Ramayana Matters

Our last three days in Bangkok were a flurry of activity. One of the highlights was a five-hour long bicycle tour through the busy markets and Buddhist temples, navigating through alleys so narrow and congested that had we wandered there on our own, we probably wouldn't have dared to venture in. Bangkok was introduced to us a city of marketplaces: weekend markets, night markets, floating markets (the Chao Phraya river used to be Bangkok's main trading artery), Chinatown markets, wholesale markets, flower markets, etc etc. Dave writes in greater detail about our bicycle adventures on his blog.

Wholesale flower market

Though Buddhism is Thailand's official religion, Thais also believe in spirits. Every other city intersection seemed to feature a spirit house, to which people brought daily offerings of flowers and food. Certain large trees were also decorated and worshipped; later we heard that every time a new house is built, a displaced spirit needs to be pacified by construction of a new shrine outside of the house's shadow. Garlands of yellow flowers are in such high demand that an entire section of the wholesale flower market was dedicated to their assembly and sales. Need to pass a test? Have bad fortune and want good fortune? These occasions undoubtedly call for extra offerings to the spirits.

Placating the tree spirit

The Wats themselves--the Buddhist temples--were plentiful and magnificent. It was not uncommon to see terrific poverty and squalor next to the tall white-washed walls and gold-plated doors of newly renovated temples: eerily similar to the experience of walking down Market Street in San Francisco, with all the new skyscrapers going up right above the homeless. We also walked through many neighborhoods of malls and hotels and office buildings and middle-class single-family Thai and Western-style style houses with garages and backyards. The different areas flowed easily into one another, extensive networks of alleys and courtyards dissecting each city block: to get a sense of each area, we quickly learned to go off map and follow our noses. Every populated alley and large intersection seemed to feature several food carts selling barbequed meats, noodle, rice, and egg dishes; carts offering instant coffee espressos (sugar and condensed milk optional); spirit temples; 7-11s. It seemed common for families to keep chickens and turkeys in their compounds. There were also many dogs and cats roaming around, none of them lacking for food: let's just say that Thai spirits were generous and ready to share.

A window of almost every store, restaurant, or semi-official establishment (including cabs and tuk-tuks) featured King Bhumibol (also known as King Rama IX) and/or other members of the royal family. Thailand is a constitutional monarchy, ranked currently 135 of 179 in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom index (somewhere between Afghanistan and Russia). A perceived criticism of the royal family is a punishable offense for both locals and foreigners alike. And who would want to criticize His Majesty? He's a very photogenic presence and a natural model--as evidenced by hundreds and thousands of images of him we've glimpsed during this trip--a photographer himself, and from what I understand a talented poet. And he takes after the best: in the late 1790s his ancestor King Rama I created Thailand's greatest epic, Ramakien, by compiling and rewriting certain episodes from the Hindu Ramayana. His son Rama II adapted the work further, apparently construing a happy ending. (The very name of Thai Kings, Rama, at least in English, comes from Ramayana, but this business is very complicated--as are Thai naming customs.)

This business of Ramayana/Ramakien gave me a great deal of hope: it instantly made Thai culture feel approachable. That is, I could simply read the Ramayana (with a great deal of footnotes) and then study the Ramakien, and this would give me far greater understanding of the Thai imagery and symbolism. As it was, Dave and I soon learned to spot references to these epics. The galleries of Wat Phra Kaew (the temple attached to the Grand Palace and housing the Emerald Buddha), for example, retold stories from Ramayana. And so did many paintings at the Contemporary Art Museum, MoCA Bangkok, one of the city's newest museums.

In every country we visit, Dave and I usually try to look up the contemporary art scene. Prior to this trip, we'd heard from my brother Kostya and Dave's colleague that Bangkok boasted a vibrant community of artists: a recent feature in the New York Times made this official. Vibrant art community there might be, but not at MoCA, Bangkok. Let's just say, I made a googling mistake. And from the photographs and the TripAdvisor page the building itself looked very respectable. Dave and I braved an hour and a half-long trip by two trains and a bus to the outskirts of the city--to find ourselves nearly the only visitors roaming the five floors of exhibit space. The art... well, it was very clean and featured many contemporary takes on Ramayana/Ramakien. Temporary exhibit #1 showed off His Majesty's own photography.

