and on and on

Anyway, where last we left off, I had departed Yara and Bangkok towards the bluer pastures of southern Thailand, specifically for the city of Krabi.

The train that I was on was a new kind of sleeper train, for me. In the daytime, its actually all seats. There’s no rows of seats, though, its very sparsely seated, with just one seat facing another on either side of the train, then another set of four after that, and another four after that. But when night falls, they put a connecting cushion between the chairs on either side of the car, transforming it into a bed, and a hitherto unseen mattress locked up against the ceiling is brought down, so that it becomes a bunk.

There weren’t too many friendly looking people on the train. Most of them were Thai anyway, but my car in particular had about 3 or 4 other westerners that I could see. One of them was a much older French lady with carrot-dyed hair, and then there was a young couple of girls, probably about my age, that didn’t seem like they were interested in interacting with anyone else.

Before all the beds were actually set up, and I was just sitting across from a lady who I guess was Thai but really looked Chinese, the attendants on the train catered to me a little more than I was comfortable with, probably due to the fact that I’m as white as a new canvas, and so they offered me menus of food to have on the train that certainly no one else was offered, and I ended up ordering some cashew chicken.

Later, when I finally actually received my food (and one bottle of Chang beer) I found myself presented with like three plates of food, way more food than I had any intention of trying to eat on my own. So I took some of it, but I asked if maybe they could find someone else who would like to have the last plate of food, which I didn’t even break open from its plastic wrap. They made as if to agree, but I suspect they ultimately just threw it away after they took the plate from me.

Another attendant, incessantly throughout the night, would walk by and make a swift motion of the hand as if holding a beer and taking a sip from it, to ask if I wanted another. At the prices that they were selling them at, I certainly didn’t, but beyond that, it still made me feel really uncomfortable the way that they were disproportionately catering to me, even when I was laying down in my bunk.

I had the upper bunk myself, and the French lady was the next upper bunk down from mine, so I occasionally made some basic attempts at conversation with her, but they never went far. She probably just thought it was funny that this young American guy was trying to talk to her at all. Eventually I got her to open up a bit and find out where she was headed to, and it was just some other random tropical paradise in Thailand, of which there are many. I think she was headed to Koh Samui, a pretty popular island.

I tried my best to get some sleeping done, rolling up against the side of the train to try to catch a bit of a draft of cold air to overtake the absolute uselessness of the rotating fans affixed to the ceiling of the train in the middle of every four upper bunks. Try as I might though, I really didn’t get more than a couple hours of sleep at the most, compounded by the fact that I still didn’t have my iPhone working, and therefore still didn’t have a working alarm, but I knew I’d have to get up pretty early to get off at the next stop, the transfer point between Bangkok and Krabi (actually, its just a transfer point in general for going to most of the most popular destinations in the south) called Surat Thani. The train had pretty much no announcement system in place at all, which made me feel even more nervous about it all. When the time came, there was an attendant who walked by each bed comically muttering “Surat Thani”, and if you had been asleep at that point (given it was 6am, that’s not so unreasonable) you could’ve easily missed the stop. I just had to laugh to myself and be somewhat thankful for the fact that I hadn’t been able to sleep at all.

When we got out, it was at a fairly standard looking nothing bus station, and we were variously randomly told what bus we had to shuffle into. I was pretty thirsty from the previous 8 hours of that humid train. This was the first of what I’d find of being pretty much constantly dehydrated for the entire month that i traveled. Figuring I had at least a minute, I ran off to a nearby convenience store and grabbed a couple of bottles of water, then shuffled as told onto some bus that housed both people destined for Krabi and people destined for Koh Samui, which was the majority of the people on the bus.

At first it was pretty quiet, but eventually I took a guess about a woman sitting in front of me, and she was in fact Chinese just as I suspected, and actually from Shanghai, so we ended up chatting in Chinese for maybe an hour or so, until we reached the point where the people bound for Krabi had to get off.

I actually had some pictures of this place, as it was actually a pretty interesting little transfer point cradled in the crook of some random small river, but those were in fact lost on the harddrive from before.

It was obvious that that Chinese lady was a bit sad when I left, since she was in fact going to Koh Samui. She waved at me for a few minutes, out of the side of the window of her bus as they were refueling before taking off. She seemed like a really nice lady, who works a modest job in Dubai, of all places, doing something in customs and immigration at the airport there. But, she was going her way and I was going mine, and that’s how it goes.

