Chris’ Blog

Our trip to Thailand

We decided to take a trip to Thailand while we are on this side of the world. It was definitely worth it, as you will see shortly. Our trip began in the usual Chinese fashion. Our flight was supposed to leave at about 10:00 pm Sunday evening. We arrived with plenty of time only to wait some more. It turned out that the flight was delayed by about two hours (not that any of this information was announced or anything; we only know it was delayed by two hours because after we waited for two hours we were allowed to board). We were not left without entertainment, however, since one fellow was quite irate. He kept shouting at and arguing with the gate attendants. That also lasted for about two hours.

Finally we were on our way! We flew to Bangkok, arriving at 4:00 am. Luckily for us, there were still people there wanting to sell us rooms for the night. We were pretty tired when we arrived; so much so that the first airport employee we found Christine started speaking to her in Chinese. I knew that something wasn’t quite right about the situation and finally I poked Christine and said, “We’re in Thailand. She doesn’t speak Chinese.” Once we sorted that out we were soon on our way to the Quality Inn for a solid four hours of sleep before returning to the airport.

Monday, May 3

We returned to the airport the next morning for our flight to Krabi. Despite the near zero visability due to the heavy rain, our 12:30 flight departed on-time. The flight into Bangkok had been on China Eastern Airlines and the flight to Krabi was on Thai Airlines. You might think that one airline is the same as the rest. You would be wrong.

As we flew into Krabi we were pleased to see that the Sun was shining. Christine took a picture of the runway from inside the airport and soon we had our bags and found the van that would take us to our hotel. It felt great to be driving on roads through forests (jungle) after being in Shanghai for many months.

We arrived at our hotel, the Seaview Resort in Ao Nang. It was quite nice. It had a swimming pool, massage hut next to the swimming pool and the reception area was nice also. We weren’t able to view the sea as far as I could tell, so we would have to ask for directions for that.

We checked in and then we were off to our room. The room was great, you could see palm trees and flowers through the open door. We took the obligatory room pictures, started unpacking, and then decided to change rooms in order to get a bigger bed or something like that.

The new room had a much bigger and lumpier bed than the first. We contemplated switching back to the first room, but decided to tough it out. The bathroom in these places was pretty crazy. The whole bathroom was a shower. In addition to that there was a strange sign that said that their toilets were very advanced,(including a picture that suggested you could wire computers, monitors, and dentistry tools to the toilet) but that you couldn’t flush toilet paper. Talk about messed up priorities.

We got settled and then headed down to the reception hut to book day trips and then explored Ao Nang a little. We still needed to buy bathing suits, and let me tell you, the whole trip was almost cancelled by the time we finished that. They best thing about Thailand is that wherever you go, there’s Thai food. We decided to give our hotel’s restaurant a try for the first night and we were not disappointed. Later that evening I found a small lizard in our room. I cornered him (or possibly her) on the counter to try to take some pictures. They weren’t very good, but you can look at one anyway. While I was taking my pictures the lizard must have been pretty scared, because he did something I certainly didn’t expect. He must have decided that he’d had enough and he made a break for it. I watched him thinking, “I wonder what he’ll do when he gets to the end of counter?” It was about four feet to the ground from there and he was no bigger than my little finger. Well, he jumped right off. It looked just like when someone jumps off a tall building in a movie. His little legs were beating the air and his body was twitching left and right all the way to the floor. He must have winded himself (possibly caused some brain damage too) because he just laid there for a while, but then he was off again. I chased him outside, trying not to let more in and the process and thus ended our first day in Ao Nang.

Ao Nang

The place we spent most of our time was at Ao Nang. It is a small town on the coast near Krabi. Below are some pictures of the town, the beach, and the local taxi.

