Southern Thailand

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January 31st 2009

Published: February 22nd 2009

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Exodus

Chang

welcome to Thailand

The land of the Thai. This was always going to be interesting. Every traveler comes here. Most leave saying "I wish I could have seen it twenty years ago." It's a testament to what traveling Thailand must have been like that so many still come in hopes of catching a glimpse of its former glory. No other country or region of the world can hold a candle to Thailand's backpacker legend. Here you could live practically for free on some of the world's most majestic real estate, amongst its friendliest people and tastiest food. It was the perfect storm of backpacking, an Eden unrivaled for those free spirited folks who dared to journey here, only to be rewarded with more than they could possibly have expected. So many of them never left. It is a fundamental rule of nature that nothing that good lasts forever and the hordes, us included of course, have shown up in force for their share of the fun.

Don't get me wrong, Thailand still remains great, its islands remain stupendously beautiful, its people are warm and friendly, its food still remains delicious...there are just so many tourists at times it feels like a "backpacker" theme

Koh Lanta

Long Beach as viewed from the beach bar. We got to know this view fairly well

park. I should clarify that we've as yet only been to southern Thailand and word has it that the northern region where we're headed is nowhere near as overrun with the likes of us. The flip side of all this of course is that if you can stop longing for what was and focus on what is, you can have a great time enjoying a pretty cool place with half the world. Think international spring break on steroids. Think full moon parties with 8000 people. You may not at times learn all that much Thai culture, but the Aussie, Swedish, Brazilian, Ghanaian, Canadian, Israeli (substitute just about anywhere) cultural cup overflowith. The guest house we stayed at in Bangkok had thirty guests from 21 countries. I can tell you what how to say "what it must have been like 20 years ago" in about 15 languages. Let's start at the beginning.

When last we left off, we were eating our way through Penang. Rene, or "The Renegade" as I like to call him, a good friend from NYC, was headed over to meet us in Phucket for a little holiday. We had four days to make our way up

Nautilus Bungalows

A nice relaxed place to call home for a few days

to meet him and decided to stop off in Koh Lanta, a little island off the west coast, to kill the time. It was a pleasant surprise and a fairly laid back place to spend a few days. We stumbled onto an inexpensive beach hut on a nice beach and focused on trying to burn off some of the calories from the last few weeks and catching up on some reading. With the ocean filled with too many dinner plate sized jelly fish, and with the sun too hot for beaching, we were left with little choice but to surrender our time to the cozy little beach bar next to our hut, where Mot, the bartender, helped us pass the afternoons with cold Changs and good tunes. On the first afternoon, when he politely asked us in broken English if we would mind (we were the only two there) if he played some Neil Young on the stereo, I knew I had found a friend for life. Cold Changs, Neil Young, and Thai sunsets are a wonderful combination.

After a few lazy days on Koh Lanta, and a minibus trip that a year ago would have been considered surreal

Koh Lanta

Our Beach hut at Nautilus Resort

but nowadays just seems normal, we arrived in Phuket (pronounced Poo-get, not F*ck-it). We found a room on Kata beach close to where Rene was staying. Our place had a bed, and a toilet/shower. His place had beds, couches, a pool bar, a gym, massage parlour and a kick ass buffet. What a difference 51 weeks of budget makes! We found Rene on our appointed meeting day wandering the beach and wasted no time getting reacquainted at the Ska Bar. It was good to see a familiar face and not many people travel half way around the world to have beers with me. Now would be as good a place as any to say thanks for coming dude, when we get back I will finally fulfill my promise to make it all the way out to Brooklyn, it seems like the least I can do.

Kata beach was very nice and the water was pretty close to perfect, so clear you can be up to your shoulders and look down and realize you need to cut your toe nails. The beach itself was busy, and as Phuket is a big European holiday destination there is no shortage of places

Koh Lanta

to eat, stay, shop, or Europeans...our first hints of what was to come as we moved up the peninsular. In Phuket the tourist crowd is quite a bit older than on the other Thai islands where they tend to be of the young gap year variety, and in fact some time spent in Phuket can make you feel both young and in good shape, which reminds me...

Dear Europe,
Would you please ask your citizens to cover themselves. If their speedos cover less than one percent of their bodies, it's due to its lack of size, or their abundance of it, so please ask them to consider a new trend in fashion...not being obese and half naked in public. Oh, and while you're at it could you ask those of your ladies wearing bikini tops to go give them to those of your ladies not wearing them as there appears to be some mix up as to whom should be topless and whom should not. As a general guideline I'd say that if you have to dust sand off of your breasts when you're done with your stroll down the beach, a top may be the way to go.

Marina Bar

A great spot to beat the heat

Many thanks.
Sincerely,
The Rest of Us

Sorry, needed to be said! We spent a few good days in Phuket, a good night in Patong, an insanely packed tourist strip, and hopped on a ferry to the legendary island of Koh Phi Phi. Some have called it the most beautiful place in the world. I'd say if you scrubbed it clean of tourists and the industry that surrounds them you'd have to put it in the top ten, but as it stands in my opinion it's overrun to the point of borderline unpleasantness (and tourism is down 40%). I couldn't imagine the place full. It's such a paradox, like a supermodel with ticks. We had a place on the side of a hill, with a quaint pool and a pool bar, a nice hammock to lounge in...sounds wonderful. It was, but we couldn't get to sleep until four in the morning, any morning, because of all the partying going on. Maybe we're just getting old. Well, I should say we are getting old, maybe age is catching up with us...NO NO, that can't be it!!! Having a friend along was a blessing, or at least a good excuse to

Jellyfish

There were enough of these around to keep us out of the water

jump into the fray...if you can't beat 'em join 'em...at least 'til midnight anyways.

