Days 28 to 33 - Sat Nov 29 to Fri Dec 5 - Koh Tao is hard not to love

Koh Tao (Turtle Island, "co tow", rhymes with wow) is our first island stop on our tour of the south, which stretches from Day 28 until we leave Thailand on Day 45. When we arrive, we haven't yet decided how long we'll stay but we're hoping for a change of pace.  Koh Tao turns out to be exactly what we're looking for.

Koh Tao is the smallest of the three easter islands and the least developed. Most tourists go there for the cheap diving certification and for the snorkeling. We do neither - instead, we do a lot of this:

Fruit shakes. We can't get enough of them. Mango, dragon fruit, banana... our fruit shake addiction doesn't really pick up until we hit the next island (Koh Pha Ngan) but the love affair starts here.

Until now, our trip has centered around finding cultural sites and taking full days (afternoons) to see all we can. In Koh Tao, we take 7 days to do not much of anything. I call it our Yen Crawl, a modified Pub Crawl since we're not doing much drinking. Got a yen for a burger and fries? Walk 5 minutes to Chopper's Pub for burgers better than any you'll find in Canada. Got a yen for a movie and dinner? Walk down the beach to the Seashell Restaurant for some Thai food, a fruit shake and a viewing of Superbad. The restaurants are some of the best Western food restaurants that we find in Thailand - great prices, amazing quality. And since the island is only 21 square km and only the west and southwest coasts are especially developed, it's very easy to get around on foot.

Less easy are the hiking trails we try to do - all the maps show them, but A) I don't think they get used very often and B) all the maps show roads that I think they meant to finish but never did. All new maps are just based on the old incorrect maps. On top of that, several roads were built but have been ruined by washouts and erosion.  This leads to a few thwarted hikes, one of which finds us at a dead end, picking our way through the woods for about 30 minutes. Pierre does manage to do one successful hike through the south of the island on a very vague trail (again, not very well used so Pierre had to rely on the kindness of strangers who pointed him in very vague directions) :

For the first few days, the sky is always overcast and the tide is in all day and covers up the beach on our side, so we hike over to the East side of the island (a 25 minute walk) where the water is a bit too rough and rocky for swimming, but great for wading:

Eventually, the sun comes out and the beach emerges on our side of the island, Sairee Beach. Our bungalow is less than a 2 minute walk from this Sairee (rhymes with "buy me"), the best beach on the island, and we swim and have at least two meals and/or a snack next to the beach every day:






We do our best to stay out of the sun when it's at its hottest:

The only real excitement that we have comes on Day 28 when we have unwelcome visitors in our bungalow.  The bungalow at the Blue Wind Bungalows where we're staying  is sturdy but pretty rustic, in 5 foot stilts over a pool of rainwater that never seems to dry up, large gaps under the front door, a cold shower and an enclosed bathroom with large unmeshed portholes for light and air circulation. The mosquitoes wander in and out of the bathroom at will, so part of our night time routine involves letting as few bugs into our room and under our bed's mosquito net as possible. We forget to take cockroaches into consideration in our efforts, and a couple of 2.5 inchers break in one night.

After these two are evicted, I immediately propose to Pierre that we refer to them as "jungle beetles" for the remainder of our stay in the bungalow.  The word "cockroach" makes my skin crawl and reminds me exactly what could wander into the room in the middle of the night.  Jungle beetle is accurate (their natural habitat is jungle/forest) and way more Disney.  Pierre seconds the motion and is a trooper, ejecting the bugs whenever they invade courtesy of his Jungle Beetle Expulsion System which consists of a cut off water bottle (the top of the bottle was his solution to our leaky sink).

On our trip so far, we note down in a slim square-a-day agenda those things that we've done and seen each day of our trip - visited such and such a wat,  travelled from A to B, evicted jungle beetles, etc - and the Koh Tao portion of the trip is no different.   When we don't have the book in front of us we usually don't know what day of the week, date or time it is for sure.  Our parents have gotten used to getting messages from us that sound like Hi, it's me, I think it's Friday, but it could be Thursday. I think it's about 10:00 am here...   But this time we top ourselves and discover, once we leave the island, that our book is one day out of sync with the rest of the world.  Somewhere, among the movies and swims and hikes and dinners, we lose an entire day and we don't which one it was or what we did on it.

photo credits: All P. D's picture eye took a vacation.