Tuesday, May 4

The next day we were up bright and early. Had a buffet breakfast at the restaurant and then off for a speed boat tour of neighbouring islands. We were picked up by an aptly named pickup and then off to the beach where the boat was anchored. Our first destination was Koh Mai Pai (Bamboo Island). There were about twelve passangers in all, so a nice small group for an outing. Christine and I decided to sit in the front of the boat for the first leg of the trip. We figured we would put on some sunscreen while we were there. We soon discovered that the front of a speedboat is not the optimal location to apply sunscreen. There is a lot of moving and bouncing and dropping that happens there. We were slapping ourselves and each other. Sunscreen was flying everywhere. Good times. We arrived at Koh Mai Pai without incident. Well, that’s not entirely true since the other fellow that was sitting in the front with us had his ball cap blow off once we got some speed, but we swung around and picked it up, so it was okay.

Koh Mai Pai is a protected park. There are some huts on the island that you can rent to stay in overnight. They look pretty nice, just don’t have a look out back. We explored the island a little and then we went snorkeling nearby. The water was really clear and we tried chasing around the fish and getting a good picture of them. We couldn’t. Christine was, however, able to get a good picture of me.

The next stop was Bay of Ton Sai where we went snorkeling again. Christine swam through a school of some kind of small fish. They all were nibbling on her. She didn’t like it. Then we went to Koh Phi Phi were we had lunch and then had some time to look around. Christine bought some sandals and we walked around to one of the resorts to see how much it would cost to stay there for a couple nights since we had two nights not booked anywhere. The beach there was really nice, and we found a cat that seemed to think so too. We kind of lost track of time (since we had no watches or sundials or anything of the sort) and rushed back to the meeting spot only to find that our boat was gone. We were about twenty minutes late I think. Christine was taking it pretty well, but I knew that it was not good. We started wandering aimlessly, contemplating the wrong turns we’d taken in life when suddenly one of our tour guides popped up! It seemed that they’d moved the boat to the other side of the beach. We got back to the boat and apologised to everyone for being so late. They all said it was no problem and that they were in no hurry, but we knew that any chance of securing a rich benefactor from the group was long gone.

The speedboat was soon in high gear (not literally of course, since a speedboat does not have gears, only a throttle) and we were off to Maya Bay, or the beach from the movie The Beach. The beach there was beautiful and the other 500 people on similar tours as us also thought so. It was extremely crowded when we arrived, so we headed away from the beach to explore. We were not disappointed. We found the biggest grasshopper I’d ever seen. That was great.

We also found a spot where if you walked on a bunch of sharp rocks, you could get to a small opening to go to a bay where you could go snorkeling. We made our way back to the beach where it was much less crowded than when we arrived. Christine snapped off some more pictures and we were on our way again.

Our last stop was at Chicken island for snorkeling! This was probably the best snorkeling spot of the day. There was a lot of choral and many types of fish. We were warned to watch out for the choral, so of course I immediately cut my foot on some choral upon entering the water. We saw the whole gang from Finding Nemo: clown fish swimming in and out of sea anemones, angel fish, blue fish and tons of other stuff. It was great. Also, everywhere we went there were the Thai style boats. They were pretty neat, but not quite so fast as ours. After that it was back to the hotel where we could rest and heal from our bruises, cuts, and sunburns.

Christine got a good sunburn all over her back and shoulders and I got a little myself. We went to the local drugstore and bought some stuff with litocane. That helped a lot. I’ll spare you the gory pictures of the sunburn, but here’s one of the cuts on my foot from two days later. It took a long time to heal and I still have a bit of a scar…memories. We tried a new restaurant and had a wonderful crab dinner. It cost 550 Baht, or a little under $17 Canadian. What a great country. We walked around the town a bit. People were always coming up to us and asking us questions: “Where are you going? Where are you staying? Where are you from? How old are you? How many suits do you have?” Yeah, people were always trying to sell me a new suit.

Wednesday, May 5

We were up early once again. We had the usual buffet breakfast and jumped in the limo (van) and headed off to the Sea Canoe pier. We met our guide for the day, Hen. He was a great guy. We suited up in our lifevests and then we were off to the races. Luckily for us we weren’t doing any racing as Christine and I soon found out that we were not the greatest paddling team. We soon improved, though and life was good as we paddled through trees, mangroves, and canyons.

