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[Giant gently caress off epic essay I just wrote about my recent trip to Thailand because I have to go back to work tomorrow and if I go to sleep IT'LL HAPPEN TOO SOON.] Thailand is very hot. Heat zaps my appetite for everything but sleep, but I still managed to have some Times while I was there. We (the Mrs and I) first got into Bangkok proper at about 3AM, so we were forced to sleep the first night on the Khaosan road, which is not a place I like. It's a permanently crowded street filled with grumpy hawkers selling old bits of wooden tat and fake IDs, with bars playing too much bad dance music. Apparently the Thai cuss of choice for deadlock sporting fucknuts who think its OK to wander around a major metropolitan city shirtless and shoeless like they're John The Baptist translates to 'bird poo poo foreigner.' Khaosan is full of those wankers. The place is a joyless hustle, and I was glad when we found our next hostel, the Cozy Inn, near Hualamphong train station. The staff were very helpful and friendly and all that good stuff you hear about Thai people. The next day we went to Wat Pho to look at the reclining Buddha and take photos of the statuary and be impressed by the shiny, pointy temples. I've always enjoyed devotional music and architecture, and Thailand has some of the most beautiful examples of the latter in the world. The next day we picked 'the torture museum' out of the Lonely Planet at random and spent most of the afternoon examining execution apparatus and sprawling in a beautiful walled park that had previously been a large prison. Lying on my back in the grass and squinting up at the birds hopping from branch to branch of the tree I was using for shade, I couldn't help but have a guilty chuckle thinking of how crummy the weather must have been at that exact moment back in Seoul. We decided on a vague itinerary of island hopping in the South, then heading back to spend the last two days in Bangkok. We took the overnight train to Chumporn, then a ferry to Koh Tao. I like taking the train, even at night, crammed into a second class sleeper seat with a faulty reclining mechanism. There's something elegant about travelling by train. I didn't even mind waiting three hours in the cavernous train station. I spent the time listening to the Mrs being interviewed by a Thai English language student, watching pretend tough guys do Thai martial arts on the immense LED TV screen at the front of the station and being careful not to tread on the stray cats that snuck around beneath the seating, snatching fallen food scraps from drowsy commuters. These gaps of dead time may be my favourite part of travelling. I get no masochistic thrill from the basic physical discomfort which my finances dictate I suffer whenever I travel, and 'people watching' grows old pretty fast - rather I enjoy the enforced mental siesta that comes with taking buses, trains, ferries and other non jet-powered means of conveyance. Arriving in a new place makes me anxious, and even after I get situated I start to worry that I'm not doing enough, not being active or living sufficiently in the moment. But when I'm on the move, I feel relaxed. I had a few excellent books with me and a lot of music, but there's only so much reading and listening I can do, and bouncing around in transit was one of the few effective remedies for the permanent drowsiness I experienced in that climate (Red Bull being another) so I spent many hours over the ten days with nothing to do but sit, think and watch the landscape pass by. At home I spend all my time working, drinking or cramming pixels into my eyes - being denied all my usual avenues of distraction was the real holiday. I know not everyone feels this way. While walking around the train station to stretch my legs I saw a young guy lying on the ground, with his head propped up on his backpack watching a movie on an expensive looking Apple laptop. I caught a glimpse of the movie as I walked past him. He was in Bangkok, Thailand, watching a movie set in Bangkok, Thailand. I saw a great deal of netbooks (tiny, inexpensive travel friendly laptops) at the various resorts and bars we visited, and the more I saw them the more irritating they became. I've had computers in my life since I was about five, which is more impressive than it sounds since I'm about fifty years old, and I've always considered myself an evangelical supporter of useful consumer electronics, but I found myself harumphing at these people like a grumpy old man. Rather than talking to their friends or playing with the sleepy, attention deprived bar pets or just staring at the horizon and thoughtfully picking their nose - they were on Facebook. In almost every instance the tiny laptop people were always looking at something on Facebook, and they'd do it for hours. I don't know if I have a point, it just bugged me. Anyway, I liked the night train a lot even though I got very little sleep. The night landscape as seen from a train is beautiful in a way that's difficult to describe without sounding like a wanker. Taking the bus back up to Bangkok once we'd had our fill of sand paper bed sheets was torture. The roadside bauble of choice in Thailand is the