What better way to end a trip than with a final 24 hour marathon (well almost) in Bangkok! Niki and I have a deep fondness for big cities - we love the constant activity, tons of people, chaotic traffic, high-energy, and fast and easy transportation! And, ohmigod, do we love this city.
On our way from the airport, much to our dismay, we found out that we wouldn't be able to go to Muay Thai boxing since it's held on Sat and Wed nights. So, we had to readjust. We caught a Tuk-Tuk, even though we swore we wouldn't ride in another one again, to the Chao Praya River. We had no idea it was so wide, but we decided to go to a New York Sunday Times Travel Section recommended restaurant that was right next to the river. It had a great view of the Rama VIII bridge and we had a pretty good grilled seafood meal. We ate just before sunset and had a chill time.
That's when the relaxation ended! After strolling around some back neighborhood streets, we jumped on another Tuk-Tuk to Chinatown. We came upon a Chinatown that really reminded me of the chaos in Blade Runner. It was so absolutely insane with activity and it was only just starting up at 5:30pm. By 7pm more and more carts were getting set up, in addition to the multitudes that were already there! Noodle soups, seafood, dumplings, dim sum, birds nest soup, shark fin soup, roasted duck soup, roasted pork soup, all types of fruits - especially Durian, all kinds of fried foods, sweet beans and dumplings in ginger syrup, pad thai, fried noodles with ingredients I've never seen anywhere before. It was a beautiful, chaotic, neon-filled, mysterious and wondrous sight to behold. Shops selling all types of teas, dried fishes, herbs, seahorses, dried coiled snakes, roots, dried mushrooms and sauces. I wandered deep into the depths of the back alleys and deep into shops where they really weren't too thrilled by me walking in and found out why. After trying to take a picture of a weird, black thing which looked like a dried potato with split running down its center with a white mold or drying agent substance on it, they sternly made sure I did no such thing! They chased me out of the store. I'm thinking it was some illegal or banned substance, but they had a huge pile of the stuff! Niki said she had seen it in multiple stores. I had been pretty horrified when I had seen the amount of shark fin soup being served up, with the fins laid out one after another in the storefront. Also, I had watched a documentary several years back about the depletion of seahorses in the ocean due to its coveted special qualities. It was really weird being blocked by the people from going into the stores. I am just a wanderer by nature and I love to see new, weird things so I'm sure it raised their hackles a bit...
Anyway, Niki and I went into every nook and cranny we could. She ate a bowl of noodle soup with pork from one cart and I had a black sesame paste dumpling in Tibetan Ginger syrup tea from another cart, and it was out of this world yummy. By this time in our trip, we even drank the barley ginger tea being served in the tin cups with crushed ice! We figured we had eaten at enough random stalls and carts that we had all the right bacteria going in our system to conquer anything.
By 8:30pm, when we were really getting tired, there were so many people getting dropped off by taxis and tuk-tuks. It was just getting revved up in Chinatown, but we knew we had to get an early start the next morning, so we called it a night.
The next morning, we went to the Grand Palace/Wat Phra Kao temple complex. What a way to end our trip! It was the most beautiful experience. We got there just as it opened, as the guidebook said to do -and what an incredible bit of advice that was - we had no idea until the hordes of tour groups descended like locusts!!!!. We raced from the ticket booth straight to the main attraction which was the Emerald Buddha (it's actually jade). We had about 20 minutes of serene, uncrowded space in which to absorb and revel in the beauty of this beautiful temple. The interiors were absolutely stunning; it's considered to be the holiest and most sacred spot in Thailand. The Thai Buddhists who were bowing in prayer were so overcome with reverence by this special place, we could just feel the power of their belief and prayer. The energy there was unlike any other temple we had visited. The gilding on every surface was overwhelming and the artwork on the ceiling and walls was tremendous. The inlaid mother of pearl on the immense doors was truly a sight to behold. The detailing in the hairs of the dragon was so fine - it was difficult to imagine how they could possibly work the mother of pearl into curving strands without shattering it. I was stunned. I wished photography was an option because it really has to be seen to be believed. Every surface of every single structure in Wat Phra Kao was amazingly beautiful, weird and so very exotic. I tried to take pictures of everything in sight so I wouldn't forget it, but it's difficult to capture the wholeness and entirety of the creativity there. As you can see, it's hard for me to even explain.
The entire interior of the exterior wall had an incredible pictoral running story of the Ramayana on a frieze. The detail of each creature, person and demon was unbelievably captivating. You would need an entire day just to fully absorb the art on the frieze. I felt saturated in beauty. I can't imagine how many artists and how long it had to have taken to complete. We only had the morning to visit the entire complex, but it was so satisfying! Everyone, everywhere was trying to capture the beauty on their cameras, and there was delight and amazement on everyone's faces.
By 11am, we were exhausted and hungry, so we went back to our favorite Pad Thai cart in the loading dock area next to the pier. We had to get another taste of the most amazing pad thai we've ever eaten anywhere, but we also made yet another fabulous discovery! We were also by this time, brave enough to try the juices. We tried one of the tangerine (?) citrus drinks and a wickedly bright purple "dragonfruit" juice which had little black teeny seedlike things floating in it. The guy selling it was the spitting image of what you'd expect a Thai-hippie-living-in-a-commune in the 60's would look like. He had a patchwork pair of Thai fisherman pants and a flowery shirt with a necklace of multiple Thai good luck charms. He had graying, long hair, and was extremely suntanned and prematurely wrinkled. He took great care in placing orchids throughout his fruit and fruit juice display, and he had cut the tiny citrus up into Sushi-restaurant style little works of art. He was so Flower Child, Niki said he was "floating" along. Because Niki had gotten a pair of ash pink fisherman pants in Koh Samui, we got him to take a picture with her - it's just the cutest pic ever.
After shopping for our last 15 minutes in Thailand, we hopped on another Tuk-Tuk. It was really weird, but that day, every single Tuk-Tuk driver had been super cool, never once tried to rip us off, and were even fun. This last driver really took the prize though! When he saw that we were having such a great time riding his tricked-out, blinged-out Tuk-Tuk, he went even faster, weaving in and out, revving his handles to scare other people on the road, and generally just having a blast! He was wearing these baby blue knit sleeves with what looked like Pink Pac Men designs on them. He had super cute sneakers on and he wore a black mask. Not the usual white I'm-trying-not-to-catch-a-disease-from-other-people kind of a mask. We were laughing and screaming! What a way to close out our last day.
We checked out, finished all our postcards at the airport, took off for Taipei, then hopped across the ocean to San Francisco. We checked into our super-fine Quality Inn at the Airport so we can catch our flights back home. Niki to Phoenix, me to Reno.
It's 1:30am on Sat night. It's my morning really. I hope I can catch some Z's. It's really going to be tearful for me to say good-bye to Niki, but what an incredible time we've had together. I feel so fortunate that we get along well enough that we could stay basically attached at the hip for 3 weeks straight; it was somewhat stressful to make sure we never parted from one another since we didn't have cell phones. We do feel braver at the end of all this, but I do admit to reliving some of the more fearful times, usually early in the morning. Mostly though, I recount all the amazing sights and experiences we shared.
It was weird to transition to parting ways tonight. We split up our stuff and packed our bags for tomorrow's flights home. I am so proud of Niki's resourcefulness and the woman she is becoming. I trust her in so many ways and truly admire how much she thinks about her world, her place in it, and what her future holds. We both have a lot to think about because of this one trip.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Paradise Day in Koh Samui
Because we were taking the Seatran Discovery speedboat which is a two story, huge and modern (for these parts) boat, we thought everything was going to be safe and "normal". Hmmm....the waves were pretty large and we drastically tilted over from side to side. So much so, in fact, that the large four person tables all up and down the boat slid over to the side (not sure why on a boat they wouldn't have been bolted down - the bench seating was), along with all our luggage. We were sitting on the lower deck of the boat. I was glad people falling off the open top deck. I thought this situation was frightening until the 3 Norwegian girls next to us said this was nothing. On the ride over two days ago, they said the waves were all the way over the window, people were hysterical, one woman wouldn't stop screaming (that would have been me!), and everything inside was a mess. The employees had been really good because they passed out plastic bags for everyone. The gals said, without exception, everyone barfed. They laughed when they said as they exited the boat, each person threw the plastic bag in the trash can.
The gals from Norway were fantastic and we had a terrific chat about how we had all done such dangerous things in Thailand that would have never been possible in Norway or in California. We talked about Norway's prison system (the maximum sentence for any crime there, including murder, is 26 years), how all our celebrities get arrested for drunk driving, how one of the gals in their group had left Koh Phi Phi the day before the Tsunami hit, and how we were the first Americans they had met during the entire 3 weeks they had been in Thailand. They were going to travel to the south of Thailand and on to Malaysia for 3 more weeks.
We got off the ferry and there was a sea of grey minivans waiting to take all of us to our hotels. We couldn't get over how much luggage people brought and how enormous their suitcases were as they STRUGGLED to get them up and down stairs and ramps. You certainly can't come here if you're not fit and strong unless you are carrying the teeniest bag.
We had torn some magazine pages out of our Thai Airways magazine for recommendations on eateries and attractions. We chose their "Cheap and Chic" pick for lunch at 2:30pm. It turned out to be an amazing lunch of deep fried whole fish with three flavor sauce (sweet/spicy), the most amazing garlic pepper fried calamari, crabmeat cocktail cooked in whiskey, and an unusual black sesame filled dumplings floating in a sweet ginger syrup. All of this while sitting beachside on a very private beach past Lamai with waves lapping right next to us. Heaven!
We also chose one of their attractions: the "Kamalaya" spa because it had a picture of a woman seated in their meditation cave where monks long ago used to sit and do their practice. We had no idea until we left that supposedly, it's one of the top destination spas in Asia. Well, we'll have to check that out bit of info when we get back home while on free Internet time.
From our very limited experience with spa resorts, we would have to vote it as number one. We arrived at a true slice of paradise. Very quiet, unbelievably lush and tropical, and it oozed zen-ness! I know that's probably not an actual word, but believe me, it's one of those places where you expect a monk to be chanting in the background and someone banging an ancient gong. We chose to pick the two cheapest activities, and can I just say, you could drop a ton of money here! We chose a 3 hour spa zone which was included the use of a beautiful locker room, with two showers which looked out onto one of the most spectacular, private, high-up-on-a-hillside, tropical ocean views ever. After cleansing ourselves, we tied on very cool brown batik-type sarongs provided by the resort which they required us to use since it was a mixed spa (male/female).
We first entered the "steam cave" which was a fantasy of a steam room. As you enter through two sets of doors, you come into a beautiful, cave lined with small ocean-blue colored tiles cave with glass block inserts spaced throughout the curved ceiling and sides which let in the natural sunlight. Inside the cave was a rock waterfall which opened from the outside and also sort of opened into the inside somehow, ending in a glass-walled pool from which you dip warm water from a wooden long-handled ladle onto yourself (or at least, that's what we did - there's was no one to tell us what we were supposed to do with it when we were inside the cave).
