This spring I went on a fantastic vacation to Thailand. My friends Kai and Allie had been bumming around Thailand and Vietnam for a few months and I flew over to join them for the end of the trip in Thailand. At least that was the plan. About two weeks before my flight over Allie had to come back to the states early to deal with some family stuff. But Kai was a trooper and stuck around so we could have a bachelor trip through Thailand (stop thinking dirty, we're good boys.)

Side note: If you want to skip the long write-up and just look at all the pictures, they are here.

Continuing on their theme of bumming around my trip was exceptionally unplanned (those of you who know me well, and know me to be an extreme planner, are probably giving your computer screen an incredulous look right now, but it's true!) Taking off from Seattle all I knew was that I was flying to Phuket, I had vague but good enough directions on how to get to where Kai would be in Phuket Town, and that I flew out of Bangkok 16 days later. That was it. We had some loose theories about what to do in that time (half in the south bumming around tropical Islands, half in the north exploring historical Thailand) but all the rest of the details like how to get from Phuket to Bangkok were all to be decided. This turned out to be a fantastic way to plan a trip through Thailand. We had a ton of flexibility and never had a hard time finding a place to stay or a bus/flight to where we wanted to go.

With my limited plans, and a reasonably sized backpack on my back, I showed up to the Seattle airport for what I knew would be a ridiculously long travel day. I'd used miles to get my ticket, and had been a little limited for options because of how late I booked it. This meant my flight over had four segments and would take about 30 hours in airports and airplanes! (For the record: Seattle to LA to Hong Kong to Bangkok to Phuket.) The whole thing was so ridiculous that I made a little photo story of it. Each picture has notes on it showing the location, local time, and elapsed time. I was fearful about the day, but it turned out to not be so bad. I slept a bunch on the flight over the Pacific and met some nice people the rest of the time. Most helpful were the two Thai women who happened to be sitting next to me on the LA to Hong Kong flight. I spent some time learning some Thai words and phrases out of my travel book and they were quite happy to help me with my pronunciation - since Thai is a tonal language this was big help! The biggest character I met was clearly the German police officer I sat next to on the flight to Phuket; his wife thought he was an a two week work trip to Southern Germany, when instead he was coming down to hang out with an old friend of his who runs a resort in Thailand. Yikes!

Anyway, after my big day of flights and airports I got into a mini-bus heading into town. But of course we didn't go straight to town, first we had to stop in at a little travel agency where they had everyone in the bus come inside so they could "be sure you were going to the right place." What that really meant was they wanted to try to convince you to book a place to stay and things to do with them. This was a constant in the touristy parts of Thailand, people were always trying to aggressively sell us stuff, which makes sense since our tourist dollars seem to run the economy in those areas. We got very good at saying no, and learning how to say no in a way that stopped the conversation ("no, we're already booked at this place and we're meeting friends there", "that's ok, we don't need a special taxi", "no, we don't know when we'll be leaving, so we can't buy a plane/bus ticket from you for our return trip.") After chatting me up for a bit they then put me in another car and took me to where I was meeting Kai.

But my travel day wasn't over yet. The place Kai and I were going to stay in Phuket was a place they had stayed earlier in their trip, but now it appeared the ownership had changed and they had raised their prices so it wasn't a good value any more. Kai and gone out that day and found a place to stay in Patong Beach, the popular beach town, so after meeting Kai we hopped in another cab to Patong. It was a quick trip and I was pretty happy with the place. It was a fourth floor walk up, but had reasonable beds, hot water, a western toilet, and AC - what more could you ask?

