Thailand; Picking Up The Pieces

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We flew back to Saigon on Christmas morning. Our hotel hostess had my regular breakfast fare of banana pancakes ready before we left by taxi. We had arranged the cab with our hotel the day before. Most hotels offer taxi service as part of the package. The taxi usually is a regular car driven by the close relative of the hotel owner. They are usually timely and a bit cheaper than the commercial rate. At the Hue hotel we breezed through check-in and grabbed a coffee at a café across the parking lot from the airport. Coffee consisted of a shot of espresso mixed with sweetened condensed milk and served in a water glass that reminded me of a Wonder Bread wrapper. We were sorry to leave Hue’. The people are friendly and the food good but the weather was literally and figuratively a ‘damper’.

As our plane broke through the low clouds we caught sight of the sun for the first time since our DMZ trip. An hour later we landed in Saigon. A taxi representative asked our destination and told us the fare would be ‘about’ ten dollars US. I insisted that we be provided with a metered taxi, which we were. The problem was that the driver refused to turn the meter on. He met my repeated requests to turn on the meter with a stony stare out the windshield. After my third try he picked up his cell phone, punched in a number and then handed the phone to me. At the other end was the same fellow that we had originally talked with. He told me that we had nothing to worry about and that the fare was ten dollars. We were well aware that the taxi business is a racket. You can usually flag down one of the green and white Saigon cabs with little difficulty but you will always have to tell the driver to turn the meter on. Failure to do so will put you at his mercy and they are rarely merciful. Getting a taxi out of the airport is another story. At the international terminal you have to go to the taxi counter and provide them with your destination. They will then sell you a ticket for ten dollars. You get in the taxi and go. It’s a clear case of price fixing but all of the drivers are in cahoots so unless you take a bus you’re stuck. If the meter were turned on the cost would be less than eight dollars. This is the only place in Vietnam that we have run into this problem but there you have it.

Saigon was hot and sunny. We headed back to our hotel and exchanged our Hue’ gear for shorts and T-shirts after turning on the A/C. It was good to be back in warmer climes. We said howdy to the friendly faces at Lam’s and looked forward to a full quiet day in Saigon before heading to Thailand.

Our original plan was to land in Bangkok, spend a night and then train to Nong Khai where we would cross the bridge into Laos. Before we had left Saigon on our way to Nha Trang I placed our request for two train tickets to Nong Khai with a sleeper. In Nha Trang I received an e-mail from the ticket agency which said ‘Ha-Ha-Ha’. Due to the earlier airport closure everyone in Thailand was avoiding flying and taking the train instead. The earliest berth we would be able to get would be in mid-January. Damn and Double-Damn! We jumped on the Air Asia site and found a flight to Chiang Mai from Bangkok two hours after we would arrive from Saigon. From Chiang Mai we would take a bus North to the Mekong River and do a two day boat to Luang Probang in Laos. We knew that the timing on the connecting flights would be tight but it should not be a major obstacle. We booked the tickets. Air Asia’s policy is that they will not refund any tickets unless they fail to provide the service. If you miss the flight you are SOL. But we’re cool with it and book anyway and then put the entire matter on the mental back burner.

On the 26th of December we spend the morning making Christmas calls to the States. Karen got a haircut and I worked on the Blog. The next morning I stop by the Air Asia office near our hotel and ask them about the likelihood of our making the Chiang Mai flight given our arrival time in Saigon. The Air Asia agent looked at me and asked if we were checking-in luggage and I said yes and she said ‘Ha-Ha-Ha’. Apparently Bangkok International airport is notorious for slow delivery of checked luggage to passengers and given that and the time required to get through immigration we had a snowball’s chance in Hell of making it. I asked her what our chances were if we didn’t have any checked luggage and she just said ‘Ha’ so I figured at least we had a chance.

I broke the wonderful news to Karen back in the room and we went to work unpacking everything and doing some triage work. At the end of our labors we had consolidated everything into two knapsacks and two carry-on bags. Cool, except that Air Asia only allows one carry-on per passenger even though we have seen Asian passengers flout this regulation regularly. Then Karen got the brilliant idea that we could buy express tickets for the plane. Air Asia has an open seating policy which basically means that when they start boarding there’s a stampede for the seats and the last people on usually find no overhead space because everybody is carrying more than one bag. For an extra fee you can be first in line and board before the riff-raff which allows you to grab a front seat (first on, first off) and hog as much overhead as you want. At the airport the clerk asks us if we have any luggage to check-in and we say no and he starts to look at us real close but Karen has stashed two of our bags out of sight. Then I tell him that we want to buy express tickets and he gets really friendly because the $18 US I will give him for the bump is a lot of money in Vietnam. So anyway, we get the tickets and get through security minus the quart of sunblock we’ve been toting around and haven’t used since Gili Air and we’re in the waiting area feeling pretty cool because we have these big red Xpress boarding stickers adhered to our torsos which all of the other passengers eye enviously and then I have to go to the bathroom. So I’m standing there tapping a kidney when this big biker type with long hair and blue tattoos asks me where I’m from and I tell him and then he says ‘Have you heard about the new Thai immigration rules about overland visas?’ And I zip up and I say no and he tells me that on December 4th (the day after the airports reopened) the Thai immigration police passed a new law stating that people who enter the country through a land border can only get a 15-day visa. Damn and Double-Damn!

