Tracy Carolyn Photography

My body felt fatigued, my mind was swimming with all of the information I’d taken in, I’d already learned enough different positions and stretches to give an hour long massage – and it was only day three.

I have to admit, after the first few days of my two week beginners course at the Sunshine Massage School in Chiang Mai I felt overwhelmed.  Fortunately, by day 5 or 6 I was starting to get the hang of things.  Our highly knowledgeable teacher, Yan, taught my class of 10 students over 125 different stretches and positions, and provided a wealth of information about pressure points, energy lines, anatomy, working with injuries, alternative healing techniques, and relaxation exercises.  Given my background in yoga and reiki, I found all of the information completely fascinating – I just hope I can remember a fraction of it.

After 60 hours of instruction and practice, I can now confidently give a full 2 hour massage – and a longer one if I’m working with someone who is a bit more flexible.  I’ll be practicing on John pretty regularly over the next few months to be sure I maintain my skills until we get home.  He’s more than happy to oblige, as you can imagine.

This course was the main reason we came to Chiang Mai, and the only thing keeping us here after we decided that Thailand wasn’t resonating with us.  I’m so happy to report that I got so much out of this course – enough to make our month here in Chaing Mai well worth it (even if you don’t add in the cooking course and ziplining adventure we enjoyed here.)  As my brain processes all the information over the next few weeks I’ll probably only have more good things to say about my time spent studying at Sunshine.

Now that I’ve finished my course, however, it’s time to move on.  Yesterday I passed my final exam (giving a 2.5 hour massage to a classmate – the middle image above is of the epically long sequence I used), and today we’re hopping the overnight train down to Bangkok.  Onward we go!

That’s right, we’ve officially been homeless for an entire year.

Where We’ve Been

Thailand.

The Highs

• The food at our  Three Day Thai Cooking Course was superb.  Such amazing flavors (and views!)
• Finally going ziplining.  We’ve skipped this tourist activity through all of Central America and Southeast Asia, but Thailand is the last tropical location where we could zipline through the rainforest so we finally decided to go for it.  I’m glad we waited – the place we went was impressive.  It took us a full 90 minutes to make it through the entire course, and we got to see a whole family of gibbons.  Much cooler than the ziplining I did in Costa Rica years ago.
• Songkran.  Simply hilarious.
• Thai Yoga Massage School.  I’m going to leave the two week course I’m currently taking with a slew of new massage and yoga moves and a whole host of information about anatomy, working with injuries, and alternative healing techniques.  Win.

The Lows

• Failure to connect with Chiang Mai.  Despite the above mentioned highs, we really haven’t much liked Thailand.  I know people all over the world rave about this place, but we just aren’t feeling it.  Time to move on.
• Homesickness.  As you can imagine, failing to connect with the city you live in makes it easy for homesickness to creep in.  Add in a 13 hour time difference that makes it difficult to connect with people back home and it’s not surprising that I visited the Denver apartment listing section of Craigslist this month…just to see what was out there…

Things I’ve Learned

Good Thai food cannot be taken for granted.  There is a (shockingly) high percent of Thai food that is not tasty.  I would not have thought that possible before visiting here.

Also, I do not thrive in 104 degree heat.  As such, I’m ready to get out of the tropics.  John, who claims to love all hot weather, is also suffering.  It appears we have reached our limits – I hope Nepal can provide some much needed cooler temperatures.

What’s Up Next

Cambodia and Nepal.

Yumazing.  I invented this word to describe the food at the three day organic and vegetarian Thai cooking course we just completed.  It’s the only one that really fits.

I’ve wanted to take a cooking course in Thailand since well before World Tour, and its something I’ve been looking forward to for months.  I’m not alone in this desire, and thus Chiang Mai is practically bursting at the seams with restaurants and cooking schools willing to provide foreigners with an “authentic Thai cooking experience.”  Of course, all of these experiences look identical – they tour the same market, teach the same bland dishes, and offer relatively few vegetarian options.  With our experience with the sub-par cooking class in Vietnam, which aimed to entertain more than educate, fresh in my mind I felt weary about taking a cooking course in Thailand.    After viewing brochures and websites ad nauseum I was tempted to scrap the whole idea of learning to cook Thai food at all.

