Although this trip did start out with a shock. I got a notice on my phone that I’d received a WhatsApp message from Exotic Asia Hotline. My first thought was, “How did my WhatsApp number get compromised?” My second was, “Do they deliver?”

It turns out it was my infelicitously named tour company confirming my reservation. Maybe it’s a side business. More likely the tours are the side business. Sweet. I’m not just a tourist. I’m a coconspirator in a Malaysian money laundering scheme. Made it, Ma!

Land: Bukit Malawati

First stop, Malawati Hill, in Kuala Selangor. About 40 miles west of Kuala Lumpur, Malawati is a strategic location at the mouth of the Selangor River, draining into the Straits of Malacca. Malays built a fort there in the early 16th century, but the Dutch, in a fierce combination of boredom and rage, took it in 1784.

My favorite part of this history is that the leader of the Dutch troops was an officer named Dirk van Hogendorp. Yep, Fightin’ Dirk van Hogendorp. I am totally not making fun of his perfectly reasonable Dutch name. I’m sure there are respectable van Hogendorps all over Dutchland. But seriously. I’m sure he was positively savage in person, but the name doesn’t exactly inspire fear. Dirk van Hogendorp. Say it with me.

Curiously, the British didn’t come along and fuck the Dutch for the fort (until much later). The Malays actually captured it back the very next year, before it fell for good in the 19th century during a civil war fought with the colonialists as amused bystanders.

But there was plenty of back and forth before then. To no one’s surprise, the Dutch took the fort back and used the opportunity to build a lighthouse on the hill in 1794. Then the whole thing became British, as things did back then, and they refurbished the lighthouse in 1910, which still stands today. The ruins of the fort are also still around.

But I promised wildlife. And a land war. What gives?

OK, absolutely no one goes to Malawati Hill for the lighthouse or the ruins of the fort. They go, as I did, for the monkeys. And where there are troops of monkeys, there will be war.

Did you know that the alternate collective noun for monkeys, besides the more standard troop, is cartload? I can assure you, Malawati Hill boasted cartloads of monkeys. Specifically, there’s one cartload of Long-Tailed Macaques and another of Silvery Langurs, also called Silver-Leaf Monkeys.

I’m on record about the macaques. They are not mischievous. They are aggressive little thieves and thugs who’d mug you for a banana. To use a random example. But I was very excited to meet a cartload of the langurs, who are, by repute, gentle, pleasant creatures. From whom the macaques could learn a thing.

They’re easy to tell apart, by the way. The Silvery Langurs, as the name implies, have black fur tipped in silver, approachable faces, and bright orange babies. The macaques are brown, with frightening muzzles tapering to sharp, pointy teeth and dead eyes that would love nothing more than to watch you suffer.

We’re dropped off at the bottom of Malawati Hill and make our way up, through the trees abutting the coastal mangrove forests that are home to both macaques and langurs. The various cartloads of monkey hang out in those trees because they are adjacent to a generous source of food: us.

On the way up the hill.

The langurs, especially, have no problem being close to humans. Very close.

There are a lot of babies, and lots of committed parenting.

Very alert and protective.

Both the langurs and the macaques carry their chiddlers clinging to their bellies.

I am forced to admit that this particular cartload of macaques seems less criminal than most. Perhaps it’s the exposure to the langurs, or perhaps they’ve simply learned that they get more food if they display some rudimentary manners. Either way, I feel noticeably less at risk in their presence.

It feels like the walk up the hill introduces you to the whole concept of monkeys, so you’re at least somewhat prepared for the scene that greets you at the crest. What is that scene like? Chaos. Madness. War.

At the top of the hill, vendors hawk little burlap sacks generously stuffed with sliced fruit, beans, shoots, and bananas. For a mere 10rm, about $2.50 USD, you can be part of the great circle of life. Feeding monkeys. So many monkeys.

That looks like fun, doesn’t it? Since the theme of this whole adventure seems to be Stupid Things Dorothy Isn’t Here To Prevent, I signed up. You’ll never guess what happened.

How did that episode end? With one of the fucking macaques tearing the bag from my hand, running off, and hissing at me with bared teeth when I tried to retrieve it. Macaques, amiright?

The langurs were pretty awesome. Even if they had trouble maintaining boundaries. But you’ll notice in these shots that none of the macaques actually clamber up people. They’ll get close enough to steal, but don’t seem to favor scaling their marks. I am, as always, grateful for the small things.

Monkey selfies!

Air: Kampung Kuantan Firefly Park

From Malawati we drove to the banks of the Selangor River, one of Malaysia’s most critical water sources. We stopped for a ridiculous dinner, and then hopped a boat to take the river upstream to the Firefly Park.

Which is exactly what it sounds like: one of the largest firefly colonies in the world. Although the official collective noun for fireflies isn’t colony. A group of fireflies is a sparkle. Aww. In related news, I just learned that the collective noun for kittens is coven.

There’s not a whole lot to see here. It’s dark, and camera flashes both ruin the view and confuse the fireflies. But floating past is an experience so magical it seems almost fake. Like if Disney wanted to do the whole firefly thing, it would look exactly like this.

This doesn’t do the experience justice, but it’s all I’ve got.

Sea: Blue Tears

After the fireflies, we turn around and head back down river, past the mouth and into the Straits of Malacca. What are we after? Dinoflagellates. No, not prehistoric kinskters, bioluminescent plankton. Pervert.

This will be my third time with glowy sea monkeys: once before as a child in Guadalajara and once in Vietnam with Dorothy. There aren’t that many places in the world where they occur. Filling in my bingo card.

But it is a subtle effect and hard to capture. Like the fireflies, camera flash washes it out completely. We were each given a PVC pole with a fish net at the end. Scooping the net through the water agitated the poor things and made them glow. Did we care? We did not. We all scooped and scooped, bathing in the mystical glow. All you get out if it is a murky video.

As promised, Malaysia’s wildlife in land, air, and sea. It may not be much for y’all to look at, monkeys aside, but it was a pretty fine show in person.

If you’d never seen a Hindu temple, it would be hard to imagine that Buddhist temples were attempting to take it down a notch. Give credit where it’s due, though, as It takes a fair amount of effort to make a Buddhist temple look restrained. Unapologetically lurid, Hindu temples are a brightly colored rebuke to the very notion of moderation. Give the people what they want: tall tales and flamboyant displays.

The Batu Caves site is actually two attractions piled atop one another. There’s Batu itself, which is a Hindu temple built inside a limestone cave and dedicated to Lord Murugan, the Hindu god of war, in 1891. The 140 foot tall statue of Lord Murugan was erected in 2006, and still has that new deity smell.

The other attraction is the Ramayana Cave, home to several Suyambu Lingam, or naturally occurring Shiva Lingams. What I might call stalagmites. But I have no connection to the divine, because I’m a peasant. The other feature of Ramayana Cave, which gives it its name, is a series of dioramas depicting scenes from the Ramayana. I’m not 100% sure when they were installed, although they’re clearly modern, or if there were more primitive installations before these, but they certainly take advantage of the natural cave system.

The Grounds

The grounds feature a handful of bonus temples, beyond those built in the Batu Caves, and a metric buttload of fucking monkeys. So many monkeys. I submit to you that there are monkeys that are cute, both visually and behaviorally. Macaques are not those monkeys. They are rats with prehensile tails. The collective noun for macaques is infestation. Look it up.

Are these adorable? They are not. They are evil.

Cute? No. Clearly retreating to their lair so they can plot against us.

Practicing boarding techniques for ship-to-ship warfare. And you thought your yacht was safe.

You know what’s even worse than macaques? People.

Vendors were selling bananas for the express purpose of feeding the monkeys. No one needs a hand of bananas at a temple. These jamokes were teaching the monkeys that if a human was holding a banana it was theirs by divine right. Droit du fucking seigneur. [This is called foreshadowing, by the way.]

This is the big not-in-a-cave temple.

So I go into that last temple, which is a no-shoe temple, as they do. But I walked past this on the way up, and there is no fucking way I’m leaving my shoes for the thieving macaques. So I take them off and carry them in, all respectful like. But everyone starts gesturing and yelling at me, in a very chill Hindu way, until it finally dawns on me that even carrying my shoes is verboten. They force me back out to set them down on top of the steps, but that was the fastest temple visit I’ve ever done, and I was looking over my shoulder the whole time. There was no way I was letting the little terrorists run off with my shoes.

The Ramayana Cave

My first stop was the Ramayana Cave, an installation that strongly suggested that LSD is part of the Hindu sacrament. God loves all his children, but especially when they’re tripping. And then we love Him right back.

The approach certainly set the stage.

The immediate response on entering is to look for the disco ball. Color changing LEDs appear to have revolutionized the Hindu religion.

The true and real attraction, disco lighting notwithstanding, was the Ramayana dioramas. Spectacular.

Come for the Suyambu Lingam, stay for the trippy lighting.

Batu Caves

Everything about the approach to the Batu Caves is epically proportioned. A massive, 140 foot tall golden statue of Lord Murugan stands in front of the 1,000 foot tall limestone bluff and to one side of the 272 colorfully painted steps that lead to the first of the caves and temples. A temple sits to the left of the stairs and is dwarfed by its surroundings. It is truly breathtaking.

You’ll be surprised to learn that there are macaques all over the damn place. I refuse to call them monkeys, because I think it’s insulting to other monkeys.

Once the 272 steps have been surmounted, the vista opens up. That’s some cave.

On my way into this temple I was offered a piece of waxed paper with some kind of rice goo on it. I asked if I was supposed to use it as an offering and was told that it was their special blessed rice goo and was a free snack. OK. Then I stood in line briefly so this next guy could magically transform a 10rm note into a smear of ash on my forehead. It’s a miracle! He also gave me a banana.

I had to ask at the rice station what I was supposed to do with the banana, and they looked at me like I’d taken a blow to the head and explained that it was a snack. And that the common practice with snacks was to eat them.

So, with ash on forehead and banana in hand, I take the next set of 100 stairs to the penthouse temple.

If you know your classic literature, you know that a banana in the first act always goes off in the third (I even called out the foreshadowing for you, because I like you, but you’re a little slow).

Next thing I know, I’m being trailed by one of the fucking macaques. Not this one specifically, as I was too busy fending off a macaque attack to take a picture for you. Get over it.

This little bandit has locked eyes on my banana. I switch it to my left hand, further away from him, and he’s tracking it like DefCon One has been declared. Back to my right hand, left hand, right hand, and he’s tracking every millimeter of movement while inching closer. I’d seen what one of his mates had done to that poor woman in the square, and she was trying to feed them.

I finally tossed the banana over his head, away from me, so I could draw him off and finish my 100-stair climb, safety trumping snackage. Fucker leapt for it and gave a distinct what-are-you-doing-with-my-banana vibe. And I thought white people were entitled.

To everyone’s surprise, there was another temple in the attic. More ashes, please.

But I watched the guy after me, and the priest dude ducked back into the alcove and came back with a little golden statue. Merch! Maybe he donated more than 10rm, maybe there’s a secret handshake, but all I got was ashes. I wasn’t even offered a banana, but I knew better by that point anyway.

Past that temple, the space opens up into a limestone chamber soaring over 300 feet and open to the sky, like a Yucatán cenote. It’s a spectacular space, and the perfect cake topper for a truly beautiful site.

Sometimes tourist places are meh, and sometimes you totally get why people bother. Batu Caves paid off.

But not until the descent. No one bothered to explain that there were also 272 steps down. That seems like a thing you’d want to know.

But Wait, It’s A Hindupalooza

Everywhere else we’ve been in SEA, Hinduism is a palimpsest, overwritten by whatever local flavor of Buddhism has taken root. You can see its traces, most obviously in the Ramayana, but even that’s picked up Buddhist flavoring along the way.

Not so Malaysia, where Hinduism stands on its own. It has to be the Indian population. Malaysia has the most Indians of any of the SEA countries, both in terms of raw numbers (almost 3M) and percentage of the total population (about 7%).

So it’s no surprise that a substantial Hindu temple, Sri Maha Mariamman, can be found in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown. It’s not a massive structure, but it’s still the oldest Hindu temple in Malaysia, having been established in 1873. Its current structures were built in 1968. It looks like nothing so much as the temples we saw in Mumbai (before this adventure, so no blog posts about that trip).

This is a working temple, an active place of worship for KL’s Hindu population. And while it might lack the overwhelming scale of Batu Caves, it makes up for it with the quality of the execution. This was a Grade A Prime Hindu temple.

The temple’s interior.

The grounds were full of really well done sculptures and dioramas.

He who loves Ganesh is my friend.

There were galleries on both sides of the temple, flanking the exterior, with truly excellent tile paintings.

What a lovely addition to the Batu Caves tour. It will be interesting to see if the Hindu temple is part and parcel of the Malaysian experience, or if these were sports. If this is all there is, I’m satisfied. This is quality, quality templeage.

