Chatting with Monks
Sometimes, I’ll come across something in our guidebook or on the internet that sounds like a cool idea. I’ll think to myself, hmmm, that sounds like a cool idea. But then I’ll never do anything to execute the idea because it either requires more effort than wandering around or involves too many unknowns. Every once in a while I’ll get in the mood to make something happen. Which is how I ended up sitting around, chatting with a bunch of monks about Buddhism and life and such.
It really involved very little effort, but the description in Lonely Planet was slightly on the vague side. It only mentioned that certain temples held monk chats to allow foreigners to find out more about Buddhism and to allow the monks to practice their English. Because I am rather on the uptight side and not adventurous by any means (traveling the world notwithstanding), this left a lot of unanswered questions in my mind. Do I have to schedule an appointment? Or do you just show up? If you’re just supposed to show up, what do I do when I get there? Do I just find any monk and say, monk, do you want to chat?
Yeah. I way overanalyze things, I know. I would be a bad Buddhist.
Turns out you do just sort of show up. The temple I visited was only a few streets away from our guesthouse, and they have a designated area for the monk chatting. Monks who are feeling chatty sit over there and strike up conversations. My first monk was a rather shy fellow, leading to lots of awkward silences. From him, I learned the basics of monkdom. All Thai men must serve a period of monkhood. Most do it around age 21, but some voluntarily because novices at a younger age. The men don’t have to serve for long periods, but many decide to stay monks for several years. Monks must leave their families behind in the villages and come to live in either a forest temple or city temple. They wear varying shades of orange, yellow, red or brown depending on what temple they are from. Monks get up early to chant in the temples, and only eat the alms donated by others.
My second monk, on the other hand, was born to chat. Good thing he didn’t take a vow of silence. From him, I learned that monks must shave all body hair, including their eyebrows. Funny how I never noticed before he mentioned it, especially since the eyebrow shaving scenes in the Wall and on the Sopranos by Anthony Jr. really freaked me out. He told me about how monks are not supposed to play sports or exercise, but he sneaks a few push-ups everyday to stay fit. He gets up at 4:00 every morning, but doesn’t usually go to bed until midnight. He doesn’t see a need for any more sleep.
Either sensing my slightly aimless state in life or just the type of monk to not let the chat end without imparting a few words of wisdom, the second monk decided to talk Buddhism with me. If you have a problem, said the monk, solve it. And there’s no sense worrying about the past, because it already happened. Nor should you worry about the future, because it isn’t here yet. Focus on the present, the monk said, for it is the only thing you can control.
Wise words.
Back to the Future
I’m jumping forward to the future again to let you in on some big news on the travel front. Before we headed off to adventures in Southern Laos without internet, we bought our return ticket home.
Because I’m all about sharing the reality of travel – the good and the bad – let me explain how that came to be. It took us a while to admit it, but somewhere in the last few months of endless buses, boats, lukewarm showers, hard beds, temples and cafes, we both started feeling a little burnt out and bored. I know it is a hard thing to imagine – how could someone feel anything but ecstatic on a “trip of a lifetime” – but it is true. And it happens to the best of them.
I can think of many possible explanations. Maybe it was because we got waylaid involuntarily in several towns in a row. It is one thing to decide to stay put and relax; it is another to be ready to move on but being stymied for one reason or another.
Maybe it was because one or the other of us was sick off and on for weeks.
Maybe it was post-India let down. India was invigorating precisely because it was challenging. Anything Southeast Asia could throw at us paled in comparison and seemed like a nagging bother instead of a cultural challenge.
Maybe it was because until recently, we’ve been mostly moving along Southeast Asia’s tourist trail. It is all too easy to go through the motions of travel and end up in the same places, surrounded by other Westerners doing the same things and eating the same comfort foods.
Maybe it is because getting off the tourist trail seemed like more work than we felt like exerting by this point in the trip.
Maybe it was because on some level, we are homesick and some part of us wants to be eating the comfort foods instead of more noodles and rice.