Day 27 - Sat Nov 28 - The fast boat to Koh Tao was not fast enough

The trick, we learn later, is to take the morning boat because the sea is calmer and hasn't yet worked itself up into a wavy mess. December, too, is known for being a month of rough seas so it's best to be prepared. Neither of us get motion sickness easily, but we both got queasy once on a rough 2-hour ferry, so we know we're not immune. We buy no-name Gravol from a pharmacist 10 minutes before closing on Day 26 (25 CAN cents for 10 pills). After breakfast on Day 27, we take a pill on the way to the boat - me a half hour before the boat leaves the dock and Pierre as we settle in on board.

To buy the pills, I had to first describe to the pharmacist, who spoke no English, that we needed Gravol so in my notebook I drew for him a tiny sailboat on a wavy sea. This turns out to be an understatement - today's ocean is brought to us courtesy of a 6-year old's crayon, the waves higher than they are wide. They swell up metres high at times, and our boat is very thorough about riding down one side and up the other when it isn't busy crashing into them, shoulders first. Just as my stomach peels itself off my clavicle it drops down past my diaphragm like a lead weight. Stomach no likey.

"I wonder if anyone will get sick on the way to the island," Pierre says a few minutes into the trip, craning his neck to assess the other passengers.

With one hand already holding the seat in front of me and a bad feeling about my decision to eat breakfast, I say "I wonder if I'm going to get sick."

A few minutes later, I've devolved to the crash position, eyes closed, searching my memory for any acupressure points relating to nausea, but all I can come up with is something about pinching the web of skin between the left hand's thumb and forefinger. Anti-nausea pressure point or trigger for child labour? Don't know, don't care, it gives me something to do for 15 minutes. Things go pretty well until I think to myself, hey, prepping a plastic bag just in case might not be a bad idea and I simultaneously lift my head, release the pressure point and learn that multi-tasking while nauseous doesn't pay.

Pierre's strong Acadian tummy holds out for an hour and twenty minutes, but mine loses the fight at around minute 25. Pierre holds my hair like a good wing-woman after a particularly rough staggette. I'm not alone in this, and I can hear a few "cousin Huey" 's* and "Buy my buick" 's* in other parts of the boat (*= brilliant Billy Connolly stand up sketch; if I ever find the clip on youtube I promise I'll post it here)

The boat staff dole out swabs of camphor/menthol; as an aromatherapy remedy or to dull the smell of vomit, I'm not sure which - either way, it's a nice distraction because there's not much else to do other than press my forehead against Pierre's knee, wish that Pierre had fatter softer knees, hold a fresh bag at the ready, and ask Pierre "Do you see an island?" from time to time. And while I'm hunched there, looking for random thoughts to distract myself with, it suddenly occurs to me that all of my relatives on both sides of my family (and on both sides of those families) hauled themselves over to Canada on boats. All of them. And as surely as I've inherited the mishmash of traits that mark me a Graham/Merrick, I've inherited this anti-sea tummy from them as well. Possibly all of them.

A few years ago, one of my uncles told me a bit about a trip he'd taken to the UK. I don't have my uncle's knack for details or I'd remember exactly where it
was that this happened, but suffice it to say that he and my aunt visited the port where the Graham side would have boarded ship for Canada. This particular town had restored one of the boats that emigrants/immigrants (potato/ potahto...) would have travelled in for however many weeks that it took to cross an ocean in those days. He described to me how dark and stale and cramped it was in the hull of the ship, how glad he was to get back into the fresh air after only a short tour inside, and shook his head: "They must've really wanted to get here."

I'm not in steerage (turn-of-the-century speak for "economy class"), and my trip has a countdownable length - 1.5 hours, a little longer if the waves delay us. Still, I cannot imagine endless weeks of this. Calm days might have been tolerable, though stuffy and claustrophobic, but rough days or storms that went until -who-knows-when-it-will-end... those days must have been a nightmare. Anti-seasickness pills need to be taken before the nausea kicks in and some people have jobs at sea with work shifts that last for weeks - if they discover they're violently ill when it's too late to take the pills or get off the boat, then these people curl up in a bunk till the ship docks again and are put on suicide watch. That's how bad seasickness can be.