Best of MoCA: Dave with Dali wax sculpture

Actually learning to take the bus in Bangkok proved useful. The very next day, Dave and I got embroiled in another adventure. I suppose, if one were attributing blame for these things, one could say that I made another googling mistake. I looked for a good walking tour, and every walking tour I was finding seemed to be at least four or five hours long. Finally, I discovered the tour that claimed to take only two and a half hours and was free to boot (I assumed the guides operated on tips--we had taken a tour like this in Sydney). The webpage gave the time and location; so I figured we'd just show up. In the worst case scenario nobody would meet us, and we'd put together our own tour: we had the map and an idea about what major Wats and palaces we still had to see.

Dave wasn't feeling well that day. He'd caught a cold a couple of days earlier and was powering through it. A tuk-tuk delivered us from our hotel to the historical center. The day was particularly hot and humid, probably the hottest day of the trip so far. The location was a large park right outside the gates of the Grand Palace. The free tour guides were nowhere to be seen, though we combed the park back and forth in several directions. Dave approached a respectable-looking Thai gentleman carrying an orange umbrella and asked him if he might be a tour guide or if he'd seen any tour guides.

The man shook his head: he was a lawyer, teaching at the nearby law school. Where were we from? he asked. Oh, California. His uncle was in California, in Southern California. What did we want to see in Bangkok? Grand Palace and all the main Wats were closed this morning because of an important Buddhist ceremony, but he could point out some temples on our map that would be open and that we had better see. We'd have to go by tuk-tuk--these temples were further away. But we could get a "governmental" tuk-tuk, with white and yellow license places, and the whole route would cost us 40 Baht (a little over a dollar). There was also a great silk store on the way that was running a special promotion. The man raised his orange umbrella, and after a short while tuk-tuk materialized. We thanked our new friend and climbed aboard.

In fifteen minutes, the driver deposited us at a small temple outside the perimeter of the old city. We weren't entirely disoriented--we had a map and a working smartphone, and we'd spent several days roaming the city at that point, and had an idea of its geography and layout. There were no other visitors at this temple. The security guard seemed very curious--how did we hear about this Wat; most tourists don't know about it, though it's a very important Wat--one of the members of the royal family had been a monk there, and the family gave the money for the temple's upkeep. The story sounded familiar--I had read about a temple like that, and so Dave and I looked closer at the Buddha towering over us. The security guard was sweet and wanted to know how long we've been married--we must've been on our honeymoon... Then, he recommended a shop where we had to go after this Wat, a shop selling gems and jewels, rubies, sapphires, with a 600% discount.

Confused at a Wat

Dave, I think, was suspecting a scam from the moment we got into the tuk-tuk, and had he not been affected by the cold, he wouldn't have let things go this far. I refused to believe that we were being scammed--so elaborately and bizarrely--for as long as I could. But then when the tuk-tuk driver insisted on taking us to that store, I had to admit that we were being taken for a ride--that that's where the expression "being taken for a ride" probably came from.

Getting out of it all was awkward. We were in the middle of nowhere. The tuk-tuk driver had called all of his friends, and there were something like eight people meeting us at the gem store (to make the place look more popular, I suppose?). The idea was that we'd go inside and buy things. The scam was apparently so popular (and effective) that it was outlined, step-by-step, in all the tourist guide books we'd read. Still it was hard to believe how many people must've been involved. On the other hand, we decided, this was probably not that different from being talked into attending a time-share presentation in Las Vegas. In both cases we didn't actually have the money on us. In Bangkok, we were down to our last few hundred Baht, and we needed them to get to the airport later that evening. So we apologized to the tuk-tuk driver--we felt bad embarrassing him in front of all of his friends--and walked away.

We visited the Grand Palace and the Emerald Buddha--both sites turned out to be open. (It took us that entire day to unravel all the stories that the scam artists had told us about Bangkok--and I'm still not sure about some of them: do, for example, differently colored license plates on tuk-tuks mean governmental vs. private?). Getting out of the downtown area proved nearly impossible. With so many tourists needing a ride, the cabs refused to turn on the meter--they preferred to charge a flat fee for at least twice the amount what the meter would cost. Though in the US dollars the difference amounted to that between $4 and $8, not getting cheated became a matter of principle with us that afternoon. Armed with the smartphone, we could take a bus where we needed to go for less than a $1. Except we couldn't: in the mid-afternoon, the city suffocated with traffic, and the right bus never came.

None of this spoiled our mood one bit. We were having fun. Dave had sweated out some of the congestion in his chest. We bought a coconut and visited another museum that afternoon--Jim Thompson's House. Then Dave took a nap and I explored the Bangkok Art and Cultural Center, a proper contemporary art museum (also an art school and a shopping center for books and new age gifts), displaying very creative and high-tech works of art, integrating variety of media, engaging with artists around the world, and reflecting on contemporary social themes beyond the Ramayana/Ramakien.