Maybe it was because the trip was rapidly winding down, and neither of us is any closer to figuring out what we want to do with the rest of our lives.
Maybe it was because we let the extraordinary become ordinary.
Maybe it was just because we’d been away from home for nine whole months.
In reality, I suspect that it was some combination of all of these things.
So, naturally, we did what any burnt-out traveler would do…we decided to extend the trip. Makes perfect sense, right?
As we waited for me to recover from a stomach ailment in Vientiane, we found ourselves scheming. One great part about Laos was traveling for a bit with our new German friends. Hearing about their upcoming plans to head to New Zealand, we found ourselves searching for flights and researching costs of campervans. We realized part of the reason we were feeling a little blah was the thought that Southeast Asia could be it for our trip. Our dwindling funds and time meant that we easily could finish out our time in Southeast Asia, in countries that may be unique but that are more alike than they are different.
So, one day – kinda like how this whole trip started in the first place – we just did it. We bought a ticket from Malaysia to New Zealand. Sure, there was much deliberation first. Sure, we probably are just procrastinating returning to the real world. Sure, we’re going to dip into our savings to finance the extension. But, you know what? Suddenly, we’re excited again. About everything. About spending more time in Southeast Asia to see most of what we want to see at a slow pace. About going to New Zealand. About getting our own wheels again. About having a firm return date home.
The truth is, I think the open-endedness of the end of the trip was making us flail around a bit. There are tons of lifestyle redesign proponents out there advocating traveling without time restraints or plans. I’m continually fascinated by the growing chorus of interesting people designing ways to travel indefinitely and encouraging others to do so. I think that’s great, and if there is one thing I learned from our travels is that I need to create the lifestyle I want rather than just do what I’m supposed to do. But the thing is, creating the lifestyle I want involves going home. We’re both too big of homebodies to travel forever. I like Pittsburgh. I like having a home. I know that I want travel to be part of my life, but I don’t want travel to be my life.
So while I haven’t had any grand epiphanies about what I want to do with my life – just small revelations that I haven’t quite worked into a coherent whole – as of May 13, 2011, 408 days after leaving Pittsburgh, I’ll have to work on creating the life I want at home. And I’m okay with that. Especially since between now and then, I have a lot to look forward to. Instead of only spending a week or so in Laos as we originally planned, we only had days to go on our 30 day visa when we crossed the border to Cambodia yesterday. We’ll spend a couple of weeks in Cambodia (famous last words!), including watching the Steelers play in the AFC championship game at the crack of dawn on Monday, then cross over into Vietnam to be in Saigon in time for the Steelers to win their seventh Super Bowl. : ) We plan to be in Vietnam for three to four weeks in total, and we’ll fly from Hanoi back to Bangkok in late February/very early March. We hopefully will be meeting up for a little bit with a friend of mine from high school who has been working on her own travel plans. We’ll head south through the Thai islands, and do a quick jaunt in Malaysia as we make our way to Kuala Lumpur for our April 3 flight to Christchurch. We’ll tour New Zealand by campervan for a month in April (when the flights and campervans are cheaper as it turns to the shoulder season), and then head home – but not before making a week-long stop in Hawaii first. As it turns out, flying from Auckland to Honolulu and from Kauai to Pittsburgh was slightly cheaper than just flying straight home from New Zealand. Which is awesome, especially since we missed Kauai on our honeymoon. As opposed to our big pimping honeymoon splurges, we’ll attempt frugality in Hawaii this time (unless the Hotel Hana-Maui wants to put us up for free, of course. Love that place). As far as re-entries to the United States go, I can’t think of a better way than to visit state number 50. I can taste the pineapple already.
So that’s our plans in a nutshell. Hope you’ll join us for the rest of the ride, as well the rest of the highlights and lowlights from our travels in Thailand, round one, and Laos. Teasers of what’s to come: elephants, elephants and more elephants; the slooooooooow boat to Laos; why foreign massages aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be; and Sean and Amy do Laos on two wheels. Thanks for reading along!
