Bangkok

I actually passed through Bangkok twice on travels through Thailand: once between Koh Chang and Koh Lanta and again at the very end of my time in Thailand (after diving the Similan Islands).

The first time I was in Bangkok I didn't stay very long or see many sights as I knew that I would be returning there and spending more time while waiting for my Myanmar visa. Therefore during the first stop nothing exciting happened, all I did was try to shop around for a new camera and I visited the small amulet market. The amulet market was a little interesting but nothing to exciting it was just loads of stalls selling mostly tiny Buddha statues that you can make a necklace out of. There were also several other figures but Buddhas were definitely the most common.

My second time in Bangkok I did some more touristy things although I still didn't cover everything I'm sure. My first day back in the capital was spent applying for my Myanmar visa (a surprisingly easy affair) and after that I went to buy a camera now that I had decided what to buy.

The second day in Bangkok was spent visiting the royal palace and Wat Phra Kaew (temple of the emerald Buddha) and Wat Pho. The royal palace was very amazing as the grounds contain several fancily decorated buildings (mainly gold painted and covered with tinted mirrors). Wat Phra Kaew is located on the grounds of the royal palace and is the area with the most spectacular buildings. The actual palace buildings were very impressive of sights and they now contain small museums in them; but the majority of the buildings are off limit to tourists unfortunately. After the royal palace I visited Wat Pho, the temple of the reclining Buddha which is 46 meters long and completely covered in gold leaf.

My final day in Bangkok and Thailand was spent running errands and getting ready for my trip to Myanmar so nothing very exciting occurred. Finally I took an early morning flight to Yangon, Myanmar which put an end to my time in Thailand.




Sight of Wat Phra Kaew in the royal palace compound with the stupa and the wat covered in gold and tinted mirrors.





Some of the figures surrounding one of the gold buildings near Wat Phra Kaew. Statues like this were everywhere over the compound and the amount of work to build them and maintain them must be huge.







One of the murals painted on a wall in the grounds of the royal palace, complete with gold leaf in the painting.













A monk praying inside the wat at Wat Pho.













The giant reclining Buddha in Wat Pho. Completely covered in gold and 46 meters long.

Diving the Similan Islands

So first of all sorry to my loyal blog readers for not posting an update in about a month; but there is a perfectly good explanation for that: I was in Myanmar (Burma). Myanmar was a great country except the government blocked lots of websites, one of them being blogspot unfortunately, but I have now made it to India so I can once again post updates. This also means that over the next few days there will be lots of updates being posted from my travels in Myanmar and also the last two from Thailand.

First of all my second to last experience in Thailand was spent doing a 3 day/2 night liveaboard dive trip to the Similan Islands. For those of you who don't know where the Similan's are they are located a couple hundred kilometers north of Phuket and about a hundred kilometers off the coast (the west coast of Thailand). Also they have been rated as one of the top 10 places in the world to dive (I think the only location in Thailand to make that list).

The diving was unbelievable with extremely beautiful and colourful coral and lots of small fish as the Similan Islands aren't known for large sea animals apparently. However, our trip was pretty lucky I guess as on almost every dive we saw at least one really impressive sea creature.

The first dive was completed just off of an island called Ko Bon which is to the north and east of the main group of the 9 Similan Islands. Here we were told is most common place to see rays and towards the end of our dive our dive group was graced with a HUGE manta ray gliding over us, it had to have been about 4 meters across! On the second dive which was in the group of the 9 main Similan Islands (all of the remaining dives were) we saw a leopard shark sleeping on the sea floor which was pretty neat as we could swim up fairly close to it and look at it for a while without it swimming away.

