Handicrafts. Ayutthaya. No Super Tourist, I.

I’ve given up pretending to be Super Tourist.

This is my explanation for why I only saw one temple in Ayutthaya, former capital of the Siam empire, city famous for its ruins and temples. (And in a related Sanskrit note, the city was named after King Rama’s golden capital city of Ayodhya from the Ramayana.)

This is my explanation for why I spent more time at a handicraft center than at said temple. I know the temples are beautiful and the history is fascinating, but I also know where my interests lie. Show me how to weld a giant robot out of scrap metal or create a traditional batik design and I’m captivated.

Bang Sai Royal Folk Art & Craft Center

This center was founded by the beloved Queen Sirikit to house and train for her SUPPORT (the Foundation for the Promotion of Supplementary Occupations and Techniques) program. You can read more about the program here and here, but I’ll summarize briefly. Her Majesty saw that many rural people in Thailand depend financially upon agriculture, an unstable base, leaving them with time during the “offseason”. She also saw in her travels around the country that the knowledge about beautiful traditional arts and crafts was rapidly disappearing. In an inspired move, she began to offer training in these traditional handicrafts as well guaranteeing a fair price for the finished products, often buying them herself. Thus, with the SUPPORT program, she is able to give rural people additional income and dignified work, all while preserving traditional culture and knowledge.

It is easy to see why Queen Sirikit is so admired and beloved all over Thailand. She is a maternal figure to the whole country, almost in a literal sense. Her birthday is a national holiday—also known as Mothers Day.

This craft center is near the city of Ayutthaya. It offers many displays and gift shops containing traditional Thai handicrafts, but the highlight for me was touring through the workshops where students are learning and mastering various handicraft forms. After you enter the facility (buying a ticket for 100 baht) you are free to wander around, ducking your head into any workshop you please, observing everything from glassblowing to dressmaking.

The handicraft village. Beautiful surroundings and traditional-style houses. You can see a few demonstrations as you walk through, but the main attractions (the workshops) were adjacent to this village.

Textiles.

True to form, I was most fascinated by the textile handicrafts.

I started with silk brocade weaving. This is highly skilled and meticulous work.

One of the women I spoke with said it would take her six months of work to complete a two-meter-long piece.

 

This is the design sheet for one brocade pattern. A lot of the weavers seem to know their designs by heart, but I saw one woman refer to this sheet once or twice. Amazingly complex.

Some silk threads ready to be woven.

Traditional weaving. This is ikat or mat mii, in which the design has already been dyed into the spools of thread themselves.

A beautiful mat mii design in Thai silk.

Next I visited the batik workshop. Batik is a southern Thai handicraft, more closely associated with Malaysia and Indonesia.

On the left, the stenciled outline. On the right, a little pot of wax and a special tool for applying the wax to the fabric.

After the wax outlines have been applied, an artist carefully shades in the floral design.

A close up of a silk embroidery piece in progress. Notice the shading on the grass.

This is the most meticulous work I saw all day. A 1x2 meter piece will take seven women two years to complete. Two years.

Here’s a picture of what the final product will look like.

Other Handicrafts.

This is a type of basketry called yan lipao. The objects are woven using a strong indigenous vine. The work is meticulous and the strands of the vine about as thin as dental floss.

They use a tool similar in design to a wire stripper to whittle down the strands of the vine until they are small and pliable enough to work with.

A large and intricate dragon in the welding workshop.

Outside the welding and metalwork workshop.

On the left, an artist works with resin to create a sculpture. On the right, a MacGuyver-like contraption of metal wire and an old hairdryer keeps the resin warm and malleable.

The outside of the stained glass and batik workshop.

Stained glass in progress.

Completed stained glass pieces.

 

I had originally planned to post temple pictures here too, but this post is long enough already. The Folk Art Center was fascinating. It’s a little out of the way from Ayutthaya, but definitely worth the trip if you’re interested in traditional handicrafts.

Chanthaburi World Durian Festival

I came back to Southeast Asia just in time for durian season and the timing was no coincidence. I arrived in Bangkok, jet-lagged and tired, at six in the morning. By two in the afternoon, I was wandering the streets of the Chanthaburi World Durian Festival.

