Thailand - a short holiday

I recently spent a week in Thailand with Emi. It was a impulsive holiday, planned just a few weeks before. Unluckily, I got asked to do a big music project by a big-shot record producer here just a few days before leaving. I really shouldn't have taken the job but I was worried I may never get the chance to show my skills again, so I took it and spent every day-time hour working on it, right until the flight. I confirmed it's completion to the guy on the phone while the plane was taxiing for take-off to Thailand. Seriously.

Well, I say Thailand, but I really mean Taiwan. You see, it wasn't a direct flight. In fact, we had three flights in one day: Tokyo to Taiwan, Taiwan to Bangkok and Bangkok to Phuket Island. I told Emi that I would take care of planning the trip (not knowing that the music project would sap every last minute) so it turned into an impromptu backpacking expedition from Phuket to Bangkok via boats, trains, buses, taxis, tuk-tuks and walking.

We flew with China airlines (why is it only with flying that we use "with"? I mean, we never say "oh, I rode with Virgin" for trains, or "I rode with East London transport" for buses) which was unfortunate because the planes looked like collectable items. They were still using the occasional big red-green-blue fuzzy projectors rather than individual entertainment panels. IAs we sat waiting for take-off, I expected the captain to announce that the main propeller elastic band needed replacing.

The scheming scamming Thais hit us immediately as we landed in Phuket and searched for a bus to go... well, anywhere. I stupidly asked at the official TOURIST INFORMATION DESK for help-
"Excuse me. We want to take a boat to the Similian islands. Where does the boat go from Phuket?"
"No bow go. No bow go. You wa bow, you go Pooket tao."
"OK, so the boats leave from Phuket town?"

And then a man darted over to us and chatted in fast Thai to the woman I was speaking to. Suddenly she said:
"Bow no go from Pooket tao, only froa Phang-nga, only fro Phang-nga."
"Um, OK, but you just said that the boat does leave from Phuket Town."
"No no no, bow no leave fro Pooket tao, you go Phang-nga."

