Phuket Island, Thailand to Chennai (Madras), India

March 25 - Today I am in Phuket Island, Thailand. Diana is still on her overland tour so I’ll be traveling solo today. We are heading up to the north and across the Sarasin Bridge to the mainland in the south of the country proper. During the drive we passed through many small villages and miles of rubber trees.

Our first stop is at the Wat Tham Suwan Kuha Cave Temple. The temple is over 200 years old and contains many statues of the Buddha in various traditional poses. The largest is in the reclining pose where the Buddha attains Nirvana (dies for the last time). Buddhists believe in reincarnation and after 56 or so lives the originator of the religion was born for the last time and lived his last life. If you see a Buddha statue with one hand raised and one finger pointing up that is what the statue is telling you, it’s his last time around. Reclining Buddhas always symbolize his attainment of Nirvana at his final death. If the eyes are open it’s just prior to his death, if they eyes are closed it’s after. I always thought he was sleeping.

No representations of the real Buddha exist so all the statues are symbolic in nature. Most are not very anthropomorphic, that is not very human like. For example, if you look closely at the figures most of them have fingers that are much too long, too long a torso or toes that are all the same length. These are only examples the differences are many, just look at the ears on the reclining Buddha and the unnatural curvature of his arms. A lot of the figures appear to have caps on. Those are actually small flames coming out of the Buddha’s head.

The temple consists of two caves, or rather a cave with a large open roof room about 150 feet from the entrance. The entrance of the cave has been left in its natural shape and they built a freestanding arch with Buddha representations on it that does not completely fill the hole (above right). When we arrived there were 4 monkeys perched at various places on the arch.

The first room is fairly large and contains most of the statues including the largest one that is an open-eyed reclining Buddha (left). There’s another, smaller reclining Buddha, this one with the more common closed eyes, in a stone display box. There are a series of stairs on the right that lead up to two more Buddhas in separate wall niches, one covered in gold leaf, the other will many offerings of flowers.

At the back of the room there is a series of 3 flights of stairs leading up to an open room with a few more Buddha statues. On one wall there are a series of initials carved. A sign nearby explains that these carvings were made by various members of Thai royalty to commemorate their visit. One set of initials belongs to Rama V, our old friend Chulalongkorn, the eldest son of the king in ‘The King and I’.

If you turn right here you can descend about 40 stairs to the floor of a large closed room. The smell of the guano let you know right away that there are bats here. You could see them pretty easily but it was hard to photograph them. The flashes from our cameras sent several of them flying around the room. From this large room you could climb a path up the far wall to head deeper into the cave. I went up to the top of that grade and then back as far as the light would allow into the cave. On the floor of the bat room there was a large stalagmite with a monument on top. There were temple dogs outside the temple and in the first room but none ventured deeper into the cave than that.

Outside the cave were several vendors selling soda, water, snacks and fruit to feed for the monkeys, mostly small bananas. It was fun to watch the tourists feed the monkeys. I was trying to get a picture of a monkey taking a banana from someone but by the time the camera focused, the monkey had grabbed and run. So I’m left with the picture of a laughing tourist with no banana and no monkey.

After bidding a fond farewell to the temple and the monkeys we drove northeast across Thailand to the city of Phang Nga to the Phang Nga Bay Hotel. There we had a break for restrooms and then proceeded to the pier next door to board our boat. The boat was about 50 feet long and had a beam of about 12 feet. It was covered and powered by a single diesel engine. It had a deck at the back that was about 3 feet above the passenger deck and had a ladder leading to the roof that was about 4 feet above the stern deck. There were rows of benches on each side of an aisle that would hold two adults. The benches terminated about 10 feet before the stern. This open space had the motor cover in the middle leaving about a 2.5-foot space on each side. I was going to stand back there so I could walk from side to side for pictures. As we pulled away from the pier the deck hand at the back pointed up as if asking me if I wanted to ride on the roof. I nodded yes and headed up the two ladders that led to the roof. It was great!! There were no seats up there but I didn’t mind standing. Occasionally when we turned or hit the wake of another boat it was a little like surfing (above right). That was great too!

After a while I was joined on the roof by several other people, most of whom sat on the roof. Two other tai chi students and Robert (blue cap in the picture above), the instructor were up there and the three of us did the Lotus exercise while Robert taped us. That was a hoot for sure. How many white folks to you think they see riding around Phang Nga Bay in Thailand performing tai chi on the roof of a boat. In fact, we passed several other tour boats and never saw anyone else even riding on the roof.

