Wat Pho We Having too Much Fun

***all photos copywrited by Nancy Hesse

It’s pretty cool to see something you’ve seen on TV and in movies and in books and never thought you’d see in person.  The Reclining Buddha statue in Bangkok was one of those things for me.

After the wonderful massage, I got to walk to the temple that held this statue.  Good thing I don’t carry my stress in my legs or I would have needed a wheel chair.

Anyway, here are the useless facts.  Wat Pho is named after a monastery in India where Buddha is believed to have lived.  Prior to the temple’s founding, the site was the center of education for traditional Thai medicine (ha!  This is where the sadists come to learn “massage”).  Statues were created showing yoga positions. Under King Rama III plaques inscribed with medical texts were placed around temple.  Adjacent to the building housing the Reclining Buddha is a small raised garden, the centerpiece being a bodhi tree which is propogated from the original tree in India where Buddha sat while awaiting enlightenment. Wat Pho is one of the largest and oldest wats in Bangkok with more than 1000 Buddha images as well as one of the largest Buddha images.  The Reclining Buddha is 160 feet long and one of the largest Buddha statues in the world.  The temple complex is also regarded as the first public university of Thailand teaching religion, science and literature through its murals and sculptures (Thanks Wikipedia!)

You take off your shoes at the entrance to the temple.  You put them in bags.  In most of the temples you take your shoes off and you go back and find them untouched and unmolested.  There you get a bag to carry them with you because you don’t come out in the same place you go in.  Still, I think in America, there’d be some idiot out there stealing shoes.  There is a sign that says “Beware of Pickpockets” though.  First time I saw anything that resembled that kind of warning.  Welcome to the tourist trap, folks.

You know you always have those friends who say you should avoid the normally touristy things and “immerse yourself in the culture.”  But you don’t go to Hawaii and avoid Pearl Harbor.  You don’t go to Yosemite and avoid “Old Faithful.”  And you don’t go to Thailand and avoid the Reclining Buddha. 

Clearly, I was not alone in this opinion.

It was crowded.

But it was worth it.

To say that the Buddha is immense does not do it justice.  The thing is awe inspiring.  The detail is fascinating.  The face of the Buddha is a soft smile as it depicts the calm passing of the Buddha as he tells his followers not to mourn his passing.  There is little talking amid the crowd.  There’s lots of photo snapping.

Nancy is in heaven, snapping away like a turtle on crack.  For the rest of our trip, I’m going to have to look at her photo of this Buddha’s face, positioned between two large roof supporting poles.  Nancy will say “I just love this picture, it’s so perfectly aligned.  I’m definitely going to get this one enlarged.”  She will say this approximately 5.3 million times over the next ten days.

The bottom of the Buddha’s feet tell the story of the Buddha and it’s depicted in mother of pearl.  No picture in the world can do justice to this.  Sorry.  It glows, it reflects a million colors.  It’s amazing.

As we finish taking pictures and gaping in awe, we meet Miki at the end of the building housing the Reclining Buddha and turn in our shoe bags.  We put our shoes back on.  As I do this, I note that my neck kind of hurts.  I wonder what I could have possibly done.

We drive from Wat Pho to a boat on the river.  It’s a big barge like boat that doesn’t move much.  It’s here that we get our traditional Thai food in buffet form.  Apparently this is where all the tour companies bring their charges.

Nancy and I get a seat and while our food is paid for, drinks are not.  Everywhere in Thailand you pay for drinks.  It’s hot.  They know where they have you.  Pay for the drink or drink your own sweat, you stinky foreigner.  Okay, they’re much nicer as a whole than I am—at least they were to my face.

I try a little bit of everything.  Different fruits, different sweets.  They offer Western food on this buffet.  But have I mentioned it’s hot?  So, not wanting spaghetti with marinara.

The highlight is what Miki recommends.  Thai noodle soup.  That’s what she’s having and that’s what all the Thai guides are having.  That’s what I’m having.

It’s a good soup, a broth with rice noodles and veggies.  You can add fish sauce and hot sauce to it however you like.  I like mine hot.  It’s also got mystery meat in it.  Don’t know what it is.  Could be chicken balls, fish balls, who knows.  I can’t get my soup through it to cut it in half and I’m not sucking in a ball in completely without first knowing where it’s been.

I order extra water too.  Hoarding water has become my primal occupation.

Nancy shows me her picture of the Reclining Buddha.  “I just love this picture,” she says.  “It’s so perfectly aligned.  I just love this picture.” 

I nod.

To be fair, it is a good picture and I am very grateful that Nancy was there to take all the photos to free me up to absorb all the details and sights and smells that I could.

Lunch smells like cloves and curry and spice.