Let’s set the daytime 90s aside for a moment. I walked out the other night on what should have been a balmy, pleasant 78 degree evening. Within twenty minutes I was literally dripping sweat and had to mop my face with a handkerchief. To be fair, this is as close to the equator as we’ve been, a mere 200 or so miles north. We were pretty close in Java, about 550 miles south, but I guess that extra distance matters. Or, and this is a distinct possibility, Malaysia is a portal to hell. Just putting that out there.

That justified getting a condo with a pool, which has been religiously used. Not five-times-a-day call-to-prayer religiously used. But daily. I offer my thanks at least daily, and they are sincere. Also, moist and cool. The very best kind of thanks.

Although now that I think of it, I’m probably showering on the call to prayer schedule. That sounds right.

At Least The French Have Clean Hands (Hint: They Were Otherwise Occupying)

As part of my Get Acquainted tour of Kuala Lumpur, I visited the National Museum of Malaysia. That would normally get a post of its own, except a) it’s pretty small (six galleries), and b) it’s focus is pretty tightly on Malaysia’s long, sumptuous history of colonial predation. There’s history going as far back as Paleolithic times and a skosh of culture, but mostly it’s the predation. So not a lot of pictures. Except for this.

Am I mocking a culture that’s not my own, making fun of rich traditions simply because they look humorous to my Western sensibilities? I am not. I am mocking nose flutes. I am an equal opportunity nose flute mocker. If they were a part of my own culture, I would be on mockery’s front lines, daring the rearguard Tucker Carlsons of Big Nose Flute to cancel me. I stand proud.

And just so you know I take all this cross-cultural stuff seriously… The museum featured a high-tech digital kiosk where you could try on different outfits and get the photo sent to you via QR code.

But I digress.

Thailand, as one of a handful of countries on the planet that have never been colonized, was a refreshing chaser to the Malort of post-colonial outcomes we’ve been chugging. I don’t think I truly appreciated that break until I landed back on the Tour de Fuckery. Malaysia was the dusky temptress that every one of the colonial powers had to ravish at least once. Except the French, who were busy tearing the knickers off of Haiti.

The Dutch and Portuguese fought over Malacca for a while back in the good old days of colonialism, the 1500s and 1600s. But the British brought Malaysia the brutal efficiency of the industrial revolution in the 1700s, turning the sleepy colonialism of their forebears into the hellish Bosch triptych of mechanized dehumanization that they later perfected in India.

The Chamber of Horrors Theater of the Absurd Chamber of the Absurd Horrors crescendoed in the Malayan Emergency that lasted from 1948 to 1960. What was the Emergency? Apparently, that the natives were restless. Having tired of the extrajudicial killings of activists, they were beginning to see torching plantations as legitimate political speech.

But why an Emergency? Because British insurers wouldn’t have paid out claims during a war, so the government simply refused to call it a war. Everything old is new again.

You’ll be shocked, shocked to learn that the British, intent on importing their enlightened civilization to the savage natives, committed war crimes and atrocities in pursuit of their goals. It finally led to their departure in 1957 when the Federation of Malaya pried the Brits’ fingers from around their throats and sent them home. I love a story with a happy ending. Even if it takes a few centuries to get there.

As a ridiculous sidebar, I would be remiss if I didn’t share the story of the White Rajahs of Sarawak. A Brit named James Brooke was adventuring around Borneo and made himself of use to the Sultan of Brunei, fighting off pirates and such. In gratitude, the Sultan granted James the province of Kuching in 1841, making him the first White Rajah of Sarawak, a title that descended through patrilineage to his heirs for over 100 years!

How did it end? One of the grandnephews, not the actual Rajah at the time, ceded the territory to the British in 1946, his not having the actual rights to do so being a non-factor for the British, who were delighted to claim a new Crown Colony. It wasn’t to last, as they were booted out of all of Malaysia in 1957.

You cannot make this shit up.

Ethnography

Malaysia is a mostly country. It’s mostly Bumiputra, a catchall for ethnic Malays and other indigenous groups, with healthy dollops of Chinese and Indian, the descendants of the indentured workers the British imported to work the plantations. Malaysia is mostly Muslim, but while Islam is the official state religion, freedom of religion is enshrined in the constitution. About ⅔ of the population identifies as Muslim, with the rest split amongst Buddhists, Hindus, and even Christians (mostly a sad remnant of Anglican converts).

But that’s really the iceberg tip. In fact, Malaysia is home to over 100 distinct indigenous languages, bespeaking a much richer stew of ethnicity and belief than the raw statistics suggest. In our experience, it most resembles Indonesia in that regard, which seems to have a distinct ethnolinguistic profile for each of its inhabited islands. If Malaysia is one thing, it’s that it’s not just one thing.

The Apartment

I’m in Southeast Asia, so my condo features the usual insults: a duvet instead of a top sheet, hot water only from the shower head, and a mattress clearly discarded from an oubliette as inhumane. Also, like my Chiang Mai condo, I’m being charged for electric, but at least here I can get a running read on consumption. I’m pretty sure I lived unnecessarily like a monk in Chiang Mai.

I suppose if I’m groping for positives, it’s nice that I don’t have to wait for the hot water when I’m doing dishes.

The apartment itself is a little studio, which is fine for me but way too small if I’d been traveling with my usual allotment of wife. But it has a “full” kitchen and is comfortably appointed and centrally located. No complaints.

Although I did have the owner send a plumber to fix the bidet, which has, in the last year, moved to a lower level of Maslow for me. I opened the valve, closed the valve, nothing.

So the plumber comes over, presses the handle and water comes out. Looks at me. “What’s the problem?” It turns out the handle holder is also the fucking valve. Pull the handle out and you can rotate the holder to open the water line. Great way to start off with my host, establishing without question that I’m an actual idiot.

Although, tell the truth. Would any of you have tried rotating that piece? That’s a special bit of hardware, right there.

But the real attraction is the pool. You know that moment when you get in the pool or the ocean and you clench up and tell yourself that if you just get in all at once your temperature will adjust and you’ll be fine? And then you are.

That doesn’t happen here. You just slide right in without any hesitation at all, because the water temperature is perfect and delicious. I’m not ashamed to admit that there are days in this heat when I’ve gone in twice. I filtered for pools on Airbnb. I am unrepentant.

Transit

Getting around is easy. Grab, SEA’s Uber, is everywhere, and KL boasts a modern, unified transit system that’s accessible through a single payment apparatus.

The hardest part of getting around is as a pedestrian. Everywhere in the world, pedestrian traffic follows vehicular traffic: Drive on the left, walk on the left. Drive on the right, walk on the right. Simple. Except fucking Thailand, where they drive on the left and walk on the right! It’s maddening. After three months in Thailand I accommodated, but now I’m back somewhere rational and I’m all verklempt. I’m walking on the right now when I should be walking on the left, causing all kinds of farang (technically Mat Salleh in Malay) chaos. I’ll adjust, but those are tough patterns to break and relearn constantly. Makes my head hurt.

Buildings

KL is a skyscraper kind of town. Most notable is the Merdeka 118, just a couple of blocks from my condo. It’s the second tallest building in the world, after the Burj Khalifa. 118 refers to the number of floors. Will I overcome my acrophobia and visit the observation deck on 118? That sounds stupid, so probably. On the other hand, airplanes don’t squick me, so what could possibly go wrong? I’m the spokesmodel for the Willing Suspension of Disbelief. And the Complete Absence of Executive Function.

At 88 stories, the twin Patronas Towers fall short of Merdeka 118, but they are probably KL’s most iconic skyline view. I’d seen them from afar, but it wasn’t until I was right up on them at night that I realized how insanely beautifully they’re lit. They’re Deco confections made almost entirely of light. Unbelievable.

Up Up & Away

So. Did I go to the 118th floor observation deck of the Merdeka 118? I did not. But not, I am at pains to admit, because I thought better of it. They’re still working on the Merdeka, and the observation deck won’t be open until later in the year.

I bet you’re thinking that I was lucky to be saved from my own folly, but that just shows how poorly you know me. Both the Patronas Towers and the KL Tower offer vertiginous observation decks. At 1,000 feet, the KL Tower has the highest open air deck in the city. At $35, it had better offer some superlatives.

How about Most Iconically Phallic? Most Like A Billionaire’s Rocket? Most Likely To Absorb Cows?

The tickets for KL Tower aren’t timed, like Patronas. They’re for the day, and you can show up whenever you like. I got there at about 6:30, so I could see both the daytime and nighttime views. You would be right to think, from 1,000 feet up, that they’re spectacular. You’re very clever.

The daytime views are great, providing a real sense of KL’s scope.

But the nighttime views kill. I think of all the big cities we’ve visited, I like KL’s skyline best. It’s iconic skyscraper after iconic skyscraper, each more beautiful than the one before.

But KL Tower had one more trick up its nasty sleeve: the Sky Box. The Sky Box is a cantilevered glass box that sits out over the edge of the tower. Shockingly, given the extortionate entry fee, they tack on another 10rm (about $2.50 USD) for a timed 45 seconds in the Sky Box. Although I imagine that’s less about the revenue and more about gating access so people don’t camp out in it and everyone gets a shot.

There are two Sky Boxes, one in front of the Patronas Towers, one in front of Merdeka 118. That’s just dumb luck, as the KL Tower is thirty years old and predates both of those towers. I had plenty of time to circumnavigate the deck, waiting for the transition to night, and I danced right up to the edge of the Sky Boxes repeatedly. “Don’t be a weenie, just do it, you’re here.” “I’m a weenie for a reason, I should listen to my guts. Especially when they’re churning.” Who says I don’t have a rich interior life? Oh, right. Everyone who knows me.

With my Jiminy back in Chicago, I didn’t stand a chance. Look, grannies are doing it! [that’s how I needed to be rescued from the top of a pyramid] My 10rm blood money paid, it was my turn to face death. I inched my way across the platform to the box itself.

Hilariously, I couldn’t go all the way in. The white band in the picture below is the actual edge of the tower structure, and I couldn’t get past it. Even though I was standing in the same structure, I couldn’t get over the visual of floating in space. Too much. Plus, and this is definitely not nothing, I could feel the fucking thing sway. No way was I staying in a second longer than necessary.

I used up a fraction of my 45 seconds and backed out sweating. At least I didn’t need a rescue.

Shopping

There’s a perfectly credible supermarket in, as is typical, the basement of the closest mall, a mere fifteen minute walk. There are convenience stores near the condo, so I don’t have to haul gallons of water too far. Or carry ice cream bars even fifteen minutes in this heat.

As is usual in Muslim countries, the Jaya Grocery keeps their liquor in a segregated area that’s almost a separate store within the store. They’ve gone a step further than I’ve seen so far, designating that shop the Non-Halal Zone. All of the sins, not just booze, but ham and sausage, are under the same roof. Convenient!

They’re also happy to editorialize. I’ve never seen this sentiment expressed before, but sure. Why not?

Bukit Bintang

Jalan Bukit Bintang is central KL’s nightlife and restaurant locus, and it’s packed, especially at night. I’m about fifteen minutes from it, now that I know where I can cross illegally and cut out an unnecessary loop.

It also offers up what is now my new favorite street food, beef roti. It’s a dough ball filled with spiced, curried minced beef and griddle-fried until it will burn your face off. Seriously, I’ve taken some home and thirty minutes later they were barely cool enough to eat. They appear to be popular in Sri Lanka and South India, but this is the first time I’ve seen them in SEA.

This place, Restoran Mon Chinese Beef Roti, had a long, slow line, so I figured it was the best. Hard to say since I haven’t compared, but so good I haven’t been tempted to compare. Also, given how generally expensive it is here, the roti are a bargain at 6.50rm, about $1.50 USD.

In addition to restaurants, bars, and massage spas, BB also hosts the night street food market on Jalan Alor.

Also available on Jalan Alor, and everywhere else: durian. Durian has been a favored treat everywhere in SEA, but in Malaysia it rivals Islam as the state religion. While plain old durian was on offer in other places, here the range of cultivars is a selling point. They are clearly connoisseurs.

Bukit Bintang also hosts KL’s most glitteriest mall, the Pavilion. Of course, it’s more than just a seven-story, 1.7M square foot mall. It’s also an office tower, residential towers, and a five star hotel. And a yacht. I think it’s also a yacht. And a pony. It opened in 2007, but it’s still top of the mall food chain here. Which is a big deal. SEA loves its malls.

I went, perversely, in search of crafts. Dorothy had found a maker of tudung saji, woven food covers, and the article suggested there was a little shop in the Pavilion that carried them. I didn’t find that shop, but I found the maker’s FB page and reached out and she told me where I could find them in KL: one shop in the Central Market, the crafts locus, and one in the Pavilion that I’d missed. In fact, on my first tour, the closest I found to a craft shop was the Christian Louboutin boutique. That counts, right?

I went back after getting instructions and was able to find the little shop in the top floor Tokyo Street section, which largely featured small Japanese shops. This shop, Artist’s Haven, specialized in local crafts, but I guess there was nowhere else to put it.

