This Land is Your Land, This Land is Thailand

I’ll be honest, I have no idea how to write an interesting blog about my tour of Thailand. Twelve days is enough time to see a lot of really cool things, have some memorable experiences, catch up with old friends, and spend more time than is seemly on a bus, but in terms of the culture and people of Thailand… well, I was a tourist. I tried here and there, but in the end I wanted to eat good food, see some wats, tramp around in the jungle, and enjoy being away from my home in Daejeon for awhile. So congratulations, internet, you’re getting a travel retrospective, lots of little stories about stuff I saw and did, and very little about the country itself. I’m sure it’s the first post like this you’ve ever seen, too! I’ll try to make it as amusingly sarcastic as I can, just for you. Ready? Here we go!

I flew into Bangkok on the night of August 5th and immediately realized that I had not planned anything as well as I thought. My flight got in an hour late. Zach was scheduled to meet me at the airport at a specific time (he’d arrived the day before), and I was late. So I was worried about that. I should’ve been more worried that we never specified a place to meet in the airport. So I spent a good half hour in the Immigration Control line trying to remember just what the hell the name of our guest house was in case I needed to find it alone. Somehow, we found each other in the massive antechamber of the airport (by following the signs that said ‘meeting point’). So that was good.

What can I say about Bangkok? It’s sprawling – unlike places like Seoul or London there really aren’t any central “go here” areas. It’s a city to explore at your leisure and find things that suit you. We found JJ Market, supposedly the largest open air market in the world. We also found Khao San, the neon-colored hyperactive backpacker district, shopping centers that outstrip the Korean ones for sheer insanity, and the Bangkok Art and Culture Center, where we stumbled upon this:

Art!

In JJ Market I experienced Thai massage. This was actually my first massage of any kind, much less a foot massage. Let me be clear: I have extraordinarily ticklish feet. For the first five to ten minutes I was holding back anything ranging from laughter to vomit to face-kicking. I would imagine it looked something like this:

Which is far preferable, of course, to this:

Luckily, we got the massages just in time, as we had long bus rides ahead of us that night. Nick was headed back to his site (he labors for the Peace Corps, bless his soul), while Zach and I were to board an all-night bus from Bangkok to the smaller, more rustic, hippie-populated town of Chiang Mai. In case you’re wondering how far that is, here you go:

This is the Indiana Jones route. The bus’s way was considerably curvier.

This first night bus ride was very pleasant compared to our second (don’t worry, I’ll get to that later). Thanks to my uncanny ability to hold back the natural reaction to someone touching the bottoms of my feet for an extended period of time, my legs weren’t stiff as I dozed on the bus. Anyway, we arrived in Chiang Mai and promptly went to sleep. Then we woke up and explored the streets of the town center, which may hold the most ridiculous density of temples ever. One side of the street was restaurants, the other side was temples. Thai wats, like the temples in Korea, are really cool the first few times you see them. Then after you see twenty or thirty they all start to blend together. Wats are certainly more spectacular, all red and gold with dragons and hydras and pagodas shaped vaguely like those weird little meringue cookies.

   Same same… but different.

We spent only one night in Chiang Mai. I wish we could’ve spent more time there as I’d heard a lot of great things about the city prior to visiting, but we had to get to Pai. This journey is just about the most nauseating thing I’ve ever done aside from that time I squashed dog shit with my foot and then inhaled the smell when I was four.

Yeah, that looks about right.

Pai, for the uninitiated, is a strange little mountain town somewhere close to Chiang Mai. The map claims north, but the road is so twisty that I doubt anyone has ever made the journey and had the sense of direction to figure out where the hell Pai actually is. Most likely someone just gestured vaguely in a random direction and said, “I think Chiang Mai is over there somewhere.”  The thing about Pai is that, while it has many of the things you would expect from a mountain town (an open-air market with fresh produce, meats, and fish, small hole-in-the-wall restaurants and bars), it also has about seven thousand guest houses and almost everyone seems to speak English. Even outside of Pai you’ll find little villages with resorts and restaurants and such tucked inside them. It’s like its own little world stocked with everything a tourist could want, and it seemed that at least a third of the town’s population was a rotating roster of backpackers.