For Pierre and I, the trip to Koh Tao isn't a walk in the park, but it's no worse than the penance you'd pay after an irresponsible night of drinking. This is been-on-a-bender grade nausea, and it will start to disappear as soon as we hit shore so it's no big deal and we treat it accordingly. Pierre finally says the magic words ("I see an island") and the vain part of me staggers into action long enough to shift the pressure on Pierre's knee from my forehead to my hairline so that I don't spend my first 20 minutes on the island with a big red dot in the middle of my face. As we exit the boat and pass the passengers remaining on board, I'm grateful that I'm wearing the pink sticker for Koh Tao and not the orange/blue stickers for Koh Pha Ngan/Ko Samui that are another hour or two further along the boat's route. Our nausea dissipates over the course of the afternoon, though it's really only 2 days later on Day 29 that my stomach is convinced that there's no reason to feel a little queasy.

"They must've really wanted to get here" indeed - no wonder they never went back.

No pics today. It's for the best.

Update (and cute fruit)

We're in Krabi (southern Thailand) as of December 11th. The south is amazing and we've had a few weeks to enjoy ourselves. We're flying out of Thailand to Hong Kong on December 17th via Phukhet/Kuala Lumpur. We've jiggled our plans a bit so that we could get a few extra weeks in Thailand and then head over to China to spend Christmas with Pierre's brother, Andre. Our pics and notes on southern Thailand might not get up on the blog until then, though I'll do my best.

The fruit here is amazing - cheap, fresh and ripe. These two tie for first place in the cute fruit category:

photo credits: P

Day 26 - Fri Nov 28 - Chumphon (or: Long Live Chokeanan Tour)

Chumphon has beautiful beaches, but most tourists, like us, never see them. Most use it as a skipping stone to the islands. Pierre and I only happen to spend a night in Chumphon because other travel plans have fallen through: our bus from Bangkok (about 7 hours) was supposed to be followed by a 6-hour midnight boat to Ko Tao (Turtle Island). The bus we took was with a company called Chokeanan Tours who, it turns out, is awesome.

True, they said there would be a washroom on the bus when there wasn't, but there's an unexpected free meal halfway through the trip that makes up for that, and in everything else the agency rocks. When we arrive at the Chumphon Chokeanan bus station (they have their own bus station) we show the desk clerk our midnight-boat ticket and she promptly calls another agent who informs us (in excellent English) that, due to rough water, the night boat has been cancelled. However, they'll transfer our ticket to a Catamaran/fast boat trip the next day - free of charge, we just have to pay the difference which matches exactly the amount indicated by the guidebook, so we know it's legitimate. They book us into a nice yet incredibly inexpensive hotel (12CAN$ a night) and, to top it all off, all transportation involved in the process - to the agency for ticket changes, to the hotel - is free of charge.

Pierre and I are really pleased, but skeptical, and we keep waiting for hidden surcharges or an unpleasant surprise to pop up. (Pierre walks around the room saying things like "There's a body in the closet, right? Nope...I'll check the tub...")

Our skepticism isn't so much pessimism as it is realism: the goal for people in the tourist industry is to get as much as possible without cutting into their profits by giving too much. This usually means, in Thailand at least, that a company's debt to you may very well end when you arrive at your destination and/or encounter your first problem (ie. your boat is cancelled). Whichever comes first.

In the end, it turns out that Chokeanan Tour has all the details worked out for us, right down to a free taxi to the bus that goes to the 1:00 pm Catamaran to Koh Tao on the morning of Day 27. All in all, a very pleasant hitch in our plans.

photo credits: Sorry, no pics.

Days 24 and 25 - Wed Nov 26 and Thurs Nov 27 - Hiking at Khao Yai National Park

Our guide's name is Pan, which is just so perfect. He demystifies the trail for us in broken, but helpful, English - what elephants eat, where their footprints are, what sounds we are hearing. When we see two bugs wrestling against a tree, he says "Marriage season," and laughs.

Our Pan isn't a pan-pipe-playing satyr - he's a 20-something park ranger in leech socks who has worked at Khao Yai ("cow y-eye", rhymes with "my") National Park for about 7 years and he loves the place. Our 8 km hike starts off well-marked and with only one path, but as we walk deeper into the forest, the path gets more and more tangled with animal trails. It could be tricky to figure out, which is why we've hired him for the afternoon. Pan never stops at a fork in the road and thinks "this way or that way?" He's walked these trails so many times that when faced with more than one choice he chooses the right one with as little hesitation as a schoolkid at the mall who knows which escalator is the quickest route to Gap.

