Climbing Three Hundred Stairs in Thailand
By: Mel Rie
Tags: Travel, Life, Culture, Thailand, Traveling

The same haunting tune followed us all the way up the mountain.

No matter how high we climbed, the music was there. You couldn’t detangle it from the walk in the dark, from the humidity in the air, from the burning in our legs. It all went together. Each time the song started fading into a white noise-esque sound in the background, a jarringly dissonant chord brought it zinging back, drowning out my labored breathing.

I don’t know who was making the music. It was too dark to see and I was too tired to care.

We had been climbing for hours, walking alongside monks up a mountain in Thailand. I was careful not to bump into them in the dark. Women can’t touch monks.

The night and elevation brought cooler air, a welcome respite from the relentless humidity. We could see the lights of the city miles and miles below. I ran out of water and my back ached from my backpack. On we hiked.

At the “top” of the mountain, we reached the stairway leading to the temple. Golden steps were flanked by two serpents, jungle trees leaning lushly over the sides. It shot straight up into the darkness.

“Saam roi,” a smiling Thai woman said to me as I stared in horror.

Three hundred steps. I debated rolling back down the mountain instead.

“It’s not too bad!” my Thai friend said with a nudge. Her name is Bee. I call her Bumble.

If I exerted any effort to speak I would die, so I said nothing and started the climb. Head down, step one. Step two. Three.

Bumble laughed and quietly encouraged me until she couldn’t breath, either.

There were thousands of us making this climb together, but my survival-mode instincts kicked in and made everything and everyone drop away until it was just me, a stair, and a foot. One at a time.

My legs were shaking and I half-dragged my body up by hanging onto the staircase. I was so close to blacking out I don’t remember most of the strange journey. It was just more stairs. Stairs and stairs and stairs until we reached what was more than three hundred because the Thai woman was a liar; it’s three hundred and six.

I do remember dizzily taking my shoes off at Bumble’s request and stepping into a temple.

It was gold, pure gold spiraling up and glowing in the inky night. People were walking around the base of the temple with candles and offerings, palms pressed together in prayer. The air smelled of incense and something else I couldn’t place, sweet and beautiful.

It just felt holy.

I wandered around the small space in silence. Ornate, intricate designs marked the doors. Low-hanging bells tolled and trees covered in flowers rained petals onto the stone floor. Pagodas. White statues of elephants. Shrines.

I took no pictures; a snapshot on a screen would have never done it justice. I was glad to have taken this strange and brutal hike up the mountain until turning to my Thai friend.

“Bumble, this is beautiful.”

“Yes!” She agreed. Then she frowned. “You look sick. Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” I lied. “It was just a lot of stairs.”

I was ready to pass out.

“Oh, yes. You should have told me! We didn’t have to walk the stairs. There’s a cable car!”