Out of Thailand into India

So, where was I? It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve entered anything on the blog so it’s about time. I believe I left off with just a few days to go in Chiang Mai. On our last Sunday we hit the movies at the mall once more to see “Hunger Games”, a must since both of had just finished the book. I was surprised, it follows the book quite closely. Now we have to find the rest of the trilogy. We stepped out of the mall into a full-fledged new car show. Chevy wasn’t all that well represented but Isuzu was. The most interesting part was peeking into the parking lot and seeing a couple of acres of motorbikes in the mall parking lot.

Liz here: Mike is showing me a part he designed under the hood of an Isuzu truck.
Mike just got 2 patents approved after 4 year wait.
Mike Thelen, Inventor

An estremely cute little ATV - street legal!

Acres of motorbikes parked outside of mall in Chiang Mai.

So now is time to leave Chiang Mai after a month in residence. It has been a most relaxing time. I could stand staying here even longer, just for the good food and cheap living along with the sheer exoticness of the place. Never mind, on to Bangkok. Once again, Liz was on the ball with a nice, inexpensive hostel. However, the best thing you the tourist can get out of Bangkok is you. Hot, noisy, just too darn big. Fortunately, this is a city which understands that and has all sorts of budget tours available wherever you look. A three-day, two night tour set us back under $120 US. OK, this isn’t the flossy tour-bus, all cares attended to type of thing. The sleeping quarters weren’t air-conditioned, heck, they didn’t even have foundations. They were, however, rafts floating right on the Kwai river. Actually quite nice, once you got used to the concept. But that was for later. There were several things to do before we saw our sleeping quarters. First, the Floating Market after an 8 AM pickup. This was not the floating market I remember from many years ago; that was right in Bangkok before property there got too valuable for such things. This one was an hour and a half northwest. Not a bad ride, surrounded by fellow travelers including four Palestinian Israelis. We had a good conversation with them about conditions there and how they got along with their Jewish neighbors. They admitted to feeling like second class citizens. Though they get along well with their neighbors, the Israeli government definitely doesn’t exist to serve them. 

Friendly, inexpensive hostel in Bangkok

American Breakfast in Bangkok means toast, butter, jam, a fried egg and 2 hot dogs with coffeee or tea.

Elephant with baby outside Floating Market supporting their handler.

 The Floating Market (from postcard)

Variety of produce and people. (from postcard)

Palestinian Israeli Instructors in our tour group to Floating Market..
They may not visit Moslem countries other than Jordan due to their Israeli Passport.

The Floating Market averages 1000 visitors per day.(from postcard) 

The Floating Market is on the Damnoensaduk canal, the longest and straightest in Thailand, 32 kilometers long and over a hundred years old. After an hour or so of exploring the shops we got into one of Thailand’s famous long tail boats for a half hour ride on the canal. These boats are a gas. They sit very low in the water and are powered by a small automotive engine complete with transmission driving a propeller at the end of 6 or 8 feet of shaft, all pivoting around one point. The canal is completely lined with homes and businesses with a side canal every few hundred meters. Many of the homes wouldn’t look too out of place along a Michigan lake. We were dropped off at a pick-up point and eventually got into another van that took us to lunch. The restaurant obviously catered to this sort of trade. As soon as we got out we were ushered to long tables where food was already being set on the tables, family style. The usual rice, two sorts of meat-vegetable dishes, fried rice, spicy condiments, assorted fruit. Not as though I’ll get tired of Thai food any time soon.

Powerplant of a long-tail boat

Our long-tailed conveyance

Scenery along the canal leaving the Floating Market

Getaway retreat near Bangkok

Off to the river Kwai and its famous bridge. Just as it was in 1945. Of course, it’s surrounded with a town and shops catering to tourists, some of whom still remember Alec Guinness. A small museum, a leopard you could pet and cuddle for a fee, no I have no idea what that was about. On the bridge, which you could walk across, there was even a fiddler playing for donations. Of course, the actual history of the bridge had only the vaguest association with what you saw in the movie. Then back into the van for a short ride to a semi-deserted train stop, strongly resembling a bus stop, only with tracks along it. Longish wait rewarded by the arrival of a classic little diesel engine and a train of a half dozen or so little (also extremely classic) little passenger cars. Fun ride, full of tourists from many nations (French and German predominating, at least on this day) for about 45 minutes. Great ride through rough country , occasionally glimpsing the river, a long way down a steep bank. Once more back into the van and to our night’s lodgings.

