pantstributor

The Land of Smiles

Hello and welcome to the Josh and Erica guestblog. Please have a light snack and a refreshing beverage. We’re going to tell you some tales of adventure from our recent honeymoon trip to Thailand, which turned out to be a bit of an adventure when 10,000 protesters took over the only airport capable of getting us back home before the entire government collapsed. Thailand: The Land Of Smiles, And Regular Coups D’etat.

Chapter 1: The Beach

It’s worth noting, at least, that Thailand has awesome beaches and picturesque landscapes and really friendly people, in addition to a totally nonfunctional government. For our first week, we stayed at a great small resort hotel in Krabi, a coastal region of southern Thailand that’s pretty close to Phuket. You may recognize that name because it’s a popular tourist destination that was wiped out by the 2004 tsunami. Since then everything’s been completely rebuilt, and the only sign that anything happened at all are the large multi-lingual Tsunami Warning and evacuation route signs along the beaches. It’s eerie that you’d never know what happened there otherwise.

It’s really easy to visit other beaches in this region, even though there are no roads and most of them are on islands, because there are tons of old wooden boats that you can charter to take you around all day long pretty cheaply. One day we took such a tour, which of course features a visit to Ko Phi Phi Ley, best known as the setting of the Leo DiCaprio anti-masterpiece The Beach. Can’t believe the director of Trainspotting made that poopbag. Anyway, this beach is in a nice cove with perfect blue water, white sand, tons of Euro tourists in speedos, and a snack bar that sells mysterious bags of unknown foods.

Yep, looks nice.  In the movie, they digitally animated in some more mountains to close that gap in the middle.

The best beach we went to, by far, was Pranang beach. You have to take a boat to one beach, walk down a path behind a hotel to a swampy inlet, then walk down another path that goes along and under a cave overhang and is infested with monkeys. When you finally reach the beach, you come out from between a narrow pass between two 150 foot tall bluffs and it’s heavenly. And the first thing you see is this:

If any Buddhists are reading this, can you please explain why there is a penis shrine in a cave on a remote beach? Thanks in advance.  We’re definitely not knocking the penis shrine, just wonderin’.

On the ride back to our hotel, on some Thai dude’s long wooden boat, we were both looking around and enjoying the scenery. Then I looked down and maybe a foot from my feet was a 2 foot long…reptile of some sort. A big freakin lizard. I jumped and it ran away. Erica says she only saw it scurry under some boards in the boat out of the corner of my eye, then accused me of hallucinating. But there is a huge dino-looking lizard that lives in that guy’s boat. I don’t know if he knows about it. It’s possible that the lizard has already eaten that poor boatman. It’s also possible that it’s his pet, and he likes to laugh at dumb American tourists who are terrified when it pops out of the woodwork. Yeah, I’m leaning towards this.

On the beach, enterprising Thai longtail boat owners set up mobile snack stands that actually had huge menus.  60 Baht, btw, is like $1.80.  You can get an enormous 24 ounce beer in this country sometimes for $1.50.  That’s why the backpacker kids like Thailand so much.

This was the view from our hotel in Krabi.  Forgive me for pulling a travel cliche, but we didn’t want to leave here, ever, under any circumstances.

Travel tip:  If you’re going to a resort type place, tell ‘em it’s your honeymoon.  Especially if you’re in Thailand.  Because then they’re likely to fill your room with flower petals and leave you a cake.

Seriously, if this country had a government, nobody would ever leave.  That’s a longtail boat, a good means of transportation but potentially full of man eating lizards.

Beaches and caves, coexisting peacefully with tourists.

2. One night in Bangkok

From the beach we went north to Bangkok: A huge city, full of street vendors, traffic, scooters that drive on the sidewalks, hellacious smog, tons of Buddhist temples, and street vendors that are actually operating in the street, in active lanes of traffic. Pretty much anything goes here.