Cutting the coconut

That night, after Dave woke up refreshed from his nap, we packed up our bags and headed out again to while away a few early morning hours till our 7 am flight. At 3 am we found ourselves at a supermarket in Patpong, shopping for Sriracha and tamarind snacks to take back to San Francisco as souvenirs. Then we took the metered taxi to the airport, and spent our last half hour before the flight at duty free shops, sampling the rice crackers these shops were promoting: all the same brand, but different flavors. (There must've been a dozen shops in a row running the same promotion--that's a scary amount of rice crackers.) We passed out the moment we got on the plane and slept all the way to our layover in Tokyo.

Round ping-pong table at Bangkok Art and Cultural Center

Arrival to Bangkok; protests

Did you know that Thailand's capital is listed in the Guinness World Records as the longest place name? The official name is a paragraph long and translates as "City of angels, great city of immortals, magnificent city of the nine gems, seat of the king, city of royal palaces, home of gods incarnate, erected by Visvakarman at Indra's behest." City of Angels for short: Krung Thep.

Dave and I arrived to Bangkok on Monday evening, and after dropping off our bags at the hotel, roamed around Siam Center, a neighborhood of shopping malls and department stores, lit up and decorated for Christmas and New Years. Instantly we fell for the beat of the city. Street vendors were selling shirts, watches, bags, trinkets, food: noodles, various meats on sticks, savory and sweet pancakes, fresh pineapple, watermelon, papaya--peeled and diced, packaged in plastic bags for easy snacking. Thais practice the art of fruit carving, and even at street carts the pineapple and watermelon were prepared in intricate geometrical patterns. After a week of eating little other than fruit for dessert, Dave and I grew googly-eyed at all the sweet options around: doughnut shops, smoothie and milkshake cafes, ice cream and frozen yogurt stands, bakeries selling pastries, pancakes, brownies, cupcakes, tarts, jellys. We shared a cream parfait and a brownie at one of these shops and, sated, returned to the hotel to sleep.

After five days of sleeping on the boat, we continued to see fish in our dreams, and as we assumed horizontal position, the room seemed to rock about us. All our senses were off. The boat's motor and the sea waves had been a loud and constant noise on board, and now the hotel seemed too quiet. Our room smelled of cigarette smoke even though the hotel staff assured us we'd been assigned to a non-smoking floor. The room also seemed cold: the air-conditioning wouldn't let us set the temperature higher than 62 F, and we had to ask for a second blanket. Used to the boat schedule, we fell asleep promptly at 9 pm.


The next day we explored the city on foot. Our destination was May Kaidee's Vegetarian Cooking School, where we'd booked a cooking class for that afternoon. On the way there we passed a large gathering of people singing and partying on the street, and later figured out that this was the protest we'd been seeing on TV.

Protesters at the Democracy monument

We'd intended to avoid the protest, but having walked into it accidentally, later we returned to the area and walked through it for a few blocks. The protesters set up tents all along a boulevard ring that encircled the center of the city. A canopy shaded the central area: protection from the sun. There were individual tents for sleeping and shared communal tents where water and foodstuffs were distributed, also medical tents, tables with water buckets for washing dishes, portable toilets on the perimeter. Each major intersection seemed to have a stage; speeches and music performances were also filmed and broadcast on the large screens all along the street.

This musician went from singing Dylan's Knocking on Heaven's Door to a Chinese song

Anyone seemed welcome and free to join the party; there were plenty of casual onlookers besides us. And on some blocks this protest did feel like a party: people waving flags, munching on rice or soup, singing, smiling. Other blocks seemed more somber: here people sat or lay down on thin plastic blankets spread on the asphalt, possibly meditating or listening intently to the speakers. As we went on, we noticed that some blocks were barricaded with sandbags, though this was done discreetly enough and allowing plenty of room for all the gawkers to pass through.

A friendly young man gave us a word of warning: "Make sure you go to your hotel by 10 pm," he said. He didn't explain what happened at ten, and we weren't curious enough to find out. It was only 6 pm or so, and we'd seen enough. We veered off to look at the royal grounds. Later that evening, we had plans to meet up with our friends Olga and Ron who were arriving to Bangkok that evening, and we wanted to rest and catch up on email. A lot of email had accumulated during the five days offline.

Check out Dave's blog for his stories and photos!

Professional diving and the tsunami

The six diving guides aboard Oktavia were all single men between their late twenties and mid-fifties. Of them the only local, Aey, came from a village about 70 km away from Khao Lak. Thai government requires foreign-owned businesses to hire a certain percentage of locals: a good thing, and yet, though we were told Aey was an excellent diver, the company didn't seem to know what to do with him. His English wasn't strong enough, English being the lingua franca among divers. Snorkeling together, Aey and I communicated mostly in diving signs--wordless gestures for "turtle," "eel," "Okay."

