Adventures in SE Asia

---

November 13

Hello everyone!
You'll be happy to know that I made it to Bangkok safe and sound. I am
writing from the Siam Inn on Khao San Rd. where I stayed the night. My
flights went perfectly. I actually enjoyed them immensely. Japan Air Lines
were fantastic. They had good food, they handed out hot towels and gave us
tea and coffee and even free booze (I had a Japanese beer, which was very
good.) I navigated the airports perfectly and stunned myself. At Chicago, I
had to go in elevators, escalators, across walkways, through multiple
buildings and even had to take some sort of a tram to get to my gate, but
amazingly, I didn't go the wrong way. The whole process took over 30 hours.
I didn't see anything of Tokyo, just an airport waiting lounge and lots of
Japanese people. When I arrived I managed to catch the last airport bus to
Khao San. It only cost 3.50. I met some other backpackers on it, but they
were staying at a place that was too rich for my blood, so I set off on my
own. I ended up at a decent place which was a little over priced for what
it was (still only about $12, but for this place, that's expensive!!) Khao
San is wild. There are all kinds of backpacker hotels, restaurants, hawkers
selling everything from clothes and food and I even saw a stall with various
kinds of cooked bugs!! There are a lot of interesting people here. A lot
of hippies. A lot of Asians hang out here too, there were more of them than
tourists, trying to sell us stuff. They drive motorcycles through the
crowds on the streets. There were people playing drums, construction
workers drilling, people yelling and singing, someone with an afro that was
a foot high, dreadlocks everywhere...and I arrived at about one in the
morning!! The noise kept on through most of the night, although I was a
little off the main road so it wasn't too loud. This is definately a crazy
place. I think today I am leaving to go to a small town outside of Bangkok.
I will come back when Jen and her Thai friend are here, because it is not
an easy place to travel in by my self. It is very cool to be here. The
weather is hot (about 30 I think). Right now it is 8:00 in the morning. I
was going to call, but I wasn't sure what time it would be there and I
didn't want to wake anyone up. Things are strange but amazing. I can't
believe I am here.
I can't believe I have written all this and today is only my first day here.
Well, I guess you've been warned. You'll have a lot of reading to do! 😊
Oh, and I saw a gecko on the wall of the stairwell in my hotel. I thought
that was pretty cool.
Write me back soon, I will write back soon too.
Love you all, no need to worry, everything is great!
XXOO Nicole


November 17

Sawat-dii kha!!
Great to hear from you all, thank you for the e-mails.
I am sorry I haven't written in a while, I have been very busy!! I am
having a fantastic time. I barely know how to begin. As a person who
always has high expectations and is usually disappointed, I have to say that
this time my expectations have been exceeded.

Since I last wrote I was on Khao San Rd. After writing that e-mail, I hired
a tuk-tuk (which is a 3-wheeled open-air taxi which the drivers decorate
with lights and flowers and things--there are tuk-tuks all over the place
here, the drivers saying "hello, tuk-tuk?" whenever you walk by). The
traffic here is crazy--it seems almost anything goes, although it somehow
seems to work out ok. The tuk-tuk ride was very fun. I went to the train
station where there was a nearby tourist information centre. I bought a
ticket to Authaya, a small town two hours from Bangkok by train, as well as
another ticket to Chaing Mai and a trek (but I will get to that later.)

The scenery from the train was amazing. Palm trees and fields, bright sun,
everything green, flowers, small villages, beautiful temples appearing out
of the trees. There were people walking up and down the aisles selling alll
kinds of food. I didn't recognize most of it 😊! Many people bought
coconuts which the vendor sliced the tops off of with a knife and put a
straw in so people could drink the milk. There were entire meals being
sold, skewers of meat, Pepsi (unfortunately!), bags of orange juice, all
kinds of fruit...it was amazing!

On the train ride I met a girl who had just come from Indonesia and had
travelled in Malaysia and Thailand for a while as well. She loved
Indonesia, said the people were very friendly and the islands were
beautiful, as well as everything being very cheap! She was from Spain and
travelling on her own as well. I also met a Chinese guy named Peter who was
going to Authaya as well. I didn't really talk to him on the train, but
when we got off we decided to look for a guesthouse together. We took a
ferry accross the river from the train station and walked into town. We
soon found a very nice guest house in the centre of town for 200 Baht a
night (that's less than 7 dollars Canadian!!) I had a double bed, my own
bathroom. Peter and I then set off by foot to visit some of the ancient
temples that Authaya is famous for. The ruins are over 600 years old, all
that remains of what was once the greatest kingdom in Thailand. There are
huge crumbling temples with steps leading up to the sky, sculptures of
Buddas everywhere and what is a famous Bhodi Tree Budda which is carved (as
you can probably guess) into the base of a Bhodi tree. The Thais had left
offerings of incence and flowers which they do when they pray or are trying
to get some good luck. They were kneeling in front of it.
There were some school children who were walking around doing interviews
with tourists for their school (learning English) and they asked me where I
was from, did I like Thailand, what was my favourite place, all laughing and
gigling the whole time. This was the first time that I heard that Nicole is
the name of a famous singer in Thailand, and I have heard it many times
since!

Peter and I got along very well. We both have the same ideas about
travelling and the same sense of humour. He has been all over the place
which is somewhat unusual for a Chinese person. He had been all over Europe
and the states, worked in England for a while. We sat on the top of a
temple and talked for a while, watched the sun set and then we went out for
dinner.

We ended up next to the river at an open-air market while a lot of the other
tourists were in pubs with western food and pool. I had a Thai curry. You
know I like hot food, but this was HOT HOT HOT even for me! But it was
still extremely good. It was composed of about half hot peppers of several
varieties! Amazingly, my stomach has been just fine even though I have
eaten nothing but Thai food since I got here. I also had a Thai "Singkla"
beer. The meal only cost 2 dollars and that is actually the most I have
paid for a meal since I got here! Can you believe that?? I spend on
average only a dollar a meal. And this for huge stir-frys, curries, pad
thai--all under 2 dollars! There were lights along the river, longtail
boats and floating restaurants drifting by, Thai music playing from the
boats and food stalls, it was very beautiful.

The Asian markets are spectacular. A far far cry from westmount mall,
that's for sure!! There are innumerable items being sold there, most of
which, again, I can't identify! All kinds of meat, soups, strange fruits,
noodles, rice, buckets of fish, turtles, eels (most of them still moving),
raw meat out in the hot sun, spices, candies, handicrafts, clothing--it has
to be seen to be believed.

After dinner my lack of sleep hit me and I decided to go back to the
guesthouse and sleep. The next moring Peter and I took a Songthaew (like a
pick-up truck with benches in the back and a roof--they are also everywhere,
you basically just flag them down and see where they are going, if they are
empty you can tell them where you want to go) and took an hour and a half
ride to see the Royal Palace, home of a former Thai King. It was absoutely
spectacular (I am running out of adjectives!)

There was a Chinese temple that had been built by the equivalent of the
Chinese consulate. It had huge red pillars reaching up to the ceiling,
everything in red and gold, chinese letters carved out of wood everywhere,
ornate carvings of plants, birds, flowers, painted in bright colours,
guilded chairs and tables, gold pillars, marble floors--again I can't
describe it well enough. By this point I unfortunately did not have a
camera. There was a "temple of personal solitude" build in the middle of a
man-made lake, and the king's residence was also incredible.
We went back to the guesthouse because we had to check out by noon. I had a
train ticket booked to Chaing Mai for 4:00 that afternoon, and Peter was
headed back to Bangkok. He was nice enough to book one for 4:00 as well and
waited with me at the train station. It was great to travel with him, he
had been in Thailand for a month and knew what to do. He spent about two
hours giving me advice, so now I know where to go and stay when I am in
Southern Thailand. I miss him now!

