chiang mai - the beginning

Bangkok without the 'bang'. Small city with a big city attitude. Friendly people. Cheap-cheap food. A little place called Pakinai where we will be residing for the month of March. A cooking course appears to be in the cards for me at this stage, as employment opportunities here seem slim, and I really need to start doing something with my time - all this inactivity is driving me crazy. In our pursuit of inactivity (however unintentional), I had a once in a lifetime experience. Seated outside our residence on a Friday night, fully engaged in a game of 'drinking crazy eights', and what else should walk up but an elephant. A common occurence during Friday-night-predrinks, is it not ? Feeding elephants? Incredible!

koh phangan

A, once very beautiful, beach sacrificed to hedonism and debauchery. Spent the week there dedicated to drinking, which culminated in the outright outrageousness of the famous Full Moon Party, which, coincidently, happened to fall on Bevan's birthday. Our buckets overflowing, we entered the madness. There was any type of music you like blaring from any number of small places to do much of the same as you did the night before, except tonight you are annointed with UV paint and the moon is full and there are thousands upon thousands of other people in the same frame of mind as you are. The result is quite overwhelming, and I was overwhelmed early. Note to self: must learn the lesson known as 'pacing oneself'!

It was fun, but as the saying goes, "Too much haha, pretty soon boohoo", and 'boohoo' I was. Very soon. Two days after Full Moon, three days of swollen glands, aching muscles, nightmarish delusions brought on by fever and a throat full of razor blades. Thank goodness for Augmentin - one times antibiotics course and we're off to Chiang Mai, the longest journey of my life... Taxi to the ferry, ferry to the mainland, bus to the bus-station, 8hrs on the bus to the train-station in Bangkok, arrive at 3am, wait until 8am. Catch a train (the first of my life) to Chiang Mai, but be prepared for a 12hr journey. 32hrs later and there we were. And here we are.

hatyai

Just another city: Cooked poultry with their heads and feet still attached. Fake trees that light up on the main streets at night. Dancers named Jasmine at the 'Pink Lady Hotel' - an elaborate front for prostitution. Buy her a pink flower and she'll sing for you. Buy her a purple one, take her home. Go upstairs into the "massage parlour" and choose a girl, sitting pretty in her glass box. It's like putting a coin in a vending machine and choosing your 'happy ending' - no sunsets and white horses here though folks, underwater murals and handjobs perhaps.

The best in your mind. In downtown of Hatyai

From Hatyai to Koh Phangan for Bevan's birthday.

georgetown - penang, malaysia

Bangkok without the smell and the overwhelming bustle and the street vendors and the prostitutes. We found ourselves here as the result of needing to renew our temporary visas. Quite a painless process really. The only snag we encountered was arriving on a Saturday and therefore having to stay an extra day due to the fact that no one works on a Sunday. Global day of rest. Am slightly surprised that a two-month so-called "tourist visa" is so easy to aquire, but I'm not complaining! Georgetown is a very interesting place, the inner (or old) city being a UNESCO World Heritage site. It was founded in 1786 by Captain Francis Light, a trader for the British East India Company, as base for the company in the Malay States. He obtained the island of Penang from the Sultan of Kedah for this purpose. As a result of it's interesting history (which I won't delve into too much), Georgetown has a unique architectural and cultural townscape without parallel anywhere in East and Southeast Asia, one that I would decribe as 'crumbling colonial'. Very beautiful. The demography is also quite interesting. I was expecting the majority of the people there to be Malay and Muslim, but it turns out that Penang's population of ethnic Chinese is larger than the Malay population, whilst 10% of the demography is occupied by ethinc Indian people. All this cultural-mixing results in really amazing food!

Summary of my Malaysian experience: hairless dogs; taxi-drivers named Alex with a good grasp of English and a humorous inclination towards extended metaphors; grungy hotels full of amazing photo opportunities and ghosts, chipped folding card tables, red plastic chairs and faded posters; incredible Indian cuisine and 10%vol. beer; 'Little India', full of music and colour and pretty little bindi's and roadside stalls selling delicious samoosas; snake temples and five venomous vipers; 12%vol. beer. And then a long bus-ride back to Hatyai.