Tea. It’s SO delicious that we went back a second time!

All over Thailand you find street carts serving “roti,” basically a type of bread/pancake stuffed with various fruits and sauces. We finally gave in and got a honey banana one. It was tasty!

I have no picture of the actual food, but these were some of my favorite burgers ever. Flavorful with fresh cooked buns! We got the Laab and Satay. Fusion dishes aren’t always done well, but these were pulled off perfectly enough that we wanted a photo to try to remake then when we get home :)! Go by “Streats” to have the originals :)!

A final picture of another canal with a reminder of the crazy powerlines we see everywhere.

Somehow not pictured in this blog is the crazy amount of Pad Thai we had during our month here – and Tom Kha (sour coconut milk soup 🙂 )! Must haves if you visit :)!

Next up, Nepal!