Thailand is Awesome: Day One
To say we were eager to get to Thailand would be an understatement. Finally, a country where our champagne tastes matches our beer budget. It is, without question, the mecca for budget travelers. I have never seen a round-the-world itinerary that didn’t include Thailand. When I’d read about Thailand in other people’s travel blogs, I was sure it had to be too good to be true. There had to be embellishment to the stories of cheap prices. The rooms really couldn’t be that nice. The street food had to be sketchy. The people couldn’t be that friendly. The sun couldn’t shine that much. It didn’t take long for us to realize that everything we had heard was true. There’s a reason Thailand is on everyone’s list and it is because it is awesome.
I knew it was going to be awesome right from the start. Our day started with watching the most amazing sunrise over Thailand on our overnight flight. Although I couldn’t accurately capture the colors of the sunrise in a picture, I will always remember the way the sun created bands of light in order of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. I stared at the colors until they were out of sight.
When we landed in Bangkok, the sun was shining and everything looked clean, bright, and modern. Our taxi driver took us straight to our chosen hotel (Roof View Place) without any detours or trouble. We spent some time just marveling at how clean and bright our room was. While this particular room at $26 was the most expensive we’d have in Thailand (not counting Santa’s upgrade on Christmas), it had anything we could want – free wifi, a big, filling free breakfast, free water, and free information about travelling around. As we’d come to learn, you get a lot for your money in Thailand. Nice rooms can be had even for less than $10, and spending just another $5 or $10 can really up the ante.
By the end of our first day in Thailand, we’d discovered our favorite hole in the wall pad thai place serving the tastiest pad thai we’ve had to date for under a dollar (yes, it is true – dinner for under a dollar!), ate fresh tropical fruit, also under a dollar (cut right before you under sanitary conditions!), and had a neck and shoulder massage for $4 each. Yep, Thailand had us at day one, and still has us. We exhausted our 30 day visa and plan to return later in our trip – we suspect as good as it was so far, the best may be to come. There’s still beaches to sit on, after all. The only knock on Thailand is that it can lull you into a routine* and you have to share the country with all those other tourists and ex-pats who love it too.
*(I know, I know. Isn’t that what we wanted after India? During our travels, it seems when things are uncomfortable, they are usually more exciting. When things are comfortable, boredom can creep up – albeit a different type of boredom from the work/eat/sleep/lather/rinse/repeat routine at home. Just goes to show – no place is perfect, whether you are home or away, and you have to enjoy and appreciate the good parts no matter where you are. Luckily, in Thailand, there are a lot of good parts.)
Relaxing in our room at Roof View Place, basking in the clean sheets and sunshine
Despite eating it multiple times, I didn't get a great photo of our favorite pad thai. Don't worry, if our travels route us through Bangkok again as I suspect they will, we'll be back. This is a similar glass noodle version by the same lady.
Not us, but you get the point: cheap massages are everywhere. We preferred to not get ours right in public though.
Holiness
Assi Ghat, shortly before dawn. This might be my favorite photograph of the whole year. The colors really did look like that.
Out of all of the holy places in a very holy country, Varanasi may well be the holiest. Varanasi lies on the Ganges River southeast of Delhi. The Ganges River is considered to be holy by the Hindu faith, so devout pilgrims make their way to Varanasi to immerse themselves in the waters. They bathe, dip, swim, pray, splash, launder, and wash in the river. Some even die there. Hindus believe that dying in Varanasi liberates the soul from the endless birth/death cycles they’d otherwise be subjected to if they died elsewhere. Cremations occur at the burning ghats on the side of the river, and bodies are carried down to the Ganges to their final resting place. The thing is, thanks to the mix of garbage, sludge, sewage, and creamated bodies that enter its waters, the Ganges is actually septic. Some uneducated people don’t know. Other people know and don’t care.
