The weekend in Surin was a fantastic real start to my travels. Surin is normally off the tourist track, the well worn tourist track in Thailand anyway. It see lots of tourists for just this one weekend a year.

I’m going to starting trying to be more brief with my blog entries… so we will see how it goes.

On Friday the big event was the Elephant parade and jumbo feast. At Joy’s suggestion several of us mounted elephants an rode in the parade. It was an amazing experience to be riding in a parade on elephant back surrounded by scores of elephants all walking shoulder to shoulder. IMHO, there are two times and places it’s worthwhile to take a ride on an elephant. The first is on a the jungle on a trek, which I haven’t done sounds great from the people I’ve talked to. I personally wouldn’t bother riding one around a stadium or “elephant village”. The only time outside a jungle I’d ride one inside a town/city is for a parade, it really just to amazing to put words to. At the end of the parade route is the jumbo feast where the elephants get to eat the tons (literally tons and tons) of food that had been prepared the following day. Each day an average elephant eats several hundred pounds of food. Two fairly good links on the state of elephants in Thailand today are here and here I’ll refrain from writing pages upon pages here on how I feel about it all.

That afternoon was spent “sitting out the front of the hotel” as Joy would say in Aussie English, just watching the spectacle go by. This is why New Hotel was so ideal. The square fronted on one side by the train station and another by New Hotel is the center point of all the non-stadium based elephant activities. So it was an all day show every day.

On Saturday Inga and I went to the stadium to see the big show. It was loads of fun and there are plenty of photos on the Flickr site from the show. The highlights for me was to see the elephants dressed in battle costume, as well as just seeing the spectacle of 300 elephants all together on the same field. I have mixed feelings about all the “tricks” they perform, whether it be painting, bowing, hula hooping, flag waving, dart throwing or anything else I can’t think of at the moment. If you look over the earlier links they explain the reality of these creature lives. That being that they have to do something to feed these giants, and with logging widely banned they are left with domesticated animals that live over 50 years with nothing “productive” to do, so they resort to being a tourist attraction.

Sunday was just a relaxing day to enjoy Surin. Aside from the elephant round-up I really enjoyed Surin as well. It has a pleasant morning market full of produce and food that I loved wandering through each day trying new foods. Surin being well off the tourist track has very few English speakers, especially in the markets, so this was an added impetus to learn some Thai.

I was a bit worried about arriving in Surin at 4:30 in the morning… however since my train was nearly two hours late we got in at 6:30, a much better hour to arrive. Sure enough stepping out of the train station I was greeted by dozens of Tuk-Tuk drivers all eager to take me anywhere I wanted to go. I was headed for New Hotel though, which at least from the map I had looked to be close to the train station. Close enough I thought I could probably walk…. Turns out it was all of about 30 meters from the train station, maybe less.

New Hotel was recommended to me by a woman I met online on Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree website. Thorn Tree is a online forum for travelers, unfortunately it’s a poorly organized one. I far prefer Bootsnall.com’s forums, but Thorn Tree still has a larger following. I digress. Turns out New Hotel was an excellent suggestion. The room was very inexpensive, 160 Baht/night regularly (US$4.50) and for Friday and Saturday of the Elephant Round-up they doubled their prices. This was a room without aircon an without TV. They offered aircon and TV in some rooms. IMHO, TV’s are worthless, and aircon is rarely worth it at least not in these season. You really do get used to the heat, for the most part. By Thai budget hotel standards the room was nice. It was clean, big (too big) and had with a large firm bed and a desk. The bathroom was reasonably large with flushing squat toilet. The shower was cold water only, or more appropriately outdoor temperature only. You see, in the morning the water was cold, but in the afternoon the water tank on the roof got super heated and the water would be super hot. It’s a minor annoyance, you get use to cold showers in the morning, but in the afternoon when a cold shower would be really nice you get hot water. I should explain at night the temperature drops to around 80-85F and during the day it’s in the 90’s. I can’t give exact numbers because it’s all Celsius and I haven’t quite got the conversion down in my head/body yet. Anyway, they cleaned the room and changed the sheets daily, as well as bringing a fresh towel every day. I was a bit bothered by the few cockroaches that would occasionally make there way up the plumbing and into the toilet. Only once or twice would they try to make it out of the toilet and onto the outside of the toilet at which point they’d get squished by a shoe. The first night I made the mistake of leaving my lights on while I was out. I came back to find the bright white sheet on my bed covered with small insects. Flys, little crawling things that looked like bed begs but were not, all vet small little bugs that thought this giant shiny white sheet was a great place to hang out. I brushed off the bugs, sprayed some DEET on the sheet, slept in my sleep sack and put DEET on my neck and shoulders. I was very happy when I woke up in the morning and didn’t see a bug anywhere to be found. I’ll also jump ahead and say that in the morning I discovered on of my screen shutters open a crack, duct tape closed it, and that when I left the light off when I went out I came home to no bugs on the bed. Enough on the room, back to my first morning in Surin.