The standard order of the paddling duties was Chris does all the paddling while Christine tries to tip the boat taking pictures from every angle. Hen was a little concerned about Christine dropping her camera in the water and he gave her some wise advice, “If you lose it, it’s your loss.” We’ll remember it always. We made a stop at crocodile cave where we were a little disappointed and a little relieved that there was no crocodile. We paddled inside though and got a picture of Hen sitting in his kayak. Oh, and here’s another picture of me.

It was time for lunch, so we paddled to this pier that was well hidden by rocks. Hen prepared the lunch for us. It was barracuda, shrimp, and pineapple. It was pineapple season in Thailand; boy were they good. We washed it down with a couple of Cokes. In Thailand the Coke is in glass bottles and they use cane sugar instead of corn sugar. I don’t know why they even bother in Canada. The Coke there tastes like dishsoap compared to the stuff in Thailand. While we were eating lunch we met a couple from Toronto on their honeymoon. We chatted with them for quite a while. I don’t know why it is, but you travel to the other side of the world and you get the most excited when you meet someone from home. Maybe it’s just me.

After lunch we went around to a few more places. We saw a monkey way up in a tree. Hen said that he was eating a crab. We could hear him cracking the shell against the tree trying to open it. Probably not too enjoyable for the crab. We also saw this crazy fish that had legs and would walk up on a tree. It was really weird. Unfortunately it was too dark in the trees to get good pictures of the monkey or the walking fish. After that we made our way back to the pier. We had to paddle across some open water that seemed much easier when we were coming from the other direction. We didn’t break any speed records. We would be making our way forwards and then Christine would stop paddling to take some pictures. I would keep paddling but we didn’t seem to be moving when it was just me paddling. Eventually I would ask Christine if she wouldn’t mind paddling for a bit and then we could go forward until the next picture opportunity came up. On top of that we always seemed to be turning left when we were paddling. We really weren’t very good. Hen didn’t say much, but I could tell that he thought we were very strange. Undoubtedly he’d heard about all the great Canadian paddlers and couldn’t understand what was wrong with us. I wished we would have told him we were American.

After the paddling we drove to the local swimming hole. It was full of locals. They all thought we were very funny when we jumped in. Maybe that or they were just squinting from all the light reflecting off our ghostly white skin. We saw the couple from Toronto again and got them to jump in. We also saw the couple from Egypt who we met in the speedboat (the fellow who’s ballcap flew off) and convinced them to jump in as well. Finally we were also able to get Hen to come in. He said, “It’s refreshing for five minutes, then cold.” He got out after five minutes.

After that it was back to the hotel where we did some SCUBA diving training in the swimming pool. I got my first taste of experiencing underwater life when I saw a water bug swimming in the pool. We swam a few circles and the instructors were satisfied that we weren’t going to freak out when we got in the ocean. Then it was dinner at another restaurant and off to bed.

Thursday, May 6

We were up early once again and jumped on a truck to go down to the beach (not before having our standard buffet breakfast of course). There we loaded up the gear into a long tail boat and took that out to the diving boat. We transfered the gear to the diving boat and then it was a two and half hour trip to the first diving site. During that time we relaxed and did a short training session about how not to die when you’re under the water. Our instructor’s name was Jorchen. He was from Germany and a pretty funny guy. In fact almost all of the diving crew was from Germany. We did what is called Discover SCUBA diving. You don’t need much training and each person has an instructor next to them the whole time. The other divers on the boat were finishing their open water diving course and so they spent most of their time studying and writing tests while I sat around. Christine, of course, took the opportunity to take some pictures.

The first dive site was Koh Bida Nok. Christine always jumped in wrong. You were supposed to just walk off the end of the boat into the water, but Christine would stand at the end of the boat and take a big leap. Jorchen was always shaking his head when Christine jumped in. Once we were in the water we grabbed onto a rope that was anchored to the ocean floor and slowly pulled ourselves down to the bottom. We practiced equalising the pressure in our ears on the way down. I had a cold that day, which is not the ideal situation for diving. First off, it made it a lot harder to equalise the pressure in my ears because they were somewhat plugged which made most of the dive quite uncomfortable. Secondly, and possibly worse, was that I also had a runny nose. Whenever I would hold my nose and blow to equalise the pressure in my ears if I forgot to stop blowing before letting go of my nose I would blow snot into my mask. Pretty nasty.

