Visiting Thai Temples and coping with heat and other hazards.
Visiting Thai Temples and coping with heat and other hazards.
What I learned by error visiting Bangkok.
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Introduction
One of the great opportunities in visiting Thailand is to visit the temples. However, it is a tropical nation and you need to consider the heat and the dress code of the Buddhist temples. There are other important considerations besides the heat. I will go over all of them in this guide. Going in winter months might be cooler, but then you miss the Pride parade in June.
There is a lot of wrong information put out on the internet which can negatively impact your trip, it did mine. There is conflicting information also. There are serious hazards Also.
You will see a lot of photos of temples in Thailand and people will show how amazing they are, but getting there, keeping from over heating they don’t discuss.
Also there are things that you can do to deal with issues which no one mentions. By the time I figured things out my trip was over.
To some extent my problem was that I was 72 years old, hadn’t been exercising as much as I should have and been in better shape. But this was good in terms of learning how to deal with hot weather since being more susceptible to heat forced me to take it much more seriously than my 30-year-old self would have had to.
Even though you might be much better equipped to deal with the heat all of the following will be beneficial for you.
Suggested Reading on Temples
There was only one good book I could find, “Thai Temples and Temple Murals,” by Rita Ringis, Oxford University Press, 1990. It is out of print, but the online book dealers have copies. Read it all the way through so you know what you are photographing.
https://digitalthaitemples.com/ Is another good resource.
If there is another good book, I would like to be informed.
Basic points to consider.
It is hot in Thailand even when it is not what they call the hot season. You need to take it seriously. It isn’t hot like most of the United States, it can be warm and humid. There is no dry heat here.
The tropical sun is more intense. You will understand more that old Gilbert and Sullivan line, “Only Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun.”
The Thai are acclimated and are not feeling the heat like you are. They may not perceive that you are over heating or understand the urgency.
Google is a mess to get good info. You get endless junk on clothing with tropical prints, and some not very accurate information.
So the following are things to do or be aware of to have a successful time visiting the wonderful Thai temples.
Heat of Evaporation at sea level.
This is actually something important to consider. The units are NOT food calories, but metric.
To melt one gram of ice to freeing (0 C or 32 F) water takes 80 calories.
To heat one gram of freezing water to boiling (100 C or 212 F) takes 100 calories.
To boil one gram of boiling water to steam takes 540 calories of water.
Given that 90 F is 32.2 Celsius, the heat removed by sweat for 1 gram would be 540 calories plus 67.8 for a total of 607.8 calories. Evaporation is huge in terms of heat removal versus ice or just water being cold.
So the evaporation of sweat is going to be an important part of keeping cool.
So having ice as opposed to water in your bag isn’t going to be much advantage, since most of the heat removal will be due to evaporation. Having ice just causes condensation in your bag and it is going to melt fairly fast since it is cold and condensing vapor which has lots of heat.
Ice in a drink when you stop is good, but it is not good to try to bring it along in your bag.
Bag
Always, always have the bag on you. It may seem like a nuisance, but it will make a big difference and possibly prevent heat stroke.
You will need a small bag with a strap that goes on your shoulder. It allows your hands to be free to take pictures.
The strap needs to have a pad so it doesn’t cut into your shoulder. When you get the bag, test it out before your trip, walk around with it with two bottles of water so that you know the strap and bag is comfortable.
Contents of the bag will be as follows:
2 bottles of plain drinking water.
1 collapsible umbrella.
1 hat
1 Battery pack with connection cord to keep your smart phone powered.
1 Long sleeve shirt.
As you drink up water, purchase replacement bottles. The availability of water isn’t always assured, so you want to replace consumed bottles as soon as possible.
You need the hat for when you are taking pictures and need your hands free
Clothing for a tropical climate.
The online advice was to have linen clothing to wick up moisture. I did purchase linen clothing long sleeve shirts and pants with what appeared to be a open weave and you could see somewhat through it. However, even on the air-conditioned plane flight over it was a little warm.
They did soak up sweat and if a strong breeze contacted you or you were standing in front of a strong fan they did cool.
After visiting a temple and returning to my hotel room, I had to drape them over the side of the bathtub to dry. They were soaking wet. The maps in my back pocket had to be laid out to dry.
This is a picture of me after a temple visit. The pants are wet also.
On days I didn’t visit a temple, I found ordinary shorts and a cotton t-shirt was much cooler. I stopped wearing the linen when I was not going to a temple.
I recommend getting cotton clothing and make sure it is loose fitting. Cotton will wick up sweat. When I talked to people from tropical nations they weren’t wearers of linen and they wore ordinary cotton t-shirts and cotton clothing in general.