There were several other people waiting for the next bus to get to Krabi, and I ended up talking to one guy who was on the older side of things, probably close to 60. We ended up hanging out on the bus together the entire way, and he told me all about his story, and apparently he’s been coming to Thailand every year for the last thirty years or something like that. Usually he comes with his wife, but apparently this year she had some other business to take care of, but he was bound on going anyway. The reason he comes is that from his part of Canada, a frozen wasteland in the middle of winter, there’s no business, so anyone who can goes on extended holiday anyway, but instead of going to Mexico or the Caribbean he and some others have found their holiday money goes a lot further in Southeast Asia, and so its been. The funny thing of it is that he runs into a lot of other northerners every year in Thailand with the same mindset, some of them he had only ever known by meeting in Thailand itself.

He was a pretty nice guy too, and we had plenty of discussions about other things also, and it seemed he was pretty tickled by some young kid talking to him, something that probably doesn’t happen too often.

When we got to the end of the line, we were brought to yet another way for Thai people to make money, instead of the town center proper. Some other random “bus station” so that they could sell us bus rides to the place we actually wanted to go, as well as an opportunity to book us at hotels or whatever in case we hadn’t already made arrangements ourselves. I didn’t have any arrangements, personally, but I certainly wasn’t going to be making any there, so I just coughed up the dough to get the ride to the beach and figured I’d be able to find something for a reasonable enough price there.

The old guy I had been talking to got himself a little motorbike taxi to a place that he apparently stays at pretty regularly, and we waved goodbye to each other, figuring we might bump into each other again at this little town on the water.

I then made my way over by minivan, and was dropped off at a place, and after looking around for a while, I saw a placed called the Aonang Grand Inn (Aonang is actually the name proper of this beach town, though it’s a part of the Krabi area in general), and after inquiring, I found the rate was higher than I’d like in general, but still doable. It was about ten dollars a night to have a room all to myself, though it had a shared bathroom. I checked in, and I think I sat around there for a little while trying to troubleshoot things a little bit with what in the world I was doing with my travels, and then made arrangements to go rock climbing the next day.

After all, the whole reason I was coming to Thailand, quite honestly, was to go rock climbing in Krabi. Ever since I first started climbing a few years ago, and did a lot of research about it online, I found out early on that Thailand has some of the world’s most beautiful spots to climb. So this has been a holy grail of sorts for me, and it was incredible to know that I’d be finally doing it in less than 24 hours.

I set out for the beach immediately afterwards, though first I had to buy a pair of swim shorts and put on my flip flops. I actually was able to fix my iPhone as well, so I brought that with me and a pair of headphones, as well as my camera bag, and got ready to see the first tropical beach of my life.

My god was it gorgeous. Post cards for these kinds of places just don’t do it justice, to be honest. I took a left as soon as I hit the beach, and just walked down the sands with my feet barely kissed by the tide, looking around at the various people who were there, and at the ocean and the world beyond it.  Here’s a few pictures:

The people who were there were heavily slanted towards older European people sunbathing, including a rather healthy assortment of older, overweight European women sunbathing topless. There was a ton of Russians, in particular, for what its worth. After walking past a resort or two, I made my way towards a small wooden bridge, which was guarded by a contingent of troublemaking monkeys that the tourists were all too happy to test out for whether or not they’d get bitten, as shown here:

There wasn’t really any good way to get around them, so I just walked through and hoped for the best. In fact, they had no interest in you as long as you minded your own business and just went your own way, so they didn’t even approach me.

The wooden path was so fricking shoddy, and I had to climb a pretty unstable staircase in my crappy flip flops, and with beautiful lush greenery all around me, and it was wonderful. Here’s a couple pictures of this path:

I had no idea where it led to, but finally it came down to a more exclusive beach for some other resort, where I had to actually sign a form and write what time I entered as a visitor to make sure that I’d do the same on the way out, and not tarry too long.

There wasn’t much more to see here anyway, but I took another couple of pictures just for fun, so here you go, including one of the hut I had to sign the form at:

I didn’t waste any time in heading back after, and shimmered up and down that path much more quickly this time, stopping briefly to take some more pictures of the cute monkeys:

After this, I traipsed through the waters of the tide some more, and suddenly I was overcome. Maybe it was a mixture of little sleep as well as Elliot Smith’s “Speed Trials”, but I suddenly felt the urge to weep, but it was a happy sort of weeping. I just couldn’t help but consider the fact of how lucky I was to be in a place such as this, a true paradise on earth, and how far removed it was from my experiences in the previous 24 years of my life, and how its basically a privilege unheard of in my extended family. I couldn’t help but get caught up in thinking of the incredible nature of it all, how extraordinarily our lives can move in new directions, how the capacity for new lives exist within us, and how sad it is that so many never really fully take use of this capacity, let or even half of it. I myself had barely done it deliberately, stumbled into this capacity more than anything else, and I feel already that I’m much the better for it.