After the steam cave, we laid down on chaise lounges outside under a covered pavilion area, rested a bit and drank bottled water. The sun was just beginning to set, so we got up and went down a few steps into another octagonal, beautiful wooden pavilion to take in the private beach way down the hill; the ocean waves; the palm trees swaying in the distance; the lush, dark green, dense foliage, and the abundance of ferns nearby. We were looking at each other in amazement and wonder. Niki said she felt so "pure". We were clean, refreshed, invigorated and somehow, it was such a perfect ending to this journey, while at the same time feeling like the start of a longer one. A lifelong journey which will only be enhanced by the experiences we shared together on this three week trip.
After taking some wonderful pictures, we repeated the steam cave and then dipped into one of their three ponds from which you could appreciate the view from yet another gorgeous vantage point. We showered again and changed into the softest, cream colored, cotton pajama-like tops and bottoms for the highlight of this wonderful spa - a traditional Thai massage.
They led us up an incredibly beautiful area, past yet another beautiful, large pavilion which had a large wooden, beautifully carved, swing-type platform. We walked up several long sets of stairs to the massage complex. We were led into a beautiful large room upon which there were two flattish-futon type cushions on the dark wooden floor. Off to the side of the room, they had built the room around an enormous boulder. It was obvious at this spa that they built the buildings around huge trees and rock formations with site preservation in mind.
We requested the "strong" pressure. Oh boy, was it ever strong. Strong as in these very tiny women had vise-grip-tight fingers you could imagine a pit bull would have if they had finger dexterity. They would lock on and drill into muscles you weren't even aware you had! For ninety minutes, they progressed from the feet all the way up to our heads. By the end, we could barely turn ourselves over to get up. We were loose and felt amazing.
They gave us ginger tea and finally took us to the monks' meditation cave. We lit incense, prayed while being instructed to breathe deeply in and out, and to enjoy and feel the relaxation of the day.
So for anyone who might have gotten depressed by reading our blogs - we're not all gloom and doom. There are amazingly beautiful places in Thailand.We can enjoy our world and not be consumed by issues and difficult situations every single day of our trip!
More later. Gotta run to board the plane for SF. I'm at the Chimei free internet area. LOVE free internet!! Hurray Taipei!
The gals from Norway were fantastic and we had a terrific chat about how we had all done such dangerous things in Thailand that would have never been possible in Norway or in California. We talked about Norway's prison system (the maximum sentence for any crime there, including murder, is 26 years), how all our celebrities get arrested for drunk driving, how one of the gals in their group had left Koh Phi Phi the day before the Tsunami hit, and how we were the first Americans they had met during the entire 3 weeks they had been in Thailand. They were going to travel to the south of Thailand and on to Malaysia for 3 more weeks.
We got off the ferry and there was a sea of grey minivans waiting to take all of us to our hotels. We couldn't get over how much luggage people brought and how enormous their suitcases were as they STRUGGLED to get them up and down stairs and ramps. You certainly can't come here if you're not fit and strong unless you are carrying the teeniest bag.
We had torn some magazine pages out of our Thai Airways magazine for recommendations on eateries and attractions. We chose their "Cheap and Chic" pick for lunch at 2:30pm. It turned out to be an amazing lunch of deep fried whole fish with three flavor sauce (sweet/spicy), the most amazing garlic pepper fried calamari, crabmeat cocktail cooked in whiskey, and an unusual black sesame filled dumplings floating in a sweet ginger syrup. All of this while sitting beachside on a very private beach past Lamai with waves lapping right next to us. Heaven!
We also chose one of their attractions: the "Kamalaya" spa because it had a picture of a woman seated in their meditation cave where monks long ago used to sit and do their practice. We had no idea until we left that supposedly, it's one of the top destination spas in Asia. Well, we'll have to check that out bit of info when we get back home while on free Internet time.
From our very limited experience with spa resorts, we would have to vote it as number one. We arrived at a true slice of paradise. Very quiet, unbelievably lush and tropical, and it oozed zen-ness! I know that's probably not an actual word, but believe me, it's one of those places where you expect a monk to be chanting in the background and someone banging an ancient gong. We chose to pick the two cheapest activities, and can I just say, you could drop a ton of money here! We chose a 3 hour spa zone which was included the use of a beautiful locker room, with two showers which looked out onto one of the most spectacular, private, high-up-on-a-hillside, tropical ocean views ever. After cleansing ourselves, we tied on very cool brown batik-type sarongs provided by the resort which they required us to use since it was a mixed spa (male/female).
We first entered the "steam cave" which was a fantasy of a steam room. As you enter through two sets of doors, you come into a beautiful, cave lined with small ocean-blue colored tiles cave with glass block inserts spaced throughout the curved ceiling and sides which let in the natural sunlight. Inside the cave was a rock waterfall which opened from the outside and also sort of opened into the inside somehow, ending in a glass-walled pool from which you dip warm water from a wooden long-handled ladle onto yourself (or at least, that's what we did - there's was no one to tell us what we were supposed to do with it when we were inside the cave).
After the steam cave, we laid down on chaise lounges outside under a covered pavilion area, rested a bit and drank bottled water. The sun was just beginning to set, so we got up and went down a few steps into another octagonal, beautiful wooden pavilion to take in the private beach way down the hill; the ocean waves; the palm trees swaying in the distance; the lush, dark green, dense foliage, and the abundance of ferns nearby. We were looking at each other in amazement and wonder. Niki said she felt so "pure". We were clean, refreshed, invigorated and somehow, it was such a perfect ending to this journey, while at the same time feeling like the start of a longer one. A lifelong journey which will only be enhanced by the experiences we shared together on this three week trip.
After taking some wonderful pictures, we repeated the steam cave and then dipped into one of their three ponds from which you could appreciate the view from yet another gorgeous vantage point. We showered again and changed into the softest, cream colored, cotton pajama-like tops and bottoms for the highlight of this wonderful spa - a traditional Thai massage.
They led us up an incredibly beautiful area, past yet another beautiful, large pavilion which had a large wooden, beautifully carved, swing-type platform. We walked up several long sets of stairs to the massage complex. We were led into a beautiful large room upon which there were two flattish-futon type cushions on the dark wooden floor. Off to the side of the room, they had built the room around an enormous boulder. It was obvious at this spa that they built the buildings around huge trees and rock formations with site preservation in mind.
We requested the "strong" pressure. Oh boy, was it ever strong. Strong as in these very tiny women had vise-grip-tight fingers you could imagine a pit bull would have if they had finger dexterity. They would lock on and drill into muscles you weren't even aware you had! For ninety minutes, they progressed from the feet all the way up to our heads. By the end, we could barely turn ourselves over to get up. We were loose and felt amazing.
They gave us ginger tea and finally took us to the monks' meditation cave. We lit incense, prayed while being instructed to breathe deeply in and out, and to enjoy and feel the relaxation of the day.
So for anyone who might have gotten depressed by reading our blogs - we're not all gloom and doom. There are amazingly beautiful places in Thailand.We can enjoy our world and not be consumed by issues and difficult situations every single day of our trip!
More later. Gotta run to board the plane for SF. I'm at the Chimei free internet area. LOVE free internet!! Hurray Taipei!
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Scuba Diving at Koh Tao! First-timers....
Coming to Koh Tao from Koh Phangan, we rode the Seatran speedboat which was much faster and definitely safer than the rickety ferry we took from Koh Samui to Koh Tao. It was so choppy, people were sea sick left and right. A guy was passing out plastic bags and boy,were they put to good use! A really sweet guy who had a very seasick wife gave Niki one of his seamotion tablets. He was a real angel! It helped Niki tremendously.
After finding that the Koh Tao accomodations we had originally booked was basically a crummy dive which we could barely stomach and which we felt was in a very unsafe area near the pier, we found a terrific resort, Ban's, which provided a great hillside room with a view of Sairee Bay and also was the largest dive shop, retail store, and restaurant. It turned out to be a wonderful experience in so many ways. Our room was pretty spectacular view-wise except that the bathroom had a wicked case of mildew/mold which emitted a god awful odor. Luckily, we had bought some incense in Ayutthaya which we put to good use. It doesn't really have hot water to speak of, but by this point, we're just really thankful when we have warm water and clean towels. The beds are so clean, the sheets are so white and there's a bottom AND top sheet!!
We decided upon arriving at Ban's that we just had to try scuba diving. There were so many people taking a pool course at the resort, we thought the instructors seemed super professional and it was all Padi certified at what it turns out was the largest resort at Koh Tao. So, today, we started off with a pool course at 9am, then at 1pm, we went out on a big boat and went open water diving. We had two other guys from Ireland, Phillip and Darren, in our small group of four dive trainees. They were so sweet and great dive buds. Unfortunately, the waves were pretty choppy, and it was windy and pretty cold by Koh Tao standards. We didn't let it stop us though! It was such a thrilling day in so many ways. It did suck that visibility wasn't that great in the water, but we did see some really cool large coral, and honestly, I've seen far better in Hawaii just snorkeling. I do realize however, that this isn't giving Koh Tao a fair shake because I know it has to be amazing on a good day. The positive thing, as our dive instructor, Karen, pointed out is that if we were able to make it through a 12 meter dive in these conditions, calm conditions are going to be a cakewalk. She said that many people who dive under pristine conditions freak out when they encounter what we dove in. She said it ended up being to our advantage in the long run. It just didn't seem that way while it was happening.
To tell the truth, it was pretty scary. The jump off the side of the boat was a big jump off of a big two story boat. It was difficult just hanging onto the rope going down because the ocean was so rough. It was hard to stay relaxed with breathing through a regulator when you're struggling to hold on for dear life. I almost chickened out, but Karen saw me almost bail, and she calmed me down. I was able to keep going down. Once I was off the rope, it got better. I was able to relax when I was able to use my fins, relax into my breathing, look at the fishes, sea anenomes and corals. HOWEVER, for some reason, half way through our forty minute dive, my regulator got knocked out of my mouth (not surprising since it was so crowded with divers, the spaces were sort of tight, and the visibility was really poor due to the murky conditions). I panicked, swallowed water, and thought i was going to drown. But, I got the regulator back in my mouth as we had practiced in the pool, and after a few pulls of breath, after trusting that I was getting oxygen, I was able to continue. I had been trying to swim to my divemaster, but she was a little too far in front of me while I was panicking. I knew better than try to get to the surface, so at least I still had my wits about me. It wasn't until we got back to the boat that I told Niki what had happened. She had been terrified during the entire dive, even though it didn't look like it to me while we were down there. She had had no idea that I was even in the situation I was in. I started crying once I was on the boat. She started crying about half an hour later, thinking that something could have happened to me. By that time, I was okay and was thinking about my future possibilities diving. We had practiced taking the regulator off multiple times in the pool, but it had been by my choosing. Having it happen by accident when you're way down below the surface is such a frightening experience. Diving after it had happened, with some seawater in your stomach wasn't terrific, but somehow, conquering your fear and making yourself relax can be quite a feeling of accomplishment.
