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.

There isn’t actually a ton of difference between inside the Old City and outside. There are old buildings and new buildings on both sides of the moat. The biggest distinction is that the Old City holds Chiang Mai’s densest concentration of temples, all within a single day’s walking tour. I took more than one day. Because hot.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t excellent buildings in the Old City.

Wat Lok Moli

I found Wat Lok Moli just a couple of days into my stay. It’s right across the street from the moat, so it’s not technically in the Old City. It appeared to have some serious years under its belt, warranting crossing the street. That’s a commitment here.

It turns out I wasn’t wrong. No one knows its actual construction date, but it’s mentioned in official documents as early as 1367, making it one of Chiang Mai’s oldest temples. They’ve also left the historical brick intact, as opposed to the common practice here of applying a fresh coat of stucco. Which I get, but which also makes brand new construction and historical sites indistinguishable from one another.

But that’s not what truly makes Wat Lok Moli special. It’s the golden rooster you fill with holy water, haul up to the Buddha by pulley, and tip over to water the plant at Buddha’s feet with said holy water. But I’m sure that was going to be your guess.

Wat Dab Pai

This wasn’t even on the walking tour itinerary I found of the Old City. Too minor to warrant mention. Which I kind of get, but still. That’s a pretty steep curve they’re grading on.

Wat Chiang Man

The Temple Of The Fortified City is also considered minor, but is notable because of its age and history. Built shortly after Chiang Mai’s founding in 1296, it’s of roughly the same vintage as Wat Lok Moli. It’s old buildings are in shockingly good shape, a hallmark of Thailand’s temples.

But what it really has going on is the Sacred Elephant Encircled Stupa. Which entirely lives up to its billing.

Wat Phan Tao

You’ll be shocked to learn that Wat Phan Tao features a golden Buddha.

But what it really has that makes it special, to me, is the monk’s bowls. For 10฿ you got to pick up a cup of what I can only assume are toy coins, for depositing one-by-one into the monk’s bowls as an offering. The offering is obviously the 10฿, but there’s something soothing about walking around the monk’s bowls and dropping in one coin at a time. They may have been fake coins, but it felt like real mindfulness. Monks, amIright?

Wat Chedi Luang

The Temple of the Great Stupa is more than just a great stupa. It has all of the expected trappings, golden Buddhas and ornate architecture, but some unexpected ones, as well.

The first odd thing you see on entry is a No Girls Allowed clubhouse. It’s hard to piece the story together, but buried inside the temple is Chiang Mai’s City Pillar. Whatever that is. And as a sign helpfully points out, women aren’t allowed inside because they menstruate, and apparently men are creeped out by that and don’t like to be reminded? Even though women are permitted inside other temples?

To quote the sign: “Women are prohibited to enter because they menstruate. It is believed that it humiliates and ruins the sanctity of the city pillar. Besides, men who dress inappropriately are not allowed to walk in. It is believed that any disobeying of the rules will cause social instability.”

OK, that makes sense. It’s not the men who are creeped out by menstruation. It’s the city pillar, which can apparently sense ovaries from its underground crypt and translate its humiliation into aboveground riots. Got it.

Well, you’re in luck, because I went in and took pictures that I am now happy to share with my Friends with Ovaries (you know who you are). Hopefully, that doesn’t trigger the City Pillar from afar. If you read this and then discover that Chiang Mai has fallen to the hordes, you know which organ to blame.

We were promised a Great Stupa, and one was delivered, as advertised.

But Great as it was, the Great Stupa wasn’t Wat Chedi Luang’s highlight. To me, it was the main temple, which was basically a Dave & Buster’s for Buddhists.

That thin veneer of normalcy hid an interior chockablock with Buddhist enrichment stations, promising a shortcut to the divine for the price of just a few baht. Step right up!

Truthfully? That wasn’t the real highlight. That would be the Monk Chat, which I’d read about and was actually my primary reason for visiting Wat Chedi Luang. They have monk or monks sitting at tree-shaded tables all day, from about 9:00 – 6:00. They’re just sitting there waiting for a chat.

The ostensible reason is that it gives the monks an opportunity to practice their English, but it seems primarily a cultural exchange. Especially since our monk’s English scarcely needed any additional practice. He was good.

I sat with three Norwegian elementary school teachers-in-training, who were on a multi-week tour to prepare them to teach Nordic youngsters comparative religion. And, as promised, we chatted. We asked our monk how he spent his days and where he was headed post-monk training, and he asked about where we were from and what the ladies were learning on their junket. It was fabulous, and may be my favorite half hour in Thailand so far.

Wat Muen Tum

I stumbled on Wat Muen Tum, home to Thao Wessuwan, The God Of Fortune, on my way home from Wat Chedi Luang. Another minor site scarcely worth a mention in the guides.

The site was also distinguished by the crazy sculptures lining the outer wall.

King Mengrai Temple

This was the end of my first day’s tour, and was an appropriate bookend to the first temple I visited, Wat Dab Pai. Likewise, this was considered unremarkable and wasn’t on any of the walking tours I checked.

Wat Rajamontean

My second day’s temple tour: seven temples, eight miles, five hours. You’re so lucky I’m doing this for you. Seriously, you are not up to this. You should exercise more. And you’re definitely not drinking enough water.

Wat Rajamontean is known as The Dragon Temple. For, you know, dragons. It’s billed as the Old City temple with the greatest curb appeal, and that seems right.

Wat Khuan Khama

Wat Khuan Khama, for reasons that are unclear, is known as the Golden Horse Temple. It dates from 1492, and legend (or history, so hard to say) has it that the temple had been the garden for the royal horse groom. When his horse died the groom was sad, and donated his garden to be a temple in memoriam for his loyal steed.

Wat Hua Kuang

Also known as Wat Saen Mueang Ma Luang, Wat Hua Kuang’s trick is that it’s much larger than it appears. Its street face suggests a modest footprint, but it just keeps going back.

While there I heard a low hum and found the gong that had made the sound. It didn’t sound like a gong, though. It sounded like the sound the universe made while being born. This is actually from another temple and isn’t quite as resonant, but gets the idea across.

Wat Phra Sing

This is one of Chiang Mai’s big daddies, as evidenced by the 50฿ entrance fee, which only a few temples charge. Also known as the Temple of the Lion Buddha, Wat Phra Sing has much to offer. For one thing, it houses over 600 monks. It also sports a stone stupa from 1345 that is now completely encased in gold. Also, golden elephants! And a Hall of Lifelike Monks!!

Here’s an ancient stupa, lovingly berobed in gold like a Buddhist Jill Masterson.

Then there was the Hall of Lifelike Wax Monks.

There was also chanting in one of the temples. It was interesting because there were song books everywhere and civilians joining in on the chanting, which I’d thought was a monk-specific practice. I was also expecting something more Om-like than the actual chanting of words. Or lyrics, I suppose. But that’s the great thing about being ignorant. There’s so much to learn.

Wat Tung Yu

A smaller temple, but still with some choice bits.

Wat Phantao

Also known as the Monastery of a Thousand Kilns, Wat Phantao is another oldie, dating back to the 1300s. It gets its nickname from the fact that it was used as something of a factory, producing Buddha statues for other monasteries. I was hoping for something a shade more Dickensian workhouse, but there’s no trace of those kilns any longer.

Wat Sri Suphan

My final stop was farthest afield, and outside the Old City, about a ten-minute walk south of the moat. Wat Sri Suphan is situated in a neighborhood historically, and still, known for its silversmiths. As a result, the complex, including the Silver Pavilion, is all done up in silver metallic, made from aluminum, nickel, and a pinch of silver.

So much silver.

There was even a temple that wasn’t silver!

There was a Monk Chat here, as well, although I didn’t want to tarnish the memory of my earlier Monk Chat. The reason for all the monks is that just about every one of the temples I visited is a working monkery. I don’t know for a fact that they were all sleepaway; maybe some of them were monk day camps. But all of them provided monk training in exchange for monk labor.

Whew! That was, I think we can all agree, a lot of temples. Take your shoes off, put your feet up, and if you’re in Thailand, indulge yourself with a foot massage. You’ve earned it, soldier.

Although I still don’t think you’re hydrating properly.

My luck continues to hold on neighborhoods, as I’m once again in a great spot. I wanted to stay right in the Old City, but I also insisted on a pool. So, close to the Old City also works.

I’m on the edge of the Nimmanhaemin neighborhood, or Nimman for short. It’s the artsy, boutiquey part of town, so there’s plenty to see strolling of a sultry evening. Which is all of them. I have the best of both worlds.

It’s certainly nice to have access to culture and some of the big city amenities that weren’t available in Krabi. Of course, the trade is that there’s no ocean here. But there is a water feature! The perimeter of the Old City is delineated by a perfectly rectilinear moat, making it very easy to tell if you’re in the Old City’s one square mile or not.

The moat and fortifications date all the way back to 1296, so they truly mean Old City. Although I’m sure that name made no sense in 1296, when Chiang Mai was founded. “Don’t worry, someday…”

The Apartment

I’ve definitely noticed that Airbnbs seem less quaint since we’ve set up a home base in Chicago. It was one thing when we were unhomed, but now that we have a sanctuary I’m acutely aware of its absence. Our apartment is comfortable and delightful, and Chicago, on the last leg back, started to feel like home.

So my Airbnb is fine. I’ve just had to accept that Southeast Asian residences only have hot water in the shower. At least in this apartment there’s a faucet. My last couple of apartments have only had hot water out of the shower head, which is awkward. I’m pretty sure this is not an Airbnb trick for farangs, but how Southeast Asians live. I don’t let dishes sit and I’ve mastered the art of the cold water shave. We adapt.

Here’s another Southeast Asian oddity. What’s up with duvets instead of top sheets? Who fucking sleeps under a duvet in this heat? I’ve shopped for sheet sets in every country we’ve been to here and top sheets just don’t exist. I stooped to buying an empty duvet cover at the Ikea in Bangkok and pretending it’s a top sheet.

This would be easy to solve by cranking the AC up to ten, except for this notice left sitting on a bureau:

I reached out to the host to help me decode this cryptic message. 600 units per… what interval? Day, week, month? Month. OK, where can I monitor usage? Not possible. She has to come to the unit and read the meter after I’ve left and tell me if I’ve gone over. So, you want me to manage consumption of a resource without giving me any information as to how much of it I’m using? Well, as long as you don’t run the AC 24/7 you should be fine.

So I’m living like a monk, running the AC about ten minutes a day. Which should be fine? I’m certainly not going to run it while I sleep so I can warm up under their fucking duvet. That’s crazy.

Other than that, it’s well appointed and clean, with enough hangers (!) and a full complement of cookware and dishes. There’s plenty of cabinets and drawers, so I’m moved in nicely for my month in Chiang Mai. And there’s that pool…

The Hood

The area around my apartment is chock full. There’s shopping, dining, entertainment. I’m a fifteen minute walk from a mall with a hypermarché in the basement. It’s not like the Bangkok malls, which all seem to feature a host of small vendors doing interesting things. This mall, the Maya, is strictly chain stores, like American malls. But mighty convenient to have the hypermarché walking distance. It makes everything easy.

One lovely thing about the neighborhood is that the closest laundry service only charges 30฿/kg, which is about 94¢. Bangkok was 100฿/kg and even the hinterlands in Krabi was 50฿. It’s good to be king.

I’ve also been able to get back into my weekly massage protocol. My bout of food poisoning in Krabi left me unwilling to be operated like a bellows, the hallmark of traditional Thai massage, so I stepped away. Under the best of circumstances I struggle to avoid farting during a Thai massage, and those were hardly the best of circumstances.

