Hot, Hot, Hot (or Wat, Wat, Wat)
After we decided to go to Thailand and Cambodia in April, we found out it was the hottest month of the year in both countries. Staying with the heat theme, we already knew the food could be quite hot as well. What we didn't know was that we would see a temple (aka wat) what seemed like every other block. The Catholics have nothing on the Buddhists when it comes to building places of worship and filling them with statues. I think Buddha would be a bit shaken if he were roaming the earth these days. Then again, the current king of Thailand has his picture plastered just about everywhere imaginable, so maybe the Buddha wouldn't mind seeing his likeness everywhere he looked - at least not with the ones that are flattering.
After a long journey (which wasn't so bad since we had first class seats from SF to Tokyo thanks to Tracy working for United and her good travel karma), we arrived in Bangkok around midnight on the first day of Songkran, the Thai New Year festival. Like many festivals these days, what started out as a low-key religious festival has turned into a 3 day party full of lunacy. The original idea, which you can still see being practiced if you stop in at your neighborhood wat, was to sprinkle yourself, others and statues of the Buddha with water as a cleansing ritual and to gain merit for the new year. 
Now, you walk through the streets eating and drinking and tossing, throwing, dumping, squirting or otherwise soaking people with water while getting soaked yourself. 
Actually, Bangkok wasn't too wild except in the area our guesthouse was in, near the backpacker ghetto of Kao San Rd. So when we told the taxi stand at the airport the address, they all started smiling and apologizing, especially the driver when he dropped us off and bid us "Good Luck". Our guesthouse was down an alley, which he couldn't drive down of course, and at the head of the alley were a bunch of young kids who were completely soaked and were holding down one of their friends and drenching her with a hose. Happy New Year! We managed to get by, with all of our luggage, unscathed. We later noticed that there was an unwritten code of compassion, for the most part, for people who weren't carrying a super soaker (I think more of these are sold in Thailand that week than any other country in the world at any other time of the year!) 
or already wet. If you weren't obviously "in the game", they were pretty nice to you. On the other hand, people in Chiang Mai, our destination the following day, did not subscribe to that same code in the least. CM is definitely the epicenter of Songkran in Thailand and all the crazy Songkran devotees make a pilgrammage there each year. We took the night train out of Bangkok to CM that night and, lucky for us, arrived there in time for the last day of the festival. Once we found a guesthouse,
we wandered around town and proceeded to get soaked. Luckily it was in the high 90s so it didn't matter too much, but after a few hours of this it got old. The amazing thing to us was that people didn't get tired of it and noone got mad or got in fights. They just laughed and smiled. I wish we had pictures of the nuts, and there were tons of them, riding around in pickup trucks with garbage cans full of water in the back soaking anyone within reach. But we didn't dare risk our camera getting wet.
With the first few days in Thailand being filled with Songkran and getting over our jetlag, we finally felt like we got going on our second day in CM. We signed up for a "Flight of the Gibbons" tour up in the mountains. It's basically a canopy tour on zip lines in the jungle, just like the one I did last year in Costa Rica. Tracy had also been on one before, but it was still pretty cool. One of the guys in our group was an Australian who was about 6'6" and over 300lbs, and he was a bit afraid of heights. I was more afraid that the cables would break, but they held up admirably, and I felt like they were well-tested when he went before me.
One of the things you read about on TripAdvisor and other travel forums is that all the hotels and guesthouses will hound you to take tours, for which they get commission, of course. We had wanted to go to the Thai Elephant Conservation Center, but we were told it was very expensive and very far. They offered us a "better" option of going to a different elephant center for only 75 or 80 bucks which included lunch and a tour of an orchid farm. We passed on the deal and went to the conservation center on our own. When we got to the bus station, everyone wanted to sell us a ticket to wherever we were going. We were a bit skeptical, but the price was good and they guaranteed us the driver would drop us off at the center even though it wasn't a regular stop. We were a bit worried we would end up in Bangkok, but were relieved when the bus pulled over to the side of the highway just as we saw the sign for the place. We wanted to go here because they help rehabilitate sick or injured elephants and they also train mahouts (the elephant trainers), and supposedly don't make the elephants do silly things like play soccer. Besides, they also make and sell elephant dung paper and it's not every day that you get to see that. 
One hokey thing they do during the show is have 2 elephants paint pictures. We were assured, however, that the elephants really enjoy it. Maybe they find it therapeutic and stress-relieving. What do I know! I did like the flower painting, but I wasn't crazy about the abstract the one elephant did. 
I clapped for both of them, though, not wanting either elephant to have a lower self-esteem. Some of the highlights of our visit was seeing the baby elephant, bath time and watching a chained-up elephant leaning his whole body over and swinging his trunk out just far enough to steal hay from his neighbor, who was quite clueless.
The most interesting part of the day, though, was the ride home. The guide books never really explained how to get back to CM from there, but a few people said you can take a bus that runs regularly, but you have to ask to find out where to catch it. Well, after asking several people we felt quite certain that a bus would come along at some point, and we were pretty sure we were waiting in the right spot, but after waiting for 45 minutes or so were beginning to wonder. I finally said to Tracy, "If we were in Chiang Mai or Bangkok, about 50 people would have asked us 'Where are you going?' by this time." (more on that later). Sure enough, about 5 minutes later a guy walked up to us and asked the question we would hear hundreds of times during our trip, "Where are you going?" Turns out he was going back to CM with his family - all 8 or 10 of them along with their belongings in a pickup truck. The difference between him and most of the other people who asked us that was that he didn't want any money to take us there. After he reassured us it was fine with him, and the rest of his family, we agreed and hopped in the bed of the pickup with him, his dad and his brother. We realized after a time that he was just a friendly Thai guy who wanted to practice his English. It's not easy carrying on a conversation in the back of a pickup going down the highway, but we managed to have a modest cultural exchange. In any case, it was better than an orchid farm and the whole day only cost us less than $20!
