libertus

The pictures are coming thick and fast now! Just some random ones I happen to like.

Malaysia

View from summit of KL Tower	Looking down from Petronas Towers skybridge	Marlin statue in Kota Kinabalu	Close-up of same

Bukit Terisek summit view	Penang laksa ready for devouring	Some Malaysians take Merdeka day seriously!

Thailand, mostly Kanchanaburi

Tourist attraction near the bridge	Close-up of mom	Happy family	Unhappy frog

Sunset view from our lodgings	Statue in wat grounds	Liberta next to statue for scale	Field of dreams!

This company has a great franchise idea!

More to come!

I have only one thing to say about Thailand – DO NOT COME HERE.

All expectations I had of culture, mystique, friendliness and slight seediness have been quite rudely shattered. It has become twisted and corrupted beyond recognition by the 10-million or so foreign visitors each year and the local population’s insane greed to get any piece of that massive influx of foreign cash without giving a thought to the effect that has on the environment and their long-term well-being.

Land of Smiles my arse. Oh yes, people smile. They smile to gain your trust then try to steal your wallet (figuratively speaking). If one complains about being treated badly they smile again, laugh, shrug and/or try to fob you off with some lame excuse. So what if you don’t like it – there are millions more of you stupid rich white people coming and one of them will pay.

The worst part of it is that now I cannot possibly figure out who is trustworthy and who is scamming. Now I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of blatant racism.

We’re leaving tomorrow for Malaysia.

If you check out Liberta’s post describing our journey here then my last post will make a bit more sense.

C’mon, as if I would stop talking. Y’all know that’s just an idle threat!

We’re on Ko Tao which, I’m told, translates to Turtle Island. It seems that this was once a turtle breeding ground. Not surprisingly, the turtles have moved on which means this place should now be called Ko Farang as that is the dominant lifeform at present.

Smart creatures, turtles.

This morning we found a snake eating a frog in the pot plant outside the door of our chalet.

Liberta would like to get some diving in before our visas expire so today we leave Kanchanaburi for Ko Tao, an island in the south of Thailand well loved by scuba divers. We’ve gone for the cheap option of using the bus service offered at our guest house. Neither of us like busses all that much but it saves the hassle of having to think about each leg of the trip.

Not sure what facilities are available on the island so the blog may go quiet for a few days. Can’t imagine a place without internet access though!

Before I forget… this happened a couple of days ago and is a prime example of how one’s reactions change whilst travelling. Imagine this happened in the UK.

Liberta and I are sitting in a restaurant waiting for our meal.

She looks at me and says, quite deadpan, There’s an elephant behind you.

Moments later, a man offers to sell me a bag of cucumbers.

There’s an elephant behind you. Would you like to buy some cucumbers? Might sound like a Monty Python sketch but it was real life. That’s what happens around here. There really was an elephant behind me and the cucumbers are sold to whiteys to feed to the elephant.

I politely declined to purchase said vegetables but enjoyed watching the elephant eat them nonetheless. Ask enough foreigners and eventually one will pay over the odds to feed your cash cow… umm… cash pachiderm. There’s a sucker born every minute and they’re here in droves!

Oh dear. I’m becoming cynical.

As Liberta mentioned in her blog, Kanchanaburi is pretty much a single interest town consisting of the famous Bridge on the River Kwai and little else. The marketing hype is unrelenting with many hotels and resorts named River Kwai this, River Kwai that. I’ve yet to find River Kwai Massage but I’m sure it’ll be here somewhere.

We visited the rather excellent Death Railway museum. My knowledge of WW2 was limited to the European aspect and it is refreshing (well… a little disturbing also perhaps) to find out that there was just as major a conflict going on in Asia and the Pacific caused by Japanese forces. Something to research into the future I suppose.

We took a day trip to see some of the local sights. We chose the tour company associated with the guest house we are using. Not that there was really a choice to make because all the 8 or 9 local tour operators offer exactly the same range of tour options at pretty much exactly the same prices. Maybe this is because there’s not much to see and do. Maybe there is only one tour operator and the rest are front-end feeders.

The tour we picked comprised being packed into a mini-bus (best so far) with 8 other people and being herded to a waterfall in a national park (full of locals), a hand-made railway cutting from WW2 (and attached museum), another waterfall (we got coffee instead), a cave with a big Buddha image and a two-hour train journey over the route of the Death Railway to the famous bridge.

The highlight for me was sitting on the train watching field after field after field of lovely hemp fly past.

