Book review - Q1/2008

In addition to traveling our trip gives us an opportunity to read a bit more than when we were working for the sake of shareholders of our previous employer (and the sake of our trip of course :)) I am not exactly sure how it happens because both activities are almost equally time consuming.

Anyway - below you can find a short review of books we have read (this list could have consisted of only books by Haruki Murakami if it wasn't for the fact that we had read all of them before our trip).

1. Gandhi An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth - was the first book we read. Somehow to get in the mood of India as it was our first destination. Initially we had mixed feelings about his views and deeds especially what concerned his family (and medical issues) but overall with time our reverence for him grew. His non-violence philosophy might seem totally out of place in todays world but yet he managed to unite such a big and diverse nation as India. Very interesting read - also about history of Indians in South Africa and their role in the British Empire.

2. Status Anxiety by Alain De Botton - an interesting book for anyone feeling that they need to change their house or car for a bigger model to match his neighbor. In fact the book goes through history and is thought provoking. The carving for more, fear of losing out is being treated in a philosophical way but in the end not telling you to retreat to an ashram for the rest of your life :)

3. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving - an entertaining book but somehow had too many reoccurring themes from the book I read before which I really liked - The World According to Garp. If I were to choose between the two I would recommend the latter one. I do not want to be judgmental but the former book was kind of too religious for me and I got an impression that Irving suffers from kind of similar syndrome as Milan Kundera. Once you have read The Unbearable Lightness of Being it seemed to me all the rest of his books hit the same tone. This is not what I like.

4. Mr.Nice by Howard Marks - quick reading written by a guy who smuggled tons of marijuana around the world and enjoyed it since his time at Oxford University. I read the book in Nepal during our trekking and it was just the book I needed. It seems everything is possible in this world.

5. The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh - the novel I liked the most so far. It is great for better understanding the local perspective. As far as it is possible since the author has also now been living in the western countries for some time. Nevertheless, it is a great novel about Burma and about Indian's and their quest for independence. A complementary book to Gandhi's autobiography as it expands on the Indian's role in British conquest. Burma as described in the book fascinated as so much that after all we decided to buy ourselves plane tickets to fly in there. We missed Tibet but we will be in what is called in Myanmar for two weeks in June (we have the tickets but no visa - we hope in won't be a problem though).

The last book I have just finished is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - the book read a bit like Lonely Planet but for space travelling. A bit confusing but overall full of fresh ideas. I liked it much more that the movie I have seen some time ago. I sincerely hope that I can buy the next edition of the guide and our next travelling will take us to some other planets instead of only continents on the same planet.

Rita read some additional books which I have read before our trip.

7. We the Living by Ayn Rand - my favorite book by this author treating about Russia and the October revolution there. The way it has been written somehow is close to the way I feel about the whole thing...feel free to guess. The best part of the book is that all characters have their weak and strong points and it is impossible to pass a judgement on anyone. Somehow I really like this book - for Rita the book was very depressing...she liked the ones listed below much more. I think they are not comparable. Good read not so old times in Russia.

8. The Fountainhead by Any Rand - the author of the book did not especially have warm feelings about communism. "We the Living" was partially autobiographical and I guess served as the basis for her own philosophy of objectivism. Without knowing her past I guess it is difficult to understand how did she end up with developing such philosophical direction. I enjoyed the very long book, the characters and her way of mixing philosophy in a novel. I also like the fact that it dealt with architecture.

9. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand - hits the same tone as "The fountainhead" just the industry and the main characters are different. Good read though again - I do not like when authors fall into the trap of certain way of writing and cannot come up with anything refreshing. On the other hand one can say that they develop a style which otherwise they would lack.

Rita loved both books in the end and I think I did too. It is just that I had to point out what bothered me.

Ok - that would be about it - I am on my way to find a new book - we are waiting for recommendations, please! Something about South East Asia by local authors would be great but any other suggestions for a good read will be appreciated.

The Golden Triangle

Since Songkran, the Thai New Year celebrations were raging at its height with more and more violent water games, we desperately wanted to get out of Chiang Mai in the hope that the countryside will be more peaceful. On the 15th of April we decided to sneak out of town on 2 Honda Phantom motorbikes to spend the following eight days riding around the Northern mountains, the area called the Golden Triangle, a journey of over 700km. Our hopes were soon let down, big time; we could not even cross the road before getting completely wet. It seems bicycle and motorbike riders were the number one target for the biggest hits with full bucket of water splashed over your face, while riding and obviously not being in the position to defend yourself or get off the bike every 3 minutes to make yourself heard. Anyway, it would not have made any difference, we were already soaking wet and you ought to feel special and lucky being chosen as a target, replying with a smile and happy new year wishes. I have to admit silently that I lost my sense of humor after the third violent stroke of bucket flying full speed to hit me frontally and I was very happy to arrive to our first destination, near Doi Saket, visiting our Dutch lady friend's home. I think it has been 4 months since we have not had the luxury to stay in a HOME, with home made food and all its beautiful belongings. And the Northern Thai countryside was a different experience, too, with its rice fields, forests and windy roads.

