So it's been forever since i've updated this, and i've had enough people giving out to me about it that i figure it's time to get stuck back in. I'm in australia now, just finished work at an avacado packing shed in Queensland, heading off in about two days for a 6000K drive to ayers rock, then on to darwin. Is good.
So, we were in Luang Prabang, Laos, just before christmas, and i'd just got a strange phone call off mick...
Me: "Morning Mick, how're you?"
Mick: "Not too bad brian. Are you at your guesthouse?"
Me: "Yeah, just having breakfast. What's up".
Mick: "Hahaha, not too much. Um, we have to leave town. Today. Like right now".
Mick and joe come over to meet kev, jax, eliane and myself and tell us what happened the night before. On leaving the bowling alley (latest place open in luang prabang), they convinced a tuc tuc driver to bring them home for about $0.20 each. The driver picked up three or four more people who he dropped off together around half way to the guesthouse. He then told the lads he was upping the price to $0.40 each. Mick being a complete miser (and a little inebriated) told him where to go and jumped out of the tuc tuc, followed by a bemused/confused joe. The driver then jumped out, shouted at them a bit, picked up a rock, and went to throw it at them. Thinking better of smashing up some tourists, he said he was going to call the police and the other tuc tuc drivers instead. The police would be trouble enough, but luang prabang has a "tuc tuc mafia" in place that are scarier than any machine gun clad copper. The guy drives off, attempts to run over the people he's already dropped, misses, turns around, tries again, and disappears into the night. Laos has a 12am curfew and this is about 2am so the lads know they're in a tight spot. The decision is reached to make it back to the guesthouse via backstreets, which results in jumping fences, hiding from the cops under cars, falling in the mekong more than once, and eventually getting back to the guesthouse covered in mud where the owner is asleep in the foyer, necessitating knocking and yelling until he gets up to let them in.
So the lads are scared shitless (naturally enough) which means we have to leave town ASAP. We spend the day going through backalleys looking for a private bus company to take us to Vang Viang (public buses in laos are, we heard, shockingly bad) and booking accomodation for that night. Eventually, when everything's come out too expensive, we hop into a tuc tuc and head for the bus station. On the way, we spot the tuc tuc driver that scared the lads the night before, and simultaneously realise the bus driver is in no way headed towards the bus station. Someone suggests we're being taken off to a back alley for yer man to beat the shite out of us, and just as the fear grips us, the tuc tuc pulls over and the guy says his friend will take us to vang viang in his van for about $3 each (half the price of the decrepit public bus). Turns out his mate is the coach of the local table tennis team, and for some reason they have a spang new air conditioned bus. We pay our money and the guy seems to be waiting for more people to hang up so mick, ever the negotiator, plays some hardball (which involves us taking our bags back out of his bus) which results in our leaving immediately, just the six of us - luxury all the way!
It's dark when we leave and the driver is a maniac so it's a hairy drive, but once we get up into the mountains i immediately wish we'd gone during the day instead - we go insanely high up into the hills and the views, even by moonlight, are spectacular. It's definitely a drive i'll make by bike the next time i'm in laos. After about two hours the driver pulls over at a random roadside crapshack where we stand around looking at the "food" on offer. Mick and Joe, ever the adventurous/hungry types, buy something that's allegedly chicken, take about two bites, and go green. Eventually we pull away and about two hours later arrive to Vang Viang.
Having heard so much about the place, we're expecting a little more than we get - a street of about two flashing neon signs and even less people. We check into our hotel and head out to get food. We pick the only place that appears to be open, Falconi Pizza, and settle around a table. The owner buzzes down the back and brings us a food menu each and a "happy menu" between us. The happy menu is basically a drug menu - weed, magic mushrooms and opium in various guises such as "Mushroom Milkshake", "Happy pizza" or "a joint of opium"! Insano! I later find out the reason the owner is able to get away with it is he sits at the front door all the time and when the cops show up he refuses to let them in as it's private property. Unsurprisingly, the guy looked like a nervous wreck. After eating we head towards the hotel and run into no less than Matty the san franciscan from pai. I spend about an hour chatting it up with him, then head back to me and eliane's room where we spend about an hour playing cards, which in our short time sharing a room has become a welcome tradition.
The next morning, matty books us into his hostel and we spend the day meeing the gang we'd convinced to come to vang viang for christmas/new years - in full - myself, Mick from oz, Eliane from Canada, Matty and Zan from San Francisco, and Joe, Mike, Kev, Jax, Najma, Jim and joanne from the UK. The next week isn't really worth going into in depth, as it was more or less the same thing every day with a few minor alterations. Vang Viang is best known to backpackers as the town where you rent out a tractor tire's inner tube, get dropped about 5-10 kms up the river, and spend the day floating down, stopping off at swings and makeshift bars along the way. Seeing as i can't swim, i was reluctant enough, but when all the lads went tubing the second day we were there and ended up very sick as a result, i crossed it off my to do list. Instead, we rent bikes and spend most days off on bike rides in different directions - hills to the north, plains to the south, waterfalls and gigantic rock/mountain things every which way - there's always somewhere to while away the day. Eliane got sickest out of everyone and discovered a bar/restaraunt where they showed Family Guy DVDs all day, so we usually meet there for breakfast, watch a few episodes, then go on a bike ride or chill in hammocks by the river, meet up for dinner, usually head for falconi where the lads indulged a bit, then across the river to the bar/nightclub to have a few drinks and meet people. Good fun all in all, but if it wasn't christmas i'd have left after a day or two - the place was just a bit mind numbing. Having the tubing angle meant once the sun got a bit low, the town was teeming with drunken idiots coming home from tubing and heading out on the town, and the main strip was a bit of a tourist trap nightmare. Fair enough we watched a good share of Family Guy, but EVERY restaraunt in town was known by what TV show they had on (Simpsons, Friends, Seinfeld, Everyone Loves Malcolm etc) and so many people with just sit all day watching telly, then head out at night, which is fair enough but not really my scene. Sealing the deal, the only bar open past 11pm is covered in signs saying "live DJ from ireland", DJ roughly translating to "50 year old northern irish prick who sticks on mix cds on random (sample playlist, Chemical Brothers followed by Dolly Parton followed by Prodidgy followed by I'm having the time of my life) then goes around abusing people over the PA for things better handled with a quiet word". The bar itself is pretty cool, never a que for drinks, covered in huts with multiple hammocks, all set around a giant campfire, but being christmas it's full of drunken arseholes, with the music/DJ pushing it over the bearable edge.
Christmas day was much like any other, went up into the hills for a bike ride, zan's tire punctured in the middle of nowhere but luckily some random local fixed it for free using a lighter and a small bucket of water. We also saw some bandits rocking around with machine guns on their backs - no threat to us though! Myself, eliane, matt and zan went out for a christmas dinner of (kinda) roast (possibly) beef with some sort of potato things before meeting up with the rest of the gang for a quality night out.
About two days after christmas, joe, mike and i decide to take a proper bike ride. We pack up with enough water and sunscreen to cover the five hour ride down to Vientiane, Laos' capital city. As we're leaving, i meet Zan at the foot of the stairs. It's the day the cast on her leg is due to come off (she'd broken it a week before i met her, having attempted to jump off a waterfall into Matty's arms, only to hit the ground due to Mattys reflexes being less lightning fast and more Lada fast). Zan not being a fan of hospitals, she was cutting off the cast herself with a swiss army knife. I took some photos as a crowd of Laoations gathered to see the crazy lady cut off her cast. I later put the photos up on my flickr page, and after two days they'd had about 1500 views each. It later turned out some germans had happened across the photos and posted them on a cast fetish website. Germans... Weird.
Anyways, the drive to vientiane was a highlight of asia for me, winding through mountains, along rivers, through tiny towns, met with smiles and waves all the way. We stop a few times to get food or just to admire views, and by nightfall pull into Vientiane. We get a bite to eat before scouring the town for somewhere to stay. Compared to the $4 a night we were each paying for aircon'd double rooms in Vang Viang, Vientiane was a splurge. We eventually settle for a fairly central hotel for about $25 for a room with five beds.
Having heard the riverside is where all the locals eat, we head off in search of some Laoation goodies. The riverside is covered in food stalls selling everything from fresh fish to "pick 'em, kill 'em, eat 'em" chickens to bugs and rats, but also crafts stalls, miniature galleries... Just about anything you could need of an evening. We eventually pick a random stall, sit by the river with some beers and order food. What we get is... An experience. I won't get into it but i'm pretty sure the meat wasn't even a relative either chickens or pigs and i think joe's fish wasn't dead (not that it'd bother him). We head off in search of bars and get our first taste of Vientiane's bar culture. While any asian cities' bars usually feature an undercurrent of prostitution, Vientiane throws it right in your face. It was hard to find a bar where 85% of the women weren't on the game, and we eventually give up trying, settling into a corner of a rooftop bar where the lads watch football while i tell stupid jokes and generally insult them (as is the custom). The bar kicks out around ten so we go in search of somewhere to get a late drink. We ask a few tuc tuc drivers, and at about $0.50 a ride (for the three of us) we can afford to try a few options, but everywhere's either insanely expensive (selling no beers, only bottles of imported american whiskey (usually jim beam) for above american prices) or jammed full of dodgy looking women. Eventually we hear there's a hotel where the bar stays open until 3am, so we make the trek and run into some weird young american kid who's dad put him in the penthouse of the hotel and given him an allowance of $1000 a day. We head up to the nightclub and surprise surprise, it's 99% hookers, just joe, mike, me, and a small gang of american kids playing pool, versus around 200 asian women doing their best to look sexier than the lady next to them. We get a few beers and try having a bit of a dance, but any movement other than bringing a bottle to your mouth lands you with eight to ten women surrounding you, whispering prices in your ear. Eventually we give up and call it a night.
The next morning we head out to get a bite to eat across town. I forget my helmet and, of course, get nabbed by the cops for it. I'm driving along and all of a sudden there's a laoation police man standing in the middle of the road in front of me. I pull over and he asks for my registration. I tell him the bike is rented and he asks me to step over to the traffic cop booth on the side of the road, where about eight guys in police uniforms are mooching around. I give a quick "sabidee" as i walk up (hello in laoation) which sets them all off laughing sarcastically - i'm obviously in a lot of trouble. The main cop asks to see my licence, which i produce, before he points out i don't actually have a bike licence, only a car licence (why i have no idea). "So, you have no helmet, no registration, no evidence of insurance and no licence. This will cost you big fine. Maybe $200. I give you address of police station where you go pay fine". Innocently, i ask if there's any way i could pay the fine at his booth instead. He looks nervous/excited and says "five dollar", which i produce from my pocket and he conceals beneath his book. "Have good day!!". He looks happy as larry with his five dollars, and well he should - a laoation policeman's monthly salary is $25 so i gave him the bulk of a weeks pay.
After breakfast, we head off on a drive to a local sculpture park, which turns out to be directly across the river from Nong Khai where i'd spent a week relaxing a few weeks before - in fact i can actually see my guesthouse across the river! We get to the sculpture park which turns out to be a stripped down version of the famous park in Nong Khai - apparently the sculptor started his park in laos, got kicked out as it was all too weird, and finished off the whole operation across the river in thailand. There's a big gang of school kids at the park and mike, hearing them saying "falang" in hushed tones (it's the asian derogatory slang for white people), hisses "falang falang" at them mock menacingly, and before we know it, him and joe are chasing them around the park shouting "falang falang", a game that keeps everyone amused for a good hour. We walk around for another half an hour taking photos of the sculputres, at all times surrounded by about 50 giggling schoolkids before getting back on the bikes and heading back to Vientiane. That night we go out for dinner and a few drinks with some vang viang people we randomly ran into before heading back to the hotel.
In the morning we set off early for vang viang. I assume the early hour will mean we can take it a bit slower and see more scenery, whereas joe thinks "early to rise, early to vang viang" and sets off at bloody warp speed. After about two hours we stop off at a roadside bar for a breather. The bar itself is literally a shack with music pumping out of it and about 15-20 heavily inebriated but friendly laoations inside. We settle at a table, get a beer, and instantly feel we're about to be kidnapped or worse. One of the dodgiest looking people i've ever seen comes over and introduces himself creepily before introducing us to half the bar, who are all looking at us like we're edible. Our drinks quickly downed, we're back on the road, but after about 20 minutes of winding up hills, i tell the lads that i'm going to go at my own pace - driving at 150kph through beautiful scenery isn't my idea of a great bike ride, so if they want to get boy racer, they can do it without me. I wind my way through the hills for about an hour before i meet them again - at which point they'd been waiting for about 45 mins (allegedly). We get home in the evening and head out for a few beers, as usual.
At some point in the night, we get chatting to two australian girls, one of whom is being stalked by a very creepy looking laoation guy. Apparently they've been trying to lose him all day but to no avail. He's keen on the girl, so she asks me to put my arm around her, assuming he'll get the hint and bugger off. Unfortunately, it's has pretty much the opposite effect, and he decides i'm to be dealt with physically. He starts shouting at me, and having heard loads of stories of the "argue with one laoation and 50 show up out of nowhere" variety i keep repeating "i have no problem with you friend". For some reason, this makes him angrier and we find out he picks fights with westerners every few days and, being a wrestling champ, usually beats the shite out of them. His threats escilate to include one of the girls with us, naj, who he tells he's beaten up many women and has no problem punching her if she doesn't get out of his way. Naj, being tough as nails, bless her, gets in his face and we eventually make our way out of the bar as it's closing. Weirdo follows us so we ask the dj/owner guy if we can hang back a little until the guy leaves, but, being a prick, he refuses. We hang back as much as possible anyways, but the weirdo is about 75 meters ahead of us doing stretches. There's a bridge between the bar and the town that's made of sticks and ropes and sways when you cross it, and it took us a good while to get yer man across, but when we get to the other side of the river, we split into a few groups and lose him. The next night, i'm at the bar again with Kev and Jax and the guy walks up to me and says "i sorry i so angry last night". I clink bottles with him and tell him it's no problem, fearing a reprise (the guy still looking like he'd pull the heart out of my chest, temple of doom style), and, of course he continues with "normally i not get jealous woman, but why you make jealous woman, WHY YOU MAKE JEALOUS WOMAN?" I keep saying "is no problem" and he keeps shouting and shaking his fist in my face until after a minute he loses steam and heads away. He spends the rest of my time there trying to stare me down, and one night even does a few menacing drive by's at about 2am when we're hanging outside our hostel, but nothing more comes of it.
For new years, Jim and Joanne convince one of the bars that's staying open late (and has a bonfire and tonnes of sweet cabins with hammocks in them) to let us play our own music as long as we do some fliers. Result!! We get down there early and people mill in from time to time from the previously mentioned late bar next door, the bar gives us free food and a few shots a piece, at some stage we move from the campfire to one of the huts (along with some randoms we pick up) and around midnight we realise it's new years because everyone at the bar next door's cheering. Seeing as i hate new years because everywhere's packed and there's always some sort of drama, this was probably the best new years i've ever had, sitting in a hammock in the asian heat with a really great gang of people, no worries in the world, happy as larry.
So i'll leave it there, that's enough for one sitting. I'll get another part done in about a week. Until then...
Friday, May 23, 2008
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
A story split in two, part one: Thailand into laos.
So........ It's over a month since I've been on here and I'd be lying if i said it hadn't played on my mind a little. At first i had no interest in keeping it updated because i wasn't sure any more than three people were reading it (my mother, Sara, and Helena) but i started getting emails from people asking "where's the update" and that gave me encouragement. It also made me think about how to write it to make it more interesting, and that probably put me off even longer. Then it got to the point where I'd not blogged in over a month but by then i was on an amazing island where i didn't feel like sitting in front of a computer for two hours prattling on about myself (plus the internet cost a tonne there and i was living super cheap).
So here's the compromise. I'm going to do this in two parts, with the second part in about a week. If you want to read the whole thing, more damn power to you. If you want to dip in and out, it's all yours. If you're as lazy as me, here's the main points from both parts, in no particular order, and if you want bigger explanations, go find them yourself.
First: The "where's your head at" stuff.
1) I started smoking again. Yeah i know. If it's any consolation, I've started losing weight. In fact, that deserves a point of it's own.
2) I've started losing weight. For anyone who knew me three years ago, you'll know i used to be a skinny fucker, far from the fat bastard i am now, so I'm happy as all hell. Thank you cigarettes, i owe you one.
3) I started getting homesick last week but i think I'm out the other end of it. I've made some amazing friends here and I'm about to see a bunch of them tomorrow in Malaysia so that makes it easier, plus i loaded some photos of Eva and Jamie (my niece and nephew) onto my MP3 player so they keep me going.
Second: The salacious stuff
4) I chatted up a prostitute for two hours. To my defense, i didn't know she was a prostitute.
5) I danced with a gang of prostitutes in a bar. To my defense, it was a ridiculous situation and i decided to make the most of it. Also to my defense, i never laid a finger on any of them.
6) I had to leave a town in northern Laos less than 24 hours after arriving. To my defense, it wasn't my fault.
7) I spent a load of time in opium dens. To my defense (and probably to my parent's relief), i didn't do any drugs there (or anywhere else for that matter).
Third: The travel stuff
8) I spent two days on a boat floating down the Mekong river. It was more awesome than i could possibly put into words. From a distance, we got to see people who lived on the hills with no money and no electricity. Insane.
9) I took a whole bunch of sleeper buses. Two of them have stories, one mildly amusing, one mildly maddening. You'll have to dig them out yourself.
10) I spent four hours on a local bus with an Australian who works for an NGO that does human rights watch on Burma, alternately hearing what's going on there (stories that i think of every few days and make me pretty depressed and sick), and telling the dirtiest jokes we could think of. Then he brought me through rush hour chiang mai traffic on his scooter with my backpack on and my day bag in my hand which was the closest i've come to death on this trip so far.