The trail is deserted and we don't run into anyone, which was the plan. Our guesthouse/"resort" specializes in group tours of the park - they go from 8:30 am to 8:30 pm, and include views of wild elephants at salt licks, and a sunset view of millions of bats leaving their cave and heading out to the woods for dinner. And a 4 km hike.

The idea of a 4 km hike offends Pierre ("I didn't come all this way to do a 4km hike. That's like an hour at most, unless you're with slow people...") as does the fact that our resort is aggressive in it's sales pitch. The Internet is 80 baht an hour, but it's free for guests that take a tour. You're not taking a tour? Well, then the "free" ride we gave you from the bus station is 200 baht. Not taking a tour? Why not why not why not?

Confrontation in Thailand is a big no-no - a cultural minefield and all the guidebook tips say to keep polite and smile. So I use friendly confusion as my weapon of choice: "Oh no, thank you, we're fine on our own, but thank you for offering again - that's so nice of you." The thank you and the genuine smile are key - ingrained politeness triggers a "you're welcome" and a smile, and the sales pitch is dropped for the moment.

Internally, however, we regress into stubborn kids. We're second-class guests without the tour? Then we won't spend any money here except rent. So we buy our breakfast at 7-11 (bread, jam and yoghurt), take dinners at a restaurant across the road (the lovely Gecko Bar), find alternate ways in and out of town, and give up Internet for a few days.

The decision not to take the tour also means that we have to find our own wheels which requires a bus ride to town (20 minutes away; about a 40 baht/$1.10 fare, flagged down for us courtesy of some friendly security guards down the road) followed by several hours of walking the main strip of Pak Chong searching for a scooter rental. In spite of the confusing helpfulness and redirections of the people we meet (including a few officers at the police station who try to help us out) we don't locate the rental place until after closing.

On the ride home and over dinner at the Gecko Bar, we debate whether we'll be reduced to taking the group tour with the resort or if we'll just skip the park and leave the next day. By fluke, the waitress has a boyfriend (a teacher from Chicago) who has a scooter he's willing to rent us, and our transportation problems are solved.

Like most mountains in Thailand that we've seen, Khao Yai rises up out of the flat landscape suddenly, without the preamble of foothills. Though I have experience driving a scooter (automatic), and so am voted today's driver, the scooter we have today is a standard and gearshifting involves a bit of a learning curve. While chugging up one particularly steep and curvy hill (about 45 degrees) I accidentally learn how to pop a wheelie at 10 km per hour: Gear down to 1st gear without taking your hand fully off the gas, and make sure you have a heavy weight (ie. Pierre) behind you on the seat. Pierre's elbow and my ass take the brunt of it, and we bang up the tail light (which we feel very bad about), but a nice ranger patches Pierre up and the rest of the trip goes smoothly.

This nice ranger is one of about 110 rangers in the park, if I understand Pan correctly. Most days, about 70 of them are out and about in the park , living in lookouts and walking trails keeping an eye out for poachers. Another 40 stay in the centre of the park doing other work, including being available for hire for hikes, which is how we meet Pan.

The pace at first is slow, and I feel bad for Pierre, who's hoping for more than a stroll through the woods. But by the end of the trail (3.5 hours) Pan's saunter feels pretty brisk. The forest changes every kilometer or so, from flat an sparse to steep and dense, from deciduous trees to bamboo and back again.



Along the trail Pan points out evidence of Thai and Cambodian tree poachers, who chip away at the trunks of a certain type of tree (probably Aquilaria) used in perfume and incense. Park rangers catch poachers from time to time, either bringing the suspect (and the woodchips) back to the headquarters for charges, or burning the poached goods if the culprit runs away. We pass one of these poach-fires, which consists of a melted green tent, a plastic carrying bag like the sacks used for bulk rice, and handfuls of charred woodchips. Pan figures it's about a month old.

Pan points out the sound of gibbons singing in the distance, places where elephants have been eating the rattan vines and climbing steep hills, where animals have been scratching themselves against trees, termite nests...


...as well as the bodhi, cinnamon and rubber trees that line the trail.

(A cinnamon stump:)

(a Bodhi tree, I think:)
I hadn't expected that elephants could maneouver in such a hilly and heavily forested place but apparently they're pretty agile.