As you could imagine, Varanasi was a whole new level of intensity for us. To be surrounded by so much faith and so many private moments that are lived out loud in public was fascinating and overwhelming. The septic waters may not be scientifically capable of creating new life, and people may be dying all around, but Varanasi is one of the most alive places I’ve ever been.
Even though Varanasi is a holy place, above all else it is an actual city. This school bus rickshaw made us smile.
We typically took the auto-rickshaws and passed up the ones that are pulled by bicycle because it just seemed so uncomfortable to force another human to pull our weight around by his own.. This guy looked so crestfallen when we first refused the ride that we reconsidered and decided we should give him an opportunity to earn a living too. Although the slow ride made us miss the beginning of the night ceremony at the Dasaswamedh Ghat, riding on the cycle rickshaw gave us a totally different perspective than the noisy, exhaust spewing auto-rickshaws.
Candle selling in Varanasi appeared to be a big business.
All around, Hindu pilgrims make their offering to the Ganges.
Dasaswamedh Ghat, around 7:30 p.m.
This man looked very solitary despite all of the fervor behind him.
Varanasi is one of those places where you struggle over whether you should really be there, paying to observe real life, but in the end you participate like everyone else and try to make yourself feel better by saying, well at least I'm just observing, not intruding. We paid this man to row a boat down the Ganges at dawn like so many other tourists. The rowing is hard work and he was quick to let us know it, playing on our heartstrings with tales of his children in broken English to ensure a tip. Travel. It's complicated.
Sunrise on the Ganges. The light created is one of the most incredible things I've seen in my whole life. It makes the brown waters luminescent.
It also makes the ghats on the side of the river glow.
Lighting candles to offer to the Ganges.
Everyone is doing their own thing in close proximity as if the others aren't there. Bathing, laundry, praying, sitting.
Happy New Year! (and 9-month update)
Interrupting your regularly scheduled India posts to wish everyone Happy New Year from Laos. We rang in the new year with new friends from Germany and some Beer Lao, which we can confirm is Asia’s tastiest and cheapest brew.
The new year also marks 9 months on the road for us. All of a sudden, we feel like our trip is coming to an end. Our plan is to return home around April, 12 months after we left, but we just can’t bear buying a return ticket home yet. 3 months sounds so much shorter than 4 months, and more likely than not we will be spending the bulk of that time in Southeast Asia. Our original plan was to be here for 11 weeks. We’ve already been here for 5 weeks, and still have lots to see. At this point in our trip, we lack the motivation to move around a ton (especially because moving around in SE Asia often requires long windy bus rides or slow boats down the river). We’re currently in Luang Prabang, Laos. We plan to head south into southern Laos and Cambodia, then make our way north through Vietnam. We’ll fly from Hanoi back to Bangkok, and then will head south, stat, to the Thai beaches. From there, we’ll just have to see how much time and money we have left. Because we are over budget due to spending an extra month in Europe and the expensiveness of Japan, we realized a while back that Australia is just not in the cards for us on this trip. I’m not ready to admit that we probably will be cutting New Zealand too. I’m still holding out hope that money will drop down from the sky.
At this point in our trip, we used to the constant packing and repacking, wearing the same clothes OVER and OVER again, and the perpetual motion. We’re still enjoying ourselves, but I must admit we were checking Craiglist for apartments the other day. It is strange – I am so ready to come home in some ways, but there is still so much more to see…plus there’s that whole pesky working thing that we’ll be needing to do at some point. I’m very grateful we had the opportunity to travel for a year straight, but I’ve decided that it is not my preferred way to travel. I think the ideal travel situation would be a couple of months at home, a couple of months on the road. If only someone would pay me to do this…any takers?
Hope you are enjoying your first day of the year. We’re off to see what I hear is a gorgeous waterfall, so I think it is going to be a good day. And also, hopefully, a good year. I’m not making any resolutions other than to enjoy and appreciate the rest of our trip, and to find a job I don’t hate this year. What are your resolutions? If you’ve been wanting to travel, make it happen in some way, shape or form this year.
And with that, wishing you…