Then I got on the Train to Chaing Mai. It was overnight 12 hours. I had a
bunk. It was very slow. I really enjoyed it when I got to look out the
window (which was huge and actually opened--I stuck my head out like a dog)
for the first couple hours until it got dark. I arrived Chaing Mai at 5 in
the morning and took a tuk tuk to my guest house (which I had booked already
in Bangkok). It is also very nice, only 150 Baht (5 dollars) a
night--double bed, my own bathroom, something that in canada would probably
be over 50 dollars. I spent the next day visiting all the famous Buddist
wats in the town. Every where you turn there is another one, even more
beautiful, more elaborate than the next. They are carved with scenery,
dragons, statues, gold, embroidery, pillars, paintings--I will have to show
you some pictures. They all have golden Budda statues as centrepieces. One
very old one had huge stone elephants on top of a huge temple. I finally
bought a camera, which I should have done in Bangkok as there aren't many
here. It was about 7 dollars. Not much more expensive than a disposable,
so I figure if it breaks that's ok. I talked to a Monk--can you believe
it??!! He let me take a picture with him. He has been studying english for
a year and is very good at it. He took psychology in school. They have
"monk chat" where you can go and talk to the monks about "buddism,
philosophy, Thai culture, anything"--I didn't have the nerve, I was nervous
enough talking to one Monk! They are everywhere here, roaming the streets
in their bright orange robes. When I arrived at five in the morning I saw
them walking around with their bowls (they carry silver bowls which are
specially made for them) and people were giving them food--the community
supports the monks in this way. All Thai men become monks for at least
three months.

At night I went with some friends I met at the guesthouse to the famous
Night Bazaar where they have hundreds of vendors selling all kinds of
handicrafts. My two friends were a Columbian and a Morrocan from Spain.
They were very nice and interesting, especially the Moroccan. He told me
about how he lived in the mountains in Spain, grew his own food, lived in an
abandonded house (for which he got arrested for squatting)--there are all
kinds of people here. Most of the tourists are walking around wearing tank
tops and shorts which is considered disrespectful and immodest here--you are
supposed to wear sleeves and pants or long skirts when you are in town, and
especially in the wats--but they obviously didn't care. They were taking
pictures of the Buddas which you are not allowed to do. It was disgusting.
Today I haven't done too much, just wandered around. I am going trekking
tomorrow and I was looking for some clothes to wear. Jeans were a bad bad
idea--I am sweltering!! However, there are not many clothes to buy here,
mostly batik (which you see sold in those tacky import stores in London) and
which all the silly tourists were walking around in (you rarely see Thais
wearing it). Anyway, I managed to pick up a pair of adequate shorts for 5
dollars (for some reason I forgot to bargain, I could've had them for a lot
cheaper!) and also some sandals for the same price. I am having my laundry
done now so all I have to wear are my shorts and my bathing suit top. I
won't go too much further than my hotel! However, now I fit in with all the
other tourists.

Now--my trek! It will be amazing! It is 3 days, 2 nights. I get to sleep
in a hilltribe village, go rafting and ride an elephant. I paid 170
canadian for the whole deal including four nights at the hotel and my train
tickets, which, as it turned out, was actually quite expensive (I could've
got the whole thing for about 100, I figure--but I had to learn that what
seems cheap here is not that cheap in comparison to how much cheaper it
actually gets--not how cheap it seems to a Canadian!!) I think there are
six or ten of us going. I will meet them tonight. I was supposed to go
yesterday, with my Columbian and Spanish friends, but I couldn't find
anything to wear in time and I was also very tired from having walked for
maybe 10 hours after getting off that train at 5 in the morning and not
having slept much on it. So I am resting up today (writing this e-mail is
the longest I have sat still since I have got here!) and will enjoy my trek
more tomorrow (with shorts!).
Wow, long e-mail! I had better go before I run out of money to pay for it!
(It is only 2 dollars an hour, but I don't have much on me--I didn't know
I'd write a novel!)
I can't believe I have been here for such a short time-I feel like I have
done so much. It is still strange to be here, but somehow I feel quite at
home as well. Did I mention the Thais are all very nice? I talked to one
girl at the train station for about an hour. She was very friendly (they
all are--although a lot of them are trying to sell you something--but they
are always nice about it!)
Okay, I have to go!!! I will write again soon!
Love you all, thank you for not worrying about me (no reason at all to
worry! I am doing great!)

November 21

Hello everyone,

I am back from my adventures in the jungles of northern Thailand! 14 of us
were loaded into trucks and driven up into the mountains, including two
dutch girls, two swedish girls, one new zealander, four irishmen and one
irish woman, one english man and one english woman, and, best of all, one
canadian. The ride took almost two hours, up and up and up. The trekking
was hard and hot, uphill and sometimes downhill the whole way, through thick
jungle, over rocks and streams, balancing on narrow logs across rivers with
uncomfortably large drops beneath them (which is to say, I had lots of fun).
We visited two hill tribe villages. The first one was the Hmong, a
semi-nomadic people without citizenship but originating from China. They
live in basic one-room huts on stilts underneath which they keep their
animals. They had cows, chickens, pigs, dogs, and cats, some tied up but
most running around all over the place. It was a bit disappointing to see
that in these primitive one-room huts, among hand made pots and straw mats
on the floor, there was also (maybe you've seen this one coming) a
television. Yes, the hilltribes have satellite t.v. But that seems to be
the way Thailand is. You'll find Coca-Cola in the markets along with live
eels in buckets.
The Hmong wear elaborate decorated hand-woven clothing and silver
jewelry. They are used to tourists, and generally just glanced at us with a
minimum of interest except when they were trying to sell us beaded
necklaces. They live very hard lives, waking before the sun rises to work
in the fields until it gets dark, and only barely managing to scratch out a
living. Most of them have absoutely no money. They keep a buffalo as a
form of insurance, so they can sell it in case of an emergency such as
someone needing to go to a hospital. Our camp was close to their village
the first night.
The second village we visited was that of the Karen, another distinct
tribe from Burma. We stayed in their village for the second night. Our
accomodation was world-class: bamboo huts where we slept on the bamboo-plank
floor. The nights were cold and the sleeping bags they gave us were very
thin. Needless to say, none of us got very much sleep.
We had little contact with the Karen. One of them played a stringed
instrument at our campfire and sang. He taught me how to play a song. He
was very happy and rather child-like, smiling a lot and showing off his
embroidered shirt ("men no make, only woman" he told us), teaching us how to
count to five. Another could do all sorts of magic tricks with string and
taught us some.
The other people in the group were a lot of fun. A lot of them had
done a lot of travelling before they got here, so I heard lots of stories.
A few were on their way around the world. We all got along really well.
On the last day we rode bamboo rafts down a river and rode some
elephants. The river ride was mostly just relaxing. The elephant ride
found me sitting beside the new zealander on a rickety wooden chair lashed
around the elephant's middle and tied onto his tail at the back. It
squeaked and creaked ominously the whole ride. The path was very steep in
some parts and we found ourselves clinging to the back of the chair so as to
keep from falling off. One guy sat on the neck of the elephant and
apparently it was very painful and he he had trouble walking once he got
off. It was funny. The dutch girl's elephant kept sneezing and spraying
them. I didn't really like the elephant ride because they would hit the
elephants or stick hooks into their ears if they didn't move. Our elephant
had a baby that followed us the whole way. We always had to stop and wait
for it. After the ride, we fed them bannanas.
After we got back into town, we all decided to go out for dinner
together. After that we went to a bar. It was a strange feeling, being at
a bar that could have been anywhere in the world with a bunch of people from
all over the world who have just come back from a trek in a Thai jungle...
Today I went to Doi Suthep with a guy I met from Singapore this
morning. It is the highest temple in Thailand, on top of a hill outside of
town. You could see the whole city from the top after you climb 305 steps
to get there. I also went to the zoo and to a few handicraft factories
where they made paper umbrellas, jewelery, and carpets. Since this e-mail
is so long already I am running out of patience for details and you probably
are too.
I am realizing with the amount of detail in these messages I won't have
any stories to tell you when I get home. I will have to keep them shorter
from now on 😊!
I hope my e-mail was mildly entertaining, though you are under no obligation
to read the whole thing. It won't be on the exam. 😉
Cheers,
Nicole

November 26

Greetings from Ta Ton!