The tour started out in a banyan forest cruising narrow waterways (left) heading for the bay proper. We passed several small fishing villages and fish farms before coming to an area with limestone monoliths and hills sticking up out of the water. Small islands dotted the landscape, most with sheer cliff perimeters. We sailed south to Khao Ping Gun (right) the island that was used as Scaramunda’s secret headquarters in the James Bond movie ‘The Man with the Golden Gun.’ It was eerie; the place hasn’t changed at all. I had a good recollection of it because the ship showed the move on the TV just two days before we got here.

After that we sailed to Koh Panyi Fishing Village (below left behind the longboat). The village is attached to an island but is mostly built on stilts and connected by wooden walkways. It looked to me like all the buildings were on stilts but I couldn’t be sure. There was a mosque so I’m assuming that the areas inhabitants are mostly Muslim. At one end of the village was a row of restaurants, each with its own pier. Apparently people come from all over the area by longboat or tour boat to eat here because the area taken up by the restaurants is almost as large as the rest of the village combined. We stopped for a look around and some shopping but we are having lunch back at the Phang Nga Bay Hotel.

We should have a short discussion on the subject of longboats (left and below right). Generally they are slim craft, maybe 6-7 feet on the beam. They are disproportionately long at about 45-50 feet (the yellow boat to the left). This is unusual, but nothing compared to the drive unit. At the stern of the boat, attached about 6 inches forward of the transom, is a swivel mounted on a short post. Attached to this swivel, just forward of the pivot point, is a full-sized 4, 6 or 8 cylinder automotive motor. A long handle extends forward of the motor about 5 feet. The pilot holds this handle and uses as a combination tiller and throttle. Extending straight aft of the motor is about 8 feet of drive shaft with the screw attached. Between the motor and the shaft is a small transmission that can shift into forward or reverse. The drive shaft, which runs inside a steel tube, is mostly unsupported between the transmission and the screw. This puts a tremendous load on the bearings of the transmission; they must be very well designed and constructed. It didn’t seem to matter what make or size of engine they had, the transmission looked exactly the same.

The pilot steers the ship my moving the tiller as you normally would, push it right and you go left and vice versa, but in this case he is not moving a rudder but the entire drive train that is balanced on the pivot, motor, transmission, driveshaft and screw as one piece. The engine runs at a constant rpm and the screw is moved up and down to control the forward motion of the ship. When they are going full out the screw is just below the surface of the water putting it in a very direct line to the forward motion and sending a tremendous amount of spray into the air in a huge rooster tail. Quite a sight!!

From Koh Panyi we went directly back to the hotel for lunch. The trip took about 45 minutes. Lunch was served on the bayside patio buffet style. The food (left) was mostly Chinese style, sweet & sour pork, cashew chicken, tempura shrimp (Japanese) and stir-fried vegetables. There was also a seafood soup but that appeared to be Thai. I think they did this so there wouldn’t be so many people whining about the ‘spicy food’. Apparently, to this crowd, anything spicier than roast beef and potatoes or seasoned with anything but salt and a little black pepper is ‘too spicy’. I’d really like to eat the local food on these tours but that will never happen. They did have several bowls of spices and spicy sauces at the end for those of us who wanted a more authentic Thai experience. The one sauce was sort of sesame oil with small slices of the very thin red and green peppers I saw the lady sorting in the Bangkok flower market. The lunch in Bangkok had the same sort of sauce and I knew it was very hot. It was great on the cashew chicken but I didn’t think it would go with sweet and sour or the vegetables. It was also great in the soup. “They had a Thai version of Plum sauce that was great on the shrimp.

After lunch we drove back to the ship and were greeted by a Thai dance group that was giving us a sail-away performance on the pier. We stood out on the deck and watched them as the lines were let go and the ship moved from the pier. It was a lot of fun.

Now we have two days at sea before we make our stop in India and Diana rejoins the ship.

March 26 – Our first day at sea was pretty restful until one of the front office girls came to get me while I was chatting in the Explorer’s Lounge. She said that the Customer Relations Manager needed to talk to me. It’s a bit like being called to the Principal’s Office in school. When I sat down in her office she told me that Diana had been hospitalized in India. To make a long story short, since you already know the end, she had exhaustion and dehydration and needed to be put on IVs and get rest. The only place to do that when you are traveling is in the hospital. Of course, I was worried at the time but as you know it all ended very well.