I tried to temper my expectations, but they were absurdly high. World. Durian. Festival. I likely would have been disappointed by anything short of a free 24-hour tasting booth with my name on it.

So when I saw the festival was a modestly sized street fair with only a few booths devoted to durian, I was disappointed. That said, it is hard for someone as obsessed with durian as I am to be wholly disappointed when at least 20% of the vendors have stacks and piles of my favorite spiked fruit.

It would be a bit more accurate to call this a fruit festival. Chanthaburi is a famous fruit-producing province in Thailand, and the bounty is especially impressive in summer. We walked by many booths overflowing with mangosteens, durians, rambutans, snakefruit, pineapples, jackfruits, and more. In addition, there were stalls selling street food of a wider scope than usual (though there was no sticky rice with durian, which surprised and disappointed me anew). The festival seemed more of an excuse to bring the family, have a walk around the man-made lake with the kiddies, and sample the snacks from the street vendors.

There was a parade and a giant stage.

The sign above the cosmic backdrop says Amazing Thailand World Durian Festival Chanthaburi 2011

And floats decorated elaborately with fruit.

Trust me, you want a closer view of this.

Check out those rabbits made from durians, cucumbers, mini eggplants, and chili peppers. Also, get a load of the chili pepper mustache on the turtle!

There were prizes awarded to the best durians in several categories and breeds.

Everywhere you could see statues of durians, pictures of durians, and even two kids dressed up as durians.

But I was hoping for more. I was hoping for a booth comparing and contrasting the different breeds of durian so I could begin to get an idea of which my favorite were. I thought it might have been nice to have durian in every conceivable permutation—ice cream, pastries, chips, preserved and dried, jams, candies. Maybe some hands-on booths which would allow you to create something—durian with sticky rice, for example. How about an informational booth in which you could learn about the process of growing and harvesting durian? I'd like to know more factoids about durian production in Chanthaburi, too. I know that a higher percentage of land in Chanthaburi is devoted to growing durian than anywhere else in the world, but I'd like to learn more. Maybe it could be possible to book a tour with a local orchard through the festival, then go visit that orchard later during the week, while there, sampling different varieties and seeing how durians are grown.

All the same, there was a lot of durian, and that is guaranteed to put a smile on my face. Here are a few highlights:

Watching durian chips being made. Turns out, it’s basically the same process as potato chips. They take underripe (and thus firm) durian, slice it on a mandoline, then fry it up in batches.

I sampled organically grown durian.

Met a kind seller who gave us all the free durian we could eat, even opening and gifting us a whole three-kilo fruit to share.

But perhaps the biggest success of the afternoon was that I finally got a chance to learn about and taste different varieties of durian: golden pillow, golden button, long stem, gibbon. I’ll write up a separate post comparing these varieties soon.

So of course it was a fun afternoon; it just wasn’t the durian gluttonfest I had anticipated.

The Chanthaburi World Durian Festival is held every year at the beginning of durian season, usually in May.

Grammar note: I apologize for the vacillation. I’m not sure whether durian is a countable or uncountable noun and therefore treated it incoherently as either and both depending on my whim in each sentence :)

Tales from Vietnam. Cycling over Mountains and in the Dark

The following is a flashback from my time cycling in Vietnam. It recounts the time I was nearly stranded on top of a unpopulated mountain at dusk with no tent, no water, no warm clothes, little food, no sleeping bag, and no flashlight.

So I pressed on, thinking, if necessary, I could flag down a bus. Almost immediately the road began to climb. And climb. I optimistically expected the road to reach the peak around every corner. No such luck. I don't know if there is any way to impart the experience that afternoon. The uphill seemed endless, and in fact, it continued uphill, often steeply, for 20 km and those 20 km took me at least 4 hours to complete. When the grade was too steep (it was quite often 10%) or when my legs were simply jello-like and sore, I got off and pushed the bike until my arms were jello-like and sore; then I either took a break or switched again to riding.

It was the hottest part of the day and the sun was merciless. I can say, on the bright side, that the scenery—the surrounding mountain view—was stunning. Cliché! My breath was taken away from the climb and then again from the view! ;)

Despite the view, though, I was exhausted and when I looked at my cell phone to check the time after noticing the air around me was chill, I saw it was getting on to 3:30 p.m. and the mountain, the uphill, had no end in sight. "Give it some time," I thought. "I can always flag down a bus in a half hour or so."

