Crystal’s Adventures

I worked at UNESCO just half a day yesterday, eating lunch with friends at an Indian fast food restaurant. McDonalds-esque visors and uniforms at fast food counter, complete with Briyani combo meals served on banana leaves and plastic trays!

Around 1:30 PM, I headed out to begin my voyage to Ayutthaya. At the last minute, I decided not to take the 1.5 hour trainride, which everyone warned me was a standing train. (Standing?!?! No thanks!) Instead, I went to the Victory Monument — a wide roundabout boulevard that encircles an imposing white sculpture where mini-vans to Ayutthaya leave every 15 minutes for 50 baht or so.

For almost the entire trip, I was so sleepy that I dozed off drooling and with my head rolling around. (Thank goodness I didn’t choose the standing train!) We arrived in Ayutthaya in just over an hour. I had the shape of the window handle stamped in a delicate red color on my forehead.

The great adventure that ensued was due the fact that I had absolutely no idea where to tell the driver to drop me off. I shrugged my shoulders. The driver stared at me blankly with his one functional eye. Then suddenly, a vague memory surfaced from the muddy depths of my drowsy, sweat-soaked consciousness. I remembered a certain fact that was to be the key to it all. Aha! The informal online review of the Amporn Floating House did mention that it was “located in walking distance of the night market”. I looked up the words for “night market” in my sticky guidebook and continued to repeat them, hesitatingly at first and surely very badly pronounced, to this very skeptical and confused driver. Somehow, he gleaned some meaning from these two magical words, Hua Raw, and he promptly dumped me off at the corner to take a tuk-tuk (these are the angry, cracked-out golfcart-mobiles I mentioned in earlier posts) to the night market. The one-eyed mini-van driver communicated my destination to the tuk-tuk pilot, and I and my backpark were jammed inside. I shared the little benches with two old ladies holding large bags of dried fish and about six or seven small children in school uniforms. Tuk-tuks are quite clever, with (actual) doorbells rigged up in the passenger area so that you can alert the driver when you want to get out without having to yell and pound on the glass.

Very proud of having made it to the night market, I strode into the 7-11 to get a cold bottle of water and ask for directions. One girl spoke English well but said she hadn’t a clue where the floating house was. I told her I’d head to the river (down the soi that was just across the street) and she said this was a good guess. (Duh,Crystal! It’s a floating house!)

The soi to the river was dim and full of shops selling clothing, shoes, and everything plastic. One place offered bird cages of every shape, size and color. Overhead, laundry strung between the buildings fluttered and blocked out the sun. An old woman was grilling pork satay. I looked around for someone bright-eyed who could possibly direct me.

To ask for directions, I would say hello,excuse me, etc. Then I would tell them that I was looking for Amporn (repeated several times for emphasis in a bad accent ). Then I would say “hotel on the water”, demonstrating by making the hand motions for “house” and then swaying back and forth. Everyone I asked thought this was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. I’d like to believe that they understood me, but alas.. Finally, one guy seemed to understand what I was trying to say. So I followed his (very sketchy) directions, which included his shouting “Bang! Bang!”, while the woman standing next to him made violent, sweeping hand motions toward the sky. (I still don’t know what that part meant, even now.)

Sure enough, there it was! The floating house bobbed over the river at the end of one particularly greasy-looking soi. A small, air-conditioned department store/ice cream shop next door was where I registered and received a set of keys — the outside gate is locked after dark for our security. It was only 200 baht per night, 1/2 the price of my Bangkok guest house. To get ‘on board’ the floating house, one crosses a set of extremely long and narrow planks of wood over a muddy embankment. These planks bow, creak and bend precariously toward the mud under one’s weight. But once you get to the other side, the house is fantastic!

It is a completely wooden teak house. Remove your shoes, go down the hallway of just four rooms to come to the small back deck which looks out over the river. The deck is laid out with tatami mats, Thai triangle pillows, and comfy, cushioned rattan chaise lounges. You can get breakfast (waffles or eggs/sausage/toast) served on the deck in the morning if you order in advance. One bathroom is shared among the four rooms.

The only other guests here are a couple (the middle-aged, chain-smoking, gold necklace-wearing type who looks like a thug from the European mafia, and his Thai ‘girlfriend’.) They bickered loudly from their room while I tried to relax on the deck. This was just after the Thai lady poured her heart out to me for 20 minutes about how this guy mistreats her and hunts her down wherever she goes. According to her, “he could kill (her) if he wanted to.” My Spidey sense is strongly indicating that I should stay away from those two… Thankfully, they went out shortly after their fight ended in her crying, probably to go satisfy his nasty drinking habit.

The online review of this place had only one warning: mosquitos. Why, with my especially tasty and sweet blood, did I select the most mosquito-ridden location on the most mosquito-ridden river, in the rainy season no less?!?! At least I have a little lizard friend who lives in the ceiling corner of my room and chirps at his mosquito prey.

My next adventure was a long evening stroll into town. There I found a department store that carried floral-scented insect repellent lotion with 13% DEET. YES!!! This I discovered only by asking a group of young giggling ladies at the makeup counter, performing a dramatic interpretation of the mosquito, complete with buzzing sounds and pinching one of the girls.

Feeling clever, I walked back to the floating house area and braved the night market for a bowl of seafood soup on the open terrace overlooking the Pasak River. Hauntingly beautiful bodhi trees are everywhere here. If you’ve never seen them, they have long finger-like roots; the tree is maybe a little similar to cypress..(?)

At 9:00 PM, I sat in a lounge chair and wrote all of this up in my journal. The floating house was doing its thing — swaying ever so gently, but not enough to cause sea-sickness — and its moorings creaked now and again. It was a mild, breezy evening and moonlight reflected on the water. On occasion, long tail boats slipped by in silence. The evening was so quiet that I could hear the Thai chatter and clattering dishes coming from the houses on the other bank.

Earlier in the day, I saw one old woman in a boat outfitted with a raggedy green umbrella. She steered the boat while simultaneously stirring her giant kettle of noodles and calling out to the neighboring floating houses to advertise her soup. She coasted near our deck to wash bowls in the river. A group of tiny brown boys from the house across the way ran down the dock laughing and stripping all the way before jumping right into the water. It looked so fun that at that moment I would have given anything to be one of them for the day!

Despite the Japanese tourist dinner cruises that passed by with their on-board karaoke and drunken cha-cha lessons, I managed to sleep.

This morning I went on a long walk. It was already hot at 7:00 AM! I had breakfast in the market: a soup containing pork knuckle, blood sausage, tripe and liver, with rice. (I didn’t know what I was ordering, obviously.) Despite what it sounds like, it was delicious. The waiter taught me the word for delicious: it’s arroi (pronounced Ah-ROY).

So far, the folks from Ayutthaya seem very jolly and especially quick to smile. I discovered where to rent a bicycle and have my eye on a particularly shiny orange cruiser that seemed to call my name for today’s ride around the ruins…