11) I went on a two hour dinner cruise. Yes, i am now officially posh.
12) I bribed a policeman. That's all i have to say about that for now.
Four: The future stuff
13) The USA road trip is in full effect. My friend john is buying us a camper van (with a bed and cooking facilities) and we'll be going from michigan, up into north east Canada, right across the way to the west, down the rocky mountains, into the US, down the coast to new mexico, up route 66 to chicago, over to maine in the north east, and down the east to Fest. So far it's me and timmy and possibly an awesome canadian named sadie. But probably not.
14) While there, I'm making a documentary about No Idea records and the Gainesville music scene and Fest, which pretty much everyone who's ever met me knows is as close as i come to organized religion. They (No Idea) are psyched that i'm doing it and I am psyched to be doing it (whatever the opposite of exaggeration is, that part back there, about me being psyched - that was that).
15) I got a working visa for Australia and will be there from probably mid march to save money to fund said documentary.
Five: The bit that doesn't fit in anywhere else.
16) I got to hang around with a six month old monkey for about a week, and the owners let me take him out for two full days where we slept in a hammock together and went on walks and climbed trees and stuff. It was ABSOLUTELY AWESOME.
Ok, so onto the blog part.
When i blogged last, i was getting ready to head off on a mammoth bike ride for a week. Each morning I'd get up to go, and it just never happened for one reason or another - too hungover, meet too many new people the same day, too hot, too cold, too tired, no mood to ride bikes all day - i just flat out didn't want to leave Pai, even though i had this niggling feeling in my head that i only had about ten days left in Thailand. On the Sunday, everyone in my gang was going to a Buddhist monastery up the road to chill out and find themselves or some such hippy crap, and it came to the crunch. Ozzie Mick, Limey Joe and i were sitting in a wheatgrass bar on the saurday and i stood up and said "fuckitt, i'm flipping a coin". Being that i decided to go on this trip on the flip of a coin, i figured i should let it up to the coin, and the coin said don't go on the bike ride, so that was it, bike ride over. I made plans to head back to chiang mai (site of my week's sickness at the end of November) and go over to the east of Thailand for a week to relax and recover from Pai.
That night (the Saturday) we all went out for the lads last big bash before heading to the monastery. It was a long night and at the end of it (about 5am) i found myself in this bar drinking Tiger beer with the English expat owner and this Australian expat asshole. There was also an Asian looking girl there with a strong American accent and an english guy, playing pool. The bar owner was a prick and I got sick of listening to the Australian so got talking to the asian, who told me she was actually from Bangkok and had the accent from teaching english. She said she was in the process of applying for a USA visa to go to college so we got talking about getting citizenship/visas, seeing as Elisa, my brother's girlfriend had gone thorough that process. We were hitting it off pretty good so we start playing pool and we're talking about going to college in the US for a good while, as I'd spent a good deal of time looking into it myself about a year ago when i wanted to go there to study photography. I mentioned how expensive the fees there are and she agreed, then looked me straight in the eye, and said "but I'd do anything to get the money together to go there".
So there it was, I'd been played by a seasoned professional, the hooker with a heart of gold. I tried to finish up the game as quick as possible but i was too drunk to play well (if i'd been any bit soberer i probably would have figured out she was a prostitute much quicker too, but whatever). She was seriously pulling her shots to let me win (something I'd already pointed out, and but had never associated with my being "played"). Then i spent a while trying to pot the black just to get out of there, but that wasn't working either, so i excused myself to go to the toilet and never came back. That incident finally made it very very easy to leave pai.
The next day we all went out for breakfast to this burger joint owned by an Alaskan guy. Interesting side story, he finally told me why thai people had been pointing and laughing at me for the last few weeks - in Thailand, having a beard means you're a criminal slash asshole slash idiot with a beard. It made sense seeing as how, when i'd stopped at the night market the night before to ask whether this delicious looking chunk of meat on a stick was beef or pork, the owner burst out laughing and ran off. Go figure.
So this place does delicious but gigantic burgers, and as it's the lads last proper meal for a week (and because I'm a bit of a bastard), i tell joe and mick that if they can eat two half pounders, with all the extras, I'll pay for the whole lot of them (i was expecting both of them to end up throwing up or at the very least give up in shame) . I ordered a quarter pounder with bacon and sat back to watch. But they did it. The hungry bastards actually managed to eat the whole lot, with bacon, veggie sides, fries - the whole lot. They suffered afterwards which was kind of worth it, but disappointing for me.
The lads hitchhiked off to the monastery, and i headed for the bus station. In a ridiculous stroke of luck,i got the last bus out of town and got seated next to an Ozzie named Sean who lived in Chiang Mai. He works for a human rights organization that monitors Burma (he earns $250 a month, which seemingly is enough to live on there), and told me some stories that really turned my stomach - if you want to know them, email me, but i guarantee they'll upset you and their retelling has made a few people cry and one guy throw up. We evened it out my telling each other some dirty/sick/disgusting jokes and actually had a great time on the bus. He also told me about when his old man used to own an opal mine in oz, and how when they'd catch people stealing from them, they'd chuck them down the mine. Sean's brother also works in human rights work, so i think there's some sort of familial karma thing going on there.
When we got to Chiang Mai, he brought me to his favorite local eaterie, and offered me a lift to my "guesthouse". Now, when i came away i made a promise I'd stay somewhere nice once a month, and tonight was that night. This guy was living on $250 a day, and my hotel cost $50, so i felt like a bit of an asshole, but what can you do. He got his scooter out of the parking lot and i hopped on the back, with my 40lb bag on my back, and my (fairly heavy) day pack (camera, MP3 player, scrapbook, notepad, bunch more heavy crap) in one hand. That ride was by far the scariest thing that's happened to me in Thailand, how i got out of there alive is a mystery. I had one hand to hold onto the bike with, and we swayed the whole way because Sean, god bless him, drives like a maniac, swinging in and out between cars, flying through red lights, all the kinds of things that should have seen my brains make a Jackson Pollack work with the pavement.
Somehow we got to my place, said our goodbyes, and i entered, hands down, the poshest hotel I've ever stayed at. There was a 24 hour band in the lobby for chrissakes. It cost e30 but at home, the minimum room charge would have been about e400, no problem. I rocked in with a week's worth of dirt all over my clothes, smelling like a pigfarm and a tshirt that had SATAN written across it in big letters (to be fair, it does say "satan has your nose" so it's not THAT bad). Once i got into my room i looked out the window and saw the amazing view over the city. I was on the 45th floor and could see for miles. That alone was worth the money.
Living in the lap of luxury as i was, i decided to eat it up in similar fashion, so i went across the street to the local Burger King and got a triple bacon cheese burger meal (Burger King and McDonalds here cost the same as home, so it was, comparatively, pretty expensive) and ate it while watching Harrison Ford movies on the free cable TV, sitting on the bed in my gigantic room, a bed i should mention that was twice the size of my room at home. I made some calls to home and crashed out with the blackout curtains pulled and honest to god, had the best 12 hours sleep I've ever had (no morning sun, no roosters, no construction sounds, no smell of thai morning food. Thank you jesus).
The next morning i checked out and to make up for my splurge, stayed in the cheapest, shittiest place in town - "Julie's Guesthouse". It's the kind of place that Ahane MacGowan wakes up and realizes he needs to get off the booze. My room was more like a box, it had a window that opened onto a wall and a camper bed that was slightly less comfortable than the floor, but for e1.50, who's complaining.
That day i rented a bike (can you see i'm already getting sick of typing?) and headed off into the hills to see Doi Suthep, the main monastery attraction in northern Thailand. There's pictures on my flickr but all i'll say is there's about 450 steps to get up there and i felt every one of them. When i got to the top i had to buy my ticket in sign language as i almost literally couldn't breathe. It was really peaceful there and it was cool to see the locals worshiping the buddahs and stuff, ringing bells, and just generally getting their religion on. They get pretty into it to say the least.
After that i headed back into town and drove around for a while, something i realized pretty quickly i love doing. Chiang Mai's traffic is pretty intense, but the Thais are great drivers, they honk their horns a lot to let you know they're there, or coming close, or turning off, or even just to say hi, so you can zip around between cars and never get hit, and believe me i tore the arse out of it.
That night i went out with two english guys and killed them at pool, but they were a little distracted as one was dating this thai girl (not sure if there was money involved but i chose not to ask) and while the other guy was friendly, we just didn't all get along so well so i made my excuses early and left.
The next day i had a bit of a freakout. I'd been in Thailand for about seven weeks and only seen about seven places, all of them what are known as "typical tourist/backpacker fare". I'm REALLLY REALLY not into this whole "I'm not a tourist, i'm a backpacker/traveler" bullshit discussion that people seem to want to get into endlessly (my opinion, if you're visiting someone else's country and not working, you're a tourist, end of story), but at the same time i was worried I'd squandered my time and not seen enough of "the real Thailand" (it pains me to write that sentence, but you get the idea). I went to the bus station in the morning and booked a ticket for the farthest away place i could find - Nong Khai. I'd heard it was nice there, it was right on the laos border across from Vientiane with just the Mekong seperating you, and i heard they had a Buddha park designed by this guy who took way too much acid. Sounds good to me.
After a quick haircut and beard trim (so as to not get laughed at too much), i went to the bus station for my overnight bus. These things are huge, and there's huge leg space and the seats go right back, so i was ready for the 14 hour journey. I settled into my seat and figured me and a normal sized Thai guy could get a proper night's sleep here without too much hassle. How wrong was i. The only 300lb guy in Thailand got on, squeezed into the window seat and pulled his blanket over him to get to sleep (a sleep that came complete with snoring. Like serious snoring). Funny story - as he fell asleep his hand slowly curled, while turned my direction, into what's known as "the finger". Yep, the guy slept for 14 hours flipping me off. I read for a few hours, and spent most of the journey listening to the Thai top 40 karaoke they insist on playing at top volume on every VIP bus until i could take no more. I dropped the last of the sleeping pills I'd got when I'd got sick in Chiang Mai last time and fell asleep listening to Small Brown Bike.
In the morning there was a minor panic when i ended up going to the wrong bus station (a story not worth telling save for the fact i got to see a small Thai town come to life, which was amazing), but eventually i got to Nong Khai and to my guest house, Mut Mee. It's a beautiful place owned by a Kiwi guy and an English guy that has a shaded garden full of tables to read and relax, amazing and amazingly cheap food, loads of yoga courses and that kinda hippie crap, a fairly good bookshop, and best of all, and amazing view of the Mekong. For the next few days i hung out there, reading books, almost not drinking, and taking in the good atmosphere. On my second last day i was off looking for an internet place when i ran into this French Canadian girl named Elian (hereafter referred to as The Alien). The Alien was/is a super cool girl with great taste in music as boyfriend in a band that sounds just like my favorite bands at home, so we got on super well. We rented bikes and headed to the Buddha park. We got lost a few times and had to make some sketchy crosses of highways but eventually got there.
And what a sight. To say this guy took a lot of acid was an understatement. They had this sculpture of an elephant surrounded by barking dogs doing different things, some playing cards, some flying planes, some throwing rocks. There was one sculpture that was about two hundred foot tall that was seven hissing snake heads, about ten feet tall a piece, with a Buddha in the middle. You can see the pictures on my flickr, but it barely covers how mad it was.
Anyways, that evening me and the alien took a dinner cruise along the mekong and went in search of a bar to have some drinky drinks. We found this once place with a cool pool table and some fairly good 80s metal (priest, maiden, that kind of thing) on the stereo, but everyone was drinking coffee. Weird. I went up to the bar to figure out the story and found out it was run by an english guy. The deal was that there was an election two days later, so by thai law, everyone had to stay sober for two days to "make the right choice". Never one to be kept away from a drink, the owner was serving beer in coffee cups. So we played pool for a while, drinking beer from coffee cups, at some point the alien headed home and i got into a bacon buttie eating competition with these gigantic scousers. Somehow i won, but somewhere along the way, i left without my bag. Go figure (i got it back the next day from a guy who seemingly knew me pretty well but i had no idea who he was. It also took me 35 minuts to find the bar, even though it was less than a minute from my guest house. I guess i must have drank too much coffee).
The alien was planning on heading for Laos but i managed to convince her we had a cool gang of people going on the slowboat expedition in Laos, so we headed for Udon Thani (local bus depot) and bought more night bus tickets. We spent the day in Udon Thani (note: complete and utter shithole) where i had sushi for the first time (just as horrible as i had guessed), ate a spoonfull of wasabi (i was told it was aubergene, it burned the shit out of my mouth), and learned to play the card game shithead. I also had my first meal at a restaurant recommended by the legendary "Lonely Planet", basically a bible for travelers. Halfway through a lasagna that consisted solely of pasta sheets and half cooked pork (and that cost me about five times the price of a lasagna in any other thai restaurant), i got my first hint that the Lonely Planet is a complete piece of toss. More on that later.
So we got our bus back to Chiang Mai (there's a side story where we spend half an hour going the wrong way down a highway in a tuc tuc, but this is getting too long already), chat about crap and fall asleep. As luck would have it we run into all the Pai crowd (English Joe, Aussies Mick, Mike, Lisa and her new friend Sam) and check into this fairly nice but really cheap guesthouse. It's Mike's last night before heading home so we have a big night out. Highlights including but not limited to: mike passing out in probably the second bar we go to and having to be carried home, a bar that served laughing gas (but was dry by the time we got there), me dancing on a table (how it held me i'll never know), a nightclub full of seedy guys and thai girls/hookers that we left in about five minutes, joe falling in the moat, seeing a dehydrated/nearly dead elephant collapse but be revived with a water hose, a tuc tuc race, a ride in some random thai guy's SUV, and finally trying to wake a completely passed out Sam for his bus in a way that i won't put in here, but suffice to say, he was totally freaked out when we told him the next day. Also notable, i had my first cigarette in three years. I don't know why or how, but i remember it was really nice and just as good as i'd thought it would be after three years of no cigarettes whatsoever. How i thought i'd get away with just one, i've no idea, but there it is. More on that later.
The day after was pretty quiet, we walked around town a bit, said some goodbyes, ate, bought books and called it a night early. We all had places to go the next day and the night before had taken it out of us.
Around 7am, me, the alien, joe and mick headed for the bus station for what we were told was a VIP (aka sleep in comfort) bus but what turned out to be the most piece of crap old local bus you could imagine. Mick, joe and i got into a seat designed for three thai people and it was pretty quickly obvious it was never going to happen - i got the asile seat and had about a quarter of a buttcheek worth of room, which meant i had to stand up every time someone wanted to pass. After a hot minute me, mick and the alien headed for the back of the bus, found some empty seats, and passed out.
Five horrible hours later we got to the thai/laos border in Chiang Khong, officially departed Thailand, and officially entered laos at Huay Xai. Funny story: every country has to pay a different amount for the laos visa (ireland was $30) and mick filled out all his forms on his Australian passport, before realizing he could get it on his UK passport for $5 cheaper, so went through the whole process again. Suffice to say, Mick's a tight bastard. Somewhere along the way we met an english couple, Kev and Jax, and spent the evening wandering around Huay Xai, which is a town of absolutely nothing to speak of other than it's the starting point of the famous Mekong Slow boat.
What to say about the slow boat. Well, it's a boat, and it goes really really slowly down the mekong, for two days in fact. We got a nice gang of us going down the back by the engine and strapped in for seven hours of amazing scenery and good chats. Every so often the boat would pull over for locals to hop on and hop off, we visited tiny villages, and through the trees we could see little settlements where people live off the land on gigantic mountains. Imagine that, if you lived in a village of about twenty people with no money, no cops, no electricity, no refrigeration, no TV... To say it must be an alien existence is putting it mildly. Top marks to the drivers too, the Mekong seems to flow about seven directions at once and every so often there would be areas with huge rocks and small rocks, which means there's tonnes of rocks just under the water. Couple that with swells, whirl pools, and diverging flows and you have a situation where a three hundred foot long boat full of fat white people must be an absolute miracle to keep afloat. At one stage the boat pulled in and these kids got on with crates full of drinks and snacks to sell to us. One kid of about six had a crate of beers, so i picked up a can of Beer Laos and asked how much. When the price was too high (and the beer was warm) i put it back and said "thank you no", he cocked his head and shouted "GET FUCKED" and walked off. We all fell about laughing, and that being one of my favorite phrases, getting it off a laoation hill tribe kid cracked me up for about half an hour.
After seven hours we stopped in a town called Pakbeng for the night. The boat stops at the bottom of a steep sand dune, so getting up was a nightmare, especially as it was covered in touts trying to sell guesthouses, marijuana, and opium (just about everyone in Laos will, at some point, try to tell you marijuana or opium, even the cops). We picked one guy and he brought us to a reasonably decent guesthouse which was cheap as hell. Me and the alien got a room (two single beds) that cost about e0.50 each and we headed out to a great Indian place for dinner. After a quick pint we all headed for bed, ready for another day's slow boating.
The next day we got to the pier to find out they planned on putting two boat's worth of people on one boat. We all hopped on and sat on the ground near the front (not as bad as it sounds) until the lads spotted what looked like airline seats on the roof. They all jumped up and settled in (i skipped out, knowing full well they'd never let them stay there - i was right, they lasted about four minutes up there) and there was a stand off between the last forty people left to get on and the slow boat people. Some prat with a lonely planet started on about "well the Lonely Planet says if you protest they'll give you a new boat" and started waving it at the boat people. They shrugged and pulled the boat out and headed off without them. I met a Slovenian couple who were on a mammoth motorbike ride and only taking the slowboat for two hours as there was no roads on the opposite side of the river to Pakbeng and we laughed at the lonely planet prat for a while. They told me about getting a flat tire in remote Laos and walking for a mile to a village to get someone to repair it, all the while people coming out of their houses and following them, having never seen white people before. By the time they got to a guy who could repair it, there was a crowd of around 300 people (i saw the photos, it was insane) and when they paid they guy two American dollar bills for fixing the bike, people went insane, they'd never seen so much money before. Madness.
