A Few Scattered, Barely Connected Notes about Phuket, in Which I Lie to My Mother

I miss Phuket. I mostly spent the month I was there trying to come to terms with the fact that I was in Thailand, which didn’t become at all real to me until the third week, despite eating dinner every night looking at this: 

 and this:  

Our hotel was really out of the way at the southern tip of the island, and we had to take a tuk-tuk, which is basically a big pick-up truck outfitted with benches, to get anywhere.

En route to Patong. We have no idea what we're in for. 

At first I thought that an inconvenience, but after a few excursions  to more traveled areas of the island like Patong:

This is a tame picture. The whole place is basically a brothel. 

I found that I preferred it that way.


Our hotel had some sweet little touches, like this ...basin? Massive vase? Thingie?...

...where women would sit once a week placing tiny blossoms in the water:

in various designs.

Just outside the hotel was a spirit house.

I've since learned that these are found all over Thailand, outside private residences, office buildings, schools, and even big box stores. They’re based on the vestiges of a belief that by building in a certain place, you’re displacing spirits who already live there. If you don’t want bad things to happen to you, you build them a house of their own and bring them offerings of rice, sugary drinks, water, incense, and all the other things spirits apparently enjoy.

Spirits are thirsty.

There were cats and dogs wandering all over the little community supported by the two hotels on our beach. Some of the dogs were friendlier than others, and the friendly ones sometimes came to hang out with us when we were lounging on the beach during the day or singing Bob Marley off-key in the evenings. I made friends with this one, and called her Lucy. 

Pitbull/ corgi mix, maybe? Cuteness. 

She was a sweetie.

One Sunday I rented a motorbike (which I may or may not have promised my mother I wouldn’t do) to explore the island a little bit. I didn’t get incredibly far, since every time I came to a road that was more than two lanes I panicked and turned around and went back the way I came, but I followed the coast south:

and then north,

climbing steep hills on this incredibly girly, not at all kickass motorbike.

I saw some nice houses

 and some not-so-nice houses

 and other sweet stuff.

And just to prove that mothers are always right even when they're halfway around the world, I did indeed crash my motorbike.

Carnage. 

Thank goodness I was wearing a helmet. 

At Long Last: The Night Market

So, clearly this post is long, long overdue. I was thinking for a while that I wouldn’t launch into an account of my travels between my time in Phuket and where I am now (living and teaching a smallish city called Sakon Nakhon near the Lao border) and would instead tell you about small town life, but that’s not coming together as quickly as planned. Really, you can take this as an indication of how things work in terms of timing in Thailand: everything is always late, and you’ll end up sitting around, not even sure what you’re waiting for, and when it arrives it’s usually not what you expected. So all this delay is actually part of my larger, over-arching strategy to make you feel what Thailand is like on a daily basis.  (Did anyone fall for that? No? Ok, moving on.)

Night markets! Markets are one of my favorite things about Thailand. In larger cities they’re massive, and the food and goods there are extraordinary.  It’s basically just a big feast for the senses. 

Phuket Night Market

 Choose one of the lanes of vendors and you’ll walk through a cloud of perfume where people are hawking factory-second brand name cosmetics, duck under wildly patterned tie-dye beach dresses deliberately hung  in your way, be assaulted by the pounding base of an illegally downloaded CD, and happily down the sample of sweet Thai wine thrust into your hand (and then probably buy three bottles which you have to lug around from stall to stall for the rest of the night without breaking-  avoid this).

Chiang Mai Night Market

The first thing you want to do is hit the food section. No one shops well on an empty stomach. 

 Spend a little time just walking around. Check out the freshest fruits and vegetables, some of which I've never seen before.

What are those giant bean things? Awesome, that's what.

Supa fresh.

 By then you'll have picked up at least one edible. When I first went to the night market in Phuket my friend Roisin and I spent the majority of our time in the food area. We circled it at least four times.

Eat everything.

How good does that look?

Ok, maybe don't eat everything. This looks questionable.

If it looks spicy, it is SPICIER THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE.

Seaweed balls are the bomb.

OK, I didn't try absolutely everything. 

Uh- what?

No. Just no.

Hell no.

Especially when there's a massive wok of pad thai to be had, free of insects (mostly, probably).

Your last buy in the food section should be something on a stick. It’s helpful when pointing to which tie-die dress you want or gesturing emphatically with while haggling. 

Decisions, decisions.

Then go check out what they have for sale. I was unable to take a lot of photos of the non-edibles, because for some reason people in Thailand hate when you take photos of the things they’re selling, even in big stores. They’ll post signs that forbid it and announce it over loudspeakers. I have no idea why. But I managed to get a few photos of random things:


You’ll find these everywhere. They’re actually soap, painstakingly carved to look like flowers.

Any town of considerable size has motorbike taxis. It's an easy, cheap, and sometimes terrifying way to get around. Don't ask your driver to drag race with the taxi next to him at 3 am in Chiang Mai- he'll do it, and once they hit 65 mph the thing starts to shudder and rattle under you like it's about to come apart. Just so you know. In any case, these are models of those little taxis made out of aluminum cans.

The sharp edges make these especially good toys for children.

And of course, the best impulse buy of all, a puppy!

A husky in Thailand? Seriously?