Once we made it to the floor we practiced a few things like what to do if your mouth piece comes out of your mouth or if your respirator stops working. Things like that. After that we were off. Jorchen literally held our hands for the whole dive. The second instructor follwed closely behind us. It was pretty amazing under the water. I never imagined that there would be so many different kinds of life and all so easy to see. Soon it was time to surface and return to the boat. Jorchen was pretty tired. Christine and I were enjoying the sights and forgot to paddle, so Jorchen had been towing us around the whole time.

Then it was back into the boat where we had lunch. Some Thai curry and a Coke or two. Christine was able to get some picture taking in as well. After lunch we went to the second dive site, Maya Bay. You might remember Maya Bay from the movie, The Beach. That’s where the brothers from Sweden were attacked by a shark. No more diving or skiing for them. I felt confident that Jorchen would always put himself between us and any danger. Looking back, I have no idea why I thought that. This time Jorchen decided that he didn’t need to hold our hands (I think he was too tired), so we swam after him with the second instructor behind us. More fishes and other life. It was pretty amazing.

We got back into the boat and started heading back to Au Nang. Had a few more bottles of Coke. As we left Maya Bay some dolphins started swimming around the boat. That was really cool. After the excitement of the dolphins I had a nap while Christine took some pictures. After nap-time the video of the dive was ready for viewing so we all took a look at that. The guy that made it did a really good job so we bought the DVD. We talked to the videographer for a while and found out that he was from Nova Scotia. It’s always great to meet other Canadians when you’re out. I’ve made the DVD into an mpeg movie which you can download and view (it’s worth it); however, you will require a password to unzip the compressed file in order to keep with the copyright requirements. The movie is intended for friends and family only, so if you fall into one of those groups you may e-mail me for the password.

Download video.

We made it back to the beach and unloaded the gear and headed back to the resort. Christine took some more pictures of the town and then we went for supper at an Italian restaurant. It was alright. Some time during the day we got a picture of this snail. I don’t know when, so I’ll put it there.

Friday, May 7

We began the day with a lovely buffet breakfast at the resort and jumped on the shuttle (pick-up with benches in the back) to Nosey Parker’s Elephant Trekking and River Camp. This was the moment we’d been waiting for, the reason to be in Thailand. I was very excited.

Once we arrived, we met our guide for the day, Dam, and we were soon mounted on our very own elephants. It was just the two of us, plus our drivers for the trek. We headed off into the jungle where the elephants soon stopped to eat a little. It takes a lot of food to fill that belly! After a few minutes of grazing we made some progress until the elephants saw some more bushes they wanted to eat and so we stopped. We had a good opportunity to look around and examine our elephants while they were eating. The have thick wrinkly skin with hair growing sparsly all over their bodies, basically what I expect I will look like when I’m 150. The elephants were ready to go (the driver gave one a big whack over the head with his driving stick) and we climbed a rocky path up a hill where we had a short stop so that the elephants could eat. They ate a lot. The elephants were also amazingly well balanced and not awkward at all in how they moved. Christine said that she was watching my elephant stepping up the hill and she could see her feeling around with her foot to find a nice place to step when my driver made her stop so she had to put her foot down an a sharp pointy rock. They have really hard feet I guess. During the ride we saw a bit of wildlife, mostly some lizards; I kept a sharp lookout for any tree snakes. After a couple hours of eating, the elephants were ready to head back and have a rest.

We headed back to the camp and dismounted. The drivers brought the elephants over to let us feed them bananas. The liked the bananas. They have a little nub on the end of their trunks that they use for feeling things. Once they’ve probed what they’re looking for with their nub they roll it up in their trunk and toss it in their mouth.