This should probably be in the Crafts post, but fuck it. Here are the tudung saji. The two shops only had the smallest size, 12″, which was fine. Even getting one of the little ones back safely will be a packing challenge.

Chinatown

Chinatown is orthogonal to Bukit Bintang, still very close to the condo. Although in this weather even a twenty minute walk leaves you drenched. The big attraction here is Jayan Petaling, a bustling street market. Perhaps I’m getting jaded (this is month nine in SEA, total), but the bustle seems very merchcentric. Nothing but tourist stuff.

Street Art & Follies

The usual review of entertaining streetscapes.

I thought this was the world’s worst retail mascot job, in KL’s heat, until I realized that they were cavorting for tips, like dehydrated Times Square Elmos competing in the Heatstroke Olympics.

Here we have one of my favorite sights so far, a location that obliterates the fine line that customarily separates restaurants and miniature golf courses.

Massage Culture

I didn’t set out to see how far I could walk without passing a massage spa, but after a while it was hard not to notice that I hadn’t seen any. Their absence was a palpable presence. My second night in KL I went for a walk to learn the neighborhood, and I walked a tick short of six miles without once seeing a massage spa, some kind of SEA record.

Crossing Jalan Bukit Bintang is Changkat Bukit Bintang, and this is where KL’s massage spas are clustered. There are spas scattered throughout the city, in the neighborhoods, but Changkat BB is the only place where they’re dense like the rest of SEA.

Like everything else here, I’ve found KL to be the most expensive place we’ve been in SEA. Not First World expensive, but definitely the high end for the area. Food, groceries, crafts… and massage. For example, an hour of massage in Thailand runs about $11 USD. That same hour in KL is $16. Not a life threatening difference, but notable.

In both cases, that’s the bottom end of the price spectrum. I’ve found that the more expensive spas are more luxuriously appointed, but I don’t think there’s much difference in the quality of the actual massage. I’ve yet to have a bad massage, and some of my best massages have been from the cheapest neighborhood dumps. I’m a value traveler.

I was all freaked about the massage scene in Thailand, because I didn’t want to wander into a Happy Ending joint looking for a real massage. Everyone would end disappointed. But I had no such qualms in Malaysia, an officially Islamic nation. While the massage spas all seem legit (I’ve yet to be offered any extras) the scene on Changkat Bukit Bintang is typical on the one hand, with women standing in front of the spas trying to lure you in, but surprising on the other hand. As in I was walking along and a woman came up from behind me and grabbed my hand. Which surprised me. If I don’t ask for consent I’m a monster, but I’m apparently fair game on the mean streets of an Islamic state.

She kept trying to steer me into restaurants, and I kept peeling her off, like I was clean enough, dammit, and no longer needed my remora. I think I finally clipped her off by taking a sharp corner around a parked car, but it made me look at my surroundings a little more closely. Why, over there are three beautiful African women in revealing dresses, each sitting alone in a restaurant. And that cluster of women offering massages are all wearing LBDs and standing on a corner that doesn’t have a massage spa. Huh. Makes you think.

Does falling in love with every one of my masseuses make me shallow? [yes] But I’m a sucker for strong, knowledgeable hands. And elbows. And feet. And knees. Like Thai massage, the local flavor, Urut Melayu, is a full contact sport, although with less yoga-like stretching and more pressure. Each practitioner I’ve tried has had some minor variation, but, like the Thai massage, they’re riffing from a common base.

I think my particular flexibility issues are best addressed through Thai massage, but Urut Melayu does include stretching, and it may be better than Thai massage for the upper shoulder tension that’s a natural side effect of immoderate blogging.

I liked one masseuse a lot, and asked her name so I could request her on a return visit. She said she didn’t have a name, just a number. She was number 21. That seemed… dystopian? Sad? Liberating? I mean, I assume that was a work thing. I’d hate to think she really didn’t have a name at all. Maybe her parents named her 21.

Money

After the differential calculus required for some currency conversions we’ve suffered *cough* Indonesian rupiah *cough*, the ringgit is a straightforward quarter. One ringgit = 25¢. 100rm = $25. Praise the Lord.

Malay

After the hell of Vietnamese and, somehow worse, Thai, Malay is a breath of distinctly less fetid air. Why so sweet? It uses the same Latin alphabet we know and love, and those letters largely make the same sounds we expect them to (looking at you, Vietnamese…). Bonus, it’s basically the same language as Indonesian, so I’ve already learned it some.

Of course, it’s only the same language to me because I speak both so badly. Native speakers can certainly tell them apart, although they are mutually intelligible, sharing about 70-80% of the same root language, Malay. The difference is in pronunciation, grammatical structure, and the source of loanwords, the latter driven by the usual colonial suspects.

Malay is stuffed full of loanwords (and a handful of cognates, but mostly loanwords), meaning that many signs are decipherable with zero Malay. Farmasi. Restoran. Kaunter Tiket. Agensi. Stimbot. Polis. Nasional. Klinik. Teksi. Komputer. Telefon. Coklat.

That last one only works if you remember that Malay has sensibly assigned the ch sound to C. K makes a hard C and S makes a soft C, so what is the C even for? It’s the appendix of letters, and Malay and Indonesian have at least put it to good use. Finally. Personally, I’ve been over the C for ages.

They’ve donated to us, as well. We can thank them for amok, ketchup, bamboo, orangutan (from orang hutan, man of the forest), compound (from kampung), gingham, rattan, sarong, gong, and tea. We’ve given them so much more. Well, the Portuguese, Dutch, and British did. And not just loanwords.

Also, not for nothing, English is the unofficial second language here, so most signage doesn’t have to be pieced together from loanwords. It’s super easy to navigate here, and the English levels are really high. I’m in the big city, so I’m sure that fades in the hinterlands, but smooth linguistic sailing so far.

Or as smooth as sailing can be through the admittedly turgid air.

Or maybe a trip to Thailand’s highest spot, The Roof of Thailand, just sounds fun. Rumor has it there are waterfalls involved. Reason enough right there.

Doi Inthanon (doi is mountain) is named for King Inthawichayanon, whose given name at birth was Inthanon. He died in 1897, the last king of Chiang Mai, and his ashes are housed in a stupa at the highest point in Thailand. Improbably, Doi Inthanon is part of the same range that includes Everest, which, at 29,000 feet towers over Doi Inthanon’s 8,415 feet.

But before we reached the Roof of Thailand, there would be trekking and waterfalls.

Wachirathan Waterfall

Our first stop, inside Doi Inthanon National Park, was Wachirathan Waterfall. At ~250 feet, Wachirathan isn’t Thailand’s tallest waterfall, but it may be the most powerful. The volume of water is truly impressive.

There’s some rainbow action in the video, too.

Trekking

Back in the van, which held a dozen of us plus guide and driver, to our next stop, the Pha Doc Siao Nature Trail, a three kilometer trek that started at over 4,000 feet. I kept asking the others whether they felt the altitude when they tried to, you know, take a full breath while hiking, but all I got was pity. Bastards.

I wasn’t sure whether the end of this hike was Thailand’s roof or only its mezzanine, so nothing to do but carry on and avoid, if at all possible, fainting.

Here’s our guide, Lucy, introducing us to the two members of the Karen village who would be our docents for the hike, as we weren’t permitted to wander loose on the trail. If one of was slow, not naming names, one of the Karen would hold back and make sure we got back to the group.

I suspect this was more safety than anything. The path was super uneven and completely unmarked. If one were, say, panting to take a breath, one might get disoriented or trip over a tree root in the path. No one wants to be the weakest gazelle at the watering hole, so the extra help was appreciated.

The trek involved following a series of three waterfalls through the jungle, the third of which permitted swimming. We’d exit through a Karen village, and then some other things would happen. Not clear what the post-3km trek offered.

You will be, I believe, unsurprised to learn that the nature trek was just unfairly beautiful. Other jungles were jealous. On the negative side, though, we didn’t see any of the gibbons we were promised lived in the area. Lucy did share with us that Thai people, who will apparently eat anything (she listed monkeys and snakes specifically) won’t eat gibbons because they pair bond for life, like humans. Aspirationally. I just felt better knowing that as an actual lifelong pair bonder, Thai people would be unlikely to eat me.

We quickly came to the first of the trek’s waterfalls. We were cautioned not to swim, but that seemed unnecessary. It was no Wachirathan, but there was still an impressive water flow. There was no part of this fall that called out to me to risk my life by entering.

The water kept us company as we trekked to the next waterfall.

This was another no-swimming, no-problem waterfall. Not even the shadow of an inclination.

Our trek to the final waterfall took us through a valley that was used by the Karen for rice cultivation. The water had been diverted around the valley, and routed to the next waterfall, to prevent random flooding that damaged crops. The park was established in 1972, but the Karen and Hmong villages had been established right around 1900, so their agricultural footprint predates the park by a fair amount.

When I was at DC Comics I visited one of my artists, Steve Parkhouse, who took me for an excursion around his home in England’s Lake District. We were touring one of the national parks when we crested a hill and I saw a village in the valley below. “Who let them build a village in a national park?” Steve laughed. “The national park is just over 50 years old. The village is over 1,000.” Like that. Only newer.

Which brought us, blissfully, to the third and final waterfall, the one where swimming was permitted.

Here we have delightful proof that children are stupid in exactly the same way across vast cultural gulfs. Let the children teach us: we are more alike than different.

The end of our 3km trek took us to the Karen village of our guides, a hamlet of about 350 people. This turned out to be the highlight for me, which was a surprise, as I’d already visited a Karen village. But these two villages could not have been more different.

The first village I’d been to had been a Long Neck village, while this tribe was White Karen, who don’t use the neck-lengthening brass coils. But the differences went way deeper than that. As I mentioned, the White Karen village had been established around 1900, while the Long Neck villagers had fled persecution in Burma/Myanmar in the 80s. As a result, the White Karens owned their land and were Thai citizens, while the Long Neck village was effectively a refugee camp, the villagers having no actual rights within Thailand.

How this played out in the two villages was fascinating, manifesting in both art and architecture. But we had a couple of stops before we hit the village proper. The first was their coffee operation, which is an important part of their economy. Prior to its establishment as a National Park, this part of Thailand was thick with opium poppy cultivation. The government officially banned opium production in the fifties, but the effort picked up speed with a Royal Project in 1969 that focused on crop substitution. That’s why the Karen grow coffee and strawberries now.

This fellow was by the path roasting coffee by hand. If only he’d had some for sale. JK. Of course I bought his hand-roasted coffee. I’d most certainly also have bought his opium, but if any was available it wasn’t on offer to farangs.

The next stop was the Karen weaving shop. I’m sure most of the weaving is done in the home, but this is a central spot on the nature trail that gathers all of the village’s wares in one place. That’s the longest backstrap loom I’ve ever seen, by the way. For making the long straps on the woven tote bags? Maybe?

I will always share video of weaving. Don’t click Play if it bores you.

The two Karen villages’ vastly different profiles, one settled citizens, one stateless refugees, couldn’t have been more apparent than in their weaving. The Long Neck Karen had small backstrap looms they clearly carried with them when they fled Myanmar, while the White Karen had frame looms large enough to be cosplaying as backstrap looms. That difference leads to a notable distinction in the depth and richness of the patterns being woven.

Finally, the Long Neck Karen have made a virtue out of the vice of scarcity, weaving pieces that are more open float than weft. While the White Karen weaving does feature some open floats, it’s a design accent rather than the primary effect.

Here’s what I picked up from the White Karen village. Those are rich and subtle.

And here’s what I picked up from the Long Neck Karen village.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that there’s a qualitative artistic difference between the two villages’ work. Both are beautiful. I’m suggesting that the obvious differences in execution are attributable to their different circumstances, that the decisions aren’t purely aesthetic, but are tied to their social and economic profiles. I wasn’t expecting a master class in microeconomics on a hike and a swim, but you have to hold yourself open to the universe.

The final lesson came when we reached the village proper, where our van was waiting to pick us up for the next leg. The village was so much more built than the Long Neck village. It might look like corrugated tin lean-to construction, but it was solid.

This is what tipped me over, though. Fucking dormer windows!

Compare that with the Long Neck village, whose building designs are constrained by the materials available. No architectural details for them, just pure utilitarianism.

Many years ago, on a DC junket, I found myself at Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands, one of the world’s oldest neolithic cities. You could see the foundations of the housing and the street grid. What was most fascinating to me was that there was evidence of indoor plumbing, the oldest, I believe, ever found. Which spoke of a society with enough labor bandwidth that not all of it needed to be focussed on subsistence.

You don’t get indoor plumbing without the equivalent of a city planning function, and you don’t get city planners unless you value their efforts enough to feed them, since they’re busy city planning instead of hunting. There’s an entire value system embedded in something as simple as sewage lines.

