A few choice accounts of my 3 week christmas vacation to Thailand, starting in Chiang Mai, skipping to the Gulf of Thailand, and finally over to the Andaman Coast.
...Sawa dee ka! Writing from CHIANG MAI, after a too-painful overnight bus trip from Bangkok - arrived early, crashed at our free guest house, and woke late to a fantastic brunch of green curry, veggies, spring rolls, and tasty thai beer, (couldn't be better food in the world! except for mom's cooking that is!) Amy, fellow Saga-ken ALT, and I explored the city by tuk-tuk, these cute motorcar thingies with 3 wheels and always a cheap fare - you barter down with the guy anyway. Saw some massive gold-plated temples, bought an umbrella at the famous "umbrella village" -what else would you buy there? - and found some table tennis to play with the locals next to a temple. Found out about a dinner/dancing event through word of mouth and went with our travelling buds, fellow ALT's Andrew and Mike, for a super non-stop dinner and a great show of traditional thai dancing, sword and fire spinning, and drumming. Amy and I even got to dance with the girls! Went to Chiang Mai's famous Night Bazaar, where everything u can imagine is sold for, you know, cheap. Gotta love the crafts, jewellery, lanterns, and clothes. Even stuff you never thought you would need, you buy. Bartering is that addictive. I think Amy and I strolled past the same tables 9 or 10 times, just to see if they would go down in price. They could easily pick our eager faces and weighty pockets out of the crowd.
...NORTH of Chiang Mai, we found ourselves spending our first Christmas away from home really far from civilization - on a 3-day trek into the jungle near the Burma border. I was riding atop an elephant, on dirt paths and criss-crossing rivers, on x-mas day! Met a few choice hilltribe peoples, ate and played guitar with them, and bought jewellery from their kids. Our guide, Chalong, is amazing, and makes all our meals (and drinks!) along the way; we just have to carry our lil bag of stuff (our huge backpacks are put in storage in the city). Though lil, that bag of stuff carried in it all our passports, money, and id. Saying that, it then went sailing down the river tied up in tee-pee like fashion to a bamboo raft. At first without us, then Chalong, our saviour, jumped his lanky tanned body into the river and with his long accurate reach, grabbed our wayward raft and saved our stuff. Whew. We then piled on like nothing had happened and managed to make our hour journey down the rushing river on a rickety bamboo raft without too many more problems besides wet shoes.
...now on to a beautiful white sand beach on KO TAO, our lil island paradise in the sea. New Years was nuts - heaps of partyers, choice drinks, beach sand, and strolls into the tide. Sometime during the night, Dustin got really soaked, stumbled into the woods, lost his whiskey, somehow kept his wallet on him, and doesn't remember a thing. We all went too big on tin "buckets" of Red Bull, Whiskey, and some unknown evil alcohol that made everybody completely blank out and have to piece together the night's events from each other's stories. Shared the fun with a bunch of JET's (they're really everywhere) and random partiers, divers, and backpackers on the beach, then moved on to a dance floor and bar on the other side of the island. Crazy pick-up truck taxis nearly killed us all, but whatever, it was all in good fun fun fun, with fireworks, fire dancing, and cheap drinks all round. After staying on our lil island home for 5 wonderful days, I got certified for Scuba Diving, the best thing i've probably ever done in the water. Our instructor was hilarious, our group genki, the ocean teeming with life. I logged 4 dives into my own lil Dive Log Book, got a kickass card to make it all real, and had a video made of all the thai-themed sights, fish, and coral. Amazing! and I'm certified for life.
...so Kao Tao, with all its tasty green curry, 50 baht Chang beer, clear star gazing, bungalow living, snorkelling, backpacker meetings, and diving, had to be left behind for different shores...after one long overnight boat ride (where we slept on mats and a hard pillow squashed like sardines) and a 3 hour cramped-as-hell bus ride, we made it to the opposite side of Thailand, to the west cost city of KRABI on the Andaman Coast. simple beautiful. We took an hour long boat ride to this amazingly gorgeous white sand beach, packed with tanned beach bums and framed by limstone cliffs. Ate samosas and donughts from thai vendors, played frisbee in the water, and took pics of some monkeys we ran into on the path, one attacked a lady carring snacks - funny sight. We were both pretty glad to have made the trek out here. Most everyone else remained 'stuck' on Ko Tao, there in paradise, too lazy to move. Dust and I hoped that more island paradises awaited us, so off we journeyed on a bus/ferry trip waaaay down the coast, close to the Malayasian border, to Ko Tarutao island. Our sole purpose, besides going waaay far out of our way, was to see some turtles laying eggs. We waited patiently at night on the beach, the cold ocean wind whipping painful sand into our eyes and making sleep impossible. Needless to say, we didn't see any turtles, but we did get to count about a hundred satellites - probably the same few orbiting our lil earth. The next day, we jumped a rocky boat, got sunburned, made it back to the mainland, took a sleeper train back up to Bangkok, and spend our last few days in Thailand touring on tuk-tuks and eating up the final few culinary and cheap massage parlour delights. Did I mention they were cheap?