After that we went for a short walk in the jungle. We saw some more lizards. No tree snakes though. I made sure. Then we walked to a cleared part of the camp where they had an elephant tethered for feeding. Did I mention that elephants eat a lot? Christine was in heaven. She snapped off three or four rolls of film while Dam and I chatted. He told me the life stories of all the elephants and how old they were and things like that. Today the elephants were eating pineapple leaves, many with pineapples still attached. In Canada I think the average price for a pineapple is six or eight dollars. So much for working for peanuts. I asked if all the elephants were females and he said that they were. I asked why they didn’t have any male elephants and he said, “The males only want to kill you.” That sounded like a good reason to me.

Next, we found out that one of the elephants was going to have a bath. Christine’s head almost exploded; she couldn’t believe it. A couple rolls of film later and we had documented the entire elephant bath routine. Mostly the elephant would suck water up through her trunk and then spray it on her head. Once she got into it, though, she did this ostrich manoeuvre where she stuck her head under the water so that only her bum was showing. Very interesting.

Watching the elephants eat all morning had given us a hearty appetite, so we went to eat at a nearby jungle restaurant while we waited for Christine’s camera to stop smoking. It was Thai food once again, and there was much rejoicing.

Included in our elephant trekking experience was a visit to a nearby fish farm. Well the fish farm wasn’t anything like I’d expected (probably because I’d never been to a fish farm, although even then…). It was well laid out for tourists as there were maps and signs in English. We picked up some bags of fish food pellets and started off. Our first stop was at the non-fish part of the fish farm where the main attractions were a scorpion and a crocodile. Great. Now not only did I have to worry about tree snakes, but the thought occurred to me that scorpions and crocodiles might be walking around. Dam assured us that there hadn’t been any crocodiles in this area for about fifty years. But what about the scorpions, man! We got a picture of the scorpion, but decided against the crocodile. His habitat was not very nice and I think if we posted a picture like that on the Internet, Steve Irwan would be making a visit to the fish farm to liberate the poor fellow. We continued on where we saw many ponds filled with koi (giant goldfish) and a few other types of fish. We would throw some fish food into the water and the fish would go crazy trying to eat it all.

As we continued on we saw a sign that both excited and terrified me at the same time. Giant catfish…swimming…what could it all mean? Images of Homer battling General Sherman flooded my mind along with the conversation between the old clerk at the general store and an out-of-town customer: “Yep, General Sherman. They say he’s 500 pounds of bottom-dwelling fury, don’t you know. No one knows how old he is, but if you ask me (and most people do), he’s a hundred years if he’s a day.” “And no one’s ever caught him?” “Well, one fella came close. Went by the name of Homer. Seven feet tall he was, with arms like tree trunks. His eyes were like steel, cold, hard. Had a shock of hair, red like the fires of Hell.”

The swimming part especially made me nervous. Both in the same direction? Do you go swimming with the giant catfish? I didn’t think I could handle that…but what if other tourists had gone swimming with the catfish? What then? What of my pride? As I imagined swimming with a six foot catfish we came to the pond to discover that it was not one single giant catfish but rather a pond full of many large catfish. We also learned that the swimming was at a different place. I sighed a sigh of relief as I realised that the challenge to my manhood had been withdrawn and I had emerged…victorious!!! Boy, those catfish were ugly. We threw some food at them and watched them freak out, swimming overtop of each other trying to get the food. Good times.

It turned out that the swimming hole was the same swimming hole we’d been to two days before. We told Dam that we weren’t interested in swimming again (we’d been swimming every day since we arrived) and he said he’d take us to a flower nursery instead. We drove to the nursery and started walking around. It was an outdoor nursery and quite large. It was pretty interesting up until I’d seen about three different kinds of flowers. After that Christine explored the nursery taking pictures of all the flowers from different angles while Dam and I followed her around chatting. He told me a bit about Thailand and the king and how all the Thai people respected and loved the king. I asked if instead of a king if they’d considered becoming an anarcho-syndicalist commune. People could take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week, but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more major…he said they’d already tried that but it didn’t work out. Below are some of the pictures that Christine took at the nursery. I also included flower pictures from the resort so that all the flower pictures can be in one convenient location. Since I don’t know the names of flowers they are mostly named “flower_1″, “flower_2″, etc. Sometimes I was able to be more descriptive and have names like “flower_with_butterfly” or “flower_with_2_butterflies”. Enjoy

It was a full day and we were ready to head back. I got a picture with Dam before we drove back to the resort. He was fun to hang out with for the day.