The second day was more relaxed than the first, as we were at the front and so had no engine noise. The scenery was no less beautiful and around seven we docked in Luang Prabang, Laos' second city. We found some cheap digs (me and the alien splitting a twin room again) and the lads went for dinner. I went off looking for an ATM as i had no local currency (kip), only to find the ATMs in Laos don't accept VISA. Shite. I found a guy with a counter who did however and set about getting e100, a small amount i thought. How wrong was i. Get this - e100 is one million, three hundred thousand kip. And the guy paid me in five thousand kip notes. It was the biggest wad of cash you've ever seen (i later took a photo of me covered in it, i'll put it on flickr soon). He packed it in a double sized Agfa bag (the ones you get photos in) and i set off down the street with my eyes darting everywhere.
We had dinner (which for four people, including a bunch of beers, came to about e4) and headed off for a bar, where i ran into some friends from pai, Joe and Jim. The bars in laos close at 11:30 sharp so while myself, the alien, and Jax and Kev headed for home, Mick and Joe decided they'd head to the bowling alley, which is the latest opening place in Luang Prabang. Alien and i played cards for a while and crashed out.
In the morning i met Kev and Jax for breakfast and we started talking about what we'd do for the next few days in Luang Prabang. At around 10:30 i got a call from Mick.
Me: "Morning Mick, how're you?"
Mick: "Not too bad brian. Are you at your guesthouse?"
Me: "Yeah, just having breakfast. What's up".
Mick: "Hahaha, not too much. Um, we have to leave town. Today. Like right now".
That's where i'm leaving it folks, it's 10pm and i have a flight in the morning to Malaysia. I'll try get the rest of this done in a week. See ya soon.
So here's the compromise. I'm going to do this in two parts, with the second part in about a week. If you want to read the whole thing, more damn power to you. If you want to dip in and out, it's all yours. If you're as lazy as me, here's the main points from both parts, in no particular order, and if you want bigger explanations, go find them yourself.
First: The "where's your head at" stuff.
1) I started smoking again. Yeah i know. If it's any consolation, I've started losing weight. In fact, that deserves a point of it's own.
2) I've started losing weight. For anyone who knew me three years ago, you'll know i used to be a skinny fucker, far from the fat bastard i am now, so I'm happy as all hell. Thank you cigarettes, i owe you one.
3) I started getting homesick last week but i think I'm out the other end of it. I've made some amazing friends here and I'm about to see a bunch of them tomorrow in Malaysia so that makes it easier, plus i loaded some photos of Eva and Jamie (my niece and nephew) onto my MP3 player so they keep me going.
Second: The salacious stuff
4) I chatted up a prostitute for two hours. To my defense, i didn't know she was a prostitute.
5) I danced with a gang of prostitutes in a bar. To my defense, it was a ridiculous situation and i decided to make the most of it. Also to my defense, i never laid a finger on any of them.
6) I had to leave a town in northern Laos less than 24 hours after arriving. To my defense, it wasn't my fault.
7) I spent a load of time in opium dens. To my defense (and probably to my parent's relief), i didn't do any drugs there (or anywhere else for that matter).
Third: The travel stuff
8) I spent two days on a boat floating down the Mekong river. It was more awesome than i could possibly put into words. From a distance, we got to see people who lived on the hills with no money and no electricity. Insane.
9) I took a whole bunch of sleeper buses. Two of them have stories, one mildly amusing, one mildly maddening. You'll have to dig them out yourself.
10) I spent four hours on a local bus with an Australian who works for an NGO that does human rights watch on Burma, alternately hearing what's going on there (stories that i think of every few days and make me pretty depressed and sick), and telling the dirtiest jokes we could think of. Then he brought me through rush hour chiang mai traffic on his scooter with my backpack on and my day bag in my hand which was the closest i've come to death on this trip so far.
11) I went on a two hour dinner cruise. Yes, i am now officially posh.
12) I bribed a policeman. That's all i have to say about that for now.
Four: The future stuff
13) The USA road trip is in full effect. My friend john is buying us a camper van (with a bed and cooking facilities) and we'll be going from michigan, up into north east Canada, right across the way to the west, down the rocky mountains, into the US, down the coast to new mexico, up route 66 to chicago, over to maine in the north east, and down the east to Fest. So far it's me and timmy and possibly an awesome canadian named sadie. But probably not.
14) While there, I'm making a documentary about No Idea records and the Gainesville music scene and Fest, which pretty much everyone who's ever met me knows is as close as i come to organized religion. They (No Idea) are psyched that i'm doing it and I am psyched to be doing it (whatever the opposite of exaggeration is, that part back there, about me being psyched - that was that).
15) I got a working visa for Australia and will be there from probably mid march to save money to fund said documentary.
Five: The bit that doesn't fit in anywhere else.
16) I got to hang around with a six month old monkey for about a week, and the owners let me take him out for two full days where we slept in a hammock together and went on walks and climbed trees and stuff. It was ABSOLUTELY AWESOME.
Ok, so onto the blog part.
When i blogged last, i was getting ready to head off on a mammoth bike ride for a week. Each morning I'd get up to go, and it just never happened for one reason or another - too hungover, meet too many new people the same day, too hot, too cold, too tired, no mood to ride bikes all day - i just flat out didn't want to leave Pai, even though i had this niggling feeling in my head that i only had about ten days left in Thailand. On the Sunday, everyone in my gang was going to a Buddhist monastery up the road to chill out and find themselves or some such hippy crap, and it came to the crunch. Ozzie Mick, Limey Joe and i were sitting in a wheatgrass bar on the saurday and i stood up and said "fuckitt, i'm flipping a coin". Being that i decided to go on this trip on the flip of a coin, i figured i should let it up to the coin, and the coin said don't go on the bike ride, so that was it, bike ride over. I made plans to head back to chiang mai (site of my week's sickness at the end of November) and go over to the east of Thailand for a week to relax and recover from Pai.
That night (the Saturday) we all went out for the lads last big bash before heading to the monastery. It was a long night and at the end of it (about 5am) i found myself in this bar drinking Tiger beer with the English expat owner and this Australian expat asshole. There was also an Asian looking girl there with a strong American accent and an english guy, playing pool. The bar owner was a prick and I got sick of listening to the Australian so got talking to the asian, who told me she was actually from Bangkok and had the accent from teaching english. She said she was in the process of applying for a USA visa to go to college so we got talking about getting citizenship/visas, seeing as Elisa, my brother's girlfriend had gone thorough that process. We were hitting it off pretty good so we start playing pool and we're talking about going to college in the US for a good while, as I'd spent a good deal of time looking into it myself about a year ago when i wanted to go there to study photography. I mentioned how expensive the fees there are and she agreed, then looked me straight in the eye, and said "but I'd do anything to get the money together to go there".
So there it was, I'd been played by a seasoned professional, the hooker with a heart of gold. I tried to finish up the game as quick as possible but i was too drunk to play well (if i'd been any bit soberer i probably would have figured out she was a prostitute much quicker too, but whatever). She was seriously pulling her shots to let me win (something I'd already pointed out, and but had never associated with my being "played"). Then i spent a while trying to pot the black just to get out of there, but that wasn't working either, so i excused myself to go to the toilet and never came back. That incident finally made it very very easy to leave pai.
The next day we all went out for breakfast to this burger joint owned by an Alaskan guy. Interesting side story, he finally told me why thai people had been pointing and laughing at me for the last few weeks - in Thailand, having a beard means you're a criminal slash asshole slash idiot with a beard. It made sense seeing as how, when i'd stopped at the night market the night before to ask whether this delicious looking chunk of meat on a stick was beef or pork, the owner burst out laughing and ran off. Go figure.
So this place does delicious but gigantic burgers, and as it's the lads last proper meal for a week (and because I'm a bit of a bastard), i tell joe and mick that if they can eat two half pounders, with all the extras, I'll pay for the whole lot of them (i was expecting both of them to end up throwing up or at the very least give up in shame) . I ordered a quarter pounder with bacon and sat back to watch. But they did it. The hungry bastards actually managed to eat the whole lot, with bacon, veggie sides, fries - the whole lot. They suffered afterwards which was kind of worth it, but disappointing for me.
The lads hitchhiked off to the monastery, and i headed for the bus station. In a ridiculous stroke of luck,i got the last bus out of town and got seated next to an Ozzie named Sean who lived in Chiang Mai. He works for a human rights organization that monitors Burma (he earns $250 a month, which seemingly is enough to live on there), and told me some stories that really turned my stomach - if you want to know them, email me, but i guarantee they'll upset you and their retelling has made a few people cry and one guy throw up. We evened it out my telling each other some dirty/sick/disgusting jokes and actually had a great time on the bus. He also told me about when his old man used to own an opal mine in oz, and how when they'd catch people stealing from them, they'd chuck them down the mine. Sean's brother also works in human rights work, so i think there's some sort of familial karma thing going on there.
When we got to Chiang Mai, he brought me to his favorite local eaterie, and offered me a lift to my "guesthouse". Now, when i came away i made a promise I'd stay somewhere nice once a month, and tonight was that night. This guy was living on $250 a day, and my hotel cost $50, so i felt like a bit of an asshole, but what can you do. He got his scooter out of the parking lot and i hopped on the back, with my 40lb bag on my back, and my (fairly heavy) day pack (camera, MP3 player, scrapbook, notepad, bunch more heavy crap) in one hand. That ride was by far the scariest thing that's happened to me in Thailand, how i got out of there alive is a mystery. I had one hand to hold onto the bike with, and we swayed the whole way because Sean, god bless him, drives like a maniac, swinging in and out between cars, flying through red lights, all the kinds of things that should have seen my brains make a Jackson Pollack work with the pavement.
Somehow we got to my place, said our goodbyes, and i entered, hands down, the poshest hotel I've ever stayed at. There was a 24 hour band in the lobby for chrissakes. It cost e30 but at home, the minimum room charge would have been about e400, no problem. I rocked in with a week's worth of dirt all over my clothes, smelling like a pigfarm and a tshirt that had SATAN written across it in big letters (to be fair, it does say "satan has your nose" so it's not THAT bad). Once i got into my room i looked out the window and saw the amazing view over the city. I was on the 45th floor and could see for miles. That alone was worth the money.
Living in the lap of luxury as i was, i decided to eat it up in similar fashion, so i went across the street to the local Burger King and got a triple bacon cheese burger meal (Burger King and McDonalds here cost the same as home, so it was, comparatively, pretty expensive) and ate it while watching Harrison Ford movies on the free cable TV, sitting on the bed in my gigantic room, a bed i should mention that was twice the size of my room at home. I made some calls to home and crashed out with the blackout curtains pulled and honest to god, had the best 12 hours sleep I've ever had (no morning sun, no roosters, no construction sounds, no smell of thai morning food. Thank you jesus).
The next morning i checked out and to make up for my splurge, stayed in the cheapest, shittiest place in town - "Julie's Guesthouse". It's the kind of place that Ahane MacGowan wakes up and realizes he needs to get off the booze. My room was more like a box, it had a window that opened onto a wall and a camper bed that was slightly less comfortable than the floor, but for e1.50, who's complaining.
That day i rented a bike (can you see i'm already getting sick of typing?) and headed off into the hills to see Doi Suthep, the main monastery attraction in northern Thailand. There's pictures on my flickr but all i'll say is there's about 450 steps to get up there and i felt every one of them. When i got to the top i had to buy my ticket in sign language as i almost literally couldn't breathe. It was really peaceful there and it was cool to see the locals worshiping the buddahs and stuff, ringing bells, and just generally getting their religion on. They get pretty into it to say the least.
After that i headed back into town and drove around for a while, something i realized pretty quickly i love doing. Chiang Mai's traffic is pretty intense, but the Thais are great drivers, they honk their horns a lot to let you know they're there, or coming close, or turning off, or even just to say hi, so you can zip around between cars and never get hit, and believe me i tore the arse out of it.
That night i went out with two english guys and killed them at pool, but they were a little distracted as one was dating this thai girl (not sure if there was money involved but i chose not to ask) and while the other guy was friendly, we just didn't all get along so well so i made my excuses early and left.
The next day i had a bit of a freakout. I'd been in Thailand for about seven weeks and only seen about seven places, all of them what are known as "typical tourist/backpacker fare". I'm REALLLY REALLY not into this whole "I'm not a tourist, i'm a backpacker/traveler" bullshit discussion that people seem to want to get into endlessly (my opinion, if you're visiting someone else's country and not working, you're a tourist, end of story), but at the same time i was worried I'd squandered my time and not seen enough of "the real Thailand" (it pains me to write that sentence, but you get the idea). I went to the bus station in the morning and booked a ticket for the farthest away place i could find - Nong Khai. I'd heard it was nice there, it was right on the laos border across from Vientiane with just the Mekong seperating you, and i heard they had a Buddha park designed by this guy who took way too much acid. Sounds good to me.
After a quick haircut and beard trim (so as to not get laughed at too much), i went to the bus station for my overnight bus. These things are huge, and there's huge leg space and the seats go right back, so i was ready for the 14 hour journey. I settled into my seat and figured me and a normal sized Thai guy could get a proper night's sleep here without too much hassle. How wrong was i. The only 300lb guy in Thailand got on, squeezed into the window seat and pulled his blanket over him to get to sleep (a sleep that came complete with snoring. Like serious snoring). Funny story - as he fell asleep his hand slowly curled, while turned my direction, into what's known as "the finger". Yep, the guy slept for 14 hours flipping me off. I read for a few hours, and spent most of the journey listening to the Thai top 40 karaoke they insist on playing at top volume on every VIP bus until i could take no more. I dropped the last of the sleeping pills I'd got when I'd got sick in Chiang Mai last time and fell asleep listening to Small Brown Bike.
In the morning there was a minor panic when i ended up going to the wrong bus station (a story not worth telling save for the fact i got to see a small Thai town come to life, which was amazing), but eventually i got to Nong Khai and to my guest house, Mut Mee. It's a beautiful place owned by a Kiwi guy and an English guy that has a shaded garden full of tables to read and relax, amazing and amazingly cheap food, loads of yoga courses and that kinda hippie crap, a fairly good bookshop, and best of all, and amazing view of the Mekong. For the next few days i hung out there, reading books, almost not drinking, and taking in the good atmosphere. On my second last day i was off looking for an internet place when i ran into this French Canadian girl named Elian (hereafter referred to as The Alien). The Alien was/is a super cool girl with great taste in music as boyfriend in a band that sounds just like my favorite bands at home, so we got on super well. We rented bikes and headed to the Buddha park. We got lost a few times and had to make some sketchy crosses of highways but eventually got there.
And what a sight. To say this guy took a lot of acid was an understatement. They had this sculpture of an elephant surrounded by barking dogs doing different things, some playing cards, some flying planes, some throwing rocks. There was one sculpture that was about two hundred foot tall that was seven hissing snake heads, about ten feet tall a piece, with a Buddha in the middle. You can see the pictures on my flickr, but it barely covers how mad it was.
Anyways, that evening me and the alien took a dinner cruise along the mekong and went in search of a bar to have some drinky drinks. We found this once place with a cool pool table and some fairly good 80s metal (priest, maiden, that kind of thing) on the stereo, but everyone was drinking coffee. Weird. I went up to the bar to figure out the story and found out it was run by an english guy. The deal was that there was an election two days later, so by thai law, everyone had to stay sober for two days to "make the right choice". Never one to be kept away from a drink, the owner was serving beer in coffee cups. So we played pool for a while, drinking beer from coffee cups, at some point the alien headed home and i got into a bacon buttie eating competition with these gigantic scousers. Somehow i won, but somewhere along the way, i left without my bag. Go figure (i got it back the next day from a guy who seemingly knew me pretty well but i had no idea who he was. It also took me 35 minuts to find the bar, even though it was less than a minute from my guest house. I guess i must have drank too much coffee).
The alien was planning on heading for Laos but i managed to convince her we had a cool gang of people going on the slowboat expedition in Laos, so we headed for Udon Thani (local bus depot) and bought more night bus tickets. We spent the day in Udon Thani (note: complete and utter shithole) where i had sushi for the first time (just as horrible as i had guessed), ate a spoonfull of wasabi (i was told it was aubergene, it burned the shit out of my mouth), and learned to play the card game shithead. I also had my first meal at a restaurant recommended by the legendary "Lonely Planet", basically a bible for travelers. Halfway through a lasagna that consisted solely of pasta sheets and half cooked pork (and that cost me about five times the price of a lasagna in any other thai restaurant), i got my first hint that the Lonely Planet is a complete piece of toss. More on that later.
So we got our bus back to Chiang Mai (there's a side story where we spend half an hour going the wrong way down a highway in a tuc tuc, but this is getting too long already), chat about crap and fall asleep. As luck would have it we run into all the Pai crowd (English Joe, Aussies Mick, Mike, Lisa and her new friend Sam) and check into this fairly nice but really cheap guesthouse. It's Mike's last night before heading home so we have a big night out. Highlights including but not limited to: mike passing out in probably the second bar we go to and having to be carried home, a bar that served laughing gas (but was dry by the time we got there), me dancing on a table (how it held me i'll never know), a nightclub full of seedy guys and thai girls/hookers that we left in about five minutes, joe falling in the moat, seeing a dehydrated/nearly dead elephant collapse but be revived with a water hose, a tuc tuc race, a ride in some random thai guy's SUV, and finally trying to wake a completely passed out Sam for his bus in a way that i won't put in here, but suffice to say, he was totally freaked out when we told him the next day. Also notable, i had my first cigarette in three years. I don't know why or how, but i remember it was really nice and just as good as i'd thought it would be after three years of no cigarettes whatsoever. How i thought i'd get away with just one, i've no idea, but there it is. More on that later.
