January 27, 2005
it's cold.
the weather thing tells me: "It feels like -7 degrees Fahrenheit outside." so, yay providence. perfect time for more thailand pics!
ao thong nai pan yai panorama
thailand pictures
i've posted a some thailand pictures from my trip. these are just my favorites, but i'll have more up when i have the time. here's a few:
you can see the rest of the thailand photos in the gallery.
January 19, 2005
back!
so i'm back now, and in that terrible, 12-hour jetlagged world where "AM" means "PM" and i want to sleep all afternoon.
i didn't get a chance to update my journal from the beach, at Ao Thong Nai Pan Yai, on the island Ko Pha-Ngan. once acclimated to the slower, chiller pace of life spent in a hammock, looking at the ocean, i didn't really find the inertia to go check my email.
what's more, internet access on the beach was a whopping 3 Bhat/minute (~US$4.67/hour), compared to .5 Bhat/minute in the cities (~US$0.78/hour)! they both sound pretty cheap now, but after two weeks in thailand, anything over 100B seemed expensive: our guesthouse in Chiang Mai was 120B/night (~US$3), and even our slightly-upmarket-for-a-backpacker beach bungalow was 400B/night (~US$10). more prices: a large beer might cost 60B, a mixed fruit shake 40B. mmm, mixed fruit shakes.
but i must stop -- all this talk of thailand is just making me more miserable in snowy providence, r.i. to conclude: i'm back now and will be posting pictures shortly.
January 11, 2005
chiang rai
just finished a great week in northern thailand! from Chiang Mai we took a 3-day trek through the jungle, staying overnight at hill tribe villages, that was wonderful (ok, a bit touristy) but a bit more grueling than expected. my legs are still sore from all the up-and-down climbing -- i suppose they don't call'em HILL tribes for nothin'. also, did some touristy things like riding elephants, and riding bamboo rafts. so check those off the list.
then we caught a boat down from Tha Ton (2km from the burmese border) to Chiang Rai, which is a much smaller city in the "Golden Triangle" region where Burma, Laos, and Thailand meet.
there's not much to do here, so we made a day trip of visiting Mae Salong, a village settled by Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) soldiers fleeing China after the civil war. people speak yunnanese, mandarin, and thai there -- so i got to use my mandarin, which was exciting, and have a bowl of yunnanese noodle soup, which was even more exciting. apparently when the town was a bit more remote, it grew poppies (in kahoots with Burmese opium warlords), but now that's all been replaced by tea; so i picked up a few hundred grams of their finest wulong.
traveling to Mae Salong involves taking a bus north along the highway to Burma, getting dropped off at an intersection in the middle of nowhere, then getting a pickup truck to take you an hour west along the windy road up the hill. stupidly, on our way back, we waited on the highway for 45 minutes, only to miss the last bus to Chiang Rai while ducking into a store to use the bathroom.
what ensued was a semi-desperate, but mostly silly, series of events involving us learning the culturally-correct hitchhiking gesture for Thailand; flagging down a ride to a fruit stand in the next town down the road (Mae Chan); learning that there were no sawngthaews likely to be going our way at this hour; and then being saved by a computer salesman who dropped by for some apples. thank god (that is, buddha) for him, as we were pretty screwed by then.
so now it's time to fly to the beach -- ko samui, ko pha-ngan, and ko tao. yay!
January 03, 2005
overnight to chiang mai
bangkok was lovely; not much else to report, except that i've seen more of the city's sights this trip than the other two times i've been to bangkok (on my way to beaches). today we were at the zoo, where we saw animals, rode paddleboats, and i spent 10 minutes stalking an 8-year-old girl with a digital camera (her t-shirt read "I SAID NO TO DRUGS BUT THEY DIDN'T LISTEN"). i didn't get the photo.
about to take the overnight train to chiang mai. okay!
fun fact: sri racha hot sauce (the bottle with the green cap and rooster label) is from the town si racha in thailand!