Category: Culture

Posted on

A Better Elephant Experience

bw elephant

Jokia was born in 1960 along the Thai-Burmese border. When she was younger, Jokia worked in the logging trade to support her tribal family. However, after the 1989 logging ban in Thailand, Jokia found herself unemployed. Being no longer useful to her tribe, they sold her to an illegal logging camp, after which she soon became pregnant. Working through her entire pregnancy, she gave birth while pulling a large log uphill and wearing heavy chains. The baby rolled down the hill behind her and she was not allowed to tend to her newborn. From the death of her new baby, Jokia was understandably depressed and refused to work despite physical threats. One such physical threat included being hit by a sling-shotted rock blinding her in one eye. She started working for a brief time before she hit her owner, who afterwards, completely blinded her by shooting her remaining eye with a bow and arrow. Now, unable to see, Jokia was forced back to work. When Sangduen “Lek” Chailert rescued Jokia in 1999, Lek found Jokia full of infected cuts and scars along with tears coming from her blinded eye and empty socket.

two elephants

The story of this elephant is only one of the 36 currently being supported by the Elephant Nature Park outside of Chiang Mai, Thailand. The pasts of the others are equally tragic from being orphaned when only weeks old to stepping on forgotten land mines to being severely handicapped from being forced to mate when no longer useful. Lek Chailert, the Founder and Director of the Elephant Nature Park was born in the small hill tribe village of Baan Lao. She grew to love elephants when her grandfather received a baby one as payment for saving a man’s life, and now she has made it her life work to save as many of these sacred and revered animals that still remain.

elephant eye

Unfortunately, with these domesticated animals out of work and expensive to care for, their owners have started using them more and more in the tourism industry offering rides. My desire to go see Lek’s Elephant Nature Park came from my two-day trek when I saw how the elephants were treated. There were chains around their ankles and necks, their owners had hooks to stab them with, and many of their tusks were either missing or cut. In a country where no house, no restaurant, and no shop is complete without decorative elephants, I wanted a better elephant experience before leaving, and I found just that at the Elephant Nature Park. We fed the elephants, bathed the elephants, and learned about their complicated but rich history in Thailand.

elephant bath

Posted on

Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai, the largest city in Northern Thailand, was a great alternative to the floods in the south. The sun was out most days, although I never complained about a little extra cloud cover making the temperature more bearable in my non-air conditioned room at Smile House. I found the people, both foreigners and locals, very nice. There was Tess and Paul who laughed with me about my fear of heights while zip-lining. Claire and Kalley from Australia who cooked with me and introduced me to some of the more delicious street food like Rotees. And Eid, a Thai native, who showed me some of the better nightlife in and around Chiang Mai. The city felt modern, yet relatively quiet and brimming with Thai culture. And with the famous Sunday Market through the middle of town, I also had the opportunity to haggle over shirts that already only cost 3 US dollars while listening to the shop owner’s favorite line “Same, same…. but different.”

dried orchids

These flowers caught my attention at an orchid farm in Chiang Mai. They were made with real dried orchids. The orchids were lacquered, painted with bronze around the edges, immersed in sulfamate and nickel, and finally coated with a very thin layer of gold.

Posted on

Trekking in Northern Thailand

So, a Spaniard, a Korean, a French couple, a group of Argentinians, and an American all pile into the back of a truck. The Korean says, “Ko ki o.” The Argentinians go, “Ko lo ro.” The Spaniard replies, “Ki ki ri ki.” The French shoot back, “Cocorico.” And then the American sings, “Cock a doodle doo.” Then, as if answering Alex Trebek, the truck driver turns around and asks, “What sound does a rooster make?” That scene was a bit dramatized for effect; however at some point during our two day trek, we did all compare our languages’ onomatopoeia for the sound made by a rooster. Always a fun discussion when many languages are represented and given that “cock a doodle doo” sounds the farthest from a rooster’s actual sound. As per usual, the group made the trek.

thailand trek1

thailand trek2

The two days were full of visiting the hill tribes in Northern Thailand, white water and bamboo rafting, sleeping in a hill tribe’s bamboo hut, elephant riding, and waterfall swimming. One of the tribes we visited called the Padaung are famous for their long-necked women. The women undergo a beautifying process throughout their adolescence by adding brass rings to their necks. The effect of the brass rings is to push down the collarbone giving the appearance of an elongated neck. Because eventually their heads are accustomed to being supported by these rings, their necks will atrophy and will be unable to hold the weight of the women’s heads without the rings.

