Day 11: Bangkok Art and Culture Center, Nana, and Raintree

After a long day and a late night, I slept in today until 1 pm.  I called Judy and she was eating downstairs at Madame Ong's with Alex and Nidia.  I joined them and ordered pork with chillies and lime sauce.  It had a cute presentation and was good.

We talked about our planned trip tomorrow to Muang Boran.  After lunch, we went upstairs and played cards for a while.  Everyone seemed pretty tired and no one wanted to do anything.  I relaxed all afternoon.  I decided that I wanted a burger for dinner.  I planned to go with most of the group to MBK where there is a Burger King.  We took the short cab ride down there.  I got the Double Outlaw, two beef patties with cheese, onion rings, and bacon.  The combo came with free ice cream sundae.  The burger was smaller than a Burger King burger in the US.  It was just what I wanted and it filled me up.

After dinner, I walked across the street with Carolina to the Bangkok Art and Culture Center.  She had been there before and knew what to see there.  The bottom four floors are set up like a shopping mall.  Each "shop" is a different small art gallery.  

One was a photography exhibit of different homeless children around Bangkok.  The photographer used an old film camera and did not edit the photos at all.  They were raw and moving.  

Another gallery was set up like a classroom.  Six graffiti-covered desks were in the middle, facing a chalkboard with famous English quotes and some things written in Thai.  On the walls, there were pictures of children's faces.  They were drawn on a multiple choice test answer sheet.  They looked like normal pencil drawings from a distance, but when I got closer, I saw that the only marks on the paper were in the answer bubbles.  

One gallery sold an odd collection of items.  They had some paintings, sculptures made from trash, a few articles of clothing, and two bicycles for sale.  Floors 5-7 of the art center resembled the Guggenheim museum, except the walls were covered with a continuous, edgy mural.  It wound around the rest of the building up to the top floor.

On the top floor, there was a table with this penguin hat on it.

The main exhibit on the top floor was about Chiang Mai, a large city and province in northwestern Thailand.  There were some movies about it playing in a large room.  In another room, there were many small models of real places in Chiang Mai, made with sticks and balsa wood.  They were intricate and impressive.

We left the art center and took the BTS to the Nana area.  We walked around for about an hour.  This area borders touristy Thanon Sukhumvit.  There are many Arabs and Africans living in this area and they run many of the shops.  I bought some street watermelon for 20 baht and felt ripped off because on my street, street fruit only costs 10 baht.  Some streets were seedy looking and i could see why Bill said this area could be dangerous.

We took the BTS back home and I found out that Shane, Rachael, and Christina were at Raintree, the small folk music pub where I had eaten but not heard the music.  I walked down Rang Nam and joined them.  When I walked in, they were playing Scott McKenzie's San Francisco.  They played a few more American songs, then switched to Thai folk music.  The others stepped out to talk for a bit, and I spent about 15 minutes sitting along at our table.  I enjoyed this time and really listened to the music.  Of course I had no idea what they were saying, but the way the music was performed and the tone of singers' voices reminded me a lot Dylan's early songs.  We sat around, chatted, and had a few beers.  The band stopped playing around one and we walked over to talk to them.  Their English was quite good and we talked to them about their music.  We told them we were from the US and they said how much they admire our music.  They knew Dylan's music well and said that it was a big part of the inspiration for their music.  Soon, the bar staff gave us our bill and we went back home to bed.

Day 10: Rainforest Zip-lining and the Zoo

I woke up at 5:30 and grabbed some snacks from a 7-11 for our 1 hour and 30 minute van ride to Chon Buri.  Nine of us went and we were picked up right on Thanon Rang Nam in a spacious 11 person van.  I slept most of the way there.  When I woke up, we were in a mountainous, heavily forested area.  A few wooden buildings constituted the Flight of the Gibbon base station.  Here, we paid 2600 baht ($86 US) for the zip-lining, a t-shirt, and the rest of the described activities, including the trek to and from Bangkok.

Then our driver drove us further up in the mountains to an open wooden shelter where we put on our harnesses.  They fit onto our legs, came over our shoulders and included a pulley that attached to each of the zip lines.  They were surprisingly comfortable.  We met our two guides, Alvin and Donatello, (we suspected he made up that name earlier in the day) who gave us our safely briefing.  They told us not to touch any of the carabiners or equipment.  They also showed us where to attach our cameras to our harnesses so we could safely take pictures.  Alvin took one of our cameras for the whole trip and took some great pictures of us.  We then began hiking up through the rainforest to the beginning of the course.  This was about a third of a mile hike, but was on a rather steep incline.

We finally came to the first platform.  We climbed a flight of stairs and zipped about 50 feet to a nearby tree.  This seemed to calm the nerves of some of the people in our group who with a fear of heights.  The guides did a great job of keeping us and themselves clipped into a safety line at all times.  The next platform looked pretty cool.

Most of the platforms looked like this.  They were somehow precariously perched 100 feet or more in the air.

I worked at a YMCA day camp with a zip line for two summers but never got to try it.  That always looked like fun, but this was just amazing.  The total tour is over 3 km (1.9 miles) long, with 26 platforms, and one of the zip lines is over 300m (964 feet) long.  Most of them were a few hundred feet long.  After about 5 zip lines, our guides clipped us into a pulley and lowered us 25m (82 feet) to a lower platform.  Here is a photo from the top of it.

That was a lot of fun.

We stopped after a few more platforms on this larger platform to drink some water.

Rachael, Judy, Nidia, and me

On this platform, we saw a gecko on a rafter.

The views from the tree tops were breathtaking.  Because the zip lines zigged and zagged across the jungle, it was impossible to keep track of where we were in reference to anything else.

This is an example of how the zip lines and safety cables were attached to the trees.

These caterpillars were on almost every tree.

This is some video I took while I was zip-lining.

About halfway through, the guides heard a faint but steady noise from far away.  They told us the rain was coming and put all of our cameras in a dry bag.  About a minute later it just started pouring.  It was very hot before this and the rain felt great.  We all got soaked so I did not take any pictures after this.  Short bridges connected two sets of platforms.  I got some of the shots Alvin took and all of the following are his.

I particularly like this photo because it looks like I have a mustache. 

The last zip line was the long one I mentioned earlier.  Alvin took a video while he was on it.

To get back to the ground, our guides lowered us on another pulley.

We took off our harnesses, rested, and drank some water for a few minutes.  Our driver then took us to an open area where some staff there served us lunch.  On the way there, this group of monkeys was just walking down the road.  The baby one was being held in it's mother's lap and would periodically get rambunctious and fall out onto the ground where it would quickly run back for protection.

For lunch, they served us a fried egg with rice, fruit, steamed vegetables, and chicken and pea soup.  Also, note the large cloth napkin.  Every other restaurant I have been to in Thailand gives you about a 2x6 inch paper thin napkin.  These large ones were a luxury.

After lunch, our driver took us over to the zoo where I saw the following animals.

Everyone knows hippos hate cigarettes.

After the zoo, we loaded up in the van and arrived at VP Tower by three o'clock.  I took a nap.  Later in the evening, nine of us ate at B-Resto, a modern restaurant with a western and Thai menu.  I ordered garlic bread and barbecued fish with sweet and sour sauce.  A whole fish.

I destroyed that fish.

After dinner, we set about our grueling nightclub assignment.  Some members of our group went to find a bar near a university in hopes of meeting some young Thais.  Their cab driver could not find what they were looking for so they just met us on Khaosan street.  We went to a few different bars there but found mostly farang everywhere we went.  We had a good time but decided we need to go somewhere with more Thais next time.