The room in photos:

 

 

 

 

 

After dropping my bags in the room, showering and reading up on Surin, I decided on a whim to see if I could get WiFi access in the hotel room. With much amazement it turns out I could, although just barely. I was grabbing a signal from some neighbor, but only if I held my laptop at just the right angle and very close to the window. It was enough I could get to email and browse a couple web pages slowly… but that’s about it.

At this point I wasn’t so sure about my room, not so much because of the “state” of the room, but because it felt like a quiet hotel and I wouldn’t be meeting people to hang out with here. So I thought I’d head out to check out the only Hostel/Guest House in town, Phirom Guesthouse. conveniently the morning market was on the way towards the guest house. Unfortunately after quite a bit of walking, but some yummy food, I discovered a note a the destination saying Phirom’s had moved. So I set about walking to it’s new location as indicated by map on the note. Turns out it has moved well outside the main activities in the center of town… a long way out it was a long hot dusty walk. If I’d realized how long it would be I would have taken a Saam-Loew (bicycle-rickshaw) or Tuk-Tuk. The guest house was nice but too far out of the action for my taste today. If I’d been looking for somewhere to relax away from it all it would be great. Fortunately just as I was leaving so was an older British woman whom had just called a Tuk-Tuk to come pick her up for a ride back to the train station, which I shared. Back at New Hotel, I showered again, something I’d do at least three times a day every day I was in Surin.

With so much done already it felt like afternoon, but in it was actually about 11am, so after a brief rest I headed out again by Tuk-Tuk to the Elephant Stadium to check out the festivities there.

Today was the rehearsal day for the Elephant show and thousands of school kids from the area were all over the place to see the show for free. As I walked into the festival grounds 4-5 young teenage Thai girls came up to ask if they could practice there English with me. I was honored to be able to help, but the brief few questions they asked that I fill out their questioner on the elephant festival. It was just a couple questions, did I enjoy it, could it be better, what did I like most/least. I’m sure they were probably suppose to ask me all the questions, but was still impressed they’d gotten as far as the did before handing me the form. As I walked around the fair grounds adjacent to the stadium I was approached by a half dozen other groups of school girls all wanting to practice English. Surprising each had a different questioner to fill out. Some where more “where are you from” type stuff, some about Surin and more about the elephant festival. Several hours and a couple of stops to eat at the fair I thought I’d move on to the location of the Elephant Feast. As I was leaving the fair ground I was approached by one last group of school girls, after filling out their questioner… I was getting good at this, I thought I’d ask them a question. How do I get to Sri Paket Square (sp?). Their understanding of English wasn’t as good as I expected based on their speaking, but after a few giggles and requests on their part to speak slowly and repeat they helped me figure out on my map where I was headed. I walked away in the direction of the square figuring I’d find a Saam-loew to take me over there. I got about a block away when one of the girls from the last group ran up behind me and began speaking an pantomiming. It took a minute to understand but she was offering to give me a ride to the square on her motor bike. Flattered I couldn’t say no. The entire group of girls lead me down the road to where one of them, not the girl speaking to me, had a motor bike. They helped me cross the street and get on the back of the motor bike and I was off on a fun ride through Surin. It was amazingly fun 🙂

At Sri Paket (sp?) I got to watch them set-up for the next days elephant fest. They set up 2km worth of banquet tables along the road and then pile them full of sugar cane, water melon, turnips (?) and pineapples. I do love seeing festivals get set up. It reminds me of being at Octoberfest so many years ago at 5am and seeing the truck after truck unload dozens of kegs of beer in the morning.