Among other wonders, Chiang Mai offered my first massage by a ladyboy masseuse. She was unusually tall for a Thai woman, and was also in possession of unusually large hands and an unusually deep, gravelly voice. To top it off, she was the only one on staff at the spa wearing a mask, which conveniently hid her Adam’s apple.

All signs point to, but short of dispositive. The actual tell was hysterical, though. At one point she was manipulating my legs and told me to relax the muscle, that she didn’t want me to help. A little later this admonition was apparently necessary again, when she lightly slapped my thigh and said, “Don’t help! I don’t need your help.” No further questions, your honor.

As to whether the large, strong hands were a net benefit, I’d say yes in a regular massage and no for a Thai massage. Thai massage is like someone using you as a Yoga prop. “Hold still and I’ll put you in Downward Dog.” It’s about leverage more than pressure. In this case, I think she leaned on her strong hands too much, as there was more kneading and less stretching than I associate with Thai massage. What with me being an expert and all.

Night Markets

I think Chiang Mai might be Thai for Night Market. You can’t throw a lemur in this town without hitting a night market. Don’t ask how I know that.

For just one example, the Weekend Night Market butts right up against the Every-Day-Of-The-Week Night Market in an Ouroboros of trinkets and street food. Ubiquitous doesn’t begin to cover it.

And no visit to a new locale is complete without enjoying local packaging and design.

The problem with waterfalls is that their romance is undercut by their terrible cost: crisp mountain waters that deliver a cold shower more life-threatening than bracing. As much as I long to stand in the pool directly under the falls and let my soul be cleansed by the healing waters, ouch. I don’t think my soul has ever been properly cleansed while shivering. Thus, my dirty, dirty soul.

Would I be able to live the dream, letting the warm waterfall flow over me in a rhapsody of jungle bliss? Yeah, mostly.

But first, never let it be said that I am unwilling to humiliate myself for your entertainment. Because this tour was my second attempt at the hot springs waterfall, not my first.

One of the big questions many of you had as I embarked on solo travel was, “Is he smart enough to keep himself alive without his Jiminy Cricket?” We now have the answer to that question. Barely. Just barely.

The day before my scheduled tour I went swimming and had lunch at my usual beachside café. I’d been eating pretty native, but decided to treat myself to a comfort burger. I’d barely swallowed the first bite when I felt my stomach churn. “Well, that’s an odd coincidence,” I thought. “It can’t be the burger. That’s way too fast a response for food poisoning. Weird.”

So I finished the burger. Which ended precisely where you’d expect.

The next morning I’m waiting for the van in front of my hotel thinking, “Ooh, I don’t know.” Retching in the bushes was, thankfully, dispositive, and I called it off.

I rescheduled for a couple days later, figuring that should give me enough time to recover, and also because it was the last practical opportunity for me to take a day trip before I left Krabi for Chiang Mai. Once again, I’m waiting for the van downstairs, thinking, “Maybe I shouldn’t.” Which is confusing, because “Maybe I shouldn’t” occurs to me so rarely.

Maybe I shouldn’t, but I did. And it was fine. A little fraught, but fine. Still, you don’t miss your water ’til your well runs dry. I’m certain I’m safer with Jiminy along.

Namtok Ron

Namtok Ron starts with a lovely jungle walk before you reach the hot springs.

There are three distinct areas: the hot spring falls themselves and then two spa pools. The spa pools are filled from the same source, they’re just constructed pools instead of the natural falls.

Each of the three areas is also a completely different temperature. I’m not entirely sure how that works, but the waterfall pool is just a degree below body temperature, and the two spa pools are 104° and 113° (!) respectively. Or simmer, parboil, and rolling boil.

I started with the mildest, the waterfall pool, and discovered that it wasn’t quite what the word “waterfall” evoked. It was more spillway than falls, but it was delightful to cozy up in a stone nook and let the warm waters rush over and around me. Even though it wasn’t what I’d imagined, my inner curmudgeon was wet, warm, and pacified.

My intention had been to do them in ascending intensity, but I got the two spa pools mixed up and went in the 113° first. I was terrified of the last one, thinking that it was going to be even hotter, so I was relieved to find out that it was actually the middle pool.

This was not our first hot springs/hot air adventure, having dipped in Cleopatra’s Pool in Pammukale in Turkey. In that case the air temperature was a near-death 107°, as opposed to Krabi’s ~ 90°. Still, all three pools performed the neat trick of making the air seem cool on exit.

Emerald Pool

Like Namtok Ron, the Emerald Pool is part of the Khao Nor Chu Chi national park, so it was a short drive to our next stop. It started with a buffet lunch of flavorless hot-table food, for which I was profoundly grateful. The last thing I wanted was activity down there.

There were two additional pools besides Emerald: Crystal Pool and Blue Pool. Emerald was the only one of the three that was swimmable, and it was already a full kilometer walk from the entrance. I decided that the additional photo ops weren’t worth the risk. I bobbed in the Emerald Pool, held pretty still, and stayed close to a toilet.

The bobbing was excellent. Emerald Pool was only cool compared to our previous stop. The water temperature was like the beach at Ao Nang, where you could just walk in without that moment when you’re waist deep and you hold your breath and dunk yourself to get it over with quickly. I stayed in for pretty much the full hour we had there, without regrets. Warm water an impossible green. What’s to regret?

Wat Tham Suea

Our last stop was Wat Tham Suea, a temple complex that includes the temple and grounds, a Buddha on the Hill, and Tiger Cave. This didn’t sound as bad as the concentration camp that was added to the Bangkok waterfall tour as enrichment, but it also seemed a little off the mark. Like that Bangkok tour, the bulk of our day was spent swimming and hiking, so sure, toss in a temple. Knock yourself out.

Imagine my surprise (I’ll wait a moment while you do) when it turned out that Wat Tham Suea is one of my favorite temples that we’ve visited. I am going to have to retire the phrase, “The Liberace of churches,” but there’s a reason I keep using it. I’ve used it to describe the Guzman in Oaxaca and the San Cayetano in Guanajuato, and in both cases I was describing a kind of overwrought turducken of architectural ornamentation.

That’s less the case at Wat Tham Suea, which seems almost subtle in comparison, but is still utterly ridiculous in a way that warrants the Liberace callout. I’m prone to clown clothes, so it should be no surprise that architecture of the If-Some-Is-Good-More-Is-Better school would sing to me.

The first and most obvious attraction is the ground level temple. There’s also one up at the top of the mountain that everyone is happy to remind you is 1,260 steps and you’re probably not up to it. That temple is fairly new at about fifty years old, but the one at ground level is so new it’s still being worked on. Unlike Bangkok’s 300 year-old temples, which are just maintained so they look freshly built, Wat Tham Suea legit just opened to the public.

The interior lived up to the exterior’s promise.

I don’t know whether there had been a complex at ground level that had been razed or whether this was all sui generis new construction, but practically the entire site seemed like hard hats should be required. But they weren’t. No tort lawyers!

Where not under construction, the grounds offered ample eye candy.

Stairway to Heaven

I obviously wasn’t going to assay the 1,260 steps to the summit. Had I been tempted, the signs to that route were labeled Mountaineer, so yeah, no.

This warning was at the very foot of the steps.

While I didn’t see any monkeys (I think they’re mostly on the path to the summit) I kept a weather eye out for the little bandits. No one wants their stuff snalched. Least of all by thrieving monkeys.

And before you’re all, “It’s insensitive to mock people for making typos in a foreign language,” I will submit to you that if I made a sign in Thai and it contained errors, Thai speakers would be fully within their rights to mock me. I would even say that they were obliged to do so. And I would join them heartily.

Our guide, by the way, offered a long list of things we weren’t supposed to do with the monkeys. “Do not feed them, fight them, eat them, or Thai box them.” Among others. Those are the admonitions that stuck with me, at least, probably because they seemed the most important to remember.

Tiger Cave

Tiger Cave is several distinct features. The first is this antechamber, before you reach Tiger Cave itself. I’m not sure about the vintage of these pieces. I suspect they’re closer to the fifty years of the summit Buddha than the just-unwrapped temple, as the site itself doesn’t have any significant history prior to Big Buddha.

Then there’s Tiger Cave itself. There are conflicting stories about why it’s called Tiger Cave. One has the monk who founded the temple in 1975 entering the caves to meditate only to find tigers roaming about. Which I would find an impediment to meditation, but that’s why I’m not a monk. That and the vows of chastity and poverty. Please comment below: Top ten reasons Mark isn’t a monk.

Another explanation is that there are tiger paw prints on the cave walls. Another is that tigers roamed those caves long before a monk found them in the 70s. However it got it’s name, Tiger Cave presents as the world’s weirdest gift shop.

The cave system is all throughout the mountain that holds the Buddha, but only parts of it are accessible. Getting to the backside of the caves requires walking around the base of the mountain and taking some steps. Quite a few less than 1,260. 137 steps up, 89 down, 25 up, and 12 down. I counted, because I hadn’t spilled any matches, so there was nothing else to do.

It’s not clear exactly what’s on the other side. This did not clarify matters.

I think it was referring to this?

I sat on a bench and waited for this photo. I think this is the best picture I’ve ever taken. It’s certainly my favorite.

There truly wasn’t much else behind Tiger Cave. Caves and Buddhas. Go figure.

137 steps down wasn’t so bad.

And that was the end of an epic day. I hiked, I swam, I sight saw, I took several long bus rides, and I did not shit myself! You define victory however you like. I’m taking the W.

Nah. The void and I are good, and neither of us would be pleased if I somehow filled it. But I am loosely tethered, and come by the gypsy feet honestly, having been subjected as an adolescent to my parents’ hardcore Wanderjahr.

So we’re doing what we’ve been doing all along: learning more about what works and what doesn’t and trimming to fit. We started with an idea, and we’ve been refining and redefining that idea on the fly ever since. No need to stop now, when the current iteration of that idea has me in Thailand instead of wintering in Chicago. Some ideas are objectively better than others.

It’s an interesting experiment, as Dorothy and I have never really been alone. We moved in together on my 18th birthday, directly from our parents’ homes. She waited until I was of age, which is kind of romantic, in a predatory sort of way. So this life is all we’ve known, and current circumstances will test our appetite for being apart and Dorothy’s appetite for my having fun without her.

Early returns are positive. We both conceive of Us as our atomic unit, but it appears that atom can be split. When we travel with others (my sister excepted, who will gladly have fun wherever you set her down) we’re always conscious of having to adjust our preferences to other’s desires. Not in an invidious way, just that we’re aware of the need to arbitrate across two sets of needs: Us and Them.

We’ve been doing it so long, it’s easy to forget that getting to Us also requires arbitrating across two sets of needs: Mine and Hers. It’s seamless and pretty unnoticeable, but now that it’s been stripped away it’s hard to be unaware of its absence. Not that the compromise is painful, but there’s something delicious and buoyant about just standing up and going somewhere, without any conversation required.

A steady diet of it would require living alone, which sounds like a punishment, but there’s no reason not to enjoy and appreciate it while we’re able. We’re thinking a few months off from each other every year could be an excellent thing for all.

On the emotional/psychological scale. On the practical side of the ledger I think it’s all negative, as we each have to replace the effort and expertise we provide one another. I have to feed myself and Dorothy has to do her own travel planning. Survivable (I haven’t gained any weight!), but measurably suboptimal.

The Neighborhood

The Airbnb is fine, its greatest asset being its location. It’s a one bedroom with a kitchenette. Like our place in Hà Nội, the kitchen sink is on the balcony. Also like that apartment and our Balinese apartment, the only source of hot water is the shower. Unlike those two, which had hose bibs in the shower, the shower head itself is the only place hot water appears here. I promise to never again take Western plumbing for granted. I believe it is our sole meaningful contribution to Civilization.