The day after was pretty quiet, we walked around town a bit, said some goodbyes, ate, bought books and called it a night early. We all had places to go the next day and the night before had taken it out of us.
Around 7am, me, the alien, joe and mick headed for the bus station for what we were told was a VIP (aka sleep in comfort) bus but what turned out to be the most piece of crap old local bus you could imagine. Mick, joe and i got into a seat designed for three thai people and it was pretty quickly obvious it was never going to happen - i got the asile seat and had about a quarter of a buttcheek worth of room, which meant i had to stand up every time someone wanted to pass. After a hot minute me, mick and the alien headed for the back of the bus, found some empty seats, and passed out.
Five horrible hours later we got to the thai/laos border in Chiang Khong, officially departed Thailand, and officially entered laos at Huay Xai. Funny story: every country has to pay a different amount for the laos visa (ireland was $30) and mick filled out all his forms on his Australian passport, before realizing he could get it on his UK passport for $5 cheaper, so went through the whole process again. Suffice to say, Mick's a tight bastard. Somewhere along the way we met an english couple, Kev and Jax, and spent the evening wandering around Huay Xai, which is a town of absolutely nothing to speak of other than it's the starting point of the famous Mekong Slow boat.
What to say about the slow boat. Well, it's a boat, and it goes really really slowly down the mekong, for two days in fact. We got a nice gang of us going down the back by the engine and strapped in for seven hours of amazing scenery and good chats. Every so often the boat would pull over for locals to hop on and hop off, we visited tiny villages, and through the trees we could see little settlements where people live off the land on gigantic mountains. Imagine that, if you lived in a village of about twenty people with no money, no cops, no electricity, no refrigeration, no TV... To say it must be an alien existence is putting it mildly. Top marks to the drivers too, the Mekong seems to flow about seven directions at once and every so often there would be areas with huge rocks and small rocks, which means there's tonnes of rocks just under the water. Couple that with swells, whirl pools, and diverging flows and you have a situation where a three hundred foot long boat full of fat white people must be an absolute miracle to keep afloat. At one stage the boat pulled in and these kids got on with crates full of drinks and snacks to sell to us. One kid of about six had a crate of beers, so i picked up a can of Beer Laos and asked how much. When the price was too high (and the beer was warm) i put it back and said "thank you no", he cocked his head and shouted "GET FUCKED" and walked off. We all fell about laughing, and that being one of my favorite phrases, getting it off a laoation hill tribe kid cracked me up for about half an hour.
After seven hours we stopped in a town called Pakbeng for the night. The boat stops at the bottom of a steep sand dune, so getting up was a nightmare, especially as it was covered in touts trying to sell guesthouses, marijuana, and opium (just about everyone in Laos will, at some point, try to tell you marijuana or opium, even the cops). We picked one guy and he brought us to a reasonably decent guesthouse which was cheap as hell. Me and the alien got a room (two single beds) that cost about e0.50 each and we headed out to a great Indian place for dinner. After a quick pint we all headed for bed, ready for another day's slow boating.
The next day we got to the pier to find out they planned on putting two boat's worth of people on one boat. We all hopped on and sat on the ground near the front (not as bad as it sounds) until the lads spotted what looked like airline seats on the roof. They all jumped up and settled in (i skipped out, knowing full well they'd never let them stay there - i was right, they lasted about four minutes up there) and there was a stand off between the last forty people left to get on and the slow boat people. Some prat with a lonely planet started on about "well the Lonely Planet says if you protest they'll give you a new boat" and started waving it at the boat people. They shrugged and pulled the boat out and headed off without them. I met a Slovenian couple who were on a mammoth motorbike ride and only taking the slowboat for two hours as there was no roads on the opposite side of the river to Pakbeng and we laughed at the lonely planet prat for a while. They told me about getting a flat tire in remote Laos and walking for a mile to a village to get someone to repair it, all the while people coming out of their houses and following them, having never seen white people before. By the time they got to a guy who could repair it, there was a crowd of around 300 people (i saw the photos, it was insane) and when they paid they guy two American dollar bills for fixing the bike, people went insane, they'd never seen so much money before. Madness.
The second day was more relaxed than the first, as we were at the front and so had no engine noise. The scenery was no less beautiful and around seven we docked in Luang Prabang, Laos' second city. We found some cheap digs (me and the alien splitting a twin room again) and the lads went for dinner. I went off looking for an ATM as i had no local currency (kip), only to find the ATMs in Laos don't accept VISA. Shite. I found a guy with a counter who did however and set about getting e100, a small amount i thought. How wrong was i. Get this - e100 is one million, three hundred thousand kip. And the guy paid me in five thousand kip notes. It was the biggest wad of cash you've ever seen (i later took a photo of me covered in it, i'll put it on flickr soon). He packed it in a double sized Agfa bag (the ones you get photos in) and i set off down the street with my eyes darting everywhere.
We had dinner (which for four people, including a bunch of beers, came to about e4) and headed off for a bar, where i ran into some friends from pai, Joe and Jim. The bars in laos close at 11:30 sharp so while myself, the alien, and Jax and Kev headed for home, Mick and Joe decided they'd head to the bowling alley, which is the latest opening place in Luang Prabang. Alien and i played cards for a while and crashed out.
In the morning i met Kev and Jax for breakfast and we started talking about what we'd do for the next few days in Luang Prabang. At around 10:30 i got a call from Mick.
Me: "Morning Mick, how're you?"
Mick: "Not too bad brian. Are you at your guesthouse?"
Me: "Yeah, just having breakfast. What's up".
Mick: "Hahaha, not too much. Um, we have to leave town. Today. Like right now".
That's where i'm leaving it folks, it's 10pm and i have a flight in the morning to Malaysia. I'll try get the rest of this done in a week. See ya soon.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Oh how plans change...
Before i start another long boring blog (and to those who read the whole lot of the last one, god bless ya, i'm never reading that much again), i should explain some changes in the plan, in case yer interested. First off: No japan. Basically, the only jobs there are in teaching english, which i'm not too hot on, and secondly, one of the "big three" english teaching companies, Nova, just went bust leaving something in the region of 25000 people with no jobs. I find it hard to get a job at the best of times, but with those odds, i think i'll skip thanks very much. Instead, and i should point out this is a very tentative plan, i'll be heading to Australia in about late March, to work until the end of july, to save money for a gigantic 10 week USA road trip me and a friend from the UK are putting together. Details are sketchy but much fun is expected. After that, i've no idea, maybe head back to OZ, maybe New Zealand, maybe canada, i've no idea. It's a long way off.
So there it is, saves me explaining in emails and phone calls, and if anyone needs a japanese work visa with the name "Brian Kelleher" and a picture of a bearded would be sumo wrestler on it, hit me up.
So where was i, ah yes. Thursday last i pack up my belongings, leave my hostel and make my way to Pai. Amazingly, the four hour bus ride costs just under two euro, and i spend it chatting with a girl from kenmare named Denise who, just a few months previously, had phoned her parents to ask if she could become a nun in thailand. Nice girl, mad stories. The bus goes up pretty far into the mountains, at one stage a quick look out either window and you could see about fifteen miles of mountains either ways. This of course being a public bus, it goes up the hills at about 4 miles an hour, but it was still a great ride. Somewhere along the way we meet up with a Canadian named Tim, and Australian named Fiona, and a Swede named Eric, and together we follow Denise down the road and across a bamboo bridge to some cheap huts she had reccomended called Family Huts. For three euro a night i get a very nice little hut with warm blankets, a fan and a light, just off the river that runs through Pai. To say pai was what i was hoping thailand would be like is putting it mildly - a small village with a handfull of traveller's needs (internet, bikes, bars), set in the hills with a beautiful river running through. The first night in, we walk up the street to find it covered in night stalls selling clothes, food, jewlery and beers. We get some really great food, find a huge bar with fire dancer guys and basketball (bizarre combination), then walk back up town (meeting a frazzled american named Aaron along the way), find a roadside booze stall, and settl in. At one point i look around and see this canadian couple that i'd already run into three or four times in thailand, bizarre yet fairly common. They come to hang out and invite me to a big party on a private island down south for christmas day. Result! After a while, Aaron shows up again and we find we had a mutual taste for cheap booze and cheaper laughs. The two of us somehow end up in some rathole bar called Bebop where terrible thai bands play terrible coverversions of recent rock hits while desperate travellers do some sort of desperate mating dance. We spend the night drinking cheap beers and laughing heartily at their expense.
The next morning i wake up not remembering much, and spend the day walking around with people coming up going "hey brian, how did you get on last night", and me smiling and nodding as if i had any clue who they were. A very common occurence in Pai it seems. Tim and i rent some scooters and head off to drive around and see what we could see. After getting fairly lost a few times, we head back to the huts in time for sundown, and meet a fairly sizeable and rowdy gang of ozzies. At some point aaron shows up and we all headed up town to see what was going on. I stop for more noodles at a street stall, and as i wait, Tim suggests i try the next stall up for 20c chicken on a stick. Never one to say no to eating some dead stuff, i buy one and walk up the street with it. Ten minutes later i walk back down and buy two more. I gather up the ozzies for a third trip to the chicken on stick stall and quickly a legend is born. The sign says they're made with garlic and peppers, i maintain it's whatever oil they're using, but either way those things are some of the best food i've ever had, and everyone agrees. One of the ozzies pledged to eat 25 in one night, and i offer him 2000 baht (about e40) if he actually does it. He would spend the rest of the weekend working up to the challenge.
For some reason, we go back to the bar which had the fire and basketball. The whole venue is actually huge, to the point where i think if you put everyone in Pai in there, it'd still be empty, so with us being the only patrons, it was cavernous and incredibly boring. Me and Aaron get pretty bored pretty quick, so we head back to that Bebop place and sit ouside a bonfire at the front door, making sign-language conversation with passing thais. One group stops for about 45 minutes, and eventually (somehow) invite us to come in with them. They sit around a short table on the top floor of the bar, pounding whiskey and taking it in turns to dance on the table. Never being one to shy away from a cultural exchange that revolves alcohol, i soon found myself full of whiskey, doing the funkey chicken (on a stick), on a table, on a balcony, with five thai guys shouting mad thai at me, and one american looking at me like "ah balls, now i have to do it". In short, we have an awesome time. When the bar closes, the thais motion something about another bar, and i run into some brits who offer to bring me up on their bike. Aaron heads off with the thais, i jump on the bike, and off we go... For about four feet until the bike falls over and i go ass over heels into the dirt. Luckily we were going 0 miles per hour at the time, and once back on the bike, we're soon at a bar called "Don't Cry" that's full of brits, americans and thais. I run into one guy from Wolverhampton who comes out with the legend "i fookin hate the brits me" and we became fast friends. More fire dancing ensus and after meeting a load of people, i head for home.
Saturday was another day for the bikes, me and tim heading off early and going a two hour drive west, which goes through some great valleys and gives me some great photos. I sleep for a few hours in the day and in the evening we all headed to the offie and stocked up on booze, got fairly lairy at the restaraunt out the front of the huts, and go to a party we'd heard about in a nightclub up on a hill somewhere. There i sit around a campfire and talk for ages with this mad US guy who's parents gave him acid when he was 16. He was still pretty normal though (for an american), and we have an interesting conversation about the New World Order, the Elite, and all that kinda mad conspiracy crap that i don't really buy, but find pretty entertaining, especially when someone tries to convince you the world is run by lizards. Some other american guy asks me what the deal was with the irish and the english, and after clueing him in on 400 years of oppression, i feel it might be time to get out of there. After chatting with some more brits for a while, and listening to aaron try to convince me to come to Laos with him the next day for all of, oh, fifteen seconds, a gang of us hop in the back of a pickup truck and find ourselves in the Seven Eleven trying to figure out what meat was what in the deli.
Sunday was another mammoth bike ride, as me and tim head off into the hills and do a 120km loop of villiages and valley views. I was getting pretty confident on my little scooter at this stage and somewhere along the way decided to get up monday morning and drive through the mountains to Chiang Mai (130 miles). After another afternoon nap, i meet up again with our Family Huts gang, which has now swelled to about ten people, and we have some farewell drinks for Aaron, Fiona and an English girl named Anna, all of whom are getting a late bus to Laos. At ten we walk them up to the bus, say our goodbyes, fill up on stick chicken, and hit a street bar for some coctails. One of the ozzies hits it off with the stalls owner, and manages to convince her to let them drink for free if they'll act as greeters and pull in people off the street. She agrees and they arrange to show up monday evening and get the party going, at least on that five feet of road. We all head off down the road to some raggae bar and have a few more drinks before some of us call it a night.
Monday morning i get up, eat, say goodbye to some people who're headed south that morning, and hit the road. My bike's only got a 100cc engine, so traversing the mountains is a bit like taking a punto up everest, but eventually i make it to the top, and enjoy about an hour's worth of views. My bike's odomoter (the thing what tells you the distance you've travelled) is knackered (as is the speedometer now that i mention it), so the drive is pretty frustrating as whenever i think i'm almost there, a sign pops up that says "Chiang Mai, 75 Miles". At one stage i'm very low on fuel, so i stop at a restaraunt that points me down a road to a ghetto petrol station where an old man with three five gallon jars of petrol and some tubes fills up my tank for half nothing. After about five hours, i hit chiang mai, check into a cheap guesthouse, and sleep for a few hours.
In the evening i do some internet and decide to hit up the night market to see if i can get some chicken on a stick. While walking around i spot a familiar head of blonde dreads, and it turns out to be Mick and Anna, the kiwis i was hanging around with the first few weeks in the south. Thailand's funny like that, even in a city of a million people, you tend to bump into people. We head to a cheap bar the guys have found and have some drinks, play some terrible pool, feed some elephants, and eventually part ways after a 2am Burger King feast.
For some reason i sleep really badly and wake from a strong night tremor at around 6:30am. i have a quick shower, drop my key to reception, and hit the road at 7am. This time the drive is much easier as i kind of know where i am most of the time, and the morning mist on the hills is just amazing. I'd filled the petrol on the bike when i arrived to chiang mai the night before, but at about 8:30am i finally putter to the side of the road, completely out of petrol and about 25 miles from anywhere. When i stop and old old woman hobbles over and gives me a kind of "what in christ's name are you doing here" type motion, so i shake my water bottle, point at the petrol tank, and make a "no" motion. She give me a quick "eureka!" type finger in the air motion, scurries back into her house, and emerges a minute later with two whiskey bottles full of dark red petrol. Result! I fill up, offer her some money (which she refuses), and head off.
Now most of you are probably thinking "yeah bollocks, some old lady just happened to have two bottles of petrol in her gaff", but if you'd been to thailand you wouldn't even be surprised. Basically they have three types of petrol station over here, western stations, ghetto stations, and whiskey stations. A western station is the same as home, you rock in with the bike, give the attendant the keys, say something asinine like "fill 'er up" and go into the (US owned) forecourt station to stock up on Doritos, Wrigley's chewing gum, and some water that's inevitably been bottled by Coke somewhere. A ghetto station is basically a little stall with three upturned five gallon drums, containing (respectively) diesel, octane 91 and octane 95. The bottom of the drum has a tap with a hose, which you stick in your tank, ask for x liters, and the guy eases the correct amount of fuel into your tank. A whiskey station is generally a little counter at the side of a restaraunt where you find three piles of empty one liter whiskey bottles, containing, again, diesel, octane 91 or octane 95. Most people here drive around with a whiskey bottle full of petrol for when they run out, and possibly for when they feel like getting very drunk, very quickly.
Inanyways, i make the drive back to Pai in three hours this time, and it's much more enjoyable. After a quick breakfast at the restaraunt with the remaining ozzies (who are still insanely drunk from what i'm assured was an amazing night running their own bar), i hit my hut and sleep for about eight hours. When i emerge, everyone's crashed out on the deck of the restaraunt, watching family guy season six. We head back up town around eight for the lad's second night of work (and about ten chicken on a stick each) but seemingly everyone's left pai that day and it's quiet night. After hitting a few bars, we call it a night.
So there it is, the update. Today is the king's birthday so there's no drinking. Tomorrow morning i'm getting on my bike with a little backpack and heading off on a 700 kilometer loop from pai to mae hong song to chiang mai to pai. I think it should take about a week and i promise to post with pictures next time. Until then...
So there it is, saves me explaining in emails and phone calls, and if anyone needs a japanese work visa with the name "Brian Kelleher" and a picture of a bearded would be sumo wrestler on it, hit me up.
So where was i, ah yes. Thursday last i pack up my belongings, leave my hostel and make my way to Pai. Amazingly, the four hour bus ride costs just under two euro, and i spend it chatting with a girl from kenmare named Denise who, just a few months previously, had phoned her parents to ask if she could become a nun in thailand. Nice girl, mad stories. The bus goes up pretty far into the mountains, at one stage a quick look out either window and you could see about fifteen miles of mountains either ways. This of course being a public bus, it goes up the hills at about 4 miles an hour, but it was still a great ride. Somewhere along the way we meet up with a Canadian named Tim, and Australian named Fiona, and a Swede named Eric, and together we follow Denise down the road and across a bamboo bridge to some cheap huts she had reccomended called Family Huts. For three euro a night i get a very nice little hut with warm blankets, a fan and a light, just off the river that runs through Pai. To say pai was what i was hoping thailand would be like is putting it mildly - a small village with a handfull of traveller's needs (internet, bikes, bars), set in the hills with a beautiful river running through. The first night in, we walk up the street to find it covered in night stalls selling clothes, food, jewlery and beers. We get some really great food, find a huge bar with fire dancer guys and basketball (bizarre combination), then walk back up town (meeting a frazzled american named Aaron along the way), find a roadside booze stall, and settl in. At one point i look around and see this canadian couple that i'd already run into three or four times in thailand, bizarre yet fairly common. They come to hang out and invite me to a big party on a private island down south for christmas day. Result! After a while, Aaron shows up again and we find we had a mutual taste for cheap booze and cheaper laughs. The two of us somehow end up in some rathole bar called Bebop where terrible thai bands play terrible coverversions of recent rock hits while desperate travellers do some sort of desperate mating dance. We spend the night drinking cheap beers and laughing heartily at their expense.
