Travel Stories

Thailand and Bangkok, by Joe Wagner. Part 1

Hello from Bangkok. We've been back from the North since yesterday, and are finding Bangkok quite intense compared to the very sweet and relaxed Chiang Mai. Chiang Mai is Thailand's second largest city, but only has about 150,000 people in it, as Bangkok has 8 million. Quite a difference. We took the overnight train up there, ignoring my brother's advice to get aircon 2nd class, and opting to save about $2 each to go non-aircon. Mistake, or, I should say, MISTAKE. We hardly slept, due to the clanking from the train, transmitted very nicely through the open window. Kind of funny, as somehow we got on the 'farang' car (Thai for foreigner) so everyone around us was European.

We arrived in the morning in Chiang Mai, hired a tuk tuk, which is a threewheeled vehicle something like a rickshaw with a big lawnmower engine on it, and zoomed across town to a guesthouse. We saw some temples (wats) and chatted with some English-speaking monks, and saw two Buddha statues that are more than 2,000 years old. We ate a great Italian dinner that night, complete with pizza and homemade gnocchi in sage butter sauce, compliments of an Italian who found Chiang Mai too wonderful to leave.

The next day we got the public 'sangtaw' a sort of mini bus with benches in the back facing each other and went to Mantak Chia's Taoist training camp ( you can look up Tao Garden, as it's called, on the web) where I had a few conversations with some senior students and set up an appointment for some excellent private instructions in the secret yogas of energy control, according to 5,000 years of Taoist study and practice.

love,
joe and cindy
Somewhere having fun.

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