fluorescent strip light bulb. They're used everywhere, I saw seven hundred thousand of them between Chumporn and the Capital. At one point the combination of sleep deprivation and constant, retina-shredding fluorescent light noise had me almost totally convinced we were travelling in an immense circle. We seemed to pass through the same town every twenty minutes. I could see too much to ignore, but never enough to focus on. By midnight I was one dismal, vacant roadside Tikki bar away from total madness. The only interesting thing I saw the whole way back was a huge, flat, spot lit construction lot occupied by a single JCB digger, belching dirt into a pit like a sick dinosaur. My opinion of the bus may be unreasonably soured by our seats, which were placed right in front of the on board shitter. Towards the end of the journey the stench of the bog combined with an unfiltered cloud of two dozen sleeping people's manky service station arse guff forced me to take olfactory refuge inside my own t-shirt, which honestly didn't smell much better. The train was different. In addition to smelling a lot better, cutting a less circuitous path through the country meant the darkness was rarely broken, and when it was it would be by things so distant or so isolated from any terrestrial context that they seemed to be floating. Koh Tao is the smallest of the big three backpacker friendly islands in Thailand. The thing there is diving, which neither of us had any real interest in, so our time was pretty uneventful. At one point The Mrs and I had a conversation with three young American women who were travelling for a few months after college. We were discussing the pros and cons of living in Korea, myself for and she very much agin. We were sitting up sharing a very nice Cantaloupe hookah and they were sitting on the floor between us. Something about this arrangement tickled me a lot, as we passed the pipe back and forth dispensing our wisdom to these youngsters who were (literally) looking up to us. I don't know, it seemed funny at the time, I was pretty drunk. Later that night, or maybe the next, The Mrs went to bed early and I decided to stay up for a little while to enjoy the last of a mild beer buzz and look at the stars, which were very bright on account of the lack of light pollution and a waxing moon. I picked a point where we'd laid out earlier in the day, between two huge round boulders that bisected the beach - being careful to make sure there was nobody around - I lay on my back and put my headphones on. About five minutes later I felt drops of beer spatter my face and heard a bottle breaking to my immediate left. Sitting up I turned around to see the silhouettes of two people sitting on a wall in front of some as yet uncompleted bungalows, a woman and a bald man. In an English accent I heard him say "[something] off!" while the (evidently Thai) woman offered loud apologies. I had to decide what to do quickly, and picked up my flip flops and walked back up the beach to where I was staying, trying to work out why it happened as I went. The only legitimate reason I could conjure was that he was somehow invested in the construction of the bungalows and thought I was some sort of vagrant, squatting on his real estate. What is much more likely is that it was a drunk tourist who had picked up a bit of local strange and, having only noticed me after sitting down with her, considered my unintentional cockblocking provocation beyond endurance. His accent was a bit of a giveaway. There's a whole generation of swivel-eyed, teeth nashing droogs inhabiting the UK's cities that, on applying for plane tickets, should simply be locked in a loving cage and fed ketamine for however long they were planning on going away. It's not like they'd notice the difference. Whatever the reason, it threw me into a depressed, anxious funk that I didn't fully escape for a some time. gently caress that guy. We took a ferry to Koh Phangan a few days later. While I was getting a drink a flawlessly sketchy looking dealer offered me some sort of leaf to chew, promising that it would have me "running on the water." I declined, but it did amuse me to see how nervous his total lack of subtlety made the staff of the ferry, with whom he seemed to have an understanding. We pitched up at a place called [name omitted] largely because it was the first pamphlet we looked at after stepping off the ferry. It turned out to be a good decision. It was a little removed from the Hat Rin peninsula where the Full Moon Parties are, but since the moon was new we weren't that interested in staying right on sunset or sunrise beach. We got a ridiculously well appointed room for 1000 baht a night, and spent the next few days walking into Hat Rin to swim and sunbathe or lounging around the little private beach next to the hotel. The place was run by a family, whose most prominent representative spent a great deal of time and energy making sure we were comfortable - part of which included assuring us that they had an understanding with the local police, so that should we want it would be no problem to hang out there and smoke weed. While we declined that we did take advantage of their happy shakes before going into town on Saturday