Fortunately, I am the queen of internet research these days, and persistently kept searching for a class that would suit our desires and needs.  My persistence paid off when I located this vegetarian cooking course.  Though I believe the program used to be offered fairly often, the woman who teaches the course now runs a restaurant in Chiang Mai and is writing a cookbook, so it has become much less frequent. After many emails, restaurant visits, and a few phone calls I managed to secure two spots for John and I just a day before it began.

The course took place at the Pun Pun Center for Self Reliance, an organic farm and sustainable living center about 30 miles outside of Chiang Mai.  Pun Pun has an amazing setting, with gorgeous mountain views and some of the most stunning sunsets we’ve seen in a while.
We arrived at Pun Pun in the afternoon of our first day.  After settling into our rooms at a farmstay down the road (think beautifully constructed adobe huts with outdoor showers where the water pours out of a hollowed out tree branch), we were toured around the facilities at Pun Pun.  A community of people live at the farm year-round, living, eating and working together.  They all live in adobe buildings they have constructed themselves, many of which are far more impressive than I expected.During our tour we learned about the sustainable projects and seed saving program at the farm.  John and I later visited the neighboring Panya Project, another sustainable community focused on permaculture.  While I don’t think I’ll be moving to one of these communities anytime soon, I did learn a lot about what they are capable of doing with sustainable resources and earned a healthy respect for their passion for innovation and education.

The chickens at Pun Pun are definitely free range – they have the run of an enormous pen and could not be happier.  They produce heaps of delicious fresh eggs to feed the community.After touring around the facilities and gardens, we plucked some fresh organic produce for our dinner.  I always love seeing how food grows (we are so sheltered from our food system in the US.)  The farm grows a huge variety of plants during the wet season, but even in the dry season we could see things like okra, lemongrass, huge radishes, plenty of fresh herbs and greens, onions, mangoes and pineapples.  You know the food will be incredible when the ingredients are picked just hours before dinner.
Rather than cooking for ourselves on the first night, we were treated to a meal cooked by our talented teacher, Yao.  While she and her team whipped up several tantalizing dishes for our dinner, we wandered to the local reservoir to take a swim with the other 10 students in our group.  The sunset and views along the way were truly exceptional. Mountains and papayas in the same space…if it wasn’t so darn hot I might call it paradise.
After our sunset visit to the reservoir (below), we practically inhaled the amazing meal Yao served us, stoked that we’d be learning to make food that delicious on our own the next day.  While Thai food in the US usually has several vegetarian options, it’s been difficult for me to find good vegetarian Thai food in Chiang Mai.  Yao’s cooking exceeded my expectations for vegetarian Thai food.Over the next two full days, we did some serious cooking.  Each morning we’d have a yoga class followed by a substantial breakfast of fresh fruits and culinary creations made by other community members.  The rest of the day was filled with cooking and eating (with a few breaks for digestion, thankfully.)

The simple outdoor kitchen provided an excellent setting for Yao’s teaching.  When it got too hot, we’d retreat to the indoor kitchen to prep more food.
Yao would demonstrate how to chop or crush each ingredient, then the 12 of us would get to work slicing and dicing mounds of produce and herbs.
We used soo many fresh ingredients, and I could not stop photographing them after we had chopped them all to perfection.  The vibrant colors of fresh food are irresistible.Below are some of the many components involved in Thai curry.  We learned to make four types of curry paste (and their resulting curry dishes and soups) from these and other raw ingredients – Massaman Curry, Green Curry, Penang Curry and Tom Yum.  The curry paste tastes exquisite on its own, but when you add coconut milk something amazing happens.  Coconut milk is magical.Since they cook for the entire community at every meal, the kitchen at Pun Pun is equipped to make enormous batches of food.  They are usually cooking for around 20 people at a time, though the numbers can swell up to almost 100 people when they are hosting certain workshops and classes.  Though I can’t imagine I’ll be cooking Thai food for groups any larger than 2-8 people, it was handy to learn some of the techniques for making these dishes en masse.

Throughout both days we were constantly tasting the dishes to learn what they should taste like and how to season them on the fly without precise recipes (though we have those, too.)  As you can see, this Tom Yum Soup was no exception.
One of the dishes we made was Banana Flower Salad.  Though we’ve seen them growing all over the world, I had no idea you could cook with banana flowers.  It probably won’t come in handy much in Colorado, but the salad would still be fantastic with cucumber or artichokes substituted in.

