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Published: January 3rd 2006
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P and reclining Buddha
P and a MASSIVE 70 meter long reclining Buddha statue. She is standing next to the left foot. September 30: We had our first decent coffee in two weeks at a Starbucks clone in the Singapore airport and caught our flight to Bangkok. Singapore airport is great. On the way down, we watched a random 30 minute chunk from the middle of War of the Worlds, which was really scary. When we got to Bangkok, we faffed about in the airport for an hour or three buying phone cards and calling hotels and changing money and buying plane tickets to Ko Samui, and then went to our hotel, which is kind of crummy but a bargain. We didn't do much else except have some nice seafood and have a walk around in the night market around Soi Patpong, which has changed a lot since I was there last as part of a government sprucing-up campaign. Bangkok is very bustling and crowded but light years cleaner and more user-friendly than India.
October 1-10: We did a day of ho-hum sightseeing in Bangkok before traveling to the islands. The most impressive thing was the football field sized reclining Buddha. Early on October 2 we flew to Ko Samui, the largest of a three island group in the Gulf of Thailand.
At Jansom Bay
This is the beach we spent all our time at. After sitting around for a little while in the airport we took a ferry to Ko Tao, which has traditionally been a island frequented primarily by divers. Our friends Peter and Julie from London were already on the island and were waiting for us on the pier, which was great. We settled into a nice hut about a 10 minute walk from the pier. The hut (which actually had air conditioning and a large bathroom) was part of a complex that has its own little bay with a beach. At that point we basically settled into the pattern of 1) get up at 9.30, 2) eat breakfast, 3) go to beach, 4) watch sunset, 5) go to dinner, 6) play cards. We repeated that for a little more than a week. Mostly while at the beach we would go snorkeling or read a book. The only place that we had been snorkeling was in Aqaba in Jordan, and this was very different. The water was much warmer and clearer, and there were bazillions of fish that were as colorful as a saltwater aquarium. Jansom Bay, which was attached to our hotel, had pretty good coral and varied in depth from
about 1 meter to about 10 meters, and you could generally see all the way to the bottom of the water. (We brought special diving masks from London that were fitted with prescription lenses that really paid off here.) We generally just floated around looking at the fish and harassing the Christmas Tree worms (which live in the coral and stick out about 2 inches, looking like a Dr Seuss Christmas tree in orange, blue, yellow or green--if you snapped near them, they would pull into the coral and disappear faster than you could see) and the clams, which close their blue mouths if you disturb the water nearby. We saw a few blue rays and barracuda, including one barracuda that was occasionally snapping up and eating fish from a school of tens of thousands of three inch long silver fish that all swam in the same direction and turned in synch. We also went out one night after dark with flashlights for a different view, and saw the sea urchins come out of their hiding places into the dark water. About 800 meters from the Bay there was a shipwreck in about 5 meters of water, so one day
Sunset with friends
Stuart, Julie, Patrizia and Peter watching the sunset we swam over to it and had a look around. There were lots of fish and sea urchins hanging out on the metal girders under the water. We had a great time with Pete and Julie and our friend Stuart, who lives in the Hague who had met Pete and Julie in Ko Tao before we arrived. We saw some good sunsets with them either on their porches or out on a raft that floated a ways out into Jansom Bay. One evening we swam out with some beers and a bottle opener in mesh bags. Ko Tao generally was similar to Ko Phangan in that there aren't many paved roads, and the infrastructure is fairly simple, but I liked it more (being an old man now) in that it was more populated by divers who had to get up in the morning rather than 21 year old Israeli ravers. Compared to Ko Samui, the beaches were much better and the infrastructure was much, much less advanced. We had some very nice food, but nothing really stood out from the general pattern of "most food in Thailand is very nice", except for a place called Tukta that you had to get a pickup truck taxi to. Charm Churee "Villa", the place we were staying, was really nice and friendly for the price and would be somewhere that I would go back to.
October 11: This day we got a catamaran to the mainland. We decided to save the pound by taking the train back to Bangkok rather than flying. It was storming in the morning and let up a little by around the time the boat left. However, we sailed right into the roughest seas I've ever been out on. For once in my life I actually felt a bit queasy, and some of the people near us had to make emergency runs to the toilet. A crewman came around to hand out sick bags. Then we finally got to the port outside of Chumphon (a medium sized city in the center of Thailand) and caught a train to Bangkok. Chumphon itself was quite civilized and we had a little walk around the night market. We had reserved the better side of second class because there was no first class available, which basically meant that we each had a little bunk separated from the walkway by a curtain, like in an old movie. It was kind of fun but not something I would want to do every day. With the curtains drawn it was too hot, and with the curtains open it was too bright. We arrived about 7am the next morning, so it was about a 10 hour ride.
October 12: Today we went straight to the hotel and dropped our bags and then went to the Vietnamese embassy, which was much more cooperative and easy than we expected. We are getting visas done overnight, which means we can go to Cambodia earlier than we thought rather than tooling around Bangkok pointlessly. On the way back to the hotel we wandered past, of all things, the main Vietnam Airlines office in Bangkok, so now our travel plans are pretty much sorted until New Zealand, except for internal trips within Vietnam. We had lunch at our favorite seafood place in Bangkok (T Restaurant) and then got rained on, as usual, trying to have a coffee around Silom and Soi Patpong.
October 13: Today we picked up our Vietnam visas and thought about trying to go to a movie. However, the big cinemas' selection of movies was limited to real turkeys (A Sound of Thunder, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo and Cinderella Man) so we decided to skip that and go to Chinatown instead. Chinatown looked a lot like the Chinatown in London or New York, except that the little restaurants were on the sidewalk rather than in buildings for the most part, like the rest of Bangkok. The food looked great but unfortunately, we weren't hungry. We also managed to wander around the Raffles Hotel looking for a somewhat bizarre little outdoor temple decorated with lingas where people mostly pray to have children. It's been there for hundreds and hundreds of years, but now it finds itself behind the hotel parking lot. Due to its subject matter, it is not signposted so we had to act like guests and tool around the hotel until we happened upon it. We had an earlyish flight so we went to sleep early.
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Floyd
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Incredible to hear that Bangkok is cleaner than something.