We had read great things about getting a Thai massage, and we were not let down. After riding in the pickup truck for over an hour we decided it was time to indulge ourselves. We were talked into spending an extra $2.50 to get a 90 minute massage instead of the typical 60 minutes for $5. A few days later we found out that 60 minutes for $5 was just fine, but figured you can't always get the best deal. Thai massage is quite different than what most people in this country know as massage. First of all, you're fully clothed (unless you go to one of the seedier places and get a "happy ending"). Second, it's intimate in the sense that they use their feet, arms, elbows and sometimes most of their body weight to stretch, bend, pressure and twist your body farther than you thought imaginable. Third, it can actually hurt and is certainly not relaxing during the process. But, when you're done, you FEEL like you've had a massage. Closer to the truth, you feel more like you've gone through your first day of boot camp, but it feels GOOD. And we happily found out that repeat customers only have to pay $4!! I had a hard time deciding if that, or if a lemon shake for 33 cents was the best deal on the planet. For the uninitiated, a lemon "shake" is more like a lemon ice or slushee. But on a hot, steamy day (or night), there's not much that satisfies better than a nice, tart lemon shake no matter how you call it. Needless to say, we took full advantage of lemon shakes and Thai massages in Thailand. Good thing because we never really found comparable equivalents in Cambodia.
Another thing we had looked forward to before the trip was Thai food in general, and taking a Thai cooking class in particular. Food, in fact, was a big part of our adventure, 
whether it was finding some really weird stuff or tasting some amazing culinary delights or trying to figure out what the heck that weird-looking fruit is.
There must be a dozen cooking schools in CM. We picked the one that our guesthouse manager recommended and we were confident that she picked a good one in the end. We went to the market, cooked, and ate for 6 hours and even I was stuffed and fully satisfied at the end of the day. Truthfully, I think the meals we cooked were some of the best meals we had on the whole trip. It wasn't too hard when you had someone telling you exactly how and when to do everything. Now, however, Tracy is a Thai food fanatic and we've already found a bunch of Asian markets in Denver. It's a little harder without our teacher watching over us, but we're actually getting pretty good. It also helps to have the right equipment, which is why I got Tracy a new wok for her birthday. So if you visit us in the future, you're likely to get Thai food more often than not.
CM is famous for it's night market and it's Sunday market so we did do a little shopping, but to my liking we didn't do a real lot of it. Tracy did manage to find some nice tops for a great price, a pair of traditional Thai pants for $3 and a scarf for $3 too, and I got a silk elephant tie for $3 but got ripped off on a pair of shorts for $5. I just couldn't bring myself to bargain with the guy at that price. We also rented motorbikes one day and took a ride out into the country to check out some handicraft "factories". 
The motorbikes were fun, though a bit scary on the busier roads, but the handicrafts were a bit of a letdown.
A big part of the motivation for this trip was to be able to deliver some handmade ragdolls to orphanages in both countries. Tracy makes them and, with the help of other ladies, decorates them and then delivers them to underprivileged kids in developing countries. Through the lady at our guesthouse we found an orphanage in CM that was within walking distance so one afternoon we took the dolls over. Unfortunately, they decided to put the dolls in the kids bedrooms at a later time so we didn't get to see the kids when they got them, but we were able to stay and play a while. 
We also managed to come back another morning, but there weren't many kids out at that time and there were other volunteers playing with them too. The Cambodian orphanage turned out to be a more rewarding experience, but that's for the next entry.
To get to Cambodia we had to head back to Bangkok first and then go on from there. Getting around in this part of the world can be quite adventurous. Not in the same way that riding in a NY city cab or driving in Boston is adventurous. More in the sense that everyone - the taxi drivers, the tuk-tuk drivers, the touts working for a hotel or tour company - wants to take you somewhere so they can make some money. The hardest part is figuring out who is, and isn't, trying to scam you. Sometimes you can't walk a city block without being asked if you want a ride somewhere. So, we were quite disappointed when we found out the night train to Bangkok was fully booked and we had to take an overnight bus. We should've had a clue that it wasn't a public bus when they said someone would pick us up at our hotel 30 minutes before the bus was scheduled to leave. It turned out to be the bus ride from hell. What do you expect when you pay $20 for a 12 hour bus ride, but in our defense, the night train was only $25. To make a long story short, we started nearly 2 hours late waiting for some mystery person who never showed up and the A/C worked about as well as it does in a 12 year old car that has never had it recharged. Needless to say, we didn't sleep much and when we got to Bangkok there was no way we were getting on another "tour" bus to Cambodia. We paid (too much) for a cab to take us to the bus station and took a public bus to the border. Later we would find out from some tourists who got scammed real badly, that it was definitely the smart thing to do despite the A/C not working all that well in it either.
You can also see more pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/23798449@N04/sets/