Today, the only way you can get a 30-day entry visa is to enter Thailand through an airport. Ostensibly the rule change is to curb immigration violations but the reality is that the Thais built this huge new airport in Bangkok on credit which is now in big trouble because they allowed a bunch of thugs to shut it down which scared the few remaining tourists into using overland routes which has reduced the number of passengers who are using the airport, so what better way to solve the problem than to hammer the tourists again by forcing them to do what they do not want to do which is to use the airport. So now you have a lot of tourists crossing the land borders and getting their passports stamped with visas that are only good for 15 days instead of 30 and apparently the border guys aren’t telling the tourists this fact when they cross over. So said tourist, who has a 15 instead of a 30-day visa and does not know it because; how many people bother to look at their passport after it’s stamped when every guide book on the market and history tells them that they have a 30 day visa? These people are going to eventually leave Thailand and when they do they’ll discover that they may have overstayed their visas and they are now subject to being fined 500 Baht ($15 US) for every day they overstayed. Thailand; Land of Smiles . Recently, the new Thai Foreign Minister, who is a friend of a Thai Army General, and got the job after the airport thugs forced a change in government, was asked why nobody involved in the airport shutdown had been arrested and he told the questioner that he didn’t understand why people were so upset because the protestors at the airport had a good time and the food served was pretty good too. So now Karen and I were faced with another problem but we couldn’t worry about it now because we still had to make the Chiang Mai flight. So when they called our flight Karen was first in line and went through and then I went but when they put my boarding pass through that machine they use now to tear off the stubs because the attendants can’t be bothered to tear the stub off themselves, my ticket jams the machine, so they tell me to stand aside while they fish my stub out of the machine’s maws because you cannot get on the plane without a stub just like you can’t take 2 carry-ons with you, and while they do that they start to let the rest of the people on because suddenly they can process passengers without the machine and I look at the attendant and say ‘HOLD ON’ and I wave my red Xpress boarding sticker in his face and demand to know why passengers without said red sticker are allowed to board before me and I’ll be damned but it works! He freezes the other passengers in mid-step, they beat the machine senseless with a screwdriver till it spits up my stub and I’m on the plane.

So now we are starving and we have 400,000 Dong left because we were told that we were going to have to pay a 400,000 Dong departure tax at the airport but they never took it so now we have a fist full of Dong. This is a new one for Karen and she thinks it’s pretty cool but I know from experience that you do NOT want to be walking around the world with your Dong in your hand so I figure we’ll spend the Dong on food. So the food guy pulls his cart up pretty fast since we are sitting in the front row and we get these really cool looking curry meals and I’m just about to pull back the hot foil from the steaming food tray when Karen puts her Dong in the attendant’s hand and he says that he cannot accept her Dong because her Dong is a controlled currency and her Dong cannot be used anywhere accept Vietnam. He took our meals away. Damn and double damn! If you need some good Dong call Karen

When the plane lands in Bangkok we have exactly 75-minutes to check in before our Chiang Mai flight closes. As soon as the plane ‘s door opens Karen and I are jetting down the jetway and things are looking pretty good, I mean we are first off the plane by a country-mile when they make us get on a bus for a ride to immigration. So now we’re on one of those airport buses with the accordion in the middle and we wait and wait and wait while they pack as many people as they can on the bus until it is chock FULL of tiny little Asians and then the driver sloooooooooowly drives to the terminal using a route so circuitous that I suspect that he was a New York City Pakistani cab driver in a former life. We finally hit the terminal doors with 45-minutes left on the clock and we race into immigration and are met by a wall of tourist bodies thirty bricks deep being administered to by a small group of Thai immigration people who are oh sooooooo bored with the goings on that they can hardly be bothered to pay attention what with all the text messaging they’re doing on their cell phones. So here we are in the brand-spanking new Bangkok airport in the lines marked ‘Foreign Passports’ while the lines marked ‘Thai Passports’ have nobody in them because most Thais couldn’t swing for a plane ticket if they had to and there are actually bored looking immigration people at these desks looking around like they expect a horde of Thai travelers to hit the line at ANY SECOND which they know is impossible but they do it anyway! I appraise the situation and go into ‘Medical Procedure Mode’ which is what I do if I have to get a liver biopsy or some other invasive procedure done and I know that I have to do it but I’m scared shitless so my brain shuts down and just lets whatever is going to happen to happen. So while I am in ‘Medical Procedure Mode’ Karen appraises the situation and goes into ‘Frantic Begging Tourist Mode’ and reaches out to some official looking guy who is wandering around aimlessly picking lint off of his blue uniform and he demands to see proof that we are about to miss our flight which we do not have because we do everything on the Internet and all we usually do is write the booking code in a little kid’s notebook that I carry around in my knapsack so I pull out the notebook and show him the penciled notes and IT WORKS! He wakes up a girl in the ‘Thai Passport’ line and she starts looking around like she cannot BELIEVE that there is a Thai that has enough moola to fly and then she sees us in front of her and she slows right back down. We made the flight.