The other tourists are pigging out on salad and spaghetti.  None of them are at the noodle soup bar, the guy serving up the broth – you pick the bowl with the noodles and veggies in it, then they add the steaming hot broth to cook them—is standing alone after he finishes serving the guides.

After lunch, I try the desserts.  This is the first place I discover khanom krok, the little sweet coconut pancakes that they serve all over Thailand on the streets and everywhere.  Holy crap, I hate coconut, but I frickin’ love these things.  They’re fried on the outside and creamy pudding stuff in the middle.  I even came home and looked up a recipe for them.  I’m going to make them soon!

Finished with lunch, Miki takes us to the other end of the boat and we step out onto a rickety rotting dock.  

“Time for boat trip,” she tells us.

Across the uneasy river, a narrow longboat starts up, billowing black smoke from its engine as the wiry, hard-looking captain pulls the lawnmower engine to a start.  The motor has a long pole at the other end, and a small propeller at the end.  He maneuvers his boat to the dock.

The top edge of the boat is about an inch wide and about a half foot below the edge of the dock.  There’s nothing to hold on to when jumping down into it except the canvas awning.

“You step down and then you sit down right away,” Miki advises.  “I’ll do it first so you can see.

Uh yeah….what I see is my impending drowning death in a sewage polluted river filled with toxic fish and bobbing discarded condoms and milk cartons.

 (to be continued in next blog.) 

Thai Massages: They're Dandy, I ain't Lying

It will feel good, they said.  It will be awesome, they said.  They are trained to find where you keep your stress and they will help work it out, they said.  It will get all that stiffness and kinks from the long airplane flight out of your body, they said.  Thai massages are world famous, they said.

According to our guide, Thai massage is one of the ancient gifts to the Thai people and the king provides schools and training to the Thai people so that they can perform this craft.

So, after a morning spent going through temples and the Grand Palace in Bangkok, I was heading off to get a Thai massage.  I should mention that it was my second day in Thailand, it was 90 degrees already and to go through the Bangkok temples and the palace one was required to dress in long pants and with sleeves. Back home it was 20 degrees and snowing.  I was not adjusted to the temperature yet and was sweating like a hairy biker during Bike Week.  And the pants I had were special moisture wicking pants that I’d bought specifically for the trip—unfortunately, I’d bought them six months earlier and they were too big.  They were designed to roll up into capris, but they rolled up into regular pants and the thighs of the pants had enough extra space that I could have put both legs in one side and still had extra room.  So I was kind of uncomfortable.

Driving through traffic from the Grand Palace through streets lined with buses that had hauled crowds and crowds of Chinese through the narrow streets of Bangkok—hey happy Chinese New Year, guess what, there are a LOT of Chinese people on the planet.  Anyway, our guide tells us that the drive is about 45 minutes, depending on traffic.

As we turn a corner, we encounter our first traffic hang-up.  There’s a guy who stopped in the middle of the street, dropped trou and was dropping a deuce right there on the median line of the street.  There was a street dog standing on the sidewalk staring with a “What the hell” look on his face.  The traffic just flows around him.  There’s no road rage in Bangkok despite the traffic.  The traffic flows around the pooper and keep going.

The guide doesn’t quite know how to react.  She’s amused and she clearly doesn’t want this to be the impression of her country to the foreigners in the back seat of the car—and she sees that I have seen what we just passed.  She laughs it off.  Miki is a great guide, full of energy, excited about her country and proud of it and excited to share it with people who want to know more.  “Well,” she says laughing, “I guess now you can say you’ve seen everything in Bangkok!”

I laugh with her and chug water while Nancy, blissfully unaware, snaps pictures of the palace through the car window, having missed the “squat and drop” completely.  I was blissfully unaware that this was an omen, a cosmic commentary on my near future.

Soon I see the signs for Wat Pho.  Wat Pho is the home of the famous reclining Buddha statue and it’s on my list of one of the things I really really want to see.  Like most of the wats in Thailand that we visited—there are thousands of wats and temples and places to worship everywhere you go and it would take a lifetime probably to visit them all—Wat Pho is more of a complex than a single building.  Each wat seems to have at least few buildings with shrines and Buddha statues, housing for the monks, and a school for the monks.

So we are dropped off and go through the line that says “foreigners.”  All Thai people get into the temples for free.  Seems kind of right to me, somehow actually.  If you want to take pictures and gawk at our religious icons, then pay us for it.  If you want to worship and drown yourself in your cultural and spiritual history, then by all means, come on in. 

Anyway, we walk in and our guide points out the restrooms.  So, yeah, we’ve been drinking lots of water all day and we’re about to get a massage.  Restrooms are in order.

