Story Jar - Chaing Dao by Bus

Chiang Dao by Bus
Story Jar published June 20, 2007 copyright Elaine Hardman
I don't have many photos of this adventure.

There are lots of ways to travel in Thailand – rent some kind of cart pulled by a motorcycle or a car or van
but we found our way to Chiang Dao on a public bus. It was a huge, tall thing. The floor, sides and ceiling were shiny metal. Above our John-Deer-green seats were luggage racks with a variety of bags and backpacks. Under many seats pairs of sandals waited empty while owner-feet rested in lotus pose, bare toes cooling in the breeze from six overhead fans.
Green curtains covered most of the windows blocking the blazing sun to create squares of precious shade but some windows were opened to catch the wind – dry, sun-hot, and smelling of roasted asphalt and concrete.
We came to this bus by Tuk Tuk, a Thai cart/motorcycle. We asked our Tuk Tuk driver where to get a ticket for the Chaing Dao bus and he pointed us toward the wrong ticket window but other drivers waved us onward to the correct window.
Thai is a difficult language but English is rare outside of tourist areas so we used a few hand signals and asked for 2 tickets to Chiang Dao. Seeing that I had a bit of paper in my hand (Chiang Puak station was scribbled on it for the Tuk Tuk driver), the ticket vendor took it to write 40 underscore 80 so Rick handed a 100 Baht note for our tickets.
She gave change and handed us the tickets after writing 11:30, 31/32 on the back of one. Okay, that was the departure time and our seat numbers. She pointed to a bus and we climbed on and found that the back of each seat actually had 3 numbers stenciled on suggesting a future coziness that would scarce allow room for sweat to drip.
The ticket seller became our conductor, closing her window and joining us just before the bus left. At the rear door another staff member had the lively job of putting a wood block behind the back wheel every time the bus stopped. He pulled out the block and we took off.
Rick and I were oddities on this bus. Western oddities. Most tourists take taxis to Chiang Dao or they rent air conditioned vans.
Taxis are actually small pick up trucks with 2 rows of seats in the bed. In Cambodia they are yellow and have a roof against the rain or sun. In Thailand they are often red and more enclosed but both of these slightly-less-than-limo services require one to ride sideways engulfed in the dust and fumes of the road at a price ten times that of a bus ticket.
Had we rented an air conditioned van, the trip would have been a pleasant journey but getting to Chaing Dao would have cost more, each way, than three nights at our "Nature Lover's Bungalow". The guide book suggested that taking the bus was an easy and reasonable choice so that’s what we did and -as a bonus - it was interesting.
People boarded the bus at several locations so that, while we were the only two in our seat, some people were crunched three to a seat. The conductor asked two skinny men next to us to stand while she lifted their seat and pulled it away from the side of the bus so that it protruded into the aisle a bit giving enough space for a new passenger to perch her size zero jeans on the edge where she listened to her Ipod for the rest of the 90 minute trip.
It gave a bit of a sense of insecurity to know that our bus seats not only lacked seat belts, they weren’t even attached to anything.
We drove past rice paddies, houses on silts, stores, laundry on lines, construction sites, at least a thousand restaurants and half a dozen working elephants in our soft, free-floating seats, under ceiling fans on a non-smoking bus.
At Chiang Dao we got a tap on the shoulder and a nod to the rear. The wood-block man jumped off and placed his block behind the tire while we jumped off behind him. He called out as a monk in dark yellow clambered up the steps and in a blur he picked up his block and gracefully flew onto the rumbling bus to take everyone else toward Fang, the end of the line.

Emilie's Green Cupboard

We have a blue cupboard in our kitchen. It was inspired, in a sense by an old door that was on a built in cupboard in our house purchased in 1985 as well as a punched copper panel. Rick was going to make kitchen cupboards with these punched copper panels until he decided that it wasn't really fun punching all those holes. He took the old door and built a copper panel into a new door and built a cupboard around them. This is the model for a new cupboard for Emilie and Josh in Boston.

I had a post of this story with photos in order but somehow changed the order of the photos and now can't get them sorted out so I will just post them without text. The photos show a finished cupboard and then the steps toward creating a second one. The new one will go to Somerville and hold the items of cookware for Emilie and Josh's Conscious Kitchen.

The cupboard is made in sections, dry fitted and then glued with biscuits (wooden discs that swell with the liquid glue and hold the pieces firmly in place. The frame of the cupboard is poplar, panels are pine, the shelves are birch inside and the hinges came from old cupboards in our house. The striking step-out shelf is bird's eye maple and the punched panel is copper. It seems to take a forrest to make a cubpoard.

Everything is constructed in the downstairs workroom or the garage.













A set of photos including one of the finished hutch is on flickr and there must be a way to see it by clicking on those little images in the border to the right.

Story Jar -The Soya Lady

copyright 2007, Elaine Hardman

In 1985 we lived in a brick and concrete house in section SS2/44, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia – a suburb of Kuala Lumpur. Ours was a corner house so along the front and on one side were ditches about 4 feet deep and 2 feet across. When the rains came they pounded into the streets turning the lawns to ponds and the ditches into raging rivers within minutes.
Our small ditches flowed to larger ones and those to larger still so that it seems almost a canal system – ridiculously large under the sun and woefully inadequate in the rain. Large ditches had narrow boards or slippery pipes stretched across them so that people could scamper across the ditches – shortcuts. Occasionally, people would try this when the water was flowing and now and then they would fall in and be swept out to sea in the torrents of rain and mud.
Actually, there was a small, narrow ditch behind every house – for gray water. This was the sewage system for bathtubs and showers and sinks. Every house had a pipe or two that emptied into the backyard ditch sending gray water into the system.
Next to our house was another just like it and on and on down the winding streets were rows and rows of brick and concrete homes surrounded by brick and steel fences with broken glass or barbed wire on top. Each had a car port and paved driveway and several air conditioners.
A regular visitor at our house was the Soya Bean Lady. This is how 7-year-old Emilie described her in a letter to her aunt– “The Soya Bean Lady walks around SS2 and other sections. She carries a stick over her shoulder. The stick must be very strong because it holds weight on each end. She must be very strong to hold up the weight. It must weigh 75 or 100 Kg. My mother and Uncle Bill tried to pick it up once but they couldn’t and the Soya Bean Lady runs up a hill with that thing.


The Soya Bean Lady wears a big hat for shading. She must be about fifty years old. She carries a big wooden container full of soft soya. She scoops up the soya with a spoon into a bowl that I bring out to her. The size of my bowl costs 30 sen (12 cents).
She carries a metal container on the other side of the stick. This container has water for washing her hands, sugar water for the soya, and bowls and spoons for people out on the street that buy her soya. She comes to our house in the morning.”
Emilie's description of the Soya Lady was spot-on. The woman was rail thin and toothless old. She carried a portable restaurant on one shoulder. The wooden bucket held ice and the metal pot with the soya. It easily weighed 35 pounds. The metal box on the other side doubled as a table and she had two folding benches to place on either side of it. She could wash her dishes and spoons (Yes, she carried the water.), serve her soya and wait while her customers ate. She could then wash up again and pack it all together to move onward to another home or another street corner.
The soya was fresh tofu. We don’t know what fresh tofu is like in the US but when it’s really fresh it has the taste and consistency of custard – creamy, smooth, sweet.
The Soya Bean Lady spent her mornings traveling the neighborhood, earning a few pennies at a time for very hard work. Emilie would hear her call (Soya! Soya!) and run out to reach her red plastic bowl through the iron gate.