And of course they were lying. The man had obviously told her that he had connections to boats to the Similian islands but his company only went from Phang-nga. Immediately my Asian distrust mechanism kicked in, dusty and unused in Japan, but born during my month travels in China. But I was ready for it. China had taught we well - it's much worse there.
We found the real bus into town (everyone was telling us that there was no such bus and that we needed to pay five times as much for their taxi) for about 50p and looked for a place to stay when we got off. It was getting late and we were tired so almost anywhere with air-conditioning would have done, but such a place turned out to be harder than I thought. We eventually found a cheap hotel that had air-conditioned rooms (it was sweltering) and paid the £5 for the room up front. Only once we paid did we realise it had no hot water.
I scrapped the idea of going to the Similian islands since I simply couldn't find the truth from anyone so we went to the Phi-Phi islands. I had expected our boat there to be a small white yacht or something but instead I was met with a three-story tourist-gobbling machine. It must have sat around four-hundred people and was hot and horrible for the whole two hour journey. Things didn't improve much once we got off; hoards of Thai men shouting "you wa hotel, you wa hotel" and trying to get us to stay at their place. It was a genuine tourist trap. This island was purely for tourists and although it was nice walking around in the evening when things quietened down, and the food was great (real Tom Yung Kun!), I wouldn't recommend it. Our hotel though was beautiful. We had an individual bungalow set on wooden walkways over marshy-tropical flowers and reeds. We walked across one of the main beaches as the sun set and just wandered across the island as far as we could. On the way we found a fire-dancer. He had what looked like two huge fire nunchakus and was dancing over and around theme. He could 't have been more than eight years old.
The next morning we took the boat back to Phuket and then a bus to Phang-nga bay, which was to be our centre-piece of the trip. The plan was to boat to a vast bay of uninhabited islands and to go canoeing through some of the ones which contained caves. Well, we arrived in Phang-nga in a storm so the place just look grey and Englandish. We had no idea how to get to the bay area. We just sat under some tarpaulin, next to some fat woman cooking food for all the locals, peering at us occasionally, and waited for the storm to pass. She came over to us and said "you wa taxi?" and yes indeed, for once we did. I got out a photo of the bay area and said "go here" so we got in a complete stranger's car (it was certainly not a taxi) and rode to the bay area. The man tried to ask us which hotel we were staying in. After eventually figuring out what he wanted, I replied "we don't know" so he just pulled-up at the largest hotel in the entire area (and in fact the only one, as it turned-out) so we stayed there. It was an eerie place. Very "The Shining". We appeared to be the only people staying in a three-hundred room or so hotel. I kept thinking "we must have gotten the wrong area".
Since the plan was to boat around, we needed a man with a boat. So we walked to the isolated tourist information center where a woman answered my questions mostly with "he can help you" as she pointed to skinny scrubby local guy who was hanging around like a vulture. Well, he had a boat - he would meet us at 8am the next day and drive us wherever we wanted for the whole day. He'd do.
After a walk around the sparse neighbourhood during which the locals stared at us and successfully tried to sell me a fake Puma cap, Emi got really depressed and lonely. She grew increasingly tired of everyone thinking she was Thai (everyone was speaking to her in Thai at first) but I think she does look kinda Thai. And what's so bad about that anyway?! The grey raining weather continued into the night, matching our grey mood. Dinner in the hotel restaurant didn't do much to take away the "The Shining"ness of the place: we were the only people dining (save an odd mother/son couple on the other side) and the waitress had a "in training" badge on. Upon closer inspection of the entire hotel staff, I couldn't find anyone without an "in training" badge. Perhaps the entire previous staff had been murdered.
The morning was a god-send: bright gleaming sun and clear blue skies. Our spirits instantly soared as we walked to meet our very own scrubby local at 8am. Would he even be there? Yes he was! He asked for the money first which was something I hadn't planned for. I considered doing a "half now, half later" like in the movies, but then realised he had nowhere to run to with the money so I gave him the 1500 Baht and off we went in this noisy long-tailed boat into pristine blue waters and huge limestone-based islands towering over us. We spent most of the day hopping on and off onto uninhabited islands, just as planned, just as I really wanted. One island had loads of coconut and mango trees. We found a freshly dropped mango (they were all too high to get) and ate it. Another island contained bat caves and ancient paintings. Another was the set for Scaramonga's island in James Bond: The man with the golden gun. The highlight by far was getting into a three-man canoe and silently paddling through limestone caves, going under very low entrances (we had to duck) and occasionally taking a dip in the extremely warm swamp-like pools. I'll never forget the boggy muddy bottom my feet sunk into - I imagined thousands of swamp-dwelling insects crawling over them, Indiana Jones style.