Below is the inside of the banana flower once you peel it.  It has to be soaked in salt water to remove the bitter sap before you eat it raw in the salad.During the course we learned how to make tofu and soymilk from scratch, how to ferment bananas into a delicious banana vinegar, how to make coconut milk, and how to make vegetarian oyster sauce from scratch.  None of these things would even be mentioned in your standard Thai cooking class in Chiang Mai.  Yao really packed a ton of information into our three days.
In addition to cooking, Yao also shared with us some of the traditions and history of Thai food, and discussed the different flavor profiles you’ll find in every dish.  Thai food always has a little sour, sweet and spicy as part of the flavor, which helps make it so complex and delicious.  Tamarind juice provides the sour flavor in many dishes.  Here Yao pours the juice into one of the giant woks to make Cashew Stir Fry with Tamarind Sauce.
Doesn’t this look amazing??  It was.  All of the food we ate at Pun Pun was easily the best Thai food I’ve ever had, and some of the best food we’ve had this whole trip.  Making everything from fresh organic produce certainly didn’t hurt.

In addition to all the curries and above dishes we also made Pad Thai, Pad Kaprow, Brown Rice Salad, and Spring Rolls (both fresh and fried) with homemade peanut tamarind sauce.  Most of the dishes we made were so delicious I couldn’t be bothered to photograph them before digging in.  I only have photos of a sample of the dishes we made – Banana Flower Salad, Papaya Salad, Fresh Spring Rolls, and Penang Curry (one of my all time favorites.)

The finale was an enormous dish of Mango Sticky Rice, which contained enough coconut milk and sugar to make you think twice about consuming it – until you tasted it.  Our group took spoons straight to the huge plate, only coming up for air once 80% of the dish was gone.

On our final day at Pun Pun our group returned to Chiang Mai just after breakfast, but not after having the opportunity to ask Yao every question we could think of.  She is an amazing resource of information.  We learned so much during the course of our three days at Pun Pun, I couldn’t possibly explain it all in one blog post.  We ate so well, and left with a cookbook full of recipes for twice as many dishes as we made.

And of course, more photos of the sunset than one could possibly need…here’s another for you in case you haven’t had enough.

Would you believe that this course (including transportation to and from Chiang Mai, three nights accommodation, all of our meals, yoga, and the endless stream of information and education) only cost US$112?  Yeah.  Oh Thailand, you may have finally won me over.  I cannot wait to cook some of these flavorful dishes at home.

We managed to make it all of 20 feet from the entrance to our apartment building before getting soaked.  The dousing came at the hand of a middle aged Thai man, grinning ear to ear and yelling “Happy! Happy!” while pouring a bucket of ice cold water down our backs.  And thus completed our initiation into Chiang Mai’s Songkran Festival.

Songkran is the three day celebration of Thai New Year.  Traditionally, the celebrations involved pouring water over statues of Buddha to cleanse a family of any bad luck from the previous year and bring good luck into the new year.  According to an expat we met who has been living in Chiang Mai for 18 years, when he first moved to this city Songkran meant elaborately dressed Thai women carrying blessed, fragrant water would pour a little over the shoulders of passers by for good luck.  Over the last few decades, however, the tradition has morphed into a full on city wide water fight (possibly with the help of some drunk Australians, but we can’t be sure.)

All of the photos in this post were taken from a safe distance – the window of our 7th floor apartment building.  As you can see, even on the relatively small side street that we live on the locals show no mercy.  You can’t go outside with a camera and expect it to survive.

Chiang Mai is one of the craziest cities in which to experience Songkran because the festivities take over the entire city, unlike in Bangkok where it only affects a few streets.  Nearly every road is lined with people hanging out near giant tubs of water and brandishing buckets, squirt guns and hoses.  They douse everyone that passes by – whether they are on foot, motorbike, or car.  Many people circle the city riding in the back of pickup trucks, filling buckets with huge blocks of ice and throwing the melted (but still freezing) water on passersby.  Traffic on the main streets is jammed with these vehicles as they stop to soak people they pass.

