Phitsanulok

Hey guys, sorry about the long delay since our last post. Internet access in New Zealand is really spotty and expensive, plus we've been up to our eyeballs in adventures and have set aside very little time for things like blogging, postcards and laundry. Now that we're about to leave, we've managed to slow down enough to put up some old news: last year's adventures in Thailand. Yipes, we need to catch you up to the new decade. Here's hoping we find time for that soon. --Danny
8-22 November

While visiting Sukhothai, we stayed in a small town, Phitsanulok. We'd intended to stay for only a day, hit the ruins, then head on, but we amended our plans so we could get some more caves in. Ryan will wrote about those already; I'll be covering the town and its night markets.

Food and Markets

Phitsanulok has several night markets – two for food and one for clothing. We checked out all three, but one of the food markets was too far away from our hotel to be useful. (We stayed in a nice, large hotel on the other side of the river from the central downtown, but the walk was short and the weather was nice enough for walking.) As for the other markets, I bought some shorts from a small-run clothing designer at the clothes market and we frequented the food market nightly to buy both supper and cave lunches for the next day.

My favorites cave lunches were some sort of pork krapow (though I never got the actual name for it - it was a spicy stir fry that may have been krapow) and a delicious barbecue dried beef, like jerky. I'm sure I saw this being made later and it's a good thing I'd already eaten and enjoyed some because otherwise I'd be too horrified at the bowl of raw meat strips sitting out, curing in the sun. For us, though, it was a lightweight and easily packable lightweight lunch.

The night market in Phitsanulok also introduced me to one of my favorite Thai dessert-like dishes, faktong sankiya: steamed pumpkin stuffed with custard. The pumpkin is hollowed out and filled with custard batter, then the whole gourd is steam-cooked. The pumpkin is sweet (and probably has an extra sauce applied to help it out there) and the custard is eggy. I've also seen it served with nests of egg yolk candy garnish.

Pumpkin & custard dessert (from Food in Thailand)

We tried going to one of the recommended (Lonely Planet) restaurants, but had a language failure. They had no English menu nor picture menu, so the only dishes we could order were the smoked duck curry (mentioned in the Lonely Planet) and something selected rather arbitrarily (it turned out to be serpentheaded fish in a dry red curry). It was on our walk back from the restaurant that we visited the distant food market, which was, for some reason, suddenly swarming with western tourists. They were crowded around the fried insect vendor, making me wonder again if fried insects are only sold to and consumed by tourists (but I've read otherwise). This vendor also had fried scorpion for sale, black and shiny with sharp claws and needle stinger. Ryan may have been dared to try one, but, alas, he was too full already.

Phitsanulok happened to have the best noodle soup I had this whole trip. Maybe that's an exaggeration (and Ryan will scoff or *roll eyes* at my possible hyperbole), but the soup was just so delicious, and I have no idea what it's called, or even really what's in it. One night - maybe the first night in town - we were looking for food and I was pretty hungry, when suddenly I smelled something delicious, like cloves and cinnamon. I looked around, and only saw a big bowl of chopped greens, but sure enough, the sweet smell was coming from them. I had no idea what the vendor was selling, but I pointed to the greens and said I wanted some of that. Shortly after that, I was given a bowl of noodle soup including the chopped vegetable of unknown kind. There were large peppery, white balls of fish or pork, perhaps, and a tasty broth, and of course the vegetable. In my notes, I wrote that I saw the same vegetable, I thought, at a buffet with an identifying tag calling it "caisim," though this note could refer to something else, I suppose. I also thought I started to identify the greens as chopped morning glory. In the end, I have no idea what it was, and why it smelled like cloves and cinnamon to me. But boy was it good, and it was of course only 20฿.

Phitsanulok's Wats

We also stopped at a couple of the local temples. One of Phitsanulok's temples (Wat Phra Ratana Mahathat) houses a famous image of the Buddha called the Chinnarat Buddha, and it's got a legend to go with it. Supposedly there were to be three Buddha's cast for the temple, at the commission of a 14th century king (Li Thai). The first two images were cast just fine, but the third kept breaking. Finally, a mysterious white-robed sage showed up out of nowhere and helped them make the last image. I think he's the one who suggested that the Buddha be wreathed in flame, but for whatever reason, the Chinnarat Buddha introduced this novel pose for the Buhhda, and it's gained the reputation for being the most beautiful Buddha in Thailand. Chinnarat means "Victorious king."

Chinnarat "Victorious King" Buddha (from Phitsanulok)

Across the street from the Chinnarat Buddha is an older temple (Wat Ratchaburana) with several historic artifacts which are attached to some quaint local customs. The king once arrived in Phitsanulok by royal barge, I guess, because now there's an old royal barge (like an oversized Venetian gondola) on the temple grounds. The custom here is to make a wish then crawl under the length of the boat three or nine times (!). It's a long boat, so this would take a long time. I went ahead an wished (for good caving) and then banged my head during the first pass under. By the third crawl, I was slithering under there like a pro, or like a caver :)

Wat Ratchaburana also has a gong which you must rub in a gentle way to make it ring, and some sort of sacred tree which must be climbed three or nine times. The copy of the Lonely Planet that we had mentioned a ladder, I think, but in fact there was a plain staircase leading up and over a low branch of the tree. It looked pretty boring, so we skipped that custom.

Three times under the royal barge (from Phitsanulok)

About 12 km out of town, we kept passing a gigantic reclining Buddha on our way to the caves. We finally managed to pass by during regular visiting hours, so we stopped to check it out. The wat (Wat Kok Mai Deng) is crazy like a mini-golf park, with brightly painted plaster statues everywhere, and of course the big Buddha. The reclining Buddha has a tunnel through its chest, and the monk there told us we needed to walk through it and around the entire Buddha. Fortunately, we only had to walk around it once, not three or nine times.

Giant Buddha (from Phitsanulok)

The Buddha was obviously freshly painted. While we were looking for the name of the temple, we came across someone else's pictures of before the shiny gold paint job:

Unpainted giant Buddha (from Thailand odd spot - someone else's blog about Thailand)

We chatted with the young monk a little more, and then we fed the fish in the pond there with a bowl of bread crumbs he gave us.

Next stop, the bus to Nakon Ratchasima!


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