Thailand
I was pretty zonked out boarding the bus at Siem Reap at 6am, and almost got lost in the border crossing no man's land, but 10 hours later recognizable sights and sounds of downtown Bangkok refreshed me. This was the first "not new" stop on my trip. I was far from familiar with Bangkok, having spent most of my time there in various Sukhomvit Sois (side streets), usually inebriated. Sukhomvit is a huge road and a life artery for the wilder expat scene, but the enormous city has far more to offer. I alighted near the railway station, where backpackers and motorcyclists flooded my path. I elbowed my way into a 7-Eleven to purchase a phone card. A pay-as-you-go phone plan was cheap in Vietnam and Cambodia, but for whatever reason I hadn't felt like getting one - a foreign trip just feels different when connected to the interwebs. However I was planning on being in Thailand for quite some time, and staying with a friend, so a phone seemed necessary. Service in the Land of Smiles is usually pleasant, but the 7-Eleven outside Bangkok Railway Station broke such stereotypes. The clerk went to activate my phone card, left me hanging for 15 minutes, then came back to simply say, "No." The language barrier surely inhibited a more detailed explanation, but this guy's lack of effort was infuriating. In one of the few shoplifting efforts of my life, I pocketed the card (and later succeeded in activating it), and snuck out the store.
"Cal!" Imagine my pounding heart - someone had caught me. Did I give the store clerk my name? I looked up to see one of the many backpackers on the sidewalk staring directly at me, a white guy with impressive facial hair. "Do you remember me? It's Mark Waterman!" I quickly pieced together my memories from another life of a college ultimate teammate, and had one of those "it's a small world" conversations. In fact I was in town for an ultimate hat tournament, but in a twist of small world irony, Waterman was not in town for that tournament.
I stayed at fellow ultimate player Asha's apartment in Silom. Dinner that night consisted of delicious street food with other visiting players from Islamabad, Pakistan of all places. The Bangkok Hat is one of my favorite tournaments because of the players it attracts. Its central location regularly allows as internationally diverse a participation group, from the UAE to Japan, as any hat tournament in the world. I captained a team with a large Singaporean core, supplemented by local Thai players and expats living in China. I think we finished 2nd to last, but no one remembers that.
Getting to explore the rest of Bangkok was a wonderful boon. You can get around the city pretty painlessly - outside of rush hour. The BTS is actually quite convenient when not jam-packed, and if you have the luxury to live near it. At Arup, I had worked on a luxury mall in the city called Icon Siam that was under construction, and savored the chance to check out an overseas project for the first time. On the western bank of Bangkok's main river Chao Praya, I approached from the east bank where the Shangri-La and the Mandarin Oriental landmarked an upscale neighborhood. Water transport used to be Bangkok's main mode of transport, and though times have changed, a raft ferry across the river cost just a few cents. The neighborhood around the western pier was drastically different, populated with dense apartments and tiny convenient stores navigated via narrow dirt roads. The construction site itself was closed off with larger banners blocking a sneak peak, and so I made my way down an adjacent narrow road. To my surprise, the path took me to what could be described as a shanty town - a bunch of tin shacks and some abandoned wooden houses on stilts. People were living underneath the stilts, proved by the operating clotheslines and hammocks. Unbeknownst to me, the multibillion-dollar luxury mall where I had done advanced daylighting simulations was next to this squatter settlement the entire time. Did my project replace the lives of many poor Thai residents? What sort of massive gentrification had I partaken in? Would the Icon Siam eventually help the lives of the people on the wrong side of the Chao Praya?
From the train ride over, I glimpsed a crazy looking building - Google eventually told me the story of the eerie abandoned Sathorn Unique Tower, 68 haunting floors of bankruptcy. Apparently bribing the security guards and taking the stairs to the top is a thing - alas minor shoplifting was enough lawbreaking for me. I also managed to visit the equally unique Jim Thompson House, a combine of traditional Thai houses lifted from remote villages by Jim Thompson, the American architect turned WWII spy who revitalized the Thai silk industry before mysteriously disappearing in Malaysia.
