the beach

I've been having more than a little trouble with the internet (not to mention the electricity) over the last few days, and I suppose it is a testament to the remoteness of my current locale that I have been unable to update. I still don't have enough of a signal to upload photos, so that will have to wait. With apologies, I'll continue from where I left off...

...after popping back insects like popcorn while watching the delightfully mindless Clive Cussler-inspired "Sahara", I got a good night's sleep and awoke to a day of cultural exploration around Bangkok. The highlight of the day was a trip to the Grand Palace, which I visited with the three Singaporean girls. Construction on the Grand Palace began in 1782 with the coronation of King Rama I. Having relocated the capital of the kingdom to its present location in Bangkok, Rama I planned a massive building project to demonstrate the renewed power and prestige of Siam.

Just to clear up any potential confusion, "Siam" refers, for the most part, to the same geographical region currently known as Thailand. The country was renamed in 1939 with the establishment of the Constitutional Monarchy, which greatly reduced the power of the King. "Thailand" comes from the Thai word "tai", which means "free".

While the palace itself is an amazing blend of the classical Greco-Roman and Siamese architecture, the main attraction on the massive palace grounds is the Wat Phra Kaew - the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. The Emerald Buddha is Thailand's most revered idol, and the Wat Phra Kaew is visited by hundreds of devout Thais every day. Sitting only 31 inches tall and carved out of a single piece of jade, the statue was discovered by a monk in the northern part of Siam in 1434 when plaster that had been masking its verdant stone began to flake off. Captured by a Laotion prince in 1552, the Emerald Buddha remained in Laos until its recapture by Rama I, who brought the state back to Bangkok and installed it in the Wat Phra Kaew. Only the king is permitted to touch the Emerald Buddha, which he does only three times a year when the Buddha's jewel-encrusted golden robes are changed in a ceremony to bring go good fortune for the coming year.

Taking pictures was, of course, strictly verboten. Nevertheless, the temple complex was incredibly ornate and fantastically captivating. The detail in the architecture was unlike anything I've ever seen, tiny bits of glass fashioned together in geometrical patterns to decorate the walls and pillars of these amazing buildings. Equally impressive was a gold leaf accented mural which stretched all the way around the inner wall of the temple complex. Depicting scenes from the "Ramakien", the Thai adaptation of the famous Indian epic the "Ramayana", the detail of each of the 178 murals was captivating enough to hold a visitors attention for hours. Of course, I didn't have anywhere near 178 hours, and so I made a concerted effort to photograph my favorite parts, and carried on through the Grand Palace.

We made stops into the Coronation Hall, the Royal Amory (King Rama V really liked his guns), and the throne room before making our way out of the Grand Palace as it began to close down. There will still many things that we hadn't gotten to - we covered less than 25% of the grounds in the three hours we spent there - but it was probably a good thing that we left before starting to feel wat-ed out. This would be my last adventure with the Singaporean girls, as they were continuing on to other parts of Thailand, and I returned to the hostel to find that I had a new roommate.

That night I headed down to Koh Sain Road with my new roommate to check out the nightlife. What we found was a kind of perpetual Spring Break atmosphere, which was kind of fun, if not exactly authentically Thai. I made the mistake of trying a red bull vodka with the Thai Red Bull, and then following that up with what, in hindsight, was some rather questionable street food. Thailand is the original home of Red Bull, the famous energy drink that has become ubiquitous around the world. The original recipe is neither carbonated, nor particularly palatable, and I wouldn't be surprised if it had something to do with my less-than-active next day.

I woke up the next day feeling about as good as I did the day after eating the pigeon in Cairo. I spent most of the day in the hostel living room, availing myself of their impressive selection of DVDs while sipping on juice and nibbling crackers. I was able to spend some time formulating a plan of attack for the rest of Thailand, so the day wasn't a total waste, though the only observations I have to offer from it are that "The Family Stone" is awkward, "The Shooter" is pointless, "Mission Impossible III" is only slightly better than the failure that is "Mission Impossible II", and "Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain" is quite good, and worth looking into.

18:59 3 October, Countryside Resort

Yesterday I woke up early enough to grab a healthy breakfast - bananas and orange "juice" - and have everything packed and ready to go by noon. Thereafter, I had a few errands to run before catching the 20:00 bus to Krabi. First on my list was more flash memory for my camera, as I've nearly filled the eight gigabyte card I brought with me. Bangkok has a reputation for being a good place to buy electronics for cheap, so I flagged down a taxi and drove to one of the larger malls in town. Seven stories tall, and boasting over 100,000 cell phones stocked in the various electronics stores littering the mall, the MBK is something of a legend in Bangkok. It's like no mall I've ever been to, and unlike my experiences with the unique shopping malls in Dubai, I did not enjoy my trip to the MBK.

If you can imagine all the stands you see in the hallways of malls in America and Europe (the ones selling useless trinkets like cell phone covers, or decorate-your-own-mugs) moved to both sides of long tight corridor, then you're starting to get an image of the MBK. Add in a smattering of inexplicably placed fast food joints, a chaotic web of escalators, and some out-of-place luxury stores, then inject in enough people to overpopulate Western Massachusetts, and bake for 45 minutes until golden brown. The rumors of low-priced electronics turned out to be greatly over exaggerated. Unless you're desperately seeking out a Super-O DinoMan Action-Bot for under 600 bhat, the prices at Best Buy or Amazon.com beat anything I came across in the MBK. Returning to my hostel empty handed, I spent the rest of my pre-departure time planning out the logistics of travel in Thailand, and eating a quick dinner.