On the other hand, I wonder from time to time now whether I’ll ever be able to look back on the person I was before traveling, and whether it’ll be someone I can recognize. When you go through the series of events that I have, an abrupt sudden shift from a mostly sedentary life to a world-traipsing one, its hard to imagine a life without moving, and its hard to imagine the outlook and mentality of a person who is only moving in place, yet I was that very person not so long ago. I know that our experiences inform who we are, and I know that it takes a long time for some of these influences to play themselves out, and I worry from time to time about how the overwhelmingly large number of diverse experiences I’m having now might move me in wholly unpredictable ways in the future. If I was to try to come up with a slogan for the life of traveling, its that you don’t plan your travels so much as your travels plan you, the road moves you, and in the communal way that traveling comes together in such an organic way, you don’t have experiences so much as you are the experience. The snake eating itself and the moebius strip and all those other continual cycles can be brought into the fold to describe the weird interplay between traveler and local, the giver and the recipient. Its so incredibly reliant upon vast networks of feedback loops, if you step back to consider it you realize how little control there is in the system. The only thing you can do is to give yourself unto it and hope for the best.

As soon as I made it back to the main roads of Aonang, I decided I was going to go for a little boat ride, as there was a fleet of quick little boats to ferry us to other places along this peninsula. Krabi has a rather unfortunately large monolith you might’ve noticed in my previous pictures blocking Aonang and the resorts from getting to the rest of the peninsula, so the only way to reach those other parts was via swiftboat. So I bought my round trip ticket and hopped in to go to something called Phang Nga Cave. I didn’t know what it was, but who cares? I just wanted to go check it out, and it was pretty cheap to do so, so away I went.

That boat ride didn’t do much to stem my own surge of emotions and sense of bewilderment with the surroundings, as the ocean breeze and light splashes of the water as well as the vast limestone cliffs and rocks jutting out of the water were just an incredible sight to behold. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves, again:

 

 

It turns out that a few of the other stops I could’ve chosen were just various points along this peninsula, and that the spot I chose was the last point on the peninsula, which worked out pretty well. I also briefly met two young American guys on the boat who got off at one of those earlier points, who I’d end up running into again later on. Here’s a couple of pictures from the different drop off points, as well as the rather underwhelming cave:

From there, I started just wandering around at random, and soon found myself on a path that would eventually lead all the way back up to the different spots I had originally bypassed on swiftboat. Suddenly, there was a sign that signaled a trail that you could take to split off to see some scenic point. I found this sign at about the same time as some young couple, and when we looked at it, we just saw an almost vertical face with a slippery dirt incline that you had to use ropes tacked into to drag yourself up, and I could only say one thing: “Shit.” The couple fairly agreed, then decided they weren’t game for it, but in my stubbornness, I went for it, and ended up being quite thankful for it.

It was actually a pretty intense climb, especially in flip flops. I met a guy who was pretty out of shape who gave up early on and went back down, and then some others who had actually gone the entire way, who gave me a better idea of what it was I was facing, since I had no idea how far this trail would go, really. Turned out there was two different points of interest, one overlook spot as well as a “secret lagoon”. The overlook was the easier of the two to reach, so I went for that one first, and it was only a couple minutes away, and gave this view of the peninsula:

Afterwards, I double backed til the fork in the path, and started heading towards that “Secret lagoon”. At one point, the path started going downwards, but was also pretty slick and required the use of either a few ropes slung down the slop or the creative use of one’s hands for stability. There was a group of people there at that moment, a couple of guys and a couple of girls, and one of the girls was feeling doubtful about her ability to move down safely. Because the rest of her friends were guiding her slowly down the rope, I moved to the side of her to leap down from rock to flat mud surface to tree root and so forth, until I could bypass them all, and then just kept moving on.

Soon I found myself at a series of sheer cliffs, each one a drop of about 10-12 feet, with a rope to hold onto while gently letting oneself down. It didn’t look all that particularly safe, since if you fell, each ledge was so narrow that you could conceivably roll off of it onto another ledge and so on, and there was three or four of these drop offs. Some other people were there too, and decided against going down. Probably, in my crappy flip flops, I should’ve done the same, but I’m too stubborn for that, so I kept on descending, hoping to god that my flip flops wouldn’t betray me, despite being slick from sweat and slippery clay.