Ta Ton is a small town in the furthest reaches of Northern Thailand and it
is incredibly beautiful. The 4 hour bus ride up here went through
mountains, forest and rice fields. I am staying at the Garden House for 100
baht a night (cheap!). It is like a resort with landscaped grounds and
little bungalows. Tomorrow I have booked a rafting trip to the town of
Chaing Rai, a little further north. I will ride on a bamboo house raft (!)
down the river, stopping at hilltribe villages, waterfalls and hot springs
and camping overnight. Should be a good time!
I took a full day cooking course in Chaing Mai before I left. I am now a
certified Thai Chef. Okay, so maybe just a mediocre amateur, but actually I
made some very successful appetizers, entrees, and dessert, including
lemongrass and prawn soup (which has about 12 ingredients, only 2 of which
you actually eat--the rest of them are just for flavour. I wish I had known
that when I was sweating and chewing my way through a bowl of hot and sour
soup at a restaurant--eating the lemongrass, whole leaves of various herbs,
chunks of ginger, hot peppers, etc.) Also I made fried fish cakes (much
better than they sound!), the famous Pad Thai (which they call Thai "fast
food"), a green curry, a brown rice and chicken salad, and water chestnuts
in coconut milk with ice for dessert. All extremely tasty--I was way too
full at the end! I have a cookbook to take home with me, so maybe I can
impress you all with some of my cooking skills!
In what was probably my most significant act of courage thus far, I got my
hair cut by someone who didn't speak english. As it happened, they did a
wonderful job for only 150 baht. Buoyed by my success with the haircut, I
later got some highlights as well. They turned out very nicely and were a
deal at 700 baht.
I met some of my friends from the trekking trip at the market while I was
wandering around, and I spent the day with them, just wandering through the
market and hanging out at bars and cafes. I made a point of trying the
strangest unidentifiable food I could find, including some fried insects in
the form of bamboo worms. I joked that I was now ready for fear factor and
the vendors cracked up; they thought it was hilarious. I also had some
green plant juice which tasted pretty much like green plant juice, what
looked like a timbit and actually tasted like one on the outside but had
some sort of spicy paste on the inside (I actually liked them, but after
three I began to feel a little nauseated).
I went camping at Doi Inthanon, a Thai national park with the tallest
waterfall in Thailand. Getting there by myself was a pain in the ass and the
whole thing ended up costing about as much as a tour would have. Lesson
learned: sometimes a tour is the best way to go! Unfortunately, I did not
even get to see much of the park as I was sidetracked by two half-Thai
half-Swedish girls who were camping with their family and family friends
(Thais, Lao, Israeli, Swedish and Vietnamese!) who co-opted me into drinking
whisky (Scottish, not Thai, which is about 80%!p(MISSING)roof!) with them. The Thai
women sat off to one side and cooked food for us all night while the men and
the swedes ate and drank. They did fabulous things with only a campfire:
there was whole barbecued fish, rice soup, meat and vegetables, fruit,
sauces and dips! It was astounding. I felt bad that they had to do all the
work, however, but like I was told, it is the Thai way! Okay, mai pen rai
(means nevermind, it doesn't matter--Thais say it all the time!)
I also visited a monastary to sign up for a meditation course, which begins
on Dec 3. It is going to be really hard, for 10 days I live like a monk. I
will write you again before I go, as I won't be able to e-mail (no e-mail,
no writing, no reading, etc.) for 10 days!
Well, I am going to wander around the town for a while, there are some nice
walks along the river before it gets dark. I leave tomorrow at 8:00! I
will write again soon,
Love,
Nicole

December 1

Sawatt-Dii Kha!

As I am preparing for my long days of silence, I'd better make this a
good one! (Consider yourselves warned). I hope to compile all this and
publish it in book form at the end of my trip (I guess I better start doing
more exciting things. 😊
From Chaing Mai I went further north to Ta Ton, a tiny northern town of
mountains, mist and river. You probably wouldn't find it on most maps, it
is so small. I stayed at a little resort with landscaped grounds, little
bungalows, and a restaurant with tables by the beach along the river, which
they lit with candles at night and started a bonfire on the beach. Only 100
baht a room!
I started a fight between Thip's Traveller's Guesthouse and Ta Ton
Tours over whose rafting trip I should go on. The two women proprietors
criticized each other's outfits (they use engines, theirs is overpriced,
they can't leave tomorrow, one even described the other as having a "monkey
face"!😊 It was all very amusing. One of the things you learn here in
Thailand is to always shop around and never take anyone's word for anything
as you will get a different answer wherever you go. Also, by creating some
competition, you end up getting the best deal. Today I went to various
agencies asking questions about visas for the rest of Indochina: it's 5
dollars, it's twenty, it's thirty, you can get one at the border, you can't
get one at the border, it can't be done faster than eight days, I can do it
in three, it's 900 baht, it's 700 baht, etc. Basically, I'm on my own.
That's okay, I've got it all sorted.
Anyway, back to my story. I ended up going on a two day bamboo rafting
trip down the Mae Kok river to the small (but less small than Ta Ton) town
of Chaing Rai (which will probably be on a map!). It was mountain after
mountain the whole way. Blue and hazy in the distance and lush and green up
close. I'm sure that Smog was sitting on his treasure on the top of one of
them. In the morning they were covered in mist which gradually lifted
through the morning. There were yellow-green rice fields at the bottom of
the mountains, all the people waved and smiled as we drifted by. Other
tourists were going by in long-tail motor boats and they took pictures of
us. I traveled with some Aussies and Kiwis (there seems to be a lot of them
over here!) who were very cool. I went kayaking for a few hours with one of
the Kiwi's, through some rather tame rapids (wait--what am I saying, I
better spice this up a little. They were class five. I barely escaped with
my life!). We also stopped at a natural hot springs which was slimy and
smelt of sulfur but was still nice. We stopped at touristy hill-tribe
villages which had stalls lined up selling souveniers in the form of woven
handbags and wallets. Mostly were were just on the raft though, which was
the best part. It was all very quiet except for the quiet hum of the motor
on low (Thip's was right: they did use motors even though they said they
wouldn't!) We actually didn't have to sleep on the boat, we had a rickety
bungalow which was nonetheless a step up from my last bungalow in the
jungle. It actually had real floors and a bathroom, along with inexplicable
plaster carvings on the ceiling. Sleeping on the floor was painful as
usual, but it wasn't as cold as last time, thank god!
I arrived in Chaing Rai late in the after noon and went with the Aussie
couple to a nice hotel. The city of Chaing Rai was unimpressive, although
less touristy than Chaing Mai. We went to a market (I am getting sick of
them, they are all the same, more clutter for rich people's houses, although
some of it beautifully made). It was a lot of fun nonetheless. After we
went out for some Thai whiskeys.
The next morning I said a sad goodbye to my Aussie friends and hopped
on a bus for Mae Sai, a border town containing the northernmost point in
Thailand, right accross the border from Myanmar (formerly Burma). The bus
ride was very amusing. I was the only foreigner on it and the seats were so
small I didn't fit and had to turn sideways with my legs in the aisle. I
was smushed against a boy who was sharing his seat with someone else (they
jam three people into two seats!). After three hours of this I sorely
wished my legs weren't so long! Anyway, I arrived safe and sound (if
cramped) in Mae Sai.
Two years ago, the entire town of Mae Sai had to be evacuated as it was
being shelled by Burmese troops in retaliation for the Thai Army's pursuit
of Shan State rebels into Burma. Nowadays, it is fairly quiet, the main
street occupied by--you guessed it--a tourist market! It still has a
border-town feel to it though, and we were stopped frequently on the way to
and from it by the police who checked ID's and searched people. Mae Sai is,
after all, at the centre of the "Golden Triangle", which is mostly just a
tourist trap these days but apparently there are still a few poppy fields
about. They ignored me, I guess I looked innocuous (although actually I am
one of the most brutal and most successful drug lords in the world).
I was in Burma for about an hour. At the border crossing, which you
basically just walk accross, there is--can anyone guess?--a tourist market!!
The same old things, silver jewelery, batik, bags, paintings, carvings,
sarongs, CD's, etc. I took a quick look around (the city's name was
Tachilieck--my visa didn't allow me to leave it), was accosted by agressive
cigarette-sellers and grubby street children who were very persistent and
followed me around forever after I gave one of them a few baht (I ended up
giving all my change away, regardless of the consquences--the guidebooks say
it encourages begging and discourages them from finding work, but they all
looked so hungry and sad. There were 12 year olds with babies on their
backs...) I think I was the only white woman alone there (although there
were many others on tours and with their boyfriends), so I didn't stay too
long. It was interesting to see what the Burmese were like, although I'm
sure I didn't get a very accurate representation of the average Burmese.
The purpose of this trip was accomplished in the form of a new Thai visa
upon my return. The old one expired inconviently on the last day of my
medidation course.
I returned to Chaing Mai the following day after sleeping for most of
the rest of my time in Mae Sai (it was the most enjoyable option). This
time I ended up taking an air-con V.I.P. bus back to Chaing Mai because
there were no other alternatives. It was quite a bit nicer than the last
one, though, which I ended up being grateful for on the five-hour trip.
Tons of legroom, reclining seats. I sat next to a nice Thai man about my
age and we talked for a lot of the trip.
I am now preparing for my meditation course. I have to buy a few
things including eleven each of white lotus flowers, candles, and incense
sticks. For 10 days there is no socializing, no writing, no books, no
music, no phones, no e-mail. My daily routine begins at 4:00 a.m. when I
start with "mindful walking practice and mindful sitting practice." 6:00 is
breakfast, if I am not on time I don't get any. More practice until lunch
at 10:30 (no more eating until 6:00 the next day!--good thing I am
substantial), then I have to report to the teacher on my progress. My
schedule does not say anything about what happens from then until 10:00 when
"sleeping time may begin." I think this may be harder than going to Burma
by myself!! However, the stated objective of all this is "to purify the
mind, to get rid of sorrows and lamentations, to get rid of physical and
mental sufferings, to understand the truth of life and to extinguish
suffering and gain Nibanna." A tall order--but if it works, I guess it will
all be worth it!