We returned to the resort just in time for it to start raining. It rained almost every evening we were there, but the weather was always good during the day, so we were quite happy. We got cleaned up and headed out to try a new restaurant. We went to one that was a little more local and less touristy (if that’s possible in a tourist town). We had some more great Thai food, some seafood dish served in a coconut, another dish served in a pineapple and some fresh fruit drinks. That set us back 265 Baht or about $8 Canadian. Wonderful. On our way back to the resort I told Christine that I’d found a lookout point behind the resort where you can climb up and see the ocean. I suggested that it would be great for a sunrise shot. She wanted to take a look at it that night, even though it was dark, so…

We arrived back at the resort and started walking up to the lookout. I was ahead of Christine and was going up the path when I heard her scream. My spidey senses were tingling and I knew I wasn’t going to like what she was going to say. “A snake!” I was right. She started backing down the path and said, “I’m going back.” I said something brave like, “Well, what about me? The snake is between me and going back.” Christine responded with something helpful like, “I don’t know.” “Well, where is it now?” “I don’t know.” It was really dark out and there was no light near by but I thought I could see the snake moving up the path and to my left. I decided to go down the path and to my right (rather quickly, I might add). I met up with Christine and we made our way back to our cabin in a hurry.

We got ready for bed and I went out to the porch to turn the light off. At night there are always a bunch of lizards on the walls of the cabin. When I opened the door to turn the light off, one of them went inside. I had to chase him down and throw him outside. Finally, the room was secure and we went to sleep. Whew.

Saturday, May 8

The day started by sleeping in until 10:00. There was no way we were getting up before dawn to climb up to the lookout only to be ambushed by a snake, so we slept in instead. We did head up to the lookout to get a picture during the day. Finally, we found out why the resort was named Seaview. We also got a picture of a lizard while we were walking around. He was pretty cute. And of course, Christine took her customary roll of flower pictures before we could do anything else. Since we slept past the buffet breakfast time we headed out into the street and had some local banana pancakes from one of the guys who had a mobile grill on his motorcycle. That was pretty common there.

We decided to devote the day to shopping and relaxing (when we weren’t shopping that is. For Christine and I shopping together is rarely relaxing. Our shopping methods differ drastically, often leading to quarrels and complex emotional situations. And of course what I consider a complex emotional situation is much different than what Christine considers a complex emotional situation which even adds to the complexity.) We strolled around the town, bought a few things, then decided to go for a massage. Actually Christine had a manicure and I had a foot massage next door. A little later we came across another lizard. We were able to get pretty close for a picture. I think he was just too hot to care. We were pretty hot ourselves, so we decided to start making our way back to the resort. A lot of the shops were closed anyway. We stopped at a place for pizza on the way back. We had Hawaiian, of course, so that we could get some more local pineapple.

When we got back to the resort, we decided to play some darts since there was a dart board in the lounge. Not only was that a lot of fun, but it was also quite dangerous. Not for us, but for others who might have been walking outside the lounge near the pool. The dart board was placed fairly close to the end of the lounge, which is elevated about 3 m above the ground. The lounge is all open (no walls) with only a ceiling and a railing to keep you from falling off. Well, just over the railing next to the dart board is where you walk to go to the washroom if you are using the pool. Every once in a while the dart would hit the metal wire on the dart board and bounce off. Sometimes it would bounce back, sometimes it would bounce left, sometimes it would bounce right over the railing and down to the patio below where it would often stick into the cement. Nobody was using the pool, so we decided that it was an acceptable risk. The game was a match between titans unequalled in the annals of sharp pointy throwing instrument sports. There was love, disappointment, betrayal, and finally for me victory.

Later that evening we headed out again. We found that prices had tripled for some items since the afternoon, but that didn’t stop us from doing some more shopping. We had supper at one of the seaside restaurants. Also very good. After supper we did some more shopping and then back to the room. We watched “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles”, wrote some postcards and then off to bed.