I hadn't made solid plans post-Bangkok, and realized too late that I may have been overstaying my welcome. To the south of Thailand were some of the loveliest beaches in the world, but I'm not much of a beach guy and I'd missed out on a bachelor party in Chiang Mai, so I looked northwards. Unbeknownst to me, that very weekend was a long weekend on account of the Buddha's birthday, and buses and trains to Chiang Mai were packed. I cover this ordeal in a separate post, where I explain how I eventually ended up in Phitsanulok, the city of 84,000 halfway between Bangkok and Chiang Mai and almost died on the back of a motorcycle on a highway. I left out another harrowing experience on that trip. Once I returned from the Sukhothai ruins back to Phitsanulok, I still wasn't home. First, I explored a sprawling night market that swallowed up two Wats, which was awesome - so many delicious options.
Then I found the Thai address of my hotel, which was really a motel 20 minutes outside the city, and showed it to a motorcyclist who was very eager to give me a ride. He looked at my address, then started driving - all the way to the first stoplight, when he asked me where to go. I was like I don't know! Here's the address again! He huffed and took a right, then in the middle of the street flagged down a driver and asked her to look at the address. I couldn't believe it. The woman read my address several times, then had a far lengthier conversation with my driver than I felt comfortable with - a simple "it's that weird Days Inn ripoff right off the highway" should have sufficed - and finally the driver seemed to know where to go. I relaxed and leaned back, or as far as I could on a motorbike. After a few intersections, I took my phone out again and checked our progress, and was stunned to find that we were going the opposite direction! I shouted stop to my driver and jumped off. As I was showing him the address again, furious and confused, I finally realized that perhaps he couldn't read. This had been such a rarity everywhere I'd been - China has a 90% literacy rate now - but I'm guessing the illiteracy rate for motorbike drivers in Phitsanulok is not insignificant. I spent another 20 minutes in the area unable to find a taxi or motorbike before finally flagging down a tiny clown car with my battery at 10% life. The car zoomed along at 25 mph and by the time I got home I was exhausted. But hey, at least I made it to those ruins.
The next morning, my bus to Chiang Mai broke down. Really not a great transportation week for me. We were waylaid for a bit over an hour and then crammed onto another bus for the rest of the journey - luckily only another hour. Behind Bangkok and on par with Koh Samui, Chiang Mai is among the Thai places best known to westerners. For tourists, it's an old city with a major airport and access to many activities. There are elephant sanctuaries, zipline course, hikes, night markets, ancient temples and massages galore. Though a city with less than a million inhabitants, Chiang Mai is also a place of abode for a unusually many foreigners, many working unusual jobs. The city teemed with cafes and bars run and frequented by white people. I struggle to find a similar city in Asia - Bali is the best I can come up with.
As a city, I found Chiang Mai...ok. The centre is constrained by a moat and well-preserved city wall, and there aren't a lot of those in the world. Many of the cafes and bars are objectively charming. I guess I found Chiang Mai to be too much of a tweener place. It was too busy and industrial to be quaint, but not nearly built up enough to be productive or have a skyline. It was too touristy to be culturally interesting, but not centralized in its activities, resulting in my walking around constantly feeling like the cool kids were partying elsewhere. Perhaps I was doing it wrong - the most appealing aspects of a Chiang Mai vacation involve getting outside the city. As such, the city itself can feel lazy and boring.
Among the outdoor activities I partook in was hanging with elephants. I had only recently learned how cruel training elephants to be ridden was, and now activities like what I did, bathing and walking with rescued elephants, were in vogue. The Elephant Jungle Sanctuary tour I signed up was located 90 minutes outside Chiang Mai deep in mountainous jungle, and had four elephants. I think all four had been rescued from other, presumably less moral, elephant tours. Seeing the elephants walking through the jungle was pretty surreal, thinking about how heavy they were but how quietly they were stepping.