The forest has gibbons, monkeys, gaurs (huge wild cattle), cobras, wild elephants, bears, and tigers though they're all mostly nocturnal and the guidebook says you have to be pretty lucky to catch a glimpse of most of them. ("I don't know if I'd feel so lucky seeing a tiger," says Pierre at one point during the walk.) We see wild chickens on our walk, and get a decent look at them through the bushes before they fly off. Pan beams. "Lucky you see," he says. "Very lucky day."

We're not so lucky with other animals on the trail, except for monkeys. Monkeys are less rare, and pretty cheeky. At the trail's end is the Nam Tok Haew Suwat waterfall, most famous for it's appearance in The Beach:


The parking lot is peppered with monkeys climbing on parked vehicles and picking through garbage cans. A few swing by us as we sit next to the road, waiting to hitch a ride back to park headquarters, and Pan shoos them away. (No monkey pics this time, sorry.)


The ride back to the park headquarters is in the open back of a pickup truck courtesy of other visitors at the park. (Our guide fee apparently includes Pan's ride-hitching thumb.) The ladies who are driving pass back bottled water and prawn-flavoured chips for us to snack on during the ride. Pierre and Pan spot a bear sleeping up a tree and we see a few tiny barking deer eating along the roadside in places where it's grassy and open.

At HQ, we say goodbye to Pan and grab a bite to eat. On our drive back to the resort, we slalom through the inevitable troupes of monkeys lounging on the roads, and trigger a bit of a feeding frenzy at one rest stop when Pierre rustles a plastic bag while opening a snack for himself: a troupe of monkeys come running from 30 feet away like housecats that have just heard an electric can opener. They eventually realize that our arm waving and footstamping mean "no", get bored and decide to go try their luck with some cars that have just pulled into the parking lot.

Further down the road, a group of cars has stopped to watch some wild elephants walk through a ravine below, but the animals are gone by the time we park and walk over. We're not too concerned about seeing elephants (or not seeing them) so we head off home to beat the dusk, weaving our way through lazy monkeys and elephant droppings along the way.

photo credits: all P

Day 23 - Tue, Nov 25 - Addendum (by Pierre), or It Pays to Pay Attention

I remember learning to drive with my father. There were some hairy moments, like when I tried to take a turn off the highway at the last moment and quite a bit too fast, and there were some cool moments, like when I'd help him jump start off a dead battery. I never did memorize that latter procedure through those lessons, but I always thought it would be good to know. Regardless, I'd never needed it, so I ended up getting through life without the knowledge until sometime not too long ago when I read, inadvertently, the theory behind the process. Again, I thought to myself: "that would be handy to know..."

So, as Dianna has previously mentioned, to get around Phanom Rung we rented a UK-style manual truck without power steering. Everything was fine until one particularly bendy hill where I didn't downshft quickly enough and stalled the engine, which isn't so bad by itself, so long as it starts again, which it didn't. There I am, thinking about how screwed we are to be stalled on a hill with nobody around who speaks English, not to mention around at all. My next though is "I don't even know how to jump start this thing", but I quickly amend to think "No wait, yes I do know how to jump start this thing." I then proceed to do the following (and hope I've remembered correctly) :

1. turn the key to just before ignition
2. hold down the clutch, making sure the transmission is in first gear
3. get the vehicle rolling to a decent speed (just a few kph will do - good thing we were just at the top of a downward slope at the time)
4. release the clutch slowly, while turning the key to ignition

note: you can also get it rolling in neutral and invert steps 2 and 3. Should also work on any vehicle with manual tranny.

To my great relief and excitement, it works and I feel awesome for having dredged the whole thing from memory and give myself a pat on the back for getting it right on the first try. In all fairness, it's not exactly rocket science, but it was pretty satisfying. Maybe it will help someone reading this sometime. Never hurts to be prepared.

Days 22 and 23 - Mon Nov 24 and Tue Nov 25 - Nang Rong

The trip from Phitsanulok to Nang Rong is about 8 hours long and we arrive late on Day 22. The guide book has no map at all for the city so we have no idea where anything is, but a nice man at the information draws us a map of how to walk to our guest house, the Honey Inn.

