Blog - 3 of 4
15 Jan 2015 | Surrender
My 2015 began in Pai, Thailand at the Xhale Yoga Retreat. This was my first yoga retreat. I’ve attended five previous retreats, one for each of the years I spent at a private Jesuit high school. Yearly retreats were part of the curriculum there and part of the Jesuit rule. I don’t remember them very well except as extended field...
14 Jan 2015 | Riding in No Man's Land
After riding a couple of hundred kilometers to Doi Inthanon from Chiang Mai and back and more than five hundred from Chiang Mai to Mae Sai and back, here are the impressions of this westerner riding in Thailand. First, riding around the city is fun. Especially in Chiang Mai where everything’s close, but there’re a lot of turns and obstacles...
10 Jan 2015 | Day 30: Border Chronicles III
Cold If it was cold coming out of Chiang Mai at 9:30 in the morning, leaving Chiang Rai at 7:30 was absolutely freezing. To my 3 top layers before, I added my ski bottom base layer under my pants, my buff as a neck scarf and my new gloves. Even with all these, within half an hour my index finger...
09 Jan 2015 | Day 29: Border Chronicles II: White Temple
White Temple The white temple (or Wat Rong Kuhn) is amazing and completely worth visiting. It’s also a very different experience from any other temple. I’m glad I didn’t know this before going there and so received the full effect of figuring it out while at the place itself. If you want the same effect — and if you’re going...
08 Jan 2015 | Booking Oddball Low-Cost Airline Flights
Booking my travel from Chiang Mai to Bali was messy. In the end I figured out a strategy to work around Air Asia’s restrictive Web site so I thought I’d share. First, the problem. When you select an origin, say CNX, Air Asia’s site automatically populates the acceptable destinations. When I select Chiang Mai’s CNX airport, I get this: No...
07 Jan 2015 | Day 29: Border Chronicles I
With my visa waiver winding down its last hours, it was time for a trip to the border to renew it. The closest border from Chiang Mai is actually Burma at the town of Mae Sai on the Thai side and Talicheck on the Burmese side. The day before expiry — which was new years’ eve since my visa waiver...
05 Jan 2015 | Day 33 to Day 39: Retreat
I’ll be in a yoga retreat in Pai from Jan 5 to Jan 10. I’m planning to unplug completely. Though it may look like it, I probably haven’t been kidnapped or murdered or fled to the mountains to be alone with my mental illness. Well, maybe that last one. Just a bit. There’s a chance I’ll rig up some posts...
04 Jan 2015 | Day 28: New Years in Chiang Mai
Thais can chose from three new years. The first is the western new year, the second the lunar new year followed by much of the rest of Asia. Finally, in April or thereabouts is the Thai New Year. Spending the western new year in Chiang Mai was extraordinary. Of course there were fireworks. And they were great, all the better...
04 Jan 2015 | Day 27: Doi Inthanon
After a few weeks in the city, I felt the strong need to be surrounded by green again. Some nature. Luckily, Chiang Mai is a couple of hours away from Doi Inthanon, the highest peak in Thailand. How high? The overly-precise sign at the top has it at 2565.3341 meters (8416 ft) above mean sea level. That’s a respectable size,...
03 Jan 2015 | Day 26: Wat Lok Mollee
Wat Lok Molee is another grand temple just outside the north gate of the city. I don’t have much to say about it. That’s not because it’s not beautiful (it is) but because it comes after so many other spectacular temples. One thing worth noting is that Wat Lok Molee hosted far fewer tourists when I went at 5pm on...
30 Dec 2014 | Day 24: Freedom
This morning I awoke without an inkling that it would be fateful. It started completely normally, with coffee and a walk. A bit of reading: I finished the book I’d started a couple of weeks ago, The Alchemist by Paul Coelho. It was the suggestion of a friend who gave me some painfully-true advice. It’s a charming fable about following...
29 Dec 2014 | Day 23: Walking Around Town
As my time in Chiang Mai winds down and I got my first free day after school, I decided to walk around and observe the town. Chiang Mai itself consists of an old city, roughly square, contained by a moat and some ruined walls. Two one-way ring roads, one inside the walls and one outside, encircle the city. I have...
28 Dec 2014 | Day 22: Pressing the Flesh
Day 22 is actually the 25th of December, or Christmas day. I spent the morning in the last session of my 4 day, 30 hour, private training in Traditional Thai Massage. It’s still a surprise to me that I took this course. I believe the origin of the idea traces back to my Sweet Auntie Karen Dear — the ‘aunt’...
Tonight a Tale of two Markets. Both catering to tourists. Or at least swarming with them. One awful and one great. One of Chiang Mai’s main tourist attractions is the night bazaar. Unhappily, it turned out to be a little too good at attracting tourists, especially those willing to pay high prices. The place was costly. A little knock-off Beats...
26 Dec 2014 | Day 17: Doi Suthep
Chiang Mai is brimful of Wats, but the famous one, the one in all the guidebooks, is an hour outside town on a mountainside. It’s rightly famous. Doi Suthep — actually Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, the temple on the Doi Suthep mountain — is extraordinary. Getting There Following the helpful directions here, I made my way to the Chang...
24 Dec 2014 | The Castaway Life
Preface This was mostly written in Seattle right when I started the blog. Thought I’d save it for a slow time, like Christmas. Merry Christmas! Casts Why name this blog ‘thecastawaylife’? I love the idea of the perfect phrase, le mot juste, something fitting. I’ll search and search for the right words. Then I’ll get tired and dump whatever I...
23 Dec 2014 | Day 14: Don't go Chasing...
This post begins with a confession: I am terrible at photographing waterfalls. They should be easy. They’re inherently magnificent to behold. But that’s the problem: the experience of being near a waterfall is much more than visual. It has that urgent, vaguely threatening wall of white noise, the subtle breath of atomized water in the air, the ever-changing texture of...
22 Dec 2014 | Day 11: Sleeper Train to Chiang Mai
Another first: a sleeper train. This one the overnight from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, leaving at 22:00 and getting in at 13:00. The AC cabins were all sold out, so we had fan cabins. Second class, but no problem. It’s cold enough this time of year that the blanket was barely enough to keep me comfortably warm enough to sleep....
19 Dec 2014 | Day 10: Leaving Bangkok
Saying I saw Bangkok, while true, is meaningless. The city is so vast it’s hard to get the barest sense of direction in a week and a half. I did get to know the neighborhood around my guesthouse and hostel — Silom and Satthorn — fairly well, and make it to some of the famous attractions. This all left me...
13 Dec 2014 | Day 9: Ayutthaya
Another up-before-dawn day. This time to catch the 6:40 train to Ayutthaya, the second Thai Capital. It was sacked by the Burmese in 1767 and contains a whole series of ruins and temples. This time I travel solo. It’s a nice change from the past few days: outdoors again and definitely less disgusting. All that violence safely far in the...