There it is, the bridge. Can you hear "Col. Bogie's March"?

Closer view of The Bridge over The River Kwai

Dad, I bought you this book about the river Kwai Railway from this lovely young thing.

Prisoners & the Bridge.

View of museum and shops from Bridge over river Kwai

Muscian and Mike on the Bridge over River Kwai.

This is where we were on Easter 2012.
We took a dramatic train ride and along the way a bunch of French tourists boarded.

This was very cool. Little apartments built on rafts, strung together and held fast against the strong river current. A buffet style dinner and then relax. Our younger contingent (did I mention that budget trips usually contain a large proportion of young people. The Thais addressed me as pawpaw and Liz as mawmaw -crap!) then settled down to seeing if they could fill a tabletop with empty beer cans. We, on the other hand, flaked out early. Next morning, I saw they’d succeeded and then some. Poor kids looked rough, especially the three who came along with us on the elephant washing.

Thai Elephant handlers with Mike and Graham from Toronto. They got up at 7:30AM to raft down the river.
They went with us inspite of jet lag and a hard night of celebrating Mike's 23rd birthday

We try to hang on while our elephant gets a good dunking.

Doesn't the handler look unaffected just standing there on the elephant
while we're barely hanging on?  

This was a high point of this tour. At a rather more than nominal fee of 500 baht (15 American dollars!) each, we got to accompany the elephants at their morning bath. I’ll let the pictures tell the story, only adding that riding an elephant’s neck in the water was even more fun than it looks!

Graham and Mike in the fast wonderful river

A quick shower (the river is just a little too thin to plough), cold of course, no hot water for these intrepid travelers and buffet breakfast. For those who didn’t get enough water earlier, we were towed a mile or so upstream on a bamboo raft and let go to drift back to the hotel. Those who chose could then jump off and drift (hurtle) downstream alongside the raft. Liz loved it, I stayed on the raft and took pictures. Then we took off to ride the very elephants we bathed earlier. We’d done this before but were totally happy to do it again. We traded off cameras among the group in order to get more shots of ourselves. I should introduce our more or less constant companions for this tour; Grace, 29, from Winnipeg, Mike ,23, from Toronto and Graham, 22, also from Toronto. Along with a very mixed group at the hotel including various young Germans, a couple from London, a retired Air Force officer originally from Colombia, there was a party going pretty much full time.

Beautiful Grace from Winipeg

After lunch at the hotel, we went to Hellfire Pass, scene of much misery to the POW’s of the Japanese. Big history and a nice long walk along the railbed. After the war, Thailand and Burma tore up the track for a hundred kilometers on each side of their borders so it would no longer be of use to anyone with only the short section we’d ridden on as a memorial. Then came another extra-price feature, the Tiger Temple. You can get the full story online but the short story that a Buddhist monk became the local amateur vet and was presented with a tiger cub that had lost its mother to poachers. Twenty or so years later, he has 40 or so tigers and several other animals on the huge monastery grounds. Of course, to keep this expensive deal going, they need to soak the tourists for whatever they can. Our end of it came out to just over 30 bucks but we’ve got the pictures to remember it by. Yes, we’d done it before in northern Thailand but how can one resist. Besides, this time we got to play with a cub! We struck up a conversation with a monk who had suspiciously good English. Of course, he’d been born and raised in San Francisco. Go figure.

ANZAC (Australian New Zealand Army Corp) Memorial to Veterans at Hellfire Pass.

More Hellfire Pass

Deep in Hellfire Pass

Next the elephant ride.

Parking the Elephant after a ride

Bananas for Elephant after ride

Tigers again

Small Green Eggplant from fields near our River Boat Lodging

By day 3, we were ready to take it easy so resisted yet another extra-price trip to yet another waterfall. Okay, the party the night before may have influenced me. Nurse the hangover, contemplate the trip back to Bangkok and watch the Kwai flow by. By 7 that evening we were back in our snug little hostel by the river and looking forward (sort of) to the flight to Bangalore the next evening.

Getting into Bangalore was not the sort of thing to make me love India. Just about the time I started considering us experienced travelers, we got scammed by a bogus cab driver at the airport. He got us to the hotel all right, but it cost us several times what it should have. Live and learn. So far, we’ve learned we need to be much more careful here than anywhere we’ve been yet. Oddly enough, it’s also harder to find someone that speaks understandable English than anywhere else we’ve been. Even those who claim to be speaking it can hardly be understood and without listening carefully, one could be forgiven for mistaking it for Hindi. Even on the TV!



