Bangkok

Despite two previous stops in Bangkok (was supposed to be three were it not for the red shirt protests), we still hadn't really had a chance to explore the city. This time through we had more time and feel we truly got to experience Bangkok --- the good, the bad and the ugly.

We ended up staying not far from the palace, many of the more popular temples and the infamous Khao San Road. But we were still far enough away to have a nice mellow, quiet hotel. We did venture down to Khao San a few times, however, and it lived up to it billing.



The recent unrest in Bangkok hasn’t seemed to slow down Khao San, at least after dark. The street and really the area are jammed packed with restaurants, bars and guesthouses. For those that don't know, it is the backpacker mecca of Bangkok and was made famous (or more famous) by the 1997 book (and later Leonardo DiCaprio movie) called "The Beach." Khao San, like Vang Vieng and Haad Rin on Koh Phangan (also depicted in "The Beach") pretty much solely exists now to cater to backpackers looking to get wasted cheap and with no ID required.


These have not been our favorite types of places. But Khao San is definitely a sight to behold. It reminds me of nights on Sixth Street in Austin, Texas on steroids, but with Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling" blaring constantly from ten different clubs.

The World Cup also brought out loads of crazy fans and every restaurant and bar shows the games. That said, we met some really nice folks sitting and watching some of the matches.

A few blocks north of Khao San there is a street loaded with street stalls. Really the stalls are everywhere, but here there was a good concentration of them and we found the best Pad Thai either of us have ever had. We went back a few times to try to get more, but never found them open again.

We also decided we had to go see some temples. Honestly, we were getting a bit sick of visiting temples. Not that they aren't beautiful, but we've seen a lot of churches and temples at this point. We decided to first walk down to Wat Pho, one of the more famous temples and site of the giant reclining Buddha (more on that later). As we were walking south to the wat, we realized we might be off by a street or so, so we sat down in a park and tried to hide the fact that we were consulting a guidebook map. Alas we were made and a nice older Thai man came up to us and offered to help. At first we were a bit wary, but he seemed very genuine. Still I was thinking that perhaps he'd ask us for a bit of change for helping at most. He told us about some of the temples on our map, suggesting some and not being too enthusiastic about others. He also pointed us to nice temples not featured in the guidebooks such as the Lucky Buddha and "Glorious Temple."

He then gave us what seemed like great locals advice and said always get a tuk tuk with a white license plate as these are government licensed and prices are fixed. Wow really!?! Why haven't I heard of this before!

We headed out to the street to look for a white license plate. A few yellow license plates passed and then there came a white. Our new friend hailed him for us and showed him on our map where we wanted to go. We got the great price of just 50 baht (about US$1.50) for our own tuk tuk for the whole day of temple gazing! Thanks, new friend! And off we went.


The first temple, Wat Indrawiharn, was very cool and featured a giant 32 meter (100 foot) tall standing Buddha.

The second temple, the so-called "Lucky Buddha" (I still don't know its real name) was actually quite nice too. Not a tourist to be seen anywhere. It wasn't very big though and after a quick look around, we headed back to the tuk tuk. When we got there, the driver asks if it is okay if he goes to the toilet. Of course, we say sure! Shortly after he leaves, a man in the car next to us starts talking to us. He asks about us and where we're from then says he is lawyer too and works for a firm called Baker & McKenzie. They have offices in the US too, he says. Leslie knows of the firm and we have a nice conversation. He's a corporate tax lawyer, he says, but his parents still live in Bangkok and his brother is a monk at this very wat. “Where are you headed,” he asks. We show him on the map that our Thai professor friend from the park had helped us with. "Oh Glorious!" he says, "you will really like that." Oh why is that? "Well it's the best tailor in Thailand, maybe all of Asia," he says. Uhh, what!?! Tailor? Umm, we thought it was a temple. "No, but it is great deal, usually not open to tourists, only Thai people. Today is the last day of their tourist promotion.”

