Well, we’ve reached the end of our long trip. We made it to Slovakia last Sunday healthy and in one piece, with all our luggage and intestines (for the most part) intact. I didn’t believe it until we landed in Bratislava that we survived almost 8 months of traveling without major injury, sickness, heavy turbulence and with only one small theft from our car (of a cheap iPod transmitter) and only one loss (of my baseball hat). Our sigh of relief when we dropped our bags for the very last time was great. It’s hard to process the whole experience now that we’re jumping head-on into the fury of job and apartment search, but I will try to recap our two weeks in Thailand best as I can.
Thailand turned out to be amazing. We don’t know why we didn’t plan 3 months there instead of 2 meager weeks, but, of course, in retrospect you’re always wiser. At the end, two weeks actually turned out to be just enough for us, travel-weary and broke backpackers, but we agreed that Thailand deserves another, more proper visit, because it is such a fascinating place. Even though Thailand is a huge mainstream tourist destination, it is a place whose soul seems unaffected by a sort of growing global cultural uniformity. Even with Coca Cola signs and tourists everywhere, it is a wildly exotic place with an air of “a far-away land” where you can still feel like a real traveler exploring an unknown world. The dazzling golden temples, smells of curries and noodles being cooked and eaten in the streets, millions of scooters, food vendors, Buddhas and street tailors, the jungle, tigers, monkeys and rice patties – every day is a feast for the senses in Thailand. And since your money goes far, you can still see all of this in style.
However, you can’t do Thailand without a guidebook. Without the help of instructions in your native language, you’re deaf and mute, street names look like a bunch of squiggles, food is unidentifiable, you get taken for shopping rides you didn’t ask for and pay 3 times as much as a local would. We didn’t realize this until we bought a used Lonely Planet book in our guesthouse and started to read about the myriad of Thai cultural customs, social taboos, hygiene habits and shopping scams that a typical Westerner would have no idea about – and a bunch of which we had already transgressed or fell victims to.
Armed with this new found understanding of the Thai culture and way of life, we really started to enjoy ourselves. We explored old Bangkok, ate loads of street food, breathed in a lot of smog and - just absorbed the unique life of this megalopolis. After about 3 days, we followed a tip from fellow English backpackers and took a local train to Kanchanaburi, a smaller town about 3 hours northwest from Bangkok. The main tourist attraction there is the famous Bridge on the River Kwai (Kwae), but there are also loads of other things to do in the area, so we thought this would be a perfect place to spend a few days away from the craziness of Bangkok.
We stayed in a charming guesthouse ($6/night!) right on the bank of the mighty river and walked the 2 km to the bridge on our first evening. It is a rather unimpressive black iron bridge that is the center of a small bustle of tourist activities (souvenir markets, upscale restaurants and groups of scooter taxis waiting to take the weary tourists back to their hotels). If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, here’s the story of the bridge: It was part of the “Death Railway” from Thailand to Burma that the Imperial Japanese Army planned as a supply route during WWII. The Japanese used 30,000 Allied prisoners of war, as well as thousands of imprisoned locals, to build this railway in extreme jungle terrain and under horrendous conditions in 1942-1943. It is said that 16,000 of POWs and a hundred thousand of laborers died during the construction of this railway, of which the bridge on the River Kwai was the most murderous to build. The bridge was subsequently bombed by the Allies, then reconstructed, and today it is still in use, although the Thai government has since dismantled the rest of the Death Railway.
So, the bridge might not be much to look at, but considering that it was built with hand tools by starving men ridden by dysentery, malaria, rotting jungle sores and brutal treatment by their guards, it is an awesome and depressing sight. Even more depressing is the small JEATH War Museum that was started in town by a monk from a neighboring Buddhist monastery. It is a replica of a bamboo shed that the prisoners used to live in and it is full of photos and paintings made by the prisoners. Even in the boiling mid-day heat, these images gave us cold shivers.
On a lighter note, one day we rented a scooter (by far the most popular means of transportation in Thailand) and rode around town like locals to visit gorgeous Buddhist temples and on another day we went to bathe with elephants. I wish I could say that the expensive elephant bathing was an unforgettable experience, but it was only a good photo opportunity. That’s actually exactly how the locals organize this outing – as a photo op for western tourists. There was not much interaction with the animal, we were quickly photographed with one elephant, then we were whisked off to another elephant, taken for a short ride around a “traditional” village and then we rode the elephant into the river, scrubbed its hairy head and got sprayed by water from its trunk. All this was heavily photographed by the young village elephant trainer, the mahoud, and our Thai driver who were both very digital-camera-savvy. The best part about this elephant bathing was that we got to cool off in the river.
Knowing how these tourist activities go, we saved our money and didn’t go to a tiger temple or the national park for a dip in a waterfall – we just stayed in our lovely hotel, ate a lot of pad thai and watched evening movies in the hotel restaurant. After 3 days in Kanchanaburi, we took a local bus to another small town called Lop Buri, whose claim to fame is the army of cheeky monkeys that inhabit the city’s temple ruins and, in fact, the entire city center. Now, this was a completely different animal interaction!