The third dive was the following morning and for most part of the dive we didn't see much except for beautiful coral until the very end of the dive a hawksbill turtle swam by near us. The fourth dive again didn't contain any larger sea life but plenty of nice coral and schools of small fish, in terms of beautiful coral this was probably the second best dive site. The fifth dive brought with it lots of Kuhl's rays (much smaller than the manta ray we saw, these ones are only 50cm to 1m across) and lots of garden eels. Finally I did the night dive on the second day (dive 6 for me) which was pretty interesting, we saw tons of shrimp, a moray eel swimming around and played with the phosphorescence.

On the final day I was only able to partake in 1 of the dives (as I wasn't feeling too good) but the one that I did was probably the best of the trip I think (and confirmed by fellow divers). On this dive we saw a white tip shark swim by as well as 4 huge tunas (about 2 meters long) but the highlight of this div had to have been the coral: it was beautiful. Words cannot describe how great this dive was (if anyone wants the name of this site I can email it to them).

All in all it was a great dive trip and I highly recommend diving here to anyone that's heading to Thailand. From the Similan's I took a night bus back to Bangkok where I spent a couple of days organizing my visa for Myanmar. So the next update (to follow soon will be my last for Thailand: Bangkok).

Krabi and Koh Lanta

After leaving Bangkok to head south I made a short stop in the border town of Ranong as I needed to renew my Thailand visa (damn government changing the rules to only allow 15 day visa exemptions if coming into Thailand overland). So after stopping in Ranong for 1 day and spending a few hours taking a boat over to Myanmar to get a stamp in my passport and then back to Thailand for a new 15 day visa extension I continued on my way to Krabi.

At first I just passed through Krabi on my way to Koh Lanta planning to spend some more time there on my way back so I didn't see too much of the town at the start. Koh Lanta is a nice sleepy island (at least for now) just south of the famous island Koh Phi Phi and Phuket; however, the island is really starting to develop fast so soon it may just be covered in more expensive resorts.

My time on Koh Lanta was mainly spent renting a motorbike and cruising around the island checking out all of the different beaches. There were lots of beaches here and all of them were amazing, probably some of the best beaches that I've seen so far. The island was very relaxing with not too much of a night life and not much to do all day other than check out the beaches. There were a couple of caves that I spent a short amount of time checking out and they were pretty extensive and impressive but you can only spend so much time wandering around caves (or at least I can).

After returning back to Krabi from Koh Lanta I had planned on spending a day sea kayaking as there are a few good day trips available from Krabi and I also planned to spend a day checking out Railay beach as it's supposed to be one of the most beautiful beaches in Thailand. Unfortunately on the first morning that I awoke in Krabi I found that I had developed a fever and wasn't feeling very well. As a result I passed the next 2 days in bed trying to get healthy as I was scheduled to go diving for 3 days right after Krabi. It turns out getting sick wasn't that bad as the sea kayaking was really expensive so I probably wouldn't have been able to do it anyways so all I missed out on was seeing beautiful Railay beach.

From Krabi I headed up to Khao Lak, still feeling a little sick, from where I was catching my 3 day live aboard dive ship for the Similan Islands. So the next update will contain my adventures diving and the awesome things that I saw under the sea.

Koh Chang

Arriving in Thailand my first destination was Koh Chang, a large island near Trat and close to the Cambodian border. This island is very nice with lots of nice white sand beaches and it even has the palm trees to make it look almost picture perfect. In addition it seems to have taken the tourism industry a few years to find so although the Northern end of the island is dominated by resorts and large hotels, further south there are still lots of smaller bungalows and more of a backpacker area.

I ended up staying in an area called lonely beach and although it certainly isn't lonely anymore it is still quite good. The atmosphere is very relaxing and it's a lot quieter than further up the island at white sand beach, and again similar to Sihanoukville there seems to be a party on the beach from one of the resorts every night.

While staying on Koh Chang I passed away a couple of days just relaxing on the beach and reading books, as lonely beach was nice and quiet with some stretches that were pretty empty and very few people walking around selling things. On another day I rented a motorbike to check out the rest of the island and visited a couple of waterfalls that were only trickles in the dry season. The western side of the island was not touristy at all, probably because there weren't any sandy beaches but there was a nice fishing village that hadn't been affected by tourism so it was a nice chance to see how the locals live.