longneck tribe thailand
A woman from the longneck tribe in Northern Thailand
thailand trek3
Floating down the river on a bamboo raft

Another highlight of the journey was around the evening bonfire when the Argentinians picked up the tribe’s guitar and drums and entertained the group.

argentinian at camp fire
As seen at the bonfire

boy from hill village

Posted on

Buddhism and Thai Massage

Much of Thai massage techniques facilitate seated meditation. I used this as validation to go to the excellent Thai massage place just next to my guest house. Bon Massage, which is located in the southeast corner of central Chiang Mai near the Thaphe Gate, provides a great atmosphere along with their traditional Thai massages.

Massage is linked to Buddhism in ways beyond its usefulness to meditating in the seated position for seemingly too long a period of time. In addition, the Buddhist concept of Metta, which is understood as Loving Kindness, is applied in the practice of massage and healing work. As a result, both the recipient and practitioner can benefit from Thai massage. Throughout the massage, the practitioner tries to work in a state of mindfulness with great concentration on each breath and each moment.

Posted on

Hindu Temple Ceremony

Street traffic is heavier than usual and people are cleanly dressed in their sarongs all heading in the same direction. I ask the obvious question and learn there is a Hindu ceremony taking place at a nearby temple. I ask the next obvious question and they said it was worth a try. I follow the masses towards the temple and when I get there, I am greeted more than warmly as I am wrapped in a sarong, given something to wear on my head, and allowed to enter the temple. After asking another obvious question, I am excited to learn that I can photograph anything and everything.

I meander around the temple often with several eyes following me as I am one of two foreigners among hundreds of Balinese. When my eyes meet theirs, I smile, they smile back, I nod, and they nod. Although this seems like an almost impossible scenario in which to feel comfortable, that is exactly what I feel. I had the opportunity to observe this authentic ritual that included people of all ages, all levels of faith, and all classes. The smells were of incense, the atmosphere comfortable because of both the friendliness of the people and the slight drizzle that dropped the humidity, and the importance of the event obvious from the numbers of people who attended.

The pictures tell a story better than I can describe in words.

hindu prayer

hindu ceremony music

baskets at hindu ceremony

Posted on

Culture in Ubud

I came to Ubud because it is touted as a Balinese cultural hub, and not just because it received such positive reviews from Elizabeth Gilbert. Bali is such a culture-filled destination because as the Hindu states fell all around Bali, many of the intelligentsia fled here along with artists, dancers, musicians, and actors. As the only surviving Hindu island, the Balinese show intense pride for the culture and enjoy sharing it with the outside world. Having so many tourists leave their homes for theirs must reinforce their confidence in their unique and creative culture. In addition, throughout this Hindu rice-farming society, I saw daily offerings made using Banana leaves outside of homes, hotels, shops, and as far reaching as the top of the Batur Volcano.

rice field Ubud
A rice field just outside Ubud, Bali
more rice field
Another rice field near Ubud

Ubud is full of live music and dance performances both modern and traditional. I enjoyed sitting in cafes in the evening listening to drum-heavy music as well as attending two traditional Balinese dance performances. The Legong Dance, performed at the Ubud Palace, included gamelan music and ritual dance. The Legong Dance also included a mask dance, contemporary dance, and sacred dance. Another evening, I attended the Kecak Fire and Trance Dance where I will never forget the last scene of a dancer kicking flaming coconuts around the stage from what used to be a coconut bonfire.

balinese dancer
A dancer from the Legong Dance in Ubud
Kecak Fire and Trance Dance
The Kecak Fire and Trance Dance

Ubud is home to many shops, but unlike most other places I’ve visited, there were less knock-off sunglasses and the like, and instead, many shops sold artwork and other cultural handmade Balinese craft. Window shopping became an enjoyable experience when simply walking through the store taught me about Balinese art. Unfortunately, Ubud is swarming with tourists who can make it hard to find an authentic Balinese experience, but I did meet some great people. Lauren from England and I went to one of the evening dances together, three German friends joined me on the sunrise volcano hike, Bruce and Carol from Vancouver who I had also sat next to on the plane bumped into me and we recapped our Bali adventures together, and Made, the driver to the sunrise volcano trek. His English was far from perfect, but his energy was high and he exuded such an optimistic vibe, that while helping him improve his English, I continued to learn about Balinese culture through his stories. Ubud, the people I met while staying there, and the places I visited in its surrounding areas are the ingredients that made for the hard-to-leave feeling I now have.