The next morning i wake up not remembering much, and spend the day walking around with people coming up going "hey brian, how did you get on last night", and me smiling and nodding as if i had any clue who they were. A very common occurence in Pai it seems. Tim and i rent some scooters and head off to drive around and see what we could see. After getting fairly lost a few times, we head back to the huts in time for sundown, and meet a fairly sizeable and rowdy gang of ozzies. At some point aaron shows up and we all headed up town to see what was going on. I stop for more noodles at a street stall, and as i wait, Tim suggests i try the next stall up for 20c chicken on a stick. Never one to say no to eating some dead stuff, i buy one and walk up the street with it. Ten minutes later i walk back down and buy two more. I gather up the ozzies for a third trip to the chicken on stick stall and quickly a legend is born. The sign says they're made with garlic and peppers, i maintain it's whatever oil they're using, but either way those things are some of the best food i've ever had, and everyone agrees. One of the ozzies pledged to eat 25 in one night, and i offer him 2000 baht (about e40) if he actually does it. He would spend the rest of the weekend working up to the challenge.
For some reason, we go back to the bar which had the fire and basketball. The whole venue is actually huge, to the point where i think if you put everyone in Pai in there, it'd still be empty, so with us being the only patrons, it was cavernous and incredibly boring. Me and Aaron get pretty bored pretty quick, so we head back to that Bebop place and sit ouside a bonfire at the front door, making sign-language conversation with passing thais. One group stops for about 45 minutes, and eventually (somehow) invite us to come in with them. They sit around a short table on the top floor of the bar, pounding whiskey and taking it in turns to dance on the table. Never being one to shy away from a cultural exchange that revolves alcohol, i soon found myself full of whiskey, doing the funkey chicken (on a stick), on a table, on a balcony, with five thai guys shouting mad thai at me, and one american looking at me like "ah balls, now i have to do it". In short, we have an awesome time. When the bar closes, the thais motion something about another bar, and i run into some brits who offer to bring me up on their bike. Aaron heads off with the thais, i jump on the bike, and off we go... For about four feet until the bike falls over and i go ass over heels into the dirt. Luckily we were going 0 miles per hour at the time, and once back on the bike, we're soon at a bar called "Don't Cry" that's full of brits, americans and thais. I run into one guy from Wolverhampton who comes out with the legend "i fookin hate the brits me" and we became fast friends. More fire dancing ensus and after meeting a load of people, i head for home.
Saturday was another day for the bikes, me and tim heading off early and going a two hour drive west, which goes through some great valleys and gives me some great photos. I sleep for a few hours in the day and in the evening we all headed to the offie and stocked up on booze, got fairly lairy at the restaraunt out the front of the huts, and go to a party we'd heard about in a nightclub up on a hill somewhere. There i sit around a campfire and talk for ages with this mad US guy who's parents gave him acid when he was 16. He was still pretty normal though (for an american), and we have an interesting conversation about the New World Order, the Elite, and all that kinda mad conspiracy crap that i don't really buy, but find pretty entertaining, especially when someone tries to convince you the world is run by lizards. Some other american guy asks me what the deal was with the irish and the english, and after clueing him in on 400 years of oppression, i feel it might be time to get out of there. After chatting with some more brits for a while, and listening to aaron try to convince me to come to Laos with him the next day for all of, oh, fifteen seconds, a gang of us hop in the back of a pickup truck and find ourselves in the Seven Eleven trying to figure out what meat was what in the deli.
Sunday was another mammoth bike ride, as me and tim head off into the hills and do a 120km loop of villiages and valley views. I was getting pretty confident on my little scooter at this stage and somewhere along the way decided to get up monday morning and drive through the mountains to Chiang Mai (130 miles). After another afternoon nap, i meet up again with our Family Huts gang, which has now swelled to about ten people, and we have some farewell drinks for Aaron, Fiona and an English girl named Anna, all of whom are getting a late bus to Laos. At ten we walk them up to the bus, say our goodbyes, fill up on stick chicken, and hit a street bar for some coctails. One of the ozzies hits it off with the stalls owner, and manages to convince her to let them drink for free if they'll act as greeters and pull in people off the street. She agrees and they arrange to show up monday evening and get the party going, at least on that five feet of road. We all head off down the road to some raggae bar and have a few more drinks before some of us call it a night.
Monday morning i get up, eat, say goodbye to some people who're headed south that morning, and hit the road. My bike's only got a 100cc engine, so traversing the mountains is a bit like taking a punto up everest, but eventually i make it to the top, and enjoy about an hour's worth of views. My bike's odomoter (the thing what tells you the distance you've travelled) is knackered (as is the speedometer now that i mention it), so the drive is pretty frustrating as whenever i think i'm almost there, a sign pops up that says "Chiang Mai, 75 Miles". At one stage i'm very low on fuel, so i stop at a restaraunt that points me down a road to a ghetto petrol station where an old man with three five gallon jars of petrol and some tubes fills up my tank for half nothing. After about five hours, i hit chiang mai, check into a cheap guesthouse, and sleep for a few hours.
In the evening i do some internet and decide to hit up the night market to see if i can get some chicken on a stick. While walking around i spot a familiar head of blonde dreads, and it turns out to be Mick and Anna, the kiwis i was hanging around with the first few weeks in the south. Thailand's funny like that, even in a city of a million people, you tend to bump into people. We head to a cheap bar the guys have found and have some drinks, play some terrible pool, feed some elephants, and eventually part ways after a 2am Burger King feast.
For some reason i sleep really badly and wake from a strong night tremor at around 6:30am. i have a quick shower, drop my key to reception, and hit the road at 7am. This time the drive is much easier as i kind of know where i am most of the time, and the morning mist on the hills is just amazing. I'd filled the petrol on the bike when i arrived to chiang mai the night before, but at about 8:30am i finally putter to the side of the road, completely out of petrol and about 25 miles from anywhere. When i stop and old old woman hobbles over and gives me a kind of "what in christ's name are you doing here" type motion, so i shake my water bottle, point at the petrol tank, and make a "no" motion. She give me a quick "eureka!" type finger in the air motion, scurries back into her house, and emerges a minute later with two whiskey bottles full of dark red petrol. Result! I fill up, offer her some money (which she refuses), and head off.
Now most of you are probably thinking "yeah bollocks, some old lady just happened to have two bottles of petrol in her gaff", but if you'd been to thailand you wouldn't even be surprised. Basically they have three types of petrol station over here, western stations, ghetto stations, and whiskey stations. A western station is the same as home, you rock in with the bike, give the attendant the keys, say something asinine like "fill 'er up" and go into the (US owned) forecourt station to stock up on Doritos, Wrigley's chewing gum, and some water that's inevitably been bottled by Coke somewhere. A ghetto station is basically a little stall with three upturned five gallon drums, containing (respectively) diesel, octane 91 and octane 95. The bottom of the drum has a tap with a hose, which you stick in your tank, ask for x liters, and the guy eases the correct amount of fuel into your tank. A whiskey station is generally a little counter at the side of a restaraunt where you find three piles of empty one liter whiskey bottles, containing, again, diesel, octane 91 or octane 95. Most people here drive around with a whiskey bottle full of petrol for when they run out, and possibly for when they feel like getting very drunk, very quickly.
Inanyways, i make the drive back to Pai in three hours this time, and it's much more enjoyable. After a quick breakfast at the restaraunt with the remaining ozzies (who are still insanely drunk from what i'm assured was an amazing night running their own bar), i hit my hut and sleep for about eight hours. When i emerge, everyone's crashed out on the deck of the restaraunt, watching family guy season six. We head back up town around eight for the lad's second night of work (and about ten chicken on a stick each) but seemingly everyone's left pai that day and it's quiet night. After hitting a few bars, we call it a night.
So there it is, the update. Today is the king's birthday so there's no drinking. Tomorrow morning i'm getting on my bike with a little backpack and heading off on a 700 kilometer loop from pai to mae hong song to chiang mai to pai. I think it should take about a week and i promise to post with pictures next time. Until then...
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Back with the fitness...
Well i promised after the last boring boring blog i'd try for something a little more entertaining. After posting the last one, things got immediately more entertaining, for a spell, and then incredibly less entertaining. Now where was i...
Well, after posting saturday from Samui, i meet up with the rest of the gang (alex, mick and sally) and we head off in search of a cheap day tour. Everyone was into elephant riding and all that jazz, but it held no interest for me so i reasoned that instead of each spending 1500 baht (approx e30) on a day's elephant riding and sight seeing, they spend 500 baht each (e5) an elephant ride and we rent another four wheel drive for 800 baht (e16) and drive around sight seeing and such, thus saving money (best part of fifteen euro each) and having the freedom to go see what we want, when we want. We find a place that sells elephant rides, the lads buy one each, and we all go get a few hours sleep.
Around eight we decide to prowl the beach for some cheap food. Around nine we realise nowhere on the beach is cheap, so head for the main street. Around ten we realise nowhere on the main street is cheap either (compared to the two euro curries we were getting where we had stayed previously on samui) so we settle on a german restaraunt and get some food. After dinner we do a little light window shopping, and alex and mick decide to get a massage. Myself and sally decline and head off to have a look at more shops. One of the painful things about shopping in thailand is nothing has a price on it, and an enquiry lands you straight into a bargaining frenzy. Being that i had no plans on spending cash on ANYTHING (a night in a hotel that costs more than your entire daily budget will do that) it was a fairly frustrating night, but i did get to see some sweet (and cheap) clothes, chat with an amazing artist dude, and generally see some sweet thai crafts stuff.
Anyways, while walking around earlier, we passed this, how do i put this, ladyboy cabaret. Being all fine heterosexual males, alex mick and i all walked past and stared while pretending to a stroll down the street taking no notice, in the process walking into everything from lamp posts to people. Sally, not giving a shit, stared while walking into nothing, and suggested we go in. Later, she suggests this again and i, having not had a drink yet that day, agree. We rock up and get a seat by the door (so i can bolt if things get too fruity) and order two drinks (which turn out to be 150 baht (three euro), an absolte rip off by thai standards). On stage are a coterie of what are almost ladies - one dudette in particular would pass for a playboy model were s/he not surrounded by badly made up tina turner lookalikes (sally keeps on about him/her all the way through the set to the point where i think she might have been turned to the dark side, but don't tell mick). The crowd is thin but surprising - behind us is an english family with two boys of about ten or twelve, obviously having the time of their lives. After one song, the tallest, scariest of the, eh, performers, announces it's time for audience participation and asks for volunteers from the crowd to come join them for a dance. As tina turner walks towards me, i get a feeling as if someone is grabbing my shoulder and, turning to find nobody there, realise i'm having my first ever heart attack! How exiting!! Luckly, she walks past me and grabs one of the ten year old english kids and coaxes him to the stage (the word coaxing as i understand it meaning "to pull kicking and screaming"). They spend another few minutes collecting various dudes from the crowd and stuffing them in behind the curtain. After a minute or so, "I will survive" starts up, and each participant comes out in sub-Monthy-Python drag and is made shuffle/shimmy/traipse the length of the dance floor to another podium at the opposite end of the club. Up last: the english preteen, a face like he's about to have us all killed, throwing daggers at his parents (both of whom are just about on the floor with laughter) and ignoring his brother, who you can tell is already looking forward to getting back to school. After a little "what's your name, where are you from", the cabaret finishes up, the DJ starts, and the ladies make around the room for photos. Sally and i take pictures with a few before realising (a) they want money for each picture and (b) we have no money left. A quick exit is made stage left.
We meet up with the lads again, head for home and crash. The next morning we move our stuff to a far cheaper resort, collect our jeep and head for the elephant trekking center. While there's no water this time (and thus no engine cutting out), there's also no suspension in the jeep, and thus the ride is, to put it mildly, uncomfortable. The thing is so sensitive to bumps in the road it could be used to locate ancient fossils hundreds of meters under the road. Add to this the state of samui's roads and drivers, and within minutes i have my head out the window shouting obscenities (the horn in this van doesn't work, though that doesn't stop me beating the shit out of the spot where the (usless bastarding) thing should be). We get to the elephant trekking center and the lads head off for their 30 minute trek. It's a nice peaceful place, and they have two junior monkies tied to a tree (plenty of room to get about mind you, not as inhumane as it sounds) so i sit on a bench and watch them for a while. Time drags and i soon realise everyone's been gone for about an hour. I head back to the van to try get a little shut eye but no hope. When i get back to the monkies, someone (presumably a keeper) has given them each a live frog. I think this is odd, but not as odd as what i'm about to witness.
Now, knowing monkies only from fota wildlife park and episodes of Friends, i assume they are friendly little fellers, all about playing games, swinging from trees, and trying to steal your sandwitches. Not so. The monkey nearest me first bashes his frog's head off the tree stump, then tries to bite a chunk out of what can only be the frog's man parts. He chews this for a while, the frog's legs going ninety, then scrapes it's head off a rock for a few minutes. Frog still alive, he bites one of it's eyes off. This goes on for another ten minutes or so until i leave (why i watched for ten minutes, i have no idea). I walk around for a while until the lads show up, having topped off their 30 minute elephant ride with an hour at the foot of the waterfall and a long leisurly stroll back to the van. I play nice and suggest i didn't mind waiting, but inside i'm picturuing me as a monkey and them as frogs (bet you didn't know that fuckers!!! hahaha). We drive around for a while and find somewhere to eat. We set off for Big Buddah (as mentioned in an earlier blog, a huge buddah (see my flickr pics)). This involves a few scenic detours and a few near instances of brain damage when the van goes over small holes and we're all sent flying around the cabin. Big buddah is, again, cool as fuck. The statue is up a long set of stairs, and from there you can see for miles. It's a square shaped covered platform, with around 25 hanging bells, and we each take sticks to ring them. It's incredibly soothing and we soon set off in a rather very good mood. We stop at a market to buy a few odds and ends, and then head for home.
Being our last night in the south, we all get dressed up fancy (meaning: I wear jeans and a tshirt with not one single profanity on it) and head for a very very nice italian restaraunt up the road. While not even remotely pricey by western standards (the meal for four comes to about e30), it's a big splash, and we are made feel like kings. We head for the beach for one last drink, and crash.
4:55am we meet outside the resort to make our way to the airport to fly to Bangkok. Our taxi is booked for 5am (our flight is at 6:30) but the cheeky fucker arrives around 5:45 and we skid into departures just as they're about to stop taking people for the flight. The flight is uneventful, with the exception of the guitarist from Pearl Jam sitting about two rows in front of me. We get into bangkok early and make for our hotel, which mick and sally assure is top class. While the foyer is pretty swank, and the price of the room suggests it's nice, the rooms are unfortunately the size of a shoebox, and my telly has four thai channels, two french channels, and the news in japanese. Balls. We sleep for a while then hit MBK, Bangkok's biggest shopping center. I was promised a floor full of electronics so i, being a sensible mature twenty six year old male, get very giddy and practically run up the escilators to the forth floor (stopping only once for a strawberry milkshake, natch). Unfortunately, electronics translates to mobile phones, and i walk around fruitlessly looking for earphones for an hour (mine having been inexplicably stolen from my hotel room in Koh Tao, inexplicably because they were an e18 pair of headphones plugged into a e300 MP3 player, which the theif left behind). Eventually, after arguing with two sales clerks and spending ten minutes having an 81 year old american tell me her family history (when will americans get the hint: we don't give a toss about your great great great great great grand aunt who once met someone who may have had a neighbour who had some stupid irish sounding (but in no way irish) surname like "ireland" or "shamrock" or "O' Hitler") i find a shop that does a fine line in sony ripoffs and get a nice pair of headphones for half nothing.
This being Alex's last night in Thailand, we decide to go fancy for dinner and then get thrashed. Unfortunately it's pissing out of the heavens when we leave the hotel, so we settle for the nearest place with a cover and get some fairly dodgy food (but still have a good time). We stop off at a few bars before heading to this one superpub on the corner with pool tables. Unfortunately, it's also chock full of thai girls (of the "for rent" variety) who are absolutely amazing at pool so we watch Alex get thoroughly thrashed at pool by one (poor bastard) and head back to a street bar for more drinks. Mick and sally are both a little sick so they head home, and myself an alex head back to the pool bar. What follows is a little sketchy, like watching a DVD on 20x fast forward. Basically: drinks, pool, some wanker from wicklow, dancing, cocktails, american girls, vodka and red bull, english dudes, beer, very dodgy tuc tuc ride, nightclub in the middle of nowhere at 4am, "i'm not paying six euro into nowhere", another dodgy tuc tuc ride, dutch girls, whiskey, some random german guy, mc donalds, some mad tribeswoman offering me a jumper, waking up in my hotel room with ABSOLUTELY no idea where i am for a good five minutes. Good night then.
