Pat's Blog

Hi everybody,

I’m now back in Chengdu, a couple days before    two weeks into    three weeks into the new term.

I’ve been way taking too long to finish so I’m breaking it into two parts. Second part of this trip covering HK/Guangdong will be out very soon (I promise). Hope you enjoy.

The flight to Bangkok from Chengdu was about 3 hours. My hotel was in the Chinatown district, which is one of the popular neighborhoods for tourists. There were lots of people out and about, both tourist and local. It was hot. Bangkok has a monsoon climate: hot year-round with wet and dry seasons, February being part of dry season. Everyone wears sandals.

I tried to learn some survival Thai language in the two days before I arrived and was only able to retain “Hello”, “Thank You”, “Don’t Want”, and “Sorry”, which to be fair is probably good enough, though it didn’t really matter in the end. Everyone I needed to speak to would lead off with English upon seeing me before I could even get a word out.

^ In Chinatown, you’ll often see a combination of Thai script and Chinese characters.

^ The street my hotel was on.

^ Tuk-tuks go into the early morning.

^ This is Wat Arun, one of the most famous and beautiful temples in Thailand, right in the center of Bangkok. You can pay for a ferry back and forth across the river for ~25 cents.

^ This building and the next few are all part of the Supreme Grand Palace of Thailand, the former court of the Thai monarchy and offices of the royal government. Now that stuff is elsewhere, but it is still a site of national pride and has a few temples to boot.

^ One of the important temples. You had to take your shoes off to go near it, and you couldn’t take photos inside so you’ll have to take my word for it that it looked cool in there.

^ I’m an idiot and forgot you can’t wear shorts to Buddhist temples (in my defense it was like 90 degrees), so I had to buy and wear a $30 pair of baggy elephant pants. When I decided I’d had enough of going to temples I handed them off to a shorts-wearing Aussie I saw walking in that direction.

Stir-fried crispy pad Thai.

Noodles, chicken, veggies, spicy chili sauce, Chang, simple as.

^ Potentially my favorite thing I ate in Thailand, Thai satay. It’s very simple, just skewered marinated chicken served with different sauces. Had to get it a second time.

^ I used the Bangkok MRT a few times and I was really surprised at how clean and convenient and just generally nice it was.

On my last night, I went and saw a Muay Thai event at the stadium that was originally the first Muay Thai venue in the world. I don’t have much to say about it, but it was definitely entertaining and worth a visit if you’re ever in Bangkok. It’s traditional for every fighter, Thai or otherwise, to complete this sort of shadowboxing/dancing/praying ritual that honors your trainer and the sport in general, sometimes for minutes at a time and with traditional Thai music playing.

I spent 3 days in Bangkok in total and really enjoyed it. There is great variety in the styles of the different neighborhoods; some are full of sleek modern skyscrapers with fancy hotels and rooftop bars, others are seemingly more traditional working-class neighborhoods with midrise apartments and cramped alleys full of greengrocers and street food vendors.

There is Chinese-influenced architecture and Chinese diaspora-run restaurants and shops, as well as enough massive Buddhist temple complexes to take me weeks to visit them all. Compared with Chinese cities, it was definitely dirtier and a bit less developed to be sure, but not enough to hurt my experience and I never felt unsafe even alone late at night. It’s one of the world’s great cities that I only had a small taste of; I would definitely visit again if I had the chance.

From Bangkok, I took a 75-minute flight to Krabi. It’s one of the popular destinations for tourists that want to lay on the beach or go island-hopping. I did some research online and found a place called Tonsai Beach that was relatively accessible to an airport but less crowded than some of the others.

I rented a hotel room that comprised 1/2 of one of these little yellow houses. The room was $75 per night for three nights, and mostly I sat on the beach, swam, kayaked, and relaxed.

^ There are many rock formations near Tonsai that are decent for climbing. I ran into a lot of climbers when I was staying there.

^ This is one of the “long-tail” boats that run from the early morning until the evening shuttling people between the nearby beaches.

It’s basically a big canoe with a weed whacker attached to the back of it. Riding in one of these is the only way to get from the busy  town of Ao Nang to the more secluded beach my hotel was on. It only took about 10-15 minutes but you had to wade into knee deep water to get into the boat (and carry your luggage over your head).

So that’s all I’ve got for the Thailand portion of the trip. Sorry again about the delay. I’m already close to done with the second part so you should be seeing that soon.

Best,

Patrick