So I've been out of touch for a while, wasn't up to much for a while, just floated around northern thailand for 10 days or so, got sick though and wasn't able to do all the stuff I wanted though, didn't get to take a cooking class, which would have been fun. I moved on though, on to Lao, which is lovely. took a two day boat down the Mekong, which was oustanding. If you ever get a chance to take a boat down a river, do it. trust me.

I'm in Vang Vieng now, which is really strange. really nice river that you can float down in a tube, mountains, caves, cool stuff, but then there's just an insane party scene, tons of strung-out hippies. all the people working at the bars are just working for free drugs, and look like it. It's partly a really cool place that I could see spending a week in, and partly it just scares me and I want to get out of here. I haven't actually been tubing, but from what I hear, it's basically devolved into a few insane bars on the river that you go to and get trashed, swim between
them and injure yourself on ropeswings. the two scots and englishman who I'm staying with are into actually getting tubes and going 10 km down the river with a couple of beers though, so hopefully we'll do that today. maybe go back to some caves tomorrow, went to some yesterday with some american folks I found, we went about a quarter mile into a cave before we decided to turn back, I'd love to go back prepared with water and food and just go as far as possible in the cave. Like I said, cool place, but absolutely terrifying, some of these people here. not because I think I could ever become like them. just looking at them is scary. I think my waiter yesterday was gary busey's son, you know, the one in starship troopers.

in any case, I'll probably be out of laos in a few days, and either on to cambodia, or straight down to malaysia, with a couple day stop in bangkok either way (you can't really get to cambodia without going through bangkok. you can't get anywhere without going through bangkok). I'd kind of like to go back to koh tao for a bit, know a few people who will be there, but I've decided I'm not going to be that
kind of traveler, I need to move on. so malaysia for a bit, maybe cambodia for a bit (I'd really like to see angkor wat, the rest, I'll see how much time I end up with) , definitely 3-4 weeks in indonesia though.

I've been traveling with people and splitting rooms with people in Laos the thing about laos is there's only like 4 places that people travel to, so you just see the same people over and over again, so pretty soon you know everyone, but I'm getting pretty tired of it. I'm gonna need to break free and be on my own again for a while. I like being able to do exactly what I want when I want to. it's nice, for a while.

I could see how someone could go crazy out here. How quickly life could just become an insane drug-fueled hedonistic party. I've been in thailand for a month or so now, and I've been living on about $20 a day. Not at all a strict budget for thailand, but not an extravagant one either. buys me a decent room, decent food, and an occasional beer and travel. $20 dollars a day. sounds reasonable, right? doesn't sound crazy or that cheap or completely ridiculous. But here's what puts it in perspective for me. $3,000. That's what it would cost to live in southeast asia for 3 months a year. Live pretty well in southeast asia. 1,000 for a roundtrip ticket here, 2,000 for 3 months living here. I've met people who do this every year, and I can't blame them. There's a canadian guy, aged 30 or so, who gets a 60 day visa and spends 50 of those days laying on a quiet beach on the west coast.
I'm not sure I could do that. I'm not sure I could do any of it. But if you found the right group of people, this could easily be your life. spend 9 or 6 or 3 months in the US working some whatever job, spend 3 or 6 or 9 months in southeast asia doing whatever it is you want to do, sleep on a beach, swim, snorkel, surf, party. I ran into the Canadian guy on the street in Bangkok today (back after 43 days on the beach, going back to Winnipeg tomorrow), and I told him I was probably gonna go up to Laos this week. He said "go to Vang Vieng, it's a good time... if you like smoking pot and doing mushrooms."
I can see how people could go crazy out here. Who needs ambition, when this exists?

On the road again, in a way

My friends have all left me. Enter Stage 2.