It wasn’t a bad trip overall but I’m not fond of being time pressured. Besides, waterfalls, holes in rock and bridges don’t really excite me regardless of how and why they came to be. It seemed to me that rather than being on the trip for entertainment and enlightenment, instead we were being pushed from one souvenir shopping opportunity to the next. I can only take so much spend money, stupid rich white person. At the end of the day I was tired and more than a little cranky. Rampant tourism is corrupting this part of the world by introducing all the worst aspects of capitalist society (greed and viewing money as the key to freedom) to people ill-equipped to deal with the consequences. Their history and culture are being distilled, processed, packaged and commercialised so that the wealthy vacationer can take a piece of it back home. I think it is foolish to base an economy on the fickle interest and short attention span of foreign tourists.

And they want more!

Woke up rather fuzzy this morning and in a bit of an introspective mood. We grabbed coffee nearby then had a swim in the hotel’s pool. I chatted with Liberta about what I seemed to be missing and it came down to one thing – routine. My life has been, until recently, filled with other people’s directions on what to do with my days which made the two or three hours I had to myself in the evenings quite precious. All that is gone now and I am faced with the daunting prospect of having to find my own purpose. Not so bad once I got thinking about it.

Anyways, we checked out at the limit (midday most places) and made our way to the other train station in Bangkok via a combination of Skytrain and river ferry – a cheap and enjoyable journey. The train station was, unfortunately, an infeasibly long way from the ferry peir which may explain why the gaggle of Buddhist monks that disembarked with us hopped straight onto a bus while we scanned around in confusion for something, anything, that looked like a train station. Still, we got there in the end.

Bought tickets (25 baht each), ate at a local street restaurant then made our way to this little gem of a place – Kanchanaburi. Tony recommended it to us. It is famous for being the closest town to the Bridge on the River Kwai and since both of us have more than a passing interest in WW2 seems like a great place to base ourselves for a few days, take in a few of the museums and see some sights.

We are tending not to book accomodation in advance these days (being seasoned travellers now ) as there are usually no shortage of touts at train stations. This was different though – the touts are on the train. We had accumulated a fair amount of paper before we got off and accumulated more are we wandered around the town looking for somewhere.

After being quite insulted by one place (I do you a special deal – 600 baht when all the other places top out at 400 baht) we settled on one of the guest houses we learned about on the train. Goodness me if it isn’t about perfect! Liberta was worried that I would get depressed because I couldn’t complain about the room! For 350 baht (about 4 quid) per night we have a clean, spacious air-con room with hot shower, TV, wardrobe, seats out front and an excellent view of the river. It was built in 2002 and was clearly designed by someone with their thinking cap on. Just little things like being able to put your own padlock on the front door – great for feeling secure when you go off for a 2 or 3 day tour somewhere.

We’ve just eaten and Liberta was feeling the alcohol a little too much so popped back to lie down. I’m going to get some more beer then join her. I’m drinking a lot more than usual but what the hell? At 60 baht (about 80p) for a 660ml bottle of Singha or 50 baht for a bottle of Chang (mmm… you can really taste the formaldehyde) my Scottish side comes out. I’m a sucker for a bargain!

I’m pretty sure that’s a lyric from a Rush song.

Yesterday we boarded the overnight sleeper from Chiang Mai to Bangkok. Quite an interesting experience in that we boarded, found our seats, headed for the bar/restaurant and stayed there until we were kicked out at 11pm. I’m sure some of the bar staff were on drugs! Not only were they generally very happy, the music they played was unexpected (the Sex Pistols) and they had one of those spinny disco light projectors. What an atmosphere!

We met a nice, young Canadian gentleman with whom we drank and chatted for a couple of hours. I approached him because he had given the bar staff one of his CDs to play (Tracy Chapman). Perhaps he wasn’t a fan of the Sex Pistols. Still, I didn’t rib him for his lack of taste. I like Tracy Chapman too. Takes me back a few years.

After being kicked out of the bar we returned to our seats to find that, during our absence, they had been converted into our beds. At the start Liberta was trying to figure out how they worked (since we expected to be coming back drunk) but the train staff were encouraging her not to. Phew!

I’m sure I slept well but being woken at some ungodly hour – even with coffee – isn’t conducive to my good mood. The train arrived at 7am but we were awake at 6am. Still, it gave me a chance to watch the mile upon mile of slums that have grown up around the train tracks into Bangkok. I was a bit too bleary-eyed and misty-minded to judge whether what I was seeing was poverty by local standards. The people at least have somewhere to live albeit made of rusty corrugated steel and plastic bags.

Bangkok is in the midst of a mayoral election campaign. The roads here are dangerous to pedestrians at the best of times but being forced to walk on them because the pavements are blocked by enormous posters advertising the prospective candidates seems to me to be a perversion of the single issue they are all agreed upon – doing something about the traffic in Bangkok! Since the text on the posters is exclusively in Thai script, Liberta and I have been looking at the pictures of the candidates to figure out what they are trying to say. Number 15 looks very stern. Number 3 is military. Number 7 is oooooooh nice and pretty, especially in her construction helmet. Number 19 is a green ant (don’t ask, I cannot explain). There are 22 candidates in total.