Over dinner at a roadside food stall, we decide to walk to another guesthouse and book it for the next night (if we like the looks of it) - the Honey Inn, it seems, has changed owners since it was last reviewed for the guidebook and it's pretty ramshackle (at least our room is). But, before we walk over to the P. California Guesthouse to check it out, we have a date with a hot chili: Pierre accidentally manages to get a julienned papaya from his papaya salad (doused in super hot chili oil) under the splash-guard of his glasses. We set up an impromptu eye flush station with a bottle of drinking water, and after 5 or 6 flushes, we're good to go.

The other guesthouse we see that night is exactly what we're looking for, so we arrange to go back the next morning to drop off our stuff and pick up a rental for the day. We decide to go with a truck (a standard with non-power steering) for our first rental, rather than a scooter.

The roads run opposite here to Canada, UK-style I guess you could say, so my key job in the rumble seat is to remind Pierre to keep left after making turns, and to say "500 baht" in Thai to the gas attendant when we fill up (and then "100 baht" again later when we drive back after a few minutes to buy a bit more, just in case.)

Our goal today is to hit a couple of key ruins that you can't easily reach without your own wheels. Our host has set us up with a homemade map of the area (there aren't many official ones, it seems) and has recommended taking the back roads, so we do. We pass a lot of scenic rice fields in mid-harvest, and drive over lots and lots of potholes - most are empty, while others are filled with hay (not so effective). Still, the backroads have some great views.

The first place we hit is Wat Kao Angkhan ("watt cow ANG can") - it's pretty deserted on this particular Monday, with only a bunch of stray/temple dogs hanging around the grounds and a huge reclining Buddha statue:

Next, we hit Prasat Meung Tam ("Meung" sounds like a cross between the "u" in "mung" and the "oo" in "book"). It's my favourite temple of the day. We're fairly close to the Cambodian border history-wise (about 80 km) so the architecture is more Cambodian/Khmer than Thai, and gives us a good idea of what we'll see on the Cambodia portion of the trip. The stone used to build this temple is surprisingly colourful, and in general the place is very well-restored:

A group of young monks pop in for a visit, which adds a splash of colour to the scene:

They're young and full of beans, punching each other in the shoulders, hopping up and down stairs and laughing like teenage boys on a school trip, which is what they are.

Later, we drive up to Phanom Rung ("pa-NOM rung") which is The Temple To See in the area. It sits on top of an extinct volcano which, after 900,000 years looks like a tall hill, and not at all like the volcano I had pictured. (Pierre would like to add here that a satellite picture of the area that we see later makes the former volcano-ness of the mountain/hill much more obvious.)

At Phanom Rung I have a Canadian moment as I imagine a Rick Mercer man-on-the-street interview skit where he drums up support for a petition to protect a volcano in danger of extinction...

The Phanom Rung complex has a long promenade leading up to the temple:

...and inside are the restored ruins:

Everythere, there are signs like this one ("please don't sit"):


Please don't sit on the 1000-year-old statue's back. Please don't sit on the 1000-year-old railing. Please don't sit on Buddha's lap. There's a certain polite exasperation in the endless "please don't sit" signs we run into, not only here but at all of the other historic sites we've visited here in thailand. Please stop sitting on our history.

photo credits: D, D, D, D, P, P, P, P, P, P, P, P, D

Day 21 - Sun Nov 23 - Phitsanulok, or "Get me the hell out of here"

I'm sure it's a lovely place, this Phitsanulok (pits-a-NOO-luck). I'm sure I arrived in the wrong frame of mind (after a 9-hour-was-supposed-to-be-7-hour bus ride with no food stops). I'm sure the guesthouse clerk didn't mean to be rude and difficult, the mosquitos didn't mean to take over our room and that our sink didn't mean to be out on our "balcony" with the rest of the mosquitos instead of in our bathroom. I'm sure everything would have improved upon acquaintance (the town's bird exhibit sounded interesting), but I'm not impressed at all and didn't want to waste any time in this city. We (it wasn't just me) spent our evening figuring out where to go the next day in order to get far away from this city.

Let's blame it on the fact that we've broken our city-rural-city-rural pattern and miscalculated by making Phitsanulok our stopover on our way to the east. We remedy that quickly and head off early on Day 22 for a two day wat-stop before heading over to the Khao Yai National Park in the east.

We only snag one pic here, our tuk-tuk trip on the way to the bus station:


Photo credits: D

Days 19 to 21 - Fri Nov 21 to Sun Nov 23 - Chiang Rai - We came, we saw, we bought books

...We do slightly more than that, but not by much.