I did hear about bamboo fabric clothing, but that was recommended by people for the purpose that it doesn’t wick up sweat. However, you need your clothing to wick up sweat as much as possible so any stray breeze or fan will cool you.
There might be some futuristic fabric for tropical climates, but good luck trying to find it with Google. You can find something on cooling clothes, but I am going to discuss that in a section.
I am going to attempt to find out more information, on this and will update this guide.
Temple dress code
There is a lot of wrong information on temple dress clothes and also you will be told things which aren’t true.
I think there are things you are told and it is perhaps what people think they should tell you.
Long sleeves: I asked if the sleeves had to be long and I asked if the cuffs could be unbuttoned. I was told that the button cuffs and long sleeves was the “polite” thing from multiple Thai individuals.
However, when visiting the temples I found that I was the only person with long sleeves. Also, some sources said just the sholder needed covering. Does it vary from temple to temple. If I could have worn a nice t-shirt from uniglo it would have been much much cooler. The internet is a jumble on this.
After that I went with rolled up sleeves which helped with the heat somewhat. I thought that if someone brought it up as an issue, I could roll down the sleeves. I was never asked about it. The rolled-up sleeves were never an issue. However, the rolled-up sleeve did prevent free circulation of air
I was just visiting the temples in central Bangkok and maybe the temples elsewhere with fewer tourists they might have a different stricter dress code.
One thing I saw at the Grand Palace and elsewhere these loose fitting short sleeve outfits. They look like keep you much cooler. They are sold here and there.
I don’t know if they wore them over shorts and a t-shirt. They look like they are much better ventilated than my outfit.
I think one strategy that might be done is to bring with you in the bag a shirt with long sleeves that you can change into if the need arises.
Further research needs to be done.
T-shirt under Shirts: You don’t have to wear a t-shirt under a dress shirt. People don’t.
Shorts: No shorts. According some some sources what is precluded is short shorts. The Temple of the Golden Mount has in English, no shorts, but the picture was short shorts. Which is it? Also, could it be possible to have a standard given out where it is specifed as inches above the need or or a distance defined as a part of a persons hieght?
Pants: I would get something that breaths. Something with zippers for front pockets.
Socks: Are ankle socks acceptable? I wore standard socks that went up 5 or 6 inches up from the ankle. It may seem like a small advantage, but every small thing to increase the bodies ability to cool is important.
I am going to attempt to find out more information, on clothing and will update this guide.
SHOES: You have to take your shoes off at a Buddhist temple. This is the same in Taipei. However, in Taipei, you are the often the only person visiting, except Lungshan Temple. The rest of the people are members. You can take off your shoes, there is no one around to steal them. The Thai temples can be overflowing with tourists.
Coming from Dallas, Texas and if you come from most places in the United States of America, the first thing that comes to mind is that your shoes will get stolen.
I bought some Adidas shoes so if they weren’t stolen I wouldn’t care that much. I don’t think that theft of shoes at a temple is an issue, but being American you will wonder if your shoes will be still there when you go to retrieve them. Having shoes you aren’t taking back to the United States anyways, will result in you not thinking about the shoes, and focus on the temple.
GRAB and getting to the temple.
In Taipei I would walk from temple to temple. You can’t do that in Bangkok. The heat is too much.
I always took Grab which is the equivalent to Uber. Not only the fee is known, they have features for your security. Uber isn’t in Thailand.
The traffic in central Bangkok is just really bad. My driver tried to get to a destination by a different route and the Grab app popped with a question as to whether I was okay.
The system does tracking. You have a known price, driver, vehicle. Grab is watching. Another type driver might leave you some place and you are on your own in a foreign nation with a language barrier and no system aware where you might be.
GRAB doesn’t have you select places off a map. You will need to type in locations and will need to type in from your map that you have printed out before your trip. (See sections on maps.)
Thermal management of your GRAB drive.
Call for your Grab drive from behind the glass doors in the hotel. Wait there until Grab says the car is arriving. Heat fatigue seems to be cumulative.
After a driver has accepted you, politely ask, “Air conditioning maximum please.” The Grab app translates your message into Thai to the driver and his Thai messages into English. Always use “please.”
Heat fatigue seems to be cumulative, and so arriving cool at the temple gives you extra time before heat fatigue causes your visit to come to an end.
I did not use a taxi. There are endless discussions about unscrupulous taxi drivers online and how to make sure you aren’t cheated. I don’t know if they are true. Who needs that issue when you are struggling with heat. You are going to need to get into an air-conditioned car right away and not be melting in the heat haggling over the price.
However, when you finish your visit at the temple, it might take a while for the GRAB driver to pick you up because of the traffic. To successfully handle the delay you want to drink some water, open your umbrella.