The moat that surrounds Chiang Mai (which looks serene and calm in the photo from this post), provides much of the ammunition needed to keep the water fight going all day.  It is packed with people filling buckets and squirt guns, pushing one another into the water, and swimming to cool off.  This area of town was pure chaos – there was no chance I was going to bring a camera into this mess, so you’ll have to do without photos.

The waterfight lasts all day long, from sun up to sundown, and no one is safe.  If you’ve left the house and are out on the street, it is assumed that you know what you are getting yourself into.  We passed through the streets completely unarmed, and were soaked to the bone in no time.  Thankfully the temperature is in the high 90s and 100s, so the cold water actually feels exceptionally good, which is a good thing because in most areas you don’t have much of a break between soakings.  As we walked along the moat and main road we were pelted by bucket after bucket of moat water and endlessly sprayed with squirt guns.  Most locals seemed to avoid hitting us directly in the face (though the foreigners appeared to adhere to no such etiquette.)  Usually I was sprayed in the chest, unsurpisingly, and on one occasion a Thai teenager thrust a bucket of water at my chest so hard that I suffered a wardrobe malfunction.  (Yes, you read that right.  It was the closest to being on Girls Gone Wild that I’ll probably ever get in this lifetime.)

The whole event is just good fun.  No one seems upset when they get hit, and anyone who wants to avoid the splashes just stays home for three days.  People drink beer all day, but no one seemed obnoxiously inebriated.  Families participate in droves, with kids running freely in the streets and soaking strangers with reckless abandon.  Music blares from cars and buildings, and street vendors sell weapons and snacks.  I was impressed to see that the vast majority of participants were in fact Thai locals, and not just twentysomething backpackers.  The Thai people actually get really into this holiday and you can tell they are having a blast as they soak and get soaked (even on the last day when you’d think enthusiasm might be waning.)  When the sun goes down each day the water fight ends, and the real party begins.  The sounds of club music and karaoke fill the streets until well past 2am every night.

We had a great time letting people drench us – we just thought of each bucket of water or squirt gun soaking as adding more good luck to our upcoming year, and who wouldn’t want that?  At this rate, we’re heading for a very lucky 2013!

You could trip on the number of wats, or Buddhist temples, here in Chiang Mai.  There are over 300 of them scattered throughout the city – we can see two huge ones just from the window in our apartment.  Earlier this week we made a trek around town to see two of the more famous ones.  Along the way, we stumbled upon two different wats that were so ornately beautiful they demanded to be photographeThe temple above is Wat Monthian.  Beside the main temple building is a massive buddha statue, impossible to ignore as you are passing by on th

A moat surrounds the Old City in Chiang Mai, creating a square around the city.  Wat Monthian is on one side of this moat.
Directly on the opposite side of the moat is Wat Lok Molee.  (I’m telling you, there are wats everywhere.)  This temple is at least as old as 1367, possibly older, though it has received a face lift recently.The courtyard around this wat houses several statues and two gold and silver bodhi trees.  I’m thinking the writing on the leaves is either some sort of prayer or names of people who donated to the temple, but I can’t find any information about it.  It will have to remain a mystery.There are several panels of carvings inside the temple which are quite intricate…
…as are the ones outside the temple.  Beautiful storytelling.Behind the newer temple is a large chedi or stupa, which is a type of Buddhist burial mound.  This one supposedly holds ashes from the Mengrai dynasty.This wat isn’t on the tourist circuit because it’s a little out of town (nearer to where we live), but I think it was my favorite.  Really cool architecture, gorgeous carvings, a courtyard full of fun statues and zero tourists.  Win.The more touristed temple in town is Wat Phra Singh.  It’s on everyone’s list because it is one of the oldest.  It houses a giant golden buddha (with several other buddhas) and a fiberglass sculpture of a monk in meditation that is so lifelike it’s creepy.  (I did not photograph the monk.  Too creepy.)Finally, we visited Wat Chedi Luang.  There is a more modern temple in front, and behind is the old chedi that was destroyed in an earthquake in 1545. The wats are beautiful, of course, but much like the cathedrals in Europe they tend to blur together after a while.  I think we’ll skip most of the 277 other wats in town and just trust that we’ve gotten a good taste of what they have to offer.