Well, you won't hear from me until after I have gained "Nibanna" (which
I suppose is like Nirvana but spelt differently 😊, so next time I write it
will be with the wisdom of an enlightened Buddhist. Ha! More like my usual
silly self rambling on for way too long. Till then!

December 16

Hello everyone!

The long days of silence are over. (Stop cringing--you know you missed my
ramblings).

So when you think of meditation you think of something peaceful and
relaxing, right? Wrong. At least in this case, you would be way off. I
think a lot of us went through a bit of a shock.

They got us started right away. The first day we meditated six hours. The
technique was actually very simple. You sit cross-legged on the floor and
observe your breathing "rising" "falling". They add a few more things to
observe as you progress. "rising, falling, sitting" and then you
concentrate on various points on your body and observe how they are
feeling.

Also there is a walking meditation, which involves walking in a very
awkward way (not bending your foot) very slowly. This goes in stages with
pauses between each "heel rising, lifting, moving, putting."

At first it was fifteen mintues walking, fifteen sitting. For six hours!
By the end of that we were so cramped we could barely move!! But that was
nothing! Oh no. The fun had only just begun.

By the second day we were supposed to do seven hours. Eight on the third
and half an hour each. Has anyone tried sitting cross-legged for half an
hour?? We were supposed to merely "acknowledge"--"pain pain pain". Now
try sitting cross-legged on the floor for an hour straignt. Alternate it
with an hour of walking a metre in five minutes, and do that for 12 hours a
day. See how you feel!! Relaxed?? HA!!!

Now, you are doing all of the above under the circumstances of having to
wake up at 4 am and going to bed at 10, sleeping on bare boards (really
helps the pain!) with an old dusty blanket that I was thoroughly allergic
to, in ant-infested rooms with freezing cold showers (it gets really cold
in the north at night, so I froze for half the time), eating a breakfast of
rice gruel (that's right--RICE GRUEL--which is like what happens when I
try to cook rice in the microwave and put too much water in so it is all
soggy and watery--I felt like an Asian Oliver Twist!), eating a lunch of
rice and some sort of vegetable soup that has been boiled almost beyond
recognition at 10:30 in the morning and you are not supposed to eat
anything else after that.

Now the thing is that the physical pain is nothing compared to the mental
anguish you have to go through to accomplish the completion of ten days at
Buddhist boot camp. Your mind (or at least my mind, and the minds of a lot
of the other's--with the exception of a few freaks who really liked the
whole thing) rebels against the meditation like crazy! Try silencing your
mind for even a few minutes, then try doing it all day! Try giving it
absoutely nothing to focus on except "walking and sitting"! I have a very
chaotic mind, and it did not react well to such attempts at control. After
being furious, frustrated, bored, pain-stricken, despondent, hungry and
miserable for the first two days, I packed my bags the next morning and was
ready to escape with what little remained of my sanity. Before you can
leave, you have to speak to the Abbot (the "head monk") and let him know.
On my way there, I ran into Maggie, who is the translator and basically in
charge of the meditating foreigners.

She talked me into staying. I have no idea how, but she always manages to
say things which which at once make you feel like a big ambitionless wimp
for running away (or wanting to, as I discovered on later occasions) and
convince you of the validity of what you are doing, as hideous as it is.
This time, she said something about how we are all walking around with
skeletons inside (like the ones in your closet, I guess), but most of us
just aren't aware of them. So by meditating, we face our skeletons (which
is very painful to do) and in the process become more peaceful. Okay, so
it sounds hokey, but in the condition I was in it worked.

So I stayed. Turned out that a lot of people wanted to leave, most of them
several times a day. Only two actually did, though. The thing was that,
deep down, a little at first and more later, we knew that the whole thing
was actually good for us. You start to have moments where your mind is
actually silent and in the moment, totally focused on what you are doing,
not nattering on about the past or the future or just whatever random
ridiculous thing it latches onto. Only moments, though. They always pass,
and even the monks who have been meditating forever still say that they
cannot quiet their minds. But it still has the effect of giving you a
measure of peace and clarity. So that is the price of inner peace and
wisdom. The monks say that this is the only way to wisdom, that knowledge
does not come from the outside, does not come from thinking or studying,
but through suffering and contemplation. You learn to be "mindful"--the
ultimate goal of meditation, along with the recognition that all life is
suffering, everything is transient, and there is no self. I think the
suffering lesson was pounded thoroughly into my head, I am VERY glad that
everything is transient, and unfortunately I can't get rid of my pesky
self.

I am not sure what to think of the whole thing. There is a western woman
who has been there for a year. She does everything very slowly, and looks
peaceful, but I thought that nobody looked really happy, even if they never
looked really sad either.

Well, I left the monastary after my last day there, and me and a few fellow
meditators ate dinner and had a beer or two (both for the first time in 10
days!!). Then I spent the night talking to my friend until two in the
morning. He was very cool--an Aussie who has been modeling in Bangkok and
has done some acting on Australian t.v. shows. Yes--that's right, I was
hanging out with a male model/actor. He was good looking, definitely, but
also very down to earth and we hung out all the next day as well. Of
course he has a girlfriend (as I know some of you are going to want to
know!! 😊

After that I took the overnight bus to Bangkok, which was horrible. It was
so bumpy that my head nearly hit the ceiling every ten minutes (as the guy
next to me said, "more like a horse than a bus!" which I found hilarious in
my sleep-deprived tortured state)! The fact that I was so sore from
meditating (sounds funny, doesn't it?) made the whole experience very
heinous. We arrived at six in the morning, and I checked into a hotel and
spent the day with a cool Polish chick who was a writer who had
volunteered in Mozambique for a year and a half. I have met so many cool
people on this trip! We were pretty "knackered" as the english would say,
so we just hung around, watched a movie, talked.

She left in the evening, and I attempted to get some sleep. i say
attempted, because i was in a hotel right on Khao San Rd which was
basically like sleeping in the middle of a bar (or several) it was so
noisy. Also, at 100 baht a night it wasn't exactly a classy place. But I
have now had the full "Khao San Rd" experience, which you do not have if
you stay in a nice hotel. As it was, I was pretty spoiled as I was not in
a dorm nor did I have any bedbugs. Just a thin mattress in a tiny,
windowless, crumbling room with a shared bathroom and two feet of floor
space 😉. The next day I moved somewhere quite a bit better for only an
extra 60 baht, in a side street off Khao San (much quieter!!) I did some
wandering around downtown (a failed shopping trip really--I ended up in
this horrifying western-style mall which had all the usual stores, Esprit,
Guess, etc., and Pizza Hut and Dairy Queen and basically every mall outlet
and fast-food place that exists). I ran away as quickly as possible as I
found the whole place very upsetting. Anyway, the bus ride there was fun,
and I was proud of myself for getting somewhere on my own on public
transport in Bangkok.

Today I will just chill, as I am not quite recuperated, and just living in
Bangkok is a very exhausting proposition. The crowds, the insane traffic,
the pollution, the noise, it is all very draining!! I am sooooo looking
forward to an island in the sun!!

Well, that concludes today's installment. Thank you for reading. 😊
Love,
Nicole


December 24

Greetings All!