Including the takeover and occupation of the airport by a gang of protesters. This happened rather unexpectedly a day after we got to Bangkok. The People’s Alliance for Democracy really doesn’t like the prime minister, or any other of the elected prime ministers of late, because they think the rural and small town Thais are too easily won over (or bought). So they want to change the constitution so that only the educated and the landowners can vote. Sounds like Democracy to me!

The police wouldn’t arrest anyone. One day they came to the airport with riot gear, but the protesters had slingshots and threw rocks, so the cops ran away. Some protesters even caught a cop and shoved him into their car to “take him away for questioning.” And this is a country where you can and do get up to 15 years in prison for saying anything that is perceived as an insult to the king.

That’s how our stay in Thailand ended up becoming a bit more of an adventure than we expected. We called our airline, United (note to reader: DO NOT EVER FLY UNITED AGAIN. EVER) to see what they could do for us. We were first told to just stay in Bangkok until the airport reopened. I’m glad we ignored this advice, because it took 2 or 3 weeks before that happened.

Anyway, here are some Bangkok pictures of cool things we got to do there before we eventually had to dedicate all of our time to getting out of Thailand.

Some classic Thai Engrish.  I don’t know why we didn’t buy this.

At Wat Po, an amazing Buddhist shrine – the famous Reclining Buddha.  About 300 feet long and 20 feet high, it’s an impressive site.  Not here, but in another part of our journey, I finally got the courage to ask someone a question that has always troubled me:  Why is the Buddha at Chinese restaurants always fat and jolly, while in other depictions he’s a slender golden god?  The story goes that the Buddha was quite handsome and popular with the ladies, so in order to test their devotion, he made himself into the huge fat Buddha to make sure they didn’t just love him because he’s a hot deity.  Pretty cool.  I’m thinking this era of American history could really use a Fat Jesus so that the average person can identify more.  Jesus was cut, man.  We should all have abs like Jesus.  I digress.

Another view of the reclining Buddha.  Chillin.  Relaxin’.

Unfortunately because we had to flee the country, we didn’t get to go to Thanksgiving dinner as planned at the mysteriously swanky, clockwork orange-like Bed Supperclub.  But we did get to go to this amazing open air swanky bar on the 64th floor of a condo skyscraper in the middle of Bangkok.  It was amazing – a jazz band played, and the only thing separating you from a 650 foot fall is a little glass railing.  Bangkok is amazingly massive and beautiful from up high.

The royal palace is amazing.  The King no longer lives there, but the gilded buildings and shrines are awesome.  This is also where we ran into our only scam in Thailand.  A guy in front of the palace wall told us that it was closed that day, but we could come with him to see the Buddha.  The problem with his scam is that we could see other tourists walking right in the entrance behind him.  A poor effort from that guy.

3. The Great Escape.

So the day before our alleged flight home, the airport is shut down and the protesters are lining it with razor wire. There are some gun battles here and there and a few grenade attacks. It’s looking like the army could get involved in removing the prime minister. In short, it’s a good time to get out of the country. I call the US Embassy, and they tell me not to go to the airport, and to call our airline and work with them. Thanks. We discover that calling United’s 1-800 number resulted in a $65 charge for the 9 minute call. I’m not sure, but I think this might be the phone call where Erica talks to a supervisor and asks him why United can’t let us fly on one of their Asian partner airlines. “Ma’am, United is not in a financial position to put you on another airline.” Thanks United. We’ll just sit here and enjoy this civil war then, thanks.

I can has escape route home?  A sad Erica shows off a ton of paper that all amounts to:  No, you can’t leave here.

We talk to some other stranded tourists. Later we learn there were 350,000 such people in Thailand. A plan is hatched: In Phuket, there is a working airport. It’s small (10 gates?), but it has some flights to other southeast Asian countries. If we drive there, maybe we can get on one of those flights! United tells us they can’t help us. Fuck United. We band together and charter a van to take us on the most terrifying 10 hour drive of our lives.

