Chiang Mai, What Lovely Smoothies You Have

Chiang Mai is a collage of hippy fashioned tourists, pad thai and fruit smoothie selling vendors, tuk tuk drivers, and enormous wats (temples).

We scored a bamboo hut for 150 baht (about 5 USD) with free wifi and free water. A pretty sweet deal. Soon after settling down and washing after our 48 hours plus of traveling, we made our way over to a local food market for some grub. Yum! Of course we chose “the best food in Chiang Mai” restaurant to go to. While we can't say if it is the best, it was certainly a highlight.

The next few days while we waited for the Engineers for a Sustainable World (an organization Derek was involved with in college) crew to arrive in Thailand, we took our time to explore the city and get up to date with our communications. Meaning: we Skyped with our lovely families, we checked out a few of the markets including the enormously overwhelming Night Bazaar, and we ate as many smoothies as we could justify considering it cost only a dollar for a two fruit shake (hello mango passion fruit). We also discovered Derek's sensitivity to large amounts of acidic fruits…maybe five mangoes a day was pushing it….

Anyways, we enjoyed ourselves in this bohemian city. In fact, we even got our clothes washed. At a laundromat. In a washing machine. Safe to say, our clothes hadn't smelled or looked that good in months!

We greeted the ESW-ers, Erik, Perapong, and Alex, on our last night in Chiang Mai for some food and bazaar browsing. They were the first home friends we had seen since our Christmas and New Years celebrations with Natalie. We were pretty stoked, and reenergized by the excitement of our friends. The change of scene and the new faces reminded us to seize the moment and make the most of our upcoming experiences.

 

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We Came, We Saw, We Got Monsooned Out

And then we decided to experience monsoon season first hand. So we headed to the south western coast, to a beach considered one of the most beautiful called Ton Sai. It was difficult to get to and we spent a couple of hours waiting for enough people to show up to take a longboat over to the main beach, Railay. We finally arrived and lucked out to have the sun with us, we took the opportunity to take the path through the jungle to Ton Sai beach. It was a strenuous uphill hike with heavy bags and sandals, but we made it to a cheap enough place right before it began to rain.

The next three days were spent dodging rain, which would appear often unexpectedly, trapping us in our damp bamboo hut or under the roofs of restaurants. So, while the beach was amazing, with intriguing karst cliffs and interestingly shaped off shore islands, we spent most of our time (you guessed it) reading, eating yummy food (I'm talking mango, banana, coconut smoothies, and masaman curry, people), and trying to get our clothes to dry.

We lucked out our last day with some sun and dry-ish weather, which was perfect to take the coastal route back to the main beach, across the sand before high tide and over some treacherous rocks.

This brings us to more waiting and then an overnight bus to Bangkok consisting of a drunk dude stumbling up and down the stairs yelling “need some food” and some other crazy lighting up a cigarette in the bathroom. Safe to say, we didn't get a good night's sleep. We wouldn't the following night, either, because we would spend it in third class on an 18 hour train ride to Chiang Mai.

 

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Breaking Budget

After our hellish (maybe this word is a bit strong, in all honesty It was exceedingly beautiful, we may have just bit off more than we could chew) experience in Taman Negara, we were in much need of some R&R (by that I am referring to Reading&Reading).

What better place to do this than Thailand's Koh Pha-ngan, situated on the south eastern coast. We arrived during low season and therefore were seduced by a low season special for a 400 baht (that's about 13 USD) bungalow on the beach on the north western part of the island, which was touted to be the most picturesque. A great deal, yes, but it also meant that we were quite isolated from cheap(er) food or means of transportation (we were too lazy to walk…gosh, what would Camino Claire and Derek have to say if they would see us now?!).

Anyways, we gave ourselves a break. Expensive by our standards, dirt cheap by US standards.

