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Two years after I left Thailand I am finally making my way back, I have been looking forward to this day since the day I left in March 06. It was so strange to be back again-the heat, the noise, the mopeds, the people and the chaos that all goes with being in S.E. Asia. I had unconsciously forgot what it felt like when all your senses are attacked with the sights, smells and noises of this amazing country- I’m so happy to finally got back here again! Asia really is one of those places that you need be here to really understand what it’s like, no amount of explanation can fully prepare you for it. Having already been here and travelled around for 4.5 months I was surprised at how many of the little things I had forgotten about, I now felt incredibly luckily to have a full month to get back in touch and once again experience this incredible country.
My first 10 days were spent in a place called Pattaya which is definitely not my favorite place in Thailand especially for a backpacker like me. Pattaya and Bangkok’s Pat pong district are known as some of the
most sex tourism ridden places in the world!! Where you see all day every day big, fat and old westerners walking down the streets arm in arm with young Thai girls, which is really disgusting. There are supposedly 15,000 girls ‘working’ in the bars of Pattaya and from walking around during my time here I can easily believe it, each of the bars were heaving with girls all trying to get you into their bar.
So you may ask why come here then? Well the answer is simple, to come and see my step brother David and step Dad, Mark who have a bar out here. Mark lives just outside of Pattaya in a nice house that I have stayed at before, where as David lives in a nice little condo in the city. Although It’s not the nicest place in the world it is a good place to have a bar as its one of the top tourist destinations in Thailand and so attracts thousands and thousands of tourists each year so makes good business to have a bar here with so many free spending westerners.
After my first night staying at Marks house on the outskirts
of Pattaya it was thought that I would be a bit far from everything, especially with no transport to get around so it was decided that I would move into one of the rooms above the bar. This was good at it was close to the beach, I could stroll around town and have a wide selection of food venders to try (which is one of the best things about Thailand) but the down side was that I lived above a bar and that was a lot of temptation!!
For the first few days my main aim was to try every bit of Thai food I had missed so much over the past 2 years! I especially craved Pad Thai from the street venders that cook it up right then and there on the street and it tastes so good and for around 50p you can’t go wrong. I went through so many Noodle soups, Kau mung kia (fried chicken and rice), these great BBQ skewers of various pork’s and chickens etc and basically anything else I could find that I thought I haven’t eaten since I was last here.
The first couple of evenings David and I
I had to laugh at this
Even the dog gets corrupted in Pattayaheaded off to walking street, which is a huge cordoned off area that is heaving with hundreds and hundreds of bars, flashing neon’s lights, restaurants with huge quantities of various fresh seafood outside, people with snakes trying to get pictures of you with them and in amongst all this there were hundreds of scantily clad women with a sprinkle of women that weren’t really women (they big hands!!). It was quite a contrast from my last few nights in NZ!
It is always an experience going to a place like this, even though it’s not really my thing, it’s just the hustle and bustle of so many people and so many lights everywhere you just can’t help but be captivated by it all. We ended up going to a few quite bars and having a good chat as it had been quite a while since we had seen each other and we had loads to catch up on. David’s girlfriend then suggested taking us to a place called ‘Airport-a-go-go’, well all I can say it is was definitely an experience! I have been too many bars, including girly bars with friends but I have never seen a place quite
like this before, it was defiantly an eye-opener. Unfortunately due to some of the people reading this (yes Richard and Tess I mean you!!) I can’t go fully into what happened but it was a funny old night and I think some of the sights won’t be forgotten for a while lol.
Before heading to ‘Walking street’ though David and I would usually stop at the ‘cocktail car’ for a quick bucket, this was always a good way to start the night because it was a huge glass bucket of any cocktail you wanted (always Long island iced tea!) and as Davis knew the bar man, it was more often than not pretty strong, so it was a great kick start to begin the night. They were also pretty good value (4 pounds) and it was a darn site cheaper than the drinks up and down walking street.
It was quite a novelty as the cocktail car was or actually still is a VW camper van that the side opens up to become a bar, there are speakers mounted on the front and back which blast out tunes. So by the end of the night the bloke closes up
the bar, folds away the sections that make the bar and the drives home - it’s great.
After the first couple of day’s Me, David, Mark and Oi drove 4 hours north into the middle of nowhere to a tiny little place called Lan Sak, this is a awesome 30 acre plot of land that Mark owns to grow Mango’s, Banana’s, rice and many other strange fruits and vegetables that i have never heard of. I had really wanting to come and visit this place last time but ran out of time, so I was well happy that we had made it up here at last. It was a complete contrast to Pattaya and was so beautiful and away from all the tourists and hotels and hustle that comes with the cities of Thailand. We planned to have a couple of days here chilling out, enjoying rural Thailand and helping out on the farm. I was really looking forward to it, as to me this is proper Thailand not the seedy tourist spots like Pattaya.
Once we arrived we stopped at this small restaurant (well more of a bamboo open side hut than a restaurant) and had some
lovely noodle soup that Oi made for us all. As Oi was from around here and the restaurant was right by the farm, everyone knew her and Mark really well, so we were like celebrities with all these people wanting to speak to us. The difference in price was incredible to, we paid less than half what we paid for the same meal back in Pattaya at it tasted loads better too!