I go in.  At first glance it’s not unlike the restrooms at roadside rest stops or national parks or campgrounds.  A line of metal doored stalls.  The concrete floors are wet.  The place smells vaguely of stale pee in the heat.  I go into an empty stall.  The seat is soaking wet.

There is no toilet paper.

There’s a sprayer on the wall.

What in the hell is that sprayer for?  Cleaning?  The restroom actually doesn’t look that dirty except for the smell.

Not only is there no toilet paper, there was never any toilet paper.

There’s no empty roll.

There’s no toilet paper dispenser niche or rack on the stall wall.

It’s a metal box with a wet floor, a wet toilet and a kitchen sprayer on the flipping wall in a holder.

I have to pee.

No moving between stalls.

I pee.

I do what guys do – the wiggle and shake.

I wash my hands.

I go outside to wait.

Nancy emerges a few moments later.

She looks at me as the guide starts to lead us to the place where we’ll get our massages.

“Did you notice there was no toilet paper?” she asks.

I nod.

“Thank goodness I had some Kleenex with me.”

I nod.

“Not just in my stall.  There was no toilet paper in ANY stall,” she says, seeming to want a response.

I nod again.

I’m not talking about this.  (call this foreshadowing for future blogs)

We go to a building.  It’s air conditioned.  It’s filled with beds and Thai massage therapists walking on top of Western tourists.  The “therapists” seem to be enjoying themselves.  Nancy is handed off to some cute little perky girl.  They hand me off to the only Thai person in the country who is taller than me.  The guy grins at me.  His eyes sparkle.  I want to believe he’s amused by the fear in my eyes, but in retrospect, I’m pretty sure he’s a sadist.

The room is long and narrow.  There are four double sized mattresses across the room, two on each side of a center aisle.  It’s shaded from the bright harsh light outside, that combined with the air conditioning might have been comforting if it weren’t for all the people lying on those beds being twisted into pretzels by Thai “professionals.”  I take off my shoes, I’m instructed to put all my stuff into a small box at the head of the mattress that has been designated as mine.

Nancy has the spot across the aisle.  There’s a woman on the mattress next to mine.  Her eyes are squeezed shut; her mouth is twisted in a grimace.

My first impression of this stranger:  wimp.  I’m judgmental like that sometimes.

Sadly, I’m in the land that karma calls home.

The first thing he does is stretch my hamstrings, by kneeling on them.  Oh, they’d cramp up if it weren’t for the unrelenting pressure.  Then the soles of my feet are gouged with knuckles.  My arms are stretched behind my back.  My knees are twisted until they touch the back of my head.

“Are you okay?” the guy asks.

I look over at Nancy.  Through the tears welling up in my eyes, I see her eyes are closed and there’s a blissful look on her face.  “I’m fine,” I say.

Oh and our guide wasn’t kidding about them being trained to find the stress spot.  A while back, I had a bulging disc in my neck.  It presses on a nerve and makes my right hand go numb.  Back then I went through 12 weeks of traction and therapy and drugs to get it right again.  Now, I have exercises to do when my hand starts to go numb.  And it was, the 24 hours on the plane did it.

But I didn’t need to do my exercises, because my wonderful massage therapist decided to apply traction with his hands—or he was trying to pop my head off like we used to pop off the flowers of dandelions when we were kids.  He had really strong hands.  With his knuckles on my shoulders and his thumbs on the base of my skull, he tried to decapitate me.

Ever have something hurt so bad that you really couldn’t make a sound?

Yeah.

It was like that.

He didn’t let up. 

Someone came by and said something to him in Thai.  He replied. 

I don’t speak Thai, but I’m pretty sure he said, “Momma had a baby and its head popped OFF!”

Finally it was over.

He walked away.

Someone handed me a mineral water.

The Thai drink a lot of mineral water.  Apparently this is allows them to lower the pressure on the toilet kitchen sprayer.  (more foreshadowing).

We walk out. 

Miki is waiting.  “How was it?” she asked.

Nancy speaks first.  “It was wonderful!  I feel so good now.”

“I think I’m bruised!”

Miki laughed.  “Did it hurt?”

“Yes!”

She nodded.  “They won’t let me back to get a Thai massage.  I scream.”

Long story short.  I had bruises.  My shoulders and the base of my skull was tender for three more days.  Every time I turned my head I was aware of the tender spots.

Okay, my bulging disc was back in place.

I think that guy was proud of himself for damaging a fat, aging foreigner.  He grinned too much.  Never trust a man who grins too much.  Never trust an Asian who’s taller than you and has hands that look like they might be able to hold a basketball without much effort.

And start screaming before you can’t make a sound.