Thailand Tales

Hey all,

First of all: Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

It has been a while and I need to catch everyone up with the fun from Thailand before I forget too much of it.  I am actually now in Dublin staying close to Temple Bar within walking distance of all kinds of goodness.  It’s actually sunny here today and people are taking advantage of it in full force so I need to write this and get back out into the sunny weather while it’s here because it’s supposed to turn chilly in the next few days…at least compared to Bangkok.

One quick (like that’s going to happen) tidbit about the Liveaboard that I forgot to put into the last update.  On the trip, we dove a couple of times around Phi Phi islands (there are 5 of them, I think) and cruised around them all in the boat.  The Phi Phi’s are where the movie The Beach was filmed.  On that island, on the back side, there are cave systems where swallows nest.  Apparently the Chinese LOVE their bird’s nest soup that is made with, you guessed it, swallow nests…real ones.  So in these caves, the Thai have put an intricate set of bamboo “ladders” (really 2 or 3 poles strapped together that they climb around on) to harvest these nests.  I have seen stuff on NatGeo or some other channel about this and the people who climb around on these things.  They are super protective about them because it’s big money.  They leave someone there to guard the place all the time and supposedly shoot if you get too close.  Anyway, we could see into one of the caves and there was a network of bamboo going on.  Pretty cool little side note.

 

Not the caves...but setting off fireworks to begin the dive trip

So back to Patong.  We stayed at a place called BYD Lofts which was really nice and by American standards was pretty cheap.  By Thai standards, we paid for the niceness.  Kris and Junior (the two guys from Denmark from the dive boat) stayed at a relatively nice place in Patong for the same amount of time we did and payed for the entire stay what we paid for one day.  But nice is relative and our place was pretty sweet.  Once funny side note, I didn’t plan it but it turns out BYD was right around the corner (literally) from Nap where Sophia and I stayed when we were in Thailand on her sabbatical.

Kris (drinking) and Junior

The first of 2 days in Patong, we went on John Grays Sea Canoe trip.  If you were a reader of my original Thailand tales from 10 years ago, you might remember (or not) that this is the same sea canoe trip that Marci and I went on when we went diving there (hi Marci!).  On that trip, we actually got to meet John Gray who, if memory serves, had an ego barely contained by the large boat we were on.  He told stories of all these amazing exploits that seemed like a complete load of BS although reading his self-written bio on their webpage now it doesn’t contain nearly what he claimed to have done then. 

No John Gray this time…the business has become just that: a fairly large scale tour operation with double or triple the number of sea canoes I remember from the first time, but still maintaining the cool vibe of going through these islands with caves in them that lead to internal lagoons that are beautiful and peaceful and like nothing you have seen before.  They still do a float making exercise where you light it and float your bad luck away before playing with the bio luminescence in the water after the sun goes down.  It was a really cool trip and I am glad we did it.

 

Monkey inside one island's lagoon

Muddy the mudskipper

These islands are limestone with cool undercuts like this

panorama of one of the lagoons

The next day we just toodled around Patong trying to move slowly and stay in the shadows to sweat less….didn’t help really.  We went to the mall to walk around mainly because it was air conditioned.  We barely escaped a time-share presentation session by being honest that 1) we had no intention of buying a time share no matter what they said and 2) using the current vacation as an example, we were on a boat for 8 days and on land for 3 so how does a time share make sense?  We finally made it to the beach and a nice little bar area where we sat next to a really nice Malaysian guy and talked to him for a couple of hours (and a few beers).  It was a nice, relaxing way to spend the afternoon before showering in the evening and going to dinner. 

 

Ronald "the Buddhist" McDonald

The Patong mall has Portland for sale inside

After dinner, we went to the main Patong drag where they sell souvenirs, have a ton of bars and have the sex shows…or at least offer them.  On the John Gray trip, we talked with a South African couple that said their friend went to one and instead of women it was men doing the things listed but I can neither confirm nor deny this claim because we didn’t do it.  We DID look at the menu and yes there was a menu of the acts that would/could be performed that, of course, started with Ping Pong show (kids, ask your parents what that is).  The barkers (if that is what you call them…agents sent out to lure you in?) would approach you with the menu and make a popping sound with their mouth that sounded like a ping pong ball getting hit…or maybe shot out of something…either way it effectively let you know what they were advertising.