Kyle and Cassidy left for Beijjing a couple of days ago, so I'm alone for a while. We'll see how that works out. Since I've been alone I went to Burma for a few minutes, I handed them 10 dollars, they stamped me into the country, he passed my passport to the man sitting next to him, who stamped me out of the country. All very seriously looking and Junta-like. The whole ordeal took about 3 hours, most of which was spent on a small boat on a river, the Welschman behind me got soaked by a wave during the trip, but I just got a pleasant seaspraying.
Then it was on to Bangkok, where I am now. After a border crossing and a nine hour busride yesterday, I'm pretty well just taking today off, wandering the streets a little bit. I switched to a new hotel this morning, promising myself that whatever I could save on the room, I would spend on the internet uploading photos to flickr. Since I had a fairly nice, slightly overpriced room last night (which I found at 1130pm), it wasn't hard to save enough to be on the internet for a long time today, this is hour 3 of 6. intersprese this with wandering around shops, idly haggling with merchants for things you will never buy (I take a somewhat perverse pleasure in this, and it's good practice. move down their price 5 or 10 dollars for something, then tell them tomorrow.) Kyle discovered the phrase "tomorrow" as the perfect alternative to no. If you say no, they try to offer a lower price, or something else better, or whatever, if you say 'tomorrow', it's universally understood that you will not, under any circumstances, buy what they're offering. It's brilliant.
Anyway, speaking of photos being uploaded, I have all my pictures up on flickr, the link of which I'll give shortly. First the warning though, this is what I'm using for my photo backup and/or primary storage for my photos taken on the trip. As such, there are way too many pictures on there than you actually want to see. So prepare to be annoyed when there are suddenly 100 pictures of the same sunset. They're mine, and I haven't decided what I'll do with them, or which one is the best yet, so just deal with it, this is the price you pay if you want to see my pictures. Maybe I'll put a few onto blog entries, or go through and tag some for general viewing, but for now, this is it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/35730196@N06/

As for the plan, I'm gonna stay in Bangkok a couple more days, weekend market tomorrow, then move up north a day or two at a town, no overnight trains or anything, just nice easy moves of a few hour train rides, see the country, see a new town, eventually going to Laos for a week or two, possibly cambodia from there, haven't decided yet, depends on what's going on.

Krabi is a nice town, you have to go through it to get to a few islands and beaches, so the area around the pier is touristed up a little with white people coming through. But moving away from that it's just a normal midsized city. They have a pretty good sized food market during the day (at least they did on Friday) which was about a third fruits and vegetables and fresh stuff. (half stuff I know, half stuff I'm totally unfamiliar with) then a third food stalls selling random pieces of food, fried chicken, egg rolls, fish, all sorts of things, then another third of half restaurant places. They'll just have one or two dishes (or 10 or 20 differnt curries to put on rice, or various things to that effect) and have 3-4 tables. All in all for lunch there I spent 2 dollars and got a large plate of sliced fruits with sugar/chili powder for dipping, fried chicken thigh,sun dried salted beef on sticky rice, deep fried rice noodles, and a hunk of chicken on a stick covered in curry sauce. It's bit quite as big and it doesn't have the same variety of things as the borough market in london, but nearly everything is amazing and exotic. At the night market for dinner (which is just a dozen or so of the minirestaurant type stalls and another half dozen food stalls) I had a plate of fried mussels which was absolutely fantastic. That was 40 baht a little over a dollar. And for 12 more baht I got a banana shake which I've become obsessed with. I'm curious to see how good a banana shake I can make with the horrible American bananas. The real secret to the banana shake, as with all thai sweets, is sweetened condensed milk.
I think my new project will be to take pictures of everything I ever eat. that'd be a heck of a blog, eh?

Most people just buy a joint bus or train ticket from travel agents, who worry about all the time tables for you. We just go and don't worry about it. It's actually usually about the same price, but our way is a lot more fun and requires no advance planning. Last night we missed the last bus to Krabi from Ranong, so we took a bus that got us most of the way there, and were waiting for another bus that some random guy at a 7-11 said he thought came at 10 pm. we're waiting at a bus stop with 30 thai military guys (which is to say 30 18 year old kids), and this guy starts offering to take us to Krabi in his pickup truck for 900 baht. after a half hour or so, kyle gets him down to 300 baht (9 dollars or so), and we hop in and go. 70 miles later, we're there. I was a little worried the whole time that this guy was gonna rob us, particularly because 300 baht wouldnt pay for gas to krabi and back, but he seemed pretty nice, and he didn't. fantastic stuff. Then we end up in the seediest hotel last night, only paying 250 baht for the 3 of us though, so what the hell. today we managed to get into this fantastic hostel though, free internet, clean, nice bathrooms, cable tv (the first I've seen in thailand) for 270 baht for 3 people. less than 3 dollars per person per night. thailand, baby, thailand.