Immediately after we came up and ended our dive, I don't think either of us were too excited to dive anymore, but with some time behind us, we're now both excited to take a diving course at our respective homes and to educate ourselves further in the ocean. We especially think the Great Barrier Reef could be amazing! I'm sure Steve is shocked to be reading this blog since I said I would never scuba dive ever in my life because a woman I worked with at a past job had a horrible dive mishap during a vacation and was permanently brain-damaged. But I am now so excited to share diving experiences with him! I am so sad now that he had to dive all by himself these past years. We could have even been diving as a family but I had let my fears overcome me and I feel awful about it.
Hey, Machiko and Naoko - thanks for being our inspiration to dive in Koh Tao! Even if it wasn't ideal, we are so grateful we did it! I know we'll be certified some day! We did get a cute "Discover Scuba" certificate- it doesn't mean much, except to Niki and me!
We're pretty tired, but I was so excited, I had to get this down in a blog! We're on our way to Koh Samui tomorrow morning on a two hour SeaTran. We heard about yet another ferry accident, I think it was Indonesia? We're pretty glad we're going to be taking a large, heavy-duty, modern speedboat.
We heard that Koh Samui is Shopping Island, Koh Tao is Diving/Snorkeling Island and Koh Phangan is Party Island. I think we're ready to gear down one day and simply do some low-key shopping! We've had way more excitement than we ever thought we'd have during this trip. But, we're going to grind it out on our last day/night in Bangkok! Then we'll crash on the plane ride home.
After finding that the Koh Tao accomodations we had originally booked was basically a crummy dive which we could barely stomach and which we felt was in a very unsafe area near the pier, we found a terrific resort, Ban's, which provided a great hillside room with a view of Sairee Bay and also was the largest dive shop, retail store, and restaurant. It turned out to be a wonderful experience in so many ways. Our room was pretty spectacular view-wise except that the bathroom had a wicked case of mildew/mold which emitted a god awful odor. Luckily, we had bought some incense in Ayutthaya which we put to good use. It doesn't really have hot water to speak of, but by this point, we're just really thankful when we have warm water and clean towels. The beds are so clean, the sheets are so white and there's a bottom AND top sheet!!
We decided upon arriving at Ban's that we just had to try scuba diving. There were so many people taking a pool course at the resort, we thought the instructors seemed super professional and it was all Padi certified at what it turns out was the largest resort at Koh Tao. So, today, we started off with a pool course at 9am, then at 1pm, we went out on a big boat and went open water diving. We had two other guys from Ireland, Phillip and Darren, in our small group of four dive trainees. They were so sweet and great dive buds. Unfortunately, the waves were pretty choppy, and it was windy and pretty cold by Koh Tao standards. We didn't let it stop us though! It was such a thrilling day in so many ways. It did suck that visibility wasn't that great in the water, but we did see some really cool large coral, and honestly, I've seen far better in Hawaii just snorkeling. I do realize however, that this isn't giving Koh Tao a fair shake because I know it has to be amazing on a good day. The positive thing, as our dive instructor, Karen, pointed out is that if we were able to make it through a 12 meter dive in these conditions, calm conditions are going to be a cakewalk. She said that many people who dive under pristine conditions freak out when they encounter what we dove in. She said it ended up being to our advantage in the long run. It just didn't seem that way while it was happening.
To tell the truth, it was pretty scary. The jump off the side of the boat was a big jump off of a big two story boat. It was difficult just hanging onto the rope going down because the ocean was so rough. It was hard to stay relaxed with breathing through a regulator when you're struggling to hold on for dear life. I almost chickened out, but Karen saw me almost bail, and she calmed me down. I was able to keep going down. Once I was off the rope, it got better. I was able to relax when I was able to use my fins, relax into my breathing, look at the fishes, sea anenomes and corals. HOWEVER, for some reason, half way through our forty minute dive, my regulator got knocked out of my mouth (not surprising since it was so crowded with divers, the spaces were sort of tight, and the visibility was really poor due to the murky conditions). I panicked, swallowed water, and thought i was going to drown. But, I got the regulator back in my mouth as we had practiced in the pool, and after a few pulls of breath, after trusting that I was getting oxygen, I was able to continue. I had been trying to swim to my divemaster, but she was a little too far in front of me while I was panicking. I knew better than try to get to the surface, so at least I still had my wits about me. It wasn't until we got back to the boat that I told Niki what had happened. She had been terrified during the entire dive, even though it didn't look like it to me while we were down there. She had had no idea that I was even in the situation I was in. I started crying once I was on the boat. She started crying about half an hour later, thinking that something could have happened to me. By that time, I was okay and was thinking about my future possibilities diving. We had practiced taking the regulator off multiple times in the pool, but it had been by my choosing. Having it happen by accident when you're way down below the surface is such a frightening experience. Diving after it had happened, with some seawater in your stomach wasn't terrific, but somehow, conquering your fear and making yourself relax can be quite a feeling of accomplishment.
Immediately after we came up and ended our dive, I don't think either of us were too excited to dive anymore, but with some time behind us, we're now both excited to take a diving course at our respective homes and to educate ourselves further in the ocean. We especially think the Great Barrier Reef could be amazing! I'm sure Steve is shocked to be reading this blog since I said I would never scuba dive ever in my life because a woman I worked with at a past job had a horrible dive mishap during a vacation and was permanently brain-damaged. But I am now so excited to share diving experiences with him! I am so sad now that he had to dive all by himself these past years. We could have even been diving as a family but I had let my fears overcome me and I feel awful about it.
Hey, Machiko and Naoko - thanks for being our inspiration to dive in Koh Tao! Even if it wasn't ideal, we are so grateful we did it! I know we'll be certified some day! We did get a cute "Discover Scuba" certificate- it doesn't mean much, except to Niki and me!
We're pretty tired, but I was so excited, I had to get this down in a blog! We're on our way to Koh Samui tomorrow morning on a two hour SeaTran. We heard about yet another ferry accident, I think it was Indonesia? We're pretty glad we're going to be taking a large, heavy-duty, modern speedboat.
We heard that Koh Samui is Shopping Island, Koh Tao is Diving/Snorkeling Island and Koh Phangan is Party Island. I think we're ready to gear down one day and simply do some low-key shopping! We've had way more excitement than we ever thought we'd have during this trip. But, we're going to grind it out on our last day/night in Bangkok! Then we'll crash on the plane ride home.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Ladyboy at the Elephant Camp
Monday was our "Safari Boat" tour day of Koh Phangan. We left the Sunset Cove Hotel at 8 am and were driven down to the Thong Sala pier neighborhood where 35 young people congregated for the daylong tour. The tour provided a variety of fruit, cookies, coffee and tea, then we hopped into 4 "taxis" the pickup trucks with a long bench running down each side and took off at about 9am for our first stop into the interior of the island - Elephant Camp.
We paid an extra 500 baht each to do the "elephant trekking" option. We came upon what appeared to be a tiny primitive hillside village, learning later on that the people who lived in this collection of about 7 huts had come to Koh Phangan with their elephants from the far north of Thailand. Elephants aren't indigenous to the island, but they are in the far North, so they had to bring them over (not sure how they accomplished this). They 3 female elephants: 2 adults, 25 and 27 years old, and a 7 year old baby. They brought females because they're tamer than the males.
We climbed up two at a time on a very rustic wood ladder with platform, up onto the elephant's back. In the U.S., at Ringling Brothers and at theme parks, they make you climb into what is basically a four-sided enclosed cage which is secured tightly to the elephant. Here, you climb into a three-sided open front cage with the handler riding the neck. He uses his feet behind the ears, prodding the elephant forward with gentle commands, however, he carries a curved steel blade/hook situated on a wooden handle in case the elephant gets out of control. At various times during the ride, he would just hang this hook on the elephant's ear. Here at Elephant Camp, the cage we rode on was tied "securely" with worn ropes and on our elephant, the rope on the left had obviously broken at one point so they tied it back together in what I'm sure was a very good, secure knot....
We climbed aboard, the handler took pictures, walked us behind the huts where he lived, then took us on a circular path up and down into the jungle for about a half hour ride. The elephants were like bad pets - they stopped as much as they could to snag foliage to eat, obviously enjoying the treat and it appeared as if they enjoyed misbehaving. The handlers were pretty calm and low-stress about making them stop eating. About half way into our ride, they jumped off and first let Niki jump onto the neck where the handler had been sitting. He instructed us to put both of our hands on the two giant rounded parts on the top of the head. Niki said it felt like she was sitting on a bristle brush. After a bit, we swapped places. I was so surprised, but I felt so much more comfortable sitting on the elephant than I've ever felt on a horse. I must have been very relaxed and a complete natural because out of all the elephant rides, I was the only person to ride the elephant the entire way back to the ladder platform. We had chosen the largest elephant to ride on and while I was riding, I was thinking this could never, ever happen in the United States. The handler was walking with his back turned to me, about 10 feet ahead of us. The elephant could have easily charged off and it would have been over for both of us, I'm sure. The elephant was huge, though I'm sure not anywhere as large as a male would have been. The weird thing was, I felt completely at ease, so happy and so entranced with the feel of the elephant's skin, the sparse, black hair on the top of its head, the mottled pink and grey of its large ears, and the feel of the enormous muscles as she walked. If I believed in reincarnation, I am sure I could have been an elephant handler in another life. I've rarely felt so peaceful, at ease, yet so connected and aware of this animal's enormity and power.
The elephant camp was truly the highlight of our day in so many ways. In addition to the elephant ride, one of the elephant handlers whipped out a pink hula hoop and threw it onto the baby elephant's trunk. The baby twirled the hoop and as if that weren't enough, the handler put a harmonica in the end of his trunk and he played a tune! We also got to buy bunches of bananas to feed the elephants. They LOVED the small bananas, of which we had to feed to them two or three at a time.
One of the best moments at the Elephant Camp was when I spotted a Ladyboy (or Shim, in Niki and my world). I walked over to the canopied areas where he was sitting in order to casually strike up a conversation. He was wearing the cutest hoodie, full makeup and was actually quite darling in his way. We made small talk and then, out of the blue, he said, "I'm a Ladyboy". I said, "I know". He told me his name was Palay and we shook hands and talked a bit further about where we came from, etc. Then, our tour guide came up and interrupted our conversation. I was sort of suspicious at that time and found that he did the same thing when I spoke with another assistant tour guide at length.
We also got to walk across the street to a set of cages which held what I think was a baby sloth (Niki thinks it was a baby monkey), a badger type animal and some birds. The tour guide said there was a python missing from its cage and he thought that maybe the villagers had made a meal out of it. They had a monkey with a rope around its neck who was certainly not friendly to strangers, but was very happy with its boy owner.
Returning back across the street, they had a male adult monkey on a rope who they had trained to go up one coconut tree, jump across to another coconut tree onto one of the leaves, scamper to the trunk and to identify the ripe coconuts. He would take the coconut in one hand, one foot, then twirl it until he could easily pick it off the tree. It was completely amazing.