I have no ending for this post, so we’ll end with a puppy, however misplaced. A puppy is always a good note to end on.

I Swear, I Will Eventually Write Actual Blog Posts Here...

...but I've been running all over the country! And, you know, flooding! Etcetera!

I'm finally getting settled in the sleepy little town where I'll be teaching, so I should have time in the next few weeks to start backtracking through my photos and recapping my adventures. In the meantime, here's a photo of me with a tiger cub.

Love Connection. 

Tourist Traps, Chapter 1

So, I’ve already been less than diligent with this blog. My parents referred to it “starving” in their last email. That’s mostly due to the fact that until this weekend, I hadn’t done much except stuff myself with Thai food...

YUM.

...go to the The Big C (the Thai equivalent of a Wal-Mart), and go to class, which is Monday through Friday, 9-5. We get out for lunch and are reminded that we’re just yards away from this:

before we have to drag ourselves back into the conference center. We do get out of the classroom in time for this:

Oh! I did go get a fish pedicure with my new friend Roisin (pronounced Raw-sheen, it's Gaelic). It was majorly gross. It felt like bubbles, but not, because it's actually tiny fish sucking on your feet. For a while I couldn't stand to look down, because they were just a writhing mass of weirdness wriggling in between my toes.

Lisa and Marga, avert your eyes.

So, you know, the usual.

But on Saturday, we went to the islands! And they were super beautiful, with white beaches, aqua water, and jagged, precipitation-stained cliffs covered in green wherever the jungle could gain purchase. They didn’t even look real while I was standing there looking up at them.

But first we left Phuket, and I took a lot of photos of it in our wake for reasons I can no longer remember.

See the Big Buddha?

We swung by the Viking Cave, where swallows’ nests are harvested to be made into soup that makes you look ten years younger.

No clue what this has to do with Vikings, if anything.

And then my camera died, because I had taken too many wholly uninteresting photos of the harbor. 

Off to Maya Bay, where Leonardo DiCaprio filmed the mediocre “The Beach”. I’ve seen this movie, but remember very little of it except for a sweaty Leo with his shirt off and guys with A/K 47s guarding impressive marijuana fields. I was disappointed that those things were no longer there, but made do with what was: a beautiful, pale-sand crescent shaped beach enclosed by fortress-like cliffs hundreds of feet high. I have zero photos of that.

But through the magic of facebook, here's someone else's.

This place, and every other subsequent stop, was absolutely lousy with tourists. Thousands of them. In retrospect, the best idea would be to charter one of these:

and tell your captain to take you somewhere out of the way. 

We got back on the boat after ducking through tourists of every nationality. It was at this point that one of the girls in the group remembered that when she had changed her camera batteries (which were just low on power- she must be one of those plan-ahead-types) that morning, she hadn’t thrown them away! Hooray! So she was very sweet and gave them to me, which gave me a little power to take photos.

ATI represent!

By this time, however, I had realized the value of getting out from behind your technology and just living in the fleeting moment without trying to preserve it, which is futile, man. Also, I didn’t want my camera to die before the trip was over.

The next stop was Ao Ling (Monkey Beach). Some people love monkeys. Actually, I would say that most people love monkeys. I haven’t done any polls or anything, but apparently enough people love monkeys that this tour boat stops at a monkey island.

These people all love monkeys.

I do not love monkeys. I find them creepy. But I did feed one a peanut.

OK, the baby was pretty cute.

These monkeys were fatasses, because they get fed by tourists on the daily.

You nasty.

 











Then we stopped the boat over a reef for some snorkeling. This did not go well for me.  I’ve never snorkeled before, and the open sea is not the place to learn. I also have pretty bad panic issues with the ocean (stemming from a scarring event in early childhood that involved the flat-out negligence of a certain family member who will remain nameless), so every time I attempted to snorkel and ended up sucking in sea water, I freaked out and ripped the mask off. It took about four tries before I decided to cut my losses and just go swimming.

Fish! Apparently. 

 
Then we had lunch on Phi Phi Don Island, which was another fabulously beautiful island with massive cliffs and jungle and beautiful beaches and so on ad nausea. The tour boat had a buffet set up, which was fine, but what was not fine was that the bathrooms there were disgusting and had no soap in them. So I ate lunch without having washed my hands, and even though I used utensils, I had hand-fed a monkey hours before, so I’m pretty sure I have ebola now. I'm, like, 90% sure.

Phi Phi.

From Phi Phi we went to Khai Nai Island, also known as Egg Island. The trip there took 45 minutes, and everyone fell asleep.

Adorable.

Egg Island is a teeny tiny little spot of land with some jungle and a beach. The beach is bristling with beach chairs, and the few families who live there sell ice cream and corn on the cob and henna tattoos at vastly overinflated prices because, hey, you’re a hot/ hungry/ stupid tourist who is trapped on their island. More power to them.

It was very beautiful. 
And exhausting. I was thrilled to get back to Phuket, out of my swimsuit, and into a shower. The End.

Next: The Night Market, or I Pretend to be Anthony Bourdain

Phuket

Just a Tuesday night on Nai Harn Beach.

A Bold Swimmer?

Long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every
    moment of your life. 

Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout,
    and laughingly dash with your hair.

-from part 46 of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself", Leaves of Grass