I'm not quite sure where I left off in my last installment--somewhere after my narrow escape from the harrowing Buddhist boot camp. After that it was a 13 hour bus ride back to Bangkok.
I will begin with my arrival at five in the morning. I got off the bus with a lovely polish girl named Marta who was writing a book. Too knackered by the travails of travelling to do much else, we wandered Khao San and watched Terminator 3 at a pub (yes, that was the most interesting thing I have to say about that day.) Mostly we just talked and hung around.

I had the real Khao San experience that night by staying in a 100 (about $3) baht a night room right on the main street. (If I have already mentioned this part, sorry, but I'm not sure so here it is again. Maybe some things get better with repetition? Ha.)

This room was crumbling and dirty with only a bed and not even a window. Steamy hot and so noisy it was like sleeping in the middle of a pub. Two feet of space between the bed and the wall. Outside, Khao San is in constant upheaval. The pavement splits and spews dust under the blasting force of chainsaws. The backpackers wear tank tops, fisherman's pants, headscarves, batik, their hair in dreads, a cultivated backpacker style. The flock to the signs advertising "Pat Thai" while they ignore the Tom Yum soup stands where all the Thais are eating because the signs aren't in english.
As I'm sure many of you who are fellow travellers have noticed, they seem to think that backpacking gives them an excuse to look scruffy, even though all the guesthouses have showers which would help them attain a bare minimum of presentability!
I have written much more in my journal of Khao San, I find it fascinating. It is a colorful microcosm of the Universe where languages and traditions and histories collide, the west and the east, McDonalds and Bhudda, freedom and unsafe drinking water, rich people and rats, shiny Japenese cars and colorfully decorated rickshaws, 7-11's and fried insects, squat toilets and Pantene Pro-V. There is a restless energy there, drifting, nervous, a sense of no direction in life, only on the road here, a falling away, a rediscovering, a following of the crowds who are all trying not to be part of the crowd, here and there originality in a place where people who think they are or were original in their other lives are now the standard-issue of "differentness."

Yet, I discovered, there were no farang (foreigners) a scant ten-minute walk away from this backpacker ghetto, as if there were an invisible force field surrounding it.

My friend Jen arrived and we decided we wanted to go and see a Thai ladyboy show. Ladyboys are very common and very accepted, even admired, here in Thailand. I asked around at the hotel (I had relocated to a more amenable living situation off Khao San), and I had the staff all laughing--I guess it was pretty funny for a farang to be asking about ladyboys--but anyway, I was introduced to a gay employee of the hotel who offered to take us to a real ladyboy bar not far away.

So there I was in a roomful of gay Thai men with my thai friend and Jen, the only westerners and two of only a handful of women (who may or may not have been real women--the ladyboys are very convincing!). The ladyboys turned out to be rather ugly, middle-aged men who came on stage in sparkly evening gowns, ten layers of make-up, and lip-synched to Mariah Carey! It was hilarious. They also performed what seemed like a comedy routine, though of course we didn't understand a word, but the thais were all laughing. As we stuck out so much, the ladyboys of course took notice of us, and came off the stage and started talking to us. They asked us where we were from, and then talked about us in Thai--I have no idea what they said, but they were probably making use of us for their comedy routine 😊.

After some Thai beer (and this is what I blame entirely for the following incident)--I am sure they put something in Thai beer that makes you get up on stage in front of a room full of gay thai men and ladyboys with your thai friend and dance with the gay man who was in the middle of a lip-synching and dance performance--but whatever the secret ingredient in the beer, there we were. For several hours.
Actually, I think the men in the bar really couldn't've cared less when it comes down to it, as impressed or perhaps horrified with myself as I was 😉!
I must give kudos to Jen here--she too is from London, which for those of you who don't know is a very conservative city and I don't suppose commonly produces people who would dance on stage at Thai ladyboy shows.

At any rate, that was the highlight of my second time in Bangkok. Other than that, I did some shopping, which was amusing because it is hard to find my size in the Thai clothing markets, and I was sized up in every store I entered, and if they didn't have my size they ignored me, and if they did they jumped all over me, usually with cries of "we have size, we have size!" Nothing like an experience like that to make one feel like a giraffe or perhaps an elephant.

I also ended up in this high-class western style shopping centre which had everything we have in the west, and I found myself disgusted by it--probably because I used to work in a mall and because I was just coming off the austere meditation regimen. I left as quickly as possible.

I saw Lord of the Rings--I know I'm not here to watch movies, but it's LOTR!! It was fabulous. The theatre was half the price of back home and twice as nice (and had popcorn for only a dollar). It was like many things here, the same but different. The seats reclined, you could by special lazy-boy type "emperor seats" or "honeymoon seats" with no armrests. We had to stand up and pay homage to the King while they showed a musical montage of his royal highness. (All this involved making use of the public transport system in Bangkok, which is fast and furious! Except when it is caught in traffic, of course--I was stuck in traffic for 45 minutes without moving an inch!)

Anyway, I really didn't do much else as I find Bangkok exhausting. There are so many crowds, and traffic jams, tourists, tuk-tuk drivers who yell at you...it is a dirty, heaving place where impatient sweaty people squint through the grimy air, a city like swirling dust, each speck a car, a drill, a man. Struggling under the effects of rapid and haphazard industrialization. This is the price of wealth.
But still the choked city is full of moments and places of kindness, beauty and purity, where millions of people battle enthusiastically with circumstance (about 13 million of them, I was told!), many that still smile easily, and still there is an element of sanuk, of fun, that pervades everything like the grime of the city but goes much deeper.

Soon enough I was on a bus again, headed for some of Thailand's world-famous islands. It took me over 21 hours to get to Koh Pha-Ngon, an island near Koh Samui, an international class destination. Koh Pha-Ngon is much quieter, and has yet to see any of the package-tour development which has proliferated on Samui. It was sixteen hours on a bus and five on a ferry in very rough seas (which made me feel seasick for the first and most inconvenient time of my life!!) I was lucky enough to meet a very nice nuclear physicist who was also making the journey from Bangkok and who had just arrived from Sweden. He was taking some time off from what must be the considerable stress of his occupation! So I have been able to enjoy in succession, the company of a model/actor, a writer, and a nuclear physicist. Not bad for a retail salesperson!! (Not that a person is defined by their occupation, of course! I think that some people have occupations which they are worthy of, like the above three, while others have occupations which they are unworthy of and then there are those for whom their professions are unworthy of them )

Now, in contrast, the company I have encountered on Koh Pha-Ngon is of quite the opposite caliber. Is is possible to be accurately convinced that people are idiots even if you can't understand their language? If so, then the French people occupying the beach resort where I am staying are idiots. They laugh like hyenas, babble like drunken idiots (which they also seem to be, given the copius quantities of beer the consume), and the only utterances they emit which I can udnerstand is their drunken wailing to the accompaniment of Bob Marley.

So here we encounter the other breed of backpacker, that hedonistic empty-headed type who drink beer, laze on the beach and party without much curiousity or respect for the new culture upon which they are impinging with things like topless bathing which the Thais find really offensive. Scotty could beam them up to Tahiti or the Bahamas and they would probably not even notice. Or like the Truman show, you could build them a set with some sand and they would probably not even notice. So here I am stuck with these yahoos for Christmas.

At any rate, the scenery is stunning! For five bucks a night I have my own bungalow on the beach. Last night the sun set in muted primary colours, red, yellow and blue covered over with a film that diluted them with innocence and melancoly. But the sun was bright and red, a perfect disc to add a mark of intensity and anger.

Unfortunately I have to go to Burma (again!) on the 26th to get my visa renewed. It is so annoying that you can't renew it here! Or, technically I could for about 70 bucks for only 15 days. Since i have more time than money, I am making the 15 hour journey to Ranong, where Thailand meets the southern edge of Burma, and from there I think I am going to meet Jen for New Year's in the resort island of Phuket. I was going to try and stick around here for the moon party, but have realized that hanging around the beach is just not my scene, nor is it Jen's. Near Phuket there are what are called karsts and hmongs, basically limestone topography which produces towers of stone with underwater caves beneath them which can be rowed into in boats at low tide. There is also a national park in the jungle called Khao Sok in the area, so hopefully we can head there where hopefully there will be fewer drunken idiots! 😊 (don't get me wrong, it isn't that I'm not enjoying my time here in paradise!)
So, I will let you know how it goes.
I hope all of you have a Merry Christmas, and look forward to hearing from you soon.
All the best,
Nicole

January 1 -
Thailand (mis)Adventures Seventh Installment--stolen shoes and drunken Russians

Stolen shoes, drunken russian shower-breakers, Chai the Thai, the potato-head make-out, the old, the weird and the ugly...all this and more in this installment!