Our next destination was Jaeson National Park, which is famous of waterfalls and hot springs. We decided to stay overnight at the nearby of the park at a lovely bungalow and walk around the park before sunset. However neatly the hot springs were organized it was not an attraction to sink in them when we have been dropping sweat all the day because of the heat and humidity. We anyway did not quite feel being boiled next to the eggs locals placed nicely in small baskets in the water, which took 17 minutes to be hard boiled eggs for the pick-nick.

I just cannot stop myself mentioning that while I am writing this post there are two Thai kids sitting next to me in the internet cafe about the age of 5, a girl and a boy in full excitement crazy about playing games on the computer. They are so small that they hardly reach the keyboard and their legs are hanging in mid air from the chair. They are really sweet, amazing!!!

Anyway, back to our adventures, the next station was really in the middle of the wilderness, off the main road to Chiang Rai, 25 km to the mountains to the Akha Hill Tribe villages. When after a good hour of fighting our way uphill on dirt roads we arrived to our destination we realized that we are so much off the beaten trek that we are not able to make ourselves understood unless we speak Thai. So I opened our guidebook which contains some life saving expressions like food and accommodation with Latin transliteration and to my greatest surprise it worked. It worked actually so well, that we got a small house for free, which I guess was held for guests, as there were no guest houses or other means of accommodation. Soon we became the attraction of the village when we were shown to the little store on the main street (the only street of the village) for stuffing our bellies with a good noodle soup. I guess the owners were making their record sales with some weird jelly-like sweets sold in tiny plastic bags with ice, which was the excuse for villagers to come close enough to see us from the corner of their eyes. This shyness is quite a different experience from India... Finally we did not see the Akha tribes, because though there was a horse, but not in a condition to ride on it, so we called it a day dedicated ourselves to our reading and an early bedtime with ants, spiders and all sorts of bugs.

Next morning we headed to Chiang Rai, a small, very easy going town with excellent street food vendors and night market, from where it is ideal to discover the border mountains of Thailand. We started with Mae Sai, the most Northern point of Thailand, where through the Mae Nam Sai river you can cross the border to Burma, Myanmar and buy almost everything on the street from chestnuts to fake brand wrist watches and opium pipes. To speed up our journey after a lunch and a walk on the street market we continued to Sop Ruak, The Golden Triangle, where the Thai, Myanmar and Laos borders meet. Though the name Golden Triangle does not have too much to do with the borders themselves, much more with World's largest opium production in the mountains of these three countries, Thais managed to turn this place into a tourist attraction and push out most of the opium business to the neighboring countries. If you have questions about the unconditional respect the Thai King enjoys, visit The Hall of Opium; there are still good kings, who are very active in improving the living standards of the ones most in need with very smart and advanced ideas. Like in this region besides the governments' merciless war against drugs the Royal family initiated projects to provide alternative earning possibilities to the hill tribes for living, mostly in the field of agriculture and rehabilitation.

We decided to spend the night at Chiang Saen along the Mekong River, over which river the bridge was build and Coppola directed the film Apocalypse Now. Today the place looks much more cheerful and peaceful, but it is not difficult to imagine the times when warlords went nuts in the jungle creating their own cult on the ruins of ancient temples.

The next day we made a longer stretch to Mae Salong, the little China on excellent mountain roads with a lot of opportunities to practice our cornering technique and enjoy the scenery. Mae Salong is a lovely hill top town with mostly Chinese inhabitants, dealing with tea production and selling all kinds of Chinese goodies. Our guest house provided us with a hand made map about the surrounding places to visit and so we got excited to go on a bit of an off road drive again to see some hill tribes and temples. The experiment proved to be to toughest riding exercise on rain washed dirt roads with rocks and steep up and down hill stretches. Hmmm, we survived, but I guess there are more pleasant way of acquiring the liking of riding the bike. After recovering from the shock we headed to Chiang Dao, which is famous of its caves. Just not to make things easy we took a guide for an excursion, which turned out to be not illuminated, leading through passages where you had to climb in pitch dark on all four and the only hope we had was a with a small kerosene lamp in the hand of our female non-English speaking guide, who was very kindly smiling all the way. We were relieved when we saw the sunlight again and agreed that for the time being we do not further experiment Thailand; we return back to Chiang Mai and make our way towards Laos.

Chiang Mai - New Year Celebrations!