So I continued up and up and up. Soon it was 4:20 p.m. and the road ahead had a sign declaring a 10% uphill grade. So I flagged down a bus that was going to Da Nang. But they wanted 20,000 VND which struck me and still strikes me as exorbitant. So I waved goodbye to them, wondering if I'd regret it later. (Spoiler alert: The answer is yes. And no.)

So I continued on—nothing to do but move forward. And lo! What's this? A downhill! Yes!

I cruised down the hill, thinking, "This is it! The crest of the mountain." Exuberantly, I used my newly defined phrase: "It's all downhill from here!"

I passed through a tiny village and three boys lined up and held out their hands to high five me as I rode by. I felt joyous, unconquerable. I passed two policemen; they tried to say something to me. Wary, I smiled and waved and kept going. I passed a waterfall, right in the nook, the armpit of the road's curve.

And then I turned the corner. "Motherfucker!" I thought, along with other obscenities. Another uphill sign!

This sign indicated only 150 m, but I knew all too well that those 150 m could drag on for kilometers. I felt completely dejected. I ate a tangerine. Now I had no water and only two tangerines. It was late, past the time when most minibuses ran and it was cold. I waited, hoping to flag down a minibus, but none passed. I had no tent, no sleeping bag, no sweater, no flashlight, no water. The situation was feeling a wee bit desperate.

I gave myself until the end of the tangerine, then when no minibus had passed or could be seen approaching, I had nothing left to do but keep moving. The white and red stone kilometer markers on the side of the road indicated a town 9 km away. Even if it was uphill the whole way, surely I could make it around dusk and find a home to sleep in! So I trudged up the hill. And it was, blessedly, the last!

It really was downhill from that point on, which was lucky because I soon found out that the "town" the kilometer markers were counting down to was not a town at all. It was a waterfall.

So I kept going. The going was easy now—all downhill. Not to mention, there was absurdly beautiful scenery at every turn. It seemed once I had reached the crest of the mountain, the climate suddenly and very noticeably changed. On the way up, the mountains had been arid, often with exposed patches of red dirt and patches of dry, brownish grass. Once on the other side of the pass, the air became absurdly thick with moisture. Every breath I took was like drowning in warm water and the mountains had no dry patches, no exposed dirt. Instead they were filled to bursting with ferns and palms and vines and greenery of every sort. I could hardly believe the lushness. At every turn there was a waterfall.

I stopped often to take pictures but soon realized I had no time to dawdle. I saw a kilometer marker for Kham Duc—my original destination—for about 25 km away. It was already dusk, but I was making great downhill time, so I decided I would try to make it. I might have to cycle a bit in the dark, but so what?

So I pushed on, as fast as my legs and the hill would take me. And the kilometers quickly ticked by. It was just that time of evening when the bugs are out in full force. This fact, coupled with the extreme humidity, soon meant my face was speckled with little black bugs.

With 10 km to go, darkness fell completely. I cycled on, using the weak flashlight mode on my cell phone and holding the phone in my left hand so I could try to make out the road in front of me. The traffic was not too thick, but I still feared some crazy driver (of which there were plenty) would swerve into me in an inattentive moment. But luck was on my side and a little after 8:00 p.m. I finally made it into Kham Duc and though I entered the town slowly and with little fanfare, I felt as if I were in a one-woman parade. I felt like celebrating.

Cycling in Cambodia: Videos from the Road

Cycling along the Mekong river between Kompong Cham and Chhlong. The river is not visible here, but it is never far off. You can see how its proximity affects the style of housing in this region. Here, as with every populated place I cycled in Cambodia, I was greeted with a rousing chorus of hellos.

Cycling in Cambodia: Videos from the Road

A video I took while the day was drawing to a close. You can spot my long shadow in the lower left corner on occasion. This region (northeastern) is one of the most sparsely populated in the country. I went three days between towns here--only seeing a stingy sprinkling of houses. The loneliness was at times difficult, but it was also a gift. During this stretch of my trip, I began to feel liberated from sanity, a phenomenon of which I will write more later. Until I found myself liberated from its constraints, I had never before considered sanity a boundary I would want to break through!