Hello Everyone, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!!
Season's Greetings from Krabi town by the Adaman Sea!

When we last spoke I was on Koh Pha-Ngon, an island in the gulf Thailand, being irritated by a bunch of idiotic french people. So I will start from there.

On christmas eve, there was a black moon party on the beach right beside my bungalow, so I decided to attend. Before I left, I was eating dinner when this russian guy came in and started talking to me. As a result I am thinking about going to Nepal, but we will see 😊. Anyway, we drank some whisky and decided to check out the party. There was almost nobody there. We hung around until 11:30 but still the party was dead.

So we went to Haad Rin, the beach of full moon party fame. There we found a small crowd on the beach and in the various bars that line the beach. We bought a "bucket of joy" (whiskey, red bull, coke and vodka--it was joyous indeed), some flashing glow sticks and danced to some techno/trance on the beach. There were christmas lights everywhere, people who (I don't know what to call them) were twirling ropes that had fires lit at the end of them, it was pretty cool but still rather quiet, especially compared to what it must be like when 20,000 people pack the beach for the full moon party. We ended up going swimming in the ocean and watching it all from shore. This is when my shoes got stolen. Who would want a pair of old 150 baht sandals? Anyway, they were gone when I came back (don't accuse me of losing them--I put them right beside the russian's and his were still there!)

So I walked in bare feet for twenty minutes to get a taxi back our bungalow. I let the russian use my shower as he didn't have one, and then I fell asleep (it was a joyous sleep indeed😊.

Anyway, I wake up in the morning and discover two interesting things. One is that the black moon party, which was dead at 11:30 the night before, was still going at 9 in the morning. I later found out that everybody came at 12. I think this is my bad luck month--that fact was the mere tip of the iceberg! The second is that there was water pouring out from the pipe for my shower. I went to investigate, and the whole pipe came out of the wall where the drunken russian had broken it off in his drunken clumsiness!! Never do a drunken russian a favour is the lesson you all should learn. (but they may be useful for paying for drinks, taxis and glowsticks--in retrospect, the least he could've done!). So I have to go confess to the guesthouse owner that my shower is broken (I adamantly blamed it on the russian of course, and she pronounced "him no good!") then she went around pointing me out to all the other guests and saying "no water, she broke shower!" It was a happy christmas indeed. Luckily she didn't charge me for it, as the russian was nowhere to be found!

But wait--it only gets better! I had to leave the next day to go to Burma to renew my passport, so I bought a joint ticket that would take me there from Koh Pha-Ngon. I am supposed to catch the night ferry at 10. I go to the pier to discover that it is "broken." So I have to check into a rather expensive hotel by the pier for the night and take the next one in the morning.

I do so, and in 6 hours I am in Surat Thani, the town from which I catch the bus to Ranong. A bunch of people come to pick the tourists up from various companies. I was showing my ticket around, and this motorcycle taxi driver says "ok, you come with me". So I do, and end up at this closed shop which may or may not have been the tour company I was supposed to go with. This was at 10:30 and my bus was supposed to leave at 10. After 20 minutes of standing around, trying to ask him questions which he didn't understand at all, and him talking to the next-door neighbours, I finally give up and ask him to take me to the bus station so I can buy another ticket.
I call the travel agency and they said I went with the wrong guy!! As if it was my fault some idiot either made a stupid mistake or pretended he was from Chong Thong Tours to make some money--he was standing beside me demanding 100 baht as I was on the phone. I told him that he should pay me as I had to pay 250 baht to buy another bus ticket and he made me miss the bus! I argued with him for a while but realized it was pointless--I made the hapless travel agent who sold me the ticket translate for me, but all I could do was get him to lower his price to 50 baht. Utterly fed up, I paid the money (it wasn't much, but it was the principle that I objected to--paying someone who made you miss your bus.)

Six hours later I am in Ranong, a Thai city on the Southern edge of Burma. Since I got there so late I had to pay for a hotel for the night, instead of making it to Krabi, were I was going next. But I made the last longtail boat across the border, where I got a shiny new visa on my return. The boat ride was the highlight of the journey, as the boats were full of cute scrubby kids, one of whom drove our boat for a while. I got another 5-minute glimpse into Burma, which, at that point, looked a lot like Thailand, but there were many cool houses/shacks on stilts lining the river, and some nice mountain/island scenery on the 45 minute journey.

I left in the morning to catch a bus to Krabi, which is where I decided to go based on my boredom at Pha-Ngon. Here there is more to do.

Six hours later and utterly exhausted, I arrive in Krabi, where I start talking to one of the Thai tour guides at the bus station. He was very cute and intelligent and somehow I end up agreeing to go out with him that night.

I actually had a really fun time. We went out for dinner at a really nice restaurant on the waterfront, then we went to a fair and rode a rather pathetic ferris wheel and played a very pathetic game involving reaching into a chamber filled with balloons, pulling one out and winning whatever prize the ticket inside the balloon was for. My luck actually came back in full force as I was the esteemed recipient of some sort of hook with a flower on it that you stick on your wall.
After that we hung out with Chai's (yes, Chai the Thai) friends and had a few beers then I went to my room and ended up barely sleeping as I was across from the aformentioned fair which was blasting incredibly loud music. Another lesson for you all: never book a hotel until you know for sure that it is not next to a fair.

Jen had asked me to meet her at the bus station on her arrival in Krabi the next morning at 6 or 7. So at five in the morning, I haul my exhausted ass out of bed and wander the dark streets trying to find a cab. I eventually do, and make it to the bus station at 10 after six. I wait until 7. No Jen. I wait until 8. No Jen. I give up at 8:30 and catch a taxi back to my guesthouse, leaving Jen an e-mail informing her of my location.

I wait around and she finally traipses in at 11 or so. I can't even remember her explanation as I was too bamboozled (do you like that word?) to even understand it. I don't really remember what we did that day either.
The next day we went to the "Tiger Caves" where there is a monastary and a wat built into the caves where there is what looks like the footprint of a tiger, and then we climbed 1200 steps straight up the mountain to where there is a "Budda footprint." The view was amazing--jagged limestone formations rising almost vertical from the forest and fields below.

The next day, I did some research into the various tours you can get here (Jen decided it was easier to let me do all the work and left everything to me), and elected to take the "four-island tour" by longtail boat. We visited, as you might be able to surmise, 4 islands. It was actually a lot of fun. Chicken Island (which actually looks like a chicken), Poda Island, some other island, and Rai-Leh beach where there is a cave where the fishermen believe a goddess resides who can grant their wishes and where they give her offerings of carved...well--male organs.
Anyway--male organs aside (with the near exception of this guy who wore a t-shirt and a speedo, and no shorts--NO shorts, even in town--the whole time), we snorkeled on all the islands for hours, and I saw some beautiful coral and amazing tropical fish. They were very friendly and would peck me on the hand (I was really hoping none of them had teeth--but I was okay, no blood was drawn). There were more limestone rock formations (called karsts) that tower out of the sea here, and perfect white-sand tropical beaches. The long-tail boats were cool as well, all wood with a long rudder (hence the name) reaching out from the back. It was a great day, but I got burnt to a crisp, especially the back of my legs which were sticking out of the water. Lesson three: don't be a crown idiot by not re-applying sunscreen after swimming.

This was new year's eve day, and that night, there was supposed to be a big party on one of the islands. Jen didn't want to go. She wanted to go to the main beach with potato-head, this guy who worked at the hotel we stayed at. This is when I ended up at the Reject Party. This was where all the old, the weird and the ugly seemed to have ended up. I was hit on by someone who pretended to be a thai boxer but knew nothing about the sport, an old man with very few teeth, a man who claimed to be the owner of the bar (a likely story) and another guy who paused for a moment in his flirtations with this other girl I was hanging out with to hit on me, and that was all.