I made it down safely, and what do you know, my first ever hidden lagoon. It wasn’t that amazing, but it was still something I’ve never seen before, so, I took a couple of pictures, but I didn’t tarry for a swim or anything, given that the sun would be setting not too much longer afterwards. Here’s the only one that came out well, plus a couple pictures of the trail:

Just a few minutes later, I was going through all the same descents in reverse, and it felt even scarier pulling myself up. The people I had bypassed earlier were there, and a few of them were thinking about going down as well, although one girl, Malaysian, didn’t have to consider it too long before giving it her best shot as well.

I gave the others my best regards, and started racing up the slopes again. I didn’t want to miss the last boats from the beaches back to Aonang, so soon enough I was back to where I started at the bottom of the crazy trail, and I hurried along the regular walking path up to West Raileh Beach, where I’d start my rock climbing the next day, and quickly hopped onto another boat to take me back to Aonang.

Back at Aonang, I didn’t have a lot to do. The sun was setting soon, so I grabbed something to drink and hit the sands to take a couple photos of that.

The people around me seemed to think I was a little weird, running to and fro, trying to take shots of the sunset from different angles and such, but screw ‘em. That’s just how it goes, you know? Minutes later, it was done, and I wandered off to find some noodles.

After that, I think I actually worked on the last blog entry I posted. I needed some down time from the previous few days, and it felt like an appropriate enough time to do so. Afterwards I just wandered around the streets of Krabi for a good long while, seeing what it was like at night. Unquestionably, its a resort area, and so what was there catered almost entirely to the sorts of people who would go to resorts. Plenty of stores selling flip flops, sunblock, and swimsuits, as well as lots of travel agencies, were the rule of the day. At nighttime, the bars that did exist started to light up and play music, and I went and checked them out, but they looked pretty sad and desperate, with very few customers compared to the number of bar girls at each.

As I gave up with all of those things and started walking back towards my hostel, I ran into those two young American guys I had shared a swiftboat with in the morning. We all hung out for the rest of the night, going to a couple of different bars, and just talking about whatever random stuff popped into our minds. One of the guys had previously lived in Beijing for a year, so he and I had a bit to relate with, and given the academic bent of each of us, the conversation soon drifted towards our own little analyses of the future of the world and China. The third guy had little in the way of input, and I felt a bit bad for ending up in a conversation that he couldn’t really be a part of, but he said that he thought it was all pretty interesting, so, there you have it.

The reggae bar we settled down at advertised itself as having like a strip show or something, you just had to go to some basement or the like. We weren’t particularly interested in checking it out anyway, but couldn’t help but laugh when we saw a couple other young Westerners try to make it downstairs, only to find to their consternation that it was closed.

Apparently Thailand’s been seeing a downturn in its tourism this year, probably connected to the downturn in the economy. Or at least, thats what a lot of Thai people themselves are reporting thus far.

Eventually it was time for them to call it a night, so the guys went home, and I stuck around to finish the drink that I did have. I wandered around for a bit afterwards, until I settled on another bar that was mostly empty and less threatening than some of the others, though it still had its fair share of bar girls.

One of them sat down with me almost immediately, and so began my first experience with bar girls in general, let alone in Thailand.

She was much more normal looking than the average bar girl, by which I mean to say she didn’t look immediately like a prostitute. No fishnets, no overly gaudy or shiny accessories and other things. She looked like a pretty normal girl, and apparently she likes playing Jenga. For those who don’t know, as I didn’t, its apparently protocol in these places to first play some sort of game or something for a while, maybe to break the ice since most of these girls don’t speak any language other than Thai anyway. They have all kinds of different games available, ranging from the absolutely typical pool to, well, Jenga.

I actually rather enjoy the game myself, but never would’ve imagined myself playing it in a bar on the beach of Krabi with some girl who can’t speak English. She was pretty good at it though, probably from getting lots of practice. I won a couple, she won one or two more than I did, and we had a couple drinks. Pretty soon it was closing time, but they let us finish one last game first. Afterwards, they asked me ever so politely if I wanted to take the girl home. I knew it was coming, of course, but I still wasn’t quite ready for it, having never been in this sort of situation before. Stammering, I demurred, and paid up for my drinks and made my way out the door to the tune of a sunken and sullen bar girl. Luckily, it had been a long enough day, and I had had enough to drink, and my inn was close enough to that particular bar, that I was able to go crash on the bed and forget it immediately, preparing myself for the next day’s adventure.