Liz takes over here:

First we were not affected by the really big earthquake near Ache, Indonesia yesterday. Indian TV news is reporting that it was 8.9 with 8.2 aftershock.

We loved Thailand. Mike speaks Thai. We understand Thailand and were sorry to leave. On our last day we (and all tourists) were shut out of the Thai Royal Palace for ceremonies for the King's Sister who died last year. Obviously State Funerals in Thailand last for many months.

The train ride to Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok is perfect. India's Bengaluru has a railway under construction to link the city to the airport but meanwhile the city's roads are torn up everywhere.

These flowers including orchids are real. They surround a Buddhist Shrine in the Bangkok Airport.

Moslim Travelers (and Israelis) abound in Thailand.

Beautiful Sisters, one with veil, one without.

Reminder of Angor Wat in Suvarmabhumi Airport in Bangkok; The Demon Side.

The Good Guys in Struggle between Good and Evil.

Heaven v. The Underworld described in Thailand's Airport.

Bangkok Airways Passenger Waiting Lounge.

Mike with coffee and Kindle in Bangkok Airways Passenger Lounge.

What we carry when we travel; camera, Kindle, 2 backpacks and 2 suitcases.
Next time we will pack a lot lighter.

Mike did not want to go to India. GM engineers who visited India told him India was filthy and foul. However he is a wise and loving husband. Love means to sacrifice for another. Mike’s motto is “What does every woman want? Her own way.” That is his operating principle that allows us to visit India. He hoped (very quietly) that our trip to India would somehow fall through, When we were in Hawaii on the Big Island, we rented our Bali Hut from Eddie Yandle. His wife Dicky Motherwell is a professional psychic in western Canada. She suggested to me not to go to India since Mike did not want to go. She reasoned that if I forced Mike go, the trip would not have a good outcome. Then on the cruise ship we met Australians, Terry and Sue Prendergast who love India. We’ve since met many travelers who love India. I am anxious about our trip’s success but anxiety is so familiar to me that I’d miss not having something to worry about. Since Mike is uncomfortable about India I modified the visit’s duration from 30 days to 20 days, from April 10 -30. Focus is only south.  I enrolled in a 3-day weekend class with Art of Living at the Ashram in Bangalore (officially named Bengaluru) giving Mike 3 days to kick back and read.

In our self guided tour of Southeast Asia Mike most enjoyed Thailand, but second to Thailand are the Cameron Highlands in Maylasia, Da Lat in Vietnam and Luang Prabang along the Mekong River in Laos. Beaches are underwhelming and another temple after seeing so many is ho-hum. He least enjoyed large hot cities like Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Saigon. So the challenge for visiting India is to chart a tour we will both enjoy in India that is close to Bangalore, a Southern Indian city. The solution so far is to visit the hill stations of the Western Ghats. We see Mysore and then go into these cool hills. Tom and Susan Cairns from Vancouver Island thoughtfully outlined a lovely sightseeing trip for us to ancient sights but the idea of a hot beach gave me pause. Resorts in Goa and a charming place called Gokarna are just really hot in April and not what excites Mike Thelen. Goa has some unmentionable charm dating back to when the Beatles visit made it famous but the broiling heat just is not worth it.

Sai Palaparthy my long time young GM friend in the US is a Brahman from India. He told me from the get-go that April was too hot for a visit to India. I laid out the 12 county route, country by country and week by week and did not find a way to arrive in India before April. It was either go in April or skip India. What if we go out in the morning and the evening like when visiting horribly humid Washington, D.C. in July? My friend Evalee and I lived like moles just going out early and late in white clothes.

Sai told me to use pay phones in India. They cost 2 Rupees. My biggest issue with planning our trip to India is that I do not telephone. I really don’t know how to telephone; I don’t know how to enter phone numbers. What is the format for the country code? I had a Thailand phone number but could not translate the Thai instructions. The Skype application is on my I-phone but I am not certain of how to input the country code on Skype either. I don’t know if my calls to India are connecting because I have yet to get a connection.