Chai the Thai was in Ranong where he works and--the reason I was hanging out with this other girl--Jen had disappeared almost immediately with the potato-head (after a gross PDA) and without telling me where she was going (she had told me that if the party sucked there we could leave--but how could we leave when she wasn't there and there weren't boats from this particular Reject Beach to the real party?-no wonder, I wouldn't have wanted any of that flotsam there either!) So there I was, stuck with a bunch of losers (a lot of middle-aged and old people--some who brought their kids even though there was nothing child-oriented about this party) with the possible exception of two girls who had also been invited to this party by potato head and who I spent most of the night with. I also ended up standing beside the bar where this black girl was shaking her huge ghetto-ass at about face level the entire night--I never saw the front of her the whole time! Jen the Potato-Head Snogger re-appeared at three in the morning and we went back to our hotel, where she checked in with potato-head and probably now expects a few spuds on the way.

So now you find me, having ditched my delightful travel companion for the moment, about to book a kayaking trip through some mangrove forests and underwater caverns. I spent a lovely day walking along the coast, where I ate something eye-wateringly hot in a real Thai restaurant packed with only Thais, and walked through a park where many Thais were picknicking and walking. And now I have spent a small fortune by Thai standards typing this massive piece de resistance of travel writing. Does anyone think I could get paid for this???
At least that would make up for my recent misadventures! Not that I regret any of them, of course. It was of great benefit in forcing the improvement of my sense of humour, along with my patience and character. It's still a great ride! 😊
P.S. To Noleen, thanks for your sympathy re: the buddist boot camp, and I really enjoyed reading your acount of your travels.
To my dear Cheryl: I sent you a christmas card which will obviously be late. Sorry 😉. Also, would you mind doing me a favour? Since I know you are saving my e-mails, could you please mail me #5? One of my friends who I missed on the mailing list wants to read it. Thank you!!
HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!!!!!
All the Best in 2004
Love, Nicole

Jan 18, 2004

Hello from Malaysia!!

Finally I have torn myself away from Thailand! (Surprise and gasps all round). At present I find myself in Malaysia, the fertile country which provided the backdrop and inspiration for the novels of Conrad and Somerset Maughn. It seems that Europeans have always had an interest in Malaysia. Right now I am in a little pocket of Englishness amongst the tropical strangeness, and my English roots seem to be asserting themselves in the fact that I feel comfortable here as the colonialists must have many years ago.

I am in what is called a hill station, the Cameron Highlands, at an elevation high enough that the tropical heat gives way to a temperate climate, not too hot, not too cold. The area is dotted with tea and coffee plantations, English-style mansions, rose gardens, strawberry farms and shops selling tea and crumpets. It is alltogether incredibly charming.

It is largely Indian-populated, and amongst the tea shops are Indian curry restaurants, and of course most of the workers at the plantations and among the construction sites (which are unfortunately rather too common) are also Indian.

Today I took a tour which brought me to a tea plantation where I had world-class "Boh" Cameron Highlands tea while looking out over a vista of rolling hills and mountains covered with fields of tea. I toured the factory which is the only one of several which is still not automated. The workers actually walk through the fields and harvest the tea by hand, quite the job considering the steepness of the hills! I also went to a butterfly garden filled with hundreds of exotic butterflies, some bigger than my hand, and also insects such as scorpions, leaf and stick insects and giant beetles. Then we went to a rose garden, which had thousands of roses and tropical plants and a trail that you could walk overlooking the valleys below. Then it was on to a strawberry farm where we walked through the greenhouses and I had fresh strawberries and ice cream, and then a honey farm where we were shown how the honey is harvested and of course got to try some. I was with a Muslim family who seemed to see me as some kind of tourist attraction in my own right, and were constantly getting their pictures taken with me, especially at the rose garden where they insisted that I pose with them in front of every ceramic Disney character we came across.

I also went on a jungle hike, which was quite the hike and quite the jungle. It was almost straight up for two hours, where you are clinging to the side of a mountain, holding on to roots and using ropes to pull youself up. The guide seemed to be on a tight schedule as we were practically running most of the way!! There was a poor man with us who was close to seventy, and he nearly died!! Me and another guy decided to walk with him and we let the tour go on without us because we felt bad for him (and it was also a little tiring for us as well 😉. There is another Canadian here from North Bay (a real canadian, obviously), and we went out for dinner at a pub.

My last stop before here was an island called Penang. Penang is a major tourist attraction because of its colorful history. The people who live there are a combination of Chinese, Malay, Nyona (half-Chinese, half-Malay), European, Arab, Indian and Japanese. I went to a great museum that explained all their history. The streets of Penang are where they filmed Anna and the King. The whole area has old colonial architecture and a strong Chinese influence. I visited the Kloo Klongsi clanhouse, where an ancient, rich Chinese clan used to live and now houses a variety of artefacts in an elabourate mansion, along with the entire history and geneaology of the family (summarized in a book which is about a foot thick!). This mansion was also used as a backdrop for Anna and the King. I saw fort Cornwallis, with cannons and ramparts, the site where the first European landed and built defenses. Also the botanical gardens, which had examples of strange and exotic tropical trees, plants and flowers. And a few temples, both Chinese and Indian. My first night I met two other Canadians and we wandered around little India and happened to see a ceremonial parade including a cart with a statue of gods being pulled by two oxen. The indian temples are quite something; they have so many gods, most of them with body parts of several animals, and extra heads and arms.

I stayed for the first time in a dorm because Malaysia is more expensive than any other south-east asian country, but it was okay because I met a nice dutch girl and we spent the next day together. We spent most of the day at the biggest temple in Malaysia (it was so big that it actually took half the day to explore it all). It was Thai on the bottom, Chinese in the middle, and Burmese on top 😊. It was decorated with thousands of paper lanterns for chinese new year.
We also hopped on a bus and took a tour of the city, and tried to find some night-life but were largely unsuccessful.

Before that I was in Thailand, not really doing that much. Jen went home just before I left for Malaysia. We went on a kayaking tour through mangrove forests and underwater caves, but it was supposed to be a full day and we only spent three hours kayaking. Mostly we were just waiting around. I find that southern thailand tour operators have gotten lazy probably because they are basically assured a steady flow of tourists. I am glad I got to go to Thailand now before it gets spoiled any more by being over-touristed. My friend told me that she met much better people in the rest of Asia, because all the idiots who just come to drink and laze on the beaches and hang out with other tourists go to Thailand. Anyway, the three hours of kayaking was very cool. We saw some ancient cave paintings, stalactites and stalagmites (of course), and along the edge of the mangrove forest (which is a very rare and fragile habitat) there were the coolest little fish that actually had little legs and could walk on land!

And on that note, I bid you goodbye (I don't know how to say it in Malaysian, as nobody here seems to speak Malay, English being the common language amongst all the different ethnic groups), or perhaps I should say I bid you adieu, good gentlemen and ladies, in proper old English form, being in the proper little England that I am in!

Until the next installment, Cheerio ol' tops!
Nicole
Malasian Adventures II - the Prosperity Burger

February 3
The World's Worst Travel Agent, The Prosperity Burger, the Reggae Bar, the elusive Dragon Dance, Medical and Liquer...

Greetings all,
Here I am in Bangkok again! Sitting in the Mahboonkrong Centre (isn't that the best name in the world for a mall? Can you imagine Westmount Mall with that name? Nobody from London would ever go!), Bangkok's biggest mall. I am surrounded by "karaoke booths" where there are a bunch of little Asian people with microphones singing along to cheesy videos in accompaniment to a variety of cheesy Asian pop and love songs. It is really very cute and inexplicable.

The World's Worst Travel Agent...
It took me a @#$%!!(MISSING)!! 32 hours to get here from Kuala Lumpur and I arrived at six in the morning on Khao San Rd. I ended up catching a bus from KL to Hat Yai in Thailand, which took 10 hours and two very inconvient and long border crossings (I managed to hold up the whole bus both times--once because I was missing some piece of paper that I was supposed to have been given--but wasn't--upon my entrance into Malaysia, and the second time because it seemed to take longer to get a foreigner into Thailand than a Malaysian and I was the only foreigner on the bus. Also, the man responsible for issuing my Thai visa typed with one finger. I could've strangled him.)

At any rate, this wasn't the worst part by far. I showed up at the train station in Hat Yai at 9:00 and the next train didn't leave until 3:00. So I went around to some travel agencies to try and find an earlier bus. I found one that was supposed to be leaving at 10:00. Now, ladies and gentlemen I present to you the Tale of the World's Worst Travel Agency. At 10:30 a minivan showed up. "Where is my bus?" I ask. "The minivan will take you to your bus," I am assured. I hate minivans. There is nothing good anybody could possibly say about them. They are inevitably cramped, stifling and smelly. Several times I checked to make sure I was getting a bus and had been told yes and shown pictures of it. However, I had already bought my ticket which clearly stated "NO REFUNDS." So minivans have very small seats, even for Thai people. So of course they decided to put four people in three seats, so for the next five hours (FIVE HOURS!!) after being up all night on a ten hour journey there I was perched on the crack between two seats being smushed by two Thais in a hot smelly hateful minivan, fuming at being taken for a ride (ha ha, taken for a ride, get it?) and trying to communicate this displeasure to the driver, who replied only in Thai (convient).