Finally the only other thing that I did on Koh Chang was to do a snorkel trip to 4 nearby islands. This trip was kind of a disappointment as I was hoping to be able to see 4 separate islands and get a feeling for how the diving was so I could determine if it was worth it. Well the 4 islands turned out to really be 2 islands and 2 piles of rock sticking out of the sea near the islands so we didn't get to see very much change. The snorkeling wasn't very good as we didn't see very many fish and the coral was really only good at one of the locations that we stopped at. As a result I decided to save my money for diving in the Similan Islands which is supposed to be one of the top 10 dive sites in the world.

From Koh Chang I caught a bus to Bangkok where I only spent a short amount of time before heading down south to Krabi and Koh Lanta. As a result I won't make an update about Bangkok quite yet but my next update will be for Krabi and Koh Lanta down south of Phuket.

Sukhothai, Korat and Getting to Cambodia

I've managed to finally get an update up (I know I'm a little behind) but there's also 2 more updates of pictures from earlier below this one too.

After leaving Mae Sot and Um Phang I had to make my way across Thailand to enter Cambodia. So I decided to break this trip up into smaller sections and spend a day in a couple of cities along the way. The fist city I stopped in was Sukhothai, the first capital of Thailand and home to some nice ruins.

Sukhothai is divided into old and new Sukhothai with old Sukhothai containing the ruins of the ancient city. For the day that I had in Sukhothai I spent the entire time cycling around the ruins and exploring the old city. Some of the ruins were quite impressive although this was only the ruins within the old city walls, all of the ruins in the surrounding area were very much ruined and didn't provide much to see except the more scenic location. Other than the ruins at old Sukhothai though there wasn't much to see or do here so I moved on.

After Sukhothai I took the bus to Korat and didn't expect to spend much time here really enjoy the time that I did spend here as it isn't a very touristy town. It was just necessary to go to to catch another bus to the border of Cambodia. However, when I arrived here I discovered that they were hosting their 4th annual grilled foods festival (something like the Thai equivalent of the Calgary Stampede). The grilled foods festival was actually very enjoyable as it had tons of delicious grilled food and even a free show that was like the grandstand show. Not to mention it was quite funny seeing all of the Thai people dressed up as cowboys.

After Korat I took a bus to Aranya Prathet (a town on the Cambodian border) and once across the border I made my way to Battambang in a shared taxi. The taxi ride itself was quite interesting as there were 3 tourists that had rented the backseat and 4 locals (including the driver) all squished up front. More updates from Cambodia to follow soon.








Ruins at old Sukhothai.

Pictures of Um Phang

Standing near the main waterfall.















Our guide walking across a bamboo bridge to get to a small set of waterfalls for some swimming.















Our guide holding a gibbon that one of the local villagers owned. We all got a chance to hold and touch it too.













A work elephant pulling a large log behind it in the village where we spent our second night.










Our porters making bamboo cups for us along the trail.











The enormous elephant that I got to ride through the jungle on.

Pictures of Pai

Some kids from one of the villages where we stopped on our trek for some lunch.








Dinner during our trek.











The acommadation during our trek, we stayed in the right half while the people who owned the house stayed in the left half.







Placing my floating banana leave candle (it may be called a kratong but I'm not sure) in the river and making a wish.









Some of the colourful dancers in the parade for Loi Kratong.











One of the beauty contestants in the parade on the second night of Loi Kratong. There were several floats similar to this one with beauty contestants on them and each float had a very large speaker system blaring out Thai music.












Relaxing in the hot springs during a break on the rafting trip.











A typical view of the river without any rapids. The second raft is floating down the river in the background.
















Our rafting guides cooking dinner at the overnight camp.













Lunch break while on the rafting trip.

Pictures of Chiang Mai

The partially destroyed chedi of wat chedi luang.