Leaving Elephant Camp, we had a great group lunch at some random restaurant in the interior of the island. They had a huge selection of Thai homemade ice cream. Niki and I had the "pumpkin", which I'm sure was some kind of squash. Yummy. We spoke to one of the assistants, Tomas, and he was originally from Slovakia and had been here for 4 years. He came to study Muay Thai boxing for 2 months and just ended up staying. The head tour guide, James, was a Muay Thai trainer and just did the tour guiding on the side. It's weird how everyone on this small island is intertwined.
Following Elephant Camp, we went to one of the best waterfalls on the island. After climbing up a rustic trail all the way up the waterfall area, Niki and I swam in the tiny little lagoon. It was completely refreshing and after taking a nice dip, we obviously gave a lot of other people the incentive to cool off too! After the walk down, we came upon our pickup trucks and found the guys driving them asleep in hammocks they had rigged up to the top of the canopy of the truck. One of them said they had only slept about four hours because they were driving people around the island until 3am. We were pretty glad they were catching a few Z's.
We left Elephant Camp to go to a Chinese temple, also deep into the interior, built by a group of Chinese who live on Koh Phangan. It was beautiful, brightly colorful and so perfect. It looked out onto the highest point on the island. A highlight of our stop was a mother dog who lived at the temple, who had about 7 puppies trying to hand onto her teats. The puppies were so cute and small. The mother dog was so thin and obviously had had enough of feeding puppies. She kept getting up, but the strongest puppy of the litter would not let go. Who knew that we should have come to Thailand and Cambodia with cans of dog food and little biscuits!
After the Chinese temple, we were supposed to go snorkeling at Koh Maa beach, but it turned out that the weather and wave conditions just weren't going our way. It was sort of a letdown to not be able to get into the ocean and look at cool fish and sealife, but we made the best of it and beachcombed for shells. It was really pretty if you looked out at the scenery, the outline of the islands, and the setting sun, but the trash all around was also pretty depressing. I guess one could look on it as an opportunity for someone to make it better.
We paid an extra 500 baht each to do the "elephant trekking" option. We came upon what appeared to be a tiny primitive hillside village, learning later on that the people who lived in this collection of about 7 huts had come to Koh Phangan with their elephants from the far north of Thailand. Elephants aren't indigenous to the island, but they are in the far North, so they had to bring them over (not sure how they accomplished this). They 3 female elephants: 2 adults, 25 and 27 years old, and a 7 year old baby. They brought females because they're tamer than the males.
We climbed up two at a time on a very rustic wood ladder with platform, up onto the elephant's back. In the U.S., at Ringling Brothers and at theme parks, they make you climb into what is basically a four-sided enclosed cage which is secured tightly to the elephant. Here, you climb into a three-sided open front cage with the handler riding the neck. He uses his feet behind the ears, prodding the elephant forward with gentle commands, however, he carries a curved steel blade/hook situated on a wooden handle in case the elephant gets out of control. At various times during the ride, he would just hang this hook on the elephant's ear. Here at Elephant Camp, the cage we rode on was tied "securely" with worn ropes and on our elephant, the rope on the left had obviously broken at one point so they tied it back together in what I'm sure was a very good, secure knot....
We climbed aboard, the handler took pictures, walked us behind the huts where he lived, then took us on a circular path up and down into the jungle for about a half hour ride. The elephants were like bad pets - they stopped as much as they could to snag foliage to eat, obviously enjoying the treat and it appeared as if they enjoyed misbehaving. The handlers were pretty calm and low-stress about making them stop eating. About half way into our ride, they jumped off and first let Niki jump onto the neck where the handler had been sitting. He instructed us to put both of our hands on the two giant rounded parts on the top of the head. Niki said it felt like she was sitting on a bristle brush. After a bit, we swapped places. I was so surprised, but I felt so much more comfortable sitting on the elephant than I've ever felt on a horse. I must have been very relaxed and a complete natural because out of all the elephant rides, I was the only person to ride the elephant the entire way back to the ladder platform. We had chosen the largest elephant to ride on and while I was riding, I was thinking this could never, ever happen in the United States. The handler was walking with his back turned to me, about 10 feet ahead of us. The elephant could have easily charged off and it would have been over for both of us, I'm sure. The elephant was huge, though I'm sure not anywhere as large as a male would have been. The weird thing was, I felt completely at ease, so happy and so entranced with the feel of the elephant's skin, the sparse, black hair on the top of its head, the mottled pink and grey of its large ears, and the feel of the enormous muscles as she walked. If I believed in reincarnation, I am sure I could have been an elephant handler in another life. I've rarely felt so peaceful, at ease, yet so connected and aware of this animal's enormity and power.
The elephant camp was truly the highlight of our day in so many ways. In addition to the elephant ride, one of the elephant handlers whipped out a pink hula hoop and threw it onto the baby elephant's trunk. The baby twirled the hoop and as if that weren't enough, the handler put a harmonica in the end of his trunk and he played a tune! We also got to buy bunches of bananas to feed the elephants. They LOVED the small bananas, of which we had to feed to them two or three at a time.
One of the best moments at the Elephant Camp was when I spotted a Ladyboy (or Shim, in Niki and my world). I walked over to the canopied areas where he was sitting in order to casually strike up a conversation. He was wearing the cutest hoodie, full makeup and was actually quite darling in his way. We made small talk and then, out of the blue, he said, "I'm a Ladyboy". I said, "I know". He told me his name was Palay and we shook hands and talked a bit further about where we came from, etc. Then, our tour guide came up and interrupted our conversation. I was sort of suspicious at that time and found that he did the same thing when I spoke with another assistant tour guide at length.
We also got to walk across the street to a set of cages which held what I think was a baby sloth (Niki thinks it was a baby monkey), a badger type animal and some birds. The tour guide said there was a python missing from its cage and he thought that maybe the villagers had made a meal out of it. They had a monkey with a rope around its neck who was certainly not friendly to strangers, but was very happy with its boy owner.
Returning back across the street, they had a male adult monkey on a rope who they had trained to go up one coconut tree, jump across to another coconut tree onto one of the leaves, scamper to the trunk and to identify the ripe coconuts. He would take the coconut in one hand, one foot, then twirl it until he could easily pick it off the tree. It was completely amazing.
Leaving Elephant Camp, we had a great group lunch at some random restaurant in the interior of the island. They had a huge selection of Thai homemade ice cream. Niki and I had the "pumpkin", which I'm sure was some kind of squash. Yummy. We spoke to one of the assistants, Tomas, and he was originally from Slovakia and had been here for 4 years. He came to study Muay Thai boxing for 2 months and just ended up staying. The head tour guide, James, was a Muay Thai trainer and just did the tour guiding on the side. It's weird how everyone on this small island is intertwined.
Following Elephant Camp, we went to one of the best waterfalls on the island. After climbing up a rustic trail all the way up the waterfall area, Niki and I swam in the tiny little lagoon. It was completely refreshing and after taking a nice dip, we obviously gave a lot of other people the incentive to cool off too! After the walk down, we came upon our pickup trucks and found the guys driving them asleep in hammocks they had rigged up to the top of the canopy of the truck. One of them said they had only slept about four hours because they were driving people around the island until 3am. We were pretty glad they were catching a few Z's.
We left Elephant Camp to go to a Chinese temple, also deep into the interior, built by a group of Chinese who live on Koh Phangan. It was beautiful, brightly colorful and so perfect. It looked out onto the highest point on the island. A highlight of our stop was a mother dog who lived at the temple, who had about 7 puppies trying to hand onto her teats. The puppies were so cute and small. The mother dog was so thin and obviously had had enough of feeding puppies. She kept getting up, but the strongest puppy of the litter would not let go. Who knew that we should have come to Thailand and Cambodia with cans of dog food and little biscuits!
After the Chinese temple, we were supposed to go snorkeling at Koh Maa beach, but it turned out that the weather and wave conditions just weren't going our way. It was sort of a letdown to not be able to get into the ocean and look at cool fish and sealife, but we made the best of it and beachcombed for shells. It was really pretty if you looked out at the scenery, the outline of the islands, and the setting sun, but the trash all around was also pretty depressing. I guess one could look on it as an opportunity for someone to make it better.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Full Moon Party 2009 at Haad Rin, Koh Phangan
Our 9pm hotel "taxi" to Full Moon Party, which we reserved a day in advance, turned out to be just an open, canopied truck bed with a long bench on each side. They crammed so many of us from our resort into one truck so full, one woman was hanging off the back, one woman was on the floor, sitting between everyone's feet. For 200 baht per person, we were driven 45 minutes to Haad Rin beach. Our taxi was a collection of couples or groups of girlfriends from Ireland, Germany, England, and Australia.
We were dropped off with instructions for the end of the night to look for the lady driver who dropped us off. She said she would be back all night long. Right. We were charged an admission fee of 100 baht to enter the beach and for that we got a bright yellow plastic bracelet with "Haad Rin Full Moon Party 2009", not exactly "Live Strong"... We encountered stall after stall selling "buckets" which is obviously the de rigeur Full Moon Party libation. Each brightly colored bucket has a smallish bottle of either a Thai whiskey, Smirnoff Vodka, or another type of hard liquor. Then, you get a can of a soda (they had many varieties), and a decent sized bottle of Thai Red Bull. You pour all three liquids into your "bucket", add ice (we, of course, declined - which made for quite a lukewarm drink...yum!), and you get four plastic straws per bucket for "sharing" with friends. The buckets ranged in price from about 180 to 350 baht, we chose the discount 180 baht bucket with Song Sam Thai Whiskey. It was awful in one sense, but great in another, since we didn't get drunk so we are completely able to blog all the details of the night. Not that we would have anyway. There were so many warnings about not taking your passport, not taking too much money, not taking any original forms of ID, and the hotel gave each one of us a business card with our hotel name on it...in case we passed out on the beach?
We were really fairly nervous about all the warnings, but in actuality, it was a pretty cool crowd! About 99.8% of the crowd were well under 30, definitely mostly Australians and Europeans. There were so many rather polite guys who were clinking plastic buckets with mine, waving for me to proceed through the crowd, genuinely smiling and not making either of us feel uncomfortable or preyed upon. I would say that most of them were there to dance and have fun on a beach at night.
Once we got down to the sand, we found huge bars opened to the beach with the most enormous walls of gigantic black speakers blasting different types of music at each location. Reggae, Psy-Trance, Techno, and what seemed to be techo-hip/hop, which I didn't even think was possible. At one location, there were single guys facing the speakers, so completely entranced with the unbelievably loud music, they were dancing as if they were swimming to the music underwater.
