Thung Wua Laen Beach - Part Two

New Day

OK, that was yesterday, and this is today, and today I'm not feeling so drained by the whole food dilemma. Today it seems like one of the many challenges one faces when entering into a completely foreign culture for the first time. All the things one doesn't know. All the details. All the adjustments and adaptations. And in this case, the heat too, which is really ok since we do have aircon, and Nancy is having a harder time with it than I am, and this isn't even the hot season here. It's just another factor.

Today we thought we might rent a motorbike for the day and go exploring, but when I asked about insurance, knowing that this is a legal requirement in Thailand, I found out that there would be some medical coverage, up to 15,000 baht (about $445) if I or Nancy were taken to hospital for treatment, but that there isn't any damage coverage for the bike itself. We would be responsible for these expenses ourselves should any damage occur, which would involve getting the bike to a shop or shops, and getting quotes, and maybe waiting around several days for the work to be done (and, I expect, paying unduly high “farang”, ie. “foreigner” prices). I opted out. We don't know enough about how things operate here to take on that kind of risk or stress; or so I feel about it. I'm happy enough to take our walks on the beach, to walk here and there, to hang out close to home, or in the broader foot-accessible neighborhood. I'm just getting my feet wet, so to speak, and don't feel driven to accomplish much of anything extraneous to our daily requirements. Maybe at our next destination, which we'll take the train to on the 21^st, we'll start to feel more confident and knowledgeable and adventurous in more extra curricular ways. Or maybe not. This is the kind of long term traveling I have in mind: slow, no undue demands, easeful and taking as much time for things as feels necessary. There's just so much to learn and to adjust to.

Now, for the other news from Lake Hereweare:

We happen to be at Thang Wua Laen Beach (we learned that “thang wua laen” means “running bull”, which explains the garlanded statue of a bull along the little beach road) just before and during a celebration at the local temple just a few meters down the road from us. This took place over two days and a night, with lots of people from the extended local area coming to party and donate money for the continued construction of a new building on the temple grounds. 

The restaurant/massage studio/dwelling that we eat at most often is also just a little ways down the road from us, and over the course of a couple of days we watched as a rotating team of several women cut and shaped and built and decorated with flowers what turned out to be candle lanterns, beautifully crafted from stripped and section-cut banana tree trunks. We watched the whole process, from stripping the trunks of their outer hairy bark, to cutting these trunks into sized sections, to peeling into half circle pieces the inner core, to coupling two of these pieces to create a cylindrical product about 12 inches high, to pinning the sections together with little staples made from small cut pieces of banana leaf mid-rib, to punching a whole in the installed bottom of this device into which the taper would be placed, to decorating the finished holder with lilawadee flowers (a kind of plumeria, Nancy tells me). After watching this for a couple of days – they had to make 200 of these holders, which all together took about 5 days – Nancy asked if she could help make them, which she was then invited to do.

These 200 candle lanterns would be used to light up the temple grounds and numerous Buddha statues when they were placed in pole holders made of bamboo stalks cut about chest high, which would be stuck into the earth around the temple complex, or on the bases of the statues. It turned out to be quite a beautiful sight on the night of the festivities.

Part of the “party” aspect of the whole affair was the EXTREMELY LOUD recorded Thai pop music accompanied by two karaoke type singers, and the dancing that accompanied all that, which we were of course invited to join in on, and even brought into the dancing area by Pon, the lovely manager of our guesthouse. The Thai people truly appreciated our participation, and I think also got a bit of a laugh watching these two farang whities groovin' to the heavily bass driven beat. There were lots of smiles all around, and after our first round of dancing we even went back in for a second.

When we first arrived at the temple grounds we were immediately invited to come and sit and eat. Such a universal welcoming gesture. Nancy communicated as best she could that we wanted to eat vegetarian, and we actually got MOSTLY that: lots of white noodles with two or three dishes of curies that contained more vegetables than we have been used to seeing, but also some chunks of meat, which we worked around, and a big side plate of cucumbers and fresh green beans. It was really “arroi”, delicious, and a bit hot, but there was bottled water to cool things off some with.

When we returned the next day to see what the continuing celebrations involved, we were again immediately invited to sit and eat. We sat, but having just treated ourselves to a farang/Western style breakfast at the Pirates Restaurant, I held my stomach and puffed out my cheeks to indicate that we were really full, and this got an imitation and a smile of understanding from the woman who had offered the food. One might think that, as Thailand is also known as the Land of A Thousand Smiles, or LOS for short, that this smiling thing might be worn out, but my experience so far is that a smile actually does seem to go a long way in just about all circumstances.

Vimeo Video Link: Watch the procession around the temple grounds with drummers and dancers setting the style and the beat  https://vimeo.com/145766069

 Of course, there is also, in the commercial world of service providers to tourists, what I would call a less friendly and more mercenary style that seems to prevail. We are, for the most part, fleeting sources of income, and probably nothing more. Here today, gone tomorrow. There's none of the curiosity about who we might be that we think we experience in India, for example. No desire or effort to connect, or communicate, except in ways that will encourage our spending. Even the other farangs we've seen here are stand off-ish and un-interested in communicating, for the most part. It feels strange to us.