Fun in the Sun: A Thai Christmas

Another "email home from Asia". Back when blogs were rare, mass emails were a traveller's best mode of communication. It was also a time when updating someone on your travels was a welcome reprieve for them and not just another input among a million others that they feel compelled to pay attention to!

Sà-wàt-dee Kha and Happy New Year!

I sort of read my Lonely Planet Thai language guide with my idiot goggles on and it turns out that Khrap is not the way to say hello. It is however the way that men have to end a lot of phrases (for women it is Kha), which I like even more!

Our plan in Thailand was to have no real plan from the get-go except to do what felt right in the moment at hand. 

Bangkok Bargains

Arriving in Bangkok on the first day was overwhelming. I was like a kid in a candy store when I realized how inexpensive everything was. The city in many places was a never-ending market with food stalls (where you could get an amazing Pad Thai or rice dish for about 1$ U.S.) and fresh fruit for days (full pineapples for 50 cents, mangoes, papayas, etc.), which was quite a novelty coming from the land of ridiculously inflated fruit prices.

Despite bargain basement prices on just about everything you could possibly squeeze into a basement, haggling is the name of the Game in Bangkok and every price is quoted with this in mind. It's actually a little bit stressful to never be aware of the true value of something and to constantly have to play the game with every purchase made. In many cases, you can overhear foreigners haggling for about a 10-cent price difference and wonder if it's worth the energy.

Bangkok is full of beautiful and over-the-top vibrant mirror-plated temples that glitter in the evening in response to the traffic lights. The King rules supreme in the minds and hearts of the residents, evidenced in his effigy which is plastered everywhere. To say something less than positive about him is tantamount to treason and I wouldn't be surprised if many households had pictures of him and his family hanging somewhere. You could even find pictures of him and his wife book ended by Elvis and Priscilla Presley for sale in the markets! River boats that collapse to fit under bridges, fried bananas, exquisite hand-woven silk, fake IDs for sale in the market, tin metal motorbikes masquerading as taxis, it's chaotic and exhilarating.

Island (Ko) Hopping

From Bangkok, we headed to the island of Phuket via a very bouncy airplane. We stayed at a less rowdy beach called Kata beach and as it was Christmas Eve, decided to take a stroll and have a few Pina Coladas. We happened across a bar street that might as well have been an outdoor hostess club. Greasy men groping or being groped by scantily clad bar ladies, all donning flashing light Santa hats (okay, I bought one too but I was far from scantily clad). Not exactly a homey Christmas Eve-type atmosphere. Christmas was a day at the beach and a 10-dollar buffet to end all buffets near our hotel. With seafood and beef and turkey and salads and you name it basically. We did it up Canadian style and if we were at home I'm sure we all would have been loosening our belts at the end of the meal.

The next day we headed off for a day on Phi Phi Island which was hit hard by the Tsunami. It was also the one-year anniversary so the boat was filled with mourners and the island was a buzz with memorial activities. There were ribbons tied on trees, pictures of the missing, Tsunami day pins and t-shirts on sale and evidence of the bungalows and life that once existed on a certain sandy patch of land. The town was still gorgeous and a hotbed of activity, however, it was a sombre day. We rented a long boat from Phi Phi for about 25 dollars for the four of us which included snorkelling gear, and we headed out to a couple of different islands (including the one where they shot the much-criticized movie "The Beach") to snorkel. It was beautiful. Soft blue water with white sand reflecting the sun's rays. An idyllic scene despite the tragedy.

Our fourth stop was Ko Lanta, an island that is renowned for being quieter and less touristy than some of the other islands in the area. We ended up staying for 7 days as we found some quaint little beach cottages on a relatively quiet yet still hoppin' beach. The cottages were about 17 dollars a night, we were a 30-second walk to the beach and it included air conditioning, a private bath for each of us, and a scrumptious buffet breakfast every morning. We were living on island time and I was soaking up the island life. I made it my mission to have as many Thai massages (right on the beach for about 8 dollars a pop compared to 80 dollars in Japan) as I could fit in between snorkelling, running on the beach to the setting sun where upturned shells glistened like diamonds at my feet, going into town for some local Thai food, drinking fresh fruit shakes on the beach, riding around the island on motorbikes, reading on the beach and swimming in the gloriously warm ocean water. It was paradise on the cheap and as a result, it didn't even feel like a guilty pleasure, it just felt like heaven. We also caught a local Mui Thai boxing fight which in the end was just brutally vivid boxing. Quite entertaining at least as it was a mix of tourist spectacle trap and local betting romp.