Niki and I walked up and down the beach several times, then situated ourselves in front of one bar that had large tatami mats spread out, with low dark wood tables on them. The people-watching was terrific, but the real reason we parked ourselves is because in front of us were the most fantastic fire twirlers. These guys were obviously paid by the bars to entertain all of us and they were true artists. They twirled long poles in each hand to the beat of the music and really got the crowd going! In addition, there were two guys perched on tables in the sand, way up above the crowd, swinging gasoline-soaked ropes which appeared to be made of vines? Anyway, they would get guys from the crowd to jump into the ropes as if they were schoolgirls on a playground. After watching for about 10 minutes, we both realized that they were stalling the ropes after about two swings in order to "catch" the guys on fire a bit. I guess it's lucky that most beach people don't wear synthetics, that we were on the sand, and that we were next to the ocean? I'm no fire expert, but safety really doesn't seem to be a huge priority anywhere in Thailand.
All along the beach were stalls selling even more "buckets", each stall decorated with hilarious poster graphics (including a liberal use of the F bomb), nonsensical sayings, with the guys/gals trying to sell in a humorous way. It wasn't a hard sell situation and it was all pretty harmless. There were a lot of finger-food stalls, Thai-style, with many sticks of fried meats, fried fish balls, roasted corn, etc., but truly, none of it met our now high standards.
By 12:15pm, the Full Moon Party was at its peak and it was a blast! We had a great time, mostly just by watching the people dancing, listening to the music, and the spectacle of it all. We'd never seen anything like it. However, by 1:30pm, we were pretty tired and it was getting pretty trashed up on the beach. Because there were no trash cans anywhere in sight, there were so many empty beer bottles on the ground it was hard to negotiate around them, some people were starting to pass out, so many guys were peeing into the ocean, and the crowd was starting to thin out a little.
We left to go to the area where the taxis congregate to take the party-goers home. That's where the adventure took a turn for the worse....We sat down to wait for the lady who dropped us off to drive by. We probably waited for 20 minutes until we realized how dumb that was. We sat down next to a huge group of what appeared to be Thai high schoolboys from a soccer team or something. They were asking us if we were "going to sleep", making the international sign for sleeping? They showed us their hotel key, pointing to the name of the hotel. I got really pissed and angry, until Niki was pointing out to me that they just wanted to know if we wanted to group together to get a taxi in the same direction, to the same area as their hotel, since that's how the taxis work. I felt kind of bad, but I was kind of paranoid at this point.
One lady taxi driver/hustler came up to us and tried to get us to pay 300B each to take us home. We had been told by our hotel that we could get charged as much as 800B each because our hotel was 45 minutes away. However, being the negotiator that she has become, Niki said no to that, we wanted 200B each and looked for other drivers to take us. At that point the lady said, okay, then escorted the entire group of young boys and us to a taxi that a skinny guy was driving. We told him we wanted to ride in the cab next to the driver since it was getting a little colder out there. The high schoolers rode in the back on the benches. They drove us for about 20 minutes, then in a fairly deserted, really dark area, they told us to get out and go to another taxi where one young boy was waiting with no one else in sight (and told us he had been waiting for 10 minutes - he admitted that he had been too drunk and hadn't realized what had been happening to him) to pay them 200B each and that we would have to pay the other taxi to take us the rest of the way.
Niki and I flipped out like crazy women, screaming and yelling, with Niki all up in the lady's face and said that we weren't paying anyone anything until we got all the way to our hotel. We knew they were going to ditch us, so we refused to get out of the cab and the driver was so angry, he was screaming at us, which was so not Thai of him. It is really out of character for a Thai to express anger. They drove us to another taxi where about 10 other people were waiting, clearing a "round-up" area for people who were staying in hotels far from Haad Rin's Full Moon Party. Thankfully, we asked them what they were getting charged, and what had happened and because we were making such a huge scene, we didn't pay the first driver anything and told the second lady taxi driver that we would hand over 400B to her when we got to the hotel. She paid the first taxi driver 200B, then we all took off.
We finally got to our room and stayed up talking until 3am. It's amazing how important it is to keep your wits about you here in Thailand, in every way. We were glad we went to the Full Moon Party since it's one of those scenes you have to see to believe, but I don't feel like I need to go again.
At breakfast the next morning, we talked to a really attractive, outgoing Australian couple with whom we shared the same taxi ride to the party and they said they danced until 4am and had a great time dancing for about an hour at each location. I don't think I could have stood all the empties on the beach for that long. It was really getting me down, especially when I was trying to get to sleep; I couldn't help thinking about who cleaned up the beach, and where all the beer bottles and plastic water bottles are being "processed". I haven't seen a single trash barge or a recycling plant, so I'm guessing it's all being dumped in the interior of the island? Are they just burning it all? I'm baffled.
It's hard to make sense of how trashy the beaches of Thailand are overall. It's really beautiful here, but the beaches are definitely not pristine like they show in all the advertising; not even close. Koh Tao is the first island where we even felt like we could go into the water, and even there, there's quite a bit of trash all along the shore. For sure, it would horrify anyone who goes to Hawaii to come here thinking it'll be the same. I guess it would be easy to say, oh, it's just Thailand. the Thais, or all the young people, but then I think of how many pounds of trash and dog feces I pick up on an almost daily basis on the beautiful trails in Tahoe, especially on the trails along the Truckee River. Are people just trashy by nature all over the world? If no one is there watching, is it just so much easier to litter? With all the "Eco" this, and "Green" that, I have to wonder, is being clean, being green, all just a joke or a fantasy, is it something people just profess they care about? I have been having trouble sleeping at night because I feel so disgusted and hopeless.
Niki and I have been beachcombing on Koh Phangan, shocked out of our minds at all the broken, dead white coral washed up on the beaches. There are so many chunks of coral the size of our head, just laying on the sand. We took a longtail boat on our "safari adventure day" and because we weren't able to go to the beach they had planned due to the size of the waves, they landed on a beach near our hotel. In order to land, they were using long poles, digging right into the coral in the water. We are realizing that they just throw their anchors down right into the coral to keep their boats afloat offshore. We went to lunch at a restaurant where broken coral was used as the "gravel" leading up to their doors.
Tourism is definitely going to kill these islands. I can't imagine how beautiful they must have once been. It's not just Thailand, though. I am sure the same is true of Hawaii, the Great Barrier Reef, etc. There are 75 diving outfits in Koh Tao alone and it's such a small island. It's obvious it's been overdived here and I'm certainly no expert in these matters.
One observation I've seen played out again and again here is that if you look at Thailand from a bird's eye view, it's much nicer than close up. You'll be much happier if you don't think about pollution, poverty, exploitation, economies based on milking or deceiving tourists, and social and health issues. Don't get me wrong though. I am so glad I'm here. I need to know. I want to learn. I want to investigate. I want to think about these issues and concerns.
We were dropped off with instructions for the end of the night to look for the lady driver who dropped us off. She said she would be back all night long. Right. We were charged an admission fee of 100 baht to enter the beach and for that we got a bright yellow plastic bracelet with "Haad Rin Full Moon Party 2009", not exactly "Live Strong"... We encountered stall after stall selling "buckets" which is obviously the de rigeur Full Moon Party libation. Each brightly colored bucket has a smallish bottle of either a Thai whiskey, Smirnoff Vodka, or another type of hard liquor. Then, you get a can of a soda (they had many varieties), and a decent sized bottle of Thai Red Bull. You pour all three liquids into your "bucket", add ice (we, of course, declined - which made for quite a lukewarm drink...yum!), and you get four plastic straws per bucket for "sharing" with friends. The buckets ranged in price from about 180 to 350 baht, we chose the discount 180 baht bucket with Song Sam Thai Whiskey. It was awful in one sense, but great in another, since we didn't get drunk so we are completely able to blog all the details of the night. Not that we would have anyway. There were so many warnings about not taking your passport, not taking too much money, not taking any original forms of ID, and the hotel gave each one of us a business card with our hotel name on it...in case we passed out on the beach?
We were really fairly nervous about all the warnings, but in actuality, it was a pretty cool crowd! About 99.8% of the crowd were well under 30, definitely mostly Australians and Europeans. There were so many rather polite guys who were clinking plastic buckets with mine, waving for me to proceed through the crowd, genuinely smiling and not making either of us feel uncomfortable or preyed upon. I would say that most of them were there to dance and have fun on a beach at night.
Once we got down to the sand, we found huge bars opened to the beach with the most enormous walls of gigantic black speakers blasting different types of music at each location. Reggae, Psy-Trance, Techno, and what seemed to be techo-hip/hop, which I didn't even think was possible. At one location, there were single guys facing the speakers, so completely entranced with the unbelievably loud music, they were dancing as if they were swimming to the music underwater.
Niki and I walked up and down the beach several times, then situated ourselves in front of one bar that had large tatami mats spread out, with low dark wood tables on them. The people-watching was terrific, but the real reason we parked ourselves is because in front of us were the most fantastic fire twirlers. These guys were obviously paid by the bars to entertain all of us and they were true artists. They twirled long poles in each hand to the beat of the music and really got the crowd going! In addition, there were two guys perched on tables in the sand, way up above the crowd, swinging gasoline-soaked ropes which appeared to be made of vines? Anyway, they would get guys from the crowd to jump into the ropes as if they were schoolgirls on a playground. After watching for about 10 minutes, we both realized that they were stalling the ropes after about two swings in order to "catch" the guys on fire a bit. I guess it's lucky that most beach people don't wear synthetics, that we were on the sand, and that we were next to the ocean? I'm no fire expert, but safety really doesn't seem to be a huge priority anywhere in Thailand.
All along the beach were stalls selling even more "buckets", each stall decorated with hilarious poster graphics (including a liberal use of the F bomb), nonsensical sayings, with the guys/gals trying to sell in a humorous way. It wasn't a hard sell situation and it was all pretty harmless. There were a lot of finger-food stalls, Thai-style, with many sticks of fried meats, fried fish balls, roasted corn, etc., but truly, none of it met our now high standards.
By 12:15pm, the Full Moon Party was at its peak and it was a blast! We had a great time, mostly just by watching the people dancing, listening to the music, and the spectacle of it all. We'd never seen anything like it. However, by 1:30pm, we were pretty tired and it was getting pretty trashed up on the beach. Because there were no trash cans anywhere in sight, there were so many empty beer bottles on the ground it was hard to negotiate around them, some people were starting to pass out, so many guys were peeing into the ocean, and the crowd was starting to thin out a little.
We left to go to the area where the taxis congregate to take the party-goers home. That's where the adventure took a turn for the worse....We sat down to wait for the lady who dropped us off to drive by. We probably waited for 20 minutes until we realized how dumb that was. We sat down next to a huge group of what appeared to be Thai high schoolboys from a soccer team or something. They were asking us if we were "going to sleep", making the international sign for sleeping? They showed us their hotel key, pointing to the name of the hotel. I got really pissed and angry, until Niki was pointing out to me that they just wanted to know if we wanted to group together to get a taxi in the same direction, to the same area as their hotel, since that's how the taxis work. I felt kind of bad, but I was kind of paranoid at this point.