Where should I go next?

For the last 3 weeks I've been traveling with a friend from high
school and her husband, for the last week I've been traveling also
with a French guy named corto. He left today on his way to Malaysia.
He could practically be there by now. He's the first real traveler
I've met, he's been out 6 months and was in turkey Syria Iran Pakistan
and Bangladesh before coming here. Pretty legit. Her moved on now and
next week my friends fly to china and I'm alone. I'm sort of looking
forward to being alone, but haven't decided where to go.
It gets real hot on the mainland starting end of march to April, then
the monsoons come. So I figure I gotta do some inland stuff in the
small window I have till that happens. So my plan now, and this
changes daily, is to cross into burma for a couple of days just to
renew my Thai visa for 14 more days. Take a week or two to move up
through Thailand to Laos then spend a week or two in Laos. There are
some river ferries (like 2 days to a week long) that sound really cool
in Laos. Then toward April 1. Who knows gulf islands of Thailand for a
bit maybe then on to Malaysia. And or Indonesia. This will all
probably change tomorrow, but I'm just trying to give an idea of what
I'm thinking in terms of.

Re: So I'm gonna do a thing where I review places I've been and things I've done. Just for my own benefit mostly, but hopefully they'll give you a bit of a sense for life over here so far.

> So I'm gonna do a thing where I review places I've been and things
> I've done. Just for my own benefit mostly, but hopefully they'll
> give you a bit of a sense for life over here so far.
>
> Koh Tao-- this place is pretty fantastic if you ask me. Very
> touristy, of course, but that goes without saying. One side of the
> island is ridiculous. Shop after shop selling tourist crap, bars
> showing rugby on tv, English bookstore upon English bookstore. Then
> there are 5 or 6 beautiful little bays perfectly secluded with one
> or two little resort places each. A little expensive over there, but
> a beautiful spot to hike to and spend an afternoon snorkeling and
> lazing about. Then there was our bay which was in between. Big bay,
> but not very nice to swim in, lots of restaurants and stores to
> choose between, but no tv bars or obnoxiousness. Nice cheap places
> to stay and easy access to everything else.
> Overall koh Tao was great, I recommend it, you can easily spend a
> couple of weeks there andnot get bored, even if you don't do any
> scuba diving, which I didn't do, but I've heard it's fantastic.
> There's at least some chance that I'm going to go back there and get
> my scuba certification and do a bit of diving. It's a bit expensive,
> but it's cheaper than it would be most anywhere else.
> Oh and if you go I highly recommend the night boat. It's 11 pm to
> 5am and they just shove you in a room with matresses on the floor
> and off you go. I slept pretty well.
> Koh Chang- there are two koh chang's one is in the gulf of Thailand
> near Cambodia and is a big resort island because it's so close to
> Bangkok. This is the other one. It was so chill. Just a mile or so
> stretch of sand with some little bungalow places along the way. If
> you go, go to sunset bungalows. Good food, good library of books,
> pretty cheap. I split a room with a frenchman who was real legit.
> We'd all just sit around swimming and reading all day. You'd just
> order food whenever you felt like it, since you spent all day in
> sunset's restaurant anyway then we'd play volleyball for a couple of
> hours towards sunset (with most everyone else from the beach,
> Germans all) and play card till the electricity went out. They only
> had electricity from sunset to eleven or so. The one time I used the
> Internet I walked a half a mile down the beach, waded a shoulder
> deep river, went up to a bartender and said "Internet?" he said "5
> minutes" shouted to the guy next Door "Internet" that guy shouted
> down 50 yards down the beach. A little while later I heard a
> generator start. A little while after that, I had the Internet.
>