 

The gateway to the Patong strip

I really really really wish I had taken a picture of the menu (if they would have let me…I tried in Bangkok and they said no) both because I want to share with you, dear readers, the amazing list of activities one could see and because I only got to about item number 10 before my amazement (and those beers on the beach earlier) caused me to stop reading and ask the people “catfish show?  What is that?  Really?”.  I do have to say that the Patong lists were more “clean” than the ones in Bangkok…sort of.  On the one hand, it seemed like they had more things listed than the lists in Bangkok, but they were listed more tastefully with just “catfish show” or “dart show” while Bangkok had things like (kids, stop reading!) “magic knife pussy” or “fish in pussy” and “rainbow pussy”.  Sort of wish we saw that one…rainbow?  Or maybe not. (okay kids, it’s safe).

One other funny side note on Patong: we saw Kris and Junior, the two dudes from Denmark who were on the dive trip with us, pretty much every day we were there.  No planning involved, we just ran into them.  Sure, Patong isn’t that big, but it was still sort of funny.  To cap it off, we were on the same flight to Bangkok with them.  Turns out the remotes that have the phones built into them on a plane allow you to call other seats in the plane for free as discovered by Junior and used to call Stacy and me.  Sadly we didn’t run into them in Bangkok while we were there.

Bangkok was what felt like an order of magnitude hotter than Patong.  Patong was sweat city but Bangkok turned the streams of sweat into rivers.  Luckily water is super cheap there.  You can buy a large bottle (2 liters?) for like a quarter at any of the conveniently located 7-11s.  Yes 7-11 is huge in Thailand.  They are the ABC store of Thailand…and if you haven’t ever been to Hawaii, that reference went right over your head.  Let’s go with: they are about on every corner there.

Our hotel was pretty cool (the Easton Grand).  I had reserved a room high in the hotel for a view and they sold me on upgrading from that to the top floor for only a little more per day and it came with access to the executive lounge that had free happy hours from 5:30-7:30 as well as got breakfasts included.  So blam, we had a room on the 32 floor and free drinks every night in a lounge with a pretty sweet view!  Since Bangkok was hot and humid, we were back in the hotel before happy hour to cool off and shower in preparation for the evening’s sweat event anyway so we took advantage of the happy hours.

 

Sunset from the executive lounge.  The building with the dome is where the sky bar is (bar in Hangover II)

View from our room,  Cool building on the left

Hot…Bangkok was H O T.  You might think like I did: let’s get up early before it gets too bad…but you would be wrong like I was.  Sure the real temperature was a little lower but the “feels like” temp due to the humidity was over 100 no matter what time of day or night it was.  Seriously.  But that didn’t deter us…much.  We still got out on our first day to go jump on the water taxi and head up to the Emperor’s Palace and Wat Pho and the flower market.  Of course, with my luck, it was Coronation day so the palace itself was closed off.  The Temple of the Emerald Buddha next door was not, though so we waded through the throng of 1000’s of Chinese tourists to check it out.  We also waded through them at Wat Pho where the reclining Buddha is (still impressive).  As we were walking down to check out the flower market, we fell for it!

 

Reclining Buddha

Temple of the Jade Buddha (not supposed to take pictures inside)

Weather bug hourly temps...with "feels like" making it sort of depressing...it didn't rain

That’s right, we got sucked into the pretty well known scam of Thailand: The Happy Buddha.  We were close…like 2 blocks away from the market when a “helpful” Thai guy came up and asked where we were going.  He said the flower market wasn’t open till 2 because the coronation but he could help us out with the happy Buddha, which was open, and this tall Buddha and some other place we ended up not going to.  He arranged for a tuk tuk for 40 baht to take us around to them all and like suckers we went with it.  40 baht, is just a hair over a dollar, btw. 