One lady taxi driver/hustler came up to us and tried to get us to pay 300B each to take us home. We had been told by our hotel that we could get charged as much as 800B each because our hotel was 45 minutes away. However, being the negotiator that she has become, Niki said no to that, we wanted 200B each and looked for other drivers to take us. At that point the lady said, okay, then escorted the entire group of young boys and us to a taxi that a skinny guy was driving. We told him we wanted to ride in the cab next to the driver since it was getting a little colder out there. The high schoolers rode in the back on the benches. They drove us for about 20 minutes, then in a fairly deserted, really dark area, they told us to get out and go to another taxi where one young boy was waiting with no one else in sight (and told us he had been waiting for 10 minutes - he admitted that he had been too drunk and hadn't realized what had been happening to him) to pay them 200B each and that we would have to pay the other taxi to take us the rest of the way.
Niki and I flipped out like crazy women, screaming and yelling, with Niki all up in the lady's face and said that we weren't paying anyone anything until we got all the way to our hotel. We knew they were going to ditch us, so we refused to get out of the cab and the driver was so angry, he was screaming at us, which was so not Thai of him. It is really out of character for a Thai to express anger. They drove us to another taxi where about 10 other people were waiting, clearing a "round-up" area for people who were staying in hotels far from Haad Rin's Full Moon Party. Thankfully, we asked them what they were getting charged, and what had happened and because we were making such a huge scene, we didn't pay the first driver anything and told the second lady taxi driver that we would hand over 400B to her when we got to the hotel. She paid the first taxi driver 200B, then we all took off.
We finally got to our room and stayed up talking until 3am. It's amazing how important it is to keep your wits about you here in Thailand, in every way. We were glad we went to the Full Moon Party since it's one of those scenes you have to see to believe, but I don't feel like I need to go again.
At breakfast the next morning, we talked to a really attractive, outgoing Australian couple with whom we shared the same taxi ride to the party and they said they danced until 4am and had a great time dancing for about an hour at each location. I don't think I could have stood all the empties on the beach for that long. It was really getting me down, especially when I was trying to get to sleep; I couldn't help thinking about who cleaned up the beach, and where all the beer bottles and plastic water bottles are being "processed". I haven't seen a single trash barge or a recycling plant, so I'm guessing it's all being dumped in the interior of the island? Are they just burning it all? I'm baffled.
It's hard to make sense of how trashy the beaches of Thailand are overall. It's really beautiful here, but the beaches are definitely not pristine like they show in all the advertising; not even close. Koh Tao is the first island where we even felt like we could go into the water, and even there, there's quite a bit of trash all along the shore. For sure, it would horrify anyone who goes to Hawaii to come here thinking it'll be the same. I guess it would be easy to say, oh, it's just Thailand. the Thais, or all the young people, but then I think of how many pounds of trash and dog feces I pick up on an almost daily basis on the beautiful trails in Tahoe, especially on the trails along the Truckee River. Are people just trashy by nature all over the world? If no one is there watching, is it just so much easier to litter? With all the "Eco" this, and "Green" that, I have to wonder, is being clean, being green, all just a joke or a fantasy, is it something people just profess they care about? I have been having trouble sleeping at night because I feel so disgusted and hopeless.
Niki and I have been beachcombing on Koh Phangan, shocked out of our minds at all the broken, dead white coral washed up on the beaches. There are so many chunks of coral the size of our head, just laying on the sand. We took a longtail boat on our "safari adventure day" and because we weren't able to go to the beach they had planned due to the size of the waves, they landed on a beach near our hotel. In order to land, they were using long poles, digging right into the coral in the water. We are realizing that they just throw their anchors down right into the coral to keep their boats afloat offshore. We went to lunch at a restaurant where broken coral was used as the "gravel" leading up to their doors.
Tourism is definitely going to kill these islands. I can't imagine how beautiful they must have once been. It's not just Thailand, though. I am sure the same is true of Hawaii, the Great Barrier Reef, etc. There are 75 diving outfits in Koh Tao alone and it's such a small island. It's obvious it's been overdived here and I'm certainly no expert in these matters.
One observation I've seen played out again and again here is that if you look at Thailand from a bird's eye view, it's much nicer than close up. You'll be much happier if you don't think about pollution, poverty, exploitation, economies based on milking or deceiving tourists, and social and health issues. Don't get me wrong though. I am so glad I'm here. I need to know. I want to learn. I want to investigate. I want to think about these issues and concerns.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Remember the Titantic Tilting Upwards? Welcome to the Koh Phangnan Ferry
Now that we're the seasoned Thai travelers, instead of the naive, night-driving dum-dums that we were (just yesterday, for instance), we jumped out of our longtail boat in Phangna Bay, hopped into our wonderful new little Toyota car with the wonderful air-conditioning and drove like bats out of hell to find a good beach hotel on Phuket Island, far, far, from Phuket Town. We came upon a wonderfully sort of grungy, beach community like I used to know in old-time San Diego where people sort of arrived at a beach and forgot to leave. The kind of universal beach town that hasn't been developed too much, where people are tanned to the color of very dark leather, extremely wrinkled from the effects of sun damage, and are unbelievably casual and laid-back in an I'm-never-gonna-join-the-rat-race-ever-again kind of way. Their clothing is beach-cool, faded and worn. The kind of beach where older couples who still hold hands, are bonded by their sun-worshipping ways, and swim in the early morning and walk along the sand, just soaking up the goodness before the rest of the world wakes up and goes to work.
Kamala Beach is a walk-down-the-strand type of beach that lines Kamala Bay. Picturesque really, if you look past the thousands of plastic lounge chairs, beach umbrellas, Thai massage shacks, and people hawking goods from white fabric gazebos erected off the sand. After the horrors of the past evening, we ended up at a cute little set of bungalows. I should say, after we looked over a set of bungalows that were a tad seedy, no top sheet to shield you from a comforter that looked like it might have been washed once a month. The Ladyboy, as we now know they're called, who showed us the room was nowhere near as pretty and feminine as the Shim who massaged my feet in Bangkok. This Ladyboywas pretty dude-ish and rather swarthy to be pulling it off convincingly, but now that we've seen so many, they're pretty out there. It's not like they have to conceal or be ashamed. They really blend into society very naturally.
I regress. We ended up at Baan Chaba, a lovely bungalow owned by a truly beautiful Thai woman, Katiya, who lived on premise. She was lovely in an organic, authentic way - like a Thai commerical for Dove. She looked like a mixture of many different ethnicities. Our room was simple, yet lovely, clean and had a miniature little porch with two chairs and a table. A total of about 10 bungalows faced each other and was set off by all types of tropical plants and trees. It was a tiny spot of paradise in what could have been an almost verging on seedy, chaotic beach town. We had a nice dinner of fish and chips, Thai-style. Two tasty, flat, square fried fish filets and four big wedges of potatoes. Eating dinner on a beach, watching the sunset in a beautiful bay was such a tremendous relief after what we'd gone through; it really took time for us to really relax into the setting.
Niki's stomach was still hurting and it got worse as the night wore on. Katiya got into the car with me and personally took me to the pharmacy at 8:30pm, spoke with the pharmacist and showed us genuine concern. She was so comforting and warm.
After breakfast the next day, Niki turned around and started on her road to recovery. It did take an entire day, but she's a survivor! Katiya told us to go to Laem Sing beach on our way to the airport. It was a steep hike down to the beach, with vine railings. The beach was a mini-bay, with rocks strewn about and waves crashing around them. The setting was tropical and magical. Again, there were hundreds of white plastic lounge chairs in front of straw hut restaurant stalls. It felt very Bali-Hai-ish (or at least my conception of what it used to be). We sat on the edge of two chairs, catching our breath, trying to relax and enjoy the scenery. A young Thai boy sat down next to us and started chatting. At first, I thought he was going to hound us to eat at his restaurant stall. It turns out, he just wanted to chat and maybe practice his English skills.
I'm not sure how the conversation evolved (Niki and I were perplexed afterwards), but we found out he was a seasonal worker from Bangkok. He only came down during the high season to work at what he considered to be a place much nicer than the big city. He was 27 and actually lived behind the restaurant stall right on the beach. He said when the night is good and there's a full moon, he slept under a mosquito net and looked up at the sky. He had beautiful tatoos on his forearms and on his upper left arm , and a full back tattoo that was not quite fully completed. He was a very attractive boy with a cute face and small in stature. We talked for a long time about learning English, schooling in Thailand, the different dialect and foods in Southern Thailand (as opposed to the food he was used to in Bangkok), his family (he has two older sisters, one older brother and a younger sister), and tourism and how the economy is affecting the number of travelers. He mentioned AIG. THEN, after we talked about the fact that he wasn't married, he got a grim, sad look on his face. He started talking to us about how many young people go to school in Bangkok after they're about 17 or 18. He said many young girls from rural and beach cities get pregnant and because they can't come back to their parents with a child, they give the babies up by leaving them at people's doorsteps, at hospitals, etc. He said it's a huge Bangkok problem, because there is a big place (I'm guessing it's an orphanage) where they take all the babies, raise them, get them jobs when they're young, give them some schooling, etc. He said there are many, many babies. He said it over and over. We are not sure why he brought this up and talked about it at length. He said he's never left Thailand and wants to learn English more and go to school some more but doesn't know how he's going to do it. He definitely wasn't saying all this to beg money from us or with any ulterior motives. We were just having a serious conversation amidst heart-breaking beauty in one of the most beautiful settings ever. Then, he had to attend to business because a wedding with an English couple was set to take place there in 3 hours. We didn't even get a chance to say good-bye.
After we left this young boy, we were walking towards one of the restaurants on this beach. As we were walking across the sand, we saw a Euro woman sunning with her top off (not legal in Thailand, and definitely warned against), and an old fat guy way in the back on one of the lounge chairs. Niki saw the guy getting a hand job from one of the ubiquitous Thai massage specialists. He laughed when he saw that Niki had seen. How disgusting is that at 10am in the morning? This is on a family beach - all kinds of families were arriving to frolick in the water. Well, we are hoping that he gets athlete's foot disease on his ding-dong! We never cease to be amazed at how scuzzy old foreign guys are! I just wish there were a network of people with long lensed-cameras taking photos of these scummy men and putting them up on a website and publicly shaming them somehow. Maybe guys like that wouldn't have feelings of shame, I'm not even sure. Oh, and if I were a woman who had a relationship with a man traveling to Thailand or Cambodia, and most likely Vietnam (but I haven't been there, so I can't say) I think I would certainly be skeptical and suspicious. It's mind-bending to see how the women try to get the men to spend money on their "services" - these women need money so badly. I believe it starts to seem more acceptable in these countries, the longer you stay here. If I were traveling with children, I would stay in really pricey resorts and not venture out, especially at night. Children should not have to see what we've seen. It's really difficult to travel here with my adult daughter and we aren't even going anywhere remotely "red-light district".
We left for the crummy Phuket airport, took a flight to Koh Samui filled with really large-muscled, big, brawny young Australian guys wearing wife-beater T's, olive green long cargo shorts and black flip-flops (as if it were the Koh Samui/Koh Phangan/Koh Tao uniform) on a tiny prop plane that seated about 80. I believe there were about maybe 10 women on the plane, maybe less. It was a really weird situation.