Sunday, May 9

Our last day in Krabi, the trip has been great so far. We had our usual buffet breakfast and packed up. Soon it was time to check out and we head back to the Krabi airport. Christine took a few more pictures and we were on our way to Bangkok. Aah, how I will fondly remember the friendly staff of Thai Airlines.

We arrived in Bangkok without incident and got a taxi to our hotel. We mistakingly got a limo taxi instead of a regular taxi and paid much more. Oops. On our way to the room we noticed a sign forbidding certain kinds of fruit in the hotel. I guess that’s a big problem there. We made our way to our room, took the obligatory room pictures (not shown here; you will have to visit us to see them) and I also got a picture of the view from our room.

After getting settled in we headed downstairs and walked around a little. The neighbourhood we were in was a little strange. There were lots of narrow streets and many stray dogs. It turns out that Christine is not very fond of stray dogs; I guess she wasn’t a fan of the Littlest Hobo or Benji when she was little. There were fruit stands selling some types of fruit we weren’t familiar with and little taxi’s called tuk-tuks. Those things are hilarious.

We decided to try and watch a movie that night so we asked where the best place to go and we headed off to one of the main shopping areas in the city. We explored the area a little. The shopping centre was much more similar to home than the shopping in Shanghai, so that was nice. We even found some bookstores with a large selection of English books. We finally found a movie theatre and bought tickets to see Starsky and Hutch. The tickets seemed awfully expensive ($15 per ticket), but we were pretty determined so we paid and went into the lobby. Yeah, that was the nicest movie theatre lobby we’d been in. When it was time to go into the theatre we were even more surprised. All of the seats were recliners. The chairs were fully adjustable. On top of that we got a blanket for watching the movie and a free pair of socks! Then a waitress came to take our order. Unbelievable. The movie was pretty bad, but what a theatre. When we left we realised that we had gone to the Gold Class cinema which is why we got the special treatment and high price tickets. It turns out that there is also a Platinum Class, but we didn’t try that out.

After the movie we decided to try to walk back to our hotel. We had a map and felt pretty confident that it should be no problem. We made our way to the area of our hotel, but couldn’t find the correct street to walk down. We are pretty used to people staring at us in Shanghai, but the way people watched us there made us feel a little uneasy. On top of that Christine had to keep mental tabs on the position of every stray dog in the area which made for a somewhat difficult situation. Finally, after walking back and forth past the same spot about three times we decided to get a taxi. We flagged one down, jumped in, and he promptly turned right, drove for a block and dropped us off in front of our hotel.

Monday, May 10

Monday, we took care of the business that necessitated us going to Bangkok in the first place: renewing our Chinese visas. We headed down to the Chinese embassy. The embassy was just like being back in Shanghai. It was extremely crowded and very confusing. It didn’t help that the embassy had been closed the previous week for the Chinese National Day holiday and so everyone that couldn’t go the previous week (including us) was there. We took a number (#164) and sat down for a little wait. Luckily we were already in the 70’s or 80’s so about a half hour later it was our turn. We handed over the forms and passports and were told that black and white pictures were unacceptable and that we would need colour photos before they would process our visas. Great. We headed out onto the street and went to a nearby convenience store that also did passport photos. A half hour later we were back in line with our colour photos. Our new number was 348…an hour or so later it was our turn again. As always we were refused multiple entry visas and even double entry visas. They would only give us single entry. We left fairly disappointed.

All the waiting had really tired us out, so when we got back to the hotel we had a little nap. We had supper and went back to the Siam Square shopping area where we looked around some more. We stumbled across the Hard Rock Cafe there also. Those things are everywhere.

Tuesday, May 11

After breakfast we headed back to the Chinese embassy to pick up our passports. Now that that was out of the way I could relax for the rest of the trip. We explored around our hotel some more. We walked down some crazy back alleys, saw some more tuk-tuks, some crazy barking dogs that Christine described as scary, and a Coke truck full of that delicious cane sugar Coca-Cola in the glass bottles. Just the way nature intended.