We may be slow, but at this point, it clicked. The guy in the park must work for this tailor, I said to Leslie later as we were underway again in the tuk tuk. At that point I told the tuk tuk driver that we didn't need any clothes, we didn't have money to buy them even if we did and we could skip Glorious and head to the next temple. At this, the tuk tuk driver came clean (sorta) and said he gets free gas coupons from the tailor if he brings us there. We only need to look for five minutes, he says. Okay, we can look for five minutes to get this guy some free gas. At least he's being honest, we think.

We were expecting a hard sale at the tailor, but really didn't get it. We sat down in the “VIP room” for five minutes, looked at some catalogs and then left. No big deal really. We then went to Wat Benchamabophit affectionately known as simply Wat Ben. Another really nice temple, but we were tired and decided to save Wat Pho for the next day.

After being dropped back at our guesthouse, I simply had to know what had just happened to us and Googled "Glorious Tailors." What I found was exact descriptions of our day. From the "professor" in the park to the tuk tuk driver bathroom break to the "lawyer" from the UK (or the U.S. if he happens to be talking to Europeans) to the claims of free gas coupons to Glorious Tailors. Everything that had happened to us that day went according to script. It was very elaborate and very convincing. We read online that a lot of people do buy a lot of stuff from Glorious which, of course, is why they do it. We didn't buy anything, however, and got a good day at the temples out of it and a very cheap tuk tuk for the day. All we lost was a little pride at being deceived so easily. All part of the Bangkok experience, I guess.

The next day we did head down to Wat Pho and saw the temple and the famous reclining Buddha.

From Wikipedia:


Wat Pho is one of the largest and oldest wats in Bangkok (with an area of 50 rai, 80,000 square metres), and is home to more than one thousand Buddha images, as well as one of the largest single Buddha images: the Reclining Buddha. Made as part of Rama III's restoration, the Reclining Buddha is forty-six metres long and fifteen metres high, decorated with gold plating on his body and mother of pearl on his eyes and the soles of his feet. The latter display 108 auspicious scenes in Chinese and Indian styles.


The Wat Pho complex consists of two walled compounds bisected by Soi Chetuphon running east–west. The northern walled compound is where the reclining Buddha and massage school are found. The southern walled compound, Tukgawee, is a working Buddhist monastery with monks in residence and a school.

It was quite cool, but again, we were a little numb to the temples by this point. With that in mind (and a relatively expensive entry fee) we decided to skip the Grand Palace and just saw that from the street.

Bangkok is definitely a trip! We're glad that things have returned to some semblance of normalcy after the protests so we were able to explore this city. Now off to Hong Kong!

Island hopping in Thailand

After the trek to (and from) Makalu in Nepal, we were ready for a change of pace, so we headed from 5000 meters down to 0 meters and eventually -30 meters in the Thai islands. It being the low, rainy or "green" season (depending who you ask), we decided to stick to the Gulf of Thailand rather than the Andaman Sea islands as they are supposed to be drier this time of year. We settled on Koh Tao, a more recently developed, quieter island that has become a mecca for divers.

Getting there was an adventure in itself. After arriving back in Kathmandu we found the city and indeed the country more or less shut down for a protest strike or "bandh" led by the Maoists. This left us relatively confined to our hotel in Kathmandu with no businesses open and no motor vehicles on the road. The exceptions were emergency vehicles and tourist transport buses. The tourist transport buses were very difficult to get though, so our friends at Rolwaling Excursions picked us up from our hotel to take us to the airport. We did get stopped at one point by some Bandh enforcers looking to make sure they were transporting tourists. They saw us and we had no further problems.

After the flight, we felt like we were going out of the frying pan and into the fire as Bangkok was similarly embroiled in political upheaval. However, like our first visit, we found the protests confined to a small area of Bangkok and not an issue for us. We cabbed it directly to the rail station, however, and hopped on the overnight train to Chumphon (over the bridge on the river Kwai incidentally). From there a two hour ferry to Koh Tao and another world seemingly as far away as you could get from politics and protests.