That’s what I thought of when I saw those hilarious dormer windows. There’s a value system embedded in those windows, that says we value beauty over efficiency, joy over utilitarianism. And we have the necessary labor bandwidth to manifest those values in silly, silly windows. The Long Neck Karen, on the other hand, are just trying to survive, and their buildings, as they will, reflect those values.

Made It, Ma! Roof Of The World…

At this point it was clear that our 3km trek was not terminating at the Roof of Thailand. Would there be another trek to the highest point in Thailand? I dearly hoped not. I hadn’t actually tweaked anything, but more than one of my joints was throbbing. That 3km was over very uneven paths, and knees and ankles took a beating.

So I was delighted to get back in the van, and surprised when, just a few minutes later, we pulled into the parking lot for the Roof of Thailand. Which was only a modest walk of 250 meters from the parking lot. That’s service! I’d just assumed that reaching the summit was its own trek.

It wasn’t a trek, but it was a ball of confusion. For starters, the sign that says “The Highest Spot in Thailand” isn’t. It’s just the sign at the beginning of the trail. You can even see the trail behind it winding higher on the mountain. I mean, you can’t even trust the signage.

Next up the path was the stupa holding King Inthanon’s ashes.

If you continue around the path, you go behind the stupa.

You can see the little square plinth just in front of the stupa’s base. For awhile, that was the tallest thing on the mountain, but so many people were traipsing up to it that it put the integrity of the stupa at risk. So on the other side of the path they built a new plinth, a couple of inches taller than the old plinth, so that could now be the highest point in Thailand, and people would leave the poor king’s stupa alone.

One nice thing about Thailand’s roof. At over 8,000 feet up, the air was deliciously cool. They’ve still never had snow up there, which is fine, but it was a refreshing break from the turgid lowlands.

Dueling Pagodas

Our final stop on our long day was the twin pagodas, one for the king, one for the queen. The setting was peaceful and the pagodas were quietly beautiful, as opposed to the not infrequent Clown Car approach to Thai temples. Looking at you, Wat Rong Khun. Let’s take a restful break before we head back to Chiang Mai.

Our Real Final Stop

Before hitting the road for real, two hours back to Chiang Mai, we stopped at what Lucy called a local market. I mean, technically true, but only in the sense that every market is local, if you think about it. But not at all true if you think the common English meaning of local market is a place where locals shop.

This place was inexplicable for so many reasons. First, there were dozens of those stalls, stretching in both directions. So that’s a lot to parse, right off the bat. What made it doubly hard to parse is that every stall carried the same snacks. In the same packaging. With the same labels. At the same price. There could honestly have been one stall.

This was all clearly a front for Big Snack. At first I thought, well, they may be buying big bags of this stuff wholesale, but at least they’re bagging it up for retail. But then I saw that the labels were identical. I honest-to-god think they’re all just buying the pre-bagged snacks from the same supplier and stacking them on their tables. As a demonstration of native Thai stacking culture it was awesome. As a local market it was… weird.

Ephemera

A couple of things that didn’t fit elsewhere.

More Me!

My daughter, Ruby, is pathological about having pictures of us on our travels. I’ve consistently demurred, as I think in any given setting we are always the least interesting thing. But I couldn’t escape my guide for my tour of Wat Doi Suthep, who insisted on taking my picture, which I shared on the post. Well, that made Ruby clap her little hands together in delight, like Veruca Salt stealing a squirrel, so here we are again. Please. Blame Ruby.

But Wait, There’s More…

These kinds of tours can make or break based on the folks. Some people are wrapped up in their own thing, which is often us, to be fair, but mostly people are there for the experience, and sharing it with the rest of your tour group is part of that experience. Which is to say, this was a pretty good group.

With one standout, who warrants specifically name checking: a charming Frenchwoman named Doris Buttignol. I know, I dunk on the French all the time. But only because it’s easy and fun. But when faced with an actual French person, I’m unexpectedly open-minded.

Doris was interesting to talk to, which we did off and on over the course of the day very pleasurably. But at lunch she confessed that she’s a documentarian, which immediately made her more interesting to me. Not that I operate at her level, but writing the blog requires looking at the world through a lens and trying to understand it, rather than letting the experience just wash over you. I’m an ardent amateur, so It was great to spend time talking to someone who does that professionally.

Doris shared with me a link to her most recently completed piece, about Icelandic politics. Which sounds dry but was anything but, encompassing as it did both women’s political empowerment and dealing with climate change. It was trenchant in its observations, but more than that it was visually stunning. Her eye for framing and composition is superb, and I was regularly brought up short by the raw beauty of an image.

Doris has generously let me share the link to her documentary. So everyone, please say Thank You to Doris.

My thanks go to Doris, as well, for giving me an experience, both in her company and her work, that went well beyond what Thailand had to offer. This is why we travel.

Khon Ramakien

The first performance was of the Khon Ramakien, the Thai version of the Ramayana. Which we’ve seen so many times at this point that I feel like I can shout out the lines, like I’m at a Rocky Horror Picture Show screening. “Girl, don’t step outside the circle!” I knew Thailand had its own version, but I honestly hadn’t planned on attending. Ramayana fatigue is real.

I was out walking a new neighborhood in Bangkok of a brutal midday and saw that I was directly across the street from the theater. Noted for future reference, until I noticed the crowd on the steps. I crossed over to check it out, and sure enough, a performance was about to tee off. An air conditioned performance. Sold.

The performance was notable for two things. First, its duration. It came in at a sprightly forty minutes, the thinnest slice of Ramayana we’ve yet been served. Maybe it’s because I’m so familiar with the story, but I wasn’t actually craving more. There’s something to be said for guerrilla Ramayana.

The second notable thing about the performance was the professionalism of the production. Of all the many versions we’ve seen, this one stood out for the quality of the costumes, stage design, lighting, special effects, the whole ball of wax. Everything about it was exceptional. Including the air conditioning. What’s not to love?

I haven’t called out the performance and the music, not because they weren’t good, but because they’ve been uniformly good at all of the various Ramayana performances we’ve seen. It was the production design that really stood head and shoulders above the competition in this performance.

My favorite lines from the supertitles: “Look, monkey. Know that my words are as strong as the mountain. I cannot take them back.” I’m going to start all my sentences from now on with “Look, monkey.” The other was “Only when Rama strokes him from head to tail three times will he be free from the curse.” Which was enacted, but modesty forbids video of such an intimate scene. You’ll just have to trust me that everyone left satisfied.

We’ve never seen the underwater kingdom in any of the other versions we’ve seen, but these folk had the budget and chops to pull it off.

And the Battle Royale.

Look, monkey! That turned out to be, after all the variations we’ve witnessed, the very best version of the Ramayana we’ve seen. Can the cabaret possibly measure up?

Siam Dragon Cabaret

A five-minute walk from my condo brought me to Chiang Mai’s premier, if perhaps only, ladyboy cabaret. Well, why the fuck not? It was obviously that convenient to me for a reason. Who am I to try to outfox kismet?

Of course, had I known that photography was verboten I might have skipped it. I don’t think my experiences are even real unless I can properly share them with you. But I was able to scrape promotional photos from their web site, so you can get a flavor of what went on. Beyond that, words will have to suffice where a picture would be otherwise worth a thousand of them.

Let’s start out with the ladyboy part before we tackle the cabaret part. I’ll confess that I’d had too narrow a definition of ladyboy, or kathoey in Thai. Based on the ladyboy gogo bars in Bangkok, I’d assumed that a Thai ladyboy was, by definition, someone who’d enjoyed some level of medical intervention, from hormone therapy at one end to aftermarket breasts and vaginas at the other.

While those are certainly ladyboys, kathoey embraces the full spectrum, including those who maintain their biological roots but simply prefer to present as women. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Siam Dragon Cabaret represented kathoey culture with performers at every point on that spectrum. Once I got over the confusion, it read as a lovely form of inclusivity. “I’m not better because I have tits and you don’t. We are all kathoey.”

I would hope that it’s uncontroversial to point out that the Thai are a small folk. That’s not othering, that’s observation. I would likewise hope that it’s uncontroversial to point out that Thai boys tend to start out pretty. The truth is, it doesn’t take a lot of sorcery to turn a pretty Thai boy into a pretty Thai lady. Especially since the Thai, not to overgeneralize, are not an extravagantly busted people. What isn’t achieved through the surgeon’s arts is plausibly attainable the old fashioned way, through padding and bust tape. It’s not a big gap to close.

The range of expression within the culture of kathoey was brought home to me the day after the cabaret. Our guide for a trip to Doi Inthanon National Park was a kathoey who called herself, for our Western ears, Lucy.

Lucy’s presentation as a woman was restrained: lipstick, lilac nail polish, and small silver hoop earrings. That was her entire kit. But she used the term ladyboy to describe herself, and the most obvious manifestation of her identity was actually linguistic.

Thai appends a gendered particle at the end of sentences to indicate respect. If you are a woman you would end your sentence with kha, and if you’re a man you’d use khrap. So a woman would say thank you as kwop kuhn kha, and a man would say kwop kuhn khrap.

Lucy ended her sentences with kha, making it abundantly clear that she identified as female and you were to treat her as such. It was a refreshingly unambiguous way to share that information, tied directly to the structure of Thai speech.

As to the cabaret, this was my first, so I have no point of comparison. I don’t believe I’ve been to either a drag show or a Vegas-style cabaret. I am, or was, a cabaret virgin. That said, I strongly suspect that this followed a well trod path. It was all lip-syncing to power ballads or overblown diva anthems and outlandish costumes whose headdresses fell a mere pineapple short of ridiculous.

I’m sharing my seat because it was actually central to the experience. Who knew that they’d be doing crowd work, and that my aisle seat put me in the splash zone? Dorothy must have had an inkling, because when I told her I’d gotten a VIP seat she said that she hoped I didn’t get accidental bottle service. I assured her that they still use the expression Happy Ending here. Although, to be fair, maybe I’d have better luck if I asked for bottle service.

The crowd work involved… shaking hands, a curiously polite and gentle interaction. At the expense, if I’m being honest, of the whole lip-syncing act. Apparently lip-syncing and shaking hands at the same time wasn’t in the union contract. One of the performers, as she reached to shake my hand, endearingly clutched her costume as if her nonexistent breasts might spill out when she leaned over. That’s some charming commitment to the bit.

They had one Divine-scaled performer, who lip-synced to one of the only songs I recognized, When You’re Good To Mama from Chicago. She totally deked me, though, when she came in for the handshake. She reached for my hand, then grabbed my head and smothered me, in a modestly non-consensual way (I think, like an airport, my presence represented implied consent), in whatever she was using to create her substantial bosom. When I broke the surface she presented her cheek for a kiss and turned her head at the last minute to plant one right on my lips. I didn’t realize until I wiped my mouth at dinner afterwards that I’d been sporting a substantial dollop of bright red lipstick on my lips. I’m sure everyone else at the restaurant was amused.

As mentioned, the songs were almost completely unknown to me, largely because many were clearly local bangers. Then I realized that while photography might be forbidden, no one said I couldn’t use Shazam. Songs included: The Show Isn’t Over, by La Voix, This Is Me, from The Greatest Showman, Get Sexy by The Sugababes, It’s A Beautiful Day by Sarah Brightman, Butterflies by Kamaliya, and Bole Chudiyan from Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (a Bollywood musical). Who even are these people? I didn’t even bother Shazaming the songs in Thai.

The performance differed from a Ru Paul jam largely because of the song choices, although there were definitely more apsara hands than I think is normal in Western drag shows. The show ran an hour and ten minutes, and I have no idea if that’s generous or mingy compared to the norm. Sadly, it seemed modestly attended, on a random Thursday night. In a theater with 104 seats there were about thirty, maybe forty tops, in attendance.

But that didn’t stop our plucky crew from lip-syncing their little hearts out. Afterwards, they lined up in a gauntlet to pose for tips. I didn’t pose with them (I think I was still recovering from my near-drowning) but I snapped a few shots of the lovelies on my way out. Proof, because I know how you are, that I was really there.

You can walk outside without your decorative belongings in hand, but you leave cloaked in the signifiers of your culture. Every time you dress you tell the world who you are. Pottery doesn’t do that.

Although this is true of all of the crafts, the constraints of primitive, manual methods leads not to a narrowing of the design space but to a Cambrian explosion of creativity within it. As we’ve chased weaving around the world, it feels like we should have seen every recombinant possibility that a backstrap or treadle loom can be strong-armed into producing. And then we see something, some amalgam of materials and techniques previously unimagined, that blows our minds all over again.

Even without Dorothy to provide a more nuanced understanding of the intersection of design and technique, I am consistently thrilled and delighted to explore textiles as a sharply focused lens into a new culture.

Silk

At least when I play word association, the appropriate response to Thai is… Silk. That’s a great jumping off point, but there’s plenty going on here besides the silk. There’s Teen Jok, mudmee, and plenty of beautiful cotton. In almost three months in Thailand, I’ve been able to see much of the range here.

