Bangkok and the Gulf of Thailand

So I left Pai, one of the most naturally beautiful and peaceful places on earth, and the next day found myself immersed in the urban sprawl of Bangkok. I had been reliably informed by the boys (who were already there) that I shouldn't be coaxed into getting a taxi to the hotel since it's a walkable distance from the bus stop. SO, after waving away a horde of taxi drivers, I plunged straight into the metropolis, keen to find the hotel before the sun reached it's highest point.
Much to my dissapointment, it turned out that my bus had stopped at the other end of town than the boys' bus, and after an hour of painfully bad sign language sessions with non-english speakers, i climbed onto a rickety public bus and endured a 50 minute journey through the city to Khao San road.
Fortunately, the hotel the boys had found was cheap. I use that adjective alone because the price was literally the only thing that was nice about it. Ed and I were staying on the fifth floor of a cramped building with just enough room to take a stride between our two beds, an irritating absence of curtains, and graffiti scrawled all over the walls. Ordinarily, I don't mind graffiti, but it is a little discomforting to see a tally of the "amount of girls  shagged" in the bed while you're trying to sleep in it. It wouldn't have made a difference anyway; the hotel was placed directly next door to 'the club', one of Bangkok's loudest and busiest nightclubs. The insomnious episodes instigated by worry about the hygiene of the bed were perpetuated by the incessant "OOMPH OOMPH" of house music, the same volume as if you'd been on the dance floor below.
To be honest, I was glad we stayed there. On our budget we can't afford to splash out, and given some of the places we've stayed, this one only ranked at about "mildly uncomfortable". My initial upset with Bangkok definitely had something to do with it's stark contrast to the Pai valley, and the next day I had already grown to appreciate the city.

Khao San itself is basically a long crowded tourist gauntlet of touts, taxis, fortune tellers, street vendors and prostitutes. While it quickly becomes annoying to push your way through it, it is extremely amusing to watch others make the attempt. The other two boys had a balcony facing central Khao San road, and it was perfect for people watching. People watching is the wrong term, what we were doing is probably better described thus; watching exhausted strangers struggling under the oppressive heat and smog to escape the swarm of predatory locals. Very much like a nature program, wildebeest crossing the Masai Mara through a labyrinth of crocodile jaws.
We watched a championship Muay Thai boxing match in ringside seats and that was fantastic. We ate the pad thai from the street and that was delicious. We visited 'the club' next door instead of trying to sleep through it, and that was fun.
Bangkok has a charm of it's own that's impossible to communicate if you haven't been there. Nevertheless I was extremely happy to leave and our flight South to Surat Thani couldn't have come sooner.
Back when we crossed the border from Laos into Thailand, we made the mistake in our sleep deprived state of not buying the appropriate visa. This basically means that every fifteen days we spend in Thailand, we have to do a visa run.
In one busy day, we got a bus from Surat Thani to Ranong, took a longtail boat over the sea for thirty minutes, entered Burma for ten minutes, returned to Ranong on the boat, and took a bus back to Surat Thani. We arrived in Surat Thani and had exactly one hour until the last ferry left for Koh Samui, our destination island. The trouble was that Surat Thani is about an hour and a half from the port. We managed to persuade a driver to take us there, and after a 120km/h average drive that felt less like a taxi service and more like a suicide attempt, we made it just in time.
The next day, happy to have made it to Koh Samui, we were reunited with Reuben, who had left us in Vietnam, and our three good friends Emma, Zara and Emily who had recently come to Thailand from Australia.

Ed enjoys a sneeze during our reuinion

A little later on

The next day we all felt suitably awful, and it was our saviour, Ed, who valiantly woke up at 9am and braved the two flights of stairs to book a ferry at reception. Doubtless we wouldn't have made it to Koh Phangan if he hadn't done so.
Koh Phangan earned worldwide notoriety a few decades ago with it's principal attraction, the full moon party. Each year more and more tourists visit the island to coat themselves in ultra-violet paint and dance until they pass out under the light of the full moon. Most people visit Koh Phangan for this reason alone, and anyone coming with the intent to experience even a tiny amount of Thai culture will be disappointed. We knew what we were in for and we made the most of it. Little more needs to be said about Koh Phangan than that we all had an absolutely cracking time there.

Quick pause from the party to visit a clinic. Ed stepped on an urchin.

But he was back on his feet almost immediately.

Aftermath

We spent five days there in all. Nathan will be pleased that i mention he was the 'winner' of the full moon party. He earned this self imposed title by staying out slightly later than the rest of us on most of our nights there. Congratulations to him.
I ought to give an honourable mention to our good friend Sam Hamilton, who hurried down from Saigon to be there for the party, and put up with a terrible fever for two nights in spite of it's terribleness. Unfortunately, he was overcome on the penultimate night, and showed up at the door of our bungalow at 5 in the morning with a nurse holding an IV drip. He spent the full moon night drugged on morphine in a Koh Samui hospital suite, and to be honest, probably was having a better time even than us.

Here's a lovely sunset picture I stole from Emma Gutteridge because I didn't take any. (thanks babe!)

After a string of gut wrenchingly heavy nights on Phangan, the five of us boys who had survived the party ventured north for Koh Tao, to be reunited with Sam later after his discharge from hospital. Koh Tao is the dive capital of Thailand, and boasts the cheapest PADI open water diver course in the world. Cheap though it is, our budgetary constraints wouldn't allow it and we were satisfied to spend our days lounging on Sairee beach, and our evenings zigzagging between the various bars and clubs on the narrow strip of road above it.
We were delighted to meet a group of Irish girls we had befriended back in Koh Phangan and spent a couple of happy evenings sharing stories, drinking games, and embarrassing dance moves.

Right now I'm in Jakarta.

It took me forty five hours in ten different vehicles to get here from Koh Tao. I haven't yet seen enough of the place to think of my own witty description for it, so here's one from the wikitravel website i like:

"A sweltering, steaming, heaving mass of some 10 million people packed into a vast urban sprawl. The contrast between the obscene wealth of Indonesia's elite and the appalling poverty of the urban poor is incredible, with tinted-window BMWs turning left at the supermall with its Gucci shop, into muddy lanes full of begging street urchins and corrugated iron shacks. The city's traffic is in perpetual gridlock, and its polluted air is matched only by the smells of burning garbage and open sewers, and safety is a concern especially at night. There are few sights to speak of and most visitors transit through Jakarta as quickly as possible."


...I think i ought to go and book a train.