It only took me half a day in Patong and on Phuket to decide I didn't like it all that much. The best way for me to explain is it just felt like Baja. It was under a lot of development (side note: Phuket was devastated by the tsunami) and just didn't have any of that tropical island charm I was hoping for. Walking down the street we just got assaulted over and over again by shop-owners trying to sell us stuff, and I just didn't like the vibe of it so much. Kai said that other beach towns on the island were more laid back but I was skeptical. I'd read about another Island on the other side of the peninsula in the Gulf of Thailand that sounded way better, so we decided to set off for Samui. The travel guy at the bottom of the guest house was happy to book us a mini-bus trip to Samui for the following morning, which gave us the rest of the day to play around in Phuket. Snorkeling was one of my big goals for the trip, so we decided to make sure it happened on day one.

We booked an afternoon trip where we went out on a speedboat to these three little islands that were essentially just rock outcroppings with a beach on one side where the current came from and coral reefs on the other side in the current shadow. The snorkeling here was ridiculous! The first place was pretty cool, with lots of fish and some neat looking coral. The second island didn’t have much so Kai and I just bummed on the beach. But the third island made it all worth it. Our guide said as we were coming up on the third island that the tide was pretty low, and he might have to drive us in the boat out to the spot instead of us just going from the island, but then he decided it was probably ok.

The tide was low, and got even lower while we were swimming. Getting out to the deeper water was a challenge, and we had to double back a couple times when we got to areas that were so shallow we couldn’t swim above the coral! Even in places where we could get through we were simultaneously holding as much air in our lungs as possible (for buoyancy) and keeping rigid posture to stay as close to the surface as we could. Even with all that there were places where we had no choice but to touch the coral. I felt bad about being one more tourist to put pressure on this natural resource, and we did everything we could to avoid it, but there just wasn’t another way back to shore. That said, being that close to all the coral formations was really amazing. It wasn’t just “so close you can reach out and touch it", it was “so close you have to do everything you can to avoid touching it." We also saw some neat looking fish, and even a pair of reef sharks. For the record, a shark swimming around in the water just looks ominous, it’s kind of an eerie feeling. Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures in the water, but we made mental notes to buy some underwater cameras for our next trip. I do have some pictures of the islands we visited.

The next day we set out for our trip to Samui. This started off being not so bad with the two of us getting the full backseat of one of the ubiquitous minibuses. It took about an hour to collect all the passengers and we set out north. After a couple hours we stopped for a break at a little shop/restaurant place and that’s where the trip got a bit worse. There were some other tourists waiting there and they got into out van as well. Not only did we get a guy in the backseat with us, but the van was now over capacity two people on other’s laps. At least that wasn’t us. But the smell got a little tricky in the bus, and the suspension wasn’t doing too good with the weight. A couple times we went over highway bumps that caused my head to hit the roof of the van. But it was a neat experience, and we got to see some pretty scenery on the way. Eventually we made it to the last transfer point, which was another travel agency where they tried to sell us stuff again. We politely turned them down and waited around for a while until it was time to catch the ferry to the island. Once on the ferry I felt a bit better, but when we were rolling up to the island I was thrilled. Just looking at the island I could tell I was going to like it more than Phuket. It just had that look to it.

Once on Samui we grabbed one of the local shuttle trucks over to the main drag, Chaeweng Beach. We didn’t really know anything about the place except what we’d read in our guide books so we just started wandering around and asking in hostels and such if they had a room open. The place was pretty packed and most of the hostels were full. We started to get discouraged but kept asking around. Just for fun we also asked at some of the beachfront resorts and ended up finding a gem! The Chaeweng Garden Beach resort was happy to rent us a bungalow for a very reasonable $21 a night. The place wasn’t spectacular, but it had beds, AC, a hot shower, very friendly and helpful desk staff, and the whole place was right on the ocean. We could walk out our door, down about 50 yards of a nice sandy road under the trees, and pop out onto the 4 mile long beach. On top of that, it was right in the middle of the strip next to many of the popular restaurants and bars. I’m still a little amazed we managed to score this kind of value and would absolutely recommend this place to anyone visiting Chaeweng.