New Year's Wishes

New Year's was relaxing and enjoyable. We had dinner in town entréed by a gorgeous bottle of Thai wine and capped with a banana flambé courtesy of our chef. We then walked along the beach and took in the umpteen shows including karaoke, Thai traditional dance and cover bands that each resort provided. The stroke of midnight was spent being showered with fireworks (literally as the guys setting them up at our bar were firework nincompoops and they buried them too close and too shallow) and watching paper lanterns floating up into the sky, turning everyone's wishes and hopes and memorials into bright orange stars in the sky. There were at least a hundred mixed with the fireworks of 6 different hotels, which was quite a sight.

Food and Fashion

The food in Thailand is really quite exquisite and varied. Rice and every colour and flavour you can imagine, using the freshest of fruits and vegetables. It was all excellent (though I was as usual craving junk by the end of the trip, and with pizzas at 2 bucks a pop in Thailand compared with 30 in Japan, I buckled). On our last day in the next town we visited, Krabi (basically a stopover on our way to Bangkok), we took a Thai cooking course and with the aid of our master chef made about 8 dishes in about 40 minutes ( Pad Thai, fried rice, red curry, peanut chicken, soup, papaya salad, etc.).

After this, it was back to Bangkok to get the last bargain hunt out of the way. I had a dress made for me while I was in the south so I had to go back for my final fitting (Thailand is the place to get clothes tailored for you super duper cheap). I squeezed in one last massage and my giggling masseuse used every part of her body to mould my doughy flesh into a pretzel formation. I got my money's worth as I felt it for days afterwards! They must get a kick out of watching our faces as they contort in pain during these practical yet painful massages. At one point they even aggressively pull at your hair and you leave looking like you've just touched a charged metal ball. Definitely bring a brush to one of these massages.

Squat Pot

Toilets are once again a subject worth mentioning. I definitely missed the basic pee holes and automated toilets in Japan. In Thailand they have the same standing toilets, however, they are oddly raised above the ground which makes peeing quite the little balancing act, one of which I was not a star. And in many places, not only is there no toilet paper, but if you use some of your own you have to throw it in a bin (please forgive any houseguest who does this at your home after recently coming home from a vacation abroad – it has happened at our house and we were not well enough informed to be forgiving), and then you have to flush the toilet manually with a little pot of water sitting in a bin next to the toilet.

Bless the poor soul whose stomach is not bosom buddies with Thai cuisine because a self-flush is a humbling experience, to say the least. And then to top that off, the showers are often in the toilets so the whole place is a sopping-wet-humid mess after you have a shower. Not the most luxurious of bathing experiences.

Trick the Tourist

Thailand is indeed the land of a thousand smiles, but in the tourist industry itself, a lot of those smiles fade pretty fast when you are not interested in spending your money. Luckily we ate at a lot of local restaurants and met some truly wonderful Thai folk who invited us fishing and chatted with us amicably. However we met a lot of aggressive shop owners and taxi drivers. Some even bold-faced lied to us. They would tell us that things were closed on a given day and that we should take a ride with them instead, meanwhile, the place in question was open. Or they would take you to a shop that they recommended and say that they would wait for you outside and then they would take off.

The prices varied like dot com stock prices and everyone that you asked for directions ended up being linked with someone else and they would try to reel you into some sort of purchase. Even pointing to a map and saying "Please take me here" did nothing to ensure an accurate destination. There is also no national tourist organization so everyone is trying to sell you their tours and it makes for many a biased recommendation. It can get quite frenzied!

Loaded down with heaps of international products (we went nuts at Boots drugstore before we left as they have products that Japan won't let in at half the price) and filled to the brim with Dairy Queen blizzards we headed back to Japan.

As my tan quickly fades, and I settle back into the home stretch of my time in Japan I think of you all and hope you all had a wonderful holiday! Send me your news and I'll talk to you soon.