Wat Tham Sua

Visit to Wat Tham Sua

Visakha Bucha 2014

Visakha Bucha commemorates the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and death, which all happened on the same date. Visakha Bucha is a public holiday in Thailand. It takes place on the full moon day of the sixth lunar month. Last year I wrote about how Visakha Bucha Day, which fell on May 24, was celebrated at my school in a northeastern Thai village. This year, the full moon was on May 13^th, before the summer school term had started, so Visakha Bucha wasn’t celebrated at Ban Rang Krathai School in Kanchanaburi Province.

Since it was a holiday, members of my host family took me shopping and then to Wat Tham Sua (tham = cave; sua = tiger). It’s a beautiful temple complex on a hill not far from Kanchanaburi City, and close to the Mae Klong Dam, built in the 1970s to facilitate irrigation of crops in several provinces.If you're on Facebook, you've seen some of these photos already, but not all.

  Arriving at the site, you see these stairs leading up to the temple complex. Or, if you like, you can take a cable car.

The temple complex consists of a plaza-type area with several buildings and a large Buddha statue ensconced in a sort of half-shell structure.

Below is a partial view of the plaza to give you an idea of how it's laid out. You see the chedi on the left and a Chinese-style pagoda straight ahead. The pagoda isn’t part of the temple complex, but adjacent to it.

Just for fun, here’s a close-up of some details of the ornamentation on one of the buildings. I have no clue what story these figures are telling, but there they are.

The next photo is a picture of the chedi, which you can enter and climb seven flights of stairs to view statuary, images, altars, and relics housed inside. 

 The photo below is a close-up of some of the ornamentation on the outside of the chedi.

 Here are a couple of views of the beautiful countryside, taken from the level of the plaza.

Here is the tower of one of the plaza buildings taken from several flights up inside the chedi.

Below you see the peak of the Buddha’s half-shell, ss seen from inside the chedi, with the mountains in the distance.

Inside the chedi, near the top, is this shrine (on the left) where visitors can make offerings and pay respect. The photo below is a close-up of the ornamentation on the shrine.

 Below is a view of the pagoda from inside the chedi, at the top

Heading back down toward the stairway you saw at the beginning, I took this video not for the picture, but so you could hear a tiny snippet of the music that floats through the air, seeming to emanate from the peaceful atmosphere.

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Scary chicken-tail guy

Back down at street level, here are a couple of the scary characters who guard the place

Scary red and gold guy

And let's not forget the tigers – it’s Wat Tham Sua, after all.

Me and host sister Mew with tiger

To my knowledge, most of the Wat Tham Sua buildings date back to the 1970s, so it’s not an ancient institution. As for the cave aspect: there are caves in the mountains, probably formerly used by tigers and certainly used by people for various purposes, including meditation. Today, the caves are closed to the public.

If you’re thinking that this post doesn’t exactly convey the religious or cultural significance of Wat Tham Sua, you would be right, because I don’t pretend to understand it myself. But it’s a beautiful place that literally sparkles in the sunlight and gives the surrounding countryside something to, um, surround.

And what about Visakha Bucha Day? One of my host sisters asked me to go with her to the temple that evening to observe Visakha Bucha (yes, the temple with the bunnies in front, seen in a recent post). When we arrived, vendors were waiting to sell us, for a few baht, the flowers, candles, and incense sticks needed for the service. Inside the building, people sat on the floor chatting while waiting for the monks to arrive and begin their chants. When the chanting paused, everyone went outside, walked around the temple three times, and went back in. Presumably the three rounds signify the three events, birth, enlightenment, and death of the Buddha. After more chanting, the head monk sprinkled everyone with water and we went outside to lay our flowers down on one of the little altars, light our candles and joss sticks, and leave them burning with everyone else’s. In all, it was a very modest and low-key service – casual, but respectful.

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P.S. Note for anyone interested in more information about the Tiger Cave Temple: If you google Wat Tham Sua, you’ll learn that there’s another temple complex with the same name in Krabi, a favorite tourist destination in Thailand – confusing at first glance. As far as I know, the Krabi temple has no connection to Wat Tham Sua in Kanchanaburi Province.

What's Cooking

What’s Cooking

At

Ban Rang Krathai School

This term, Ban Rang Krathai students in grades 4 through 9 are spending half the day on Thursdays making food. This activity isn’t part of the standard curriculum; it's funded through a project sponsored by the Royal Family, one of several initiatives focused on teaching students practical skills and traditional Thai culture. The first dish they made was som tam, the green papaya spicy salad that Thais eat at least several times a week. I didn’t have my camera that day so I can’t show you our students making som tam, but here’s a link to a recipe if you are interested. http://www.eatingthaifood.com/2014/01/thai-green-papaya-salad-recipe/

On the agenda for the following three Thursdays were two banana recipes and a recipe for

nam prik (chili sauce). The students were divided into three groups that rotate each week, so they learn to make all three recipes.

The students pictured below have ripe bananas, sticky rice, sugar, and red beans. They’re making khaao tom madt, sweet sticky rice with banana slices and [optional] beans, wrapped in banana leaves.

