Fried insects and charming Buddhas

Bangkok
13 Sept 2010

Leaving Koh Tao for Laos, Bangkok was the obvious stop-off as we headed north, so for a few fun days we enjoyed the huge city's waterways, its elaborate and gilded Buddhist temples and its amazing, bustling street life.

Bangkok has so much to offer that we only saw a fraction of what is there, but the amulet market was truly fascinating and stands out as a place everyone should visit to get a taste of the 'real' Thailand.

A whole street is dedicated to stalls and shops selling supposedly protective Buddhist charms that are popular with drivers and those in dangerous professions, as well as collectors who pore over them with jewellers' magnifying glasses trying, I think, to spot a genuine antique amongst the millions of modern copies. As well as the amulets, the stalls are littered with strange herbal potions and small phalluses and supposed tigers' teeth (grrr) and many things that defy identification, by us at least. Wonderful.



















We did also make the standard foray to the famous and gigantic weekend market that I had enjoyed when I visited the city some 15 years ago, but it was mostly full of home furnishings and tourist tat and left Maja and I rather disappointed. The boys enjoyed it for a while, though - especially their new ostrich puppets and some deep frozen bananas dipped in chocolate sauce and covered in hundreds and thousands. Yum!













A trip to the lovely Wat Po temple and its huge reclining Buddha left us in no doubt as to the amazing abilities of the Thai people when it comes to blending art and religion. The temple complex is a treasure trove of beautiful and skillful architecture, painting, carving, ceramics and more. It is also a peaceful place and despite being a major tourist site, is also an active temple with Thais coming to pray and make touching offerings of lotus blooms or small squares of gold leaf which are pressed onto a base-metal statue. We loved that: from many simple actions something special arises (see pic, top left).



















The boys also loved banging the temple gongs and putting small coins in the offering bowls that line the halls, not to mention the slightly irreverant games of hide and seek and tag they like to play in any big space, temples included. We did mostly keep them under control and the Thais are very tolerant of children, thankfully.













Bangkok isn't a cheap destination anymore, but the street food still is and it tastes great.You can pick and choose from many specialities to make an exciting inpromptu lunch: tasty things like crispy but succulent fried pork with sweet chilli sauce and tart green mango salad were hard to stop eating. Some of the dishes on sale were a bit more out of the ordinary. One stall, close to the Baan Sabai guest house we had chosen as our Bangkok base, was offering big piles of fried grasshoppers, bamboo grubs and beetles. I had a strange urge to try them, but somehow I didn't pluck up the courage to actually buy a bag.













One thing I had wanted to do while in Thailand was seek out some local potters to see how they do things and perhaps brush up on my making skills. Koh Kret - still home to the Mon people who have run potteries in the area for hundreds of years isolated by an artificial moat of muddy river water - promised to be a great day trip. The island is 20km or so from the city centre so we took the boat bus as far north as it went and then jumped into a minivan that eventually dropped us at the short ferry crossing to the island. Yes, there's a lot of water to navigate in this city.













Koh Kret was a bit of a damp sqib, though. Quite literally. The rivers, swollen with monsoon rains, had flooded parts of the island (see above) and most of the pot making was suspended for the time being. Worse none of the old wood-fired kilns were in use any more - instead they are preserved as museum pieces for the tourists and ceramics aficionados. The potteries that still produce on the island use modern gas kilns. I guess that in the confines of a big city, a collection of active wood-burning kilns would be an air-pollution nightmare. Still it would have been great to see them in action. I did get to throw a small bowl however and even impressed the guy whose wheel I borrowed. I made a bowl exactly like the ones he was producing. Of course, I used too much water and when he cut the bowl off the wheel it pretty much collapsed. D'oh!













Before we left town, I developed curiously sensitive skin, a light rash on my lower legs and occasional nausea; it was a warning of worse to come but I had no inkling yet of what I had. So we stashed our by-now huge bag of dive equipment with Maja's Croatian ex-pat friend Leo and his Thai wife Tu and took the overnight express to the Friendship Bridge over the Thai-Laos border.