Bug bites!!!

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First off, I forgot to mention notes about Malaysia in my hurry to get our last entry out. So here goes:
1. In our experience, it rains a lot. But apparently that was not normal weather for this time of year, so who knows.
2. In Kuching, the people really like White people. Apparently they think that we are all English and they have an appreciation for the English because an Englishman helped to free them. People would go to great lengths to say hello to us as we walked down the street, like turning around in their seat while driving a motorcycle to wave at us, or rolling down their car window while driving through an intersection to shout “Hello” across 3 lanes of moving traffic. Very bizarre.
3. Lawnmowers do not appear to be all that common as we saw a number of landscapers mowing lawns using whipper-snippers (that must take forever!!!).
4. Road lane markings appear to be just suggestions and it is quite common to drive down the middle of the road or on the other side altogether.
5. There is no need for the sidewalks in front of storefronts to all be at the same height. It made it a real challenge walking around the shops with the sidewalk constantly changing levels by a couple of centimetres or foot - sometimes with a step, or sometimes with a 45 - 60 degree angle ramp.
6. Rice is eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We are sick of rice...

So we've been in Thailand for almost 2 weeks now. We arrived in Bangkok and headed to the legendary backpacker district - Khao San Road. Once we arrived, we found a place to stay and then set about getting our Vietnamese Visas sorted out. You can hire a travel agent to take care of it for you instead of having to go to the embassy, so we just walked into one that first evening and they said to come back in 2 days at 6 pm to pick it up. We could have gotten it faster if we paid more, but there was no need. With our main task for the evening completed, we set out to enjoy the evening. We found a place to get some cheap food (easy in Thailand) and ordered some Thai dishes. I was so excited to be getting Thai food after all of the food in Malaysia - which is mostly Chinese style. Then we watched life on Khao San Road. This place is surreal. There are backpackers from all over the place and then all the Thai vendors that come out to greet them. The place is flashy and a bit sleazy, but a lot of fun. You can't walk more than a couple of metres without some guy coming up to you and offering to make you a suit. Then there's the women offering massages. Later on in the evening, its cheap cocktails, and then the ping pong show (more on that later). Then, of course, there's the tuktuk drivers offering to take you anywhere. There are also street food vendors selling pad thai, corn, fresh fruit, and banana pancakes. It was a pretty crazy place, but we loved it.

The next day, we were up early (actually extra early when I forgot about the hour time difference on my alarm clock) and headed out on an organized day trip. We were picked up in a mini-van and were driven out to the Damnoen Saduak Floating Market. This is a market set along a series of canals and there are also boats with vendors selling things like fruit. It was a lot of fun. After a bit of time shopping, we took a longboat ride through some of the canals to a snake show where we saw guys wrestling cobras and other snakes. One guy was up against 3 snakes and after dodging them for a bit, he grabbed one in each hand and then the final one using his mouth! Very impressive. Next, we had lunch and then drove out to the Tiger Temple. This was so awesome. It is a place where monks started taking in orphaned animals. They started taking in tigers about 10 years ago. Most of the tigers are cubs that were orphaned by poaching. The monks raise the tigers and are working on building a large area to give them more space. Tourists can go there to see the animals and can actually touch the tigers and have pictures taken with them! They do this in the afternoon when the tigers are sleeping. They have an area where the tigers are resting and the people working there will take you by the hand and bring you over to the tiger and tell you to sit there while they take your picture. Then they take your hand again and take you to another tiger and you sit and touch the tiger's back while they take your photo again. We were able to see about 8 tigers through this process. After going through them all, you could get back in line and do it again. It was really cool to be able to sit next and touch these animals. We could also go to a different area where they had some tiger cubs and we were able to get pictures with them as well. They also had a lot of wild boars there, as well as a few different types of deer, and a leopard. I was pleased to see that all of the animals were well taken care of and there didn’t seem to be any sort of abuse going on. After the Tiger Temple, we drove to see the bridge over the River Kwai. There was a museum there about the history of the original bridge, which was built by prisoners of war. When we got back, we went to see if we could get tickets to the Cabaret show, which is a "lady boy" show. We managed to get some, so we rushed to dinner and headed off to the show. The show was really good and I had a hard time believing that they were all men (or originally men). Most of the lady boys had had some sort of chest surgery, so they all looked real (well maybe a little fake) from that standpoint. The show was mostly dancing and lip-synching and was a lot of fun. All in all, it was a very full, but good day.

The next day, we spent some time walking around Bangkok. We took a river taxi once we figured out how to tell which one to take - they are more like river buses - down to the Grand Palace area. It took us a really long time to figure out how to get into the grounds because it is enclosed in walls and is the size of a large city block. There are lots of little entrances and we got stuck at one which we though we were supposed to go in because there was a guy telling us that it had closed at 2pm due to holiday. I heard that this was a huge scam at the palace, but we didn't know what to do because we couldn't very well just walk past him as he was blocking the entrance. We wasted a lot of time there before we finally moved on and discovered the real entrance on another side (and it wasn't closed). By that time, we only had an hour before it closed at 3:30 and since it cost about 12 dollars to go in and we figured we'd have to go back another time anyway in order to see everything, we decided to leave it for another day. Instead, we went to the nearby Wat Pho, where the highlight is the very large reclining Buddha. We spent quite a while walking around the temple taking in all the architecture, etc. Next we took our first tuk tuk taxi to get back to our guest house. A tuk tuk is a 3 wheeled open air motorized vehicle. The drivers are really aggressive and dodge through traffic erratically, but its definitely a must-do experience. Unfortunately, our first one ended up being a bit of a dud after our driver got caught in a traffic jam down a street that they blocked off for some official business (we don't know what it was, but there were all these guys in uniform on horses in formation on the road). He tried to tell us that it was only a short walk to our guest house and wanted the full fare that we had negotiated, but we knew better and managed to get away with only half. After dinner, we headed to a Muay Thai (i.e. Thai Boxing) show. Theｙ market the ring side seats to the tourists and charge about $80 for those, but we had heard it was better to sit with the locals in the cheap seats. Unfortunately, we discovered that sitting with the locals does not mean paying the same prices as the locals. We still had to pay about $40, but it was definitely something that we wanted to do, so we didn't mind. We had a lot of fun watching the boxing, which involves a lot of kicking and kneeing in the chest. We found it really interesting that the largest boxers weighed in at only 130 lbs! It was also interesting watching the locals because there was a lot of betting going on. We weren't able to figure out how it worked, but it looked a lot like a stock market trading floor with guys standing up and waving around a couple of fingers.