The textbook protocol for what we do is to take a place for a week on arrival and then use that week to scout neighborhoods and be certain of where you want to stay. We’ve never done that because it sounds tense and hard. Hitting the ground and having that kind of existential task in front of you with the clock ticking just seems nasty. So we do our homework in advance, learn about different neighborhoods, make our commitments and takes our chances. We’ve only had one fail so far, where we didn’t really enjoy our location, but our track record’s been pretty good.

Bangkok has been no exception. I’m in the Sukhumvit district, a ten-minute walk from stations on two of the main train lines. I’m a ten-minute walk from two hypermarchés. There’s a convenience store on the corner, a laundry a few doors down, and a weed shop directly downstairs. There’s two major malls, including an Ikea, within that same ten-minute radius. And food fucking everywhere.

The streets here are filled with weed shops (four just in the half block from the apartment to the main street), massage spas (eight in that same half block), bespoke tailors (only three, but that would be ridiculous density on any other half block on the planet), and more restaurants than can be counted. I have all the amenities I could want right at arm’s length, with trains able to take me to whatever isn’t right at hand.

I had to get to the Immigration office to extend my visa and there was no gracious public transit method, so I took the scooter version of Grab, the local Uber. It was faster than a car and a quarter the price. What I didn’t factor in was that the streets around my apartment were constantly clogged with traffic and moving at a crawl, but other streets were open and moved at full speed. That was a harrowing 30 minutes. That I won’t be repeating. I took a car home.

I have no idea how the ladies sidesaddle the scooters. That’s just nuts.

Those trains, by the way. First, always nice to have your train station look like a pagoda. But one of the lines has a positively brilliant innovation. You can buy a ticket or a pass, but if you’re a casual traveler you can also just wave your credit card at the gate and it will open up. Do it again on departure and the system will calculate your fare and charge your card. I think it’s new and hasn’t been rolled out across the entire system yet. It is the most friction-free transit system I’ve ever encountered.

Add bilingual signage and Google Maps directions that tell you what entrance to use and what platform to wait on, and it couldn’t be easier to get around like a local. Literally, as I’ve yet to see another farang on a train.

The extreme walkability of my neighborhood has led to extreme walking. In my first seven days here I’ve clocked 43 miles. That is not a typo. Thank goodness massage is so cheap and plentiful.

Neighborhood Wonders

OK, don’t pretend you weren’t about to google it. I did, and once I saw the pictures I had to go. For you, dear readers, always for you.

It turns out, which would have been my very last guess, that Cabbages & Condoms is the front end for an NGO, the Population and Community Development Association, focusing on birth control, education, and AIDS safety. It was founded by a retired politician interested in improving lives by promoting sexual health, and all profits go to the NGO.

It’s actually a lovely space, although the condoms are everywhere, once the eye adjusts. The food was OK, nothing to write home about, but the bowl of condoms on the table was a nice touch.

That was entirely my pleasure.

And then there’s this. This was just occurring outside an entrance to the MBK mall. No explanation was offered and, frankly, none was expected. I watched it until just before it got creepy and I was asked to leave.

Medical Tourism

I saved $850 today. I needed a root planing, but didn’t have time to take care of it before I left. I figured that I’d get it done in Bangkok, since my Balinese tooth cleaning had been such a positive experience. I saw this place in a mall (within my ten-minute radius), and walked in to inquire about rates. All four quadrants would be $250, as compared to the $1,100 I’d last paid in the US, so I asked to be scheduled.

They had me wait a few minutes then took me into a practice room for what I figured was a conversation with the dentist. Nope, they sat me down and started in. The dentist had excellent English (they even had forms in English), and asked me if I had any problems with my mouth. I told her that I couldn’t make it speak Thai.

She was super deft, and even the anesthetic was administered gently. I don’t much care for needles, whether they’re depositing or withdrawing, but of all of the places I hate needles, needles inside my mouth are the worst. The entire process was gentle and impressive. Although leaving the hearing aids home was a solid decision.

She did the first two quadrants and scheduled the finish in a week. Elapsed time, from walking in the front door cold to leaving with a slab of meat where my face had been: an hour and fifteen minutes.

Sometimes I just never want to come back.

Fun Fact

Thailand is the very first place we’ve been that doesn’t have some kind of brutal colonial hangover. Because it’s never been colonized, one of only a handful of countries that have avoided the master’s whip hand. There are a few we’re unlikely to visit (Afghanistan and Iran, although I’d love to see both), but we could wind up in Nepal or Ethiopia. It could happen.

Frankly, it’s a delight. Wading through the colonial aftermath, especially in Southeast Asia, has been illuminating but rough. Whatever fuckery they’ve inflicted on themselves is a rounding error compared to what the West would have done to them. Except, I suppose, Pol Pot, who colonized his own country. Anyway, I’m happy to have the break.

Massage Culture

There are two distinct and largely mutually exclusive massage cultures here: the traditional Thai massage and the traditional Happy Ending massage. Tradition! The trick is telling one from another, as each is only good at its specialty. If you’re looking for a real Thai massage and stumble into a Happy Ending place, you’re going to leave disappointed. And vice versa.

Some of the Happy Ending spas are easy to spot, as the photos of their “therapists” are alluringly posed, often including measurements and specialties, and their menus are a matrix of duration and granular variations on the Happy Ending. Just right out there in front of god and everyone. Unashamed. Easy, however, to avoid mistakes.

Real massage shops tend to offer masseuses in uniforms, rather than low-cut dresses. Although that’s a sort of uniform, too. A masseuse is assigned, rather than selecting one from a lineup. Some of their menus even say No sex, which is pretty clear. But not dispositive, since some of the Happy Ending shops are camouflaged, with uniformed girls and innocuous menus. By the time you’ve suffered an indifferent massage and been offered a Happy Ending, you’re already way past the desired experience.

Another tell: do they offer nuru massage? Nuru, if you don’t know (and if you do you probably shouldn’t admit it), is a Japanese invention, because of course it is. It involves a slippery, seaweed-based gel that’s applied by a naked masseuse using herself as a loofah. Like if a Slip ‘N Slide® and a succubus had a baby. It’s hard to conceive of anything more Japanese than that particular combination of innocent and depraved. That’s not just my opinion, by the way. These are the people, after all, who gave us anime tentacle porn. Anyway, as delightful as it sounds, nuru’s intentions are completely different than that of an actual massage.

Or this. The emphasis is probably not on the quality and integrity of the massage.

Online reviews are their own minefield, as coy verbiage makes it unclear exactly what experience is being reviewed. I found a forum where men traded intel on Bangkok’s various Happy Ending spas and posted a question: where do you go when you want an actual, real Thai massage? I figured consumers of the one would be able to tell them apart, and sure enough, I got a handful of recommendations right within my ten-minute radius.

Wat Pho? I Don’t Know, Stop Asking…

My first stop, counterintuitively, was the temple at Wat Pho. Wat Pho is actually the thankfully shortened nickname, its full name being Wat Phra Chetuphon Wimon Mangkhalaram Rajwaramahawihan. But everyone knew her as Nancy. No one knows exactly when it was built, but sometime during the Ayutthaya Kingdom, which places it anywhere from 1351 to 1767, a pretty wide range. The current footprint appears to have been established right around 1700. Which is notable because it still has that new temple smell, like they just removed the tape.

We’ve been in plenty of places (Angkor Wat, Borobudur, Hagia Sophia, the Medina in Marrakech, Tunisia’s El Jem colosseum…) so deeply infused with their own antiquity that their age had a seat at the table. And ordered for you. Not so Wat Pho, which has been buffed so hard and maintained so diligently that it could have been built yesterday. But it wasn’t.

These days, Wat Pho is known for several things. One is a 150 foot long, 50 foot high golden Buddha statue. If you had one of those, that’s what you’d be known for, too.

But I’m not fooled. You came for the stupas. And you’re not wrong. They are splendid. Enjoy.

It is also Thailand’s first public university, teaching traditional Thai arts and sciences. In 1955 they opened a school for traditional medicine, including Thai massage. It’s still operating, and there’s a massage center on the grounds of the Wat. No appointments, but I walked right in. I figured I’d baseline Thai massage at ground zero and have a yardstick for judging how good the massage was at a more convenient, less expensive location.

Back To Our Regularly Scheduled Massage

I’d never had a Thai massage before. It’s on the menu at most of the places I’ve been in Southeast Asia, but I didn’t know enough about it to know if I’d like it, or what it was for, or even if what was offered was an actual Thai massage, so I’ve never requested one.

What surprised me most was how intimate it turned out to be. Not in the Happy Ending sense, obviously, but in the sense that it’s a full contact sport. Elbows, knees, legs, feet, all used to stretch this limb or that, to bend me, rotate me, and generally tie me into a pretzel knot.

Rather than standing up and addressing me from a remove while I lay on a table, like an autopsy, the massage therapist was on the same surface as me, climbing, rolling, circumnavigating, and doing anything a squirrel can do to a tree. She was a preposition. We were engaged with one another, rather than my being the supine recipient of the kneading of muscles.

It was a lovely, intricate dance (I followed), and a fabulous massage, so much more actually therapeutic than a traditional massage. I staggered to my feet feeling noticeably better, more limber, able to move more freely. I am an official Thai massage stan.

Armed with my newfound expertise, I went to one of the shops from the suggestions I’d been given. Truthfully, I picked it on price. There were a number of ladies sitting in front in branded masseuse uniforms, and I wasn’t given a choice of therapist, so that was promising. One just grabbed me. I did notice that most of the masseuses were aunties, but the young cute one had picked me. It’s all the charisma. Not my fault.

I then proceeded to get the very best massage I’ve had in my life. In fact, had I done this one first I think I’d have been disappointed in the Wat Pho massage. In the interests of full disclosure, I was high. I’d stopped at one of the many dispensaries on the walk there and scarfed down a 10mg gummy on the way. No paperwork or ID, by the way, more like a convenience store purchase. It was harder to get a tube of cortisone cream.

I don’t think that harmed the experience in any way, but I also think, my condition notwithstanding, that it was an objectively amazing massage. I’ll be going back, for sure, and will do it sober, so I can report if the experience in that condition is less ecstatic, more quotidian. What I suffer for you all…

In addition to massage, the Me Time options here include a smattering of Vietnamese-style barber shops, like the one I visited in Hà Nội. 700฿, by the way, is about $22 for 90 minutes of service.

Weirdly, the one thing they don’t offer is the haircut. I guess the claw grooming makes up for it.

Bangkok

Bangkok feels most like Istanbul to me, with echoes of Mexico City. It’s a dense capital city with plenty of historical flavor and a strong modernist streak. But our view of the cities we’ve visited is inevitably colored by where we’ve chosen to stay. Hà Nội undoubtedly has much in common with Bangkok, but we stayed in the Old Quarter, which felt more like a LARPing arena than a modern capital.

Here’s one of the strangest things I’ve noticed about Bangkok. In every other place we’ve been on the planet, sidewalk traffic patterns mirror roadway traffic patterns. If the cars drive on the left, pedestrians walk on the left, and vice versa. Not here. The cars drive on the left but pedestrians walk on the right. The only pedestrians walking on the left are farangs, desperately trying to rationalize the chaos. And only making it worse. It’s a gift.

It makes crossing the street even more disorienting than usual, for those of us used to cars on the right. I feel like a meerkat, swiveling back and forth, never certain in which direction lies danger. All of them, I think. Danger lies in all of the directions here.

The Old City

If I’m staying in the heart of modern Bangkok, I owe myself a visit to the Old City to compare the experiences. Little did I know that I’d already been, as Wat Pho is in the Old City. I did a little more homework before venturing back, and learned that the area, properly known as Rattanakosin, is also home to the Grand Palace, the ferry piers of the Chao Phraya river, ancient forts, and Phra Athit Road, home to some of Bangkoks oldest structures.