 

Stacy in her first tuk tuk!

We got to the Happy Buddha Wat and it was under refurbishment…should have been a clue…with none of the doors open.  One guy at the back said they were only open on the weekend and to come back then.  After we left there, the tuk tuk driver convinced us to stop at a Thai shopping area where the scam was about to come down.  Really it was to lead us to clothiers…where we could get suits or shirts made.  And that is what the Happy Buddha scam is about…you hear that and it’s really just a trip to a couple of lesser Wats as a pretext to taking you to these clothes makers you wouldn’t want to go to normally…unless you needed some suits in which case, happy Buddha!  Our Tuk Tuk driver said he got a free gas card if we would stay for 10 minutes and being the nice suckers we are, we tried.  We made it 2 and a half minutes in that place because it was small and we said “no we don’t wear or want suits” which sort of ended any reason to stay any longer.  Our driver’s enthusiasm dropped when we came out so quickly.

We did get to see a tall Buddha that was pretty cool…before the driver took us to another, larger clothier (I was hoping for jeweler just for variety) asking us to try to say 10 minutes so he could get his free gas card.  This clothier was larger than the first, to be fair, and I did meet a guy who went to Rockhurst (a Kansas City high school) and commented on my Royals shirt I was wearing (go Royals!).  I even flipped through the “catalog” of items they made trying to drag out the time, but still we were out of there in under 8 minutes.  Our driver’s enthusiasm was at 0 at this point and he took us to the flower market where we wanted to be from the get go completely ignoring the third temple he was supposed to take us to.  We didn’t mind as it was hot and the flower market was what we wanted to do anyway.

 

Cool tall Buddha

Hot enough I will admit I got a Tutti Fruitti Berry smoothy

The flower market was interesting…fewer flowers than I was expecting, but it was in the middle of the heat of the day and I guess the peak times are evenings and early mornings.  It is also an area that has bulk food supplies like where restaurants come and buy from so it was cool to see anyway.  After that we went back to the hotel to cool off and shower.

I wish we could find some garlic around here....

That night we went to a night market north of where we were staying.  Our hotel was right on the light rail line with a bridge from the 3^rd floor to the station so getting around was super easy.  We took the light rail to the subway up to the night market and had dinner and walked around.  Really if you are looking for stuff to buy for cheap, night markets are the way to go.  There was a ton of stuff there.

The next day we did a canal tour with Pandan Tours that ran from 8:30 to 3.  This also started from the light rail but was off the beaten track in Bangkok.  There are some tours/canal trips that start from the main river and sort of do a loop back to the river.  Marci and I did one back in the day that was pretty cool.  This wasn’t like that and got more into the “real” Bangkok experience, I think.

Our guide was Nui who was an older lady who was Buddhist and shared that philosophy with us throughout the day.  Thailand is 95% Buddhist (4% Muslim, 1% “other) so she brought a nice flavor to the day and the tour.  We stopped at a couple of Wats and walked around them.  The first was what I would call a traditional Wat with the temples and what not.  The second was more nature oriented and more open but still had monks and Buddha’s but a completely different feel. 

 

Glass pagoda inside a large pagoda at one of the Wats

Ceiling above the glass pagoda

Us in the boat...Nui barely pictured

We ended up doing around 20 km of canal in this teak boat that had what seems like a car motor on the back powering the prop on a long pole.  It was cool to ride around in but the canals are really polluted…or full of trash (and I am sure people waste since a lot of houses along the canals are on stilts with no visible plumbing) and water would splash up occasionally onto your face.  First couple of times I was thinking “eww” but eventually, you get used to it and remember a shower is right around the corner so you don’t bother with it.

