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Published: February 21st 2010
'Thailand is a different animal altogether'. Those sage words came from my father when I'd skyped the Aged P's one Sunday afternoon. Whilst my mother knows best, Dad knows everything. Thailand is an entirely different kettle of fish to Philippines and Vietnam. I really get the impression our trip in Thailand was badly planned; we sort of did things the wrong way round. When I take in to consideration that I was in charge of planning Thailand this impression becomes somewhat distended.
We deemed to head straight for Phuket in search of beaches etc. We stayed for a few nights in Karon which, in Turkey equivalents, is a bit like the Ishmala to the Marmaris. It's still quite busy and very touristy but not the screaming hell mammoth that is Patong. We had our first experience staying in a hostel dorm. It was a good way to meet people, like Anna, the Bristolite from Wales. Having said that it was VERY hot and smelt quite badly. Thailand is stupifyingly hot. It is the hottest place we've been so far (although my memory of Dubai was dwindled heat-wise). It is perhaps the combination of the ridiculous heat and the huge increase
Making friends!
Tom, Anna and Nik (who is in to extreme sports which thus accounts for the lack of 'c')in tourism since the, in comparison, tourist free Philippines which turned us off Thailand. I began to view the place with the same annoyed, slightly amused, disinterest that Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight gives an item he feels is unjustified. Anyway, on the details!We get the impression that if we'd started our trip with it, things would have been different. Anyway, on with our trip...
After spending a few nights in Karon, chilling out on the beach and drinking the last of our beloved Ginebra, we opted to head to the belly of the beast: Patong. We decided to fork out for a posh hotel as it'd been a while since we'd had any luxury and we fancied staying somewhere with a pool. Patong's beach is very crowded and a bap buffet which makes me a little uncomfortable. We blissed out for a couple of nights, flopping between the pool and our sun beds and shaking the vestiges of the 19 hour journey that we'd conducted a few days before. Our tans jumped on leaps and bounds!
After dealing with Patong for a bit we fancied some diving so we got the ferry to Koh Tao and headed straight
A reggae band
with a terrible, terrible percussion section. to the opposite side of the island where it is quieter. We did a couple of dives but the dive master was rubbish... we had to rigidly stick to a 45 minute time frame for each dive and the dive centre wouldn't take our adventure dives in to account; we were lumped in with the open water group and only went down as far as 16m! A travesty when you consider we paid 80 squid! Having said that, we did see a pretty big shoal of barracuda on the first dive. Pretty menacing looking but the stories about their viciousness towards humans is largely unjustified. It was a shame that, on this first dive, there were around 100 divers in the water at one time because this was a spot where one might see bull sharks!
Aside from having to listen to the Best of Bob Marley over and over again whenever we went to a bar, the biggest highlight of Koh Tao was, of course, our shark-spottings! The first occasion, the sea was very rough and the visibility was pants because of clouds of coral spores floating around near the surface - not great conditions for snorkelling. Fuelled
with nervous energy, we swam a kilometer to where they are most likely to be spotted. The first occasion we saw a total of four Black Tipped Reef sharks although each sighting was very fleeting. They were, at most, 1.5m or thereabouts and wonderful to watch. I would have been happy with that, but we went again a couple of days later. The visibility was still dreadful but this time we saw more of them, a maximum of five at any one time. It was an incredible moment but also quite eerie. They began circling us at our level (previously they'd swim near the bottom). I lost them and Oriel dove down to get a better look and I lost her too! I was swimming back, occasionally stopping to see if i could spot her. I saw a glimpse of Oriel swimming hell for leather, leaving an actual wake behind her. It took be ages to catch up with her and when i did she was pretty shook up (not, it should be noted, as shook up as she was when a fish swim in to her snorkel...). The biggest of the sharks had been following her for all that
The lovely Anna and Oriel
Anna is from Haverford West in Pembrokeshire, Wales and now lives in Bristol. Looking forward to meeting up. time (some get all the luck) and she got a tad unnerved and head for the rocks. Whilst this was understandable - we'd not had any prolonged encounters with sharks and we couldn't see very well - she realised afterwards that she would have been fine.
Due to the fact that we didn't trust other dive centres to be any less busy than the one we'd gone to, and the fact that we didn't like the tourism or the tourists* and particular in light of how expensive it is (same as England for most things) we decided to cut our stay here short and headed to Bangkok with a mind to arrange getting to Malaysia. We've had a nice few days in Bangkok although we've not explored much as it is too hot and the city is very, very dirty. We've been staying in the backpacker hub Khao San which is a cleaner area and has an atmosphere a bit like a festival sans bands. There's lots of food stalls and on-street bars. We've been mainly resting up for our 24hr train journey to Georgetown, Malaysia.
We feel disappointed about Thailand but there were always going to be
bits of the trip we didn't enjoy so much. This far in, we didn't see the point in putting ourselves through a place we didn't get on with. Money is dwindling and we should concentrate on the places we like. Our energy for exploring new places is also wearing thinner. I'm getting pretty homesick and my enthusiasm for discovering The New is lessening. Craving some familiarity, we've decided to head to Malaysia for a month and then head back to the Visayas, Philippines to hook up with Harold and finish our advanced open water on Apo island before heading to Palawan which we had to miss out last time. We are very happy with this decision, despite missing out Indonesia. We feel really proud of ourselves to have gotten this far as we are not natural travellers at all and this really is a very long trip indeed!
*The typical tourist in Thailand:
Female: typically blonde, pouts a lot, looks wistful whilst wandering down the road. Tends to do annoying things like lie across a whole row of seats when taking a ferry. Generally very OTT on the boho front which leads to the impression that they
Oriel floats
This was taken from a posh hotel what we decided to stay in after slumming it in a very scuzzy hostel for three nights are simply just very selfish rather than being too in tune with their environment.
Male: Much the same only the groups of boys tend to strut around wearing t-shirts emblazoned with their favourite brand of Thai beer.
Both all seem to create more noise, fuss and mess than is generally necessary.
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