We spent our days lazing by the beach reading. We spent our meal times sitting in the cozy bamboo shelter, eating delicious home cooked Thai food made by our private chef (practically, since we were the only guests at the resort). On special occasions we went snorkeling or borrowed the kayak to take a ride along the coast. We talked about life as little kids, we reminisced about high school and team sports, we got over our traveler's weariness, we revved ourselves up for the last stretch of the trip, we talked about seeing family and friends and eating guacamole.

The day before we planned to leave, one of our hosts begged us to remain two more nights to celebrate his 22nd birthday with him. Feeling it was a sign, we gave in. The night of his birthday, his mother cooked Claire her own special tofu dish, Derek an entire barracuda, and proceeded to push whiskey towards our cups. The family gathering was sweet, and we enjoyed our time hanging out. Don't worry, things didn't get crazy and we didn't drink too much. We did feel it was worth it to spend those extra days, to experience that connection with such a warm family.

The next day we walked 13 kilometers to the port for an overnight ferry ride back to the mainland, feeling rejuvenated and reenergized, ready to take on the remaining weeks of the trip.

 

Here are some nice sunset pictures for you.

 

 

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Taman Nevar-again-a

Imagine, trekking through the deepest jungle of Malaysia. The sounds of the jungle surround you as you go farther in, butterflies of every color flit around you. You are on your way to an animal observation hide, the most famous one in this wilderness, in fact. You will spend a night there in a shelter overlooking a salt lick where animals such as tapirs come to supplement their diet throughout the night and early morning. You are ripe with anticipation, ready for some sure animal sightings. You feel like a true adventurer, a backpacker, and off-the-beaten-tracker….

Imagine that.

Now imagine your ankles are covered in leeches. You are soaking wet and you don't know if it is sweat or moisture from the air. You have been walking for five hours when surely you walk more than three kilometers an hour and the hike was only supposed to be twelve kilometers, but you still aren't there yet. A third of the path is a semi vertical climb up a hill assisted by a rope, another third is a semi vertical climb down a hill assisted by a rope, the other third is fallen tree trunk hopping and stream crossing.

You hear the crack of thunder in the distance and feel a shift in the wind. Rain approaches. Seven hours of walking and you finally see it, climbing up the stairs and entering the shelter a moment before the rain starts to fall.

That was us in Taman Negara.

We arrived after an exhausting day to the Kumbang hide, said to be twelve k's away from the park headquarters (that's about seven miles), at about 5:30pm. A swarm of bees followed us inside the windowpane-less room, seeking moisture from our soaking clothing. The rudimentary toilet was teeming with some sort of black, wingless insect. There was an enormous, teenager's hand sized spider in the door frame. The bunks were mattress-less. It was raining.

We spent a few hours looking out, shining the flashlight every few minutes. And then we fell asleep exhausted, waking up early to see if we could catch a glimpse of some shy jungle creature. Feeling a bit let down, we left the hide early, to take the shorter, flatter route back to catch a bus at 10am to catch another bus to catch a train to catch a bus to spend the night in the airport.

Instead the route back took twice as long as we anticipated. Even though we booked it the first two and a half hours (could have sworn we were doing five kilometer an hour pace!). The return hike back, though not as hilly, seemed just as difficult. After such a rainy night, the “river crossing” we were warned of meant we walked waist deep through a strong current and murky waters, shoes on, holding hands. And then, if we weren't climbing through wet and fallen trees, we were pouring salt on leeches and running from their creepy bodies as they probed the air looking for something (our ankles) to leech onto (pun intended). Derek had blood on his socks. Claire's ankle was experiencing severe pain. We were feeling a bit hysterical. We were running low on water and food. The signs lied to us and told us we had gone a shorter distance than we really had and that we had a greater distance ahead of us than we thought we should. When we finally reached town and stripped off our wet clothes in favor of drier ones, we were threatened by hornets and Claire got stung and then stepped in an ant hill and got bit. We washed and hung our clothes on a line that we happened to come across.