Thai highways: Not a good scene. You can do a u-turn across them. There are mopeds and dogs in lanes of traffic. They drive on the left side, which is already weird, but it’s compounded by The Way Every Thai Drives. And this is: whenever a big truck doing 30 mph is in your lane, you fly up at 70 mph until your bumper is a foot from the back of that truck. Then you pull violently out into the oncoming lane of highway traffic to pass. Repeat the process every 3 minutes. Erica took a bunch of Benadryl so that she could try to sleep through this experience. But me…oh no. Riveted awake, I was. Around 1 am, our driver reached into the glove box for a jar of pills, which he took. I didn’t tell anyone. Not many other options. This part of the country is right on the Myanmar border – not a happy place right now – so every 20 miles there was a military checkpoint. They’d stop us, shine their flashlight in, and each time I was pretty sure we were about to become some choice political hostages in the Thai revolution.

But in actuality, this was the biggest threat of the road trip:

Sorry Sarah, I had to include that. That’s a squat toilet. That’s the only thing you’ll find in Thai highway rest stops. Erica adopted a “nothing goes in, nothing comes out” policy for the 10 hour drive. She is wise. That philosophy also resulted in no Thanksgiving dinner, unfortunately.

Your worst road trip nightmare, realized.

When we reached Phuket, more chaos. Apparently some of the 350,000 decided to try our strategy. This is what the airport looked like:

Magically, we got on a flight to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where we got to spend a day, but didn’t really, b/c that entire day was spent arguing with United on how they would get us out of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Turns out the answer was: by buying a ticket to Singapore.

A fun fact about Malaysia: Their customs form cheerfully informs you that drug smugglers are executed in Malaysia. Also, their currency is called the Ringgit. I liked that. It’s nice to say.

We’d heard about Singapore what everyone else had: Don’t chew gum, that’s a caning. Don’t spit, that’s a caning too. Singapore does have a lot of signs telling you not to do things:

I don’t even know what I’m not supposed to do here. Don’t….road?

But Singapore is also aggressively modern, incredibly well laid out and tidy, and fun to walk around. It’s also the closest we’ve ever been to the equator – about 200 km – so it’s toasty there. We had a full day to wander around and be tourists, which was great after spending 3 full days fighting with United (don’t fly United!) and taking van rides of death throughout Asia.

We found a hotel online that sounded fun: “Hotel Re!” It’s the only hotel I’ve ever stayed in with punctuation. It reminded me of a scene in Austin Powers maybe: everything was super kitschy, 60’s and 70s Americana references abounding.

Yep, kitsch.

Singapore is very clean, very orderly, easy to walk around, and full of extremely international entertainment districts.  It’s Epcot Center, in city-state form.  Saying that here might get me caned.

The Clark’s Quay area of riverfront, full of brewpubs and restaurants and nice neon lighting.  Like the San Antonio Riverwalk, but with less margaritas.

One thing I loved about southeast Asia was the odd juxtapositions of Western commerce with eastern…well, I don’t know what this is.  Gross commerce?

Believe it or not, we had neither a slurpee nor a fish head curry bowl.  or box.  or whatever it comes in.

Finally, the next day, our journey was at an end:  Our flight left Singapore at 8:30 am on Monday; then a 7 hour flight to Tokyo, then a 9 hour flight to San Fran.  We arrived in San Francisco at 8:40 am Monday morning.  If that’s not a mindfuck, I don’t know what is.  Then…on back to Austin.  I believe I was awake for 30 hours that “day.”  Work Tuesday?  Not awesome.

In conclusion, I leave you with another toilet picture.  But a much more awesome one, from the airport in Tokyo.

Erica reports that she hit the “flush sound” button and it definitely makes a loud fake flushing sound, probably to throw off the people in the stall next to you in case you, um, need to throw a distraction.  My guess is if you press “powerful deodorizer” while sitting down, you will regret the decision.

To wrap it all up, the Thai supreme court dissolved the ruling party the day after we got home, and the protesters got what they wanted and eventually went home.  The next election will no doubt result in the second cousin twice removed of the old dictator taking charge, and the protesters will sit down in the middle of the street, shutting down every roadway in Thailand.

© 2008 Poshdeluxe.