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Still disorientated from the debauchery of the full moon party on Ko Pha Ngan I went from ferry to bus to bus to minivan working my way down to Hat Yai, a city near the southern tip of Thailand.
Hat Yai is essentially a bordertown, its dirty and old and everything looks a bit run down. Its as if there was a surge of money and development in the 80s but since then no one could be asked to build anything new. In my memory I also remember having the distinct impression that nobody liked to clean either. Black mold enocroaches on every 'white' wall, and lines the trim of every roof, a tribute to hat yai indifference and climate (hot, humid, and frequent rain and sunshine). Lonely planet refers to this area of Thailand as dangerous with separist terrorist activities but that warning refers mostly to the area to the southeast of Hat Yai.
I would reccomend to any traveller bummin about Thailand that they should get down this far south, because although Hat Yai may be north of the Thai-Malay Frontier, it is unmistakably a malaysian town. And if you are tired of the thai tuorism hussle,
then Hat yai might be
just enough to get you to keep going south to see a country that is refreshingly different from the "SE Asia" in most people's minds.
I had decided to head for Hat Yai with the intention of going to Malaysia. Two weeks in Thailand had been enough for me and I couldnĀ“t convince my weary travel phsyche that seeing the others sights of Thailand would be exciting and fun. Though perhaps more importantly going to Malaysia was breaking away from the plan, the plan that I had had in mind for so long that I was bored of it.
I stayed in Hat yai for 3 nights and 3 days, arriving straight from the full moon party on the 13th and leaving for Malaysia on the 16th, but I didn't get up to much. Literally, I spent almost all my time in front of a computer at an internet cafe uploading photos, booking a flight to vietnam, updating my travelblog, researching malaysia, and talking to Kjersti on Skype. In my journal I have written down that between two days I spent 17.5 hours on a computer. If you had told me two Market in Satun
I didnt get to Satun in time for the last ferry so I stayed one more nightr in thailand. years earlier that when I was in Thailand I'd be spending whole days on a computer, I would have categorically denied it as a possibility. Back then my image of travelling was one where you were completely disconnected with the outside world, an email a week to the parents leting them know that you are alive, 10 minutes on the computer a week and thats it. Even now, sitting here and writing this, this out-of-touch concept has a romantic appeal to me. This was, after all, the way things were before you could access the internet from everywhere, probably just 10 years ago! But these days we young travelers are all over-connected (not necessarily a bad thing), we need to access our emails, our facebook, couchsurfing, travel forums, hostelbookers.com, googlemaps, upload our photos, write our travelblog, check our bank accounts, and read the news! I don't defend this practice, in fact I believe that the majority of travellers really shouldnt bother with all of this, but thats just the way it is. The internet is there, its useful, and there are all these other things you can do on it too! The days of letter writing and constant postcards are
long gone, nowadays sending a postcard is a novelty rather than the most convenient way to send a message home.
When I wasn't on the computer I was aimlessly wandering around the streets and markets of Hat Yai munching on roti canai. Roti canai is a form of fried flat bread, that you can find all over Malaysia and it is gooood. It is so good that I can remember having it 11 years earlier when my family went to borneo (malaysian), we all loved it because it tasted delicious, my dad loved it because he could feed the whole family for a few dollars. Finding it in Hat Yai was a surprise to me (though it shouldnt have been) and it was almost like finding a long lost friend. In fact, it had made such an impression on me in 1997 when I was 12, that my ex-girlfriend (who I was with when I was 17/18) remembered me talking about it and brought it up when we saw each other again in London in 2006.
So apart from using the computer, wandering aimlessly, and munching on roti canai, I was also trying to figure out a way
to motivate myself. I'd been travelling too long. When I left Shanghai I clearly remembering talking to firends and saying that I felt that (for me) 4 months is the perfect length of time for a long trip, and so I was going to spend 1 month in China, and then 3 months in SE Asia, I'd be teaching windsurfing in Veitnam by the end of november. But instead I spent 3 months in China, and now my four months had already come... and gone... and I had at least 2.5 months to go. I told myelf over and over again that I was so lucky to have these opportunities, that so many others would give anything to be in my place right now, that at least Im not stuck behind a desk 5 days a week, etc... But it wasn't enough, I was tired and spoiled, travelling had become the desk, and I couldn't see the point of it anymore. The only thing stopping me from going completely insane was the knowledge that I would be meeting up with Kjersti in a month, at least then I wouldn't be travelling alone anymore!
But how was I going to get through this last month? I didn't just want to "get through it" I wanted it to be an amazing month, full of fantastic and enviable memories and experiences! (This is essentially the travelers primary responsibility). OUt of my whole trip these days in Hat Yai were the most difficult and frustrating. In the end I resorted to a skill I have become very adept at: take the same facts and view them from a completely different angle such that they are barely recognisable. In this case, I stopped thinking of it as being my 15 month of travelling, but instead I though of it as my LAST month of travelling (alone), and that I would spend my LAST month squeezing the most out of the eastern Malaysian peninsular. So on the 16th I woke up re-energised and ready for one last country... In retrospect, I didn't do so bad....
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