The golden chedi at wat phrathat doi suthep, unforunatly it was being repaired or repainted while I was there so scaffolding was erected all around it.









Here is the view of Chiang Mai from the top of wat phrathat doi suthep, the wat located on a mountian just outside the city.





Also if you want to see pictures of me from the cooking course I took just follow this link: http://www.cookinthai.com/photo/browse.php?folder=20081106

Um Phang

OK first of all pictures are coming soon I promise.

After my multi day journey to get to Mae Sot I quickly left there heading for the small town of Um Phang. Um Phang is a beautiful town located in the hills close to the Burmese border and as a result there are lots of Burmese people that try to smuggle themselves into Thailand here. The trip to Um Phang was done on what is best described as a pickup truck bus, the bed of the truck has 2 benches placed in it and a nice shelter placed over top to protect us from wind and rain. Needless to say it's really uncomfortable. My trip started off pretty interesting as I'm fairly sure that we were smuggling somebody in our truck as one woman kept paying the police officers that stopped us to inspect our ID cards. After all of the bribes the trip got significantly worse: the road to Um Phang is through the mountains and so it's very twisty turny and steep. And as I soon found out the local people there can't handle these things at any speeds as of the 10 locals riding the "bus" with me at least 5 of them were vomiting for most of the trip. So that 5 hour bus ride was one of the least enjoyable I've ever taken.

Once in Um Phang I quickly signed up for a 3 day trek that included rafting, seeing the largest waterfall in Thailand and elephant riding. I thought it would be great fun. The rafting was in beautiful scenery but very similar to what I saw white water rafting so nothing too new and the short trek to the campsite after the rafting wasn't anything special either. To top it off there were at least a few hundred Thai tourists who did the same rafting trip and camped at the base of the waterfalls as us so there wasn't any chance to really see nature. The waterfalls themselves were very nice and probably some of the tallest ones that I've ever seen, but again there were at least a few hundred Thais there to enjoy them too. The last day was spent taking an elephant ride for 2 hours back to the road where we were to be picked up. Well I was pretty excited to get to ride an elephant but I very quickly lost all of excitement. Once on the elephant the basket that you sit in was very uncomfortable and you always had to hold on so that you wouldn't fall off. Then to top it all off my elephant was at least 1 meter taller than all of the other ones so when walking through the jungle while other people could easily fit under the leaves and branches of trees I had to fight them off.

After the trek I was able to get a ride back to Mae Sot in a private bus with the other people on my trek so the return journey was much more comfortable and faster. In Mae Sot I only stayed for one night before heading out to Sukothai and eventually Cambodia.

Pai

I haven't been keeping up with my blog updates as planned so today I have made 2 new updates (Pai and Chiang Mai) but unfortunately the computer I'm on doesn't let me upload photos so those will come later.

Pai is a little hippie town to the northwest of Chiang Mai and quite different to Chiang Mai. Everything here is much more relaxed and slower although it's still very touristy both with foreigners and with Thais. The biggest difference here though is that the town is located in a mountain valley so in the morning and evening it's quite a bit colder. The temperature was a nice change from the rest of Southeast Asia as I even had to put on long pants and a jacket one night, but it was pretty entertaining watching all of the Thais walking around in huge parkas and toques while I was usually in a t-shirt.

For my first couple of days in Pai I joined a 2 day trek to nearby ethnic villages in the national park. The trek was a lot of fun as it wasn't too hard but we got to see some nice scenery and all our meals were eaten in different villages (except breakfast and dinner). Meeting the locals was quite interesting and seeing how they lived was great, the most unexpected aspect of the villages was that almost each house had a solar panel for electricity but as far as I could determine the only thing that they used electricity for was a radio and large sets of speakers.