And then we left, treating ourselves to a banana roti and some sickeningly bright orange drinks before catching the bus.

 

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Are we there yet? Part 2

Little did we know that the cheapest way to Taman Negara would be the most expensive.

We were caught in an onslaught on unfortunate events preventing us from reaching our destination. A bit reminiscent of Rome to Greece.

We would stay over night in a bustling small city called Kota Bharu. Quite a pleasant town with a wonderful market place. Fruits galore as well as sweets, fish, and cooked questionable items.

We overloaded on fruits, literally buying about 20 pounds of fruit for around 7 dollars. These fruits include amazing mangos, bananas, dragon scales, lychee, long an. Decadent really. We justified that buying this would be way cheaper than anything we bought in Taman Negara. Not exactly true, but we will get to that later.

Early morning, the next day we were on our way to the train station that would take us to Jerantut, the main hub to our destination of Taman Negara. We arrived to find out the train was cancelled. We would have to come back the next day or go to an alternative town.

We chose to go to Kuala Lipis. A classy town that was host to a very large wedding.

A wedding so large that all the guest houses were filled up as we arrived two hours behind schedule. This meant a couple hours of walking and searching for the best deal in town.

After a few failures, we were spotted by a local guide. He and his friend picked us up and drove us around trying to find a place for us to sleep. We ended up getting a hotel that was three times more expensive than our ocean view bungalow. It was 30 dollars for that four star hotel. At least it came with breakfast 🙂

Again, we were off, we took a bus ride to Jerantut. We would get into Taman Negara to find that the offices were closed and we would have to wait a night to get to the observation hides. Evidently severely disappointed and frustrated from such long travels, we were recommended to go book a place, eat, and relax and then come back.

We did. The place we booked was no 4 star hotel. It was a 3 dollar per person hostel with bed bugs included. Don't worry, unlike the lice we received, these buggers were checked for before we hopped into bed. (Tip: check the seams of the bed for spots (their poop)).

We made it, at last!

 

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And then we stayed another week…

About two weeks in to our adventure on Kecil we met Jo and Tom, a couple from England with oddly similar characteristics to ourselves. Both Claire and Jo are the older of the pair. While both Derek and Tom graduated with a degree in Engineering, Claire and Jo graduated with degrees in Social Science. Both couples are traveling on the cheap and understand the beauty of finding inexpensive, local food to make room for an ice cream or mango smoothie in the day's budget. And this is just the tip of the ice berg.

We had one week left on the island upon meeting them and ran into them the following evening at dinner time. Somehow they seemed to know half the people on the island, so we had quite the long table for our feast. This became a daily event, dinner after sunset and until late in the evening, talking about everything from Mars space expeditions to the size of Gibraltar to the best curry on the island, and of course, to our travel experiences and the sightings of the snorkeling and scuba diving adventures of the day. We had some other regulars at meals, Anna from Germany, Vivian from Australia, Chris from Gibraltar and a number of other people coming and going.

It was wonderful. Community again. We clicked and talked for hours, sometimes over lunch, as well. In the meantime Derek raced through all seven Harry Potter books and Claire read a weird sci-fi book and a good but somewhat depressing book about the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.

Challenge: find the lizard. Hint: it's green.

On our last Sunday on the island we, of course, partook in another Adventure Sundays adventure with Jo and Tom. This involved a long walk to the other side of the island for some snorkeling (black tip reef shark and colorful sting ray sighting) followed by a painful, shoeless walk back through the jungle to retrieve our things. All in all, an adventure.

When it was time to leave, we enjoyed our last few meals eating our favorite island dishes (veg curry, mango shake, banana and chocolate shake, pineapple and eggplant curry) with our favorite people on the island, we gave in and went on a snorkeling trip (which was awesome), and picked through our hair another couple of times to rid ourselves of as many lice and nits as possible without a lice comb.

And then, we hopped on a boat and said goodbye to the island we couldn't seem to leave for three whole weeks.

 

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