In Koh Tao we made the decision to first head to the quieter east side (or sunrise) side of the island and Tanote Bay. Though the island is not big, a very bad road serves to fairly isolate Tanote. There are only four or five "resorts" in the bay, each consisting of maybe 10 (maybe fewer) bungalows. It being low season, we guess it was less than half full. Our bungalow, though modest, was right on the water and cost about US$13 per night for the two of us!

We spent our days lounging in the bay and snorkeling and occasionally cliff diving (see that big rock in the bay in the pic above). The snorkeling here was as good as we've ever encountered. The reefs go right up to the shore and there is virtually no tide. But swim out a bit and you can dive down along some striking walls. We saw tons of reef sharks, grouper, triggerfish, barracuda, a ray and tons of other assorted colorful tropical fish. The coral and anemone were beautiful as well. Sorry though, we no longer have an underwater camera so we have to poach pics from the web.

Each night we tried a different restaurant and ended up enjoying Poseidon the most with its treehouse-like atmoshere. We were a bit disappointed, however, in the lack of good seafood and fruit. I guess Tanote's isolation keeps that stuff out.

After five days, we decided to head across the island to the west (or sunset) coast to the more happening Sairee Beach. This is Tao's main drag just north of Mae Haad where the ferries come in. We found another cheap bungalow though this one wasn't on the beach (there are plenty on the beach for more money though). Sairee has a ton of dive operators and it seems the beach is deserted by day as everyone is off diving. Just before sunset though the boats roll back in and the bars and restaurants start hopping with beers being swapped over stories of the day's adventures. The sunset is amazing and some of locals entertained us twirling their sticks. A bit down the beach they were twirling sticks that were on fire.

We were going back and forth as to whether to dive or not since the snorkeling had already been so good and so cheap. But we relented... it is one the cheapest places to dive on earth. We decided to go for a full day, three dive trip to Sail Rock, one of Thailand's most celebrated dive spots. It didn't disappoint. Though we saw much of the same marine life we saw snorkeling, the swim-through "chimney" was worth the trip alone. We also got a great look at a lionfish which was pretty cool. We had a great time and it was a perfect day. The only disappointments were we did not spot a whale shark and the visibility at 30 meters was pretty bad.


After two dives at Sail Rock, the final dive was at the Southwest Pinnacle. This was the highlight for me as we swam through a huge school of yellowback fusiliers that was simply surreal.

Back onshore, we grabbed a spot on the beach at the Big Blue Bar and shared a beer with Jen, our divemaster and took in yet another beautiful sunset. The next day we hopped to Koh Phangan. Phangan has a reputation as a party island, but we were led to believe that if you avoid the "Moon Parties" it isn't that crazy. We made the mistake of going to the cheaper Haad Rin, the backpacker destination on Phangan and the site of the Full Moon Party. Being weeks away from the full moon we expected it to be mellower. We were mistaken. We spent one night partying with kids half our age (okay well maybe half Jim's age), drinking free Red Bull and vodkas (courtesy of the hotel) and the legendary "buckets" (see photo below of our friend Dennis deep into one). We didn't even make it to 11:00, let alone the midnight traditional start to the nightly festivities.

We quickly headed up island to the more low-key Haad Yao. One benefit of Koh Phagnan is that it is more developed and therefore things are a bit cheaper. An A/C room was about half what it was on Tao (though we stayed in a fan room on Tao). That was nice, but we definitely preferred Tao, though it is impossible to truly evelauate either island after so little time and so few places visited.

We didn't spend really any time on Koh Samui other than from ferry to airport, but it definitely seemed to be the biggest, most developed of the three with chain restaurants and even malls. It was a nice time in the Thai islands, though we didn't encounter much local culture. It is definitely a spot catering to tourists and western tourists specifically. One spot on Phangan even had a sign that said "westerners and foreigners only" which made us sad.

We decided that rather than test the political climate in Bangkok, we would re-route through Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to get our visas for Vietnam and China, so we loaded into a small prop plane and left these little island gems behind.