After the trek I returned to Pai where a festival was about to start called Loi Krathong. This festival started on the 12th of November and lasted for 3 days with celebrations occuring each night (not much happened in the day though). So I ended up staying in Pai for two days of the festival so that I could observe the party. The festival was in celebration of the end of the rainy season and to celebrate it the local people send flaming laterns (like small air balloons) into the night sky and float rafts made of banana trees and leaves down the river with candles lit on them. Also added to the celebration was a parade each night and a big outdoor festival. The festival wasn't all that interesting because all it seemed to be was food stalls, muay thai boxing, a game that's best described as volleyball without using hands, and lots of noise. The muay thai boxing and feet volleyball were quite interesting but with the boxing more time was spent waiting for the match than actually seeing it. The volleyball was pretty interesting but it's played everywhere here in Southeast Asia so I had seen it lots before. The biggest problem with the festival was that it seemed like everyone had large stands of speakers blaring music as loud as possible, but each one was playing something different so it just seemed like a lot of noise.

After the festival I took a 2 day white water rafting trip from Pai which ended up in Mae Hong Son. The trip turned out to be pretty fun but at first it seemed that our guide was completely crazy as he would aim for every rock in the river to make the raft swing around and get everyone as wet as possible. In the end it was a great trip and no harm was done although we did manage to flip the raft once and I fell out with our guide a second time. The rafting was a great way to travel between Pai and Mae Hong Son because the road between the two towns is extremely twisty and the river we rafted on was along the edge of the national park so the scenery was absolutely beautiful.

I spent a day in the small town of Mae Hong Son relaxing after the rafting trip. The town was quite nice a small lake in the centre but not a lot to do in town, most people make day trips to nearby villages which I didn't have time to do since I felt that I spent too much time in Pai. From Mae Hong Son I made my way down to Mae Sot stopping overnight in Mae Saring (another small and sleepy town with not much here).

Chiang Mai

After leaving Laos my first destination in Thailand was Chiang Mai. My first impression of Thailand was one of almost a culture shock because after sleepy Laos Thailand was very busy. The amount of traffic on the streets and the number of people walking around was something that didn't exist in Laos.

The old part of Chiang Mai contains several wats that I spent the better part of a day wandering through. The wats seemed to be fairly similar to most of the wats that I had seen in Laos so I didn't feel that many of them were special. There were a couple though that were quite impressive: wat chedi luang contained the largest chedi that I had ever seen even though it was significantly damaged in 16th century, wat phra singh is the other impressive wat as it is quite large and one of the most important temples in the city.

Just outside of the city is wat phrathat doi suthep which is located on a hill overlooking the city. This wat is huge tourist attraction as when I was there so were about a hundred other tourists, mostly Thais. The wat itself was quite impressive with a golden chedi in the middle; however, the most impressive aspect about this sight were the superb views of the city from here.

Aside from all of the wats located in Chiang Mai many people come here for a massage or cooking course. I joined a cooking course on my last day in Chaing Mai and had a great time although I ate entirely too much food. The course started out with a trip to the local market to learn about the fresh fruit and vegetables used in Thai cooking. After the market tour we returned back to the house to spend the next 6 hours learning how to make 5 Thai dishes of our choice (from a list of 15). I learned how to make phad thai, spring rolls, panaeng curry paste and panaeng curry with pork, tom yam soup, and sticky rice with mangos for dessert. It was all very delicious and a great way to spend the day.

At night in Chiang Mai there is always the night bazaar which is a fairly long night market set up on one street. Here a person could buy anything that they desired; but it was a very touristy market with the majority of people wandering around being foreigners. In addition to the night bazaar there is an even bigger night market every sunday that seems to take up most of the old part of Chiang Mai. I was lucky enough to be here for a sunday and got to witness this huge market where you could still buy anything you wanted and more but it was not only for tourists which made it even better. There were still lots of tourists there but probably just as many Thai people shopping around as well.

After Chiang Mai I took a bus to Pai a small town just to the Northwest of Chiang Mai. Again the computer I'm on doesn't let me upload photos so I'll get some up soon.