I got to talk to the tour manager in India while I was still in the office. I gave her Diana’s medical history and her medication list. Then I told her about the effect Diana’s extra asthma medications could have, inability to sleep resulting in exhaustion and then dehydration because she forgets to drink. She caught a cold just before leaving on the overland tour and was taking both of the extra medications, either one by itself can cause her problems sleeping. I found out later that they passed this info on to her doctor and he began treating her for that and she recovered quite quickly.

March 27 – I talked to the doctor at noon today and he thanked me for the information from yesterday. He said that he had given her many testes, EKG, CT scan, kidney function, etc, and found nothing wrong except her electrolytes were all messed up from the dehydration. He didn’t think she could rejoin the ship in Chennai but might have to wait to Colombo, Sri Lanka. I told him he might be surprised at how quickly she would bounce back. He said I should call him back at 5PM when he would be in her room.

We did call back and he told me that he thought she would be returning in Chennai on schedule and that he was very pleased with her recovery. I also got to talk to Diana. She sounded pretty well but still a little tired.

March 28 – Well here I am in Chennai, India; finally in the same country as Diana. The tour group is not returning from the overland trip until about 10PM so I’m going to go on my morning tour. I talked to the front office and they confirmed that they had received email from the tour that Diana was indeed going to be back with the tour this evening. Buoyed up by this good news I departed on the morning tour with a much better outlook.

We’re headed south to the city of Mamallapuram, the stone-carving capital of India and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The area has a famous Shore Temple, an exceptional collection of rock sculptures that reflect the creativity and glory of the Pallava emperors of the 7th and 8th centuries. There are four types of sculpture – open-air bas-reliefs, temples, man-made caves and monolithic Rathas (Chariots), which are actually shrines, carved in situ from single granite boulders.

We are traveling by bus, of course, so each stop requires us to get out of and into the bus. Normally this would not be an event of much notice however, traveling with a group this old makes every stop an adventure in limping, moaning, groaning and general grumbling. Mind you, about 5% of the group contributes 95% of the griping.

Traveler’s Note: There are several observations I could make about the people I’m traveling with. Most are warm, outgoing, very kind and personable human beings. The rest are a collection of various oddballs and malcontents. Here are a few examples.

The first 8 seats, two pairs of 2 on each side of the aisle, at the front of the bus are reserved for physically challenged people and that’s totally reasonable. Here’s where the odd balls come in. There are people I see on the ship all the time scooting around without any assistance. God help you if you get between them and the lunch buffet, they’ll stomp you to death. But when it comes to shore tours, there these people are, cane in hand, limping and breathing heavily as though they’re on their last legs, headed out to the bus to claim one of the front seats. During the trip if you observe them carefully when we’re on free time and they think no one is around, you’ll see them zipping over very uneven ground cane cradled in their arms to get to some merchant’s stall to shop. It’s really funny. I’m not sure whom they think they’re fooling. I prefer to sit in the middle of the bus toward the rear to keep away from these phonies for fear I’ll have to comment on their off again/on again infirmities.

Next group is what I call ‘disinterested travelers’. They ride the bus through some of the most beautiful scenery as a guide gives them all sorts of great information about the people and the area and there they sit with their head stuck in a newspaper or a paperback paying no attention to the sights or sounds. These same people usually also spend a lot of time complaining about the food, the local people and the accommodations of the area. I often wonder why they bother to travel at all.

There are lots of other oddities, these are just examples.

As we came down the gangway to head to the busses there was a group of Indian ladies dressed in traditional garb that were applying the ‘third eye’ to the forehead of each passenger. The dots were red and yellow. They also put a garland of very sweet smelling white flowers with one yellow mum at the front (above left). When we got on the bus the thing smelled pretty good but after a while it got to be too sweet for almost everyone.

Our destination today is the city of Mamallapuram. The rock carving tradition of the area is known all over the world and carving shops are everywhere (right). During the Pallava era some 1,400 years ago the tradition was developed and it has continued to this day.

Our first stop is at a bas-relief carved in the 7th century. It’s carved on the side of a granite rock about 80 feet long and 30 feet high. They said it is the largest single panel bas-relief in the world and I must admit it’s huge. It depicts Arjuna’s Penance, which involves him standing on one leg with his hands over his head for so long that the god Shiva takes pity on him and as a reward allows the Ganges river to flow across India to the sea. The depiction of the river divides the relief approximately in half and is shown with several cobra shaped gods in the middle helping it flow (left). Arjuna is depicted to the left of the river near the top with the much larger, four-armed Shiva standing next to him. It’s a very intricate carving with people, gods, animals (including two large elephants) and a temple. The rock protrudes from the ground pretty much in the middle of the city so we had to negotiate a fair traffic jam to get there and out again.