After a slightly dodgy meal of luke-warm lemon squid at the only small area of restaurants on the water, we got on the boat and Mr Scrubby Local Man let me drive most of the way back. We were on a pretty tight schedule since our next plan was to go back to the bus station, get a bus into Surat-Thani, a major city, and take an over-night train into Bangkok. We checked out, got a taxi back to the bus station and were please to find that we'd be able to get a bus that would arrive in Surat-Thani in time for the 8.30pm overnight train. There were other trains running that night but the internet site I had researched said this was the quickest and most comfortable one. I started feeling a bit sick on the coach and couldn't stop thinking about the lukewarm lemon quid. We found the train station and were told that all tickets had been sold out apart from, would you believe it, the most expensive private room sleepers.
"Really?" I said, "but this isn't a busy season."
"All tickets sold. Only private room. You wan priva room or no?"
And so we paid the ridiculous price of 1200 Baht each (unheard of in Thailand and another example of the institutionalised corruption that goes on across Asia and ignorant naive tourists don't even see) and waited an hour for our train since the 8.30pm was also apparently "full". My sickness grew worse and I just wanted to cry: we had one more full day left which was dedicated to exploring Bangkok but now I seemed to have full-blown food-poisoning. Poor Emi ended-up nursing me for the rest of the evening as I threw up heavily twice (don't you hate it when you are sick but you know that's not the last of it) and could hardly walk. The private room ended up being the best-case scenario. I recovered much quicker than I ever have after food-poisoning and slept for most of the 12 hour journey but Emi, bless her, hardly slept a wink as she lay freezing in the top bunk, unable to turn off the air-conditioner that was right above her, even after asking the conductor to help her twice (who obviously didn't understand her). The bottom bunk was warmer and in my state I wasn't too fussy about being cold. Poor Emi - all she had to do was turn the knobs on the black sphere-like direction controllers and it wold have turned the air off.
The train journey was nowhere near as comfortable as we had both imagined (especially considering we were paying the highest possible price) because the train was just so noisy and so slow. We were an hour late, so we quickly found a travel agent at Bangkok station and booked a hotel for that night. Now we needed to hire a taxi to take us there. This was ridiculously difficult. Taxis and Tuk-tuks were streaming through a single pick-up point but everyone was just leaping out in front of the vehicles and jumping in so unless you were prepared to seriously risk your life, you had to wait ages for a lucky moment as we did. And then our driver didn't even know our hotel. So I showed him a map - he still didn't know. So we got out of the much-prized taxi and repeated the whole damn process. We eventually settled on a Tuk-tuk driver and experienced our first dash through the city. If crashing into another vehicle wasn't going to kill us, the smoke and fumes soon would so it was just as well that the journey wasn't so long.
The hotel looked promising but after climbing six sets of stairs to our room, I had to come back down and politely demand a room on the ground floor explaining that we were both sick and simply couldn't do this hotel without an elevator. Once the new room was secured we tried to find a taxi boat on the river to the Grand Palace. We were met with a tattoo-covered guy who aggressively assured us that the next taxi boat was at least ninety-minutes away. And would you believe it - he owned a private taxi-boat service! This constant dishonestly from the locals to make a quick buck really pissed me off and was too reminiscent of China for my liking. So we went back to the hotel and found a better spot to board the taxi boat which cost almost nothing to ride compared to the one-month-salary price of Mr Tattoo fuck-you-over man. When we got off, I asked a friendly-looking guy if he knew where the Grand Palace was, and after ten minutes or so of chatting in the blistering sun-light (I kept thinking of saying "could we just walk a few steps into the shade please?") he made our entire itinerary of the day, marking the hot spots on our big "I'M A TOURIST" map for us and even going so far as negotiating a super-cheap Tuk-tuk who would run us around for the entire day for a mere 40 Baht. I'm guessing we were the only tourists to ride at that price. This guy seemed a bit obsessed with telling us about how cheap precious stones were in Thailand and how we should buy one (not from him) and sell it in Japan for a huge profit (since we could buy one as a "gift" - i.e. from me to Emi, thus avoiding the huge export taxes).
Our first stop was a local temple in which a local showed us how to do the ritual of lighting the incense and rubbing a gold leaf onto the Buddha statue. This guy also spoke about the great system of buying local stones and selling them abroad - why was everyone so obsessed with having me buy these stones? And so, sure enough, our next stop was the previous stones shop in which we were met with the most aggressive salesman you will have ever met: his main tactic seemed to be making you feel like scum for even considering not purchasing anything. We got out of there alive and diamondless where our personal Tuk-tuk driver was waiting to take us to the giant gold reclining Buddha at Wat Pho, which was great. The area was a huge mass of Thai temples and heavily ornamented buildings. We both took a massage there. We had been planning to take one but it seemed hard to find a place that didn't promise more than was on the price-list. But here was an open-plan legitimate place. Still, I was kinda looking forward to being massaged by some Thai goddess with slippery hands but instead was met with a skinny young guy... and Emi got an old frumpy woman. Still, it was great although Emi seemed to be more tense than relaxed since she couldn't stop laughing every time Mrs Frumpy touched her. My guy was just fabulous!