Just like any visitor to this town, we could not believe our eyes – there were monkeys everywhere! The local residents are used to the monkey antics and ignore the animals or try to avoid them, since they can get pretty moody and even aggressive. They swing from power lines, crawl over shop and street signs, sit around on sidewalks or balconies, roam around rooftops and climb up TV antennas. Everywhere they go, they snatch whatever is not attached and try to eat it. They’re really, really funny, but sometimes you get the weird feeling that you are the one who’s being watched by an ever-present beady little brown eye… For the most part, the monkeys ignored us, but when we visited the “monkey temple,” some curious youngsters got brave and started to get very close. I allowed one baby to jump on me, which was a big mistake because within seconds I was attacked by about 5 of his friends, all pulling on my shirt, swinging from my skirt and pulling out my hair. Luckily, my bag was zipped up, so they couldn’t steal anything, but by the time I shook them off, my shirt was ruined and I lost a few hairs. But they didn’t mean any harm, they’re just monkeys!
Beside these cheeky little buggers, the town of Lop Buri had a great evening market overflowing with the typically Thai sensory overload: meat and fish sizzling on the grills, fragrant curries bubbling in large pots, mountains of alien-looking fruits, wall-to-wall crowds of hungry locals (Thais love to eat), Asian pop music blasting out of the CD stalls and vendors calling out to buyers… all this veiled by the omnipresent malodorous mix of car exhaust fumes and stench of rotting puddles in the street. Even though it is the most common everyday routine for locals, a Thai street market is an experience in itself for a western visitor.
By now, we were getting pretty sick of the sticky heat and were ready for a beach. It was my idea to take a bus to the island of Ko Chang off the northern shore to cool off near the sea for the last time before settling in the shoreless Czech Republic. According to our book, Ko Chang is a largely pristine island covered by rain forest and hemmed by gorgeous white sand beaches. It did mention that Ko Chang is up-and-coming, but we were assured that backpacking still flourished on the island thanks to a myriad of cheap accommodation. Well, that information was way old.
The whole island is now a big tourist rip-off. As soon as we landed, we were hit by an astronomical taxi fee, which we had to pay, since there were no more taxis to take us to the beach town. In the town of White Sand Beach (just an endless strip of seafront resorts and souvenir shops), we did not find a single affordable guesthouse, so we inquired about the one cheap room we saw a sign for ($6/night). When we were shown the room, I had to laugh – it was a dump with rags nailed to the window (presumably as mosquito nets) and a disgusting non-flushing concrete bathroom. There was an even cheaper option, which was a bare hut comparable to what POWs in Kanchanaburi slept in, so we gladly paid double of what we paid in Bangkok for a nice modern room with cable TV. By now we were starving. Ryan had been feeling sick all day from Thai food, so we went to look for some western food and were shocked by the absurdly high prices of any non-Thai fare in the many pretentious restaurants catering to middle-aged white men in need to impress their Thai girlfriends. After another long search along the strip, we committed a crime in the land of amazing food: we got hot-dogs from 7-Eleven! By the time we went to bed, we were broke and really pissed off.
The next morning we were determined to take a taxi to a less touristy and expensive part of the island, only to hear that we can get there “only” for about 3-times the fee that we thought it should reasonably cost (and almost the price of one hotel night). Since we had no idea whether the situation would be any better in the smaller town, we scratched that plan and went to check out the beach. It was a disappointingly mediocre, gray stretch of sand with muddy surf and no snorkeling possibilities. By now we just wanted to find a cheaper room and get out of Ko Chang the following day. We found a room slightly cheaper and closer to the beach, but it was such a dump (with dirty walls, threadbare sheets and a window into an ugly yard with a TV blasting in it) that we gladly went back to our original “hotel” across the road and for almost the same money got our nice room with TV. We enjoyed the beach only for a short while and spent the rest of the day watching movies, which was almost just as good.
We left the overpriced island the next morning. On the last day I admitted that it wasn’t all that bad (it was just no good for penny-pinching backpackers used to the cheapness of Bangkok) and that maybe we just had bad luck and bad timing, but we simply couldn’t afford Ko Chang. The most irritating part about Ko Chang was that the garbage-strewn beach was not worth the glamour that the resorts were making it up to be. But at least it made us appreciate Fiji that much more.
After this faux pas, we spent the last 4 days in the beautifully cheap Bangkok. We saw the famous giant reclining Buddha, Wat Arun temple, shopped on Khao San market street and we got sick from pad thai. On different days we each spent 24 hours in the agony of persistent nausea and slight fever. To top that, our room seemed to be particularly hot in this guesthouse even with the fan on full speed and that made the sickness much worse. We later figured out what it was – the guesthouse laundry was being dried in an industrial dryer right below our floor and the rising hot air turned our room into an oven! This sickness prevented us from seeing the famous red-light district and a Thai-boxing match, but we could hardly care anymore. With a fragile stomach, walking in Bangkok’s smelly streets was a real ordeal, so we were happy to be leaving on June 7.
We had a comfortable 12-hour flight to London (Thai Airways is really great!) and spent 2 days there in Covent Garden with our good friends from DC, Marc and Eileen. It was amazing to be back in a land of mild weather, long summer days and street markets where food not only looks recognizable, but also safely tasty!
And now we are in my hometown of Stara Tura, where we’re getting ready to start a life in Prague. We’re doing a lot of apartment and job searching on the internet and when we’re not doing that, we hang out with my brothers, play with 5 little kittens that live in our garden or stuff our faces with my mom’s delicious Slovak cooking. Our newest Thailand photos are up online.
This is the end of our half-around-the-world trip. We’re happy we made it. Thank you for reading.