We walked next door to a cave temple. These are actually rocks that have been carved out to allow you to enter them for worship. The one we were in has a large relief carved on the back wall. The main subject was Vishnu holding up a huge rock as an umbrella to protect the people from a terrible rainstorm. There are scenes from daily life on the relief. A Brahma bull, a man milking a cow that is licking her calf, women carrying goods on their heads, men farming, lions and one picture of a sphinx that the guide says proves that the Indians had contact with the early Egyptians. Could be true, I’m afraid that I’ll have to do some research to see what evidence exists for that assertion.

Our next stop was at the Five Rathas (left). Ratha means chariot in Tamil, the language most prevalent in Southern India. Hindi is spoken in the north. This should no be confused with Hindu which is a religion. The similarity in the names is coincidental. The five shrines found here were meant to be models of the various types of Southern Indian temples. They are all carved out of one single boulder of granite. There are also statues of a Brahma bull, lion and an elephant among the shrines. They were carved in the early Pallava period, around 600AD.

From there we drove to the oceanfront to the Shore Temple (right). It is believed that these two temples are the only survivors of a series of seven temples that stood along the ocean. It is postulated that the sea claimed the other five since the early 700s when they were constructed. They were the culmination of the rock artistry that began with the earlier bas-reliefs and extended through the Rathas to these temples. In contrast to the earlier two types of carving, these temples are carved from rock moved here for that purpose, not carved in place like the earlier forms. They are functioning temples, not shrines like the Rathas. There’s a reclining Vishnu between the two temples that is carved out of the bedrock on which the temples were built.

Just up the beach from the temple site was a very strange procession. Young women carrying baskets of freshly mixed cement on their heads from a mixing site across a field (left). They carried them up a hill to a man who took the basket from them and poured it in a frame that appeared to be the base of a water tank. Further down the beach was a procession of women carrying sand from the beach to the mixing site. I didn’t have time to get close for pictures but I think I got something to work with in Photoshop.

On the drive down and back we passed large camps of housing for victims of the tsunami. Some were in thatched huts (below) and some in tents provided by aid agencies. Our guide told us that most of the people we were seeing here were fishermen whose houses had been destroyed by the wave. He did say that the thatched huts were exactly like the ones they usually lived in but they were much further from the sea than they usually built. He said that it had only been about 25 days since the first of the fishermen would venture out onto the ocean since December. In one place what had been a nice little bay was now mostly a sandbar due to the deposits from the tsunami.

We stopped at a Taj hotel for lunch. The Taj is a chain of very nice Indian hotels. This one was the Fisherman’s Cove Resort. They had some very nice beachfront cottages. They were round with one half of the building being a large living room with a central hall between two bedrooms that took of half of the remaining space. The front half of the building had large windows for the entire 180 degrees facing the ocean. Very nice.

The lunch was not what I expected. They had 7 meat dishes and 7 vegetarian dishes on the buffet and not a single one was a curry, masalas, vindalus and tandori but no curry. As a ringer they had Shrimp Newberg. My favorite was Meen Moilee (left). I’m not sure exactly what was in it, some green leafy vegetable and meat in a yellowish sauce. The hint that I would like it was two large, hot red peppers they had floated on top to warn everyone that it was hot.

After lunch we went to an outdoor folk village. It’s like Greenfield Village in Detroit next to the Ford Museum. They’ve collected buildings of significance from all over southern India and moved them to this sight for preservation. They had buildings representing various religious and ethnic styles of architecture. It was interesting.

After that it was back to the ship for dinner and to wait for Diana’s return from Delhi. She finally arrived with the rest of the tour group at 9PM and it was sure good to see her. She was pretty well recovered but was a little tired and her left hand was swollen because they had gotten an IV started improperly and no one had noticed for some time. That should subside in a day or two.

We went directly to the cabin and she went to bed and was asleep in no time. We’ve got a day as sea to rest up tomorrow.

March 29 – A much needed day at sea and Diana slept most of the day and all night. I’m glad that this day was available before our arrival in Sri Lanka.

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(c) Rod Longenberger 2005