Thailand – A Summary

We say goodbye to Thailand sooner than anticipated. It was in the Philippines we first realised that we had +40° heat to welcome us to mainland SE Asia, and we first started discussing contingency plans. Thankfully, in this part of our travels, we’ve been able to not plan things so far in advance. This means we’ve not only taken the decision to try and get to the middle of Vietnam as quickly as possible (where it should be a bit cooler), but also cut our time in all SE Asia short by a couple weeks in favour of adding a couple of weeks to our Japan stint. Originally we were going to head a bit further south of Thailand and visit Krabi and/or the Phi Phi islands made famous by The Beach film, but having done a good amount of island hopping around limestone cliffs and beaches in the Philippines, we decided our time, budget, and internal thermometers would be better off in Vietnam sooner rather than later. So we embark on our 28 hour journey up and across to Siem Reap, Cambodia.

We’ve met some really brilliant people on this leg, that have tempted us with other routes, plans, options and dives. I definitely know how easy it is to get stuck because you’ve found a good group, and maybe if we were ten years younger or at the beginning of our trip, we may have just succumbed to temptation. But we’re sticking to our guns. James can’t travel this long and have come all this way to miss Vietnam again!

Thailand is definitely a country I would come back to though, just maybe when it’s just a bit less hot, when it’s not burning season up north (which we thankfully missed by pure luck), and when we’ve got a stronger dive certification under our belts. This country is beautiful, with its nature and culture, but it’s really been the people who’ve made it. From the friendliest of locals who smile and help and don’t get mad at us not speaking the language or understanding anything, to the foreigners who’ve been not only great company but fantastic guides (under and above the water!). It’s certainly the people that can make or break an experience, and here they’ve only augmented an already wonderful country.

We’re not out of the 40° woods just yet though. Cambodia promises more time in the dreaded soup, and so may be our quickest country yet, but I’m looking forward to exploring Tomb Raider levels in real life, learning more about the culture, and the tragic history. Onwards!

Rule of Three

Highlights (Alex): James’ birthday (amazing dive seeing a shark and octopus, cake on board, back to the hotel with surprise fruit platter, flowers and cake waiting for james, then out to Hungarian place for dinner with the dive crew, getting completely soaked on the way, then up to Build market).  Peaceful lake times. Temple run in Bangkok

Highlights (James): being a tour guide for Alex in Bangkok and Khao Sok, scuba diving to see a shark, octopus and sea snake. Birthday celebrations featuring songkran.

Lowlights (Alex): Heat wooziness. Heat headaches. Less than desirable start to Khao Sok tour.

Lowlights (James): Bangkok sauna (let the sweat drip out of every pore). Surat Thani abduction fears. Setting up dive equipment on a crammed bouncing speedboat.

Takeaways (Alex): I really don’t understand how Google Translate can work with tonal languages, maybe it can’t and that’s why our attempts fall flat! Travelling SE Asia is so much easier than travelling Latin America, we can’t put our fingers on why. Very a la Cheers, there’s nothing like walking into a space and having familiar faces welcome you, especially when travelling and we’re always meeting new people, there’s something intoxicating about that camaraderie we got to experience that has been really tempting for the first time on this whole trip.

Takeaways (James): you never have the same experience twice, for better or worse doing the same touristy things again with a different guide or company can make a big difference to the experience. They say that Thailand is the land of smiles, are they genuinely happy people or is it the tourists money that brings out the smiles, personally I think it’s a bit of both. A moment to pat ourselves on the back, we’ve been travelling for nearing 8 months now, apart from the occasional speed bump we’ve not had any major roadblocks and we’ve packed plenty in.

Description (Alex): Cheap (food and accommodation, so cheap), super friendly even though we only know how to say thanks!, beautiful underwater and above the water

Description (James): Fun with a dash of crazy, seasonal climates, fantastic cheap food.

