Thailand Ho! My Travels in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam

This is my third whole day on the island and things are going well, but not without a few fits at the start.

Leaving the ferry port, heading to Koh Chang.

Arriving on the island from the Bangkok involved a 9 hour bus from Bangkok (VIP bus albiet, where leg room is plentiful and the seats hit almost 40 degrees), and a 1.5 hour ferry, putting me on dry Koh Samui territory at about 8am on Monday. Given the costs compared to flying I’m not sure I would do it exactly like that again, I mean, 900 baht for the bus ticket, 100 baht for the ferry ticket, about 400 baht together in taxi rides… it adds up! Top that off with the less than ideal night’s sleep and the 2200 baht plane ticket starts looking like a very attractive option. But meh, I digress, I need to start saving my cash more effectively and sleeping on the bus saved me a night’s hotel room, right? That’s how I’m trying to see it.

An awesome Bay of Thailand…

This morning I headed out on a simple two pronged mission: do laundry, and solve my power adapter problems for my Mac laptop.

After a quick swim and sumptuous breakfast at my hotel I was off by 9:30am with backpack on back, laptop inside, and a big bag of laundry. After the third try I finally found a cheap enough place to drop off my laundry (ie. it wasn’t going to cost me $12-$15USD for a small 3kg bag of laundry...). Feeling good about that I started out for what I figured was my best shot at finding a Mac store.

Now I say best shot because despite my efforts at locating an Apple repair and service centre in Bangkok on the web I came up nearly empty handed. I found the following address on one of Apple’s support pages:

87 M. Thai Tower; All Seasons Place, 23rd Floor; Wireless Road Khwaeng Lumpini, Khet; Pathumwan, Bangkok Metropolis

This address however, is quite far from my hotel and I had a bad feeling about it.

So instead I made way for Siam Paragon, the premier…

Cambodia is awesome.

So far so good at least. One day and one night into my brief stint in Cambodia and things are really good. Better than Thailand, at least compared to the time spent in Thailand up to this point. I’m currently sitting in a chair in the lounge of the Angkor Star Hotel where they have free wifi Internet access and things are pretty good.

That’s not to say it’s been easy. In fact last night was one of the most harrowing of my time in Asia thus far (although Saturday night was pretty rough too just for totally different reasons).

At least today’s been great though. We went to Angkor Wat, or, well, rather the Bayon actually. Bayon is the largest of the grounds of temples in the Angkor Wat area. I’m not too sure what people called each little area, but Angkor Wat is a bunch of archeological sites of old temples. I wish I had more background info on the whole thing, but I don’t. I bought a DVD from a street vendor today however, so perhaps by tomorrow, and given a little luck that the battery holds out…

Today I find myself feeling almost content. I got the proposal done and am just waiting on an email response before getting sent out. That’s great news and may change my plans here somewhat. I mean, if I have a 10k web project to do (which should take about a month of hard work to finish), then perhaps what I should be doing is hunkering down in some idylic resort in the southern archipaelago with some good wifi, snorkeling in the morning and working in my air conditioned bungalow all afternoon and doing drinks with expats in the evening. Sounds kinda good no? We’ll see very soon.

For the moment however, here’s the situation. I’m supposed to go to Cambodia on Monday. That’s two days from now. The Fins, Perttu and Kathry, and the Canadians, Damien and Kelsey, all left the island this morning… at 5:30am! I guess this is because one has to catch the early bus and then ferry in order to get to the mainland in time to get anywhere before evening. I know I’m quite close to the Cambodian border, but for me this may mean either getting up THAT early on Monday morning,…

I’ll probably check out Soi Cowboy tonight. Last night I had round after round bought for me at a little pub on Sukhumvit Rd called the Black Swan (how British is that) which offers free wifi Internet access and finds itself quite close to the Soi Cowboy. I had a great time talking to a Jewish Arab (yep!) who’s escaped from the UAE and a British expat who does “Risk Management Consulting”. The Arab, Suleman, was pretty cool but his English made for some difficulty in any good conversation. He’d also been drinking for many hours (it was 6pm when we went into the pub) which must have catalyzed his massive explosions of laughter at the slightest notion of a joke. I felt bad for everyone around us, it was THAT appallingly loud.

Felix (or the man we’ll refer to as “Felix"), the risk manager, proved to be quite the interesting character. If one believes him, he was one of a few hundred secret British soldiers on special operations during the Vietnam war. His experience doing so led to his specialization in hot zones around the world where he provides risk assessments for businesses like,…

35,000 feet up and 2000 miles from home I feel vulnerable to disconnection.

That’s the beginning of it. It, of course, is that traveler’s feeling. Once you’re on the road it becomes your companion. It’s what keeps you strong and sane. Survival instincts perhaps. “I don’t have anything beneath me, now I must fight for myself without family or state.”