Why the numbers? Well, get this. I learned from the local newspaper that for this election, the ballot papers are going to have a revolutionary new feature – the names of the candidates. In all previous elections, voters had to select them by number only. Something about that bothers me but I can’t quite put a name to it. Democracy takes a strange form in this part of the world.

I’ll have a number 6, a number 2 and, for a laugh, a number 14.
Would you like rice with that, sir?

Anyway, back to the travels. After a few coffees at the train station, we left our backpacks and went off on a mission – to get my post from the main post office and to search for somewhere to stay for the night. We were both dreading the post office visit after our previous experience there but this time it was a breeze. One down.

So, somewhere to stay. Given Liberta’s fetish for mass transit systems we hopped on the brand spanking new BTS which covers a large tract of Sukumvit Road where many hotels are to be found. The Skytrain is what it sounds like – an elevated railway – similar to the one we used in Kuala Lumpur. Not much to say about it really – the stations and trains are clean and the service is cheap and efficient. I was a little concerned at the slight squealing that the train emitted when going around bends but I’m sure the engineers could spray a little WD40 on the track to get around that.

I was insisting on a luxury hotel – anything up to 1,500 baht per night (about 20 quid). The excessive pollution from the traffic in Bangkok makes me feel very dirty very quickly and I’ve been lusting after a hot shower for about a week now. We found a charming little place on one of the Sois offering a clean room, comfy bed, hot shower, balcony and swimming pool for a little over 1,200 baht. What a relief to get out of my my sweat-soaked clothes and scrub. Luxury!

After cleaning up we had to go back to the train station to get our packs. Liberta reckoned we could do it using the Skytrain and tuk-tuk in about an hour. I was skeptical but while we were walking back to the Skytrain station I noticed that the MRTA helpfully went straight to the train station. Seemed quicker and allowed Liberta to add another system to her list so we used that. Again, not much to say – clean stations and trains, service cheap and efficient. We did the entire return journey in around an hour and a half without much stress. We could have done it more quickly but we spent some time reading the posters in the entry tunnel that describe how the MRTA was built. An underground rail system is a remarkable feat of civil engineering and it is good to be able to find out more so easily.

I must point out that neither the Skytrain nor the MRTA are representative of Bangkok in general – which is dirty, smelly, noisy, expensive and infuriatingly distracting. Here’s an example…

You have been waiting for five minutes to cross the road. I say road but imagine a six-lane racetrack full of vehicles of all shapes and sizes belching out noxious fumes and being driven at maximum speed by maniacs. Finally, you see a space forming that you can run through. Just as you step out to make use of this precious space, a tuk-tuk pulls up in front of you and the driver yells TAXI!?.

NO! THANK YOU!

I love Bangkok. It is one of the most vile places I have ever had the displeasure of visiting more than once!

Liberta has posted a review of Tony’s Chez Swan restaurant in Pai.

A regular theme when chatting to falangs in Pai is the sticking effect. People come here to visit for a few days and end up staying for weeks, months, years or until the authorities kick them out! The Mountain View bungalows almost perfectly illustrate why this phenomenon exists.

The bungalows are on the spacious land surrounding the owner’s house at the top of a hill on the outskirts of Pai. The approach road is steep and only partially clad which is fine for walking but I imagine motorcyclists must be careful, especially in the wet. A sweaty hike to the top is rewarded with the first view of mountains to the west. I was a bit too puffed out to take it in much but I did sigh for a moment.

The bungalows are basic wooden A-frame box houses on stilts with two rooms; the main bedroom which is just large enough for the two matresses on the floor and the bathroom which has toilet, washbasin and cold shower. The bedroom has a fan. There is a verandah with seats and a hammock.

The bungalows are basic but they come attached to a most spectacular view! Open the door and the eastern mountains stretch off into the distance – the sunlight playing with the clouds skiffing over them to produce a never-ending show of patterns and shades. Over time the weather changes and one can just sit watching captivated as butterflies and dragonflies play in the fields while nature passes time in the background. Wow.

Such a tranquil location conduces one to kicking back (even further!) and just lazing. And lazing. And… you get my drift.

However, we’ve decided to move on from Monday so there’s only tomorrow left to laze. We can’t even do that all day because there are certain travel arrangements to be made including booking a mini-bus for the helter-skelter ride back to Chiang Mai, saying au revoir to Tony and perhaps a nice meal or two to remind us of Pai. I think we should be able to laze for a while though.

I’d like to catch sunrise. Did I mention the verandah faces east? Sunrise over those mountains… mmmmmmm. If I can get it all together I’ll try to remember to take a piccy. Or maybe I’ll just laze…