Truthfully, Phra Athit was a little underwhelming. Yes, there were some old buildings, but they were leftovers that have been individually repurposed as shops and restaurants. There was no sense of the history of the district or what it had once been like. Hà Nội’s Old Quarter, Marrakech’s souks, Istanbul’s Sultanahmet historic district… You could trace their history directly back from their modern iterations in an unbroken lineage. Phra Athit, on the other hand, was some old buildings still in use. Not uninteresting, but not the living history I craved.

The Grand Palace

This was definitely the highlight of the Old City, especially viewed in tandem with Wat Pho. The grounds of the Grand Palace hold two distinct attractions: The Temple of the Emerald Buddha and the Grand Palace itself.

Before I could cross the threshold, however, my exposed calves were deemed insufficiently respectful. Thank goodness they couldn’t see my musclebound thighs. The horror! I was forced to both purchase and wear a pair of long pants. In their defense, they were light and gauzy and were gaily festooned with elephants. In my defense, I was wearing long pants in 90° heat. I appealed to Buddha directly, but was met with stony silence. Fucking Buddha, amIright?.

Like Wat Pho, every one of the buildings here seemed scrubbed raw and built yesterday. The Temple of the Emerald Buddha was built in 1783, but you’d have to carbon date it to tell. As advertised, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha holds an emerald Buddha, high up on a platform, orders of magnitude smaller than Wat Pho’s massive golden Buddha. In addition to pants being required, there was a sign at the entrance admonishing: Do not point your feet to the Buddha. Not entirely sure how that was supposed to work in practice. Crab walking?

No photography was allowed, so let’s thank Wikipedia for this image.

But that’s OK, because the temple itself had plenty to offer on the outside, having a, how do I say this, distinctly Liberace vibe, all gilt and polished mirror tiles.

The Grand Palace was built in 1782, and served as the royal residence until 1925, although it’s still in use for official events and state functions. Which is probably why this was as close as I could get.

The grounds also held the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles. She seems to have been much beloved, and had just died in October of 2025, a few months before my arrival. Memorials to her are all over the city.

Just hanging out in front of a metro station. The guest book on the table was completely full

Finally, I ended my tour of Rattanakosin with a walk to Phra Sumen Fort, right on the Chao Phraya River. Dating from the late 1700s, Phra Sumen is one of only four of the original forts still intact. The rest were demolished to make room for roads and buildings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It was a peaceful way to end my visit, but I was truly knackered by the conclusion. The easiest way to get home from the fort was a water taxi to a train, about an hour-and-a-half total transit time. I buckled, and took a Grab back to the apartment.

The Dainty Elephant In The Room

While there are Happy Ending massage parlors everywhere on the planet, Thailand stands tall as one of the globe’s sex capitals. Much of it is tourism-based, but there’s a considerable portion of it that’s local. It seems only lightly stigmatized, as it enjoys a quasi-legal status and is a substantial contributor to Thailand’s economy.

Prostitution in Thailand is legal so long as there’s no coercion or trafficking involved, no pimping, and so long as solicitation isn’t undertaken “openly and shamelessly.” That’s a vague metric, yet no one seems to have run afoul of it.

In July of 2016 the then Tourism Minister announced that the government would be abolishing the sex industry to make Thailand a more wholesome destination. He lasted just over a year after that proclamation. Instead, there’s a substantial movement in Thailand, led by human rights organizations, to fully legalize and regulate prostitution. Which would bring Thailand up to par, human rights-wise, with the rural parts of Nevada.

The Happy Ending massage parlors, because they blend into the landscape and are everywhere, are actually the underneath of the iceberg. The more visible tip is the overt red light districts: Soi Cowboy, Nana Plaza, and Patpong in Bangkok, Bangla Road in Phuket, Soi 6 and Walking Street in Pattaya. Unsurprisingly, given my central location, I’m close to two of them, Soi Cowboy within my ten-minute perimeter, Nana Plaza just outside it.

All of these areas are combinations of gogo bars, hostess bars, and ladyboy bars. Soi Cowboy has a ladyboy bar called Cockatoo. That’s just excellent. Thailand’s ladyboys are legendary, and if it was just a cabaret show I would totally go. Why not? But all of the bars, ladies and ladyboys alike, are hard-sell hustles. Entering a ladyboy bar is implied consent to being hustled, so no. Also, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about beautiful women with unusually high testosterone levels. I just feel like I’d be on the wrong end of that. I am a gentle woodland creature.

One of the bars just off Soi Cowboy is called Bush Garden, which also warrants calling out. It’s not even their language, but they use it awfully well.

I’ll confess that I walked Soi Cowboy’s single neon-lit block intending to check out one of the gogo bars. First, because why not? And second, because sure. I’m here. It’s a thing. Life’s rich pageant. But the drink hustle is supposed to be fierce in those places, and if you’re not vigilant you can wind up with a substantial, padded tab and large men insisting it be paid in full. The level of effort required to avoid being hustled just seems to exceed the likely entertainment value.

In general I consider myself a pretty intrepid traveler, hardy and capable of taking what the universe throws at me. Unless it has tentacles. Then I’m out. But if I’m being totally honest, it’s not just the effort to avoid being hustled that’s keeping me out of the gogos. I don’t consider myself easily intimidated, but they intimidate me. I’m probing that feeling like a sore tooth, and the only solution may be to man up and cross the threshold. Or I can just be a weenie. Also a perfectly reasonable option.

I think the most dangerous thing we can do, as travelers, is to apply our lens to other cultures and judge them on their fidelity to a foreign point of view. We’ve been able to see positives in everything from one-party rule (Cuba, Vietnam) to state religions (Morocco, Tunisia), although, looking through a US lens, those things are just objectively wrong. Even though plenty of Americans, it seems, would be happy with a state-sanctioned religion. So long as it’s theirs.

So I’m not about to tell Thais that their approach to prostitution is wrong. If that’s how they felt about their own country, they’d abolish it, not work to legalize and formalize it. There’s an argument that in a perfect world prostitution would probably follow the abortion mantra: safe, legal, and rare. In that perfect world, every man would have a partner he loved and who loved him in return, and every woman would have a wealth of career opportunities. But that’s not this world.

Say what you will about the underlying economic conditions that make this true, but prostitution in Thailand pays better than many of the available options, allowing women to send money back home and support their families. Until there’s equity in access to education and career paths, I’m not in favor of shutting the industry down because it’s morally dubious. To us.

I remember the last time I went to a strip club, 20+ years ago. I went for Pretty Ladies, but that’s not what I saw. I saw a room full of men desperate for connection, with, for a multitude of reasons, no other options for achieving it. It wasn’t at all obvious who was exploiting whom. And it was sad.

I think I’ll skip the gogos.

Shopping

I’ll be doing a separate post on craft shopping, as I do, but there’s still plenty to discuss short of that. The big reveal here is that local shopping is incredibly mall focused. I suspect that’s because of the weather. Mall shopping means air conditioning, which seems to be everyone’s first choice.

My host came over the other evening to drop something off, and I was very proud of the fact that the AC was off and the balcony doors were open. Living like a local. I thought. Until he asked if the AC was broken. I’d assumed that living here inured you to the heat, but they hate it just as much as we do. Thus, I believe, malls.

Because they’re the dominant form of retail, they exist in a dizzying range of variations. Unlike the US mall monoculture, which is nothing but chain stores, and where the physical relationship of Hot Topic : Auntie Anne’s : Victoria’s Secret seems to be an immutable law of nature. Or at least building code.

Sure, they have their fashion malls here. There’s Chanel, YSL, Tory Burch, and both Dolce & Gabbana. The usual suspects. But the malls distinguish themselves primarily in the small one-off shops that make up the bulk of their rosters. In fact, in hunting for Thai silk I found Old Siam Plaza, whose entire massive second floor is given over to small silk shops, most of which had room for a sewing machine. We tend to have a negative view of mall culture, but it means a completely different thing here.

One of the malls nearby is the EmSphere, which is where the Ikea is located. It also has a robust first floor food court, which has both Subway and Krispy Kreme kiosks, but is primarily made up of small one-offs, just like the retail tenants.

The other mall right nearby is Terminal 21, which has a very odd conceit. Each floor is assigned a geography, so there’s a Rome floor, San Francisco, London… The shops aren’t specific to the location, but the site design traffics in unsurprising stereotypes. San Francisco has a faux cable car, Rome has classical statuary, London has inedible food…

I took an entire afternoon one day to tour a mall complex with four (or more?) malls all connected by sky bridges. My research told me that one of them specialized in indie fashion and the other in crafts. I did find a few non-branded clothing vendors in the one mall, amongst all of the LV and Vans and Levis shops. Hardly a concentration. Likewise for the place that was supposed to have crafts. I found a few shops tucked in a corner, and that was it.

What I did discover was that mall layout here is so non-linear as to be effectively non-Euclidean. I did an entire tour of the first mall, Siam Paragon, without seeing any clothing stores, except the high fashion brands on the lower floors. Then I did a second tour and there was an entire wing of the mall that I swear hadn’t been there on my first go-round. Same thing happened at the second mall, Siam Discovery. The Discovery being, I suppose, that the laws of physics have been suspended on premises. Every mall here is a Harry Potter tent, bigger on the inside than the outside.

The Fucking Language

I thought Vietnamese was the worst. With an honorable mention to French, for, you know, all that French. But Thai takes the cake. It has the worst elements of every language we’ve tried to learn, plus a unique fillip all its own.

First, the alphabet. It’s pretty, like Khmer in Cambodia. But put all those letters together into words and sentences and it’s just a soup of loops and whorls. Here’s an example.

ผ้าพันคอสวยๆ ที่หน้าต่างราคาเท่าไหร่ and ฉันสามารถมีเพศสัมพันธ์กับภรรยาของคุณได้. The first is “How much is that beautiful scarf in the window?” The second is “Can I fuck your wife?” It’s a minefield.

Then there are the vowels. Thai is tonal, like Vietnamese. No one can agree on the exact count, but Thai’s five tones interact with the basic vowel set to create well over 100 distinct vowel sounds. To put that into perspective, English has 19 vowel sounds. Your mouth can’t make a sound your ears can’t hear. That’s fucked up.

What’s really fucked up? Thai has taken the worst elements of both Khmer and Vietnamese and added… duration. Yep, how long you hold a vowel completely changes its meaning. It’s like the anti-Esperanto, a hash of phonemic fuckery whose sole purpose seems to be tripping up farangs. I’m sure it is a constant source of amusement to them. Or they wish we’d just stop shitting on their language. Or both.

The vowel stretching is also why Thais always seem to be singing, but that’s not enough. Beautiful, yet incomprehensible. That about sums it up.

Any final indignities? Oh, right. No cognates to speak of. Sandwich. Awesome.

I think we may have learned three words in Vietnamese, which is three more than I’ll be learning in Thai.

The only upside, such as it is, is that none of the farangs, no matter their country of origin, are able to learn Thai. Which makes English the official language of tourism, leaving everyone else to struggle with a non-native tongue. There is something delicious about making French people butcher another language, since they’re so snooty about theirs.

It’s the small pleasures that make life worth living.

Unless you need dental work done. Then Denpasar is a must-visit dental tourism destination. Because, you guessed it, we needed dental work done.

Dorothy developed a throbbing pain in a tooth with a filling, so we got a referral to a dentist in Amlapura, a mere hour from Amed, rather than the three-hour drive to Denpasar. Verdict: “Dude, that’s fucked up. You need to see an endodontist.” They provided a referral to a provider in Denpasar, but they couldn’t see her soon enough, so we found someone the old fashioned way: Google Reviews.

We made an appointment and got dropped off here. Which is whatever the superlative of unprepossessing is.