We took a short minibus ride to the Big Buddha Pier on Koh Samui. The ferry taking us from Koh Samui to Koh Phangan was at 6:30pm, as the sun was setting over Koh Samui. It was filled with 98% young kids, mostly Australians and Europeans, and maybe a handful of Americans. They all sat on the upper deck and we went down below to be shielded from the wind. The ferry was really old, top-heavy from all the kids, and the water was pretty choppy. To say it was a harrowing ride would be a complete understatement. We were so completely frightened. The deck below had big open sections where windows would be located and we were sitting next to these sections. We made friends with a Malaysian man who was coming to Koh Phangan to spend two weeks at a Meditation Center at one of the Wats (wat means temple). We could barely get over to the cabinet with the life vests. We were the only ones to get them. I put it on and finally, Niki did too. The three Thais guys across from us were laughing, but I was recalling that the week I left, there had been a Nepal boating accident and many people drowned. I could just see the headlines on this ferry ride. The water was splashing through on us and the waves were high and the boat was just bouncing around. The boat was so back heavy, it was ridiculous. The front of the boat (can't remember if this is bow or stern, or whatever) was lifting upwards the entire ride over. Oh, did I mention that this was a 45 minute ferry ride? I was sweaty from fear, Niki was getting seasick and we were extremely scared. Even the Malaysian guy was really frightened. We were discussing what we would do if it tipped, how we would try to get out of the boat, where we could possibly swim to, etc. I don't know if swim would be the right word. Flail in the huge waves, try to keep our heads above water, try to stay together in the water - that would be more accurate, I suppose. Niki was white. For some reason, I don't get seasick, but I think I might have been close. I was really happy to get off onto the 1 foot wide rickety plank out onto the rickety pier. Oh, it felt good to get on land!
After that fun ferry ride, we took a pretty exciting minibus ride on a really narrow, hilly, windy, curvy ride in a minibus for a 45 minute ride to our bungalow resort. We're RIGHT on the ocean, the waves are pounding against the low seawall, and we're praying a tsunami doesn't decide to occur. (We're getting pretty good at figuring out what we'd need to do should the ocean recede - and that's if we're lucky and it happens while we're awake). Our resort is pretty nice for $53 USD a night. The room is really basic but super clean. The shower/toilet area is basically like what you might find at a campground. We have a wood cabinet/closet in the shower/toilet area. The resort has a swimming pool, it's super-tropical and they serve really good food.
Unfortunately, the internet isn't free (at this moment, I'm not caring about the cost) and it's pretty slow, but we're super internet-starved and we really need to blog as a release, I believe. It really relieves our stress and we feel so much better after we get our feelings out in text. Thanks to all of you for reading, commenting, and emailing us! It's a little bit of home for us and it's very comforting.
Kamala Beach is a walk-down-the-strand type of beach that lines Kamala Bay. Picturesque really, if you look past the thousands of plastic lounge chairs, beach umbrellas, Thai massage shacks, and people hawking goods from white fabric gazebos erected off the sand. After the horrors of the past evening, we ended up at a cute little set of bungalows. I should say, after we looked over a set of bungalows that were a tad seedy, no top sheet to shield you from a comforter that looked like it might have been washed once a month. The Ladyboy, as we now know they're called, who showed us the room was nowhere near as pretty and feminine as the Shim who massaged my feet in Bangkok. This Ladyboywas pretty dude-ish and rather swarthy to be pulling it off convincingly, but now that we've seen so many, they're pretty out there. It's not like they have to conceal or be ashamed. They really blend into society very naturally.
I regress. We ended up at Baan Chaba, a lovely bungalow owned by a truly beautiful Thai woman, Katiya, who lived on premise. She was lovely in an organic, authentic way - like a Thai commerical for Dove. She looked like a mixture of many different ethnicities. Our room was simple, yet lovely, clean and had a miniature little porch with two chairs and a table. A total of about 10 bungalows faced each other and was set off by all types of tropical plants and trees. It was a tiny spot of paradise in what could have been an almost verging on seedy, chaotic beach town. We had a nice dinner of fish and chips, Thai-style. Two tasty, flat, square fried fish filets and four big wedges of potatoes. Eating dinner on a beach, watching the sunset in a beautiful bay was such a tremendous relief after what we'd gone through; it really took time for us to really relax into the setting.
Niki's stomach was still hurting and it got worse as the night wore on. Katiya got into the car with me and personally took me to the pharmacy at 8:30pm, spoke with the pharmacist and showed us genuine concern. She was so comforting and warm.
After breakfast the next day, Niki turned around and started on her road to recovery. It did take an entire day, but she's a survivor! Katiya told us to go to Laem Sing beach on our way to the airport. It was a steep hike down to the beach, with vine railings. The beach was a mini-bay, with rocks strewn about and waves crashing around them. The setting was tropical and magical. Again, there were hundreds of white plastic lounge chairs in front of straw hut restaurant stalls. It felt very Bali-Hai-ish (or at least my conception of what it used to be). We sat on the edge of two chairs, catching our breath, trying to relax and enjoy the scenery. A young Thai boy sat down next to us and started chatting. At first, I thought he was going to hound us to eat at his restaurant stall. It turns out, he just wanted to chat and maybe practice his English skills.
I'm not sure how the conversation evolved (Niki and I were perplexed afterwards), but we found out he was a seasonal worker from Bangkok. He only came down during the high season to work at what he considered to be a place much nicer than the big city. He was 27 and actually lived behind the restaurant stall right on the beach. He said when the night is good and there's a full moon, he slept under a mosquito net and looked up at the sky. He had beautiful tatoos on his forearms and on his upper left arm , and a full back tattoo that was not quite fully completed. He was a very attractive boy with a cute face and small in stature. We talked for a long time about learning English, schooling in Thailand, the different dialect and foods in Southern Thailand (as opposed to the food he was used to in Bangkok), his family (he has two older sisters, one older brother and a younger sister), and tourism and how the economy is affecting the number of travelers. He mentioned AIG. THEN, after we talked about the fact that he wasn't married, he got a grim, sad look on his face. He started talking to us about how many young people go to school in Bangkok after they're about 17 or 18. He said many young girls from rural and beach cities get pregnant and because they can't come back to their parents with a child, they give the babies up by leaving them at people's doorsteps, at hospitals, etc. He said it's a huge Bangkok problem, because there is a big place (I'm guessing it's an orphanage) where they take all the babies, raise them, get them jobs when they're young, give them some schooling, etc. He said there are many, many babies. He said it over and over. We are not sure why he brought this up and talked about it at length. He said he's never left Thailand and wants to learn English more and go to school some more but doesn't know how he's going to do it. He definitely wasn't saying all this to beg money from us or with any ulterior motives. We were just having a serious conversation amidst heart-breaking beauty in one of the most beautiful settings ever. Then, he had to attend to business because a wedding with an English couple was set to take place there in 3 hours. We didn't even get a chance to say good-bye.
After we left this young boy, we were walking towards one of the restaurants on this beach. As we were walking across the sand, we saw a Euro woman sunning with her top off (not legal in Thailand, and definitely warned against), and an old fat guy way in the back on one of the lounge chairs. Niki saw the guy getting a hand job from one of the ubiquitous Thai massage specialists. He laughed when he saw that Niki had seen. How disgusting is that at 10am in the morning? This is on a family beach - all kinds of families were arriving to frolick in the water. Well, we are hoping that he gets athlete's foot disease on his ding-dong! We never cease to be amazed at how scuzzy old foreign guys are! I just wish there were a network of people with long lensed-cameras taking photos of these scummy men and putting them up on a website and publicly shaming them somehow. Maybe guys like that wouldn't have feelings of shame, I'm not even sure. Oh, and if I were a woman who had a relationship with a man traveling to Thailand or Cambodia, and most likely Vietnam (but I haven't been there, so I can't say) I think I would certainly be skeptical and suspicious. It's mind-bending to see how the women try to get the men to spend money on their "services" - these women need money so badly. I believe it starts to seem more acceptable in these countries, the longer you stay here. If I were traveling with children, I would stay in really pricey resorts and not venture out, especially at night. Children should not have to see what we've seen. It's really difficult to travel here with my adult daughter and we aren't even going anywhere remotely "red-light district".
We left for the crummy Phuket airport, took a flight to Koh Samui filled with really large-muscled, big, brawny young Australian guys wearing wife-beater T's, olive green long cargo shorts and black flip-flops (as if it were the Koh Samui/Koh Phangan/Koh Tao uniform) on a tiny prop plane that seated about 80. I believe there were about maybe 10 women on the plane, maybe less. It was a really weird situation.
We took a short minibus ride to the Big Buddha Pier on Koh Samui. The ferry taking us from Koh Samui to Koh Phangan was at 6:30pm, as the sun was setting over Koh Samui. It was filled with 98% young kids, mostly Australians and Europeans, and maybe a handful of Americans. They all sat on the upper deck and we went down below to be shielded from the wind. The ferry was really old, top-heavy from all the kids, and the water was pretty choppy. To say it was a harrowing ride would be a complete understatement. We were so completely frightened. The deck below had big open sections where windows would be located and we were sitting next to these sections. We made friends with a Malaysian man who was coming to Koh Phangan to spend two weeks at a Meditation Center at one of the Wats (wat means temple). We could barely get over to the cabinet with the life vests. We were the only ones to get them. I put it on and finally, Niki did too. The three Thais guys across from us were laughing, but I was recalling that the week I left, there had been a Nepal boating accident and many people drowned. I could just see the headlines on this ferry ride. The water was splashing through on us and the waves were high and the boat was just bouncing around. The boat was so back heavy, it was ridiculous. The front of the boat (can't remember if this is bow or stern, or whatever) was lifting upwards the entire ride over. Oh, did I mention that this was a 45 minute ferry ride? I was sweaty from fear, Niki was getting seasick and we were extremely scared. Even the Malaysian guy was really frightened. We were discussing what we would do if it tipped, how we would try to get out of the boat, where we could possibly swim to, etc. I don't know if swim would be the right word. Flail in the huge waves, try to keep our heads above water, try to stay together in the water - that would be more accurate, I suppose. Niki was white. For some reason, I don't get seasick, but I think I might have been close. I was really happy to get off onto the 1 foot wide rickety plank out onto the rickety pier. Oh, it felt good to get on land!
After that fun ferry ride, we took a pretty exciting minibus ride on a really narrow, hilly, windy, curvy ride in a minibus for a 45 minute ride to our bungalow resort. We're RIGHT on the ocean, the waves are pounding against the low seawall, and we're praying a tsunami doesn't decide to occur. (We're getting pretty good at figuring out what we'd need to do should the ocean recede - and that's if we're lucky and it happens while we're awake). Our resort is pretty nice for $53 USD a night. The room is really basic but super clean. The shower/toilet area is basically like what you might find at a campground. We have a wood cabinet/closet in the shower/toilet area. The resort has a swimming pool, it's super-tropical and they serve really good food.