While it may be lonely, it’s certainly the cure for the organic-only, -reading, inwardly self-pitying westerner these days. Perhaps it’s always been. Go Picasso! Go Hemingway! Thailand Ho!?

This is what it’s all about though really. This is why I’m here, and it must have registered for you at some point to be reading this (that is if you’re part of the interested few, family and friends outstanding). Of course this entry will be lost with all the rest and it will have no chance to shine, not because it’s less, it’s actually more – it’s just all been sooo done.

Moving on…

This guy walking down 16th yesterday was advertising my site. I had no idea it was so popular already... I’m back at the cafe where we were yesterday. This morning was worse than yesterday. My nose is running now, and the cough seems more intense. I think the cold is already in decline, but my system is pumping it out so my symptoms are a little worse.

Last night we went to a really cool little Palestinian/Lebanese restaurant in the Haight.  The Haight has quite the scene. People describe it as being the hippy district, but it’s more than that. It’s kinda the crazy district. Ecclectic stores, ecclectic people… t’is tres cool.

I AM a Bold Hatmaker!Today I’m going to try to get a few more items done on my to-do list for Thailand and the website. I think I’ll take another look at hotels in Bangkok (kinda getting important!), check out the currency situation to see how the baht is doing after the coup, and get some of the features of this site sorted out…

Gahd I can’t believe it but I’ve managed to get myself sick on the second day of my real voyage. This is ridiculous. My chest feels like about 200lbs and I had some good-ass diarrhea last night. The bloating is mostly gone today (although I’ve had to cut down the cigarettes as they seem to agitate my intestines), but we’ve had to cancel plans for going to Emily’s friend’s BBQ this afternoon because of my cough and congestion. Luckily my nose isn’t runny though, which is suprising and nice. This afternoon we find ourselves hanging out at this really cool cafe called Cafe La Onda on 16th St in the Mission district. They’re playing Franz Ferdinand, offer great coffees, teas and pastries, and have the coolest furniture (all older stuff, makes it feel like home) along with free Internet! If I could find a place like this in Thailand I’ll be set!

I’m really curious about the wifi/Internet cafe scene in Bangkok and the rest of Thailand. I’m hoping some entrepreneurial expat has setup something similar (preferably with free wifi if you have a beverage type deal).

But back to being sick. I’d love to know…

In the USA I received an email. The email was from EVA Air. There are no changes to flights to Bangkok. I’ll be in Thailand in 6 days. Flights from Ottawa to San Francisco were good.

Damn it’s a beautiful day here! SFO is awesome. Palm trees (how I missed those!), old buildings, crazy people on the street everywhere… now THIS is a city!

Last night we went out for comida mexicana pero el problema era que el restaurante elegido estaba super ocupado y completo. La cola era mas de 4 grupos de tres personas o mas. Loco eh? Pues fuimos a un “taqueria” que es un lugar donde se hacen tacos y burritos (little donkeys!!!) y cenabamos muy bien. Yo tenia un burrito (little donkey!!!) de mas cosas que podia recordar. Super bueno, todo.

From the fire escape, looking out on San Francisco. And of course it’s amazing to see Emily. She’s done really well out here and has herself setup with a really nice studio in the Mission district. The Mission is awesome, full of…

About a week and a half ago I went to Canmore for a day to visit my step brother Dave. We spent most of the day hiking up a mountain.

Dave spent almost three months in Thailand (but didn’t cross over into Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) back in 2004, in fact his trip was nearing its end when the Tsunami hit on December 26 of that year. He happened to be in the north at the time but I remember being over at a friend’s house for a pseudo-Christmas dinner in Barcelona when I heard the news - I was pretty worried to say the least (and called home at 4am their local time to ask them about it).

During my day in Canmore and between picking up his backpack and some sandwiches I found some time and paper to write down a few of his suggested common phrases or expressions in Thai. Let’s see if I can decipher my own scribblings amid my badly romanized spelling of a new language.

In the order of what…

I’ve spent the last couple weeks building the site and getting it ready.

Last Friday while my mother went to the football game, I spent four hours hammering out the (relatively) final design for the site here.

At the top left we have a picture of a Thai beach, perhaps Phuket, but it was an older photo found on the net. It’s not ideal, but I still like it. The right-hand photo is an evening shot of the Bangkok skyline, toned and cropped - I love that one. The middle one is a temple. I don’t know where it’s from specifically, but I believe Laos.

Today I’ve fixed up some of the About text and sorted out the social bookmarking features for the site.

Any feedback on the design? Let me know.

While this isn’t incredibly relevant to my upcoming trip, I’m wondering what people think about this Canadian university’s advertising campaign.

Good ol’ Thunderbay. I think the cold winds of Lake Superior keeps them a bit loco-er than the rest of us.