Despite the first impression, the interior was clean, modern, and well-staffed. We’d made an appointment for an exam for Dorothy and a cleaning for me. My cleaning was outstanding, maybe the best I’ve ever had, and the price tag was 600,000 rupiah, about $35 USD. It was so good, I canceled my return cleaning at my expensive Chicago dentist. This is how I’ll be managing dental care going forward.

Dorothy’s X-rays and exam came to $18, and they scheduled her for a crown. One appointment for the surgery and the temporary, and a follow-up appointment to install the final crown. That last appointment was five days before we needed to be in Denpasar to fly to Yogyakarta, so we decided to burn our last five days in Amed and pick up a hotel in Denpasar. Easier than the back and forth, and onsite in case any follow-up care was required before we left.

As it happened, they were able to replace the filling on Dorothy’s first visit, so she never went the crown route, but we stuck with our plans to finish up Bali in Denpasar. Why not? By the way, the hypermodern, ridiculously skillful filling came to $60 USD. Here’s hoping our next dental emergency happens outside the US, where we can afford it.

We were pretty confident we could fill five days in Denpasar. Despite its reputation, a little digging revealed a fair amount going on. There was a whole street of fabric stores, a massive craft market, an array of temples, and an annual, month-long arts fair. We’d be fine.

Goa Lawah Bat Cave Temple

Our first stop was actually on the road to Denpasar, the famous Bat Cave Temple in the seaside village of Klungkung. It’s truly built around the opening of a bat cave, although that part wasn’t open to the public. It’s one of Bali’s six most holy sites, and dates back to the 11th century. And it’s bat-themed. Which is, I suppose, all you truly need to know.

We thought this was pretty cool, right at the first courtyard. But then we looked closely and realized it was starlings, not bats. Still pretty cool.

The courtyard also featured a couple of these crazy seed beasts. I have no idea why it appears to be standing over a pair of severed human feet. It does give one pause.

T

Like all proper Balinese temples, a cadre of fierce yet charming guardians.

There was plenty of action cross the street from the temple, too. There were services being conducted right by the beach.

Even better, there was a massive bat-themed sculpture (Installation? Roadside attraction?) that was the total highlight of the visit.

Hunting Crafts

I had a couple of hours to kill on our day trip to Denpasar for Dorothy’s filling. I thought I’d check out the Kumbasari Art Market, four floors of crafts. I figured I could scope it out in advance and that Dorothy and I could make quick work of it together when we came back.

Kumbasari was impressive in scale, the first two floors dedicated to clothing and textiles and the upper two floors featuring handicrafts. Bali is known for its beautiful ikats, and while we’d picked up museum quality specimens in our day trips to Tenganan and Sidemen, we were short on textiles that could be fashioned into personal wardrobe.

With that prompt, I was in and out of Kumbasari pretty quickly. The third and fourth floor crafts mall was mostly souvenir grade goods. There were some nice wooden bowls and trays, but nothing that inspired acquisitiveness, and certainly nothing that warranted trying to squeeze in the additional weight of wooden artifacts. And the first two floors were mostly utilitarian ready-made clothes for locals, so no treasures to be unearthed there, either. Unless we truly ran out of things to do, there’d be no reason to return with Dorothy.

That took all of half an hour, so with more time to kill I crossed the street to Denpasar’s largest fresh market, Pasar Badung. We’d be staying in a hotel for our five days in Denpasar, so we wouldn’t be cooking. Still, these local markets are always a treat and it was fun to walk through. But knowing that we wouldn’t be shopping there meant it was more a tourist visit than a scouting trip, so that didn’t take long, either.

Finally, I took a quick tour of Julan Sulawesi, three solid blocks of nothing but fabric stores. I didn’t do any shopping on my own, but this definitely warranted returning with Dorothy.

We did go back, but the goods leaned distinctly utilitarian. There wasn’t a lot of art there, and we wound up scarcely stopping. Part of that was because the night before we’d gone to the annual arts fair, Pesta Kesenian Bali, and that’s where the action was. They had a craft mall set up with an exceptionally well curated selection of textiles, jewelry, and crafts. We went three of our four nights in Denpasar, and found something new each night. With a rich array of art, performances, and food, I had to give Pesta Kesenian Bali it’s own post.

Bali Provincial Museum

The Bali Provincial Museum was just the right size to do in about an hour without feeling overwhelmed. There are three galleries, each housed in a discrete building. As with so many Balinese museums, the grounds were as, or perhaps more, spectacular than the collection.

The collection itself was… odd. There were representations of multiple art forms, but all of the artifacts on display seemed modern. I’m not at all clear what their curatorial POV might have been, but it was still all interesting stuff.

Bajra Sandhi Monument

This, despite looking ancient, is modern, designed in 1981 with construction completed in 2013. Its design abstractly celebrates Indonesian independence, which was declared on August 17, 1945. The monument has eight main pillars, 17 gates, and central tower of 45 meters. Which, you know, visually screams, “Hey! It’s about independence.” Couldn’t be more obvious.

Still, even if you somehow miss the hit-you-over-the-head symbolism, the building is awesome and the site is beautiful.

The exterior is also festooned, as the Balinese do, with guardians.

The first thing you notice is the faux Victorian interior, complete with marble columns and staircases and a pond. Because, you know, Independence.

The second thing you notice on entry is the garish, exaggerated sculptures of pig-nosed turtles. They surround the main floor, with their snouts facing out and their tails facing in. There’s no overt explanation for their presence, but Hindus believe the world is supported on the back of a turtle, so… probably?

The second floor is a rotunda with wall to wall dioramas covering the entire history of Bali. So, plenty of chieftains overseeing their bucolic domains, and plenty of Dutch fuckery. Which, sadly, is not the name of Amsterdam’s red light district.

It’s a lot of fuckery to take in at once, and I’m not sure the dioramas truly help it go down easier. Dioramas don’t usually make me want to cry.

It turns out that a 45 meter tall tower holds lots of steps. Lots and lots of steps. But if you make your way to the top, no matter how slowly, you are rewarded with spectacular views, both of the surrounding area and the compound itself.

Puri Agung Pemecutan, The Pemecutan Royal Palace

This 17th century palace is technically open to visitors, but only a tiny bit. You get the outside, but the inside is off limits. Still, sometimes a lot is too much, so I’m not going to complain about having a manageable scale.

Mostly, as seems to the case in Bali, it was about the statues. There were the expected Balinese guardians, but the emphasis here was on goofy animals. Hard not to love ’em.

Roadside Attractions

No trip anywhere is complete without enjoying what can be found on the way.

This was an innovation in dessert so compelling we went back. They make and stock plain yeast donuts. The bins on the left are the icing dips, and the bins on the right are the toppings. So you could get mango icing with peanuts, or chocolate icing with crispy ball pink. As you should. And they make them to your spec right there. In front of you.

And this, just your run of the mill bridge decoration. Basic.

And finally. I thought it was a lesbian bar, but it turned out to be a women’s clothing store. I wasn’t going in either way, but I was still kind of disappointed.

And it was, if it was important to have our noses rubbed in the destructive impact of overtouristing.

By hype, Bali is thick with tourists coming for yoga centers and wellness retreats. We intentionally chose to stay in Amed, an off-the-radar beach town, to avoid that, and it worked. Even Denpasar seemed more like a bustling capital than Man Bun Mecca. We were beginning to think that Bali’s reputation was unwarranted.

Har.

It’s not just that we were greeted by a sign on our way into town offering a men’s retreat where you could “Learn To Love Like A King.” Ok, fine. That is such low hanging fruit for mockery that it’s doing its own heavy lifting. But there’s nothing funny about the devastation wrought on Ubud by tourism.

I am not immune to the irony, or whatever the superlative of irony is (self-loathing?), that the only way to learn about the impact of overtourism on Ubud was to arrive as tourists. That’s the throbbing cognitive dissonance that has been a top note to our entire travel extravaganza. Sometimes I feel like a john who justifies his behavior because he treats the girls so well.

We maintain a light footprint. We live as close to the local lifestyle as possible. We support artisans over merchants. And we’re still helping to drive up the cost of living and housing wherever we go. We’re still part of the problem.

Which makes whinging about Ubud problematic. But nothing I can’t overcome by ignoring it!

Ubud reminds me of nothing so much as San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. Like San Miguel, Ubud is a charming town whose charms have been nearly obliterated by tourists. In both cases you can squint and see the town that was the original draw, the elements that attracted tourists in the first place. San Miguel still has much of its original allure, as its clientele is the 1%, and their EPCOT Center village will be properly maintained. Don’t make them contact the manager.

What’s disturbing about San Miguel takes a minute to notice. It’s not that it’s a squalid hive of tourists, it’s that there are close to zero locals loose. No visitors, just shopkeepers. Mexicans have been priced out of San Miguel, which boasts Mexico’s worst income inequality.

Ubud is pretty much the same story, although its native charms are less manicured than San Miguel’s. But the setting, the old temples, the winding streets… The attraction is still evident, despite being buried under the avalanche of boutiques and souvenir shops that cater exclusively to tourists.

It’s not the wellness centers and the retreats. It’s that there’s nothing left of Ubud for people who actually live, or lived, there. It has given itself over completely to the predations of tourists, the most invasive species of all.

Because San Miguel truly is a way station for the 1%, it’s clean, curated, and modestly peopled (the only modest thing about it). There’s only so many folks who can afford San Miguel, which is how they like it. Ubud, on the other hand, was reminiscent of the souk in Marrakech, a veritable ant farm of gringos. It was, if I may permit myself, disgusting.

“But I’m not like those other guys, baby. I’ll love you like a king.” Which I think means that when I’m done with you I’ll fuck your daughter and your livestock. It’s what kings do.

*sigh* Welcome to Ubud.

Despite the above, we managed to squeeze out several positive experiences in our day there: a pair of nice temples and one spectacular, wholly unexpected museum.

The Royal Palace: Puri Saren Agung

Very little of the Royal Palace is open to the public, though what is available is choice. The palace was built in the early 1800s and restored after the 1917 earthquake, so it’s fairly modern. It’s used these days primarily as a performance space for traditional dance and gamelan music.

No Balinese palace is complete without a panoply of delightful carvings and adorably fierce guardian statues.

Puri Kantor Legacy Palace

Puri Kantor, like the Royal Palace, isn’t terrifically old, having been built in 1930. It’s a hotel now, with its grounds only available to guests. We got to view the courtyard, which was plenty interesting, especially since there was renovation underway.

There are still plenty of highly skilled stonemasons in Bali, working on both restorations and new construction. It was fascinating to see one of them at work.

Setia Darma House of Mask and Puppets

On paper, this looked like an interesting place. In real life, it was breathtaking, combining a ridiculously beautiful natural setting with a world-class museum collection of masks and puppets from all over the world.

Despite being hard by Ubud, 6 km and about 30 minutes by taxi, the place was deserted. There was one other couple there during our entire visit. It’s actual culture, so I suspect it doesn’t resonate with the kinds of tourists who find Ubud worthwhile. Fine. We were more than happy to have it to ourselves.

The museum is set up as a massive traditional Balinese compound, with each gallery taking up a discrete Javanese wooden house, a joglo. While the focus is on Indonesian masks and puppets, the collection features artifacts from all over the world. The compound also serves as a cultural hub, hosting performance and workshops.

Like many specialty museums we’ve seen, Setia Darma is the brainchild of a lone obsessive. Hadi Sunyoto is a wealthy collector who turned his private collection into a public museum in 2006. On the plus side there’s no entrance fee, so thanks, Income Inequality!

While there is, I’m sure, scholarly discourse available on the fine distinctions between regional storytelling traditions, we’ll have none of that here. That would require knowledge and expertise, and I’ve sworn off. What we have instead is a breathtaking collection of artifacts that can be appreciated for nothing more than their raw beauty. That’s enough for me, and it will have to do for you, too.