In any case, being tourists, we fit right in. Zach and I rented motorbikes, christening them Brandine (Zach’s) and Red Rocket (mine), and tore ass around the idyllic mountain scenery as The Wolverines, the awesomest and probably only two-man scooter gang this side of Chiang Mai (whichever side of Chiang Mai we might have actually been on).

Aw scoot scoot muthaf&%ckah, aww scoot scoot goddamn! (Goddamn!)

We saw waterfalls, a canyon, some elephants, and floated in some hot springs despite the fact that it was already pretty hot outside (although, my co-workers were shocked to learn, not as hot as Korea is right now). It was, obviously, a beautiful, awesome, and exciting adventure. Only three things went wrong. The first was that it kept raining, but of course it’s rainy season so we couldn’t complain too much. Instead, we just resigned ourselves to being damp and uncomfortable during our outdoor explorations (not to mention risking life and limb to travel in the rain). Second, we kept getting lost thanks to a less-than-stellar map that was supposed to be scoot-friendly.

“Jake, just because there aren’t any cows on the map doesn’t mean we’re in the wrong place.”

Third, I ran out of money. Okay, I didn’t exactly run out of money. I still had plenty in my Korean account. But I had brought enough cash to get me through nearly a week, thinking I would be able to draw more from an ATM or bank with either my US card or my Korean one. But I underestimated the screwiness of international finances. I suppose I should’ve seen it coming, given the amount of time I’ve spent in Korea sitting in various banks trying to convince people that it is not, in fact, illegal to allow me to send my own money home over the internet. But anyways, luckily Zach looked ahead and brought too much money, and that’s how I wound up with a sugar daddy for the final leg of our trip.

After we finished in Pai we boarded another minivan (thanks for the ticket, Zach!) and went back down the impossibly twisty road to Chiang Mai, where we boarded what shall henceforth be referred to as the Devil Bus. Our destination was Koh Chang, an island south of Bangkok. We sat in the very back row of the Devil Bus, the one with five seats all along the wall. I sat on the far left side, against the window, Zach sat on the far right side. In between us sat two large British men. The one sitting next to me loved the Minnesota Vikings, which, being raised in Wisconsin and a lifelong Packer fan, did not make anything easier for me. This is how things started:

Unfortunately, very quickly British Guys 1 and 2 realized that they could share that lovely empty space rather than having to sit next to each other. British Guy 2 also insisted on sleeping, for most of the duration of the ride, curled up in a fetal position taking up a full two and a half seats, which looked more like this:

I tried using my considerably broad shoulders to force British Guy 2 to move, but that resulted in being just as cramped while risking this snoring fetal Favre-loving Brit falling directly into my lap. So instead I tried using my ass to push him a little bit in the direction of his second empty seat, thus facing towards the window. When I somehow managed to fall asleep in this position, I awoke to a startling discover: the wall of the Devil Bus next to the window was decorated with sharp metal pokey things, which I guess are all the rage in vehicular interiors these days. I would fall asleep until we hit a bump, then awake with a sharp stabbing sensation in my face.

“Shh, just go back to sleep. Everything will be okay in the morning…”

When we finally arrived back in Bangkok, it was time for another minivan ride. Four more hours of jostling and leg cramps later, we arrived at the truly spectacular island of Koh Chang, a place where people as pale as me really have no business frolicking.

Around here our journey just about ended. We met up with Nick and few of his fellow Peace Corps people, relaxed on the beach, ate food, drank cocktails, and saw some random cows. And lots and lots of banana hammocks and thong-kinis (seriously, I thought that only happened in the movies). After a couple of nights here, Zach, Nick, and I all headed back to Bangkok, where we gathered for one last picture before Nick headed home. Zach and I tried to have an adventure in our last night together in Thailand, but we were both too exhausted from all the exploring, adventuring, scooting, Devil Bus riding, and beach relaxing to make a go of it. And that’s the story of my trip to Thailand, edited for public consumption.

‘Til next time, dear readers.

I have no excuse for myself.