A priority for me is to get another book to carry me through the next week or two. (A book lasting me "a week or two" means I'm rationing it out to myself, ie. 20 pages a day, and if I feel I need to read more, I have to re-read what I've already read. Otherwise, I could easily disappear into book after book.) Pierre still seems to be content with the guide book as his only reading material.

Again, in Chiang Rai (sounds like "Chang Rye") we decide not to do any wats, and to instead check out the Hilltribe Museum. Mountain trekking is big business in many parts of Thailad, and one of the things almost all ads tout is Hilltribe Trekking - part of your walk includes "dropping in" on one or several hilltribes.

We aren't comfortable with the idea of this, especially since it isn't entirely clear whether or not these visits are really welcomed or of any real benefit to the tribes that get visited. The museum is our way around this dilemma.

Very good exhibit,and very educational - it covers the 6 main hilltribes of Thailand and includes a lot of pros and cons of hilltribe tourism. As suspected, hilltribes often get little from trek visits (ie/no share in the profits) and so their only choice is to hound tourists to buy their crafts.

One of the most disturbing factoids is about the "Long Neck Karen" (kuh-REN) women that appear in so many postcards here (they have the metal rings on their necks and arms):
"...a businessman has imported them for the sole purpose of tourism. The Long Neck Karen women who are living in these virtual human zoo's are seldom if [ever] allowed to leave the premises. The Hilltribe Museum objects to this exploitative kind of tourism." (<- quote from one of the museum posters)

There's one organization that has commuity-based tourism - the Ban Lorcha Project via an office called Population and Community Development Association (PDA). The PDA has done a number of projects in Thailand over the past few decades, one of which is their line of restaurants with the dubious name of "Cabbages and Condoms"; it's attention grabbing, as is their logo: "Our food is guaranteed not to cause pregnancy". Originally, they focused a lot on family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention, but now they are working to increase food security for people and "to make cabbage as easy to get as condoms."

The decor at the restaurant includes a 5'5" Santa Claus whose outfit, beard and hair consists of hundreds of unrolled red and white condoms (sorry, no pic).

After dinner, we stumble across a Saturday Walking Street night market, complete with breakdancers:

...and lovely lamps:


Before checking out, we get a picture of the view from our balcony, because during our stay it made us laugh (in a good way) every time we saw it:

photo credits: P, D, P, D

Days 16 to 19 - Tue Nov 18 to Fri Nov 21 - Chiang Dao

Our pattern so far on the trip is city-country-city, which seems to work for us, so we continue the trend by stopping off in the small town of Chiang Dao on our way up to Chiang Rai in the North.

When we arrive on Tuesday, we head over to the famous Chiang Dao caves (called Tham Chiang Dao, which sounds like "Tam Chang Dow" rhymes with "now"). To see the caves, you have to have a tour guide, which is fine by me since I have no experience spelunking and have seen The Descent (excellent horror movie if you haven't already seen it). At the entrance you "donate" 20 Baht per person for electricity (no donation = no tour, but it works out to only 70 cents Canadian per person.) Inside, a number of tour guides are waiting and ready for hire with their kerosene lamps.

Some of the rock formations, all natural, are pretty neat - a personal favourite is definitely "the Rooster"

"Dead Elephant" is pretty good too, though you can just kind of make out the belly and legs in this pic:

It's a tight squeeze in places....

...and in others it's pretty roomy.

Afterwards, we feed the fish on the grounds of the cave complex:

...and then head home to our little bungalow at the Nature Guest House. Originally, we plan to stay for only two nights, but on Day 17 and 18 Pierre is under the weather so we stick around for 3. It's the ideal place to be - we have our own bungalow, and there's next to no traffic. The hosts are friendly, the air is fresh and the restaurant is about 25 metres from our doorstep and they make all the meals from scratch.

Our bungalow:


On top of all that, there's a mountain just behind us visible from the yard (though this pic is not from the yard):

We hang out, read and watch "Russia Today" on our TV, a 24-hour English language news site from Russia on Russia. It's the only English programming on our TV worth watching, plus we figure it's good research for the Russia leg of our trip in 2009.

By day 19, Pierre is feeling better ("around 90%" by his estimate, which later proves to be incorrect) so we pack up and head off to Chiang Rai.

photo credits: P, P, P, D, P, P, D, D, D, P