Wayang Kulit

Originating in Java, but performed in Bali, as well, Wayang Kulit is the traditional Indonesian shadow puppet show, a storytelling form over 1,000 years old. Unsurprisingly, the collection of Wayang Kulit puppets is excellent.

Balinese Ramayana Masks

Like many Southeast Asian storytelling traditions, the Ramayana figures prominently in Bali, and is responsible for some of the most beautiful masks.

Masks From All Over

Although it favors Indonesia, this truly is a worldwide collection.

Marionettes

We did a poor job of documenting countries of origin for the marionettes, but it’s pretty clear they represent a lot of different cultures and traditions.

There was also a display of hyperrealistic marionettes with no real explanation. These don’t look like archetypes, they look like very specific people. Other than the first one, which is obviously Obama and which was tagged to identify the other marionette as Hadi Sunyoto, the museum’s founder, there’s no information on who these people might be. But they’re definitely real people.

Random Acts Of Puppetry

There was a small display of New Guiinea Hand Puppets. A seriously missed gift shop opportunity.

There were a few full-size, multi-person Barong puppets.

And even a collection of puppet-themed paintings. As if the entire place didn’t already scream, “I have more money than I know what to do with!”

This one warrants its own discussion. The demon creatures are a Javanese-specific addition to the Hindu Ramayana narrative. The creature seated on the right is Samar, a Javanese demigod. The character on the left is Petruk and the bowing one in the middle is Bagong, both of them Samar’s sons. Along with their brother, Gareng, they make up the Punokawan, or clown servants. They are a consistent presence in both Balinese and Javanese wayang puppet shows.

OK. Great. But what the fuck is actually going on in this picture? Whatever it is, the women are clearly horrified. I’m horrified, and I have no idea what’s supposed to be happening. I can’t decide if I desperately want to know the story behind this or desperately don’t, so I can make up my own. Please offer potential narratives in the comments, like a New Yorker cartoon contest. There will be voting.

So did the Setia Darma House of Mask and Puppets make the visit to Ubud worthwhile? A resounding yes. As repulsive and disturbing as we found Ubud, the mask museum was at the other end of the spectrum, a peak experience and a must-visit if you ever find yourself in Bali.

Which you should.

We had driven through the mountainous inland on our way to Amed from landing in Denpasar, but we’ve been on the beach since. Now that we had our bearings, the drive into the backcountry was a delight.

But what’s a roadside without monkeys? Didn’t know we were going to get all existential, did you?

There was an entire roadside monkey village. These guys may have been meant to stand guard, but they were notably derelict. They just let us past.

I did get out of the car to capture pictures, but I never approached them and never made eye contact. I’m not that stupid. Although Dorothy stayed in the car, so maybe I am.

Our first official stop on this tour was, of course…

Tenganan

Tenganan, like many of the traditional villages we’ve visited in Southeast Asia, has an entrance fee. Or in this case, a donation of your choice. Whatever you donate gets you in and assigns you a local guide. Which is good, as there’s a lot going on and no obvious way to parse it without an expert.

Tenganan is over 1,000 years old, Bali’s oldest village, and is one of the homes of the Bali Aga, the original indigenous Balinese. It holds about 250 families, around 750 people total. There are no homestays or Airbnbs. If you weren’t born there you can’t so much as spend the night, let alone move in.

About half of their economy is agrarian, primarily rice, with the other half handicrafts, mostly textiles and basket weaving. They are almost completely self sufficient. They do their own construction, carve their own wooden ornaments and stone statues, grow their own food, and raise their own livestock. The entrance donations go directly to the village, to help them sustain their atavistic culture. They aren’t untouched by modernity so much as uninterested.

But they will happily take a credit card.

The setting is, unsurprisingly at this point, idyllic. Bali, am I right?

The village is full of wonderful statues and carvings, all of them made by villagers at one time or another. I asked how old the doorway guardians were, and our guide laughed. No one knows.

The carved friezes in the public square depict various scenes and rituals associated with village life. This is where we learned that cockfighting was an important cultural and religious component of Balinese life.

Which explains this. Kind of.

That is a hand-dyed rooster, caged for our protection as it’s been trained as a fighter. While cockfighting is a Bali thing, dying the roosters ridiculous colors is a Tenangan thing. I couldn’t figure out a reason. I think it just amuses them. I stole this from Flickr, because I wasn’t able to enjoy the caged rooster in all its natural glory. No reason for you to be denied.

The wood carving is also present in elaborate doors and fanciful tools.

But I’ve buried the lede. We came for the traditional crafts and so did you. I’ve kept you waiting too long. Thank you for indulging me.

Geringsing Double Ikat

After touring the village, the guide took us to a weaving shop. Which, surprise, turned out to be his home. Hey, we’re there to support the economy however we best can. But the lovely side effect is that, after looking at the outside of the village, we got to go inside someone’s home.

Part of the home was set up as the workroom and shop, where both husband and wife worked and displayed their creations.

So what’s all the fuss about? Why is geringsing double ikat such a thing? First you have to understand how ikat creates woven patterns.

There are a variety of ways to create patterns in textiles. You can take a solid fabric and embroider over it. You can print patterns on it, either through modern printing techniques or through older methods like batik. Brocades are made by layering solid colors of thread in various patterns in both the warp (the threads running top to bottom) and weft (the threads running side to side).

Then there’s ikat. In ikat, the warp or weft threads are resist dyed in a pattern, so each thread is multicolored in stripes. The distance between the colors and the pattern of the thread’s color repeat defines what the finished weaving will look like. You design the finished weaving when you dye the thread.

Single ikats use the resist-dyed thread in either the warp or weft direction. Double ikats use different resist-dyed threads in both warp and weft directions. This is considered the single most complicated weaving technique of all, so difficult that only a handful of locations all over the world are capable of producing it (without going mad). Three villages in India, one in Japan, and Tenganan.

Tenganan has been making its double ikat, geringsing, for at least 700+ years. The earliest known citation is from 1293, but some theories tie it to the Indian Gujarati double ikat going back 2,000 years.

But wait. Geringsing isn’t just a double ikat. It’s a powerful, magical double ikat, capable of providing its wearers protection. It’s right there in the name. Gering means sickness and sing means no. There are rituals and practices associated with the weaving process that imbue the Geringsing with its powerful properties.

Warriors have worn geringsing into battle, but its more common use is to protect villagers during rites of passage and important transitions. Death is one of those transitions, and a geringsing may no longer be used after it’s helped a villager over the final boundary. That’s how antique geringsings get sold.

Our guide’s wife only made single ikat, although he had vintage pieces his grandmother had made fifty years ago. He still had the components of her backstrap loom, although his wife doesn’t use it.

Our guide told us that no one made geringsing anymore, that it was too hard. That was, how do I say, untrue. His wife didn’t make geringsing and he had us in his shop and didn’t want to lose a sale. Rather than take us to another workroom that made modern geringsing, he pimped his grandmother’s vintage pieces.

Which was fine. The antiques are more expensive than the new pieces, but they’re also antiques. We could have insisted on being taken elsewhere, and chose not to. That’s on us, not him.

We started by looking through his wife’s single ikats. Maybe she wasn’t up to the rigors of geringsing, and who can blame her, but her single ikats were beautiful.

She even had a couple of brocades to show us.

Then we asked for geringsing, and that’s when the private stock came out. They had a few more pieces, but they were similar enough that they just showed us these two.

Palm Leaf Books

Our guide’s wife was the weaver, but our guide made palm leaf books. There were two styles, one a calendar and one a retelling of the Ramayana. We picked the epic, of course.

The method was fascinating. Palm leaves are trimmed to serve as the book’s pages, and the design is etched into the palm pages with a stylus. Burnt macadamia nuts are then rubbed into the pages as an ink, sinking into the etched lines. The excess is cleaned off, bringing the drawings to life.

Stick Ikat

Having selected an antique geringsing, a modern single ikat, and a palm leaf book, our guide walked us and our haul to the lady who had the credit card terminal. And her own workroom/shop. While ringing us up she encouraged us to look at her work, but we demurred. Having just spent Berber carpet money, we were tapped out.

Then we looked at her work. Fuck.

Ikat is hard enough to wrap your head around, and double ikat requires a willing suspension of disbelief. The artisan referred to this as stick ikat, and while this is a single ikat, it’s almost as mind-blowing as the geringsing. How? Just… how?

I could find out almost nothing about this technique online. But seriously. How?

Ata Reed Basket Weaving

Just when we thought our last shekel had been surgically extracted, we came to a basket weaving shop on our way out of the village. I’m sure our route was entirely coincidental.

All the work had been produced by the man sitting in front and his family. The baskets are woven from Ata reeds, which grow in abundance in Tenganan. The work is tight, precise, and elegant. How could we leave empty handed? We’re not monsters.

We wound up enjoying the rest of the tour, but Tenangan had been the motive force for the trip, and it was 100% the highlight. We were expecting spectacular weaving, and were still blown away, but we weren’t expecting the delightful peek into ancient village life. Thanks, Bali.

Lebah Agrotourism

Lebah Agrotourism, a coffee plantation and honey farm, sits just outside Tenganan. It wasn’t on our itinerary, but our driver said it was worth our while. Who are we to argue?

Well, we did try to argue. The sign on the front said their specialty was Kopi Luwak, which is civet coffee. Civets, which are just weasels with airs, eat coffee cherries and poop them out, fermenting them in the process. The cherries are harvested and then made into coffee the usual way. As if nothing untoward had occurred.

Dorothy is a hardcore omnivore who will eat just about anything, but she has, entertainingly, drawn the line at Kopi Luwak. Not a chance, which made the stop seem superfluous. But our driver insisted that fun was to be had, so we relented.

Like, I suppose, the entire island of Bali, Lebah was a lush jungle paradise. We started with a walk through the coffee plantation. It’s not a plantation in the rows-of-trees sense, more just a place with lots of coffee trees.

A lot of the large-scale Kopi Luwak providers keep caged civets and feed them coffee cherries, like a caffeinated goose, but Lebah does it the old-fashioned way: they scour the jungle for civet scat and scoop it up for the partially digested coffee cherries. Free range, y’all. Also, world’s worst job?

The honey operation is likewise not an industrial operation, just a jungle with a lot of beehives. They keep two kinds of bees and make two kinds of honey. There’s the standard bee (Apis Cerana), which they call the Asian Bee, and then there’s these tiny little bees, almost gnat-sized, which they call friendly bees (Apis Trigona, or the Kelo Honey Bee, locally), because they bite instead of stinging.

The friendly bees live in forests, which means that harvesting the honey is a foraging operation. Lebah has been able to breed them, which is much harder to do than breeding standard bees, so they have their own population and can harvest honey onsite.

As their size suggests would be the case, the friendly bees produce much less honey than a standard bee. Each friendly bee colony produces only 1-2 kg/year, whereas a standard bee colony produces up to 10 kg/year.

But the differences really show up on the tongue. The tour ended with a tasting, meant, I believe, to part us from our cash. The standard bee honey was very good honey. If I’d tasted it on a farm in Wisconsin I’d have said, “That’s very good honey,” but I wouldn’t have gone all Tex Avery on it.

But the friendly bee honey was… something else entirely. It was way more complex than regular bee honey, with more going on than just sweet. It has an almost sour undertone, and is much less viscous than standard honey. It’s also eyepoppingly expensive. They don’t make enough to export, so it’s pretty much only available at Lebah. 60 ml was $20 USD.

It’s in a sealed bottle, so we’re confident we can get it past customs.

