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| I don't think I was much of a burden to him. |
Which stands of course for Reading, 'Riting and Riding Elephants! All of which I am now able to do with more or less skill... honestly the elephant riding is the easiest of the three, and there are many options to do it around Chiang Mai, I'm not sure how many of the country's thousands of working pachyderms are here but it seems like a lot. They seem happy enough to me for all the tales of cruelty you hear, though I guess you never know what goes on behind the scenes, I enjoy spending time with them anyway, if I'm going to do tourist things here - and I am - then this is perhaps my favourite. Getting an elephant to myself for a bareback ride is a particular highlight, I manage to do some bathing with them too and even see a show, they are very talented I must say, playing football, the harmonica and even painting - though, looking at the photos later I rather suspect the trainer is putting in most of the creative thought.
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| The trainer is just... reassuring the elephant. |
Mostly though I don't go in for the 'organised trip' sort of tourism, rather I just hop on my bike and head for some local attraction - often this means either a waterfall or garden, there being many examples of both nearby. There seems to be a standard plan for the waterfalls, with a car park and then a footpath leading up along the river past various named levels, each with at least one fall and often a pool in which one can paddle or swim. I think the level thing has some kind of religious symbolism... all very scenic anyway, and popular with the locals as well as tourists. A favourite activity is to slide down the often quite high falls on your backside, what I believe is called canyoning by extreme sports fans... not dangerous at all I am sure, well, I give it a try once at least.
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| I slid down this. Spanish dude included for scale. |
As for the gardens, I have now found three, of the huge, landscaped, botanical variety in the neighbourhood. Rajapruek to the south of Doi Suthep, and the Queen Sirikit Garden to the north, are both big enough that you can easily spend the entire day just walking about, or indeed both have a network of bus stops to help you get around. The former's highlight is the array of gardens from around the world, whereas the latter excels on the botanical front - so many banana species - and also has a stunning canopy walkway. Both have lots and lots of big greenhouses. A few km along the main road from my condo is the Tweechol Botanic Garden, a little smaller but still huge, and a winding maze of topiary, lakes and canals, it also has an amusing zoo where you can feed massive animals such as camels and water buffalo.
Oh yeah, the reading and writing... hum. A quick google for 'Thai Writing System' returns on the first page a video titled 'World's Most Complicated Writing System' - it maybe isn't that bad, but it sure isn't easy. I've been working my way through learning it via self-study, whereas I see school has fully five books, that is five months of teaching, devoted to reading and writing. I'd kind of assumed this was because written Thai has a somewhat different vocabulary to the 'street Thai' we've learned up 'til now, but while that may be true to an extent, I also think the writing system really is just that complex.
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| The Bhutan Garden at Rajapruek. |
Seriously... there are some 44 consonants, including many apparent duplicates, for instance there are five 'K letters' and five 'T letters'. This is partly because one way the writing system allows you to indicate what tone a syllable is pronounced in is via the choice of initial consonant. Did you catch that 'one way'? Yeah... in addition to this, Thai also has four tone marks. Also a bunch of consonants are apparently only there because at some point the monks felt that the existing Thai alphabet was not able to properly reflect how some words are spelt in the original scripture, written in the ancient language Pali - so they added a bunch more letters. And yes, the vowel system is even more complicated and arbitrary...
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| Banana terrace at Queen Sirikit Botanic Garden. |
It must be said as well that now that I am able to read, slowly, a lot of the signs and adverts I see around town, the result is a little... disappointing. Because so much of it is simply transliterated English - perhaps the most common word I see is ฟรี - that is, 'free'. Looking at hotel or shop signs and hoping to learn the Thai word for 'place' or 'clinic', I am rewarded with 'pley' and 'kaliinik'. I also can't help but laugh at how the Thais will always conscientiously transliterate a final consonant from English, even when they simply cannot say it - the reason here being that despite the ludicrous number of consonants in the language, there are actually only six acceptable consonant sounds at the end of a syllable. So, often the final consonant will have a special 'silencer mark' written over it, such that, for instance, 'tent' becomes 'ten' in the Thai. At other times, a consonant is used which would match the English if it was at the start of the syllable, but is pronounced quite differently at the end. So 'cheese' becomes 'cheet' with a barely voiced T at the end. All very odd and hard to get to grips with.
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| Still at the Queen Sirikit Garden, this will be the orchid house. |
Photos to go with this post can be found here
