BANGKOK: CITY OF ANGELS

They say that in New York you are never more than 3 feet away from a rat, in Dublin it's a pub and in Bangkok it surely must be something to eat. (A cynic might also say you are never more than 3 feet from a farang DOSM with a young Thai girl on his arm) Food vendors literally clog the streets, from market stalls, to snack bars, mobile fruit vendors, grills that appear from no where offering delights from pig skin to octopus, to my personal favourite - footpath restaurants, and that is not even including the actual established restaurants and the like. All this proved to be pretty handy for my temporary incapacitation due to a run n with the reef at Nias on my last day. As the picture shows, the rot set in on my foot and it ain't pretty. (The other foot is actually worse !!!)
In any normal city I would have had to haul myself for block after block just for the smell of decent food, whereas here I have counted 21 restaurants within 500 metres of where I am staying. My quest to eat at them all is proceeding at a leisurely place - I have rediscoverd my favourite pad thai restaurant in all Thailand, and the street stall out the front sells a tom yum goong to die for. So despite my suffering - oh the pain, the pain, fear not - I am being well looked after - by my self.

A DAY IN BURMA

On my way back from my travels in the north of Thailand I stopped in at Mae Sot again to nip across the border to Burma to get a new Thai visa.
At the Burmese border control it was very much business as usual - your passport is taken, you pay the 500 baht fee and then they ask whether you will enter Burma. If you say yes, then they keep your passport, which you collect when you return to Thailand later in the day.
I spent less than 30 minutes in Burma, and simply walked about 15 minutes up the road through the town, then turned around and walked back to the border.
From what I saw things looked pretty similar to Thailand, perhaps a litter poorer, but still the same mix of people of Indian, Burmese and tribal descent.
The one thing I did notice was that the Burmese men are very serious about there longhyis (sarongs) which come in a variety of chequered patterns and were worn by almost every man I saw - except those in uniform.
The other thing I noticed was the difference in cars - no fancy brand spankin new four wheel drive utes here - check to photo.

PARTY ISLAND - KO PHAN GAN, ON THE SHEEP TRAIL

Finding myself with two weeks before my flight left Thailand, and faced with warnings about being prepared for the cold of Colorado, I decided to head down to the south of Thailand to a beach to catch a little sun before the ominous cold. Arranging to meet up with some French guys I had met in Indonesia, I boarded a tourist only bus in Khao San Road in Bangkok. Welcome to the Herd the sign on the bus door should have read, please commence behaving like sheep. Before getting on the bus everybody was given a fluorescent sticker to put on their shirt (think ear tag for sheep) which designated which flock you belonged to (and allowed the Thais to more efficiently herd people around).
The bus was filled with an array of tourists, most already sporting a tan, and almost without exception fisherman's pants. (See the RANT page for my opinion on that) Fortunately the bus headed off a little late so I only had to endure one action movie, mind you it was so bad I may not have lasted a second one. We stopped at 11pm for dinner, which involved everybody being herded out of the bus, past the fried rice counter, followed by a smoke, and then back on the bus. At 5.00 am we arrived at what looked like a ferry terminal and were told the boat leaves at eight. We then had to be processed, passing a counter a being given another fluorescent sticker, and a new tribe. The attitude of the Thais reminded me of stockmen in the Kimberley looking at the cows they were mustering with a mix of disdain, pity combining to generate a disinterested and all in another days work approach.
The more enthusiastic European tourists immediately started drinking beer (nothing like a 6am start) whilst Thai hotel touts worked the crowd. started to discover that whilst Ko Phangan was famous for being a party island (original home of the full moon party) everybody was looking for a quiet place to stay. During the three hour wait another five double decker buses filled to the gills with tourists arrived, and they too were processed at the counter and given the appropriate coloured sticker to put on their shirts. After three hours of waiting about in the stalls we were herded back on to the bus for another hour to the actual ferry terminal, and on to the boat. The boat was completely full, and whilst I had noticed the large number of tourists on the streets of Bangkok it still took quite a bit of adjusting to take in the actual number of tourists all together in one place. The chances of finding a quiet beach diminished by the moment.
i finally arrived on Ko Phangan and there was no sign of the Frogs, so I hired a motorbike and set about checking out the more likely quiet beaches. I ended up on the western side of the island at Thong Noi Pan, a 3km stretch of fine white sand, border by limestone hills on either end of the beach. (Check the view from my bungalow window)