I mentioned in the post on Thai crafts that there’s cheap and expensive for crafts here, but not much in the middle. That’s 100% true for the silk. There’s the kind of manufactured goods we used for corsets at one end, and then silk made from worms fed mulberry leaves to make their cocoons a golden color, massaged in the morning and evening, and read bedtime stories before being tucked in with a glass of warm milk. That shit’s expensive.

I found one shop in Bangkok close to where I was staying, Queen Thai Silk.

It turns out, the biggest marketplace for quality silk in Bangkok is… in a mall. Specifically, Old Siam Plaza.

Malls are a central component of Bangkok’s retail profile, and they all have their own flavor. ICONSIAM features more European fashion houses than any other Bangkok mall. Terminal 21 plays host to a cornucopia of small makers offering unique products. And Old Siam is the locus of Bangkok’s silk trade.

An entire floor is given over to silk shops, almost all of which, large or small, feature someone operating a sewing machine. I saw measurements being taken and fittings occurring in dozens of shops the afternoon I was there. You can pick your fabric and have it turned into the schmatte of your dreams all in one go.

The selection was phenomenal, as were the prices. I don’t have notes, so I can’t say exactly, but I know there wasn’t a single piece that we considered affordable.

Which is a shame, because the range and quality were incredibly impressive.

Mudmee

Mudmee is just the Thai word for ikat. There’s no special flavor, it’s the same way ikat is made all over the world, by dying the weft fibers. I didn’t find a mudmee weaving village, but I found two shops in Chiang Mai that carried high quality mudmee. One shop, Shinawatra, was literally five minutes from my condo.

They also carried a high quality selection of silks and wovens, although the mudmee was the standout.

The other shop, Studio Naenna, was an hour’s walk from my condo. So, should have been a Grab. That midday hour was intense. But so was the shop, and well worth the visit. Even if I needed a minute to recover once I got there. They don’t weave onsite, but they were the exclusive reps for some truly gifted artisans. All of the pieces were created with exclusively natural dyes.

Of course, the biggest challenge was shopping for Dorothy without a Dorothy there to render judgement. My plan was to take photos, send them to her so she could shop, and come back to pick up her selection. It’s so cute when I make plans.

What actually happened was I found this, a seven color mudmee created by their master weaver. Yes, Dorothy, it has seven colors, but it’s also a subtle and beautiful weave. And you own it now, so no carping.

By the way, it took three months each for dying the thread and weaving, so six months total effort to create that piece.

Teen Jok

Given our relative indifference to the silk, due to its cost, it looked like the mountain village of Mae Chaem was going to be the payoff. Mae Chaem specializes in an ornate, embroidery-like weaving called Teen Jok. Maggie, my guide for the trip to Wat Doi Suthep, had suggested that a friend of hers, whose nom de touriste was Cartoon, could drive me there for the day. Because absent a car and driver, there was no way to get to Mae Chaem.

Mae Chaem is like the Benjarong Pottery Village outside Bangkok: a completely inaccessible locus of Thai cultural heritage. It’s baffling to me that no one goes there. It’s not far from the famous and well-traveled Doi Inthanon national park, but not one of the dozens of tour operators goes there. When I visited the Erawan National Park outside Bangkok they tacked on a visit to a WWII-era POW concentration camp. That made sense to someone. But adding a cultural treasure like Mae Chaem to a national park tour, that would be madness. Grr.

Because it’s not on anyone’s route, there’s a shocking dearth of detailed information about Mae Chaem, even from those who blog about it. When Cartoon picked me up her first question was “Where are we going?” As in, the name and address of one of the weaving studios, but I had nothing. We were going to drive about three hours to Mae Chaem on the assumption that we’d find the studios once we were there. No wonder no one goes.

We arrive and we’re driving down what seems like the main drag, until we finally see a shop with a sign that says Textile Café. Odd, but promising, except that the shop’s doors are closed and drapes are drawn. But we pull over, and sure enough, it’s an actual studio that’s actually open and has actual Teen Jok.

So what exactly is Teen Jok? The technical definition is that it’s a discontinuous supplementary weft technique. What that means is that the weaver hand ties additional weft threads around specific vertical warp threads (that’s the discontinuous part, as the supplementary weft threads don’t go selvedge to selvedge) to create an embroidery-like pattern directly on the loom.

In the clip below, the weaver is using a porcupine quill to pull apart the warp threads.

That technique is ridiculously labor intensive, with a skilled weaver able to produce about two inches of Teen Jok in a day. That’s why you see it woven as a six inch border finish on sarong lengths instead of as entire fabric.

We saw a similar technique in Bali, called songket. The primary difference is that Balinese songket is woven on a backstrap loom and the supplementary weft threads tend to run towards the metallics. Thai Teen Jok pulls from a library of sixteen traditional patterns that all the weavers use, although any meaning those patterns might have is lost to history. There’s no jig or template for those patterns, by the way. Teen Jok is created entirely by eye and hand. Colors are dealer’s choice, and weaving is done on a traditional frame loom.

The Textile Cafe had the real deal. As beautiful as it was, I needed to see more. I don’t like running the meter with artisans, making them spread out their wares so I can take pictures and go on my way, but I needed to see more of the range before picking a piece to bring back to Dorothy. And if this place was the bomb, I’d be happy to come back.

When I told Dorothy I was going to Mae Chaem, I got a reminder: “If you buy a piece, it’s ok not to have allllllll the colors in it.” Right. I’m a clown. Noted. But the color palette on the Textile Cafe pieces seemed on the bright side, trending lurid, and I needed to know if that was just what Teen Jok looked like or if it was this particular weaver’s eye.

Now that Cartoon and I knew what to look for, finding more Teen Jok weavers was easy. Our second stop was just a little further up the road, and answered the color palette question. The weaver in this shop also had brightly colored pieces, but quite a few with a richer, more restrained palette. I suspect that the first weaver exclusively used commercial rather than natural dyes. The second shop also had a pretty wide range of clothes with Teen Jok details.

But two pieces really stood out, and I was pretty sure, although I was going to keep looking, that I’d come back for at least one of them. The first was a traditional Teen Jok sarong, but in truly beautiful colors.

The second was a solid piece of Teen Jok. I suspected I wouldn’t see another piece like it, and I didn’t. It was a startling 12,000฿, about $360 USD, but it was the very definition of the kind of signature pieces we’ve been seeking out on our travels. Less than a rug and just as significant.

The third studio we visited was probably the largest, with not only the Teen Jok sarongs, but a really nice selection of clothes with Teen Jok decorative elements. The sarongs were beautifully crafted, but I didn’t see anything I preferred to the two pieces from the previous studio.

I did love the clothes, though.

I felt like I’d seen the range, and I didn’t know how much more there was to see in terms of variation. I told Cartoon we’d do one more store and then go back to the second shop where I was prepared to comically overspend for a piece of magic.

This weaver had the expected range of Teen Jok, but nothing that was more impressive than what I’d seen at the second studio.

But then I saw something I hadn’t seen elsewhere: Teen Jok runners, over six feet long. She had four pieces of nothing but the Teen Jok.

Thinking back to the Balinese songket, Dorothy had picked a runner as the easiest format to find a home for in our crowded home. You’d never cut up the all-over Teen Jok. It would have to be a wall hanging, and empty walls don’t exist in our home. Arguably I should have gone back to the second studio to get the beautiful sarong piece, as Dorothy would have turned that into a lovely skirt. But I settled for the runner, which was hardly settling.

I asked, by the way, and that 6 ½ foot long runner took six weeks to complete.

I feel obligated to share that Cartoon was a great companion. She didn’t know anything about textiles when we set out, and it was a delight seeing comprehension blossom as she realized just how unlikely and magical the weaving is.

She also taught me two new Thai words: beautiful and delicious. Beautiful (suay) was for the weaving and delicious (aroy) was for lunch. Aroy was easy, but I still haven’t mastered suay. First, that’s a very slippery diphthong in the middle which I still don’t quite have. Second, it’s said with a rising tone at the end. That would be ok, but if you muff that and use a falling tone it means ugly.

That’s not OK. If the rising tone means beautiful, the falling tone should mean bathtub. No way should it be an antonym. Also, when I flub the diphthong, it feels like I’m being intentionally misunderstood, like how the French pretend not to understand when you say kroi-sant instead of kwa-sahnt. They know what you mean, they’re just being French.

I feel like suay, even with a slurry diphthong, should be intelligible from context. I clearly don’t mean bathtub. But I suppose if someone foreign, say French, for example, told us that something was betty-fail, it might take a minute to catch up.

A quick lunch stop and three hours driving to get home. On our way back the way we’d come into town we passed another half dozen studios we’d missed on the way in, when we didn’t know what we were looking for.

Wovens & Embroidery

The wovens were one of the few places in the panoply of Thai textiles that landed in between cheap crap and debt financing. Lokna Naono hit that middle nicely.

On the other hand, Srisanpanmai, in the upscale Nimman neighborhood, was at the trust fund end of the spectrum. They carried two things, primarily. Some excellent Teen Jok, for everyone who couldn’t make it to Mae Chaem (which was everyone but me), and antique (is 50 years old antique, or just used?) wovens from Burma/Myanmar. The Teen Joks started at about 15,000฿ ($460 USD). For comparison’s sake, the Teen Jok in Mae Chaem was 2,500฿ to 5,000฿. The Burmese wovens were priced from 15,000฿ to 30,000฿. Spectacular goods, but not even at my craziest…

While Mae Chaem’s Teen Jok weaving was almost exclusively the six inch border, the specimens at Srisanpanmai mostly featured more generous expanses of the weaving. Not enough to cover the cost differential, but enough to narrow the gap.

The Burmese wovens were all cut and sewn into wrap skirts. You could pick the stitches out and return them to fabric, but that just made the pricing even harder to swallow.

And some beautiful embroidery, too spendy for us.

Ban Don Luang Weaving Village or Bust…

As it happened, bust.

After our success finding the Teen Jok in Mae Chaem, Cartoon and I got the band back together and headed out to track down the weavers of fine cottons clustered in Ban Don Luang.

But first, please join me at the sidebar. Bloggers. Hey! Over here. I beg of you, date your blog posts. Is that asking too much? Whatever platform you’re using keeps track of publication dates. It’s a data element you can choose to display or not, and for some reason so many of you choose not to display it. All of my blog posts have publication dates, because their absence doesn’t make your posts timeless. It makes them garbage.

OK, thanks.

My point being that whatever I read about Ban Don Luang Weaving Village must have been pretty old, because it simply wasn’t true any longer. The town still had the profusion of inexpensive clothing shops I’d read about, but the actual weavers were almost completely gone.

Through much discussion with locals we managed to find two studios still engaged in weaving, but they were both doing contract work for Chinese jobbers. Neither of them had so much as a showroom featuring their creations.

The proximate cause of the decline in weaving, as we were told, was the younger generation’s disinterest in long apprenticeships whose payoff was a lifetime of manual labor (the same reason the Burmese wovens from Srisanpanmai were all fifty years old). To be fair, neither of the workrooms we visited was producing the kind of artisanal products that deliver the pride in craft and culture that offsets the grueling work, so it’s tough to argue with the young’uns.

Still, weaving by hand is always a delight to witness first hand.

This was an interesting technique, using the stick to create the dimensional weft pattern.

For some reason, this charming creature asked my age. With Cartoon translating, I told her that I was 69 and she replied that she was 67. “So, if I was looking for a younger wife…” There was much merriment, while the other women assured me that they were all much younger. One of those unlikely contexts in which I look like a catch.

Sadly, I had to leave the trail of broken hearts behind me. Ban Don Luang was a bust, for both textiles and romance, and it was time for Cartoon and I to return to Chiang Mai, bloodied but unbowed. But Thailand’s textiles were anything but a bust, as my mudmee and Teen Jok purchases attested. Although Dorothy’s presence would have elevated and enriched the entire experience, I feel like I can leave Thailand with my head held high. I did pretty good, for a boy.

One hill village, one hot spring, and three color-coded temples. Let’s make a day of it.

Our guide was an irrepressibly chirpy woman who went by the nom de touriste of MM. When MM wanted to signal that something was true, she’d say “I confirm.” “It is very hot out today, I confirm.” She would do elaborate skits where she’d act out asking herself a question so she could answer it. “But MM, why are there no photos in the temple?” “Well, my dear…” We were all My dears. 100% charming.

The group was small, only five others besides me. An American man; two 18 year-old girls, one from Mexico and one from Spain, who’d met at a Danish international school and become fast friends; a French woman; and a grown-up Mexican woman. Maybe it was the small group and maybe it was just a random collection of friendly folk, but we all chatted amiably in different groupings all day. It was the most social group I’ve had on a tour, and it was a pleasure to spend the day with them.

Mae Khachan Karen Village

Thailand’s north is home to a number of hill tribes: Hmong, Karen, Lisu, and Akha. None of them are native to Thailand, having migrated from the north, mostly originating in China, over varying timespans. The Karen migrated from Burma/Myanmar starting as far back as the 1800s, with a large influx fleeing persecution in Myanmar in the 1980s.