So now we’re on a packed plane and we are so relieved that we made the flight that we do not care that the flight is packed and the service sucks. When we enter the little Chiang Mai airport to collect our bags I stroll over to the ‘Hotel Reservations’ stand. It is now 11 PM and the middle-aged slender Thai guy behind the counter who looks like he cannot wait to get home sees me coming and perks right up. I tell him that I need a room and he tells me that it will be VERY difficult to find a room in Chiang Mai because it is the holidays and everything is booked up. I don’t like to blow my own horn (too often) but I can usually smell BS when it comes my way. So I toss him a hard look and he bats it right back at me. I do the math. The plane was packed with people (mainly Thais but they sleep too, I think), it is the holidays and I’ve heard that Thailand is a tough lodging nut to crack at this time of the year. I tell him to show me what he’s got. He pulls out a three-ring binder full of cracked page protectors holding brochures for hotels that are quoting $75 to $100 a night. I wave him off and tell him that I’m a Guesthouse kind of guy. (Guesthouses are small hotels that usually run $10 to $20 a night and don’t have a pool). He pulls another binder out and peruses it slowly. He makes a phone call and brightens right up. Tells me how lucky I am as he has found a place for 850 Baht a night ($25 US) two-night minimum. The stub machine and ‘Medical Procedure Mode’ have plumb tuckered me out so I acquiesce. 15 minutes later we’re on our way to the Lanna Orchid guesthouse. The night clerk tears himself away from the soccer game on TV and shows us to our tiny room with bath. We grab a burger at Mike’s Burgers because as everyone who’s been to Chiang Mai knows, Mike’s are the best burgers around. So while we’re eating at the open air counter we check out the action at the line of sex bars directly behind Mike’s and the first thing we notice is that it’s nearly midnight and most of the girls don’t have ‘dates’ yet. This is odd. During season you’d expect the girls to be juggling three guys simultaneously. Maybe there are more girls than usual this year. Whatever. We head back to our walk-in closet and crash.

The next morning we head to the old market building and score some fried dough (think beignets) and go upstairs to the market restaurant where I know this old Thai woman who makes pretty good coffee for thirty-six cents and she throws in a free glass of tea for a rinse and we look around and we see lots of Thai tourists hanging out but no Westerners. Whatever. We have one night left in the guesthouse so I ask the owner how much per night if we stay on and he says ‘Same price’ which I think is kinda whacked since he doesn’t have to pay the slender hotel reservation guy anymore but it’s his shop so I tell him that we’ll be departing in the morning and then he says ‘How much you want to pay?’ Now I’m starting to smell a rat. Karen and I take a tuk tuk (Thai motorized trike) to a guesthouse I stayed in last December when I came to get some dental work done. The owner is an American and I asked him how business was and he tells me that it has been the worst year that he has ever had and he’s been there for a dozen years. So that night we go to the Sunday market which is full, I mean FULLY LOADED with people but we notice that they’re primarily Thais with a few Farang (Thai word meaning; Foreigners) thrown in. The next morning I cruise down the street and walk into 4 guesthouses and everyone of them has rooms available immediately for $10 to $13 a night and they’ve had rooms available immediately for $10 to $13 a night all year. Damn and Double-Damn! So my point is that the guy at the hotel reservation counter is a pretty cool salesman and if I were hiring I would sign him up immediately.