Nias to Bangkok - Highway to Hell

As I was reminded by Sparksy when I caught up with him in Thailand last time, when we were young, tireless whipsnappers we put a few good non stop trips under our belts (mainly spurred on by each other's stupidity and oneupmanship) Maybe its just because I am a little older, but my recent trip from Sorake Beach in Nias to Bangkok, involving car, boat, bus, boat, taxi and train over seven days felt like I was a hamster on a exercise wheel - and as Denis Cometi would say - the hamster is dead but the wheel is still turning.
Together with a couple of other surfers I had arranged a car to take us to Gunungsitoli (click on the map page to see where I went) after a morning surf. My last surf was rudely disrupted by my losmen owner, who when I reached the shore told me that the driver had come to see him to say he couldn't take us. So the losmen owner headed of in to town and for almost double the pre-agreed rate managed to secure us another car. On the road with only an hour or so delay everything seems OK, until we get to Gunungsitoli and are told that all the boats that night are full, except the speed boat, which if we rush we can get on now and buy a ticket on board. So we high tail it down to the port and push through the crowd with our backpacks and boards and somehow manage to scramble on to the boat. We then sit for the next two hours in an over crowded non airconditioned boat waiting for Godot. Eventually we get kicked off because we don't have a ticket, and watch the boat literally sail off in to the sunset. We then had to prevail on UNICEF - or more accurately a fellow surfer we had met in Sorake who worked for UNICEF. He helped us find a room, after trying about 10 hotels which were all full, and organise a ticket for the next day. We managed to finally escape Nias the next day at around 2pm in the afternoon in a far more orderly fashion. (seems the moral here is don't travel on 2 January in Indo, because everyone else already is) But the dramas continued - the car we got in to at Sibolga decided we should stop for a couple of hours for dinner, and then the driver decided that the three 6ft plus surfers should all sit in the back with their knees next to their ears so that an Indo family of short arses could have the front seats with leg room. After an hour of heated argument, we eventually gave in and sat in the back. The night dragged on, and we finally arrived at Prapat at 3.30am in the morning, where my travelling companions alighted - to find their hotel full. Leaving them to find another hotel, the driver then decided to pick another fight and made me sit in the front. The car then refused to start, so at 3.30 am I find myself pushing a car on a highway in Indo wondering how I got there and why I was paying for the priveledge. Sitting in the front of a car in Indo is never a good idea, and it was made even worse by a driver who appeared to intersperse his bouts of nodding off with an erratic and overwhelming desire to overtake abosolutely anything (motorbikes, trucks, semis etc) at what appeared to be the most dangerous times (blind corners, rises etc). I tried to forget that 30,000 people die on Indo roads every year and fall asleep. This however only made things worse as I would periodically be jolted awake and momentarily think my life was coming to an end as bright headlights careered towards me from the opposite direction but the same side of the road, before the driver deftly weaved his way back on to the right side of the road. I have never been so relieved to see the rubbish tip that is Indonesia's third biggest city Medan.I got of the car and said my usual never again.
Medan gave me a little heart attack when the booking agent told me the boat was full and they didn't have a reservation for me - despite me having called two days previously. Do you remember the name of the person you spoke to ? I was asked. I refrained from explaining that in 6 trips to Indo I could remember about 3 names, and eventually much to my relief my details were found, and I was given a ticket. After another three hour wait in the bus we finally make it to the jetty where we wait another hour before the boat heads off to Penang.
After enduring six hours of the coldest air-conditioning I have ever been in (it felt like being in a fridge) and another Van Damme movie, we finally arrived in Penang, after dark.
The next day I took the train for Bangkok - actually more accurately, I bought a ticket for the train to Bangkok, but the delay of the ferry between Penang island and the mainland meant that I missed. Fortunately I was able to arrange for a taxi to chase the train and take me across the border in to Thailand, where I spent three hours waiting for the train to arrive at Hat Yai.
The train did finally arrive and trundled off towards Bangkok, where I finally arrived at around 11 am the next day - four days on the road, pretty much non stop.
I was exhausted, tired and impressed that I had ever undertaken such journeys routinely in my younger years.