I left my place of lodging at just after 18:30 to be sure that I had plenty of time to catch the 20:00 bus south to the coastal town of Krabi. However, even with the help of one of the receptionists (both of whom are the nicest, most bubbly people I've come into contact with during my travels) it took the better part of 15 minutes to hail a cab. When one of the familiar bright pink taxis finally did pull over for me, I noticed that there was an old women walking toward the cab. I politely offered her the taxi, but she smiled in a way that told me that she did not want it, and so I hopped in, said my goodbyes, and sped of for the bus station. "Sped off" is perhaps an inaccurate way of describing the momentum of the trip, and certainly fails to capture the parking lot-esque quality of the streets of Bangkok during my journey to the bus station. Illustrating this condition, the old lady who had earlier refused my offer of the cab limped passed me about 15 minutes into my ride... 30 minutes into the ride, when the lady had probably made it halfway across Bangkok, I could still see the road my hotel was on.

We finally broke free of the traffic a little after 19:30, and with under half an hour before my bus was schedualed to leave, I was growing a little worried. My anxiety was not helped by the taxi driver pointing to the bus station as we sped passed it on the wrong side of a highway median. To be fair, the highway system of Thailand makes less sense than the tenants of Scientology, and it's entirely possible that the only way for me to make it to the bus station was to follow the ridiculous route we traced out after speeding passed it. Still, I couldn't help feeling that I was being taken for a ride. The driver made a 270 degree turn on an off-ramp, then sped farther and farther away from the bus station, until he found a u-turn (which in Thailand is actually marked as a "u-turn lane", which splits off from the main road, and goes underneath the highway in its own private tunnel, reemerging on the other side). Having completed the u-turn, we drove back the way we had just come, continuing through a 90 degree turn that brought us back onto the highway that the bus station was located on. Except this time, instead of being just on the other side of a median from the station, we were on the other side of the entire highway from it. Bafflingly enough, this was a good thing, because from this side of the highway I could access a pedestrian walkway across the highway and to the bus stataion.

Paying the fare was a bit tricky as it came to 160 bhat, I only had 145 in small bills, and the driver didn't have change for a 500. So after a failed attempt to make change with another driver, I convinced my driver to take the 151, and I hurried to the bus station. It was 19:53 when I burst into the station, and it took me almost five minutes to work out where I was supposed to go. When I finally arrived at the ticket booth, I was quietly praying that my bus had not left yet. My prayers were answered when, seeing my somewhat flustered state, the lady behind the counter informed me that today the bus would be leaving at 20:40. Hallelujah!

This gave me enough time to buy a bottled water at the 7-Eleven and eat the remains of my dinner. When my bus pulled in, and I was shown to my seat, I felt like I had won the lottery. You know those scripts where they take some poe-dunk hillbilly who grew up without electricity or personal hygiene standards, and they plunk him down in a mansion with a staff of individuals ready to cater to his every need? Well, having come from the buses in Nepal, I felt like the poe-dunk hill billy sitting down on this Thai bus. I was in a bottom room ("I didn't knew buses had rooms" said the hillbilly) in the double-decker vehicle, and I would be sharing this space with only seven other passengers. In Nepal, I'm sure they would have found a way to fit at least 16, if not 20 seats into this amount of space, but here, the eight passanger chairs were well spaced, allowing for unheard of amounts of leg room. This spacing was necessary if one was to take advantage of the reclining features of the chair, which went back more than 45 degrees and included a pop-up leg rest. Snuggelling into my chair with my complimentary blanket, I waited until beverage service ("I didn't knew buses had beverage service") was completed before reclining into a sleeping position.

It was early still, so I watched a Thai TV show that combined various elements of a 70's variety show, a sketch comedy, and a game show with the sound effects offerings of an over-caffeinated Foley Director. "Boinks", "wee-oops", and "zuu-eeps" helped to convey the message of the show, but judging my how much my fellow passengers were enjoying the program, it would seem you have to speak Thai to really get it. All in all, it was the best thirteen-hour bus ride I've ever experienced in the world.

I woke up this morning not entirely sure which stop I was supposed to get off at. While I waited for things to get sorted out, I availed myself of the complimentary breakfast ("I didn't knew buses had complimentary breakfast", said the hillbilly, by now fully bedazzled) which gave me my first taste of soy milk. When this stuff was originally manufactured, the term "soy milk" was chosen in preference to "soy juice" on the basis that no one would purchase the later, where some poor, sad, lactose-intolerant bastard would probably be tricked into believing that it tasted similar to real milk. For my part, I'm pretty sure I'd have another slice of rotten shark before I indulged in soy milk again.

When I arrived in Krabi, I hired a motorbike to take me down to the pier, where I chartered a boat to take me to the peninsula that I'm currently staying. The peninsula is totally isolated from the mainland, by virtue of a series of massive vertical limestone cliffs, and so it has an air of isolation to it. It also doesn't have regular internet or electricity, and hot water is something I knew I'd be leaving behind in Bangkok. That having been said, I'm hardly roughing it. I have a charming little bungalow to myself with a queen sized bed and a nice little porch that looks out over the jungle.

18:32 5 October, the jungle

I've spent my last few days here exploring the jungle, taking walks along the beach, and retreating to my bungalow whenever it starts to rain to catch up on my reading. It's been relaxing, perhaps too much so, and I'm starting to itch for some adventure. The landscape is admittedly breathtaking, so I can hardly complain; massive columns of limestone festooned with tropical growth jut straight out from the sea. Small pieces of coral occasionally wash up on to the powdery-white beaches, and lush green jungle hides inviting limestone caves and deserted coastal coves. If the weather is nice tomorrow, I'm hopping to rent a sea kayak to explore some of the deserted beaches that line the coast in this area. For now, it's dark, and there's some rather interesting wildlife that comes out at this time of night.