We paid off the Tuk-tuk driver and caught the "Sky Train" (Bangkok's monorail-style metro system) to the main shopping center where I bought a shirt but nothing else - the prices were just not much cheaper than Japan or the UK. Then me and Emi had a argument based on "why did we come here again?" which resulted in Emi storming off. Now, storming off is something you do in the same house, or even perhaps the same building, possibly something you do in the same town back home when you could just phone each other and meet somewhere, but it's certainly not something you should do in Bangkok, when only one person has the plane tickets, passports, money and address of the hotel. So I walked around looking for Emi, very conscious that this was our last night in Thailand and each minute walking around in circles was a waste. After thirty worrying minutes, I amazingly found Emi in some shopping mall. I was furious but contained it as much as I could until we both felt better and arrived at the night market. This was last on our itinerary for Bangkok and it was a lot of fun - endless inside-markets of food, jewelry, clothes, souvenirs, shoes, DVDs, everything really, and there was a great live band playing covers in a huge stadium with endless tables in front of it for drinking and eating. We were looking for an elephant, having been told that there was often one there, since Emi was desperate to ride one, but it wasn't there that night. Emi bought a truck-load of souvenirs for friends and colleagues back in Japan in the form of dried fruit and coconut toffee. Japanese people tend to go overboard on gifts for people back home. Emi is no exception.
The funniest and most heart-stopping moment of the trip came on our way back to the hotel from the night-market. We got the "Sky Train" back to the river and needed to get a river-taxi back to the hotel. But they had stopped running some time ago, although there were some very exclusive-looking posh lighted boats which were just for the super-high-end hotels such as the world-famous and incredibly luxurious "Oriental" (noted as one of the world's greatest hotels, see http://www.mandarinoriental.com/bangkok) . So I suggested to Emi that we should just jump on one of those and pretend we were guests at the Oriental since our hotel was right next to it. I figured that since all the piers were public, we could just hop off and go to our hotel instead. So we got on and I immediately started to doubt the strength of my previously solid plan. It was only us and another couple, who were surprisingly well-dressed on this big lavish boat. I kept hoping that no-one would ask for any evidence that we were indeed staying at the Oriental. Things seemed to be going OK as the boat started pulling in to dock and I noticed that we were to dock directly into the private gardens of the Oriental. Oh no no no, shit shit shit. I told Emi to just act relaxed, like we stayed at top-notch hotels like this all the time. But as we got off the boat, a posh-looking security guard with a walkie-talkie approached me and said it:
"Excuse me sir. Could I ask if you are staying at this hotel?"
I babbled. I blundered. I stuttered and murmured-
"Er....yeeeeah. Yes. Sure. Of course. Why?"
"Well it's just that you're wearing ... (a swallow of repulsion) shorts, sir. You know we don't allow shorts here in the evening."
I improvised -
"Oh yes yes. Of course, of course. How stupid of me. Naturally I have a pair of trousers in my bag" which was true, I really did have a pair of trousers in my bag since I had read that I couldn't enter certain temples in shorts.
"Oh very good sir. I'm so sorry to trouble you. If you'd just step this way into the an area where you can change. Sir. Madam" and he led us through the beautiful hotel into a glamourous bathroom where I quickly changed into my trousers and went back out into a posh corridor with a confused Emi, and no security guard.
"He's gone" Emi said. And so we were in the Oriental Hotel. On no account could anyone just walk into the hotel without a reservation, but we had. I started pushing my luck -
"wanna get a drink here Emi?" I asked with an air of satisfaction and mock poshness.
"No!" she replied, "let's get out of here" which was much easier said than done. After ten minutes of winding corridors, lavish lobbies and the gentle tickling of expensive crystal glasses, we finally found the main entrance and ran the hell out, seeking refuge in our meeker hotel, much more suited to the likes of us commoners. But oh, just briefly, we were one of the elite class.
The next morning was just a cab-ride to the airport for our flights home. I bargained a four-hundred Baht journey and at the end gave him a five-hundred Baht notice saying "you have a hundred change yes?" to which he said no, which was bollocks because he I saw he had it. So I snatched the note back and found the correct change. Honestly. Everyone. Everywhere. Just like China.
The flight home was fine apart from a nasty huge black guy who we were met with as we went to sit down, sitting with his thick arms over one of our seats. The tiny fragile Chinese cabin crew member clearly saw the situation and naturally said nothing to help us out. So Emi sat with just half a seat, having swapped with her to the black guy announcing "now that seems to help the situation", pointing out that Emi was smaller than me. Nasty piece of work.

So me and Emi had a good time. The few arguments we had were predictable and not so bad but once we got back, I found that it was as if nothing has changed - we argued about the same old shit, and after a week of this, I put it to Emi that we needed to split-up.

And that was about a month and a bit ago. I've been single since. It's sad to have to end an eighteen-month relationship but one of us had to do it since we had been arguing since November and Thailand was really an "emergency" holiday. Sadness.

Thanks for reading. Sorry for the somewhat sober ending. The next email will be happier I hope.

Trev