Tuesday not much happens. The hangover's pretty bad but i don't complain much, for some reason it's the first hangover i've gotten here, so i don't want to jinx it. We run into Mike and Anna (who we left on ko tao) and it turns out they got in at 2am and booked into the same place. I book back into the same place i stayed before (cheap and cheeful) and pass the day walking around, eathing, and sleeping. At night we go out for alex's last meal in thailand, play more pool, have the craic with the street sellers and around midnight, see alex off in a taxi. Tis sad to see him go and he's pretty upset about it, but we're all sure we'll see him again, legend that he is. After a quick McDonalds, we all crash.
Wednesday i check out of my hotel and drop my stuff to the lads' hotel room. My train to Chiang Mai (about fourteen hours north) isn't until 10pm so i have a lot of time to kill. I eat a few times, do some shopping, and at some point settle into a bar on the street to read my book. I pass about an hour and a half eating a little, drinking a bit, and getting through a shitload of my book while occasionally watching people on the street. The bar isn't all that busy, yet for some reason, when a very obviously worse for wear english dude with some very dodgy prison tattoos falls into the place, they put him at the other side of my table. I try to avoid him as much as possible, until he starts talking to me. The conversation goes something like this.
Random British Nutter: Good book is it?
Me: Yeah not bad.
RBM: Crazy place this.
Me: Mad enough alright.
RBM: I have to get out of here, it's driving me fuckin mental.
Me: Yeah, bangkok's a bit nuts alright. How long are you here?
RBM: Not sure mate, it's either (counts on fingers for a while), it's either two days, or a week and a half. It's driving me fuckin mental.
Me: Eh.... Right.
RBM: Are yeh graftin coke at all?
Me: Eh, no. (to a passing waiter) could i get my bill please?
RBM: This place is driving me fuckin mental. I want to go down south but i spent a month in prison there last time and they told us if i ever came back they'd bang me up again.
Me: Not a nice place to be locked up i'd say.
RBM: No likes. You're irish aye? I've done time in the joy, and i've done time in britain, but these prisons here (making a fist) i fookin tells ya.
Me: ....
RBM: I'm a violent cunt at the best of times but the shit you have to do down there.
Me: ....
RBM: Are ya sellin coke at all?
Me: Eh... No. (to passing waiter) any sign of my bill?
RBM: The women here are savage, but you've to watch out for the ladyboys, ken? I'd to beat the shite out of one there a few weeks ago.
Me: ... Sure you'll have that i suppose. Anyways, if the waiter comes back, give him this (throwing 300 baht on the table). Cheerio!
RBM: Cheers. (to my back) Here, do you know where i can get any coke?
I walk around for a while, meet the lads, and we go for dinner in this rather nice indian place. We head for the pool bar for a while, and at around nine i flag a tuc tuc, say my goodbeyes and head for the train station. Or at least the direction of the train station. I think. Remember what i said about tuc tuc drivers being nuts? This one stops to renegociate a few times, in the middle of a few dodgy neighbourhoods. Then he stops a few times and disappears into houses leaving me expecting to be mugged at any moment. I eventually get to the train station and get on my train. Peace at last i think, until this thin nervoous/exuberant english guy comes up and introduces himself. He's on a month off work and trying to pack in as much of thailand as he can. I'm fairly tired at this point but i chat with him for a while, sipping on some cheap beers i got at the station. He's about two years out of college and a complete prat, the type to tell you tonnes about himself and his past and the things he's achieved in his job (including names of superiors and stuff that nobody other than his mum cold ever give a toss about), but as soon as someone else starts talking, he's bored out of his brains and making no attempt to hide it (and yes i recogise the irony in complaining about someone telling you boring details of their life in a huge boring blog, shut up). I try to stonewall him a few times into leaving me alone but his bunk isn't ready yet (it's a sleeper train) so he starts into another story about his walking around bangkok or the things he's going to do in the north or the computers he got his bosses at work to use. I have no problem with someone being a bit lonely and enjoying company, but when i tell him about my own experiences, he's staring bored around the carriage, patently not listening and obviously wishing his bunk was ready. Mercifully, after an eternity (probably about fifteen minutes), his bunk is ready and he cuts me off mid sentence with "see you later" and bolts. Thank christ!!! I drain my beer and fall asleep.
We arrive into Chiang Mai around 1pm. I pass the time beforehand reading my book, taking photos out the window, and listening to music. When i get off the train, i head for a songthaw (shared taxi - a hiace with seats in the back) and ask to go to Libra House, a guesthouse i hear is nice and cheap. After a minute, the driver arrives with another lady who tells me there's actually a free songthaw to libra house. I gather up my stuff and arrive to the free transport, and who's in the back? The english prat. Ah shite. He bores me for a while on the way to the guesthouse, we get there and it turns out to be just as cheap and cheerful as promised. I get a room and head back to the restaraunt for food. As i finish, english dude comes back and asks if i'm interested in heading off around town. It's tempting (or rather, as tempting as eating my own testicles) but i pass saying i'm going to go get a few hours sleep first and head back to my room. I give it 30 mins for safety's sake, and head out.
Chiang Mai's a nice spot. One of the guide books says it's like a small town grown bigger and i'd have to agree. I walk around checking out the shops and some temples and things, eat some food, drink some beers, check out the night market and eventually crash around 11pm.
At about 1am i wake and throw up. Same again at 3am, 4.30am, 6am and 8am. Balls.
This is where things get pretty boring. I spend a few days in my room sick, reading about three books a day and eating about once a day. Nice for saving money, but a shit thing to do on your own in a foreign country. At this point i'm still a bit sick but also sick of being indoors so i'm around town a bit more, but taking it very easy. I haven't had a drink in almost a week. Imagine!
Anyways, i do make it out for a few hours on sunday for the Loi Krathong festival. This is an annual festival held on the 12th full moon (or some such pagan bollocks) and is to celebrate the end of the monsoon. Everyone in town makes a little raft out of bamboo leaves, loads it with flowers and candles, and sends it off down the river. Add to that thousands of thai candles being let off (a large paper cylinder, open at one end, with some sort of candle thing underneath - basically it fills with smoke and after a few minutes takes off and floats into the sky until it's the size of a star) and millions of fireworks, and you have a rather large but beautiful brouhaha. Thousands of people come out and line the streets, there's fire breathing, dancing, sparklers, singing - all kinds of madness. I head out for about four hours of it, walk about ten miles with the parade, take some pics, and head back to my cave.
So now it's.... Wednesday. Tomorrow i'll be in Chiang Mai for a week, which is a pretty sorry situation seeing as all i've done is see some fireworks, read most of John Grisham's novels, and throw up a lot. Tomorrow i'm heading for pai where i hope to go see some tribes, check out some countryside, and catch up on my drinking. Until then....
Well, after posting saturday from Samui, i meet up with the rest of the gang (alex, mick and sally) and we head off in search of a cheap day tour. Everyone was into elephant riding and all that jazz, but it held no interest for me so i reasoned that instead of each spending 1500 baht (approx e30) on a day's elephant riding and sight seeing, they spend 500 baht each (e5) an elephant ride and we rent another four wheel drive for 800 baht (e16) and drive around sight seeing and such, thus saving money (best part of fifteen euro each) and having the freedom to go see what we want, when we want. We find a place that sells elephant rides, the lads buy one each, and we all go get a few hours sleep.
Around eight we decide to prowl the beach for some cheap food. Around nine we realise nowhere on the beach is cheap, so head for the main street. Around ten we realise nowhere on the main street is cheap either (compared to the two euro curries we were getting where we had stayed previously on samui) so we settle on a german restaraunt and get some food. After dinner we do a little light window shopping, and alex and mick decide to get a massage. Myself and sally decline and head off to have a look at more shops. One of the painful things about shopping in thailand is nothing has a price on it, and an enquiry lands you straight into a bargaining frenzy. Being that i had no plans on spending cash on ANYTHING (a night in a hotel that costs more than your entire daily budget will do that) it was a fairly frustrating night, but i did get to see some sweet (and cheap) clothes, chat with an amazing artist dude, and generally see some sweet thai crafts stuff.
Anyways, while walking around earlier, we passed this, how do i put this, ladyboy cabaret. Being all fine heterosexual males, alex mick and i all walked past and stared while pretending to a stroll down the street taking no notice, in the process walking into everything from lamp posts to people. Sally, not giving a shit, stared while walking into nothing, and suggested we go in. Later, she suggests this again and i, having not had a drink yet that day, agree. We rock up and get a seat by the door (so i can bolt if things get too fruity) and order two drinks (which turn out to be 150 baht (three euro), an absolte rip off by thai standards). On stage are a coterie of what are almost ladies - one dudette in particular would pass for a playboy model were s/he not surrounded by badly made up tina turner lookalikes (sally keeps on about him/her all the way through the set to the point where i think she might have been turned to the dark side, but don't tell mick). The crowd is thin but surprising - behind us is an english family with two boys of about ten or twelve, obviously having the time of their lives. After one song, the tallest, scariest of the, eh, performers, announces it's time for audience participation and asks for volunteers from the crowd to come join them for a dance. As tina turner walks towards me, i get a feeling as if someone is grabbing my shoulder and, turning to find nobody there, realise i'm having my first ever heart attack! How exiting!! Luckly, she walks past me and grabs one of the ten year old english kids and coaxes him to the stage (the word coaxing as i understand it meaning "to pull kicking and screaming"). They spend another few minutes collecting various dudes from the crowd and stuffing them in behind the curtain. After a minute or so, "I will survive" starts up, and each participant comes out in sub-Monthy-Python drag and is made shuffle/shimmy/traipse the length of the dance floor to another podium at the opposite end of the club. Up last: the english preteen, a face like he's about to have us all killed, throwing daggers at his parents (both of whom are just about on the floor with laughter) and ignoring his brother, who you can tell is already looking forward to getting back to school. After a little "what's your name, where are you from", the cabaret finishes up, the DJ starts, and the ladies make around the room for photos. Sally and i take pictures with a few before realising (a) they want money for each picture and (b) we have no money left. A quick exit is made stage left.
We meet up with the lads again, head for home and crash. The next morning we move our stuff to a far cheaper resort, collect our jeep and head for the elephant trekking center. While there's no water this time (and thus no engine cutting out), there's also no suspension in the jeep, and thus the ride is, to put it mildly, uncomfortable. The thing is so sensitive to bumps in the road it could be used to locate ancient fossils hundreds of meters under the road. Add to this the state of samui's roads and drivers, and within minutes i have my head out the window shouting obscenities (the horn in this van doesn't work, though that doesn't stop me beating the shit out of the spot where the (usless bastarding) thing should be). We get to the elephant trekking center and the lads head off for their 30 minute trek. It's a nice peaceful place, and they have two junior monkies tied to a tree (plenty of room to get about mind you, not as inhumane as it sounds) so i sit on a bench and watch them for a while. Time drags and i soon realise everyone's been gone for about an hour. I head back to the van to try get a little shut eye but no hope. When i get back to the monkies, someone (presumably a keeper) has given them each a live frog. I think this is odd, but not as odd as what i'm about to witness.
Now, knowing monkies only from fota wildlife park and episodes of Friends, i assume they are friendly little fellers, all about playing games, swinging from trees, and trying to steal your sandwitches. Not so. The monkey nearest me first bashes his frog's head off the tree stump, then tries to bite a chunk out of what can only be the frog's man parts. He chews this for a while, the frog's legs going ninety, then scrapes it's head off a rock for a few minutes. Frog still alive, he bites one of it's eyes off. This goes on for another ten minutes or so until i leave (why i watched for ten minutes, i have no idea). I walk around for a while until the lads show up, having topped off their 30 minute elephant ride with an hour at the foot of the waterfall and a long leisurly stroll back to the van. I play nice and suggest i didn't mind waiting, but inside i'm picturuing me as a monkey and them as frogs (bet you didn't know that fuckers!!! hahaha). We drive around for a while and find somewhere to eat. We set off for Big Buddah (as mentioned in an earlier blog, a huge buddah (see my flickr pics)). This involves a few scenic detours and a few near instances of brain damage when the van goes over small holes and we're all sent flying around the cabin. Big buddah is, again, cool as fuck. The statue is up a long set of stairs, and from there you can see for miles. It's a square shaped covered platform, with around 25 hanging bells, and we each take sticks to ring them. It's incredibly soothing and we soon set off in a rather very good mood. We stop at a market to buy a few odds and ends, and then head for home.
Being our last night in the south, we all get dressed up fancy (meaning: I wear jeans and a tshirt with not one single profanity on it) and head for a very very nice italian restaraunt up the road. While not even remotely pricey by western standards (the meal for four comes to about e30), it's a big splash, and we are made feel like kings. We head for the beach for one last drink, and crash.
4:55am we meet outside the resort to make our way to the airport to fly to Bangkok. Our taxi is booked for 5am (our flight is at 6:30) but the cheeky fucker arrives around 5:45 and we skid into departures just as they're about to stop taking people for the flight. The flight is uneventful, with the exception of the guitarist from Pearl Jam sitting about two rows in front of me. We get into bangkok early and make for our hotel, which mick and sally assure is top class. While the foyer is pretty swank, and the price of the room suggests it's nice, the rooms are unfortunately the size of a shoebox, and my telly has four thai channels, two french channels, and the news in japanese. Balls. We sleep for a while then hit MBK, Bangkok's biggest shopping center. I was promised a floor full of electronics so i, being a sensible mature twenty six year old male, get very giddy and practically run up the escilators to the forth floor (stopping only once for a strawberry milkshake, natch). Unfortunately, electronics translates to mobile phones, and i walk around fruitlessly looking for earphones for an hour (mine having been inexplicably stolen from my hotel room in Koh Tao, inexplicably because they were an e18 pair of headphones plugged into a e300 MP3 player, which the theif left behind). Eventually, after arguing with two sales clerks and spending ten minutes having an 81 year old american tell me her family history (when will americans get the hint: we don't give a toss about your great great great great great grand aunt who once met someone who may have had a neighbour who had some stupid irish sounding (but in no way irish) surname like "ireland" or "shamrock" or "O' Hitler") i find a shop that does a fine line in sony ripoffs and get a nice pair of headphones for half nothing.
This being Alex's last night in Thailand, we decide to go fancy for dinner and then get thrashed. Unfortunately it's pissing out of the heavens when we leave the hotel, so we settle for the nearest place with a cover and get some fairly dodgy food (but still have a good time). We stop off at a few bars before heading to this one superpub on the corner with pool tables. Unfortunately, it's also chock full of thai girls (of the "for rent" variety) who are absolutely amazing at pool so we watch Alex get thoroughly thrashed at pool by one (poor bastard) and head back to a street bar for more drinks. Mick and sally are both a little sick so they head home, and myself an alex head back to the pool bar. What follows is a little sketchy, like watching a DVD on 20x fast forward. Basically: drinks, pool, some wanker from wicklow, dancing, cocktails, american girls, vodka and red bull, english dudes, beer, very dodgy tuc tuc ride, nightclub in the middle of nowhere at 4am, "i'm not paying six euro into nowhere", another dodgy tuc tuc ride, dutch girls, whiskey, some random german guy, mc donalds, some mad tribeswoman offering me a jumper, waking up in my hotel room with ABSOLUTELY no idea where i am for a good five minutes. Good night then.
Tuesday not much happens. The hangover's pretty bad but i don't complain much, for some reason it's the first hangover i've gotten here, so i don't want to jinx it. We run into Mike and Anna (who we left on ko tao) and it turns out they got in at 2am and booked into the same place. I book back into the same place i stayed before (cheap and cheeful) and pass the day walking around, eathing, and sleeping. At night we go out for alex's last meal in thailand, play more pool, have the craic with the street sellers and around midnight, see alex off in a taxi. Tis sad to see him go and he's pretty upset about it, but we're all sure we'll see him again, legend that he is. After a quick McDonalds, we all crash.
Wednesday i check out of my hotel and drop my stuff to the lads' hotel room. My train to Chiang Mai (about fourteen hours north) isn't until 10pm so i have a lot of time to kill. I eat a few times, do some shopping, and at some point settle into a bar on the street to read my book. I pass about an hour and a half eating a little, drinking a bit, and getting through a shitload of my book while occasionally watching people on the street. The bar isn't all that busy, yet for some reason, when a very obviously worse for wear english dude with some very dodgy prison tattoos falls into the place, they put him at the other side of my table. I try to avoid him as much as possible, until he starts talking to me. The conversation goes something like this.
Random British Nutter: Good book is it?
Me: Yeah not bad.
RBM: Crazy place this.
Me: Mad enough alright.
RBM: I have to get out of here, it's driving me fuckin mental.
Me: Yeah, bangkok's a bit nuts alright. How long are you here?
RBM: Not sure mate, it's either (counts on fingers for a while), it's either two days, or a week and a half. It's driving me fuckin mental.
Me: Eh.... Right.
RBM: Are yeh graftin coke at all?
Me: Eh, no. (to a passing waiter) could i get my bill please?
RBM: This place is driving me fuckin mental. I want to go down south but i spent a month in prison there last time and they told us if i ever came back they'd bang me up again.
Me: Not a nice place to be locked up i'd say.
RBM: No likes. You're irish aye? I've done time in the joy, and i've done time in britain, but these prisons here (making a fist) i fookin tells ya.
Me: ....
RBM: I'm a violent cunt at the best of times but the shit you have to do down there.
Me: ....
RBM: Are ya sellin coke at all?
Me: Eh... No. (to passing waiter) any sign of my bill?
RBM: The women here are savage, but you've to watch out for the ladyboys, ken? I'd to beat the shite out of one there a few weeks ago.
Me: ... Sure you'll have that i suppose. Anyways, if the waiter comes back, give him this (throwing 300 baht on the table). Cheerio!
RBM: Cheers. (to my back) Here, do you know where i can get any coke?