So five hours later I get dropped off in Surat Thani, a town only an hour or two away from Hat Yai where I came from. The driver had spent the rest of the time dropping the other people in the van off. I was the last. The travel agency I had gotten dropped off at told me the bus was leaving at 7:30, in four and a half hours. The driver was grinning at me, waving goodbye and I'm not sure if he was just being friendly and had no idea what was going on, or if he was mocking me, but at any rate I simply gave him a withering glare which, even if he really didn't understand English, he must've got the gist of.

I called the company back and explained the situation, and the owner said he was sorry, he must've made a mistake and he would try to find me an earlier bus and call me back. Anyway, he called the travel agency back almost immediately, obviously having made no attempt at finding me another bus, and said that there wasn't one. The travel agent informed me that he had lied to people before. So I call back in an attempt to tell him that I hope he is proud of himself for being a lying @!!! Canada!!!
Now I tell that story not because I am really devastated, but because I now find it moderately amusing and I suspect you may as well. At the very least, I get to release some repressed murderous rage and leave a written record for posterity of the sum of all tourist-destroying evil.

At any rate, the long overdue second half of my Malaysian adventures.
The Elusive Dragon Dance...
I left the Cameron Highlands earlier than I wanted to because I wanted be in KL's Chinatown for Chinese New Year. Turns out Chinese New Year festivities are very elusive. There were promises of fireworks and dragon dances, but after wandering around Chinatown on new year's eve with my friend Matt who came with me from the Cameron Highlands, we saw no evidence of either, but heard what sounded like gunshots--which apparently, were the fireworks, their only purpose being to make noise to scare away the evil spirits for the new year. I'm surprised they didn't scare away everybody else as well--with the threat of going deaf. There was a big group of us that banded together in search of more festivities (which were supposed to be going on all week), and we asked around all over the place and got a myriad of different answers, but eventually we ended up finding a definate lion dance. At a shopping mall, of course. It seemed to be the only one in town, as all the other Malaysians seemed to be there as well. We took Malaysia's light rail transit system (the LRT) which was remarkable in the amount of pushing and shoving that goes on. It is the only time that I've ever seen Malaysians move even remotely fast. They don't wait for anybody to get off the train before they shove their way on. I got shoved out of the way before the doors even opened on my stop. I made it there nonetheless, however, and got a choice spot on the 7th floor for viewing the lion dance on the first floor. It was still really cool. It was the first of several I saw happening all over town. I never did find a dragon dance. The lion dance involves two people in, guess what, a lion costume, dancing, jumping and spinning in accompaniment to a band of drummers. They even hop onto posts and jump and dance across them, which is really remarkable considering there are two people in the costume and the back person is bent over and can't see.

I happened upon several more of these performances in my travels, one while I was in a shop and the owner had paid the performers to do a dance outside his store, so I got to stand in the doorway close enough to touch the lions and watch. I have some good pictures for you to see.

That was about all of the chinese new year festivities I saw. It is mostly a family event, and the celebrations take place inside the home. There were some interesting articles in the newspaper; being perfectly serious about making stock market predictions based on the chinese horoscope, (this is the year of the Monkey, so the markets will be tricky), and telling people who were born in the year of the Rat to place Prosperity Hippos in the northeast corners of their living rooms and such.

The Prosperity Burger...
I learned a little about Malaysian history and culture with my visit to the Malaysia National History Museum. They went through a long struggle against various colonizers; the British, the Dutch, the Portugese, had to fend off a communist takeover, and finally gained their independence in 1957. The museum is all about commemorating the leaders of the nationalist movement. This area is also home to some fantastical colonial architecture, combining British Tudor with Arabic turrets, arches, minarets, etc. One of the buildings used to belong to a Sultan but now houses the supreme court. The sultans actually still have their own building in the city though!

The pride of Malasia is the Petronas twin towers and the KL radio towers, described in an introductional video as symbols of Malaysia's "prosperity" and economic progress. Situated along the "multimedia supercorrider", these "symbols of national pride" are two of the city's must-see tourist attractions. Prosperity seems to be a concept which Malaysians--perhaps Asians in general--seem to be very preoccupied with. McDonald's even uses the slogan "The Taste of Prosperity" and you can find on the menu a genuine "prosperity burger"!! I have yet to try one due to my reluctance to support Ronald's quest for world domination--or is that Bush's?--I keep getting them confused...

Anyway, to go up the Petronas Towers requires that you get up early to line up for a limited number of tickets and then they only let you go halfway up the tower. However, it is still THE tourist thing to do and everybody else was doing it--but I still didn't. HA. I am so anti-establishment or perhaps hungover from late nights at the Reggae Bar.

I did, however, venture up the KL tower, which is the 4th highest in the world (the first being the CN, of course, yay Canada eh). At a pricey 15 ringgit it was still an amazing view, accompanied by an audio headset that described what you were seeing as you looked out. It was interesting that the commentator on the audio was talking about Malaysian pride with a british accent 😊.

On my way to the KL Towers, I discovered what was actually KL's last remaining fragment of rainforest. Of course I got eaten alive by bugs within seconds of entering it (have I mentioned that the mosquitoes here seem to have some sort of vendetta against me?) but I also had a nice little hike across the city. On my way I met another Canadian girl, who'd just left Alberta and was on a stopover on her way to Australia. She was quite shell-shocked, having never left Canada before, it was really funny--the heat, the dirt, the crowds, the noise, the staring malaysian men were a little overwhelming for her. The next day, her and my other english friend went to the Islamic Arts museum, which was really cool. The exhibits were about religious art work, so there were various hand-made artistic versions of the quaran (my favourite being about an inch tall, designed to fit in a beltloop), calligraphy, jewelery, swords and weapons (very beautiful and deadly-looking--but we wondered, if you were about to stab somebody, would he really be thinking "my, what a pretty sword"?). Besides swords there were also axes, machetes and maces, along with incredible armour. It was very lord of the rings, but the real thing. There was also clothing (my favourite being something that was made out of what was translated as "choice" goat hair 😊. We also went to the National Mosque, which was a very modern affair and didn't really look Islamic at all. The best part was we had to wear robes and headscarves and looked like women out of The Handmaiden's Tale. I felt very oppressed.

Matt and I (actually, another Matt that I ran into who I also met at the Cameron Highlands) went to the Batu Caves the next day, literally a huge cave, which is a holy site for Indian worshippers, and the setting for the Thaipusam Festival which draws anywhere from 10,000 to 2 million (I read both figures in the papers!) pilgrims annually to witness masochistic feats of devotion performed by worshippers who put hooks into their bodies and carry things as a symbol of their willingness to carry burdens for their faith, and to gain the blessing of the gods by demonstrating their devotion. (I suspect they are probably on some serious pain-numbing drugs).

The really amazing thing I did in Malaysia was travel to the little town of Selangor with a bunch of friends to see the fireflies. The river in Selangor is home to one of the highest concentrations of fireflies in the world. We rented our own van and drove down for the evening, rented some boats and drifted down the river in the dark. The trees were lit up like christmas trees with millions of tiny little lights. They flickered and sparkled in the darkness, more fireflies than you could ever imagine, all the little firefly-men trying to attract a mate 😊. It was magical, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Other than that, I was mostly just exploring the city and hanging around with my friends. I went to the Reggae Bar almost every night. Also at the Reggae Bar were what I think comprised Malaysia's entire population of black tourists. The owner, paradoxically, is a young Japanese guy. I got to know him and ended up deejaying one night.

Since Malaysia is very expensive, I decided to head back North and work my way up into Laos. As I said, right now I am in Bangkok where I seem to have arrived right in the middle of the Bangkok International Film Festival. I am now staying at a hotel right smack in the middle of the theatre district to take advantage of the festivities (apparently Jackie Chan was on my block yesterday!!)

My time on this computer is running out, so I will have to end it there!
Talk to you all soon,
Happy Chinese New Year
Nicole

---