Friday evening on September 15th we boarded a plane again.
This time we returned without a ticket.
A very strange feeling, I know that I always have all my loved ones with me even if you are not physically there. And if I want to go home, all I need is a ticket and a maximum of two days and I'll be back in Germany. It's strange but not worrying, my time at home was very nice but I felt that my journey and my traveling is not over yet and I'm still on a path, even if I don't have a plan of what it looks like. But the next 4 weeks are at least planned for now.
After about 20 hours of travel (including driving to the airport and waiting time, the actual flight time was 6 and 6.5 hours) I get off in Bangkok at 8 p.m. The trip won't start for another two days and I've booked a small hotel in the center.
And it's really strange to be here again. My head and soul just can't keep up so quickly. After checking into the hotel, I order food online and go to sleep.
The next morning I don't feel like getting up and exploring the city. I'm super exhausted and all the feelings and thoughts have to be processed first. It's completely different than I imagined and somehow strange not having got off in Bali and now being in a really strange place. I spend half the day in the hotel room sleeping.
Then I pull myself together around 4 o'clock in the afternoon. It is very warm and much more humid than in Indonesia. The rainy season is just coming to an end. I stroll a bit through the streets of Bangkok with no particular destination.
I don't feel like going sightseeing at all right now. After an hour I go back to the hotel, get something to eat and go back to bed.
The next morning I get up very relaxed. Since I don't have breakfast at the hotel, I walk 15 minutes to a small café that I discovered on Google Maps. After a really good cappuccino and a croissant, I walk back and accidentally stumble into a small temple. It's a Hindu temple and there's a lot of activity there. Local residents come and go to pray. Outside there are stalls selling flowers to place in the temple. I hear ceremony music from the temple.
I'm watching the whole thing from the outside. After I understand what the process is, I decide to go in. At the gate I ask with a show of hands whether I can enter wearing my shorts and top, because normally your legs and shoulders should be covered when you enter a temple. However, it's fine here.
I am given a mask because the temple can only be entered with a face mask. At the entrance I take off my flip-flops and walk barefoot across the pleasantly cool floor. Everything is colorful and gold decorated, it smells of incense and there is a nice atmosphere with the drums and flutes in the background. I go to the small stand in the temple where you can get a bowl of flowers as an offering for around €1 and take one. Then I walk to the first point. There the bowl is placed and you sit on the ground in front of it, you ask for the blessing or, like me, for health and safety for my journey. Then we continue and walk into a small “house” within the temple to place the offering bowl at a place in front of the altar of Ganesha. After my little ceremony I walk back to the hostel, check out, and leave my luggage at the hotel to make my way to a few temples in Bangkok.
To save a bit of money I would like to take public transport, it won't be that difficult here 😂
I walk to the subway station, go to the ticket counter and point to which station I want to go to. I somehow expected that many Thai people would speak English, but somehow I have the feeling that English is not that widespread here, even though Bangkok is a huge metropolis. Maybe it's just my own encounters that make me believe that. But everything works without speaking.
I get a chip and run through a barrier to get to the tracks. Without a ticket you can't even get to the trains here. It's pretty well signposted and I only wait 3 minutes for the subway to arrive. The stations are incredibly clean and air conditioned!
After 5 stops I get out. In front of the exit there is another barrier that you can only get through if you scan your ticket or insert the token. (I was already wondering whether I would keep it and how many of the locals would have the chips at home hahaha)
Then I walk to the first temple "Wat Arun" - a Buddhist temple whose outer walls are decorated with small ceramic mosaics. Some of it is ancient Chinese porcelain and the whole temple is colorful and glitters in the sun. A lot of Asian tourists are running around with booked photographers and in very beautiful traditional clothes and people are posing for pictures everywhere, but that only makes the temple even more attractive. It is said that the king who commissioned the temple did not want to waste anything and therefore the temple was decorated with many fragments of porcelain. There is a bed in the temple that belonged to the king, who was also a monk for a long time.
The Thais believe that it still contains good energy and crawl under the bed to free themselves from curses and collect good luck. So I lie down on my stomach and crawl under the bed, it doesn't do any harm.
The temple is right on the river and I go to the jetty to go to the other side to go to another temple. The journey only takes a short time but you have a great view of the Bangkok skyline from the river. The next temple is very famous, there is a huge Buddha statue. The Buddha lies on his side and rests his head on his hand. It is very crowded and quite a crowd. The Buddha is almost 50m long and completely gold-plated. The different postures in which the Buddha statues can be seen symbolize a different level of consciousness. A reclining Buddha figure is said to represent Buddha's transition from the earthly world to Nirvana. With the seated Buddhas, for example, the position of the hand is always different. The giant Buddha is very impressive. Like all Buddha statues, he looks straight down at you.