After lunch we joined a tour of the Grand Palace. What an amazing place. The Thai architecture is really unique, but you could also see how some of the newer buildings had a lot of European influence or were even more European style with some Thai influence. One of the more interesting buildings was the temple of the Emerald Buddha. The Buddha is not actually made of emerald, but is carved from jade. The Emerald Buddha has three sets of clothes that he wears depending on what season it is. We also learned a little Thai history. In 1939 the name of the country was changed from Siam to Thailand which means freedom land. The present king is the ninth in the current dynasty and this dynasty is the only dynasty that has ruled in Bangkok. Thailand is a Buddhist country with 95% of the population professing to be Buddhist.

That evening we headed out again to go to one of the night bazaars. We went to one called the Lumpini Night Bazaar. When we arrived it hadn’t really opened yet so we went to a nearby restaurant to have something to drink while we waited. Once it started getting dark the differnet shops began opening and we started looking around. They had all sorts of great things there. It was a lot of fun. We picked up a few things but spent most of the time looking around and saying things like, “Once we get a house we’ll have to take a trip back to Bangkok to buy all our furnishings.” We decided to grab a tuk-tuk for the ride home. We flagged him down, haggled the price down to half of what he wanted which was probably about double of what it should cost and we were off. Our driver was a real comedian. He was always looking at us through the rearview mirror and making faces and posing for pictures. At one of our stops he got the tuk-tuk to do a wheelie when we pulled away. What a character.

Wednesday, May 12

Wednesday morning we were up early (we really were this time; we had to be on the bus at 6:30) and we headed out for a day tour of Ayutthaya. Ayutthaya was 2nd capital of Thailand. It was conquered twice by the Myanmarians (Burmese). The second time they burned the city. After that it wasn’t the capitol anymore. While on the way, Christine and I were commenting to each other how heavy the traffic was when the tour guide announced to the group, “As you can see, the traffic is very good today.” Our first stop was the summer palace, built in 1632. Parts of the movie “Anna and the King” were filmed here. Where the Grand Palace was very compact with many buildings very close together, the Summer Palace was much more spread out and provided a relaxing environment. We saw a crazy long freaky worm caterpillar bug there!

We went to the temple of the sleeping Buddha. The Sleeping Buddha is this long Buddha that is laying on it’s side. It’s pretty neat. Around the temple were many Buddha statues. Some of them would have drinks that people had left there, I guess so the Buddha could have a drink on a hot day. Inside the temple they had a row of small Buddha statues each one representing a different month and ones representing day and night. If I remember correctly you could make offerings and pray to the ones that represented your birthday.

We went to the ruins of a temple that was near the river. There’s not much to say about that place, but we got some great pictures.

We also stopped at the ruins of the old palace. The most interesting thing here was one of the Buddha heads had made its way into a tree where the roots had grown around it and now the head is part of the tree. We were also told of a German man who had taken a rock from the ruins but mailed it back a few months later as he believed that he had been cursed because of it.

It was time to head back to Bangkok, and we all loaded into a riverboat, the Pearl of Siam, for a three hour ride on the Chao Phraya river. The ride back was a lot of fun, although it could have been a little shorter. The boat was decked out with the standard pictures of the king and queen and a small shrine at the bow. We saw lots of neat things on the ride about river life. There were many homes built out on the water with stilts. A few times a bunch of children would get together and jump off the deck in front of their house into the river for us. That was really fun. We also saw temples and different types of boats. It was a relaxing end to a great trip.

We finished off the evening with dinner at the Sizzler. I’d always wanted to go there ever since I watched Happy Gilmore and that crazy guy tries to get Shooter to meet him at the Sizzler. Now I know why Shooter didn’t want to go. The next morning it was back to Shanghai and the end of another adventure. Now, you may be wondering why it has taken so long to get this update up. You might think, “Trip was in May; now it’s November. What’s the deal?” Well, let me tell you, there were A LOT of pictures to sort through (see picture) and scan which is very TEDIOUS and very BORING. Much more boring than playing computer games, which is generally what would happen after about an hour of scanning. So there.