As a result, every Karen village in Thailand is a refugee camp. Citizenship for Karen refugees is being slowly doled out, but most of the Karen are stateless, having only the most limited of rights, if any. Many of the Karen tribes follow the traditional practice of the women wearing brass neck rings, which is why you’ll see references to Karen Long Neck tribes. Mae Khachan is a Long Neck village.

I’m sure you’ll agree that that’s all kinds of fraught, and there’s an active debate about the ethics of visiting the Long Neck villages. The Con argument is that the villages are human zoos, and what the fuck is wrong with you? You monster. The Pro argument is that they charge a fee to enter the village and sell handicrafts that they make or resell, and without the income that tourists bring they’d die out as a distinct culture.

I obviously came down on the Pro side of that argument. Mostly because I wanted to make sure I brought money and left it with them, but also because the Con argument, while morally compelling at first glance, seems wrong to me. You could make that argument about any native village, and we’ve been to lots of them. They provide insight into different, compelling cultures and allow us to take home beautiful representations of those cultures. In exchange, we leave money behind. That seems to me the very essence of tourism, the alternative apparently being staying home.

We visited the rug weaving workshops in Teotitlán del Valle, outside Oaxaca. We visited Tenganan, a thousand-year-old Balinese village, to see the weavers of rare Geringsing double ikat. I visited a village outside Bangkok specializing in Benjarong ceramics. No one has suggested about those locations that visiting them was an unethical act that treated the residents as zoo animals.

Which leads to the only possible explanation, which is the neck rings. Treating the Karen as so exotic that visiting them in their village is deemed a form of colonial-style aggression is to infantilize them and other them in ways I find problematic. They have agency here, and they have chosen to open their village to tourists and sell their handicrafts to support their way of life. It seems like they should have the last word on that subject, not some pearl-clutching philosophy major.

MM started us with an introduction to the village’s guardians, a male and female figure right by the entrance. “But MM, why is there a statue with a penis?” I wasn’t curious about that in the slightest, as lingams seem super common in Southeast Asian art. I did wonder why she was stroking it. That seemed odd. “But MM, why are you treating the lingam like your long-lost best friend?” Neither she nor I asked, so we were all just left to wonder.

She explained that starting as young girls, lingam carvings were worn as a kind of protection, and that her mother had gifted her first lingam charm when she was eight. Wha?! Since when have penises protected women? Women need protection from penises, not by them. No questions, though. I just wanted her to loosen her grip so we could move on.

When MM had gone over the itinerary in the van, I was concerned because only half an hour had been allocated to the Karen village. I was afraid we were going to one of the smaller villages, and was concerned that there would be no mercantile opportunities, which was kind of the whole point for me. If I couldn’t leave money behind, the Con argument carried more weight. MM assured me that there were handicrafts available, so I relaxed.

Half an hour turned out to be perfectly adequate for exploring the small village. Especially since no one spoke English. I’d have definitely sat down for a conversation, had one been on offer. The village boasted about twenty stalls with women selling their weaving, as well as manufactured goods they were reselling.

The weaving is done on an old-style backstrap loom, and features wide, exposed floats, where the horizontal weft threads are skipped. This creates a distinctive design, but it also requires less materials and less time spent weaving. That hardly seems a coincidence, and wouldn’t be the first time that practical constraints drove creative decisions.

This picture is too good to bury in a slideshow. I didn’t pay anything to take pictures of people’s wares, but I just wanted a picture of this beautiful family. The little girl is clutching the 20฿ note I tipped her. Children should totally get paid for being adorable. To be fair, she’s probably more than 20฿ of cute.

For accuracy’s sake, by the way, the Karen women don’t really have long necks. The rings push their collarbones down, which compresses their rib cages and makes their necks look unnaturally long. Is trick!

I left the Karen village feeling pretty good about the visit. The people were lovely and the weaving was excellent. I walked away with five scarves and a lighter wallet. Order had been restored.

Mae Khachan Hot Spring

This was more a roadside stop than an actual hot spring. MM admonished us that there was no swimming, but there were places where we could dunk our feet if we wanted to. I stuck a finger in that water, and there was nothing to worry about. No one who enjoyed having skin would even think of swimming in that water. Or even putting their feet in. Yowch!

Wat Rong Khun – The White Temple

The next batch of weird presented itself at the White Temple in Chiang Rai, and the Blue Temple that followed it on our tour. Both temples seemed at first blush to have been manufactured as tourist attractions. They seemed less like authentic Buddhist temples and more like temple-adjacent fever dreams. That feeling was reinforced when I learned that the White Temple was not a working monastery, like every other temple I’ve been to in Thailand. Not a monk to be found.

This fractal confection seemed to be cosplaying as a Buddhist temple, and the word that kept coming to mind was inauthentic. But that wasn’t quite right, as it was certainly an authentic artistic expression. It took a minute, but it finally clicked into place.

Our absolute sweet spot for crafts is when artisans take traditional techniques and rework them through a modern lens. That’s not a lack of authenticity, it’s the precise method by which cultural traditions thrive and grow, rather than being preserved in the amber of custom. It’s the Mahler quote I used to describe the weavers we met in Teotitlán del Valle: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”

Looked at through that lens, the White Temple wasn’t the Disneyfication of a Buddhist temple for the entertainment of tourists, but a towering artistic achievement, the reimagining of an entire Buddhist temple as a work of modern art. That flipped my perspective completely.

When I got home, the interwebs taught me more about the White Temple than MM was able to share, confirming what I’d come to on site. First, Wat Rong Khun is not as sui generis as it seems. A temple of that name existed on the site, but had fallen into disrepair. With no funds available to renovate it, a local Chiang Rai artist, Chalermchai Kositpipat, decided to take on the work himself, and has poured more than $1.2M USD into his Buddhist money pit.

The White Temple was opened to the public in 1997. Kositpipat continues to work on it, with work scheduled to be completed by 2070. Presumably after his death. Rather than being a touristy gloss on a Buddhist temple, Kositpipat seems to mean it. He intends for there to be a real working monastery and meditation center, the whole complex sincerely meant as an offering to Buddha.

These are my favorite travel experiences, when the struggle to make sense of what I see leads to a broader, deeper understanding. In this case, it allowed me to fully sink into the White Temple’s ridiculous excess, without any niggling concerns about its authenticity.

While the Ubosot isn’t quite so sanctified that it bars women from entry, it is sacred enough that photos are not permitted. Which is a shame, because the interior makes the outside look sedate. Rather than the traditional Buddhist murals focused on karma and rebirth, Kositpipat has let himself go apeshit. It’s his money, after all.

Images from pop culture and recent history serve Kositpipat’s perspective about the perniciousness of overconsumption and Western cultural influences. This manifests as images that range from Michael Jackson to the World Trade Centers, from Angry Birds to mushroom clouds. But don’t be sad that I couldn’t take pictures. I’m happy to scrape the web for these photos from travelphotoreport.com. Not sure why they were permitted to take photos and I wasn’t (am I not a journalist?), but these exist and that’s a good thing.

The backside of the Ubosot is just as deliriously overwrought as the front.

The rest of the grounds may fail to live up to the insanely high standards of the primary temple, but there’s still another 44 years of work to be done. I believe in the vision. Which is not to say that there wasn’t plenty more weird on offer.

This looked like a sculpture, but on closer inspection it was a Buddhist Donation Station. For 30฿ you get a metallic lucky bodhi leaf that you inscribe with a wish and hang on the tree.

And fish feeding. I’m a sucker for feeding fish, I confirm. If you ever want to take advantage of me, take me to a koi pond and hand me fish pellets. I’ll be incapable of executive function and will sign whatever you put in front of me.

Sorry there are no 3d glasses for this.

And… There was merch.

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…”

Wat Rong Suea Ten – The Blue Temple

The Blue Temple is the White Temple writ small. Built by one of Kositpipat’s students, it opened to the public in 2016, and was likewise built on the site of a derelict temple. Unlike the White Temple, it’s not a Buddhist Winchester Mystery House. It’s more modest in scale, if just as outrageous in conception (OK, slightly less outrageous in conception), and is actually completed.

Thankfully, pictures were permitted inside the temple.

As spectacular as the entrance was, walking around the main temple offered up even more extravagant follies.

As elaborate as the design is, the site is basically the main temple and some modest, if ornately decorated, grounds.

And here we have the quintessence of the Thai temple experience: Monk’s bowls for a donation, and the source of that donation. No problem if you’re tapped out, step right up.

The reunion tour…

Wat Huay Pla Kang – The Red Temple

Our last stop in Chiang Rai was the Red Temple, another contemporary structure. It opened as a monastery in 2001 and was certified as a temple in 2009 by the National Buddhism Office. Which I did not make up. The National Buddhism Office is a real thing that exists.

The red temple of the Red Temple is actually a nine-tiered Chinese-style pagoda. But that’s OK. Buddhists are chill about that stuff, so it’s ok to let it go.

There was also a swell white stucco ordination hall.

But the payoff here isn’t the Red Temple at all. It’s the 80 meter tall statue of Guan Yin, the largest Guan Yin in all of Thailand. She sits on top of a hill and towers over the rest of the compound. And she is not a Buddha, a common misconception. She is the Goddess of Mercy in Chinese Buddhism, befitting the general Chinese flavor of the construction at this site.

It is very hard to judge scale, so let me help. You’ll notice that Guan Yin has two eye slits and a third eye in her forehead. Those are windows accessible from an observation deck. You take an elevator to get there, which lets you out on the 25th floor. That structure is over 250 feet tall.

You’ll be shocked to learn that the interior is overdecorated.

And there you have it. I had a wonderful tour. I’m using the same tour operator to visit the national park near Chiang Mai, Doi Inthanon, and I am gutted that MM won’t be the guide for that tour. I would follow her anywhere, I confirm.

The official story is that a monk named Sumanathera had a dream that led him to a location where he found a bone. Given that said bone exhibited magical powers (it glowed, it could vanish, it could move…) it was naturally deemed to be the shoulder bone of none other than Buddha himself.

A local king heard of it and demanded the monk bring it to him. On inspection, the magical bone played possum, and the king, seeing nothing but a random bone, passed. Another, presumably better king got a look, and the bone did its thing. Which thing involved breaking into two pieces. The king enshrined one in Wat Suan Dok, and placed the other, larger chunk of Buddha on the back of his prized white elephant which he set loose in the jungle.

The elephant wandered about, climbed Doi Suthep mountain, then called, appropriately, Doi Aoy Chang (Sugar Elephant Mountain). He looked around, trumpeted three times, and keeled over dead. Thus selecting Doi Suthep as the location to build the temple and the shrine to hold the Holy Shoulder Bone.

Still with me? Good. I knew you could do it. I believe in you.

Before we actually made it to Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, commonly referred to as simply Wat Doi Suthep (Phra That literally means Buddha relic), we had a stop for a pre-prayer. This was a roadside shrine to a famous monk who died in 1939. I offered a lotus flower whose petals I had folded myself into the appropriately respectful shape, a cluster of marigolds, incense, a candle, and a piece of gold leaf that I applied to the monk’s statue. It was quite the kit. Once our monk had been properly propitiated we were safe to move on to the temple itself.

I realize that I’ve failed to introduce our dramatis personae. My guide was Maggie and my driver was Mr. K. Thai names are typically ponderous aggregations, not unlike German portmanteaux, so everyone has chosen Anglicized nicknames. Maggie’s full name on WhatsApp is Margaret Maggie Rose. Sure it is. It’s not liked I asked to see her ID.

But the most salient feature of this tour, which I’d booked on GetYourGuide just the previous evening, is that Maggie and Mr. K were the only personae. I was the sole member of their group tour, and had them all to myself. Which was excellent, as the pacing and focus were 100% to my preference. It was, in all practical senses, a private tour.

The juicy temple bits are aloft, and there are two ways to get to the top of the mountain. A stairway of 309 steps, boasting the longest Naga balustrade in Thailand, or a funicular for an extra 50฿. Happy to walk down 309 steps, but it was the funicular to go up. Maggie was relieved.

Until about 30 years ago, the alternative to the 309 steps was a basket system that involved pulleys and ropes. The funicular was built after that arrangement failed, leading to multiple deaths. If you do make the ascent by steps, you’re rewarded with a statue of the famous white elephant. I saw him at the top of the stairs on the way down, but he’s your greeter if you’re coming up.

While Wat Soi Duthep has all of the expected accoutrements of a Buddhist temple, the highlight, and the reason it’s so famous and revered, is the massive stupa holding the Buddha Bone . It’s the OG stupa, dating all the way back to the construction of 1383, with a fresh coat of gold to keep it looking sharp.

The plaza surrounding the Golden Stupa (which sounds like a prize from a Buddhist Willy Wonka) is just as gilt and spectacular as the stupa itself, home as it is to so very many golden Buddhas. Maggie explained that the aspirationally holy are supposed to make three counterclockwise trips around the plaza, circling the stupa. After a single circuit my eyes were swirly, so we deemed it holy enough.