One of the guides, an expat from Europe, gave us a glimpse into the life of a nomadic diving guide. Each location had a particular season: the Andaman Sea season, for example, lasted from November to May. Guides who had been at it the longest, and given a measure of luck in establishing the right relationships, could get hired for the entire season. This allowed them to stack seasons and after Andaman, go, for example, to Egypt, where the season was from May to October. Sometimes there could be an unfortunate overlap, where Egypt's season might start a few weeks before the Andaman's ended: but that wasn't the worst problem to have, a problem of over-employment. In addition to Aey, two most senior diving guides on Oktavia were hired for the season; three others, including the speaker himself, had short term contracts for Christmas and New Year's trips, and their reemployment depended on the number of tourists booked for the following weeks. A short-term contractor established a base in a town like Khao Lak, and every couple of weeks went around all the diving companies to drop off his resume. And sometimes that strategy worked out, and at other times, he would run into the company owners and managers at the local pubs, and that worked just as well.

This was a very particular lifestyle, infinitely fascinating to hear about; it seemed singularly suited for the single men who didn't mind remaining single. The opportunities to settle down existed in larger cities and year-round tourist destinations, long-term gigs at dive shops, teaching beginners. Many of these men had done stints on land in the past, but opted for the nomadic life on the sea. If there were any women guides on the live-aboards, they were certainly in the minority. (I've yet to meet one.)

For Dave's perspective and pictures, check out his blog: http://blog.bewilder.com/2013/12/dec-29-2013-disembarking-oktavia-for.html

Due to their exposure to nitrogen, divers are not allowed to fly for twenty-four hours after their last dive. Dave and I spent one night in Khao Lak, where Oktavia had dropped us off. This coastal village was one of the hardest-hit areas in Thailand by the 2004 tsunami. A ten-meter high wave that formed after an earthquake in the Indian Ocean washed over the Similan Islands, destroying much of the sea floor and corals there, and then crashed into the mainland, wiping all the coastal hotels and local dwellings. Somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 people died. The township designated the memorial to the tsunami: a large police boat that had landed a mile into the shore.

On our ride from Khao Lak back to Phuket airport, our driver turned out to be a former dive guide. He'd spent nearly fifteen years on the live-aboards in the Similans, and he'd been out at sea when the tsunami hit. They had no radio or any other kind of advance warning before the tsunami. Half hour before the wave came, the sea changed color. From blue it turned yellow: the wave was sucking up all the sand from the sea floor. The crew canceled all the dives for the day and returned to Khao Lak. Being in the deep, they hardly noticed the wave onboard--nothing beyond the normal rocking. Upon returning to town, they found total devastation, levels of damage "like you wouldn't believe," our driver said.

The police boat memorial (img from Wikimedia Commons)

In the decade since the tsunami, Thai government invested into the system of advance warning towers all along the coastline to give the people a bit longer notice. We saw two of these towers on the Similan Islands; solidly constructed and equipped with large antennae, they inspired confidence. And the corals, our driver said, were recovering much faster than had been predicted. They were possibly not as colorful as the corals of old. Manta rays and whale sharks became much harder to spot in the last ten years. Why was this? The water temperature seemed colder. The fishing industry did its damage. The whole world was changing.

Aboard Oktavia

After two days of travel from San Francisco, Dave and I boarded MV Oktavia at the port in Khao Lak in south Thailand, on the Andaman Sea. Oktavia, the largest live-aboard diving ship on the Andaman, was headed to the Similan islands for five days. Experienced divers prize this archipelago for the biodiversity in the coral reefs on the eastern side of the islands (protected from the Indian Ocean) and the larger marine creatures that also prey there: the barracudas, manta rays, whale sharks, moray eels, sea turtles, octopi, cuttlefish, sea snakes, scorpion fish.

During the five days on board, Dave more than doubled his diving record. I snorkeled three-four times a day, and thanks to the experience of my guide, Aey, was able to spot nearly as much as the divers: though I didn't see the bottom-feeders, the cuttle fish, the octopus, I got very friendly with the turtles, the barracuda, the schools of fusiliers, and a few eels. For more pictures and stories, check out Dave's blog.