night. Since we split it neither of us got especially buzzed, luckily I compensated for this by drinking quite a lot. We got to the beach apparently very early - it was almost completely deserted, despite all the tables, bean bags and stalls having been set out and lit up. It may have been the happy shake or the zombie movie atmosphere of the beach, but it wasn't until 11 or so when lots more people showed up that I loosened up enough to enjoy myself. We forswore buckets on account of old age and clashing chemicals and wandered from place to place, watching the fire throwers and the young people trying to dance in the sand. At one place where we stayed long enough to take part in a weird balloon stomping game, there was an old fella clearly tripping his balls off on something evidently very potent. He was drenched in all manner of blinking LED tack, dancing with everybody and posing for photos. It was fun for a while, but when I started to picture his serotonin hangover the next day the novelty wore off, and we quit the beach. The next couple of days were spent in a very pleasant haze of sunbathing and naps. Getting off the bus to Bangkok again very early in the morning, we booked into the first halfway acceptable place we found, and arranged to meet old friends from China and Seoul during our last day. The first part of the day was spent sending postcards and souvenir shopping, then in the early evening myself and The Mrs reconnected with an old friend from her days in China and his girlfriend. We ate and took off to a fancy bar at the top of the Banyan Tree hotel, 60 floors up. After a little sartorial confrontation (the dress code required shoes and trousers, which they helpfully supplied) we enjoyed one slowly sipped round of extremely expensive drinks with one of the most exclusive views in the city. Sensing that we'd missed our mutual friend from Seoul, and having been to the top of the city we decided to spend a little time in the muck, and The Mrs' friend who lived in Bangkok some years previously took us on a quick tour around some of the red light districts. For a little while we became Sex Tourist-tourists, we were suddenly on a confusing and slightly depressing meta-vacation. Soi cowboy is like a large chunk of Las Vegas squeezed into a narrow sliver of downtown Bangkok. Bar girls and beggars lined the street while haunted, unsmiling middle aged men strode around purposefully or lounged on the patios of the bars, attended to by more or less naked young women. My favorite part of Soi Cowboy was the Dutch bar we decamped in for drinks, it was full of weirdly passive aggressive signs pre-emptively excusing the lousy service. They said things like "Our food is prepared with love, not a STOPWATCH" or "We'll be nice - IF YOU ARE". Nobody else found this as funny as I did. After traipsing around a couple titty bars we ended our holiday in a very nice street near the Khaosan Road, sharing a slightly harsh apple hookah and talking about China, Korea, our various points of origin and potential future destinations. It were a gud holiday. [/Giant gently caress off epic essay I just wrote about my recent trip to Thailand because I have to go back to work tomorrow and if I go to sleep IT'LL HAPPEN TOO SOON.] I went to Thailand five years ago, but I went by myself back then and didn't really have a good time. It definitely seemed to be easier to get around this time, but that may just be on account of having more money and being a bit more experienced at travelling. I can't recommend the place near Hualamphong enough, they were incredibly nice and the general atmosphere of where it is is a ton nicer than the Khoasan area. If anyone wants the name of the place near Hat Rin they can PM me, I just didn't want to put it in the main text in case they got in trouble. I doubt their weed is that good anyway. For those of you who have may have lived on Koh Tao or know a lot about it, if I'd decided to get into a fight with that dude and it had got serious, what was the worst that would have happened legally? Not being an internet tough guy, I'm just curious. joedevola fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Feb 25, 2010 |
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Feb 25, 2010 19:56
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 14:25 |
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Sheep-Goats posted:Other than getting beaten up by him, nothing. The police are never going to take the side of a bottle hurling British fuckface over mildly drunk dude in his 50s carrying around his walkman and looking a little confused. If he was somehow friends with the policeman or whatever you'd probably be taken out of sight and let go. If he was friends with an rear end in a top hat policeman maybe he would pretend there was a 1000B fine first. Odds of that happening are one in a thousand. Thanks, I'm actually 28, I was joking about being older because, y'know... late 20s angst and that. Anyway, my main concern was what would have happened if I'd hurt him at all. Now I'm sort of annoyed that I didn't. OK, internet tough guy discussion over.
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Feb 26, 2010 11:28
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