Once a GRAB driver has accepted your request, tell the driver that you are a foreigner so he can spot you more easily. Again ask for maximum air conditioning please. Also, in the message mode you can take a picture of where you are. Use this feature a couple times even when you don’t need to use it to be familiar with it. You don’t want to be learning this in an emergency. I did learn it in an emergency.
You need to factor at least a ten-minute delay into being picked up. Check if the GRAB suggested pick up point has shade, consider alternatives. Grab makes suggested pick up points without consideration of shade.
Grab also makes pick up suggestions regardless of whether the Grab car can actually reach that location.
Being in a location where the driver can’t reach you and, in the sun nearly resulted in me collapsing on the street.
I only used Grab premium. You don’t get taxis that are also signed up for Grab. I am not going to give reasons why. However, the 3rd time getting picked up by a taxi, I decided to only use premium.
Don’t get into a car which doesn’t have a license plate number matching the Garb app assigned license plate number.
For temples outside Bangkok rent a driver for 12 hours.
There is no delay getting into an air-conditioned car after the temple visit.
You can’t put in an itinerary of stops. You can’t tell grab the general plan for your 12 hours. I had maps prepared before leaving and I used Google maps to show next where I wanted to go. You can use Google maps to show the next stop.
For renting drivers the app is not updated and flawed. A link to instructions was broken. There are instructions to reserve a driver in advance, but you can’t.
What you do is when you need the driver you use the app and ask for rent a driver and wait for a response. The one time I used it I got a response fairly quickly. Good luck with using GRAB.
Renting a driver for a series of temples in Bangkok city.
By the time I thought of doing this, I was too tired from heat exposure and spent the last few days just resting and recovering before my flight.
However, you can take your map and just go from place to place and exit the air-conditioned car and enter the air-conditioned car.
One issue is that sometimes there really isn’t a place for the car to park while you are visiting the temple. If the person has to go a few blocks for parking, then it might be a delay in you getting picked up. However, being that you have paid for 8 hours, you might just arrange that you will notify the need for pick up about 15 minutes before you need to be picked up. Explaining this idea will require Google translate.
I think I could have visited a lot more temples.
Don’t torment your driver by trying to verbally speak Thai place names.
Thai has intonations. English doesn’t have formal intonations. Even beyond that, there usually is a convention how to translate words into Roman letters, but those Roman letters aren’t necessarily pronounced as in English. Have a Google map where there is Roman lettering, Thai writing, and you can sort of see from the map where the place you want to visit is.
I never failed to amuse Thai when I tried pronouncing Wat Hua Lamphong.
Cooling at the temples
Wat Arun had a small place where I could get something cold to drink and cool down. Another had an air-conditioned mini-museum. The Wat Hua Lamphong temple and Ruamkatanyu Foundation had stand-alone air-conditioning units that you could stand in front of.
The Grand Palace didn’t have cooling of any type. It did have water for sale, but after the initial exit. The final exit had no shade. It was amazing, but my nickname for it is Wat Death Trap.
At one temple, the vending machine for water was broken. Don’t depend on the temple to have consideration for cooling.
Go early
The daily temperature cycles and in the morning it is cooler generally. Also, less noisy tourists in the way of you taking pictures of the temple with them taking selfies.
Fan
A desk top fan would be good for the hotel room to cool down faster. I was in a Google five-star hotel and the rooms had good air conditioning, but after a temple visit you might be wanting to cool down immediately. Without the fan take off the shirt and pants and wipe yourself with a damp towel and then lay quietly on the bed.
I didn’t get one of the small hand-held battery powered fan. I did see a few people use them. They aren’t that expensive. If it doesn’t work just leave it in the hotel room.
Shade
Be aware of shade and keeping out of the sun. Use the umbrella right away if you don’t have shade. Initially it may not seem like a real problem, but heating is sort of cumulative. You want to always maximizing your cooling and minimizing heating.
Be alert for air conditioning.
Always be on the lookout for places that you can cool down. Shopping malls, some of the stores have them. Don’t wait until you really need cooling to wonder where you might find it.
Bearing the heat.
Don’t struggle or get irritated by it. Remain calm and collected and acquiesce to it. It will help you bear it and keep you a little cooler.
Physical preparation for Thailand
If you are out of shape and heat up as it is, in your house or outside ordinary weather you will find Thailand challenging. You need to do walking to get into shape before you are there. In Taipei I was able to get into shape by walking around, since the weather wasn’t super hot. The first week sort of hit hard, but I strengthened and was really able to go places.
Losing weight would be helpful also. There is less weight to carry around and the ratio of surface area to mass increases and aids in cooling.
Outdoor activities might have some benefit in getting acclimated to heat.