Our time on Samui was all about bumming around in island paradise. We hung out on the beach, played in the water, wandered around the island, and generally acted like tourists. We did leave the island one time, and that was to visit Ang Thong National Marine park. Initially reading about it in the guide book I was thinking about trying to spend a couple nights there, but the logistics of that proved difficult. They have some bungalows you can rent on the main part of the island, but information about them was scarce. They’re run by the national park service and are very cheap, so the armies of people trying to book you for things don’t know much about them since there’s no real profit opportunity. I figured out how to book them online and could have done that, but couldn’t figure out if there were things like a store on the island or the ability for us to rent kayaks there to go explore the other islands. But with Samui being so nice we didn’t worry about it and just booked a guided day trip to the park.

Ang Thong is perhaps the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. It’s a series of islands/rock outcroppings that just pop out of the sea. We took a speedboat out to the Southern edge of the park and stopped there for about an hour to snorkel. This time we brought cameras, but the snorkeling wasn’t nearly as good here and the visibility kind of sucked, so none of the pictures came out well. That’s ok though, because after snorkeling we weaved through the islands and those pictures are amazing.

Our first stop was at an island that has an interior lake connected by an underground tunnel to the ocean. It was a quick hike up over the ridge, down to the lake, then up again to an observation tower. The lake was pretty cool and had lots of fish in it chilling in the intake from the ocean. It reminded me of seeing fish in a stream hanging out in the food rich current.

After that we weaved through some more islands on our way to the main island. We pulled up to the beach where there are some park offices, the bungalows you can rent, and a little restaurant. We got lunch at the restaurant and since we had some time before kayaking started we decided to hike up a trail to a viewpoint on the top of the island. The trail caught us both by surprise, it started off looking like a normal trial, but that only lasted for about 50 yards. Then it turned into less of a trail, and more of a part of the mountainside with less vegetation and a big rope running up the hill. The rope served two purposes, it showed you where to go and was useful to help pull yourself up.

The whole climb took a lot longer than we expected, but we also didn’t realize how high we were going to climb. The guidebooks said it was a 500 meter hike, but Kai and I are pretty sure what they meant was a 500 meter elevation gain. It got especially dicey at the top when the jungle opened up and we had to scramble across some very uneven and strongly pitched rock faces. And of course we’d packed excellent hiking footwear: Kai in his Teva’s and me in my trusty Reef flip flops.

It was all worth it though (and makes for a great story.) There were two viewpoints along the trail and I could barely stop taking pictures at both of them. [For the whole Ang Thong gallery go here.] It just seemed surreal that were actually at this place. This is the kind of spot you see in movies or travel magazine pictures. And there we were, staring down at these islands popping out of a beautiful blue/green sea. Check out my panorama picture for a good idea of the view.

Eventually we had enough of the view and trekked down. By this point we were way late for the kayaking and the group had left without us. We were able to track down one of our guides and get him to give us a kayak to just tool around the bay by the island. We didn’t get to do the whole tour, which I would have liked to see, but I think the hike was totally worth it.

Ang Thong was by far my favorite place in Thailand, and if I go back I will absolutely visit the park again and would hope to stay there this time. I still didn’t figure out all my questions, but the restaurant would be able to provide food, and there were a bunch of kayaks there so I bet there was a way to rent them directly from the park people.

Other things on Samui were pretty cool too. Kai and I did a little tour of alternative golf types - Soccer Golf, Mini Golf, and Disc Golf. We spent a fair amount of time just walking around exploring the Island as well. One of my favorite days we took a taxi up to the soccer golf spot, but then just set out walking. We ended up at the mini-golf place, walked by the Big Buddha perched over the sea, saw the Crocodile Farm where a crazy guy put his head inside a croc’s jaw, and wandered through the villages where all the locals live who work in the hotels and restaurants we’d been patronizing.