We did some decent diving, which was Rene's first time playing submarine. In most places this means you do some course work and spend some time in the pool going over situations and procedures. In Koh Phi Phi it means they hold your money up to a light to make sure it's real and throw you overboard. That's a bit of a stretch, and they did give Rene an excellent instructor to go along with us. We saw some nice black tip sharks, good turtles, the usual corals and a good selection of fish. All in all I'd say it was a good days diving and I think Rene would agree.

We spent most of the rest of our stay getting some sun, forcing our favorite foods down Rene's throat with little resistance, and hanging out in the evenings with the rest of the masses in the countless little bars in "town." There's no doubting that a good time was had, but to beat a dead horse, I'd love to have seen it twenty years ago before the masses showed up. To be fair,

Koh Lanta

The view from our porch

I should say that the Tsunami completely destroyed this little island not too long ago and as of now it has been completely restored. Tourism is the reason. I think the developers swooped in and saw the opportunity to do a little too much restoration, but the point being all us annoying tourists bring valuable income to the people here and it's undeniably selfish to want the place the stand still in time just for me. I don't know if the locals would vote to get their quiet little island back or would rather have the mayhem and money. Chances are that's not a vote that's going to happen anyways so lets talk about Bangkok.

Lee and I took the bus up overnight and Rene flew (as we turn down the homestretch, every penny counts) and we had our second reunion in as many weeks, this time on the streets of this crazy, busy, noisy, dirty, amazing city. We found a place near Khoasan road, probably the most densely populated and well known backpacker havens on this little planet of ours. It is a tourist Mecca in the truest sense of the word and a place where the backpack

Koh Lanta

Going back to real life is really going to take some adjusting to

laden pilgrims seem to outnumber the locals. You know when you walk down a street and pass stores selling only Lonely Planet guides, well...that you're not that lonely anymore. Rene found a place in a pretty sweet hotel on the river where Bangkok is a little more modern and beginning to reach out into the giant, sprawling, modern metropolis that it is.

There are basically three ways to get around Bangkok, on the river, on the roads, or on the rails. Getting around is a little intimidating at first as Bangkok, and in fact Thailand in general, hasn't thrown itself into the English language with as much enthusiasm as would be expected from a city so entwined with tourism. Maybe it's defiance, and if it is, good for them. The bus stops are filled with those crazy, spaghetti like characters that pass as consonants in the Thai language, and there's a bus headed in any given direction. The ferry stops are numbered and as rivers only have an upstream and downstream that seemed like the way to go. Armed with ten fingers and a visual current we hopped on a boat to see where it would take us. The

Playing Vet

Extracting a thorn from a poor little beach dog's foot

river plays a big part in the lives of many locals, especially in the older, western half of the city. It's a source of food, transportation, and tradition, and taking a ferry down it at rush hour was a great intro into the Bangkok that remains at a crossroads of past and future with the old eastern traditions juxtaposed with the newer more western ones. Commuter ferries taking the suits to work pass by old fisherman paddling their goods to market and people living in the little houseboats their great grandparents used lived in. You pass ancient temples, modern skyscrapers and everything in between. We ended up doing a lot of walking, we tried out the excellent skytrain, visited some of the many temples, braved a few tuk tuks and of course hit the street food with a vengeance...the basic tourist stuff.

Bangkok is certainly more than just another city. It's an awesome place and gets so many tourists for what it is, not just because it is so geographically central to the region. It's the New York of this hemisphere at one fiftieth the price and it's been great. Having a buddy to share it with was even

Koh Lanta

better. Try imagine a New York in the 70's before Guliani scrubbed it clean, imagine the Hudson and East rivers bustling with floating markets where farmers from upstate sell their produce, imagine hot dog stands where you can sit down and have top quality Thai food food for next to nothing, a New York with a beautiful historic temple on every other block, the streets sprinkled with the ubiquitous orange clad monks, replace half the yellow cabs with tuks tuks spewing diesel fumes. Picture the harbour filled with communities of houseboats and an endless supply of long boats hustling people up and down the rivers and surrounds. Mostly picture a New York that slows down ever so slightly to enable a wonderful, patient, and friendly people to take the 3 seconds to square their shoulders, raise their palms together and bow their heads in greeting or thanks, rather than worrying about catching the next light.

The fantasy breaks down of course when you imagine the cliched dirty old man coming over to New York expecting to buy a young lady for the week, only to be sent packing with a black eye, a string of expletives and her chasing

Koh Lanta

Long Beach

after him with a baseball bat. Don't mess with NYC's women...'atta girls!!! You can't tell the Bangkok story without a chapter on the sex industry which isn't well hidden or seemingly attempted to be hidden at all. It all seems rather odd, if not disturbing, probably due to the rather conservative nature of the American experience we're all raised in. A biologist would classify it as symbiosis between older men and a younger ladies, I would classify it as a loser having to fly halfway around the world to get laid and a young lady for whom the temptation of a few Euros or Dollars for her and her family proves too much. What the hell do I know, I'm just trying to paint a fuller picture and if I don't use my soapbox it gets rusty, like a good cast iron wok.

When you enter Thailand overland you only get a two week visa. It's a new rule and a bit of a spanner in the works as at this point we're thirteen days into it. The original plan was to go from here to Thailand's serene north for two weeks and then into Loas and onwards. As

Mot, the Man

bartender/waiter/rock 'n roller/philosopher. A very good human being and a Neil Young fan!!!

it turns out we now need to leave the country in a day. We're off to have a few beers and decide whether to take the overnight bus into Cambodia or find a cheap last minute flight to the Philippines. Flying blind and loving it...we'll let you know how it pans out.

speak to you upon return,
cheers

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