A view of what the water looked like...some places were worse with trash...some better

We also ate from a canal boat that made a noddle dish with chicken.  It was pretty good and a super cool experience sitting next to their boat while they made it and handed it over.  Occasionally children would be feeding the fish in the canal and you could see swarms of LARGE fish going for the food.  We also saw a ton of egrets and monitor lizards and snails and what not.  We stopped at an orchid farm for a while and saw different varieties there.  I guess the main season is earlier in the year, but they still had quite a few flowering plants.  We had dinner at a pretty large market on the side of the canal and then went to an artists’ conclave to see a traditional puppet show.  The puppets take 3 people to work where one person does the head and the left arm, one does the legs, and the 3^rd does the right arm.  It’s a pretty cool dance between the 3 people that translates into pretty cool movement in the puppet.  They did both a traditional play as well as a Michael Jackson bit doing Billy Jean complete with moon walk.  It was pretty cool.  Overall I would highly rate this and say “go do it” but…..

View of the back of another canal boat.  Look at that engine!

Cooking boat making us a noodle dish

looking out at the canal

one of the orchids at the farm

ginormous fish

puppeteers in action

audience participation time!

The artists place where the puppet show was

I got food poisoning somewhere in there.  Might have been the lunch since Stacy didn’t get it and we had different lunches, but by the evening the stomach cramps were starting up.  That sort of curtailed the activities for the final Bangkok evening outside of going for some mango sticky rice for Stacy (she had been wanting to try it the whole trip) and getting some pepto for me in case it was just upset stomach.

Skip the next paragraph if you don’t want to know the fun of food poisoning or if the Rio tales were enough…you have been warned….slight spoiler: there were no soiled undies.

When you’re sliding into first and you feel something burst…diarrhea…yeah!  At least I was in the hotel and prepared when it hit.  I had been doing the pepto and Stacy had an Imodium (dries you right up and blocks all output!) so that helped a bit but the stomach cramping was still there the next day.  Luckily the airport had a pharmacy AND prescriptions are not needed for much so I got Azithromycin.  I took Cipro in Brazil and knew that was right on, but the internets were saying for SE Asia zithro was the way to go instead.  It was 600 Baht…under $20 for 6 250mg pills (take 2 daily with meal for 3 days), FYI.  I was originally just going to get it “just in case” but since the symptoms were there pretty strong the next day, I started self-medicating.  Then I got on the plane for 12 hour flight to London.  The first 3 or 4 hours weren’t terrible but then my stomach was on fire.  I thought it was acid or something but I was popping the pepto like it was nothing so my theory was gas expanding due to altitude.  I think the Imodium stopping up one exit maybe trapped air from escaping that way (to my fellow passenger’s unknown good fortune) and for some reason I couldn’t burp it out.  Anyway, I spent 8ish hours in pretty bad pain that DID lessen once we started getting down towards landing at London.  The Imodium finally let some items (black sludge) come out along with some gas and I got some more medications at a pharmacy in London’s airport (anti-gas stuff mostly) and the flight to Dublin was relatively okay although I only had water for the flight.  Made it to the hotel here in Dublin and the stomach was only slightly grouchy so I survived.  Still a little diarrhea-y today, but I hadn’t eaten much in the 30 or so hours before breakfast this morning so I think maybe my system is resetting (I hope).

Okay…I guess that wasn’t bad, but the poop talk is done.

The flight from Bangkok to London was British Airways and was layflat.  The seats were sweet and the food looked good and I would have appreciated the flowing liquor had I not been sick so I am giving BA a thumbs up even if I didn’t get to do the whole shooting match personally.  At least for international.  The flight from London to Dublin (only an hour flight so take with grain of salt) was a little lame.  It was basically coach seats (with crap coach legroom) with the middle seat blocked off with a “tray” setup.  We got the nice service and dinner (I didn’t have any: sick) but the seating was poor.  Oh well.

 

International BA business = sweet

Domestic BA business...not so much

Holy crap…this was long.  Sorry about that.  I will do a Dublin update in a couple of days so hopefully it won’t be as long winded as this, but you never know!

Until then: our time, the people’s time!

Love to all

Jim