Happy New Year - we have just went through 3 day New Year celebrations - Songkran - in Chiang Mai - in the north of Thailand. Honestly the celebrations can only be described as pure madness. The whole trip started in a mad way - we could not buy tickets for train since they were booked out for weeks ahead but finally managed to get tickets for a bus. We managed to board a bus from Bangkok right before the start of celebrations and hit the road north together with millions of Thais. Therefore we spend HOURS in traffic jams on highways and arrived after almost 18 hours of sitting on the bus. In addition to the traffic jams our bus only resembled a bus from outside. Otherwise we had to stop every now and then to repair the gearbox (3rd gear was the highest our driver ever managed to use).
By the time we arrived in Chiang Mai the celebrations were in full swing - since the bus was in desolate state in dropped us a bit out of city where we were picked by several pick-ups (seems everybody has a Toyota pick-up in this country), loaded on the back of them and then consequently flooded with water every two minutes. The good thing is that it is 40 degrees here so it just cools you - though most of the times the water is first cooled with ice so the splash becomes relatively chilly. To put the story short - it was impossible to stick your head out from hotel not to become wet - on every corner "danger" was looming, every single pick-up was loaded with a huge barrel of water waiting to be graceful thrown on you...

Anybody, who has been to Thailand during Songkran knows what I am talking about - we have recorded the sample of the madness...

The second highlight of our festivities was sending to space a hot air balloon - we have seen them flying in the sky and decided to make some investigation since if you send a balloon you can make a wish and we had two (though I cannot tell what they were). Firstly, we found out where we can buy one (to our surprise we learned that it is a paper "object" heated by a relatively big candle). Secondly, for some reason Rita came to the conclusion that they are to be sent from the temples. So we walked through the whole city to our favorite temple which at that specific moment was in the middle of a market. The temple was a perfect example of Burmese architecture - wooden one. We managed to light up the candle and had serious problems with holding the paper hot air balloon but it did not want to lift itself in the air. On one side of us we had parked cars, on the other the wooden temple and 50 meters in the direction of wind - hundreds of people - and the balloon did not want to lift itself up. We asked for help but the balloon decided to go up a bit and make an emergency landing on the back of one of the pick-ups. We saved the pick-up by having a local jump on the back of it - also the balloon was saved...Then it finally took off - right in the direction of the wooden roof of the temple. I was terrified - the prospect of fire made my heart almost jump out. The temple would have burned down in 60 seconds since it was anyhow as usual 40 degrees...Finally the balloon managed to miss the room and started ascending - it did so at least for another 10 minutes...our hopes of fulfilled wishes were high again - then being quite far away from us it somehow lost its urge and started a quick descend - we however, do not know whether it crashed or just decided to take a flight corridor not so high - perhaps our wish will still come true...

By the way - it is year 2551 and Songkran is a great time to explore the evening market in the middle of Chiang Mai where you can try zillions of local specialties and afterwards get a foot massage - all right on the street - what we did and what we encourage all of our readers to do once in Thailand...

Baan Thai Cookery School - Chiang Mai

Being so much fascinated by the Thai kitchen what else could be better thank staffing your belly with all sorts of culinary delights - as a matter of fact in Chiang Mai at the Songkran - on a street food festival: to learn preparing the dishes yourself. So I went out to look for a cooking school, which is plenty around here offering from day courses to 2 weeks long programs - and proving the deliciousness and healthiness of the Thai kitchen, they are very popular.

I choose Baan Thai, which means Thai home, as the school is located in a traditional Thai home with its old furniture and atmosphere. We started with a visit to the local market to purchase the ingredients for the 5 dished we were supposed to prepare during the day. The abundance of fruits, herbs and vegetables never seen before made me and my camera tick, so hopefully I can share a lot of pictures and try remembering also some of the names - as my parents are constantly questioning us about our diet; now here comes a full introduction.

We started with a Thai welcome snack, which was a fruit plate: honey mango, melon, rosy apples and lychee. Than we continued with preparing a Phad Thai, which is THE Thai fast food: rice noodles with chicken, egg, tofu, garlic, spring onion, bean sprouts and as most Thai dishes fish sauce, oyster sauce, cane sugar, lime and nuts. Do not get scared, I am not going to write down all the recipes, just wanted to give an idea about the basic differences to Hungarian Gulyas.

The feast continued with Tom Yum Soup - Hot and Sour Soup, Crispy Catfish Salad, Green Curry with Chicken and Rice and finally Water Chestnuts in Coconut Milk. Yes, we prepared this all for ourselves and we all ate them (Tomek got a belly squeeze from not being given a spoonful). And we had to prepare the green curry in a huge basalt mortar - even if at the end our chef admitted, that now knowing the usage of the mortar we can use a blender... But the most important spice we learned today was the smile, which has to be constantly on your lips, because Thais believe this gives the extra taste to the food.