My other Chiang Mai activities included going to a bizarre outdoor music festival in a hot air balloon field, with a handful of imported American freestyle rappers, and playing pickup with the (relatively) large ultimate community. There I met Jazi, the mysterious Israeli-born handler with a huge beard. When Jazi heard I was a math major, he actively tried to recruit me. He never got too detailed with the type of work I'd do, but it was basically data analysis for his online gambling site. I didn't find that particularly interesting, but I found him fascinating. Jazi was part of the sizable digital nomad crowd that had settled in Chiang Mai, and had made enough money from the site that he didn't need to work a ton. He spoke with a thick accent but with a learned vocabulary, for he had learned English in his adulthood for the express purposes of understanding an academic computer science paper (which I still can't understand). His English was aided by having been raised bilingually in Hebrew and Yiddish, a Germanic language. He didn't seem to have had a formal university education, but instead got intense programming training in the military.
After 3 days I boarded a bus to the legendary backpacker town of Pai. Unlike Chiang Mai which I think is trying to be many things, Pai knows what it is. It's only got 6,000 or so residents, but another 600 or so tourists, and about 60 ways to make a pun on its name. With streets full of souvenir shops, signs in English and four 7-Elevens, no one will mistake it for an authentic Thai village. However it's geographic remoteness helps preserve a chill atmosphere and keep it from getting overrun with tourists. Some of the bar owners I spoke to were Bangkok transplants seeking a quieter place to ply their trade.
I stayed at an inn complex with an upside down house in front of it. It proved to be a popular photo spot for tourists who were consistently mainland Chinese. Most of the Chinese tourists traveled in groups to a variety of sites, including a strawberry field outside of town that wasn't even on my English map. The tourists explained to me that there was this love movie popular in China set in Pai, which started a buzz for this spot. Funny how one movie can tap into a market of a billion people.
I was pretty zonked out boarding the bus at Siem Reap at 6am, and almost got lost in the border crossing no man's land, but 10 hours later recognizable sights and sounds of downtown Bangkok refreshed me. This was the first "not new" stop on my trip. I was far from familiar with Bangkok, having spent most of my time there in various Sukhomvit Sois (side streets), usually inebriated. Sukhomvit is a huge road and a life artery for the wilder expat scene, but the enormous city has far more to offer. I alighted near the railway station, where backpackers and motorcyclists flooded my path. I elbowed my way into a 7-Eleven to purchase a phone card. A pay-as-you-go phone plan was cheap in Vietnam and Cambodia, but for whatever reason I hadn't felt like getting one - a foreign trip just feels different when connected to the interwebs. However I was planning on being in Thailand for quite some time, and staying with a friend, so a phone seemed necessary. Service in the Land of Smiles is usually pleasant, but the 7-Eleven outside Bangkok Railway Station broke such stereotypes. The clerk went to activate my phone card, left me hanging for 15 minutes, then came back to simply say, "No." The language barrier surely inhibited a more detailed explanation, but this guy's lack of effort was infuriating. In one of the few shoplifting efforts of my life, I pocketed the card (and later succeeded in activating it), and snuck out the store.
"Cal!" Imagine my pounding heart - someone had caught me. Did I give the store clerk my name? I looked up to see one of the many backpackers on the sidewalk staring directly at me, a white guy with impressive facial hair. "Do you remember me? It's Mark Waterman!" I quickly pieced together my memories from another life of a college ultimate teammate, and had one of those "it's a small world" conversations. In fact I was in town for an ultimate hat tournament, but in a twist of small world irony, Waterman was not in town for that tournament.