There was even one day on Samui where the tide kicked up and there was actually surf on the beach. We rented ourselves some boogie boards and went to work. It was fun, but the waves were pretty poor – they were thick and badly formed which meant catching them was tough and they didn’t give much of a ride. I was happy to spend a few hours in the water though since I don’t get to play in surf much these days.

After our week of bumming around on Samui it was time to head out. We bought plane tickets to head up to Sukhothai, which was the capital of Thailand around the 14th century. These days there are two Sukhothai’s – one is the old city with the ruins of the old capital and the other is a modern small city where people actually live and work, these are typically called New Sukhothai and Old Sukhothai. We stayed in the new city which was neat because it was the first time I didn’t feel like I was in a tourist spot. Even though there is the attraction of the old city there, tourism is clearly not what makes Sukhothai tick (for the record, I don’t know what does make it tick, I couldn’t tell.) This also meant that prices were crazy low here, since we weren’t paying tourist prices as we ate at spots that locals visited as well. In the new city I got to see some of the locals actually being locals. We walked by a city park where they were doing aerobics in the evening. I went on a run through what I’d guess was a Thai middle class neighborhood one night (it would be the slums by American standards.) I wandered through the local temple and watched the monks go about their day.

The one full day we were in Sukhothai we went out to the old city to tour the ruins. I probably should have paid more attention to what they were, maybe did some reading, or hired a tour guide. Instead we just rented bicycles and rode around for the afternoon looking at the ruins and taking pictures of things that looked cool. As an added bonus there were tons of school kids on a field trip while we were there, and they had a great time talking to us in their limited English – mostly saying “hello" then hiding in embarrassment when we responded (this was most typical in the young teenage girls.)

There wasn’t much in Sukhothai other than the old city so after seeing that we took off on a bus for Bangkok. There was some nice in route entertainment but my favorite thing was watching the scenery roll by. Lots of times it seemed like a normal bus ride, until some gold plated temple would roll by on a hill side. That stuff was neat.

I spent my last three days or so in Bangkok. Bangkok is a crazy city. It’s dirty, crowded, fast paced, and quite a sight. We rode local busses, walked all over the place, took cabs, and even a the river taxi’s. There was lots to see in Bangkok and I saw only a very small amount of it.

The first day we visited the Bangkok Zoo, which was actually pretty interesting. As a zoo it wasn’t anything special, about on par with the Seattle Zoo. The neat thing was the spread of animals they had. Oddly enough, a zoo in Southeast Asia has a whole different set of animals compared to Zoos in North America. Sure, all major zoos tend to have the big mammals like elephants and big cats. But not many zoos have more than 30 species of turtles. Overall, reptiles, snakes, and primates were heavily represented. And not just in the cages either, we stumbled across a couple of water monitors eating a fish in the public waterway!

We visited a few historical sites, including the Grand Palace, and they were cool but I have to admit I think my tolerance for finding temples interesting is kind of low. At a certain point I just kind of tune out (the same thing happened to me when visiting cathedrals in Europe.) Instead we spent most of our time bumming around the backpacker district souvenir shopping for our families and people watching.

We did go to two interesting areas though. Like most tourists, a trip to Bangkok wouldn’t have been complete for us without a trip to the red light district. This was a very strange area. Because all us tourists visit this area there are little shops setup everywhere, to the point that it looks just like one of the other market streets with fake sunglasses, odd T-shirts, and other tourist stuff for sale. The difference is many of the businesses in the buildings are related to the sex industry. We didn’t go inside any of them, but we heard a lot just walking by. We couldn’t walk 10 yards without a guy asking us if we wanted to see a “sexy show" and chattering about ping pong balls, bananas, and other things that I assume were to be inserted into random body orifices - these didn’t sound like sexy shows to me, but whatever. In the end Kai and I settled into a bar to have a few drinks and watch English Premier League soccer action. It greatly disappointed the prostitutes working the bar that we paid more attention to the game than to them.