But the highlight of the tasting was shaming Dorothy into trying the Kopi Luwak. I don’t drink coffee, and I’m remarkably more squeamish than she is about what I put in my mouth, but I told her that I’d have some if she did. I was as good as my word. Joint verdict: Good coffee. Less alkaline than coffee that hasn’t passed through a digestive system. Not worth the weasel poop.

Taman Ujung Water Palace

Water palaces are a thing here, and they are, sadly, not grandiose, palatial water parks, which is certainly what I was hoping. Rather, they are palaces in which water is a critical part of the site design. Taman Ujung was constructed from 1909 to 1921 by the last king of Karangasem. He leveraged a site the previous king had built for exorcisms. So, no bad vibes. Nope. None. Everything fine here. Fine. Everything is fine.

The grounds and structures are, well, fit for a king. They are gracious and serene and beautiful, and less ornate than you might think. Luxurious, yes, and grand, but more stripped down than expected. It’s hard to think of a site like this as tasteful and restrained, but we’re grading on a curve here.

Belying that whole restrained thing, the compound is stuffed to the gills with fabulous carvings and sculptures.

We didn’t spend a ton of time here, but it was a lovely, relaxing interlude in an objectively stunning setting.

Maha Gangga Valley Rice Terrace

This was a funny place. On the one hand, it’s a working farm, growing rice, vegetables, and flowers, as well as managing livestock. On the other hand, it’s a roadside attraction, offering a curated experience and leveraging its natural beauty for tourism.

We were kind of expecting to be underwhelmed by the visit, due to the theme park undertone, but we were charmed by the setting and our guide.

The guide is part of the experience, and is included with the entrance fee. There’s no just wandering loose. When you arrive at the gate, you’re presented with a menu of options. You can go for a simple trek, you can swim in the pool under the waterfall, you can have lunch at their restaurant or visit their spa. You can stay in one of their huts. We chose a guided trek, which was least expensive and took a couple of very enjoyable hours.

While they’ve tarted up the fields with follies for the tourists, Maha Gangga is first and foremost a rice producer. There’s something about the green of rice paddies that seems to be its own particular color.

Beyond that, the site was truly stuffed. The valley it sat in was gorgeous.

They had ponds with both catfish and koi. We enjoyed the feeding frenzy for both of them.

There was a little stone temple just sitting in a field.

Hut-el rooms.

There was a lovely valley with a waterfall and a pond. And, for no identifiable reason, this:

There were lots of amazing flowers and plantings, some decorative and some planted and harvested for sale.

This is bola adil, a traditional Balinese gambling game. It looks like Twister, but it involves rolling a ball on a custom-made board until it falls into one of the shallow indents (it can take awhile), with betting on where it will land. We played a few rounds, with victory ever out of reach, but it was fun.

And finally, there was this. For scale, I’d say it was about 20′ tall. Other than that, your guess is as good as mine.

Where We Didn’t Go

As usual, where we chose not to go says as much as where we did visit.

When we proposed a trip to Tenganan, our driver immediately suggested two other stops in that direction: Tirta Gangga and the Penataran Agung Lempuyang Temple. He proposed both locations because they’re top bucket list stops for tourists. We declined, for the same reason.

Tirta Gangga is a water temple, like Taman Ujung. Taman Ujung is older, larger, and classier, but it’s much less traveled because it lacks Tirta Gangga’s Instagram pedigree. Which is why we didn’t go. I don’t even feel guilty about scraping this photo.

I love almost everything about our lifestyle, but one thing I definitively hate, besides the French, is what Instagram has done to travel. How long did that shot take to stage? How many people couldn’t enjoy themselves while it was happening? How can someone be so aware of the frame’s composition and unaware of their surroundings? On the other hand, it was pretty cool to learn that koi can be fed with self-regard. It’s the unexpected lessons that really hit home.

We passed on Lempuyang Temple for pretty similar reasons. It’s heavily touristed, and even more Instagram-degraded than Tirta Gangga. In fact, when you pay your entrance fee you’re assigned both a photographer and a number for the iconic photo spot, the Gates of Heaven. You queue up and wait for your number to be called, hand the photographer your camera, and pose for your Instagram photo. You get a couple of minutes to get your shot, at most, before the next number is called.

Instagram has made a photo factory out of a holy site. It’s stomach-churning.

Somehow even worse, there’s no reflecting pool. The local photographers hold a mirror under the camera to get that effect. To be fair, though, the choice to be good tourists was pretty easy. It requires over 1,700 steps to visit all of Lempuyang’s temples.

We were having a conversation on the topic of physical limitations the other day, lamenting that Bali seemed to offer a number of adventures we’d aged out of. Ziplining through the jungle. Hiking to the caldera of an active volcano. Whitewater rafting…

Then we realized that we wouldn’t have done those things when we were younger. It felt good to know that our age and fitness weren’t keeping us from adventure, just our natural aversion to things that might be fatal. It was very affirming.

After much searching, we found Amed, a quiet beach community in East Bali known for its accessible snorkeling. It’s one of the few places on the planet where you can walk into the water and swim a reef, perfect for those of us not up to the rigors of, you know, actual swimming.

Technically, I am a NAUI-certified scuba diver. Realistically, I received my certification when I was twelve and haven’t exactly kept up. I have a memory of being competent in the water, but now I can’t quite figure out what prevents drowning. Are you supposed to just naturally float? Tread water the entire time? Swim uphill to keep from sinking? I see people do it, and it’s just baffling.

Bali Fun Facts, or The Parade of Ignorance

Bali is not a country. It’s an island in Indonesia. Bali is not one of the Spice Islands. They are also a part of Indonesia, but you can’t name a single one of them. While Indonesia as a whole is Muslim, hosting the largest Muslim population on the planet, Bali is Hindu and marches to its own offbeat drummer.

While Bali is a single island, the nation of Indonesia is home to… well, nobody knows exactly how many islands. Everyone has agreed to the oddly specific count of 17,508, while also agreeing that the correct number could be anywhere between 13,000 and 25,000. The count of inhabited islands is… about 6,000. Or 922. Or 10,000. Is mystery. Wrapped in rising sea levels.

In an unforeseen plot twist, Bali and Indonesia were not primarily fucked by the French. Say hello to the Dutch East India Company. Although Napoleon did have control of Indonesia for five years, because if there’s one thing the French can’t stand it’s being shut out of fuckery. Not to be overlooked, the US supported an Indonesian dictator because he was anti-communist. Did not see that coming.

In fact, our Southeast Asia tour has been a cavalcade of nations willing to overlook American sins in the service of being gracious to American visitors. I get the self interest of tourism-based economies, but most of the tourists we’ve seen seem to be European or Australian. They could easily shun Americans without tanking their tourism industries. So, points for being nicer than we are.

On the other hand, there’d be no tourist economy anywhere on the planet if they locked out the citizens of countries that had fucked them. Easier just to open their doors and our wallets. It’s like reparations.

I still say they’re nicer than we are, but that’s an admittedly low bar to clear.

Our Homestay

Our homestay in Bali feels like we’re living in a jungle next to a farm. Or farms. I think that’s because we’re living in a jungle next to a farm. Or farms. The grounds here are lush and full of tropical flora as well as a rich ecosystem of birds, bugs, reptiles, and cats. The farm(s) next door is (are) chockablock with chickens, roosters, pigs, geese, cows, and goats. Who all appear to be early risers.

And that thing about roosters crowing at dawn is bullshit. They go off all day and night.

Here’s a panorama of the grounds, with the morning soundtrack. It’s almost like you’re here with us.

Breaking Waves In The Hot Sun

Our homestay is across the street from the beach, a mere five minute walk to the water. The beachfront is littered with resorts with swimming pools and palapas for shade. The closest one to us is the Seamount, which has an outdoor shower for cleaning the black sand from our feet and a ridiculously warm pool.

Our first day here we were good citizens and paid for a day pass to the pool and the lounges, 50,000 rupiah ($3) each. Now we feel like regulars. We walk to the beach, swim, come back through Seamount’s pool area, wash our feet and rinse the salt off. Maybe we take a quick dip in the pool, maybe not. A couple of times we’ve drafted behind a group of guests moving from beach to pool and just blended in. But there are 24 hours in a day, and we did buy a day pass, so we figure we’re good until we’ve used up all 24 hours.

The beach in Amed is blessed with beautiful, volcanic black sand beaches. There isn’t a definitive count of black sand beaches around the world, but it’s a countable number. 20? 40? So it’s our first, and an unexpected treat.

The beach here is known for, aside from the black sands, a few things. First, it’s known for its very, very calm, clear water. The surf here ranges from pacific like a sheet of glass to adorable Shetland breakers with tubes scaled for a Surfer Barbie. Perfect for just bobbing. We’ve found that a morning bob is dramatically enhanced by an afternoon bob. There is no shortcut to this kind of knowledge. You just have to put in the hard work.

The other thing it’s known for, as noted earlier, is how close the coral is to the shore. There are multiple spots right on our beach where you can walk into the water with a mask on and be swimming in the equivalent of an aquarium in short order, no boat necessary. We’d read that about Amed, which is why we landed here, but that scarcely prepares you for the experience.

Unsurprisingly, given the quantity of black volcanic sand on the beach, there is a volcano nearby, Mount Agung, which looms over both beach and town. Its last major eruption started in 2017 and ended in 2019. So, yeah. Active.

Amed is a traditional beach village with a main drag following the shoreline. Officially, Amed is Bali’s second largest city, but they got there by cheating. They added six other adjacent villages to Amed and called it Amed. Right. The Greater Metropolitan Amed Conurbation. But Amed proper, pretty small.

The Neighborhood

Most of the shops along Main Street are dive shops, small restaurants (warungs), spas, and tour providers, with a smattering of minimarts, produce stalls, and retail sarong and authentic! cowrie bracelet shops. The closest thing to a central market is in a village three kilometers away. There’s not much by way of art or handicrafts or culture, which is fine. We’re here for the fresh fish, both as companions and entrées.

There’s plenty of neighborhood just off Main Street. Walking the residential streets provides a beautiful window into daily life here, as well as gorgeous views of the jungle vistas.

One of the things we noticed is that vernacular residential architecture is structured around compounds with multiple, discrete buildings. A kitchen, a common room for dining and gathering, a residence/bedroom for each couple, and a temple for the ancestors.

We obviously weren’t invited into anyone’s home, so the most we were able to see from the street were the temples. Echoing the larger compound, each temple had specific altars for each ancestor. Designs ranged from humble to ornate, but all of them were well cared for and well maintained. The daily connection to the ancestors is a real thing here, and kind of cool. Sam and Ruby are now hereby notified that we expect no less than altars tended daily when we’re gone.

We also learned that they use bamboo for everything here.

Other Things We’ve Seen In The Neighborhood

JFC: Jaya Fried Chicken. It’s really good.

This is a thing we haven’t seen anywhere else. Yet. Manufactured products and snacks are made in a string of connected packages. They’re perforated, so the bottom one gets torn off to sell. The benefit of this arrangement is that you just toss them over a string or a piece of bamboo and they display themselves. They don’t need counter space or a fixture, and it’s easy for customers to see what you have on offer. Very clever merchandising that benefits everyone.

Reggae Bars

For reasons necessarily opaque, Amed is flush with reggae bars. We met a guy in Hội Án who was also on his way for a brief stay in Amed, and he said he had a reggae bar he loved, and maybe we’d see him there. Not even close to enough information to locate him, even if we’d wanted to. Which we didn’t. There are a lot of reggae bars here. OK, not dozens, but way more than should be plausible outside of Jamaica.

Which is more than a little cognitively dissonant, as the Rasta religion forbids alcohol. No problem for the flexible Balinese.

One of these joints, Rasta Bar, is right next to the Seamount, where we swim, and I have to confess that it’s not at all unpleasant to bob in the ocean to the hypnotic reggae rhythm. Perhaps it’s that Bali and Jamaica share a laid back island vibe, but it almost makes sense.