The plaza with the Golden Stupa was hardly the last word in Wat Doi Suthep’s splendors. This was probably the finest Thai temple I visited, and well worth the trip. Exemplary.

The back end of the day’s tour was a visit to San Kamphaeng, a town known for its high-end craft factories. You can read about that part of the tour here. But before we got there, we stopped for lunch at a restaurant with delightful grounds.

All About Me!

When I was consulting, an Indian colleague and I had a gig that lasted almost two years. So long that it was cheaper to pay for my hotel room by the month than four days every week around weekends at home. It was great. I had the hotel remove furniture I didn’t need. I went to Ikea to decorate. I set up a more robust liquor cabinet than could possibly be arranged for multiple short-term stays. I had my dry cleaning and laundry done there, so all I traveled with was a briefcase and my laptop.

But this idyllic arrangement had one notable downside. The hotel employed a greeter, a woman who patrolled the lobby in order to be helpful to guests. Because we were long-term regulars she knew us. And boy, did we know her. We knew the names and ages of her children, all their salient illnesses and achievements, her political beliefs, and what neighborhood she lived in. It got to the point that we dreaded crossing the lobby.

When we returned to the hotel from work we’d peer around the corner to see if she was occupied so we could cross to the elevator without getting buttonholed. One day we were scoping the lobby and saw her deep in conversation with a fresh victim. My colleague turned to me and said, “It is safe to walk near the tiger if it is already feeding.” So very true.

The thing about most tourists is that they love getting pictures of themselves at whatever monument or landmark they’re visiting. Proof, I suppose. And the thing about tour guides is they know this, so they’re constantly taking pictures of people with their phones. Often, if the spot is Gram-friendly, they’ll line up for their pictures. It’s easy to dance past without getting snared. The tiger is feeding.

In this circumstance, though, on what had become a solo tour, I was all there was for the tiger to feed on. There was no getting around it. Pictures would be taken. And so I offer you, who have so often scolded us for not taking pictures of ourselves, an entire gallery of Me. Under the general rubric of Be careful what you wish for. Especially considering that these are the highlights of almost 100 pictures she took. This is the cream. Sad.

Captain All-Thumbs

I’m Marc-Fucking-Bolan, y’all!

Hey, hey, it’s a monk!

Well, I love that holy water. [Oh Boston, you’re my home.]

My Life In The Ghost Of Bush

As some of you know, and most of you probably don’t, I was, briefly, a pornographer. I’d started a graphic design firm with DC Comics’ Director of Design after leaving DC, but after multiple years it clearly wasn’t going to turn the corner so I moved on. To… nothing? I didn’t really have a post-Brainstorm plan, except that I needed a job.

Back in them days, we found jobs through newspapers, and the Times classifieds offered up an editorial position. I’d been an editor. I could do that. I called and set up an appointment. The ad had mentioned Adult, but I didn’t honestly have a clear conception of what that meant. Editing the next Fanny Hill?

Not quite. It meant picking up the editorial reins at Hawk, the title in High Society‘s stable devoted to the dewiest of legally photographable models. Which was funny, because we had a weekly editorial meeting where the editors of all the different magazines got together to share submissions they’d received from photographers to determine which of the mags, if any, was a fitting home.

We’d pass around one set of photos at a time, and inevitably just as I said, “She’s kinda hot,” someone else chimed in with, “Too old.” The joke was that they should start an over-40 magazine for me, and how sad that I’d been stuck with Hawk.

But Hawk it was, and I’d picked up an issue that was only partially completed when I started, so I had to finish it up. I maintained the previous editor’s nom du porn, as I quickly intuited how much our readers valued continuity. Henceforth, I was professionally known as Alphonse Romano.

I lasted not quite three months, and thus had one issue that had been completely produced under my version of Alphonse. I was very proud of that issue. For those curious, which is asymptotically approaching none of you, my job consisted of picking photo sets, choosing the pictures that we’d use for publication, and writing the copy that went alongside those photos.

The copywriting was my specialty. I couldn’t manufacture erotic prose to save my life, but I was the king of tortured metaphor. Another magazine’s editor came to me once desperate for help. He was on deadline to close his book for press and he had nothing to publish in the Letters to the Editor section. He said he needed one on Topic A, one on Topic B, and another that he didn’t care about. He specified word count and begged me for help.

About fifteen minutes later I gave him three letters. He looked them over with a puzzled expression. “These are all good. I can use all of them. Did you just write these now?” “Is it supposed to take longer?” And that was that. I was unofficial ghostwriter for every magazine in the stable.

I know some of you will be shocked, shocked, to learn that the letters to the editor weren’t from actual readers. I want to assure you that Hawk had higher editorial standards than that. For my one and only issue I had three letters from actual readers, more or less copyedited, as circumstance dictated.

Was I concerned that 100% of Hawk‘s letters to the editor came in envelopes that featured stamps on the outside reading, “The Warden has reviewed the contents of this letter and approved it for release”? Maybe a little, but at least it gave me a clear picture of our market. It did make me wonder, given what I received, what didn’t make the Warden’s cut.

I proudly took the letters to the publisher, who, without reading them, pointed to the longest one and said, “Too long. Cut it in half.” Which I did, of course, albeit grudgingly. But I now had to manufacture a fourth letter from scratch to fill the void, as the three letters I’d chosen were the only ones I’d received that could be massaged into publishable form. It became a parlor game at our house. When we had new friends over I’d hand them my issue of Hawk and ask them to guess which of the letters I’d written. We never had prizes for correct answers, which seems wrong in retrospect.

The copywriting became a push-your-luck game for me. I wanted to find the line they wouldn’t cross, for sport, so I kept pushing the boundaries, writing more and more outlandish nonsense, praying for something to be rejected. Just so I’d know. As it happened, I only ever got one line of copy sent back. There was a feature in Hawk that I, of course, maintained. It was a double-page spread of a brownstone’s windows, alluringly titled Hawk’s Rear Window.

I took promotional stills from porn videos that had been sent to us and dropped them into the window frames, like we were peeking into the windows and watching people have sex. Good times. Nothing mixes better than poor taste and copyright infringement. We rationalized that we were promoting their films, even though there were never credits, and that the photos had been sent to us and we were using them. Wasn’t that the point? No one ever complained, so I guess that was the point.

But the feature wasn’t complete without captions. Funny captions, according to this Alphonse. And that’s what finally got sent back. I used a photo of seven girls kneeling in a row with their butts to the camera. The caption? “This episode of Sesame Street is brought to you by the number Seven.” Curiously, they didn’t care about the highjacking of someone else’s corporate IP for salacious purposes. I had made reference to a children’s show, and any allusion to children, no matter how vague or abstract, was off limits. Which appeared to be their only line. Nothing else ever got sent back, so, question answered.

My reason for this lengthy digression, and if you’ve made it this far you must be boiling with curiosity, is that I can’t write photo captions for the blog slideshows without thinking of Hawk’s Rear Window. It transports me back to those halcyon days spent with a light box and a loupe.

As a coda, as if necessary, when I finally got a real job Dorothy and I discussed the best I’m-outta-here message. I favored “I have to leave while I can still masturbate,” but calmer heads prevailed. “I know my son is only two, but all I can think about is career day at grade school.” Message delivered, message accepted, next chapter commenced.

Defying any sense of narrative structure, as my career did, that next chapter was as the Technology & Operations Director at a Manhattan advertising agency. Because why the hell not.

Spoiler: it ended weird.

Not unlike this blog post.

P.S. I apologize that this section is nothing but text. But trust me. You don’t want pictures from Hawk.

Fine, you pervert. Here’s the cover of the issue that’s mine, all mine. Well, technically it’s Alphonse’s. You are hereby warned.

I think it’s mostly ③ with a side order of ②, but I must soldier on, even with my paltry resources.

One of the biggest challenges is that quality and price don’t seem to be on a spectrum here. They’re a binary, with cheap tourist crap at one end, heirloom artisanal hoohah on the other, and precious little in between. On the one hand, that meant I wouldn’t be coming back with crappy merch, and on the other it meant I’d have to make sure I didn’t overspend for a signature piece of questionable (i.e. my) taste. As Dorothy will attest, threading needles is not my specialty.

There were definitely winners in the Thai handicrafts mix, but plenty of losers, too.

Chatuchak Weekend Market

One of my first stops in Bangkok was the Chatuchak Weekend Market, which purported to be the major crafts and textile market. As you can see, it’s a beast.

Also, less than intuitive to navigate. I had read that the textiles were to be found in Stall 25. I found Stall 24 and Stall 26, but no 25. I asked a security guard to help, and he took me to 25, which I couldn’t find by myself because they were in the following order: 24/26/25… Of course. Silly me.

Also, very little fabric in Stall 25, or elsewhere. I took what I believed were two full, exhausting turns around the market and never saw any concentration of textile shops. The odd one, randomly dropped, but no sector. And most of what was there fell on the Cheap Tourist Merch end of the spectrum.

Even merch can be, comparatively, quality, and Chatuchak definitely offered quality merch.

One shop had every flavor of Ganesha imaginable. Merch, for sure, but I honestly wanted every one. I’m easily beguiled. On the other hand, these are objectively adorable.

And there was even a little bit of fabric.

Warorot Market

Chiang Mai also has a primary textile market, or so the legend goes, the Warorot. Turns out that’s trueish. Warorot is a large market with a lot of crafts and manufactured goods, as well as a produce market, and a few textile shops. The real textile shops are on the streets surrounding the market. The closest I could come to identifying them was the vague advice to “Walk around outside the market. You’ll find them.” Which I did, but not until my second visit.

These are not quality goods, however. These shops carry commercially produced bolt goods, not artisanal wovens. No Thai silk, and none of the mudmee, the Thai ikat, produced in the north, which is what I was really hunting for. I’d seen a little mudmee in Bangkok, but Chiang Mai felt like it should be the source. Yes, of course, but not at Warorot, as I’d been led to believe.

There were quite a few shops in the streets around Warorot featuring Hill Tribe-styled clothing. There are a number of ethnic hill tribes in the north of Thailand: Hmong, Karen, Lisu, and Akha.

Starting in the 1980s, the brightly colored embroidered fabrics made by the Hill Tribes caught on as fashion, and demand, as it does, began to outstrip supply. The traditional Hill Tribe embroidery is time consuming to make, and that simply won’t do when the market demands volume.

You’ll be shocked to hear that it’s very difficult to find authentic Hill Tribe textiles or clothes today. What’s on the market now are manufactured goods made in the Hill Tribe style, including, even, printed knockoffs of embroidered patterns. That’s almost exclusively what’s to be found around Warorot.

Chinatown’s Sampeng Lane

Bangkok’s Chinatown was another place that was supposed to feature fabric, but I never really found it. It’s a dense warren of narrow lanes that’s pretty confusing to navigate. I did see a few fabric shops, but they were selling cheap cottons and rayons, not quality goods. Dense and interesting, but the hunt continues.

Song Wat Road

Hard by Chinatown, right by the river, Song Wat Road is an up and coming neighborhood with some pioneer boutiques opening up. In a couple of years I’m sure it will be much less commercial, much more gentrified.

This was probably the closest I came to the missing middle part of the spectrum: affordable craft goods made by real people, not stamped out of factories.

Pak Khlong Talat Flower Market

You may certainly argue that a flower market hardly qualifies as crafts. You may also get your own blog and taxonomize the world however you like. But this is my blog, buster, and I say that Bangkok’s Pak Khlong Talat Flower Market is displaying crafts.

One of the most notable things about this market is that it smelled good to me. That may not sound like much to you, but I pretty much lost my sense of smell some years back. I went to an ENT recently, whose qualified medical response was, “Huh.” I hope he’s still paying off his student loans.

My nose isn’t completely dead, just mostly. If you dropped me off blindfolded in a wet market, and please don’t, I’d know. I might even be able to tell if I’d been left in livestock or fish. But an odor has to be pretty strong to register, so the flower market was a pleasant surprise.

Shocking no one, the area around the flower market was also given over to flowers.

Jing Jai Market

Another Bangkok market that offered craft goods in the rare middle of the price/quality spectrum. Jing Jai sprawled across a large, non-linear space, so it was hard to make sure you’d seen it all. It even had its own dedicated farmer’s market.

Srinagarindra Train Night Market

Bangkok’s most massive night market. This one boasts over 2,000 vendors and an unknown amount of acreage. It big. It also has a weird specialty: antique furniture and vintage clothes. Crafts per se, not so much. But excellent food and a very entertaining evening. Also a ton of nail salons and tattoo parlors had stalls, but not a single massage spa. If there’s a Guinness record for Fewest Massage Spas Per Square Mile in Thailand, Srinagarindra is the obvious record holder.

It was also a profoundly local experience. It took the fingers of both hands to count the other farangs I saw, but that’s all it took.