Sunrise on the Similans

Boarding the ship for five days was a disorienting experience. Though Oktavia was large for the area, it was about three times smaller than the previous ship we'd stayed on (when two years ago Dave dove in the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia). It had three passenger decks (including the dive deck and the rooftop sundeck), and filled to maximum capacity for the Christmas holidays, housed twenty-two passengers, six diving staff, and six boat staff. The co-owner of the company, an expat from Sweden, supervised the departure in the port, but didn't himself go on board. All six of the boat staff were locals and also one of the dive staff--Aey, assigned as my snorkeling companion. The rest of the dive guides were expats from Serbia, Germany, Belgium, and England. They were well matched with the passengers: one German couple, a French couple who lived in Singapore, a Swiss man, an Israeli woman, one couple from Hong Kong, one couple from India, a man from Korea, and four couples (one with teenage daughter) of American military stationed in Okinawa. And us: Dave and I had traveled the longest to get to the Andaman. We were also the least experienced. Most people on board had clocked hundreds of dives over many years; diving for them was a weekend activity. Dave held his own and earned the advanced PADI certification during this trip, allowing him to go on deeper and more adventurous dives. I came up with a dozen new answers to the question why I didn't dive (none of them very good).

Gearing up

The indoctrination to life on board began on dock. We were asked to put our shoes in a large crate--they were promptly stowed away somewhere, and we didn't see our sneakers and flip flops again until the end of the five days. From then on everything we did--hanging out at dinner, going to the bathroom, to our cabins, to bed, we did barefoot. Boat rules (shoes are a liability when it's rocky) seemed combined with Thai culture: Thais take off shoes when entering living quarters. At the airport in Phuket, I watched as a cleaning woman took off her shoes before entering the women's bathroom to clean, upending all of my notions of hygiene. At a public bathroom on one of the Similan islands, the entrance to the bathroom was blocked by a deep basin for feet: day-trippers were encouraged to leave their shoes on the beach, and rinse feet on both entering and exiting the bathroom. Thais also don't use paper for wiping, and so every stall was outfitted with a special hose for washing up. Luckily, there was plenty of toilet paper for the foreigners on the boat, though it got pretty wet, especially on the first day or two: bathrooms on the boat also served as shower cabins, and after every dive or swim we used them to rinse off the salt water. This, I supposed, helped to keep the bathrooms clean. I stopped cringing on the third or fourth day aboard.

The divers meant serious business. The amount of time they could spend underwater was strictly regimented by their exposure to nitrogen; within that they maximized their diving opportunities. At 7 am people assembled in the common area for early breakfast (toast and/or cornflakes with bananas, Nescafe or Lipton tea) and dive briefing. At 7:30 am they started putting on their gear and set off for 45-60 min underwater. By 9 am they were back and the breakfast was served: bacon, chicken sausages and nuggets, eggs. Fruit--pineapples, watermelons, apples, lychee, bananas--was available with practically every meal.

Divers at briefing

At 10:30 am, the second briefing began, and by 11 am the divers set off for the second dive of the day. That was followed by "snack" at 12:20 pm--the most desserty meal of the day. One day this was rice porridge with coconut milk; on other days we had pancakes, fried bananas. After an hour-long break, the third dive commenced around 2 pm. Lunch was served at 3:30 pm--a heavy meal with fried pork or chicken and a Thai curry and coleslaw. The chef always made a veggie curry for Dave, one of the two people on board who didn't eat meat.

After lunch, divers were given the long two hour break. On the two first days, the crew organized shore trips: the ship's dinghy took us to shore of Similan islands 4 and 8 (the largest). We went on short jungle walks, spotted some very rare pigeons that looked a bit greener than city pigeons (fish people are NOT bird people), mingled with large crowds of Russian day-trippers, and lingered on the beaches of fine white sand. On the other two full days at sea, the boat was moored away from inhabitable land, so one time Dave went snorkeling with me. Snorkelers, he confirmed, saw the large picture: like getting the bird's eye view of the landscape that divers were able to explore in greater detail.

The last dive of the day took place just before or just after sunset: the sunset or the night dive. Divers were equipped with flashlights and took off around 6:30-7pm to look for crawlers: the shrimp and the crabs and other shellfish that could be easily spotted when the light reflected from their eyes. For me, this was a reading and writing break: I took notes for future stories. The social dynamics between all the passengers and the staff of the diving boat were fascinating; the mixes of cultures and languages and occupations and social classes all brought into play as people were forced to mingle in the constraints of the diving ship. More on that to come.

Leaving on a night dive

The divers returned to the boat in time for dinner, served at 8 pm sharp. They shared a beer or two (alcohol and diving don't mix; after drinking a single beer a diver is disqualified for the rest of the day), exchanged pictures they took during the day, and then quickly dropped off to their cabins, dead tired, to sleep. 

Leaving Koh Bon