I spent the late afternoon back at the hotel where I finally met up with Joy who was the one that had recommended New Hotel. Along with Joy I met Inga, Richard, Faye and Faye’s Father… and suddenly I knew a half dozen people in Surin. This is what I love about traveling. New friends. New Stories. I also have to admit I love having new friends without commitments. If any person sudden decided they don’t want to hang out with the other, you just part ways… no hard feelings… no bad thoughts…. because everybody understands and appreciates each others situation. Everybody is just doing their own thing and it’s totally normal to spend a day or two enjoying time with someone and they say “I feel like wandering alone today”. Then a few days later you might bump into each other in a market and sit down for lunch or just say hi and keep going… it’s wonderful.

I spent the morning figuring out my schedule for the next couple days and when/how I was going to ge to Surin for the Elephant Round-up. I determined I’d be best going on a night train (about 8 hrs). Then headed out to see Wat Phrea Kaew (Temple with the Emerald Buddha) and stop by the train station to buy my ticket.
The Emerald Buddha was beautiful, but a bit disappointing… it’ no where near as large as I expected. Being the most venerated Buddha image in all of Thailand I just expected it to be bigger. It’s most special because it is carved from jade. It is just about life size, which is small in comparison to many of the seated buddha images are several meters tall or more. The Emerald Buddha on an very high alter about 10 meters up in the air… The alter is spectacular, but somewhat overwhelms the Emerald Buddha. Regardless it was wonderful to see and sit and mediate, briefly, before it.
I walked around the temple grounds seeing all the amazing Chedi and Stupas around the grounds. There are also magnificent murals on the walls. As I left the Wat and Grand Palace I decided it’d be fun to make my way down to the train station by river boat.

I walked along river until I found a boat dock. I’m not sure why the river was so high, but much was flooded along the edges, water coming up into the streets. To get to the boat dock you walked through a little set of stores, quite like walking into Kimo’s on Maui. The floor of the stores all had a tiny bit of water on them and they’d built a temporary runway down the middle so that you could walk through to the boat docks without getting your feet wet. The runway however made the ceiling about 5 feet high. The boat dock actually had several docks for boats going to different places. It was all a bit confusing but I wasn’t too worried about getting on the wrong one since it just meant seeing more of the river. It’s not obvious since there are ordinary boats and express boats both going up and down river, as well as a third boat the simply goes across the river to another Wat. Fortutantly I made it on the correct boat, and no it’s not the boat in the picture, that’s a river cruise boat not a taxi boat. It was great to see the city from the water, so many houses and building sitting right on the edge of the water.

The ride down the river was wonderful and I started to see the real city of Bangkok. I saw dilapidated shacks falling into the river, next to new-ish high rise condos. It was great to see it all, to take it all in. From where the boat dropped me off I made my way through several non-touristy alleys toward the train station. Apparently I was in the automotive district or something, because every other shop had huge piles of car parts out front and were busily rebuilding engines, transmissions, differentials or whatever… Every few shops there would be a food place, sometimes tiny, sometimes larger. How great to be able to walk five feet to lunch… how horrible to eat the food soaked in diesel fumes all day. The highlight of the walk though was something unexpected as I walked along the channel. Just as I was walking past a local guy pulled a huge catfish out of the water. I gave him a big smile and thumbs up on his catch, he was clearly very proud. I ended up walking a long way down the street behind him as he walked and all the other locals would do the same thing (big smile/thumbs up) and comment on his good catch. So cool… this is the stuff I love about “getting lost on a walk in a new city”.
I finally made it to the train station and found the 8:30pm train was the only one with sleeper cars and it got in at 4:30am. I think it’s strange that neither the 10:00pm, 10:30pm nor the 11:15pm trains had sleeper cars, maybe they were just already booked… oh well.

With that taken care of I made my way back towards the hostel for a foot massage, a shower and dinner before turning around and heading back to the train station. The foot massage was fantastic the one hour massage which was 80% feet, 15% lower legs and 5% neck and back, cost me all of 250 Baht… US$7. It did wonders for getting my body back in balance after the plane flight, walking with an overly heavy pack, and the general lack of sleep.
The train ride started out louder and rougher than I expected but I got use to it and got a little bit a sleep as we went along eventually getting a few hours of sleep, but mostly doing some reading.