The other crazy place we went was the new Siam Paragon mall in the center of the commercial district. This was, by far, the most out of control mall I’ve even seen. If you had an apartment here you would literally never have to leave. There was a health club (named California Wow! Xperience of all things), a high profile and very large grocery store, a four story department store, electronics, art shops, luxury car showrooms(!), food ranging from standard mall food court fare to high end restaurants, a full blown aquarium with a shark exhibit, a bowling alley, and a 14 screen movie theater. I was actually shocked that there wasn’t some kind of condo or hotel setup on the top of the whole thing. While most of the mall was only casually interesting, I thought the luxury and electronics levels (yes, they had levels for these sorts of things) were pretty cool. Every clothing and show designer I’ve heard of, and many I haven’t, had their own shop showcasing their goods. Then the electronics areas had vendors like Sony, Pioneer and Panasonic with their own showrooms displaying their top of the line and unreleased consumer electronics. This was very much not a Thai experience, but the place was certainly a site to see.

Alas, after a few days of bumming around Bangkok it was time for me to head home. A car to the airport started the long trek home, which was much harder than the flight over. I didn’t sleep well on the way across the pacific and by the time I got to LA I was pretty beat. Fortunately I had a great pick me up scheduled in LA. Erin, a friend of mine from college who I hadn’t seen in years, lives in LA now and ditched work to come pick me up at LAX. We went to the In-N-Out Burger on Sepulveda for lunch and got a chance to catch up in person which was a welcome change from our usual phone calls and emails. As far as I’m concerned this was the best layover ever.

After a good lunch it was just a quick flight up to Seattle where I was thrilled to finally climb into bed. I did get to have a neat conversation with a girl on that Seattle flight who had come from New Zealand that day. We were comparing stories about “the longest Wednesday ever." She clearly won because she had yet another flight after me.

In closing, here are a few interesting take aways:

• Thailand is ridiculously cheap. My grand total cost for 15 days, including food, lodging, activities, and in country travel was $850. Yeah, Kai and I were not staying at what you’d typically call “nice" places, but we always had a clean place to sleep and shower. We didn’t eat at upscale places, but we always ate well. To give you some perspective: the room we shared in Bangkok was $8/night, when eating at tourist spots we’d usually eat for $5 each, when at local spots food was closer to $1.25. You can live it up in Thailand and still spend a bunch of money, but if you’re not picky about most things it’s a crazy cheap place to travel.
• I’m not sure why I didn’t get more Thai Massages. Yeah, a lot of massage shops are not-so-secretly brothels, but there are still lots of opportunity for an actual massage. And continuing the theme they’re cheap! An hour massage for $5 – I really should have gotten one of those every day.
• When we were in the mall I noticed that there were a ton of employees. All over everywhere. When I mentioned this Kai, restaurant manager that he is, instantly responded “labor is cheap in Asia." He’s right, and I saw evidence of this all over the place. It wasn’t just that there was an excess of service employees in the high class mall, there was a general theme of using people to do things that we’ve replaced with devices or equipment in the west. My favorite example was on the city busses. They didn’t have a far box that you put money in when you got on the bus – they had a guy walking around the bus taking money and giving out tickets. That would never fly in the west , it would be too expensive, but in Thailand they didn’t have the same pressures to replace people in an effort to reduce labor costs, because labor costs are low.
• Perhaps the most interesting thing for me was the lack of English I heard. English is clearly the primary international language, so I was always able to get what I needed and converse with people. And I didn’t expect the locals to be talking in English to each other. The thing that caught me off guard was how few of my fellow tourists were speaking English amongst themselves. I’m used to traveling places where most of my fellow tourists are other Americans, but when I went halfway across the world to Asia something else happened. Most of the western travelers were people from Europe or Russia, and they were naturally speaking their native languages. It got to the point that I was surprised when I’d be walking down the beach and overhear some English talk, kind of like when you go to another state and catch a glimpse of a license plate from your home state. A little bit of familiarity that feels rare in a different place.