I purchased our visas to India through VisaHQ, a 3^rd party that manages US visa applications for the Indian government. We have a 10-year Visa to India that cost us $532 or $266 each. The 5-year Visa costs $20 less than a 10-year Visa. I did not figure out how to request a $99 6-month Visa since we needed to mail in our passports in time to get the Visa and the 6 month Visa would have expired before we arrive.

2 years ago Sudheer who performs stack analysis for HFV6 wrote a list of places to visit. Sudheer wrote down Kodiakanal. I looked at his note and looked up Kodiakanal in Lonely Planet and that is how our beach trip got replaced with mountains. Thanks so much, Sudheer!

In Pai in Thailand I seek advice from an experienced, very fit, middle aged Indian backpacker. He said that he pays more for his tourist visas than do tourists from most other countries. Do other countries charge Indian citizens a lot more than people from wealthier countries for travel visas? However unfair, discrimination against a country with a lot of poor people makes sense to me. I tell the Indian backpacker that since my birth certificate did not state where my father and mother were born, I had to get their birth certificates. I had to show that my parents were not born in Pakistan. He is amazed and says he truly never heard of such issues. He says a visa to Pakistan costs 1 Rupee and people travel back and forth all the time.

Often backpackers are unwashed, unclean and poor. Some live on extremely tight allowances. Spirited backpackers seek “non-touristic” sights steeped in natural beauty. The first Lonely Planet travel guide gave a backpacker places to stop and tips in remote Turkey, Iraq and Iran. I wonder how long it takes to get a visa from China for a border crossing overland. Reportedly China discourages backpackers from trekking through. China wants affluent visitors. We will make a point to get a Chinese visa when we return to Thailand just so we can cross over to visit Kunming in southwest China easily.

I ask about budget travel in India for our upcoming trip. The Indian backpacker tells me that typically Indians are not budget travelers. He is traveling solo as an Indian backpacker. He rarely find Indians in hostels. Ohh, that explains a lot. We are booked into a hotel in Bangalore through Cleartrip that costs as much as our hotel in Singapore or $68 per night. Hotels are in short supply in Bangalore due to their rocking IT industry. We booked The Emlion because it was the least expensive of the 6 hotels choices suggested by Shashikumar H., a GM colleague with TCI. Shashi advised me on how best to connect between The Ashram in Bangalore, a hotel and Bangalore International Airport. Traffic is notoriously bad in Bangalore so having Shashi, an insider direct us is a true gift.


Bangalore changed its name to Bangaluru in 2007 but we all know the city as Bangalore. What is confusing for our trip plan is that no hotels are close to Bangalore International Airport. Have you ever heard of an international airport without hotels nearby? In addition to visiting GM colleagues, I am visiting Bangalore to take a class called Art of Living (AOL) at The Ashram in Bangalore. My friend Sai is an AOL course leader. They set my donation to the Ashram at $150. I am invited to stay in the Ashram. Mike is not taking the class so he is not invited to stay in the Ashram. I did not figure out how to call the place near the Ashram that the Ashram referred us to.

We met 2 young angelic-looking English women on the bus coming back from Pai to Chiang Mai. They spent 3 months in India and think that Thailand is expensive. We offered to take them to our hostel but it is out of their price range. They budget $5-6 per night whereas we typically spend $13.50 in Chiang Mai.

On March 23, Judy sent me a timely link to an article by Guy Trebay in The New York Times.
To give you some idea to a good trip strategy for India, this article is useful.
"THE connection between travel and a Coco Chanel dictum may not be that obvious. The French designer once purportedly said that a woman should stop before leaving the house, gaze in the mirror and then remove one piece of jewelry. The operative principle was to simplify.
In travel it is seldom acknowledged how routinely people pile on excess. And while this may not hold true on cruises or Club Med, where the biggest daily challenge is finding the proper level of SPF, among independent travelers the tendency is to take on countries, regions, continents, galaxies.
From the placid vantage of a laptop, the world looks manageable. In real time, the degree of travel difficulty unfolds in agonizing increments. Did I really think I could fit all that into a week? I did.
Across almost three decades of travel I’ve often noted the general custom; I’ve inflicted it on myself. And it occurs to me that in few other places are Chanel’s words of advice better applied than India, a country my passports inform me I have visited more than 20 times. Assuming, perhaps, that the first trip to that compelling and bewildering country will be their only one, friends cram itineraries full to the point where misery is a guarantee. Thus my advice to pals heading to South Asia is to appraise the itinerary with a ruthless eye and then, long before heading to the airport, strike something off. "