Ayuthaya

Being stuck in Bangkok because of visa processing to Vietnam we decided to take a day trip to (one of) the formal capitals: Ayuthaya. It is 86 km North from Bangkok and I know it is boring, but it is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It was the Siamese royal capital from the 14th till the 18th century, when Burmese took it over and almost completely destroyed it. Today not too much is left to be proud of other than the ruins, as a silhouette reminding the once illustrious city. Three rivers meet here and most of the ancient ruins by canals, making it a really idyllic option to discover the sights on boat ride or bicycle.

We have chosen the later option, as usual pushing the pedal when the Sun was at its peak, so we had to take it really slowly with a lot of breaks and trying to drink at least a portion of the liquids we have lost by perspiration. Amazingly sometimes only by sitting sweat run all over us just like when sitting in a Finish sauna.

I am not even trying to list all the temple ruins there are to visit and the ones we saw, hopefully our photos in the Gallery will talk for themselves. But the elephants! I have to mention them after we fell in love with these creatures in Nepal; there is a so called Elephant Kraal, which used to be the spot for the annual wild elephant show, now functioning much in a similar fashion except that it is mostly for the tourists, not for the royal family. Luckily these species seem to have have a better treat than their sisters in Chitwan, having a huge area for their walkabout and a number of babies similarly charming and playful as we already experienced. They are beautifully decorated with paintings already preparing for the biggest Thai festival, the Songkran, starting on the 12th turning the whole country upside-down till the 15th of April. Probably we should better equip ourselves also than at Holi Festival in Nepal...

Koh Tao - Turtle Island

Yess, we are certified PADI Open Water Divers!!! It took us 4 days, a lot of very fascinating theory lessons and 4 open water dives. After we managed to relax and forget all the possible accidents and became comfortable with breathing only through our (otherwise your nose runs full of salty water or your mask sucks in your face like a vacuum cleaner) it is soo great fun! We saw all kinds of tropical fish and different corals, sometimes eyeing with a big buffer fish with one broken tooth in the front or swimming in the middle of a cloud of fish. It is so funny that they come close to look into your eyes or just swim next to you as if you were one of them. But the most fascinating thing about diving - at least for me - is the neutral buoyancy; it negates gravity and you are weightless like in a vacuum or space. You can turn up-side down, flip or "fly" over a coral, stay still and enjoy the view from above. You can see and touch the air in water as it bubbles up in huge umbrella shape shiny balloons when divers exhale. Unfortunately we did not see whale sharks nor turtles, but at least we have an incentive to continue making more bubbles. One of our next course may be underwater photography, but until then you have to accept pictures from public galleries...


We decided to cut our seaside vacation for the time being and return to Bangkok to head further North in Thailand. Though the fascinating electric storms, the turtles, the lagoons, the blue eyed cats and funny dogs all around and our Eden-like bungalow home secluded in the jungle will make us miss this place.

Koh Tao

A peaceful island - without hoards of tourists - this is how we have chosen it among scores of other islands we were looking at. Secondly a paradise for diving. Not that we had a clue how to dive but we came with the idea of learning how to do it. So we enrolled ourselves for a PADI Open Water Diver Course - after it we should be certified to dive wherever...assuming we pass all the examinations. Today was our second day and both of us feel a bit exhausted. All the magic we are doing under water does not come without a price. The first day was hard on me - today was hard on Rita. On the first day we boarded a boat - went to the sea - put on 18kg of gear on us and we told to jump of the boat. I felt like committing suicide and right about to drawn with all this things on my back - fortunately I floated. The second day we spent over two hours under water practicing all kind of emergency things like running out of air, losing your mask etc. This time Rita had hard time - somehow she could not make her nose not want to take in water :) - she recovered but I was totally exhausted by the end of the lesson.

As to the island - it is much more developed than we expected and can host much more people than anticipated (though no package tours seem to come here). Although at beginning it looked bad and seemed we will be frying on the beach with zillions of people we managed to find partly secluded lagoon on the southern end of the island. In principle we sometimes feel that we are almost the only ones there. Honestly, it is heavenly. For Rita it was even better than that in the hammock on the veranda of our lovely house. Today however, the hammock gave up after both of us boarded it. Rita is very much in despair and the owners of our resort seem not to have a new one for us - so I guess we will be buying a portable hammock for our own sake.


Of course, traditionally Rita has met some friends in our bathroom - this time it is a HUGE gecko - at least 30 cm long. The sound they make is amazing. GECKO - GECKO seems to be echoing everywhere but usually in the evening time. In the evenings we usually move to another lagoon which is about 10 minutes walk with a torch through the water of the lagoon. All perfect - just the idea of letting my breathing device out of my mouth tomorrow at some 10 meters below does not make me look forward to the next day :)