While all of this is going on we are planning a new method of attack on the Laos issue. Given the new visa regulations and the fact that you can only stay in Laos for 15 days we have to enter Laos on the 5th of January so we can re-enter Thailand on the 19th of January so we can meet friends arriving in Bangkok on the 19th and still be able to leave Thailand when our overland visa expires on February 3rd. New research on the two-day boat ride does not prove promising. Recent passengers complain that when they re-boarded the boat for the second day of the journey they met demands for more money. The boatmen are telling them that the fare they paid at the start was for the first day only and if they do not pay the same amount again they will not go and not going means that they will be stuck in the middle of nowhere which is what Laos is anyway. While I am absorbing this information on the computer there is an Indian woman at the travel agent’s desk next to me trying to book a bus ticket to Laos. The travel agent suggests that she travel by boat and the woman laughs and says that she took the boat last year and she will never do it again. I talk with her later and she confirms everything that I have read. Bottom line: We’re not boating to Laos. So we research flights from Chiang Mai to Luang Probang. Air Lao is the only carrier handling the route and they have a daily flight but you have to buy the ticket at their office because their Website does not work. So Karen and I tuk tuk to the bare bones office on the other side of town where we are informed that the one-way ticket is not the $108 we were quoted before but it is $140. But wait! We can go to one of their authorized agents back where we came from and they should be able to sell the cheaper ticket. So we tuk tuk back to where we came from and are now quoted $150. In addition we will have to pay $30 for the entry visa. So Laos went on the back burner.

It was time for a vacation from the vacation if you know what I mean. The next morning we caught the public bus North to Pai, which we had visited the year before. Quiet little place in a beautiful river valley. The epitome of peaceful. Our bus was packed with Thais. Half of them Pai residents headed home with crates of fresh eggs and bags of produce. The other half were Bangkok rich kids with 500 Baht haircuts and I-Phones who killed time laughing at the local yokels and futzing with their mirrored aviator sunglasses. Karen and I grabbed a bench seat designed for three but none of the Thais would sit next to us and there were no other Farang on the bus. We had never encountered this side of the Thais before but the legroom was a plus. After 3-hours on the road we pulled into Pai and peaceful it is not. The town is drowning under an ocean of Bangkok Thais on holiday. I went to the cute little guesthouse we used twice last year (Baan Tawaan) and it is gone. Completely torn down and replaced with a high-end operation using the same name. Last year we had a nice room with bath for 250 Baht. This year we were offered the laundry-woman’s former quarters for 300 Baht a night and we could only have it for one. As for the room, picture a plywood box on stilts with an outhouse beneath.

We ‘lucked out’ and got a different place (2001 Rooms For Rent)) for 5 nights at 600 Baht a night ($18) and were fortunate to do so. Parking is at a premium here so the streets are full of ambling Thais in silly hats and Bangkok plated cars endlessly circling the tiny streets for a place to stop among all of the holiday food and souvenir stands. The Hill Tribe women are here in force. There are 5 animistic flavors of them living in the hills surrounding Pai and they love to come in for the holidays with their babies bound tightly to their breasts and bags of homemade goods bundled on their heads. The men are opium smokers who prefer the blue misted confines of their village huts to fresh air crowds. They are a short, squat, Mongol featured people who are given to brightly colored and embroidered clothing festooned with thick hammered silver bells that chant Chang, Chang, Chang as they walk. These are the makers of silly hats and stony, silent, Betel Nut countenances that peer out at us over their low set goods tables like hunters in a blind. Our favorite restaurant, Dang’s, is still in operation and being studiously ignored by the Thais. At least we have that. Dang tells us that all of the Thais will head out on January 2nd. As of now we are toying with the idea of choo-chooing South to the islands or trying an overland to Laos after all but in the meantime we have decided not to decide for a few days. We still have the luxury of time. In all of the planning we did for the 4-month trip never did we imagine that Thailand would turn out to be the spanner in the works but there you have it.

It is New Year’s Eve. Outside our hotel the streets are jammed with people. Like fools we decide to turn in and actually manage to doze off around 11 when the air around our little hotel suddenly explodes with sound. Firecrackers, the whoosh of rockets and strange clamoring voices force us into our jeans and out into the street hopping on one leg because this much noise from these sorts of makers cannot last long. On the lane I see a group of small dark women sitting on a large embroidered cloth with glinty empty brown beer bottles scattered amongst them playing music on strange stringed instruments and small drums and singing with a collection of sober male mongrel dogs by their sides. Next to them two women stand and send big flame-powered paper balloons aloft one after another after another and my eyes are commanded to follow them upward and as the street falls away I see a black night sky shimmering with a thousand glowing yellow diamonds that flatten into pinpoints as they rise. I watch as drunken women on the ground stare ecstatically upwards at the rapidly evolving paper constellations while canine astrologers whisper furry fortunes in their ears and now I can understand where stars come from.

The trip has gotten weird.

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Photos

Mouse Man
They're everywhere

Karen Bleeds Another Vendor
Taken at the Chiang Mai Sunday Night Market.

Chiang Mai City Market
Greatest selection of salted snacks in Thailand.

Chiang Mai Bus Station
I am fairly certain that the baggage handler gets out before the bus departs

Pai Morning
Cold mist every morning soon burned off by the high altitude sun

Ginger Tea
Karen's morning cup/ bowl at Dang's

New Year's Eve
From a cafe in Pai

Hill Tribe Hats
On Bangkok kids