Posted on

The Balinese Calendar

I still remember on several of my family trips when breakfast conversation would include my dad’s explanation why that day was a lucky day—maybe the numbers made a palindrome, or summing the numbers in the date equaled someone’s age, or one number was overrepresented like on September 9, 1999. In a slightly more rigorous fashion, the Balinese calendar also includes good days (dewasa luwung) and bad days (dewasa jelek), and certain tasks, no matter how seemingly mundane, can only be done when the day so suits them.

Luckily, for my trip planning purposes, Indonesia standardizes itself around the standard Gregorian calendar; however, Bali also uses the 210-day Pawukon calendar and the Saka lunar calendar. As I’ve heard that understanding these calendar systems can be difficult for Westerners, I took such warnings as a challenge, and I then needed to study them.

Because of it’s association or lack there of with the Gregorian Calendar, the Pawukon calendar feels more like a cycle than a calendar. The simplest correlation I can draw is the 7 day week that we have become so accustomed to. The 7 day week does not fit neatly into a 365 day year, and as a result, if my birthday was on a Friday one year, it would be on a Saturday the next year, unless of course it was a leap year. That all said, I agree it is much easier to conceptualize a 7 day cycle rather than a 210 day cycle that has come to be filled with many internal cycles as well. The 210-day Pawukon calendar can be broken up into weeks, and these weeks have lengths of 1 day, 2 days, 3 days, 4 days, up to 10 days. Even more confusing is that these weeks overlap. In other words, because every day of each of the ten possible weeks has its own name (just like we use Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc), some days can have up to 10 names in the Pawukon calendar.

I will spare all of the details of this calendar system that Balinese expert Fred Eiseman describes in his book “Bali: Sekala and Niskala”, but to get a sense of how this system might get a bit confusing, I will share this one fact that I quote from Eiseman:

Determining the day name of the Dasawara, the ten-day week, is a bit more complex: add the urip [day value] of the Pancawara [5-day week] to that of the Saptawara [7-day week]. Then add 1, and divide the total by 10. The day of the ten-day week is determined by the remainder of this division.

Just the fact that days of the week have values that don’t correspond to the order they fall in a particular week and then all of these operations need to be applied to those values to determine the day of another week is no small task. Luckily, for the 5 and 7 day weeks, the days repeat in a 5 or 7 day pattern respectively.

Back to the real point of all this calendar talk, I want to figure out if the days that I’m in Bali are good days! Generally, the most important days in the Pawukon cycle occur when important days of multiple week systems intersect– sort of like our Friday the 13th. Important days occur when the last days of the 3 and 5 day week cycles overlap, which when we figure out their lowest common dominator, this can be calculated to occur every 15 days. These two days, called Kajeng and Keliwon, are good for prayers and ceremonies, but also days when evil spirits are around. It does not look like the days I am in Bali will overlap with these days, but the day I entered Bali was three, double-two, double-one, which must be a lucky day.

Posted on

Tulamben and the USAT Liberty

Tulamben is a small town in Bali built around a “major” highway, and the town extends about one kilometer. The air is quiet and still and yet there is still an excitement in the town for scuba diving. People come here from all over, and especially Australia, to dive. While in Tulamben, I learned to dive with an Australian family, I had breakfast every day with a nice couple from Sweden, and I bumped into the same German group of girls a couple times on the town’s only street. Although only there for five days, maybe because of the smallness of the town and maybe because of the friendliness of the people, I truly felt at home. I met a local named Gada from a restaurant called Sandya that had free wifi, so I usually ended my days here, whether for dinner, dessert, or just a drink. I made friends with one of the dive masters, Ketut, from Tulamben Wreck Diving and we spent an afternoon together touring around the local area on his motorbike.

big fish

Side Note: Birth order in Bali determines one’s first name. Wayan is the name of the firstborn child, Made for the second, Nyomar for the third, Ketut for the fourth, and then start back at Wayan or at least a derivative of Wayan. This, predictably, can make things a bit complicated because it means that more than 1 out of 4 Balinese will be named Wayan. The first person I met at Tulamben Wreck Divers was Big Made (pronounced “Ma-day”), then there was Boss Wayan, Dive Instructor Wayan, Dive Master Made, Ubud hotel Staffer Made, Ubud Hotel Manager Wayan, and so on. Adding adjectives before and after their names becomes critical.

a-ok diving
Swimming with the fishes

Back to the town of Tulamben, it became a Scuba divers destination because of the sunken ship, the USAT Liberty. Although USAT might sound like some standardized admissions test or aptitude test, it actually stands for United States Army Transport. The ship was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine during World War II in 1942. Later, in 1963, a volcanic eruption moved the ship off the beach and into the water where it is now a popular dive site. Although I didn’t find any treasure, diving in and around the wreckage is awe-inspiring as coral and sea life has attached itself to almost every available surface. Big fish, small fish, red fish, blue fish, and more. I’d be more specific with the fish names and less like Dr. Seuss, but I honestly don’t know which fish is which.