I stayed at fellow ultimate player Asha's apartment in Silom. Dinner that night consisted of delicious street food with other visiting players from Islamabad, Pakistan of all places. The Bangkok Hat is one of my favorite tournaments because of the players it attracts. Its central location regularly allows as internationally diverse a participation group, from the UAE to Japan, as any hat tournament in the world. I captained a team with a large Singaporean core, supplemented by local Thai players and expats living in China. I think we finished 2nd to last, but no one remembers that.
Getting to explore the rest of Bangkok was a wonderful boon. You can get around the city pretty painlessly - outside of rush hour. The BTS is actually quite convenient when not jam-packed, and if you have the luxury to live near it. At Arup, I had worked on a luxury mall in the city called Icon Siam that was under construction, and savored the chance to check out an overseas project for the first time. On the western bank of Bangkok's main river Chao Praya, I approached from the east bank where the Shangri-La and the Mandarin Oriental landmarked an upscale neighborhood. Water transport used to be Bangkok's main mode of transport, and though times have changed, a raft ferry across the river cost just a few cents. The neighborhood around the western pier was drastically different, populated with dense apartments and tiny convenient stores navigated via narrow dirt roads. The construction site itself was closed off with larger banners blocking a sneak peak, and so I made my way down an adjacent narrow road. To my surprise, the path took me to what could be described as a shanty town - a bunch of tin shacks and some abandoned wooden houses on stilts. People were living underneath the stilts, proved by the operating clotheslines and hammocks. Unbeknownst to me, the multibillion-dollar luxury mall where I had done advanced daylighting simulations was next to this squatter settlement the entire time. Did my project replace the lives of many poor Thai residents? What sort of massive gentrification had I partaken in? Would the Icon Siam eventually help the lives of the people on the wrong side of the Chao Praya?
From the train ride over, I glimpsed a crazy looking building - Google eventually told me the story of the eerie abandoned Sathorn Unique Tower, 68 haunting floors of bankruptcy. Apparently bribing the security guards and taking the stairs to the top is a thing - alas minor shoplifting was enough lawbreaking for me. I also managed to visit the equally unique Jim Thompson House, a combine of traditional Thai houses lifted from remote villages by Jim Thompson, the American architect turned WWII spy who revitalized the Thai silk industry before mysteriously disappearing in Malaysia.
I hadn't made solid plans post-Bangkok, and realized too late that I may have been overstaying my welcome. To the south of Thailand were some of the loveliest beaches in the world, but I'm not much of a beach guy and I'd missed out on a bachelor party in Chiang Mai, so I looked northwards. Unbeknownst to me, that very weekend was a long weekend on account of the Buddha's birthday, and buses and trains to Chiang Mai were packed. I cover this ordeal in a separate post, where I explain how I eventually ended up in Phitsanulok, the city of 84,000 halfway between Bangkok and Chiang Mai and almost died on the back of a motorcycle on a highway. I left out another harrowing experience on that trip. Once I returned from the Sukhothai ruins back to Phitsanulok, I still wasn't home. First, I explored a sprawling night market that swallowed up two Wats, which was awesome - so many delicious options.
Then I found the Thai address of my hotel, which was really a motel 20 minutes outside the city, and showed it to a motorcyclist who was very eager to give me a ride. He looked at my address, then started driving - all the way to the first stoplight, when he asked me where to go. I was like I don't know! Here's the address again! He huffed and took a right, then in the middle of the street flagged down a driver and asked her to look at the address. I couldn't believe it. The woman read my address several times, then had a far lengthier conversation with my driver than I felt comfortable with - a simple "it's that weird Days Inn ripoff right off the highway" should have sufficed - and finally the driver seemed to know where to go. I relaxed and leaned back, or as far as I could on a motorbike. After a few intersections, I took my phone out again and checked our progress, and was stunned to find that we were going the opposite direction! I shouted stop to my driver and jumped off. As I was showing him the address again, furious and confused, I finally realized that perhaps he couldn't read. This had been such a rarity everywhere I'd been - China has a 90% literacy rate now - but I'm guessing the illiteracy rate for motorbike drivers in Phitsanulok is not insignificant. I spent another 20 minutes in the area unable to find a taxi or motorbike before finally flagging down a tiny clown car with my battery at 10% life. The car zoomed along at 25 mph and by the time I got home I was exhausted. But hey, at least I made it to those ruins.
