Sanctuary of Truth

Local Time: Sunday 5.20pm

Two things were repeated to me often by people when I told them I'd be going to Thailand: 1) that the food is good, and 2) that the food is cheap. And darn right they were, too. We wandered down to a local hawker place for dinner last night and had a scrummy meal of chicken fried rice, fried glass noodles, and something else chilli-ish I can't remember, with Singha beer for D and mum. Three people well sated for 270 baht (about AU$10.50). Phwoar yeah. Thai food, being a lot of deliciously flavoured rice and fried noodles, is very much up my alley, and my recovered appetite from the flight certainly helped.

Slept well last night, though still not quite adjusted to the timezone. Mum and I woke at about 6am this morning and met D downstairs at about 7.30 to partake of the hotel's complimentary breakfast buffet. I've seen a number of TS people around the hotel. They stick out not because they're TS, but because they're westerners that happen to be TS. I wonder how many are current patients and how many others are visiting to provide support.

After breakfast, we organised through broken English and gesturing and pointing at brochures for a taxi to somewhere we'd seen in one of the pamphlets - the Sanctuary of Truth. This is a sort of monument still under construction in Pattaya, south of Chon Buri, to spirituality and the triumph of good over evil. The description in the pamphlet reads, "the sanctuary was conceived out of the vision that human civilization has been achieved and nurtured by religious and philosophical truths." Sounded like a pretty good starting point for building something to us!

Our transportation - an "outside taxi" that the hotel arranged for us ("outside" meaning external as opposed to part of the hotel) - arrived at about 11am. The driver was a wiry, weathered man who spoke no English but would enthusiastically ask locals for directions in order to get us where we wanted (which we indicated by pointing at the brochure and consulting with the hotel staff, of course). And his vehicle was a capable van with some questionably bumpy suspension. How bumpy? Well, this is what it did to my hair band after bouncing me into the ceiling:


Oww.

But it was worth it. The place was truly impressive, being a structure built entirely of wood on the shores of Pattaya and carved with utmost intricacy. The building is awe inspiring from the get-go, looking more like something from ages long past than something being built in the modern world.


Wooden struts and ladders still adorn it where workers clamber up and carve their artwork directly into the bare wood with hand tools.


The carvings are unfinished and expected to take another twenty-something years, but even what's there is remarkable.


I expected something a little more touristy and less outright incredible, but the Sanctuary does more or less live up to its vision.

Mum, D, and I then managed (by way of back-and-forth hand waving and miming with the people stationed at the entrance) to communicate to the driver that we wanted to find somewhere for lunch, and he brought us to a little building on a pier where we sat down to a really fresh seafood meal. Despite sputtering over a bit of chilli he'd evidently bit into, D refused ice in his water (as a prudent move to avoid food poisoning, since ice is often frozen from water that isn't thoroughly clean, and stored in places which are susceptible to contamination).

I've mentioned before that I wanted this trip to be as much a holiday as for the sake of the surgery, and it's been so enjoyable thus far that I'm almost sorry I'll be spending most of it in bed recovering.

P.S Something that I forgot to mention is that everywhere I go, the locals greet me with a cheery Sawasdee-kah, rather than the -khrab for men. Whether I'm passing, or whether people here are just used to seeing transwomen, I don't really know, but it's nice all the same.