Posted on

Come of Age in Bali

When I hear about a coming of age ritual, I naturally imagine a 13-year-old memorizing a Torah portion in preparation for his or her Bar or Bat Mitzvah. After all, that is when I made the transition from boyhood to manhood. I still wasn’t ready to drive, join the army, vote, drink or smoke, but in the Jewish tradition, I was ready to lead a Shabbat service. But in all seriousness, more important than becoming a certified “man” or being considered an adult, having my Bar Mitzvah connected me to my family and to my greater Jewish community. I am the eighth of ten first cousins, the seven older cousins had already had their Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, and the two younger were still waiting their turn. We happen to be spaced about one-year apart spanning a decade; therefore, our yearly family reunion during the 1990’s revolved around this coming of age ceremony. And from that experience, I can appreciate a coming of age ritual regardless of what the ritual may specifically consist of.

My Bali expert, Fred Eiseman (writer of Bali: Sekala and Niskala), describes this coming of age ritual as a Tooth Filing. A time when an individual moves away from being “kasar” or coarse, and moves closer to being “alus” or refined. Eiseman puts it best in his book when he writes, “Balinese Hinduism can be very highly symbolic, and the one characteristic that epitomizes uncivilized, uncouth, coarse disposition is protruding canine teeth.” And like a Bar Mitzvah in the Jewish tradition, tooth filing has become an all-out event in the Bali Hindu tradition. Extended family, friends and community members celebrate this event together. The ceremony is called matatah. I will probably not opt to have a matata, but I did want to draw its possible similarities to events more familiar to me.

Posted on

Invest More in Chicken

While listening to the radio in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the same news story was repeated multiple times in an hour segment. The price of chicken in Malaysia has reached a 10-year high. Chicken now costs more than 6 ringgit ($2 USD) per kilogram, which surpasses the 1999 record price of more than 5 ringgit ($1.70 USD). Chicken supply is just not meeting the needs of the chicken demand. And as one of the largest fast food chains in Asia, KFC may be one of the culprits. Here’s an article from the Malaysian Star Newspaper explaining the issue in more detail:

Country’s chicken shortage to be overcome by next month
By P. ARUNA

KUALA LUMPUR: The shortage of chicken in the country is expected to be overcome by next month, said Agriculture and Agro-based Industry Minister Datuk Seri Noh Omar.

He said that the shortage was due to several factors, including the unexpected high demand that exceeded the supply of chicken after the Chinese New Year.

There is usually a drop in demand between April and June after the festive season.

This year, the high demand for chicken continued into the school holidays after the festive season,” he said, adding that the poultry industry had not been prepared for the continuous demand.

Commenting on the recent price increase for dressed chicken, he said that prices would stabilise by next month when the supply returned to normal.

Noh added that floods in several states, including Negri Sembilan, Malacca and Johor, early this year and the 60% surge in the price of chicken feed last year also contributed to the shortage.

The Veterinary Services Department (VSD) would take several immediate measures to ensure sufficient supply of chicken, he added.

A national buffer stock programme will be implemented to stabilise the price of dressed chicken,” he said, adding that excess supply of chicken would be frozen and stored for distribution to locations facing shortage.

He said 24 import permits were issued to private companies but none were used as the price in neighbouring countries was higher.

Currently, Malaysia imported only chicken parts while local poultry farmers produce adequate whole chicken to meet the demand.

Noh said that the shortage of chicken had nothing to do with the disaster in Japan as the country did not import meat from Japan.

There are no production plants in Japan that meet our halal standards,” he said, adding that the VSD would make an audit trip to Thailand next month to increase the import of chicken from the country.

Department director-general Datuk Dr Abdul Aziz Jamaluddin said that the daily demand for chicken in the country stood at 1.2 million.

The supply of chicken is usually more than enough with 1.3 million, but it has now dropped to below 1.2 million daily,” he said.