Entertainment

TV: Clarkson’s Farm

Books: The Drawing of the Three, Silence of the Lambs

Podcasts: [the usual], Who Trolled Amber?, Black Box

Where We Stayed

218 The Corner Airbnb (Bangkok): 4.5 ⭐️ huge, comfy bed, free supplies, great location, just half a star off for the bathroom being downstairs

Khao Sok Green Valley Resort: 4.5 ⭐️ another huge bed, brilliant breakfasts that we could order more than one from, lovely setting

Khlong Ka Lakehouse: 2.5 ⭐️ Bees for breakfast, toilet smells, unhelpful staff

The Palm Garden Resort Hotel (Khao Lak): 5 ⭐️ just bliss.

Cutting Room Floor

• The impressive traditional Thai dance show ending with “if you’re happy and you know it clap your hands”.
• Being so hot our knee pits were sweaty. Oh so sweaty.
• The humidity bringing a whole extra layer of melt to the heat, a weird sensation to describe, but it’s like your skin is this extra layer keeping the heat in, that creates this feeling of claustrophia in your own skin. It was hot in ,Central America, but this has been a whole new ballgame.
• Other countries we have been to have made as little sense as Thailand has. The difference here seems to be that whilst in those other countries, you just have to trust in the system and it’ll work out. Here that’s not the case. People telling us, oh just get this bus, it’s fine, and then finding yourself stranded with no onward travel, and them looking at you like this shouldn’t be a big deal, is a new one.
• We learn from Jack on our Khao Sok tour that it’s still legal in the UK to keep big cats as pets. We joke it seems harder to adopt/foster a pet cat, maybe we should have gone bigger.
• Ketch swimming in just his underwear despite having trunks explaining to us that it’s way more comfortable. Maybe for him, but not so much my eyes.
• Being told many times about his wedgies from the life jackets.
• The Midlands couple who came out here with 4 days’ notice after their kids did the trip themselves and then convinced them to do the same upon their return.
• Finally meeting some other travellers who have jacked in their lives for a year and aren’t working their way around.
• Pad TAIIIIIIIII, how our guide pronounced his name for us at each gathering point, and now how I pronounce it in my head every time I see it on a menu
• Pad Thai apologising to us quite often, but we weren’t entirely sure what for. Not knowing any better, he could have gotten away with whatever it was that went wrong, like not seeing any animals on the tour. But because he kept apologising, it meant we assumed he had some part to play in that, even if he didn’t. We’ll never know of course, but it was an interesting psychological lesson.
• In Khao Sok there is a Muay Thai ring with fights every Thursday and Sunday, and before each of these fights there is a recording promoting it as… “Real. Fight”. “Champ of the champ”. And if it was that same night, you’d get “Two-noite. Real. Fight.” In this accent that put the emphasis in all the wrong places, and seriously deadpan. Making us wonder how much we’re pronouncing this tonal language completely wrong every time all we say is ‘thank you’
• Accidentally crashing the leaving drinks of one of the dive company and managing to get a couple of free beers
• Hearing about a certain dive master’s ‘adventures’ in Khao Sok, meeting the ‘love of his life’, having an encounter that resulted in him getting kicked in the balls, but him still going back for more
• There’s a lot of Germans here. No idea why.
• Learning how much Brexit has screwed over European seasonal workers who would come and work the summer school season, but of course no longer can
• The orca boat crew being a family, dad driving, mum and kids on dive support, the kids sleeping in the kit bay during the journeys, and then one of the girls swimming around like a fish without any gear as us heavily clad divers went under
• The affectionate and sweet bond Viktor had with her. The dive guides must see these kids almost everyday, so it was really nice seeing this kindness where language didn’t matter, just a big and small kid playing around
• Trying to arrange James’ birthday surprise and the lady responding to my question of how much it would cost with, “oh cheap, not expensive”, and then when I did get the price it was not “cheap”, at least by backpacking standards. Thankfully at my request to rein it in a bit they ended up giving me it all for the original price of just the cake. Phew!

Photos