The next morning, my bus to Chiang Mai broke down. Really not a great transportation week for me. We were waylaid for a bit over an hour and then crammed onto another bus for the rest of the journey - luckily only another hour. Behind Bangkok and on par with Koh Samui, Chiang Mai is among the Thai places best known to westerners. For tourists, it's an old city with a major airport and access to many activities. There are elephant sanctuaries, zipline course, hikes, night markets, ancient temples and massages galore. Though a city with less than a million inhabitants, Chiang Mai is also a place of abode for a unusually many foreigners, many working unusual jobs. The city teemed with cafes and bars run and frequented by white people. I struggle to find a similar city in Asia - Bali is the best I can come up with.
As a city, I found Chiang Mai...ok. The centre is constrained by a moat and well-preserved city wall, and there aren't a lot of those in the world. Many of the cafes and bars are objectively charming. I guess I found Chiang Mai to be too much of a tweener place. It was too busy and industrial to be quaint, but not nearly built up enough to be productive or have a skyline. It was too touristy to be culturally interesting, but not centralized in its activities, resulting in my walking around constantly feeling like the cool kids were partying elsewhere. Perhaps I was doing it wrong - the most appealing aspects of a Chiang Mai vacation involve getting outside the city. As such, the city itself can feel lazy and boring.
Among the outdoor activities I partook in was hanging with elephants. I had only recently learned how cruel training elephants to be ridden was, and now activities like what I did, bathing and walking with rescued elephants, were in vogue. The Elephant Jungle Sanctuary tour I signed up was located 90 minutes outside Chiang Mai deep in mountainous jungle, and had four elephants. I think all four had been rescued from other, presumably less moral, elephant tours. Seeing the elephants walking through the jungle was pretty surreal, thinking about how heavy they were but how quietly they were stepping.
My other Chiang Mai activities included going to a bizarre outdoor music festival in a hot air balloon field, with a handful of imported American freestyle rappers, and playing pickup with the (relatively) large ultimate community. There I met Jazi, the mysterious Israeli-born handler with a huge beard. When Jazi heard I was a math major, he actively tried to recruit me. He never got too detailed with the type of work I'd do, but it was basically data analysis for his online gambling site. I didn't find that particularly interesting, but I found him fascinating. Jazi was part of the sizable digital nomad crowd that had settled in Chiang Mai, and had made enough money from the site that he didn't need to work a ton. He spoke with a thick accent but with a learned vocabulary, for he had learned English in his adulthood for the express purposes of understanding an academic computer science paper (which I still can't understand). His English was aided by having been raised bilingually in Hebrew and Yiddish, a Germanic language. He didn't seem to have had a formal university education, but instead got intense programming training in the military.
After 3 days I boarded a bus to the legendary backpacker town of Pai. Unlike Chiang Mai which I think is trying to be many things, Pai knows what it is. It's only got 6,000 or so residents, but another 600 or so tourists, and about 60 ways to make a pun on its name. With streets full of souvenir shops, signs in English and four 7-Elevens, no one will mistake it for an authentic Thai village. However it's geographic remoteness helps preserve a chill atmosphere and keep it from getting overrun with tourists. Some of the bar owners I spoke to were Bangkok transplants seeking a quieter place to ply their trade.
I stayed at an inn complex with an upside down house in front of it. It proved to be a popular photo spot for tourists who were consistently mainland Chinese. Most of the Chinese tourists traveled in groups to a variety of sites, including a strawberry field outside of town that wasn't even on my English map. The tourists explained to me that there was this love movie popular in China set in Pai, which started a buzz for this spot. Funny how one movie can tap into a market of a billion people.