Unfortunately, the internet isn't free (at this moment, I'm not caring about the cost) and it's pretty slow, but we're super internet-starved and we really need to blog as a release, I believe. It really relieves our stress and we feel so much better after we get our feelings out in text. Thanks to all of you for reading, commenting, and emailing us! It's a little bit of home for us and it's very comforting.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Stilt House Community in Phangna Bay!
Daylight can be such a comfort, bringing a renewal of hope and possibilities. We woke up to a still-miserable hotel room and forced ourselves to take showers in a very, very basic shower (the entire time I was in the shower, I was telling myself that many of the people in the surrounding area can only dream of showering like this). We wore our flip-flops the entire time we were in the shower, and in the room for that matter.
We went downstairs to check out the complimentary breakfast and had to decline. It was a sad and miserable buffet, but I'm sure if I was starving to death or was in jail, I could have eaten something. We left and went back to Phangna town, and luckily, I saw a small bustling market, down an alley, almost invisible from the main street. We walked through the market, and again, found amazing fresh produce and tremendously interesting food items. There were meat stalls, with whole heads of pig, pig feet, lots of different organs, animal carcasses, many types of fresh fish and dried seafood. No refrigeration, but surprisingly, very few flies. We bought a few fried coconut-macaroon type disks, a square block of what looked like flan but turned out to be another coconut jelly type sweet, and two little sticky rice packets wrapped in attractive dark green leaves with a toothpick to secure it shut. We were starving since it was about 10am, having had no dinner the night before. We were looking to find a food stall where a lot of locals eat, since that piece of advice has served us well to this point. We were definitely the only foreigners around yet again. We're sure no tourist buses stop here and they see few foreigners in the market since everyone was staring at us. It was so terrific though, the women selling at each stall were smiling at us, nodding in friendship to us. I like to think that they liked that we were buying and eating their food, not just gawking AT them.
We found a little stall with a tiny woman frying up something in a huge wok. Next to her were two small tables with very small plastic stools surrounding them. On the top of each table was an assortment of bean sprouts, green beans, boiled brown eggs, cucumbers/garlic in a vinegar sauce, leaves of different herbs, and some other things for which I'm sure there is no English translation. In front of her wok, were 5 deep pots with a variety of different curries, and sauces. I chose cross-sections of fish cooked with what looked like celery stalks, in a spicy curry. Niki chose a spicy lemon-grass curry. The tiny woman put mine on top of rice and Niki's on top of white noodles. We took it over to the table and put something from each of the little condiments on top and had an amazing feast!! She asked us if we would try the fried items. Turns out that one of them was disks of sweet potato and one was small bananas - they were dipped in an amazing coconut batter with a variety of wonderful, deep spices - they fried up into the crispest, non-greasy, sweet fried goodies. We bought even more for the rest of our day. We asked if we could take a picture of her cooking - she turned out to be a real ham - she wanted me to take several pictures of her frying up her bananas, standing next to Niki and standing next to me. She was the first Thai woman who stood super close to us and actually was touching us. She was so warm and friendly, it was like visiting with a really nice aunt. What a terrific start to the day - I don't think we'll ever forget our breakfast or this woman.
We investigated many options for taking us to the various stacks. We tried negotiating on prices and finally decided on one. It was a 3 1/2 hour tour on our own private longtail boat for 1600 baht. Riding on a fairly decrepit longtail boat with no "Coast Guard" or lifevests anywhere in sight was a bit disconcerting, especially when the waves got a bit bigger. The scenery was breathtaking and I would recommend this tour for anyone. We saw a cave with a prehistoric drawing which was over 3000 years old. We made two stops, the first at James Bond Island. It was amazingly beautiful and we hiked up and down stairs that were carved into the stone. We saw caves with stalagtites (sp?) and even went "through" one with our longtail boat.
Our second and final most interesting stop was at a stack, Koh Paynee, at which a Thai Muslims have built an entire community built on stilts. They live in their stilt houses built right into the ocean, next to a stack. Many of the houses have young children glued to their TV sets. Not sure how they get electricity there, but they were selling cold drinks and ice cream from glass cases and deep freezes. There were several little mini-mart type houses, and even a beautiful mosque set deeper in the back of most of the houses. They basically earn their living by fishing and by women selling souveniers to tourists. The souveniers are all the same 80 items arranged differently at each house. Nothing is "hand-crafted" really, they all look like they're made in some factory in Thailand. You walk all around this community on boardwalks erected on the stilts about 20 feet up from the ocean. In many sections of this boardwalks, they are only thin logs, about 2 1/2 feet wide, not even nailed or strapped together, but just laid down one after the next, across other long, skinny posts laid flat. It was not for anyone with a fear of heights. It was fairly frightening, I felt like I was on an episode of The Fear Factor, yet that wasn't even the scariest part. Below these walkways was a sludge which appeared to be sewage (which makes sense, since we're not sure how they could possibly process their waste). In places, on top of this sewage, were little lizard type sea creatures running across. If that wasn't disconcerting enough for the visitor to this community, we saw several unsupervised little toddlers running around the walkways. I have no idea how they don't slip, and if anyone slipped, how on earth someone could be saved, other than by the small fishing boats which are tethered below. If you survived the fall and the ensuing infections from the bacterial stew, then how would you ever survive the nightmares reliving your fall, which would probably haunt you for the rest of your life? Since it wasn't a super-hot and humid day, the smells weren't that bad. Lucky for us, I guess. The people were very nice, as long as you didn't let the begging you to buy get to you. Niki had a rather amusing encounter with a white-faced monkey wearing a diaper which a woman was holding in order to get people to pay for pictures with them. The lady put the monkey on Niki. She couldn't get over how soft and strange the weird, long fingers felt on her skin. She ended up wanting a monkey.
It turned out to be quite a glorious, wonderful, amazing day! It gets the top prize for the biggest turnaround of a day.
We went downstairs to check out the complimentary breakfast and had to decline. It was a sad and miserable buffet, but I'm sure if I was starving to death or was in jail, I could have eaten something. We left and went back to Phangna town, and luckily, I saw a small bustling market, down an alley, almost invisible from the main street. We walked through the market, and again, found amazing fresh produce and tremendously interesting food items. There were meat stalls, with whole heads of pig, pig feet, lots of different organs, animal carcasses, many types of fresh fish and dried seafood. No refrigeration, but surprisingly, very few flies. We bought a few fried coconut-macaroon type disks, a square block of what looked like flan but turned out to be another coconut jelly type sweet, and two little sticky rice packets wrapped in attractive dark green leaves with a toothpick to secure it shut. We were starving since it was about 10am, having had no dinner the night before. We were looking to find a food stall where a lot of locals eat, since that piece of advice has served us well to this point. We were definitely the only foreigners around yet again. We're sure no tourist buses stop here and they see few foreigners in the market since everyone was staring at us. It was so terrific though, the women selling at each stall were smiling at us, nodding in friendship to us. I like to think that they liked that we were buying and eating their food, not just gawking AT them.
We found a little stall with a tiny woman frying up something in a huge wok. Next to her were two small tables with very small plastic stools surrounding them. On the top of each table was an assortment of bean sprouts, green beans, boiled brown eggs, cucumbers/garlic in a vinegar sauce, leaves of different herbs, and some other things for which I'm sure there is no English translation. In front of her wok, were 5 deep pots with a variety of different curries, and sauces. I chose cross-sections of fish cooked with what looked like celery stalks, in a spicy curry. Niki chose a spicy lemon-grass curry. The tiny woman put mine on top of rice and Niki's on top of white noodles. We took it over to the table and put something from each of the little condiments on top and had an amazing feast!! She asked us if we would try the fried items. Turns out that one of them was disks of sweet potato and one was small bananas - they were dipped in an amazing coconut batter with a variety of wonderful, deep spices - they fried up into the crispest, non-greasy, sweet fried goodies. We bought even more for the rest of our day. We asked if we could take a picture of her cooking - she turned out to be a real ham - she wanted me to take several pictures of her frying up her bananas, standing next to Niki and standing next to me. She was the first Thai woman who stood super close to us and actually was touching us. She was so warm and friendly, it was like visiting with a really nice aunt. What a terrific start to the day - I don't think we'll ever forget our breakfast or this woman.
We investigated many options for taking us to the various stacks. We tried negotiating on prices and finally decided on one. It was a 3 1/2 hour tour on our own private longtail boat for 1600 baht. Riding on a fairly decrepit longtail boat with no "Coast Guard" or lifevests anywhere in sight was a bit disconcerting, especially when the waves got a bit bigger. The scenery was breathtaking and I would recommend this tour for anyone. We saw a cave with a prehistoric drawing which was over 3000 years old. We made two stops, the first at James Bond Island. It was amazingly beautiful and we hiked up and down stairs that were carved into the stone. We saw caves with stalagtites (sp?) and even went "through" one with our longtail boat.
Our second and final most interesting stop was at a stack, Koh Paynee, at which a Thai Muslims have built an entire community built on stilts. They live in their stilt houses built right into the ocean, next to a stack. Many of the houses have young children glued to their TV sets. Not sure how they get electricity there, but they were selling cold drinks and ice cream from glass cases and deep freezes. There were several little mini-mart type houses, and even a beautiful mosque set deeper in the back of most of the houses. They basically earn their living by fishing and by women selling souveniers to tourists. The souveniers are all the same 80 items arranged differently at each house. Nothing is "hand-crafted" really, they all look like they're made in some factory in Thailand. You walk all around this community on boardwalks erected on the stilts about 20 feet up from the ocean. In many sections of this boardwalks, they are only thin logs, about 2 1/2 feet wide, not even nailed or strapped together, but just laid down one after the next, across other long, skinny posts laid flat. It was not for anyone with a fear of heights. It was fairly frightening, I felt like I was on an episode of The Fear Factor, yet that wasn't even the scariest part. Below these walkways was a sludge which appeared to be sewage (which makes sense, since we're not sure how they could possibly process their waste). In places, on top of this sewage, were little lizard type sea creatures running across. If that wasn't disconcerting enough for the visitor to this community, we saw several unsupervised little toddlers running around the walkways. I have no idea how they don't slip, and if anyone slipped, how on earth someone could be saved, other than by the small fishing boats which are tethered below. If you survived the fall and the ensuing infections from the bacterial stew, then how would you ever survive the nightmares reliving your fall, which would probably haunt you for the rest of your life? Since it wasn't a super-hot and humid day, the smells weren't that bad. Lucky for us, I guess. The people were very nice, as long as you didn't let the begging you to buy get to you. Niki had a rather amusing encounter with a white-faced monkey wearing a diaper which a woman was holding in order to get people to pay for pictures with them. The lady put the monkey on Niki. She couldn't get over how soft and strange the weird, long fingers felt on her skin. She ended up wanting a monkey.
It turned out to be quite a glorious, wonderful, amazing day! It gets the top prize for the biggest turnaround of a day.
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