Thai are acclimated
I watched carefully Thai in the same location where I was warm and sweating. They weren’t experiencing it like I was. Some Thai know foreigners tend to have issues with the heat, but many Thai don’t. Also, things there are for Thai. Don’t expect things to be arranged for your issues with the heat.
Also, they may not have any useful advice because of the language barrier and they aren’t experiencing the problem.
Map
Having maps printed out before your trip and 3-hole punched in a binder can be helpful to plan where and how to get there. I would fold them and put them in my back pocket. They can be shown to the Grab driver. When you do the screen capture of the map, (don’t use the print function) you will get the following which is useful for the driver to know where to go next.
On the backside of each map, I had this translated text.
As I visited places, I would circle off the temples I had visited. When I had visited them all, I wrote DONE in capital letters.
Photographing a monk.
Ask. Evidently there isn’t a problem with it if you ask.
Temples and random visitors
Buddhist temples aren’t like Taiwan Taoist temples where people are just walking in praying and you can just walk in and get a lot of photos.
Also, if the temple isn’t oriented towards tourist, I am not sure how as a person you might see things. Photographs at Taiwan Taoist temples isn’t an issue and Taiwan Buddhist temples isn’t an issue either. But I am at a loss at how you might see and photograph the Buddhist temples as a visitor to a non-tourist temple.
I did talk photographs of Wat Hua Lamphong exteriors, but the stairs up to the temple were locked and I had no idea who to talk to and if it was permissible.
Behave yourself
It is a temple. They are holy places. You will see Thai praying. Don’t shout. Have a respectful attitude.
However, don’t worry about the “ugly American” stereotype. When it comes to bad behavior in a temple we are greatly outclassed by some other national groups.
Tour guides are constantly shouting to their groups.
When I was about ready to go into the Grand Palace, I chose one of the lines and just before I got to the person taking the ticket, the woman in front of me started shouting at the top of her lungs. It looked like she hadn’t gotten her pass and the tour director was already entering. The police officer told her to step back twice. I thought, of the two lanes I picked, I had to have picked the wrong one. However, the screaming woman came to her senses, and the Thai police didn’t smack her one, which disappointed me a bit.
I thought the Buddha must indeed be compassionate, since any of the European Gods, Norse, Greco-Roman or Christian would have slaughtered them.
Selfies
Really! Why do people do that? I took no selfies. Besides wasting my time when I could instead take a photograph of an interesting feature at the temple, it is basically a waste of time in general and stupid. You are the same mediocrity and your friends know it, regardless how fantastical the backdrop is. You are almost assuredly less interesting than the temple feature you obscured with your prosaic and possibly ugly self. You might be preserving for posterity your bad taste in clothes, lack of good eating habits and exercise. Further, you would likely become a little less mediocre as a person if you were observing the temple and seeing the detailed features.
I would have to wait, time and time again, to get photo documentation of a fantastic feature because of a person wanting to get 3 or 4 selfies.
The tourists would treat these temples as if they were Disney theme parks.
Further research.
I am going to do some investigation. I will update this guide as I learn things. I am also going to distribute this to people who travel or know about heat to see what inputs they have.
Cooling clothes
I am going to be looking into cooling clothes. Some of these items are hats and vests which absorb water and cool by evaporation. Since my shirt was soak with sweat, I am not sure how much additional evaporation would be expected. However there is a hat made of this material that releases water slowly. The thing is that to be cooling, it has to have water in it, and would be heavy.
I ordered a short sleeve black t-shirt with a pocket and a short sleeve sports shirt from Arctic Cool, a vendor of cooling clothes. I am going to test them out.
I am going to test out these clothes and see how well they work, I will update this report with what I find out. Even if the benefit is the equivalent to 5F equivalent cooling, this would be significant for visiting Thailand.
UPDATE 8/5/2024: The Arctic Cool shirt actually was cooler. I tested in in a walk in the neighborhood. I think going to Thailand with 2 or 3 of these shirts would be good. I emailed Artic Cool about long sleeve shirts, but they didn’t reply.
I looked at Uniglo also. There shirts entirely made of cooling material are out of stock in my size. Other brands are very vague as to how their shirt is cooling. There aren’t any standards or ratings of cooling clothing that I have found.
There is clothing with built in fans also.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_conditioned_clothing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_vest
Perhaps the following would be overdoing it.
Final note
Though I only visited a fraction of the temples that I visited in Taipei, I am happy with what I got. I spent a lot of time documenting the Pride walks, structures, decorations, installations which I came across. It was astounding, Also, the small shrines that were with any building of significance were very interesting and I photo documented them. I did all eight of the shrines on the Ratchaprasong Skywalk.
So in the end the trip was okay, but I never visited Buddhist temples that served neighborhoods.
I agree, the heat is life threatening from the second you exit the plane. I am now motivated to get in better shape.