But not the karaoke reggae bar. That’s just wrong.

You can join us for drinks on the beach at Rasta Bar, and enjoy the slinky reggae vibe.

Balinese Hinduism

Hinduism first came to Bali around the 1st century, but it didn’t stay put. Balinese Hinduism adds a soupçon of Buddhism to Indian Hinduism and wraps it around a meaty core of traditional Balinese animist beliefs, arts, and rituals. That was fine for centuries, but then it got weird, thanks to the Indonesian government.

On independence from the Dutch in 1945, the new constitution enshrined freedom of religion as a core right. However, Islamists took control of the Indonesian Ministry of Religion in 1952, and severely restricted what could legitimately be considered a religion that citizens had the right to practice. Aimed specifically at Bali’s Hindu population, the new rules required that a religion must be monotheistic, have a Holy Book and a prophet, and have a codified set of religious laws, among other strictures.

Having none of those things, the Ministry of Religion declared that Balinese Hinduism wasn’t a real religion. To which Balinese Hindus replied, “OK, we have all of those things. Now leave us alone.” So Balinese Hinduism is technically monotheistic and practically polytheistic. This makes Balinese Hinduism, in a roundabout way, much like Santeria, which coated Yoruban beliefs with a thin veneer of Catholicism, so no one got huffy.

I don’t know if the 1952 regulations were ever rescinded, but as a practical matter Balinese are still very much practicing their bespoke brand of Hinduism, seemingly unfettered by the long arm of the state. We spoke to one of our drivers about the differences between Bali and the rest of Indonesia, and he offered up a list of behaviors that would be unacceptable under Muslim law, such as premarital sex and drinking. It’s no wonder, I suppose, that Bali is Indonesia’s party capital.

Canang Sari

Canang sari, set outside of homes and businesses every morning, are a small but lovely manifestation of Balinese Hinduism. From simple to elaborate, they are sometimes tucked into altars, but are often just left on the sidewalk. They are a deeply felt thank you to Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa, the supreme being in Balinese Hinduism (or at least the one they picked to mollify the Muslims), for the gifts of peace, prosperity, and the harmony of the universe, weaving the ineffable into a daily ritual.

Penjor

Penjor flank the entrances to homes and businesses, and line the streets. Like the canang sari, they are devotional pieces dedicated to Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa. Unilke the canang sari, they are not a daily ritual, but are for special occasions and ceremonies, acting as a spiritual conduit connecting the mortal and the divine.

They are made, as a thank you, of the natural products that sustain Balinese life, such as bamboo, coconuts, bananas, and sugarcane. We saw many penjor with sprays of seeds attached all up and down, to also provide sustenance to bird life. While you can have them professionally made, people here take pride in making their own.

This is yet another example of the ways in which a shopping culture, as opposed to a making culture, impoverishes its inhabitants. It’s hard to put your soul into an Amazon cart, and lord knows I’ve tried. But when you make things, you have an incentive to make them well and make them beautiful. And then you’re surrounded not just by beauty, but by meaning. Or you could be surrounded by receipts. That’s OK, too. God loves all his children.

Bedogol

Another visual representation of Balinese Hindu beliefs is the presence of fierce gate guardians at the doorways to temples and homes. These Bedogol, or Dwarapala in Original Hinduism, are always in pairs surrounding the gate. The right hand Bedogol represents active energy and masculinity, while the left hand Bedogol signifies passive energy and femininity. The one is good for strength and protection, and the other provides intuition and gentleness. Together, they keep their charges safe from evil creatures and bad vibes.

I’m sure our Homeowners Association couldn’t possibly object if we put a pair in the hallway around our door. Who doesn’t need evil kept at bay?

Murder Most Fowl

There are a ton of free range chickens and roosters here, but also a surprisingly high population of caged roosters. There are shops that make and sell rooster cages, and then there are all the places with the caged roosters. It’s a thing. A weird thing.

It turns out that cockfighting is an ancient ritual connected to Balinese Hinduism. I told you the Balinese had made up their own brand of Hinduism, but you didn’t believe me, did you?

The roosters are caged because they’ve been trained to fight and aren’t safe wandering loose. And also because they’re super valuable. They start at 1,000,000 rupiah (about $60) and go up from there with pedigree and wins in the arena.

Cockfighting is actually a religious obligation at Balinese festivals and ceremonies. The losing rooster’s blood is meant as an offering to placate evil spirits. Legally, cockfighting is permitted in Bali only as part of religious ceremonies. And, hey! No gambling!

But we saw way more caged roosters than temples on their own could possibly have required. 100% there is non-religious cockfighting and gambling. We are shocked — shocked — to find that gambling is going on in here!

It’s also yet another layer of feigned compliance on the part of the Balinese. “Sure, we’ll be Hindu. We just need to add a few local spices. You need us to be monotheists? No problem, we’ll just pick one of our gods to be the Kahuna. We can only cockfight in the temple? You like our new temple?” Culturally they’re made of jello. Push on it and it seems to give, but the moment you let up it pops back to its original shape. They are Jedi masters of the Okey-Doke.

Roosters!

It’s hard to get a good look at the caged roosters, at least partially because it feels dangerous to get too close, but the loose roosters are spectacular. I know nothing about rooster genealogy, which I’m sure comes as a shock to y’all, but there seems to be a stunning range of rooster morphology on display here.

By The Way…

I got scuba-certified at twelve because my parents, Jackie and Stan, decided they wanted to dive and it became a family affair. It was a ten-week class, mixed between classroom (gas physics) and pool. The first three weeks in the pool were all swimming exercises, but we were permitted to put on scuba gear in week four and just sit underwater in the shallow end, to get used to the equipment.

At which point Stan stood up and tapped out. Give him credit for knowing himself. He found the experience claustrophobic and unsettling, and couldn’t think of a reason to shoulder past that.

Jackie and I continued, but I failed the final swimming exam. I did fine on the classroom test, and Jackie passed everything, but the swimming exam was hard. Among other soul crushing tests, you had to: swim two lengths of an Olympic pool underwater on a single breath; tread water for seven minutes with your arms out of the water, only legs; swim multiple laps, I don’t remember the actual number, in full gear, but only using your snorkel. They weighted you so you had negative buoyancy and had to swim uphill while someone walked at the edge of the pool and randomly poured buckets of water into your snorkel, to simulate all of your failed relationships waves. It was a lot, for a twelve-year-old.

I was technically too young, as thirteen was the NAUI cutoff, so I shouldn’t have been surprised to fail. But I was humiliated. It took me two more tries, but I did finally pass.

When I was thirteen and on our North American wanderjahr, we wound up in Acapulco, where Jackie and I took a dive boat together. We were the only certified divers aboard, so the guide provided training to the others: “OK. Exhale on the way up. Do you know what urchins look like? Great. Don’t touch them.” And off everyone went to enjoy their new skills. It really made me appreciate all the hard work I’d put in.

Then I touched an urchin.

Then we started looking at flights. They all stopped in HCMC for heinous 6+ hour layovers before continuing on to Bali. We decided it would be easier, and more fun, to burn a few days of our Airbnb, fly to HCMC for those days, and take a nice, direct flight to Bali. Three days in HCMC would be a rushed, tourist cadence, but we figured we’d have more fun than if we’d skipped it entirely.

So… maybe?

The thing is, we’re not at all used to the tourist cadence. Our slow travel lifestyle has us staying in a location for from 1-3 months, so we’re used to taking our time to learn a place. We don’t have any muscle memory associated with the guerrilla rhythm of hitting a place hard and fast to squeeze the juice out in a few days and move on.

It’s not like we haven’t had successful short jaunts. We spent three days in Lan Ha Bay, for example, but we had boat trips scheduled for two of those days, and toured a couple of local caves on the third day. We had an itinerary, so it worked.

We hit HCMC with nothing more than a vague idea. It’s one of those places with so much going on, it’s not immediately obvious what you’d triage down to for a three day visit. Chinatown seemed like it would be fun, and there were a couple of good looking museums. Other than that, our “plan” was to walk the city and see what it had to offer.

Which, as a practical matter, meant that we just kind of wandered aimlessly for three days. We did go to Chinatown, and we did go to the History Museum, but HCMC is a big capital-style city (I know Hà Nội is the actual capital, but HCMC has a more capital city vibe – like NYC vs. DC), and it wanted a plan that we hadn’t prepared. Still, more fun that a six hour layover at the HCMC airport.

Chinatown

HCMC’s Chinatown, Chợ Lớn, was not at all what we were expecting. Because, you know, ignorant. I was expecting it to look like a US Chinatown, which is stupid, since I’m well aware that the entire Chinatown esthetic had been dreamed up as a marketing ploy by a pair of white US architects who had never been to China. So HCMC’s Chinatown looked just like the rest of HCMC.

The other confounding factor is that Vietnam, due to history and proximity, is closer to China culturally than any other country. So when we went to Chợ Lớn’s main market, Bình Tây, we couldn’t tell the difference between the Chinese products and what was on offer at Bến Thành, HCMC’s main market. Again, ignorance, but Vietnam already has a lot of Chinese products, so the untrained eye really couldn’t tell the difference. Bình Tây and Bến Thành looked pretty much the same to us.

This was Bình Tây, the Chợ Lớn market:

And this was Bến Thành, HCMC’s regular market:

Obviously a little different in layout and overall design, but not much to pick between them as one being quintessentially Vietnamese and the other being hardcore Chinese. If you swapped the photos, no one would know.

After Bình Tây we walked around randomly hoping to see some of Chợ Lớn’s history, as it dates back to the 17th century, but no luck. Maybe if we’d done more research and planned everything out we’d have known where to go look, but as it was, Chợ Lớn was kind of a bust for us.

Ho Chi Minh City Museum of History

We also got to the history museum. Which I only have a few pictures from, because, honestly, museum fatigue. In our ten weeks in Vietnam it felt like we’d visited scores of museums, and at some point they just become a blur. Especially, because the Vietnamese forms share a number of design elements with the Angkor-era carving we saw in Cambodia. That’s a lot of time looking at art with a common underlying framework. I’m looking forward to Indonesia, where Bali and Java have distinct artistic traditions.

These Cham sculptures are from the 12th-13th centuries. The first two were building supports for a tower that collapsed before it was completed. They’re in such fine condition because they were buried in the resulting rubble, which protected them from erosion.

Unsurprisingly, Dorothy found beautiful garments.

Aimless Wandering

As promised, the rest of our stay in HCMC was completely random. We had post cards to send, so we went to the main Post Office, which was in District 1, where we were staying.

We had one dinner at a one star Michelin restaurant, Mặn Mòi, which also boasted high-style architecture.

Another dinner was at the Bến Nghé Street Food restaurant, a food court style arrangement with over 50 stalls. We could even have had tacos. Which we didn’t.

Randomly walking the streets we saw…

Random topiary.

Random electrical lighting objects.

A random Indian temple.

We even went to a typical pagoda, the Ngọc Hoàng, not far from our hotel. And tried really hard to care. But temple fatigue is real, like museum fatigue. Despite being stuck there in a torrential downpour, we just couldn’t get into it. Time to leave Vietnam.

But it did have a few treats. You still have to keep your eyes open, no matter what, or you’ll miss some tucked away morsel of wow. Not OK.

For some reason, we thought this table of offering votives was really beautiful.

I’ll leave you with the most HCMC thing about HCMC: Traffic.

That, by the way, was a street we never crossed. Normally we’d draft behind an auntie, but not even the locals were crossing that street.

Should we have skipped HCMC and just flown directly to Bali from Đà Nẵng? I still think we were better off this way, but note-to-self for the future, we should only do short visits if we’ve done our homework and have a clue how we’re going to spend the time.