I walk around for a while, meet the lads, and we go for dinner in this rather nice indian place. We head for the pool bar for a while, and at around nine i flag a tuc tuc, say my goodbeyes and head for the train station. Or at least the direction of the train station. I think. Remember what i said about tuc tuc drivers being nuts? This one stops to renegociate a few times, in the middle of a few dodgy neighbourhoods. Then he stops a few times and disappears into houses leaving me expecting to be mugged at any moment. I eventually get to the train station and get on my train. Peace at last i think, until this thin nervoous/exuberant english guy comes up and introduces himself. He's on a month off work and trying to pack in as much of thailand as he can. I'm fairly tired at this point but i chat with him for a while, sipping on some cheap beers i got at the station. He's about two years out of college and a complete prat, the type to tell you tonnes about himself and his past and the things he's achieved in his job (including names of superiors and stuff that nobody other than his mum cold ever give a toss about), but as soon as someone else starts talking, he's bored out of his brains and making no attempt to hide it (and yes i recogise the irony in complaining about someone telling you boring details of their life in a huge boring blog, shut up). I try to stonewall him a few times into leaving me alone but his bunk isn't ready yet (it's a sleeper train) so he starts into another story about his walking around bangkok or the things he's going to do in the north or the computers he got his bosses at work to use. I have no problem with someone being a bit lonely and enjoying company, but when i tell him about my own experiences, he's staring bored around the carriage, patently not listening and obviously wishing his bunk was ready. Mercifully, after an eternity (probably about fifteen minutes), his bunk is ready and he cuts me off mid sentence with "see you later" and bolts. Thank christ!!! I drain my beer and fall asleep.
We arrive into Chiang Mai around 1pm. I pass the time beforehand reading my book, taking photos out the window, and listening to music. When i get off the train, i head for a songthaw (shared taxi - a hiace with seats in the back) and ask to go to Libra House, a guesthouse i hear is nice and cheap. After a minute, the driver arrives with another lady who tells me there's actually a free songthaw to libra house. I gather up my stuff and arrive to the free transport, and who's in the back? The english prat. Ah shite. He bores me for a while on the way to the guesthouse, we get there and it turns out to be just as cheap and cheerful as promised. I get a room and head back to the restaraunt for food. As i finish, english dude comes back and asks if i'm interested in heading off around town. It's tempting (or rather, as tempting as eating my own testicles) but i pass saying i'm going to go get a few hours sleep first and head back to my room. I give it 30 mins for safety's sake, and head out.
Chiang Mai's a nice spot. One of the guide books says it's like a small town grown bigger and i'd have to agree. I walk around checking out the shops and some temples and things, eat some food, drink some beers, check out the night market and eventually crash around 11pm.
At about 1am i wake and throw up. Same again at 3am, 4.30am, 6am and 8am. Balls.
This is where things get pretty boring. I spend a few days in my room sick, reading about three books a day and eating about once a day. Nice for saving money, but a shit thing to do on your own in a foreign country. At this point i'm still a bit sick but also sick of being indoors so i'm around town a bit more, but taking it very easy. I haven't had a drink in almost a week. Imagine!
Anyways, i do make it out for a few hours on sunday for the Loi Krathong festival. This is an annual festival held on the 12th full moon (or some such pagan bollocks) and is to celebrate the end of the monsoon. Everyone in town makes a little raft out of bamboo leaves, loads it with flowers and candles, and sends it off down the river. Add to that thousands of thai candles being let off (a large paper cylinder, open at one end, with some sort of candle thing underneath - basically it fills with smoke and after a few minutes takes off and floats into the sky until it's the size of a star) and millions of fireworks, and you have a rather large but beautiful brouhaha. Thousands of people come out and line the streets, there's fire breathing, dancing, sparklers, singing - all kinds of madness. I head out for about four hours of it, walk about ten miles with the parade, take some pics, and head back to my cave.
So now it's.... Wednesday. Tomorrow i'll be in Chiang Mai for a week, which is a pretty sorry situation seeing as all i've done is see some fireworks, read most of John Grisham's novels, and throw up a lot. Tomorrow i'm heading for pai where i hope to go see some tribes, check out some countryside, and catch up on my drinking. Until then....
Friday, November 16, 2007
Long week of nothing
Well, i was reading back over the end of the last blog there to see where i pick up, and it says sunday, but it could have been any day. Nothing particularly noteworthy happened the few days in Pha Ngan, basically, get up, breakfast, walk around, lunch, sleep a bit, walk around more, dinner, pints, handsome burgers, pool/pints, more handsome burgers, sleep. If anyone ever makes it to Thong Nai Pan, places to visit are Star Huts for the sleeping (nice spot and cheap as all hell), Handsome Sandwiches for eating (thinking of having my Christmas dinner there, the burgers are amazing) and Rasta Baby Bar for the drinking (most laid back/relaxing pub ever, and the food is deadly).
Anyways, at some point (not sure which day) we headed for Koh Tao, the third island here on the south east coast. The ladies from Handsome Sandwiches drove us into town in the back of their jeep (scary stuff, those ladies drive like fuckin maniacs) and after walking around Thong Sala for a while (shithole) we went to our ferry... And waited. Had a few beers (50c a can from the vendors, and ice cold too - job), talked to this canadian punk guy and this english pete doherty lookalike and occasionally walked into the sun to remind myself why i was sitting in the shade. After about an hour and a half, we got on the boat to find out there were huge flatscreen TVs everywhere and a fully bitchin sound system... Playing a live acoustic DVD of The Scorpions (them who done Wind of Change) (the one with the whistling). Hellish. I pulled out my MP3 player and listened to some D4 while the ozzies and kiwis slept and alex played with a parrot. The crossing was kind of cool as we passed loads of insanely large fishing boats, or to be exact, small boats with huge cages on them. How they stayed afloat i'll never know. We got into Ko Tao around sunset, and after walking the beach for a while, found a resort that had cold water fan rooms (with TV - score!) for about e12. Grand out, found a nice restaurant that did great curries, cheap beer and free pool, and then headed to another beach front bar with cheap cocktails, beers and buckets (literally, a tin bucket filled with booze with about five straws hanging out of it for a fiver) where you sat outside on beanbags. Sweet.
The next day, everyone got up and rented a longtail (sort of a taxi boat) to go on a trip around the island and do some snorkeling, but being as i can't swim and seven hours of direct sun is my idea of hell, i opted out. I was pretty wrecked at this stage from the travelling the day before and the drinking all night, so i camped in my room for the day, watching free movies and enjoying not being boiling hot all day. Score. When they guys got back that night, we got some dinner, played a tonne of free pool, and headed back to the beanbag spot. Thursday (i think) we rented a load of scooters for about e3 each. I'd never driven a bike before, so i was a little nervous, but it was a piece of piss. We drove around for about five or six hours to see the island, which was cool except that most of the island is inaccessible by bike so most of the day was spent driving up busted roads only to find them too busted before turning back. Still, i really loved the scooters and can see why all the ozzies at home have them. Definitely getting one when i get home. In the evening it rained, so we found another bar with free pool, had a few drinks, got some eats, and relaxed.
Friday i was good and ready to leave the islands. Being that i can't swim and i hate direct sun, island life has feck all to offer me except napping all day and drinking all night, which is all well and good except that the islands are about 35-40% more expensive than the mainland. Alex, the ozzies and i hatched a plan to head north saturday (today) which evolved into a plan to head back to samui (land of flooded jeeps), ride some elephants, and fly out monday. Job. Saturday evening we went to an ozzie bar with cheap beers (two chang for e1.60), paid for pool (booooooo), and half price thai food (sound). After a few hours there we headed to a beach bar and had the craic with some english girls we ran into.
So this morning we got up early and got a boat to saumi, checked into the swankiest hotel i've ever stayed in (e30, which is way over my budget, but the place would cost upwards of e300 anywhere else so for one night, why not), and came across the road to check flights and write this.
So sorry this one is so boring, i'm exhausted and not much happened that makes a good yarn. That's not to say it's not been fun, just beach life is quiet and relaxing, and Dan Brown don't write no quiet relaxing thrillers. In the next week i expect to be back to bangkok with alex for a few days before he goes home, which, his being a madser, means a bunch of insano nights out (and seeing as so many people have hinted in emails and such i'll remind y'all neither myself or alex is gay, he's just a cool dude). After that i'm off to chiang mai for the Loi Krathung festival (where they send thousands of candles down the river every night for a week - sweet) and then possibly up to pai to volunteer on an elephant farm for a few days. No shit.
Laters...
Anyways, at some point (not sure which day) we headed for Koh Tao, the third island here on the south east coast. The ladies from Handsome Sandwiches drove us into town in the back of their jeep (scary stuff, those ladies drive like fuckin maniacs) and after walking around Thong Sala for a while (shithole) we went to our ferry... And waited. Had a few beers (50c a can from the vendors, and ice cold too - job), talked to this canadian punk guy and this english pete doherty lookalike and occasionally walked into the sun to remind myself why i was sitting in the shade. After about an hour and a half, we got on the boat to find out there were huge flatscreen TVs everywhere and a fully bitchin sound system... Playing a live acoustic DVD of The Scorpions (them who done Wind of Change) (the one with the whistling). Hellish. I pulled out my MP3 player and listened to some D4 while the ozzies and kiwis slept and alex played with a parrot. The crossing was kind of cool as we passed loads of insanely large fishing boats, or to be exact, small boats with huge cages on them. How they stayed afloat i'll never know. We got into Ko Tao around sunset, and after walking the beach for a while, found a resort that had cold water fan rooms (with TV - score!) for about e12. Grand out, found a nice restaurant that did great curries, cheap beer and free pool, and then headed to another beach front bar with cheap cocktails, beers and buckets (literally, a tin bucket filled with booze with about five straws hanging out of it for a fiver) where you sat outside on beanbags. Sweet.
The next day, everyone got up and rented a longtail (sort of a taxi boat) to go on a trip around the island and do some snorkeling, but being as i can't swim and seven hours of direct sun is my idea of hell, i opted out. I was pretty wrecked at this stage from the travelling the day before and the drinking all night, so i camped in my room for the day, watching free movies and enjoying not being boiling hot all day. Score. When they guys got back that night, we got some dinner, played a tonne of free pool, and headed back to the beanbag spot. Thursday (i think) we rented a load of scooters for about e3 each. I'd never driven a bike before, so i was a little nervous, but it was a piece of piss. We drove around for about five or six hours to see the island, which was cool except that most of the island is inaccessible by bike so most of the day was spent driving up busted roads only to find them too busted before turning back. Still, i really loved the scooters and can see why all the ozzies at home have them. Definitely getting one when i get home. In the evening it rained, so we found another bar with free pool, had a few drinks, got some eats, and relaxed.
Friday i was good and ready to leave the islands. Being that i can't swim and i hate direct sun, island life has feck all to offer me except napping all day and drinking all night, which is all well and good except that the islands are about 35-40% more expensive than the mainland. Alex, the ozzies and i hatched a plan to head north saturday (today) which evolved into a plan to head back to samui (land of flooded jeeps), ride some elephants, and fly out monday. Job. Saturday evening we went to an ozzie bar with cheap beers (two chang for e1.60), paid for pool (booooooo), and half price thai food (sound). After a few hours there we headed to a beach bar and had the craic with some english girls we ran into.
So this morning we got up early and got a boat to saumi, checked into the swankiest hotel i've ever stayed in (e30, which is way over my budget, but the place would cost upwards of e300 anywhere else so for one night, why not), and came across the road to check flights and write this.
So sorry this one is so boring, i'm exhausted and not much happened that makes a good yarn. That's not to say it's not been fun, just beach life is quiet and relaxing, and Dan Brown don't write no quiet relaxing thrillers. In the next week i expect to be back to bangkok with alex for a few days before he goes home, which, his being a madser, means a bunch of insano nights out (and seeing as so many people have hinted in emails and such i'll remind y'all neither myself or alex is gay, he's just a cool dude). After that i'm off to chiang mai for the Loi Krathung festival (where they send thousands of candles down the river every night for a week - sweet) and then possibly up to pai to volunteer on an elephant farm for a few days. No shit.
Laters...
Saturday, November 10, 2007
It's raining sun - Hallelujah!!
After posting Wednesday i go up to see some of the town but it's all sandbags and long faces, so i get out some cash, hit up a 7-11 for some beers and taytos (or the equivalent, lays, which are actually pretty nice) and head back to my porch to listen to music and read my book. After a while this slightly dodgy looking trio check into the corner room, so i head over to say hello. They turn out to be Swiss, and within about a minute and a half are asking where they can get some drugs. I make my excuses and head back to my porch. This big tattooed dude walks past a few times and i make a little conversation with him. Eventually he joins me and we sink some beers. His name is Alex, turns out he's German, in Thailand for a month, been over on the south western islands for two weeks and only seen two days of sun. We get fairly hammered and head for some dinner around five, where we meet up with two couples, one from New Zealand (Anna and Mike) and one from Australia (Sally and Mick). We invite them to join us and we all sit on one of the porches drinking for the night. Around eight the rain gets silly and the place starts to flood. After wading through the water at one point, i get a pain in my toe, but think nothing of it. I head back to my room to find it under two inches of water, so i move all my stuff to another bungalow. At some stage we go to the nearby shop to get more beers, where it turns out a can of heinekin is about fifty euro cent. Score!! At some stage, i crash.
The next morning we all meet up for breakfast. At some point during the night, my toe has turned 100% purple, which is a bit worrying, but being the good sensible chap i am, i decide to let it be and see if it spreads to the rest of my food. I check into my room for one more night (ten euro - score) and the kiwis tell me that the girl from the swiss apartment came up to them three times that morning asking to borrow money (first e400, then 4000 thai baht (around e80), then 100 baht (about e2)I get talking to some english girls who say she did the same to them. It becomes pretty clear soon enough that she's a bit of a junkie, as she's pale and, eh, looks like a junkie. Sure enough, about a half an hour after asking the lads for money, she's sauntering around drinking a bottle of tiger beer. We get back to the kiwis porch to find the leftover bottles of tiger are gone. Hmmm....
Anyways, for e16 we rent a jeep, split it four ways between me, alex and the two kiwis, and head off to drive round the island. Sure enough, we get out of the resort and onto the road, and find the crossing under about four feet or water. We elect to drive through it nice and slow, but sure enough as it's starting to get shallower, some prick in a large SUV comes barreling towards us, hits us with a huge wave which floods the engine, and the jeeps cuts out. Prick. The two lads push the jeep out of the water (joined by about five thais - sound!) and we head off to figure out what to do. Luckily we meet the guy who rented the jeep to us and he gets it going. We head off for a while, see the airport (awesome) and get some food in this little market (i get these delicious fried chicken/veg/herb balls on a stick for twenty euro cent. Nice). We go see the big buddah, from where you can see Ko Pha Ngan, and island about ten kilometers to the north of us, and then head for the waterfalls in the south of the island, which are amazing but necessitate driving through huge floods of four foot water again - all one way traffic, luckily, but we do get stuck in a few traffic jams, while in water, which freaks me out no end. When it gets dark, we head back for our resort. It's still raining so i try to avoid the floods, only getting into deep water on the last stretch before our resort (where we cut out earlier). And guess what. Some fucker does the exact same thing, ploughing through in some bastard SUV flooding the engine again. While i maintain my composure (see: punching the roof while shouting "PRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICK") the lads push us home, just in time for dinner and drinks (in the bar we spot the three swiss, sitting at a table full of food, eyes rolling back in their heads). Later me, alex and mike head to this nightclub as reccomended by alex, where me and mike play some of the worst pool of all time, before heading for home.
Friday my toe is a mixture of red and purple, but it's not spreading, so i decide to leave it. It's a little sore but not sore enough to be broken. Job. We decide, if we're going to be in the rain anyways, why not be in the rain on another island? So we pack up our stuff and make for Ko Pha Ngan. Mercifully, it's not raining yet, so we get a dry and smooth crossing on the ferry. We land into an area called Haad Rin where the famous Full Moon Parties are, to be told there's a Black Moon party the next day. What this is i have no idea, but it sounds fun. We get food, hawk with a rake of taxi dudes, and eventually settle on one taxi to take us to this beach that Alex is mad to visit, Thong Nai Pan. The beach is on the north east of the island, and is fairly inaccessable at the best of times as the road isn't paved and goes over mountains, so with the rain, it's a bit.... Eehhh... We set off with this mad samoan looking dude in some mad party van covered in lights and speakers. What follows is about the scariest 45 minutes of my life as we go up and down sixty degree slopes with abrupt four hundred foot drops on either side into blank jungle. Did i mention there's no barriers at the side of thai roads? Dad would have loved it. When things go offroad i start staring at the ground (highlight: sliding backwards down a hill of about 80 degrees while the driver tries to get some traction going). We eventually get to our destination and i just about hug the driver.
One of the happiest moments of my life quickly turns sour when it becomes evident we're the only tourists for about ten miles. Grand and all, except that there's no damn guesthouses open. We check out a few places on the deserted north beach before getting a taxi to the south beach where we check into this place called Star Huts, and i get a bungalow on the beach for about eight euro. Dinner and drinks ensue, before we head for an auld schroll down the beach, over some rocks, and onto a neighboring private beach, where an super swanky resort is built into the rocks, with four levels of infinity pools, and all mad swanky decking and marble walkways. Someone shows up and we start to leg it before he points out the way to the main restaurant area and we head for a schonz (aka, a look around). To say this place is plush is an understatement. Some serious richie rich shit, each chalet with it's own outside jacuzzi, staff everywhere bowing despite our obviously being out of place, we leave before we're kicked out and i crash.