Sticky rice, or glutinous rice, is a variety of rice that, when cooked, has a sticky and chewy texture very different from that of the familiar steamed white rice that you usually get in Thai restaurants in the US. When I first came to Thailand, I didn’t like sticky rice, but have come to enjoy it in some dishes.

To make khaao tom madt, the bananas are peeled, cut in half, and sliced in thirds lengthwise. Each banana slice is sandwiched between two layers of sticky rice that has been moistened with coconut milk or coconut cream and sprinkled with a little sugar. It’s a bit like rice pudding wrapped in a banana leaf and tied shut or skewered with a toothpick. Sometimes red beans are mixed into the rice. Each time I eat one of these snacks, I expect the beans to be raisins, because that’s what our mom put in rice pudding when we were children. 

Instructed by Ms. Sunan, the school’s cook, the girls in the picture below have cut the leaves into the correct shape for wrapping the khaao tom madt.  You can see a tray of halved bananas on the table still waiting to be sliced.

 And in the picture below, Kruu Yu Pin is showing students how to wrap and tie the khaao tom madt, which are then steamed for a half hour or so before they are ready to serve.

 There are many other Thai dishes that are wrapped and steamed in banana leaves, not only sweet snacks but also small meals of seasoned rice and bamboo shoots or other vegetables with pork, chicken, or fish. You can buy them from street vendors and at open markets. The banana leaves make an environmentally friendly, biodegradable package, as well as imparting a flavor to the wrapped food.

The next recipe uses green bananas. In the pictures below, you see my host sister, Kruu Kwanta, with a big bunch of green bananas (picture on the left), and showing the students how to peel them the Thai way (picture on the right), always slicing away from yourself.

The results of the students’ work can be seen below. They have sliced the green bananas into two shapes, one more like French fries, and one more like chips.

And that’s what the green bananas are for, deep-fried green banana fries and chips. 

Here you see the students at the wok filled with hot oil, monitoring the frying.

In the next picture, you see one of my English-teacher colleagues, Kruu Bussara, adding a handful of baai toey (pandan leaves) to the frying banana slices.

Pandan leaf is used as a flavoring in many Thai recipes, both sweet and savory. It’s sometimes compared to vanilla, but has a much milder, slightly sweet flavor. I’m not sure what its role is in this recipe, because I couldn’t taste it in the fries. The finished product, pictured below, was sprinkled with paprika and a little salt – and didn’t taste all that different from French fries.  However, beware of eating too many of them (voice of experience here).

I should mention that it’s not only green bananas that are deep-fried. Ripe bananas are also sliced in half or thirds and deep-fried. In my former village, in the northeast, I used to buy them from a street vendor on the way to school, to share with my fellow teachers. They taste something like McDonald’s apple pies, sweet and greasy.

In the next picture you see the third group of students, with bags of garlic, chilis, and shallots, which they will use for the chili sauce.

And below you see Kruu Pailin and a student pounding garlic and chilis with mortar and pestle. This is a familiar activity in Thai kitchens, as garlic and chilis are standard ingredients for many if not most Thai dishes. The garlic isn't peeled before being pounded, nor are the chilis de-seeded. If you get some garlic skin in your serving of the meal, you can discreetly push it to the side of your plate.

 In the video you can also see a plastic container with sugar and a bottle of fish sauce – some of the other ingredients of the nam prik, which has many variations. I didn’t taste the finished product made by this group of students, but can guarantee that it was hot!

Finally, here are some videos of students making a dessert called bua loi (bua = lotus, loi = float). Rice flour and other ingredients are mixed to make a soft, springy dough. You pinch off little pieces of dough and roll them between your fingers to make pea-sized balls that are then cooked in boiling water for several minutes, until they float in the water (floating lotus).  Here is a short video of a student starting to mix the dough.

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Next we see students kneading the dough. When it’s finished and food coloring has been added, it looks a lot like play doh, and I suspect that students enjoy making lotus balls for the same reasons they like play doh. 

The picture below is just to show you the cute braid that quite a few girls wear to keep their hair in place.

In the next video, you see my co-teacher, Kruu Bussara, showing students how to roll the dough, followed by a video of students rolling dough and giggling over being photographed.

Here we see a student transferring a batch of lotus balls from the boiling water to a bowl of cold water.

 The lotus balls are served in warm coconut milk. They have a slightly chewy texture and, to me, they don’t taste like much, but maybe they’ll grow on me, as sticky rice eventually did.  Here's a link to a detailed recipe for bua loi if you are interested.

http://importfood.com/recipes/bualoi.html

It won’t have escaped your notice that the recipes the students have learned so far are labor-intensive and best done with many hands – another aspect of Thailand’s collectivist culture.  You see, too, that the participating students are mostly girls. Several boys participated in the first som tam lesson, described above, but usually, they are sent to work in the school's vegetable garden while the girls cook. The cooking classes remind me of a comment by a colleague at my former school:  “We keep our traditions alive.” I used that quote several months ago as the title for a blog post about the Loi Krathong festival, and think of it often as I watch and learn about Thai cultural practices.