By the way, there are over 40,000 temples in Thailand. Before a village can be built, a temple must be built.
After strolling through the rest of the temple, I grab a grave and drive to the hotel. I grab my luggage and drive to the meeting point.
The trip with the group starts tonight and we take the night train to the north of Thailand to Chiang Mai.
The group is huge and I'm a bit scared at first. We are 23 people and almost all come from England. It's a very young group and a wide variety of characters. Our guide Prae is super sweet and comes from Chiang Mai himself. She is 35 and seems very likeable. After getting to know each other for a short time, we can get started. The night train starts at 8 a.m. and haha I have to say, really very comfortable! After the night buses in Indonesia, the bar is not high either 😂
The rest of the group is less than enthusiastic, but everyone has a bed and the pillows and blankets are clean.
I've already spoken to a few while waiting to leave, but it will take a while to really get to know everyone. There are also 5 Germans there and it's really nice to be able to chat in German every now and then.
The train takes us through half of Thailand and I thought that I would be able to sleep in such a comfortable bed, but that wasn't the case. The jet lag was probably still too present because I didn't fall asleep until around 3 a.m. and was awake again at 7 a.m. The train crew came, collected the blankets and pillows and folded the beds into regular seats so that the rest of the journey ended like a normal train journey.
In Chiang Mai we were loaded up directly by 3 trucks and we drove another hour to our first homestay. It was a really beautifully located homestay, the owners were very nice and we had an amazing view of the mountains. However, there wasn't much time to rest. After unloading the luggage and finding out who was sleeping where, we went to a family that looks after elephants. There are a lot of these elephant sanctuaries in Chiang Mai and only around 1000 free-living elephants.
There were a total of 4 elephants there, and one of them was a "little baby" named Milly and 1 year old. We got lunch and sat on the terrace while the elephants also comfortably ate their lunch on the meadow.
Then each of us was given a t-shirt and the guide explained to us that the elephants remember the colors and are therefore immediately familiar with us and are not afraid of new people. We were handed sugar cane and then the feeding started. "How to become friends with an elephant? - Feed them 😂"
Afterwards we went into the river with the 4 elephants to swim. It was an incredible experience. The elephants threw themselves into the water, cuddled and played around. It was so beautiful to watch. We were standing in the river right next to them and then one of them stood up and the current that suddenly came through almost knocked us over🙈
And then it was time for mud bathing with the elephants. In the middle of the meadow was a shallow pit with water and quite a bit of mud. We were allowed to give the elephants a skincare treatment and smear them with the mud. I was only standing at the edge of the pit with Jana when I saw the little elephant "Milly" running towards us.
And I'm telling you, I could already see what she was up to! I took a step to the side to make room for her and wanted to tell Jana that Milly would probably want to go through here (right where we were standing, of course) but I swear - then this little elephant smiled very mischievously and Zack - nudged Jana very gently the mud pit!! We laughed so hard, and Milly definitely did too.
And then a real mud fight broke out hahaha! After everyone was covered in mud masks from top to bottom, we went back into the river to shower the elephants and ourselves, whereupon a water fight broke out. It was great fun.
We spent the evening in our homestay. The view of the opposite slope with the forest, rice fields and even an elephant was incredibly beautiful. The family cooked for us and we all had a blast.
The next morning we went to a temple “Wat Phra That Doi Suthep” on a mountain. It was a long, steep staircase.
The story of the temple says that a monk placed a bone of Buddha on the back of a white elephant and as soon as the elephant lay down or the bones fell from the back, a temple should be built on that spot. And after the elephant had walked for a long time and had made it all the way up the hill, he lay down and the bones fell to the ground. Prae laughed as she told us the story and said there used to be a lot of sugar cane here, the elephants' favorite snack 😂 It's an incredibly beautiful temple with a great view over Chiang Mai.
Afterwards we went to a very beautiful waterfall that you could either climb down or climb up. The water was pleasantly cool because the weather is currently very hot and humid and so it was a relief to bathe in the cold water.
After my 3 months alone, it's quite a change. The group is really big with 23 people and the days spent there are something different than getting up in the morning and seeing what the day brings. However, there are always days when there are only optional activities, which I will use to my advantage.
We spend two more days in Chiang Mai, visiting a waterfall in the middle of the jungle, temples and an evening in a bar/disco that was super fun. We stormed the dance floor straight away and danced until 1 in the morning.
After 2 days we boarded the plane to Laos.
We said goodbye to our guide Prae, because we have a new one in every country.
Things are really happening in quick succession and after 4 days in Thailand and a 2 hour flight I am sitting in Laos. We will spend 5 days here and also visit two places. I'm a bit behind, so many experiences in such a short time 😊🙈
I give you all my warmest regards and will hear from me again very quickly ☀️♥️