Despite it not raining at all on saturday, it's still a huge surprise when sunday is actually a nice day. Feeling good beacuse my toes about 50% back to normal, I negotiate three nights for my bungalow for e20. Score! We get breakfast and have a walk around town, hang out on the beach, eat some more, walk to this awesome bar on stilts called Rasta Bby Bar (pumping raggae, cushons instead of seats, bob marley posters everywhere) where i get the best food i've had in thailand, "Rasta Bruschetta" (italian flat bread, tomato, garlic, basil, cheese and olive oil. Amazing and only about e1.20). We head back to the huts and hang out for a while drinking on the porch before heading back to that rasta bar for more food and drinks. They have a load of new kittens so we play with them, take some pictures, and i show everyone how to bust out a gang sign with their hands for their respective hometowns (i've been rocking WC (west cork) in photos all weekend so when someone asks, everyone wants their own). As we pour out at around 1am, me and mick start busting some mad snoop dog pimp talk (basically taking the first one or two letters of a word and replacing the rest with either "izzy" or "izzle" - "this weather is very hot" becoming "this wizzle is mad hizzy". Yeah, i know, pretty stupid eh?) which confuses our german buddy Alex so much he decides he's had enough and crashes, poor bastard. We head to a bar on the beach to play some pool and crash around two after some amazing burgers at "Mr Handsome's".
So today is Sunday and the sun is absolutely splitting the stones. As anyone who's ever seen my skin will know, me and the sun are mortal enemies, so i've been keeping to the shade live the Lestat i am. I did make one attempt at walking down the beach with my tshirt off, but when the coastgards helicoptered in only to shout "that's not a whale, that's an irish dude. Hey fatty, get off the fuckin beach, you're scaring the tourists" i put back on my shirt and hit the bar. Good move methinks!
The next morning we all meet up for breakfast. At some point during the night, my toe has turned 100% purple, which is a bit worrying, but being the good sensible chap i am, i decide to let it be and see if it spreads to the rest of my food. I check into my room for one more night (ten euro - score) and the kiwis tell me that the girl from the swiss apartment came up to them three times that morning asking to borrow money (first e400, then 4000 thai baht (around e80), then 100 baht (about e2)I get talking to some english girls who say she did the same to them. It becomes pretty clear soon enough that she's a bit of a junkie, as she's pale and, eh, looks like a junkie. Sure enough, about a half an hour after asking the lads for money, she's sauntering around drinking a bottle of tiger beer. We get back to the kiwis porch to find the leftover bottles of tiger are gone. Hmmm....
Anyways, for e16 we rent a jeep, split it four ways between me, alex and the two kiwis, and head off to drive round the island. Sure enough, we get out of the resort and onto the road, and find the crossing under about four feet or water. We elect to drive through it nice and slow, but sure enough as it's starting to get shallower, some prick in a large SUV comes barreling towards us, hits us with a huge wave which floods the engine, and the jeeps cuts out. Prick. The two lads push the jeep out of the water (joined by about five thais - sound!) and we head off to figure out what to do. Luckily we meet the guy who rented the jeep to us and he gets it going. We head off for a while, see the airport (awesome) and get some food in this little market (i get these delicious fried chicken/veg/herb balls on a stick for twenty euro cent. Nice). We go see the big buddah, from where you can see Ko Pha Ngan, and island about ten kilometers to the north of us, and then head for the waterfalls in the south of the island, which are amazing but necessitate driving through huge floods of four foot water again - all one way traffic, luckily, but we do get stuck in a few traffic jams, while in water, which freaks me out no end. When it gets dark, we head back for our resort. It's still raining so i try to avoid the floods, only getting into deep water on the last stretch before our resort (where we cut out earlier). And guess what. Some fucker does the exact same thing, ploughing through in some bastard SUV flooding the engine again. While i maintain my composure (see: punching the roof while shouting "PRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICK") the lads push us home, just in time for dinner and drinks (in the bar we spot the three swiss, sitting at a table full of food, eyes rolling back in their heads). Later me, alex and mike head to this nightclub as reccomended by alex, where me and mike play some of the worst pool of all time, before heading for home.
Friday my toe is a mixture of red and purple, but it's not spreading, so i decide to leave it. It's a little sore but not sore enough to be broken. Job. We decide, if we're going to be in the rain anyways, why not be in the rain on another island? So we pack up our stuff and make for Ko Pha Ngan. Mercifully, it's not raining yet, so we get a dry and smooth crossing on the ferry. We land into an area called Haad Rin where the famous Full Moon Parties are, to be told there's a Black Moon party the next day. What this is i have no idea, but it sounds fun. We get food, hawk with a rake of taxi dudes, and eventually settle on one taxi to take us to this beach that Alex is mad to visit, Thong Nai Pan. The beach is on the north east of the island, and is fairly inaccessable at the best of times as the road isn't paved and goes over mountains, so with the rain, it's a bit.... Eehhh... We set off with this mad samoan looking dude in some mad party van covered in lights and speakers. What follows is about the scariest 45 minutes of my life as we go up and down sixty degree slopes with abrupt four hundred foot drops on either side into blank jungle. Did i mention there's no barriers at the side of thai roads? Dad would have loved it. When things go offroad i start staring at the ground (highlight: sliding backwards down a hill of about 80 degrees while the driver tries to get some traction going). We eventually get to our destination and i just about hug the driver.
One of the happiest moments of my life quickly turns sour when it becomes evident we're the only tourists for about ten miles. Grand and all, except that there's no damn guesthouses open. We check out a few places on the deserted north beach before getting a taxi to the south beach where we check into this place called Star Huts, and i get a bungalow on the beach for about eight euro. Dinner and drinks ensue, before we head for an auld schroll down the beach, over some rocks, and onto a neighboring private beach, where an super swanky resort is built into the rocks, with four levels of infinity pools, and all mad swanky decking and marble walkways. Someone shows up and we start to leg it before he points out the way to the main restaurant area and we head for a schonz (aka, a look around). To say this place is plush is an understatement. Some serious richie rich shit, each chalet with it's own outside jacuzzi, staff everywhere bowing despite our obviously being out of place, we leave before we're kicked out and i crash.
Despite it not raining at all on saturday, it's still a huge surprise when sunday is actually a nice day. Feeling good beacuse my toes about 50% back to normal, I negotiate three nights for my bungalow for e20. Score! We get breakfast and have a walk around town, hang out on the beach, eat some more, walk to this awesome bar on stilts called Rasta Bby Bar (pumping raggae, cushons instead of seats, bob marley posters everywhere) where i get the best food i've had in thailand, "Rasta Bruschetta" (italian flat bread, tomato, garlic, basil, cheese and olive oil. Amazing and only about e1.20). We head back to the huts and hang out for a while drinking on the porch before heading back to that rasta bar for more food and drinks. They have a load of new kittens so we play with them, take some pictures, and i show everyone how to bust out a gang sign with their hands for their respective hometowns (i've been rocking WC (west cork) in photos all weekend so when someone asks, everyone wants their own). As we pour out at around 1am, me and mick start busting some mad snoop dog pimp talk (basically taking the first one or two letters of a word and replacing the rest with either "izzy" or "izzle" - "this weather is very hot" becoming "this wizzle is mad hizzy". Yeah, i know, pretty stupid eh?) which confuses our german buddy Alex so much he decides he's had enough and crashes, poor bastard. We head to a bar on the beach to play some pool and crash around two after some amazing burgers at "Mr Handsome's".
So today is Sunday and the sun is absolutely splitting the stones. As anyone who's ever seen my skin will know, me and the sun are mortal enemies, so i've been keeping to the shade live the Lestat i am. I did make one attempt at walking down the beach with my tshirt off, but when the coastgards helicoptered in only to shout "that's not a whale, that's an irish dude. Hey fatty, get off the fuckin beach, you're scaring the tourists" i put back on my shirt and hit the bar. Good move methinks!
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Weather With You
So saturday ended up a quiet day. The jaunt between time zones over the previous week had caught up on me so i was pretty tired to begin with. I passed the day doing some shopping for books, shorts and sandals, getting train/bus/boat tickets for Ko Samui (sweet island in the south), eathing cheap food, drinking cheap beers, generally being a lazy bastard. Around four i headed back to the hostel to deposit my swag and have a look at my books. Woke up around ten, realising i'd fallen asleep checking out John Grisham's "The Partner" and slept for about six hours. Remembered i was supposed to ring the folks (hadn't talked to them since NYC where i'd promised i'd ring as soon as i got to thailand) so headed off down the road trying to figure out the phone buzz. Half asleep, i found a 7-11 and bought a phone card with most of my money, before realising it wasn't the type that worked on any of the phones. Tried to collect call off a few payphones but the reception was terrible. Shite!! Found this internet/travel agent/international call place where you write down the number on a piece of paper and they diall for you. Tried the house phone, got the answering machine, tried both parents mobiles but both were switched off. Double shite! With about 50 baht (around e1) left i tried barry's mobile and got through to be told the folks were actually on holiday. Balls. Barry asked how bangkok was and how my adventures with the ladyboys had been, but the call center lady was sitting there looking at me so i couldn't say "bangkok's a shithole and they ladyboys are everywhere, in particular on the arms of 35-50 year old germans, oh and one dude i saw in a bar earlier who looked all of 17 but had five "ladies" of (i guessed) mixed gender sitting with him, he looking very excited with himself" so i opted for a steeped in sarcasm but in retrospect sleepily dozy "great" before hurrying off the phone with about half a second to spare before my cash ran out. Thank god i got that out of the way, eh!
So i slept for another three or four hours, then woke up at about three or four and read a few hundred pages of that book. Went out around eight for some breakfast, was walking around a bit when this random american girl came up to me and said "where you going". Half asleep and rather confused as to what was going on i said "no idea". She said "wanna go together?" and dragged me around a shitload of temples and wats and crap for a couple of hours. Was an odd pairing seeing as I am (much to my da's chagrin) a liberal of "douchebag" proportions, whereas her da, brothers and fiance are all military dudes, she voted for Bush, and made a number of dodgy statements about "towel heads" and white power. Still, we'd good craic and i got to split the transport costs of seeing most of the city's attractions by taxi. Oh and a guy in a tuc-tuc said "fuck you" to me a number of times because i didn't want to pay him an inordinate amount of money to go in a direction i wasn't headed. Funny that. So anyways, around five i headed back to my hostel (a sweet double room with A/C for about eight euro) and pass out, sleeping right through my alarm at eight and waking at 2am. Balls. I finish off my book and fix up all my crap into my bag, check out just before 12 and leave my bag at reception. Having four hours to kill, i do the only sensible thing and head to a pub and get a wee bit drunk on my own. At half four i go back and get my bag, spend half an hour trying to flag a taxi on road that doesn't allow taxis to stop, before eventually finding a tuc tuck that'll take me to the train station for 80 baht (about e1.60). To say i'd been avoiding getting a tuc tuc at this point is putting it mildy. For those who, like me until about a week ago, have no idea what a tuc tuc is, it's basically rodney from only fools and horses' three wheeler with a motorbike engine and a small canopy type section at the back for carrying about two people. Oh and the drivers are all, in my opinion, absolutely out of their minds on speed. So we're racing through traffic, running through red lights and bumping gently off lorries when i realise - tuc tuc's are fuckin cool. It's like some sort of extreme sport to these guys, and when you're a little bit drunk, it's a big bit fun. I get to the train station, buy a few more beers from a vendor and hop on my train, making friends with the guy across from me by giving him a beer cosy (i got tonnes of them free at fest) and trying to keep up with the speed at which he's demolishing his beers. We make some conversations via mime before the train departs, whereafter i stare out the window for about half an hour as we pull out of bangkok. Eventually someone comes along and sets up all the beds (it's a sleeper train where the seats become one bed and then another is lowered from the ceiling), so i hop into mine and promptly pass out.
I've woken up not sure how i got there in some strange places but 4am on a sleeper train in thailand packed full of men women and children who speak no english has to be at least top ten. After i get my barings i figure out i've another three hours to go so i pull out my mp3 and rock some Small Brown Bike, who i've been listening to almost repeatedly since they slayed at fest. Eventually our train pulls into, eh, some town, everyone gets off, i get on a bus, and end up at this ferry, and then on this rather small boat. We pull out for our two and a half hour trip to Ko Samui, which at first is awesome. Green seas, loads of small boats, islands in the distance, palm trees everywhere, the full picture postcard deal. Oh except that it's pissing rain. Yes, in my hurry to get tickets booked i neglect to check the weather, and it turns out i've arrived at the height of the one month when it pisses from the heavens 24/7. After a while the seas get very choppy but the drivers giving it socks and i just about hold my stomach together as we arrive into ko samui. I get a taxi to one of the resorts reccomended in the book and get a room (well, chalet sort of) for e10 a night. I crash for a while before heading to the restaraunt for some food (spagetti bolognaise and a tiger beer for e3, awesome) and then take a long walk along the beach. This stretch is about 6km long, dotted with restaraunts, bars and guesthouses. It stops raining long enough for me to walk about 3km down it, before the thunder and lightning kicks in and i make for home, arriving just in time for it to start pissing down again. My room/chalet/whatever is basically a two room affair with two single beds, and ensuite (no hot water though), and a little porch with a table and two chiars. I sit for an hour listening to Smashing Pumpkins and, bizarelly, Sonic Youth, reading the new Kevin Smith book and polishing off some beers i had left from the train. Eventually i head inside and crash.
So now it's.... Wednesday? Anyways, it rained like hell all night (i woke around four) but stopped around 10 so i got some breakfast and wrote this. Gonna probably head back up north tomorrow and come back here in late december. It seems a lovely place but the weather renders it a bit pointless.
Think my internet credit's about to run out so....
So i slept for another three or four hours, then woke up at about three or four and read a few hundred pages of that book. Went out around eight for some breakfast, was walking around a bit when this random american girl came up to me and said "where you going". Half asleep and rather confused as to what was going on i said "no idea". She said "wanna go together?" and dragged me around a shitload of temples and wats and crap for a couple of hours. Was an odd pairing seeing as I am (much to my da's chagrin) a liberal of "douchebag" proportions, whereas her da, brothers and fiance are all military dudes, she voted for Bush, and made a number of dodgy statements about "towel heads" and white power. Still, we'd good craic and i got to split the transport costs of seeing most of the city's attractions by taxi. Oh and a guy in a tuc-tuc said "fuck you" to me a number of times because i didn't want to pay him an inordinate amount of money to go in a direction i wasn't headed. Funny that. So anyways, around five i headed back to my hostel (a sweet double room with A/C for about eight euro) and pass out, sleeping right through my alarm at eight and waking at 2am. Balls. I finish off my book and fix up all my crap into my bag, check out just before 12 and leave my bag at reception. Having four hours to kill, i do the only sensible thing and head to a pub and get a wee bit drunk on my own. At half four i go back and get my bag, spend half an hour trying to flag a taxi on road that doesn't allow taxis to stop, before eventually finding a tuc tuck that'll take me to the train station for 80 baht (about e1.60). To say i'd been avoiding getting a tuc tuc at this point is putting it mildy. For those who, like me until about a week ago, have no idea what a tuc tuc is, it's basically rodney from only fools and horses' three wheeler with a motorbike engine and a small canopy type section at the back for carrying about two people. Oh and the drivers are all, in my opinion, absolutely out of their minds on speed. So we're racing through traffic, running through red lights and bumping gently off lorries when i realise - tuc tuc's are fuckin cool. It's like some sort of extreme sport to these guys, and when you're a little bit drunk, it's a big bit fun. I get to the train station, buy a few more beers from a vendor and hop on my train, making friends with the guy across from me by giving him a beer cosy (i got tonnes of them free at fest) and trying to keep up with the speed at which he's demolishing his beers. We make some conversations via mime before the train departs, whereafter i stare out the window for about half an hour as we pull out of bangkok. Eventually someone comes along and sets up all the beds (it's a sleeper train where the seats become one bed and then another is lowered from the ceiling), so i hop into mine and promptly pass out.
I've woken up not sure how i got there in some strange places but 4am on a sleeper train in thailand packed full of men women and children who speak no english has to be at least top ten. After i get my barings i figure out i've another three hours to go so i pull out my mp3 and rock some Small Brown Bike, who i've been listening to almost repeatedly since they slayed at fest. Eventually our train pulls into, eh, some town, everyone gets off, i get on a bus, and end up at this ferry, and then on this rather small boat. We pull out for our two and a half hour trip to Ko Samui, which at first is awesome. Green seas, loads of small boats, islands in the distance, palm trees everywhere, the full picture postcard deal. Oh except that it's pissing rain. Yes, in my hurry to get tickets booked i neglect to check the weather, and it turns out i've arrived at the height of the one month when it pisses from the heavens 24/7. After a while the seas get very choppy but the drivers giving it socks and i just about hold my stomach together as we arrive into ko samui. I get a taxi to one of the resorts reccomended in the book and get a room (well, chalet sort of) for e10 a night. I crash for a while before heading to the restaraunt for some food (spagetti bolognaise and a tiger beer for e3, awesome) and then take a long walk along the beach. This stretch is about 6km long, dotted with restaraunts, bars and guesthouses. It stops raining long enough for me to walk about 3km down it, before the thunder and lightning kicks in and i make for home, arriving just in time for it to start pissing down again. My room/chalet/whatever is basically a two room affair with two single beds, and ensuite (no hot water though), and a little porch with a table and two chiars. I sit for an hour listening to Smashing Pumpkins and, bizarelly, Sonic Youth, reading the new Kevin Smith book and polishing off some beers i had left from the train. Eventually i head inside and crash.
So now it's.... Wednesday? Anyways, it rained like hell all night (i woke around four) but stopped around 10 so i got some breakfast and wrote this. Gonna probably head back up north tomorrow and come back here in late december. It seems a lovely place but the weather renders it a bit pointless.
Think my internet credit's about to run out so....
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