Advertisement
Published: October 5th 2010
Further evidence
of my continued retardation. I’ll be honest, while Southeast Asia had always been on my list I always kind of associated Thailand with too much tourism and disgusting sketch balls visiting to indulge in their darkest perversions but I’ll have to admit a misconception as it was fantastic. We spent almost our entire trip on Ko Phi Phi Don, one of the destination islands on Earth (where The Beach was filmed) but during monsoon season there are so few tourists that they shut down 3 of the 5 ferries that go to the island. Lodging prices (which range up to 5 grand a night) drop to more than half off. All of this because it rains torrentially all day everyday and who wants to go on vacation in the torrential rain? We did, against all Lonely Planet advice. If you’ve been stepping over homeless people, littering, or rooting for Duke than don’t come during rainy season as karma will surely deliver nothing but rain. I however have been reading to the blind, listening to music for the deaf and helping little people push high elevator buttons and was rewarded with five perfect sunny days in the middle of the rainiest month of monsoon season. The
island is perfect. I went in with pretty low expectations because well, it’s the rainiest time of year. The color of the water is amazing, the beaches chill and nearly empty and the locals laid back (other than the foreign scuba shop who asked us if we were “in for scuba” about 900 times). We stayed in an amazing little tree house on the hill by the water at a great resort called Viking. It reminded me a lot of our summer house in Minca. The resort’s restaurant had a food tasting with about 15 dishes every night where you just helped yourself to samples of each plate they offered for the evening and then picked one. We spent our days swimming up a storm, kayaking around, snorkeling, eating well, getting frequent massages and all around enjoying ourselves. I totally got
Rick Rolled while getting a massage. No song relaxes you better. I accidentally punched a jelly fish right in his gelatinous face while taking my cheap blow up raft way farther into the ocean that I should have. He tried to sting my eyes out and got what was coming to him. Thailand’s reputation for being SE Asia’s sketchy taint
Kayaking
With cocktails. is well earned. Even in low season there are lots of 60 year old disgutors with under-20 Thai girls and the tranny/lady boys are everywhere. The most interesting was on an airplane when the two came together and an old ass white man was with a young lady boy. Speaking of airplanes, I got upgraded to first class for the first time ever in my life. I’m pretty sure they just scanned economy and picked the two most attractive people on the plane. On the flight there I sneezed and lost my voice… for two days. How that’s possible I don’t know. 1,2,3…4,5,6…7,8,9…10,11,12 white spots, means you have tonsillitis. This should be sung to the old Sesame Street tune… found
here. We visited the hospital* got some antibiotics and didn’t let our white spotted tonsils bother us. Dr. Fish is something here in Asia where you put your feet in water tanks and tiny fish eat the dead skin. It’s quite popular in Korea and something I’ve been meaning to do. It’s horrible. It’s like being attacked and eaten by a thousand cockroaches. If someone asks you to put cocobutter on their back, DO NOT put doo doo butter instead. They
Rainy Season
It's the worst don’t find your prank as funny as you think they would, trust me. We spent a day in Phuket doing all the things you have to do while in Thailand and it was pretty freaking entertaining. We rode elephants, got kissed by elephants, got a massage from an elephant, saw an elephant show, bought an elephant painting, rode horses in a rubber tree forest, went to an aquarium, saw a monkey show, and an alligator show. We left a passport and several credit cards at a restaurant only to have the server chase us down and give them back proving that even in a place as sketchy as Phuket there are plenty of nice, honest people on this Earth. Sea turtles are the perverts of the ocean. You know what has an awesome name it doesn’t live up to?
Dragon Fruit. Looks awesome, tastes like nothing. We barely left the hotel in Bangkok, we tried but we were constantly surrounded by poor people. Gross.
I’ve seen some inefficient stuff in my lifetime but none of it compares to the ridiculous retardedness of the Guangzhou airport in China. It’s not bad enough that you have to deboard into the “international terminal” where
Lil' Crab
I shook him trying to get him to sing Under the Sea, instead he abandoned ship and left me with an empty shell. you inexplicably have to pass through customs although you aren’t entering China - then go through security again keeping in mind we had just deboarded. But the worst part is the system, oh the system they have in place. I’ve have never seen anything so retarded in my life, and I’ve attended the Special Olympics twice. They don’t have the capability to check your passport at the counter, so they take your passport while you go stand in a corral with 80 or so other foreigners. Then they bring the passports out from the back and a lady who can’t pronounce anyone’s name correctly tries to read them and you wait to hear your name. Several times they dropped the boarding passes out of the passports and they were quite free about giving someone a passport that wasn’t theirs if you told them “he’s a friend of mine.” They finally just gave the stack to one foreigner who was waiting and had him read them and pass them out. They do this for EVERY plane that comes through? This is the hub for the very international airline, China Southern. Once you got your passport they told you “this way for
Huts from the water
It's a rough life I live. the secret.” The secret turned out to be another security check where they confiscated anything you’d bought in duty free, pretty awesome. I did get two more China passports stamps out of the whole ordeal though.
To sum up, Thailand is perhaps the most naturally beautiful place I’ve ever been, the people were kind, less sketch than I expected, I enjoyed it immensely and was terribly blessed concerning the weather and my company but if you meet someone who is going there by themself, they’re probably going to do deeds so dirty they didn’t feel comfortable bringing anyone who knows them.
In domestic news fall is upon us thankfully as summer sucks almost as bad as winter does here. I've started volunteering again at a soup kitchen feeding Seoul's rare homeless. I applied to be the guy who turns away people showing up for food and a bed after we were full so I could see the crushing disappointment of knowing they weren't going to eat that night on their faces but got dish washing duty and a horrified look instead. I have no large travel plans in the near future so I'll just be teaching up a storm until
Christmas or so.
Movie of the Trip: I fittingly watched part of Castaway in Thai one evening in our hotel.
Song of the Trip: I thought about making it ODB's
Baby I Got Your Money just b/c there are lots of things in Thailand that make you wanna sing, "Hey, dir-tay" but The Drums
I Wanna Go Surfing is probably better.
Book of the Trip I didn't really read much except the guidebook as I failed to plan much of anything beforehand as is my way. I reread about half of Me Talk Pretty One Day if that counts.
Theme of the Trip Millhousing our way through our vacation. Best exemplified by the weather and the lady returning the passport/credit cards in a land where theft is to be expected.
~Tyrone SnowCone
“Are you showering in the bidet?” ~ Maria. This would normally be a ridiculous question... if I hadn’t done it the night before.
One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. ~ Andre Gide
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy. ~ Alfred North Whitehead
Most human beings have an
Devil Fish
Eating my flesh. almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
~Aldous Huxley
Why don’t you drag yourself into an office and get a job? ~ Steve to an
extremely handicapped gentleman dragging his body across the ground pushing a box full of change.
*As much of a hospital as one can find on a small island without a single road.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.454s; Tpl: 0.025s; cc: 12; qc: 87; dbt: 0.1633s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.3mb
Dad
non-member comment
A life lesson
Now Joel, don't play with the tigers, you could lose a limb!