ICONSIAM

ICONSIAM is one of Bangkok’s newest megamall experiences, having opened in 2020. Sitting directly on the Chao Phraya river (I arrived by ferry from the other side), ICONSIAM boasts >5.5M sqft of retail space, a 3000 seat auditorium, two residential towers (52 & 70 stories) with 446 units, a >110,000 sqft waterfront park. And a Hil-ton ♫in a pear tree♬.

It has a fuller complement of luxury brands than even the other Bangkok malls: Prada, Armani, Hermés, Cartier, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Tiffany, Gucci, Balenciaga… None of which are the reasons I went. It also has a couple of floors devoted to ICONCRAFT, showcasing handmade goods from local artisans. That was the draw.

At the end of the day, it was long on spectacle and short on crafts. They had a few pretty things, but the selection seemed much ado about not much.

Nothing says luxury like calling out the Singapore airport.

Chamchaa Market

How many ways is it possible to fuck up a simple shopping excursion? I am so glad you asked that question. Spoiler: all of them. You can fuck up a simple shopping excursion all of the ways.

Dorothy had found a site aggregating dozens of specialty craft makers in Chiang Mai. One of them had their shop in Chamchaa Market, about 25 minutes from my apartment by Grab, so I thought that would be a worthwhile excursion. I pulled them up on Google Maps, and then opened Grab to see how much it would cost to get there. All the deets seemed perfectly reasonable, and I added Chamchaa to my To Do list.

Next thing I hear is my phone chirping. It’s the Grab app telling me that my driver is on their way. I must have inadvertently hit the Book button when I set my phone down. And the driver wasn’t the typical 8-10 Grab minutes away. They were two minutes away.

I apologize for the image, but it’s important to note that I spend almost all of my time in the apartment in my panties. I don’t like to run the A/C, so I keep a table fan turned on me and bask in the comparative coolth. That meant that when the app chimed, I had two minutes to throw on clothes, grab my bag, and make it down by elevator from the ninth floor.

Which I did, with only a modest helping of agita. First hurdle cleared. Then my driver pulls up and tells me that Chamchaa is outside of Grab’s Chiang Mai zone, so while she can take me there, I won’t be able to get a Grab back, and she won’t be able to pick up a fare to return to town. I ask if she’d wait for me while I shopped and take me back, for which I’d pay her cash outside of Grab. We agreed on a price and took off. Second hurdle cleared.

When we arrived, it was to a suspiciously deserted market.

Further inspection revealed this:

It was a fucking weekend market. Which I’d arrived at on a Monday. Final hurdle: tripped over and faceplanted. Whaddaya gonna do? The whole escapade was so ridiculous, the only appropriate response was to laugh at the absurdity.

Chiang Mai Old City Elephants

My mother, Jackie, collected elephant figurines. She had quite an impressive collection. I asked her once what that was all about, and she told me that someone had given her an elephant once as a gift, and then someone else had come over and seen the elephant and brought her another, and it just kept snowballing and that if I ever brought her an elephant figurine as a gift she’d be delighted to kill me.

You can imagine how hard it was not to bring her elephants after learning that, but I was a good son and controlled my urges. Still, I’m grateful she died before I visited Thailand, because I’d have broken down and brought her multiple elephant figurines. They’re hard to escape here, and they made me think very fondly of the crusty old broad.

Nimman

The Nimman district, where I’m staying in Chiang Mai, is full of shops that fall squarely in the otherwise empty middle of the price/quality binary.

Now we come to the winners. Textiles, obviously, clothes, no surprise, but also some unexpected ceramics and lacquerware.

Benjarong Porcelain Village

First up, Benjarong. The word is a mashup of Balinese and Sanskrit that means “five colors,” but modern Benjarong can be anywhere from three to eight colors, or more.

Benjarong dates back to Ming Dynasty China, circa 13th century, and was exclusive, in the beginning, to the royal court. It migrated to Thailand about 600 years ago when a Chinese princess married into Siamese royalty. The technique is notable because it gets kiln-fired after every color, an incredibly labor intensive approach that pops the colors and gives the surface depth. It’s a rich, sumptuous effect. And if you sense more than a whiff of chinoiserie in the designs, that’s its geographic origins leaking through.

The Benjarong Porcelain Village, Don Kai Dee, is about 1:15 west of Bangkok by car. Except that there’s no way for tourists to get there, which is baffling. It’s not on any tours, and while you can take public transit part of the way, you’re finding a tuktuk for the last bit, making it about 3 hours each way. You could rent a car, but how many tourists are doing either of those things? Way too much friction.

There are shops in Bangkok that have some Benjarong, but there’s a whole fucking village producing it well within tour range. Why isn’t it promoted and easy to get to? The place was deserted while I was there. There were three other people: a farang with a Thai wife and her mother. They’d driven there in their car. I had to suborn a Grab driver to work off app in order to get there. It’s just crazy. This is serious Thai cultural heritage, and it’s treated like a state secret.

But I am brave and intrepid, so I got to go. And you get to ride along.

Benjarong comes in three design patterns: geometric/floral, figurative, and portraiture. I’ll sorta apologize for how many pictures there are of this stuff, but the breadth of the designs was wild. Maybe it was confirmation bias because my rent-a-driver cost $65, but I thought this stuff was the bomb.

I was most attracted to the florals and geometrics. The figurative stuff, although undeniably awesome, had too strong a chinoiserie flavor for my taste.

There were even a handful of practical items. Not that bowls aren’t practical.

I saw exactly two paintings done in Benjarong, and man was I tempted. The only thing holding me back was my uncertainty about how to manage transit home without it getting broken. I would 100% have bought one if I could have imagined that solution.

What actually made it home? It was so hard to choose. I felt Dorothy’s absence keenly. I left with a footed dish, a covered bowl, and *shhh* earrings. Don’t tell her, OK?

San Kamphaeng

The quaint hamlet of San Kamphaeng sits about 25km and 40 minutes west of Chiang Mai. It is known specifically for its cluster of high-end craft shops. And I do mean high-end. These shops epitomized the expensive end of the Thai craft binary. In fact, only a few of them had anything affordable at all. Absolutely beautiful work, but most of it pitched to trust fund babies. Fine. Bring on the hunt.

San Kamphaeng was the tail on a day trip to Wat Doi Suthep, but right outside the temple, even before we left, there was a high-end jade outlet, the Orchid Jade Factory.

In San Kamphaeng itself we stopped at a gemstone jeweler, a lacquerware maker, a silk weaver, and a celadon ceramics shop. All of which were outlandishly expensive. But I was able to find a pretty piece of affordable lacquerware and a nice celadon bowl. I am brave, intrepid hunter.

This is the hall of ridiculous gemstones. I asked about a pair of earrings with the smallest possible jadeite stones I saw: $460.

Next up, the lacquerware. During the demonstration she kept taking a lighter to the finished lacquerware, to prove… that you could take a lighter to the finished lacquerware? Sadly, they wouldn’t let me take pictures in the shop.

My purchase.

Then we went to a Thai silk maker. They raised their own silkworms and fed them mulberry leaves, which is where the classic Thai golden silk comes from. I’d never actually seen the silk thread being extracted from the cocoons, so that was pretty cool.

The final stop in San Kamphaeng was Baan Celadon, another fully vertical enterprise.

Thankfully, no restrictions on photography in the shop.

Clothing

I think I’ve been comfortable buying clothing for myself because I haven’t had to triangulate with Dorothy’s exceptional taste. I kept looking at stuff saying, “Well, I think that’s swell, but what would someone with taste and discretion be attracted to?” That’s a sucker’s game, but I didn’t have to play it shopping for my own clothes. Dorothy already knows I’m immune to the eyebrow, and she’s resigned to being seen in public with me no matter what I’m wearing. Bless her soul.

The Terminal 21 mall, just a few minutes walk from my Bangkok condo, was a treasure box. Each floor was themed to a location, and for some random reason the London floor was all independent menswear shops. It was easy for me stop in after dinner and find another shop I’d somehow missed on previous visits. Then it wasn’t, which was OK, because Chiang Mai.

Here’s a few things I picked up on the Chiang Mai portion of the itinerary.

Textiles

Not a one of you will be surprised that the big win in Thai crafts is textiles. Every country we’ve visited in Southeast Asia has specialized in some kind of hyperlocal weaving technique that, on close inspection, boggles the mind, and Thailand is no exception.

I’d intended to cover textiles in this post, but I think this has gone on long enough. You can find the textiles post here. After you’ve had a chance to recover from this post.

Thailand is blessed, in the south, with beautiful beaches and islands. Chiang Mai, in the landlocked North, not so much. Thus, we have the Grand Canyon Water Park, an abandoned limestone quarry about 30 km southwest of Chiang Mai. There were several pickup windows, but I opted for the 9:30 shuttle, which picked up at my condo, in order to beat the worst of the afternoon heat.

There were two British gals in the van, and when we arrived we discovered that we were the only attendees. The place was empty, which was weird. Then they held back, to see if it picked up, I assume, leaving me to navigate the place all by myself. Which was weird.

I’d looked at pictures before going, so I realized that most of it was like a floating bouncy castle crossed with American Gladiator. Not my jam, but I figured I could bat at that a little bit and then relax in whatever they had set aside for lolling. Except there wasn’t anything set aside for lolling. It was all obstacle course.

What’s a 69 year-old man to do except press on as if he couldn’t imagine how he’d feel the day after? I mean, what were my options? Well, the water was actually quite a bit warmer than it looked, and life jackets were a requirement, so one of my options could easily have been just relaxing and bobbing in the water. Of which I did some. But mostly I climbed and clambered and crawled and fell into the water and pulled myself back up. With, as it happens, no regard at all for how I’d feel the day after. Spoiler: really, really sore. And for more than just the day after.

But it was curiously fun, and made much more sense as the morning wore on and more people showed up. It’s a place that operates best when full. Which also gave me ample opportunity to take pictures of activities I had no interest in participating in myself. Which was quite a few of them.

Several items were verboten in the water: glasses, hats, phones. You were going to tumble into the water, so that made sense. But I had a dry pouch for my phone and found a few vantage points that seemed stable enough to keep me from falling in while holding my unsheathed phone.

One challenge was the giant sprinkler heads which shot water all over the park. While they obviously used quarry water, aerosolizing it and spraying it made it noticeably colder than the lake water. I tried to find a dry spot where the streams from multiple sprinklers didn’t intersect, but no such luck. Which meant that while I was braced to keep from falling off a floating, inflated platform while I took pictures and video, I often forgot that I was never more than a few moments away from being completely doused in cold water, phone and all.

Which is my way of apologizing in advance for the shakier-than-usual camera work. I was standing on something that was moving underneath me, and which could jump violently if some mook came running down the same section I was on.

While there was plenty of solo climbing and scrambling, there were tons of group activities, many of which fostered displays of performative masculinity that, interestingly, weren’t confined to men. There were squads of womenfolk willing to push the boundaries of common sense if it meant they could show off. It was a very egalitarian demonstration of stupidity. The dream is alive.

There was a floating soccer pitch.

Here it is with pratfalls. Always an improvement.

There was also a floating badminton/volleyball court.

There were slides, one of which released close enough to the water that even I was willing to try it.

The others? Nope. Check that close one, which has a wicked scoop at the end, to help get that last little bit of stomach churning loft.

Here it is in nausea-inducing action.

A closer look? Sure.

There was quite a bit of equipment available.

There was also whatever this is:

I love everyone’s confidence in this clip that they are the one who’ll maintain their balance.

But the absolute acme, the pinnacle, was the Pillow Bounce. It was like a trust fall for profoundly untrustworthy people. I have multiple clips, because I was transfixed. Here’s the lifeguard showing how its done.

Here’s civilians, not entirely in sync.

You don’t have to watch all of these. Although this one’s pretty good.

I saved the best for last. I apologize for losing the end of that spectacular finish, but someone came running down the inflatable lane and I was lucky to not go completely ass over teacups. Still, plenty awesome.

There was even a performance, right before I left. It answered this question: Why is there someone down there wearing a lamé dragon costume?

I should have known. A dragon in the first act…

Those little white skimmers the performers were riding were available for patrons to try before the show. No one got farther than about two leg pumps before slow motion sinking. Is it schadenfreude if it’s funny?

I love that the superhero didn’t make it to the end of the zip line and had to be rescued. By a blue-suited monkey? My admission came with a zip line ticket, which I gifted to the British gals so one of them could go twice. I could close my eyes and visualize the firehose of vomit that I’d rain down like one of the sprinkler heads if I were foolish enough to zip line.

And finally, no water park would, apparently, be complete without cheesy, inexplicable décor.

And thus I drag my weary body back up to meet the van that will return me to my condo. Where, once I’ve relaxed, I’ll realize that I’m not weary so much as very, very sore. Every time I fell into the water I had to haul myself back up hand over hand on the grips. I am still sore, several days later, in places I didn’t know could hurt.

Hopefully, this thing that’s keeping me young won’t kill me.