It was a really beautiful area with a huge amazing limestone mountain as a back drop to the farm. It turned out to be quite a laugh as we had a go at picking Mango’s, I don’t think I have ever seen so many mango’s in my life before. Mark showed us around the plot of land, including some of the ponds that he wants to turn into fisheries which are also used to flood the paddy fields to grow the rice. I actually had a go at this which was well funny because when we flooded the field Marks feet got stuck in the soggy mud as the field filled with water and he nearly fell flat on his back, as you might have guessed I
was there to egg him on and fall over as I had my camera there to capture the moment, but unfortunately he didn’t!
I think the first day we were up in Lan Sak it had to be one of the hottest days I experienced, it was so hot I remember at every opportunity trying to take shade under anything I could find, trees, vehicles, barn even a cow if there was nothing else around!
Mark and Oi drove David and I around to a few various places before stopping at her uncle’s place where he owns a small plot of land to grow rice. We grabbed some beers on the way over and joined them outside as the sun finally went down. They brought out some various different types of fruits and nuts, as we all sat around and on the old wooden table drinking beer and moonshine (Thai rice whiskey). As the sun set the heat just started to get bearable once again but I was still sticky with sweat and dust from the day but the ice cold beer defiantly help with the internal cooling. Even though Oi’s uncle and Aunt couldn’t speak English and we
could only say a few words in Thai, the evening went really well with Oi translating bits and pieces.
It is moments like this that I love travelling and going to places such as Asia, because you get to see how the real people live, eat and survive. It was strange thinking that 4 days ago I was in New Zealand and now I I’m sat on a wooden table in the middle of nowhere sweating my ass off unable to understand half the conversations that are going on and eating all this different, weird and wonderful foods!!
The Thai people are amazing because people like Oi’s Auntie and Uncle they have absolutely no money, and there work all hours of the day just to be able to live from one day to the next but they are so happy and so generous, it really makes me really pissed off how people back in the UK can be so unhappy with everything they have, just cause someone else has more than them.
The following day, David and I were roped in to helping mow one of Marks paddy fields with his small tractor, the grass was severely
over grown (a good 2 feet high in places) and needed to be taken down. This isn’t bad a job usually but when we had heard that Keith (eldest step brother) had seen quite a few snakes last time he did it, it did worry us a little, because out here I couldn’t imagine a hospital anywhere close by!
It was the strangest feeling driving a small orange tractor up and down a rice field in the swamp of overgrown grass, sweating our ass’s of again in the middle of nowhere in rural Thailand, it just felt so surreal!! But still good fun, well until I over-heated the tractor that is!
It was funny as David set of first and all you could see was the top half of the tractor in this sea of grass bouncing down the field, Mark than turned to me and mentioned that that field has never been mown before and he was not sure whether there might be a pond or something right in the middle!! So we stood and watched him for a good 10 mins waiting for him and the tractor to suddenly disappear, unfortunately he didn’t much to my
disappointment. I’m not being mean but he would have wished the same for me if I was driving the tractor.
As we both drove the tractor we adopted the position of putting our feet up on the bonnet because we were both scared of hell of a snake biting us especially as Keith had seen 4 last time he did this job.
Later that evening after packing up loads of mangos and then totally filling up the back of Mark’s Toyota Hilux we drove back south to Pattaya. I had had a great time up in Lan Sak and had really enjoyed seeing a typically Thai farming community, having a go at picking mangos and it was especially great to meet some of Oi family and spend the evening with them. Although I wasn’t that excited about heading back to Pattaya I was really looking forward to a cold shower and air-conditioning again as the past 2 days had been stupidly hot.
Unfortunately Mark had to fly back to Brazil to work the following day but I was great spent the last few days with him and catch up on everything we have done. I was able
tractor with great air-con and light weight option
Thought you would like this Guy - is it like youre tractor? to bore him with everything I have done in New Zealand and he was able to give me some advice on what I should at the end of the year, as I have so many options and don’t know whether to go back home or not.
For the rest of my time I chilled out around the bar, hung out with David, went up a mountain to see a big Buddha and nearly ended up in the middle of the riots. That was by accident as one of my friends Lek took me on a bike ride around the harbor area and somehow we ended up on this blocked off road with heavily armed police and army one end and the red shirt protests the other end, with us stuck in the middle. That really was a surreal moment, thinking what the hell is going on and how the hell did we just end up in the middle of it!!So we managed to find a small dirt track that took us another road and got out of there. It was only 2 days later when all the riots on TV proper kicked off in Bangkok with the same group
Great sign
Believe it or not people actually do this of people!!
Well with only 5 days till I meet Laura at the airport, I had decided to take a trip down south to the island of Ko Samui. I had never been there before so wanted to make sure that it was where I wanted to take her but also because for the past 10 days apart from when we went to Lan sak it has pissed it down with thunderstorms every day and wanting to see how the weather was down there. I had really forgotten what real rain was like, once it starts to rain here the roads flood within minutes and yours up to your ankles in dirty scummy water with in no time at all! The only thing to do is hid away in the bar, drink beer and play pool, it was truly horrible lol!
I had planned to take Laura to a few other islands such as Ko Phi Phi but from various reports the wet season had started on that side of the coast so I suddenly decided to make the trip to Ko Samui which has the wet season slightly later.
Well I had my fingers crossed that
Vendor food
great selection on meat on a stick known as BBQ's to the thai's the weather would get better for when Laura came out, but as I was soon to find out whether it rained or not I was in for getting very wet over the coming days!! I was just about to experience the Thai New Year which is known as ‘Song Kran’ (water festival). But I will leave that for my next blog.
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