Thailand to the Islands

Our travels have continued with a trip through Thailand. We flew into Bangkok and spent the obligatory day in Kaosan Road. After three months in Asia the big cities are no longer very interesting to us and we could not even muster the enthusiasm to go out and look into some of the more specialist night time entertainments that Bangkok has to offer. But on the plus side Thailand is not as hot as Vietnam or China were, so we are far more comfortable.

After 20 years of heavy tourism development Thailand is no longer a really cheap country, being instead merely quite cheap when compared to NZ and certainly more expensive than any of the other places we have been on our trip. Our universal yardstick is beer prices and by this measure Thailand is about 50% of NZ prices (Vietnam 5-10%, China 10%, Nepal 10%).

After a day in Bangkok we traveled down to Koh Tao (ie Tao Island) off the south east coast of Thailand. This is a 20 square km island with a relatively small town Sai Ree strung out along a a beautiful beach about 1.5km long with tons of restaurants, cafes, bars and reasonably cheap accomodation. You can walk everywhere or hire a quad-bike or motorbike if you are a lazy bastard. We spent an hour walking around looking for accommodation and eventually got a nice self contained bungalow 50m from the beach with en suite and veranda for NZ$16 per night. Koh Tao is rated as one of the best places in the world for diving, and it is the primary focus of the whole island, this, on top of the more tolerable temperatures out in the Gulf of Thailand, was one of the big motivators for our going there. There is a huge population of European tourists and dive instructors (like ski instructors but better tans and less use of terms of personal address like "dude" and "bro") that keep the beach bars and restaurants full at night, and it feels very safe, friendly and relaxed after the frantic bustle of some of the cities we have been to.

Highlights of Koh Tao include walking to a secluded bay on the far side of the island (40 minutes) where we went snorkeling in amongst the beautiful coral and rocks. And of course diving, though unfortunately we went with a group that included a dopey pair of Dutch boys who sucked through their air twice as fast as we did and so cut one of our two dives down to 25minutes rather than the expected 50, however we still saw massive schools of fish as well as decent sized reef sharks and moray eels etc. Some of the beach bars have lounging mats (built in head rests) on the sand only a meter or two from the water's edge, and we really enjoyed a night we spent at Lotus Bar watching their very talented performers spinning fire-sticks and burning pois around. Win for me too as Jane accidentally stole someone else's jandals (Thongs for you foreign types) and they turned out to be far too big for her, and about right for me.

Koh Phangan was the the next stop as we Island hopped our way south. The main reason for going here was the "full moon party" - a monthly party on a short beach at the southern tip of the island that plays host to 30,000 people or more and goes all night. Trouble is that it is difficult to find accomodation for a few nights either side, with some places insisting that you book for at least 5 days during this period. As a result we got a bungalow on the beach 25km away at the very far end of the island down a long and very rough dirt road 30 minutes walk from the main road. To combat this isolation we hired motorbikes for $6 a day, but Jane found it very tough going trying to drive up and down the deeply rutted and rocky hill road to our bungalow. There were a few spills, and may have been some words spoken and possibly a dummy spit or two, as well as a reasonably big burn and cut on her leg. But all credit she managed to get the job done having only ridden for a few hours in her life, and we met one lad who hurt himself worse on our road.

We were a little dubious about the party ourselves, but we reconnoitered the day before swimming and sunbathing at the beach and on the night it turned out to be a lot of fun. Buckets 'o vodka and mixers are the standard cheap drink ($10 per litre), and there are 30-40 beach bars pumping out different forms of entertainment, from fire poi and fire-sticks to different sorts of music and dancing, fire limbo competitions and huge numbers of vendors selling food, clothing and other adornments including body paint (you even see the odd naked painted person wandering about). If you get tired, you just lie down and sleep on the beach, and at the end of the night large numbers of land and water taxis exist to get you home. The gulf of Thailand is generally very calm (similar to a large NZ lakes) 25-30deg water, so you can swim day or night and even small boats are quite safe. We finally got home at 5:30am, and had to be up at 9:30 to catch our ferry to Koh Samui.

Koh Samui was the last Island and the biggest and definitely most charmless of the three we went to. Not much to note about it though there were some nice beach bars and restaurants at Chaweng (People who remember the movie "Wayne's World" may like to say that name to themselves a few times) and on the first night we did go to watch the kick-boxing (Muay-Thai) generally reckoned as the most lethal form of fighting after wrestling. It was a little bizarre in that it turned out that half the fights were children (10 year old or thereabouts) and they were fighting for substantial amounts of money. But still fun to watch.

On our first night Jane got approached on the street by a cheery little European guy to do a free scratch-and-win competition, where it turns out we had won a great prize! Either a laptop, a weeks accommodation at a resort or a video camera. And all we had to do to collect was attend a 90 minute presentation tomorrow! Welcome to the exciting world of timeshare sales. We did attend, had our free breakfast and endured the 3 and a half hour pitch (whilst repeatedly asking how much, how much, how much to no response), to find out that we had indeed won the weeks accommodation (not surprised at this), with a number of catches, not least of which is that we or whoever else used it would have to endure another similar pitch. Lesson learnt, but if anyone wants our prize they are welcome to have it, it was a nice 5-star place in Koh Samui with swanky AC bungalows with kitchens and en-suites. For the morbidly curious the deal was $US7000 upfront + US$252 per year for a weeks stay at this place or one of 10 other similar places in Thailand and another $100 to stay at one of several thousand other places around the world through a company called MCI. Not totally stupid but working out that US$7000 in the bank gives you about NZ$500 per year (more if you're paying it against a mortgage) it really isn't that cheap, call it NZ$1000 for the first weeks accommodation in places outside of Thailand and about $500 for subsequent weeks.

We hired a motorbike visited some beaches and a waterfall but after that we were all done with Thailand, almost. On our final night we went out and had a few drinks, generally avoiding ladyboys and coming home at 1am Jane fell asleep like the dead, but about an hour later there was an enormous ruckus as some deranged English speaker was charging around the hotel breaking stuff, throwing things out of windows, saying some very loud and uncomplimentary things about women and Thai's in general and trying to kick down several peoples doors, I was wondering whether I should get up and do something about it when several Thai voices joined the fray and there were a number of bangs and thumps before it all went quiet. Jane of course slept through it all.

We caught a plane from Koh Samui to Penang in Malaysia, the final country in our Asian Tour. Fun at check-in as they inform us that there is a 15kg checked baggage limit per person (20kg is standard international flight IATA limit) and we hastily move heavy items to our day-packs and put on boots and heavy clothes (in 30 deg+ high humidity), I am sure they are quite aware just how ridiculous it is to be doing no more than moving weight around the plane and adding to our discomfort in this manner for no benefit to the airline.

So now we are sitting in Penang an island on the south west coast of the Malay peninsula that extends down from Thailand waiting two days for a place on the ferry to Langkawi - apparently the ferry is booked out by all the Arabs fleeing hot weather in the gulf, they come to Malaysia in mid summer to escape it!