After two days in Bangkok, and having gotten our passports back with our Vietnam visas, we were ready for a break, so we booked return bus and ferry tickets to Koh Chang, an island in Eastern Thailand. It took us most of the day to get there. When we arrived, we were met at the ferry terminal by these pickup trucks with benches at the back. These were group taxis that took people around the island. Basically they fill them up (and I mean full - like a dozen people in the back of the truck), and then drop people off at the various beaches around the island. We asked to be dropped off at the KP Huts, which sounded good based on our guide book. We got dropped off at the side of the road and it started to rain (hmmm). We were told to walk down a nearby street to get there. As we are walking, it seems like we are going into the middle of nowhere and we are thinking that the KP Huts had better be good and have space because we didn't want to have to go anywhere else in the rain. 10 minutes later we found it and it was right on the beach. They had rustic huts and fortunately there was space, so we picked one right at the edge of the beach.

That night after dinner, we were heading back to our hut so that I could put on some pants to protect against the bugs, when we passed a foursome of Australians. They invited us to join them so we took them up on their offer. It was 2 hours later that I finally put my longpants on. We had a great time chatting, drinking, and playing Jenga that night. I paid for it later though when I woke up in the morning to discover that the 2 hours without my long pants on had resulted in almost a hundred (yes, I counted) bug bites on my lower legs!!!! No one else got any. If that wasn't bad enough, I had a severe reaction to them and each bite swelled up into a raised welt the size of a loonie. There were so many that they just blended together into ugly red welts all over! They were also extremely itchy. The only thing that saved me from scratching was that I knew once I started I wouldn't be able to stop and my legs would become a hug mess. I took some antihistamines which knocked me out pretty good and so I spent the morning napping. In the afternoon, Greg and I went for a walk on the beach and discovered that we weren't as isolated as it had seemed when we came in the previous night because there were several different places to stay along the strip. The beach was pretty, but it wasn't all that enjoyable as walking made my itching even worse. We tried swimming and that seemed to work to take my mind off it for a bit. The water was beautiful!!! It was so warm - a nice change from the Canadian ocean. In the evening, we enjoyed a really amazing sunset and then later we went for another walk, but the itching was driving me crazy, so we had a pretty early night. The next day, the swelling was down a little bit, so we headed out to the main road to check things out. There I was stopped by an Australian woman who had similar bites but not quite as many. We were both relieved to see that we weren't the only ones with the problem. Then when we went to a place for lunch, the owner saw my legs and offered a remedy - rubbing half a shallot on my bites to reduce the itch. It seemed to work a bit, but I was ready to try anything at that point. In the afternoon, we did some more swimming and relaxed. We also had another amazing sunset. The next day, we headed back to Bangkok. We had an awful bus ride as we got stuck in the back row where there was warm air blowing for some reason. We were dying of the heat and were ecstatic when the 6 hour ride was over.

Back in Bangkok, we decided to take in the so-called Ping Pong show that night. This is not like any type of ping pong that I’ve ever seen or imagined. Essentially this is a type of sex show. I’ll keep the details out because it was pretty shocking and disgusting, but seeing as the sex industry is a huge part of Bangkok, I guess it was a sight to see.

We spent the next morning at the Grand Palace. It was quite a complex to visit and very beautiful. The complex has a number of temples as well as the palace. While we were there, there seemed to be some sort of offical royal business going on as there were lots of guards in uniform marching in formation. They were herding the tourists out of the way. None of us had any idea what was going on, but it was interesting to watch.

That night, we took the night train to Chiang Mai. We had been unable to get a first class private cabin, so we ended up in a second class sleeper. It was mostly tourists and was an interesting experience. Early on in the evening, there are soft seats, but at around 9 o'clock, they come around and convert everything to beds. They run along the side of the train in two levels. There are curtains to give everyone privacy. We had the top bunks, which were quite a bit more cramped than the lower bunks. It wasn't the most comfortable sleeping arrangement. They kept the lights on the entire night and these shined right into the top bunks. Plus the train was rocking quite a bit so you kept on being jostled about. I was worried that I was going to fall out of the bed because there were no rails, just straps that went from the bed to the ceiling. We arrived in Chiang Mai mid-morning and got set up at a decent guesthouse. In the afternoon, we walked around town a bit and made arrangements to go on a "hilltribe trekking" adventure. Then we relaxed back at our guesthouse and took advantage of the pool that they had.

We've since returned from our trekking tour and had a great time, but I'll leave that to our next blog. We're still in Chiang Mai and will head to Vietnam in a few days. We'll try to write again soon - there's so much to tell.

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