Back on Track
Trip Start
Oct 17, 2007
1
15
19
Trip End
Mar 14, 2008
Phuket / Koh Tao / Bangkok,
Thailand
Monday, January 28, 2008
Anyhow, I guess I'll update on what the last 10 or so days since Phi Phi have been all about. From there we took a boat over to Phuket just to check it out despite having heard bad things about the place. We stayed in the ultra touristy / sleazy beach resort town of Patong. It's like Khao San Road multiplied by about 10 and instead of being a fun traveller's meeting ground, it's a resort for vacationers and dirty old Western guys wanting to hook up with young Thai girls... and boys... and ladyboys. Everywhere you look there's an old white guy with a young Thai on his arm just sitting in restaurants or walking around and the first thing you notice is that they're not even talking to each other. It's a pretty sad sight, but unfortunately it's a big part of the tourism industry over here. There's also places where tourists line up to pay $5-$10 to get their photos taken with the ladyboys. Not my idea of a place to spend two days...
That being said, we didn't go there to stay there. We went to book a day trip to the nearby Phang Nga Bay, home to the infamous "James Bond Island" where they filmed a few scenes of "The Man With The Golden Gun" starring Roger Moore. So we went there which was pretty nice and we took some emberassing photos of us in front of this cool rock structure doing James Bond poses. It was cliche and emberassing, but we started a trend and within a couple of minutes there were a bunch of other groups taking the same shots... Also on the tour we were taken in sea kayaks into these crazy sea caves that would emerge into the center of these islands like some sort of river structure surrounded by walls of rocks on all sides with vines and mangrove trees everywhere. Really nice scenery, but sort of hard to explain. And being close to Phuket, the tour was absolutely jam packed so that there were even kayak traffic jams trying to navigate through the narrow caves. Also, we were probably the only people there younger than 30... Still though, it was worth checking out.
Next, the plan was to go back to Koh Tao to do our advanced diving course. Once we got there though Karl's ears were hurting from our Phi Phi dives and so he wasn't fit to go diving. So he split off to Bangkok early and I stayed behind and did the dive course. The dives we did were pretty cool, the highlights definitely being the night dive and the deep dive. The night dive was sort of creepy, but really cool as well. All the fish were really ghost-like and moving around really slowly since they weren't feeding or anything. We saw a pretty big sting-ray under a rock as well and some crabs and anemones that get more active by night. The coolest part was probably when we all got to the bottom and turned off our flashlights. It was almost fully dark, but when you moved your hands or your fins around you would disturb all of this phosphorescent plankton which would glow and sparkle in the dark. Pretty cool stuff. On the deep dive you get something called Nitrogen narcosis which is your body's reaction to the Nitrogen gast in your bloodstream under pressure once you get down to 30m. You get a feeling of being slightly drunk and disoriented which was sort of cool. My instructor had me do a puzzle at the surface which took me like 35 seconds and then I did it again at 30m and it took me almost a minute and 45 seconds... Other than that I learned some navigation and buoyancy on the other dives as well.
A few of the people I had been hanging out with during the dives talked me into going to ANOTHER full moon party since our dive course happened to end the day before the party. It seemed like it just wouldn't be right to not go since I was only about 40km away... The night was fun as always, but it just wasn't the same. The novelty had finally worn off. The next day I booked myself straight back to Bangkok on a night bus and we got to watch Die Hard 4 for the fourth time this trip except this time they were blasting it in Thai... I have to admit though it was pretty funny seeing Bruce Willis speaking Thai though.
Since being back in Bangkok I've seen a couple of movies (Hitman which was terrible, and Cloverfield which was amazing) and met a whole bunch of really cool people who unfortunately are all going in different directions than Karl and I... No worries though since meeting people while travelling hasn't really been a problem at all. Now I'm just counting down the hours until my flight laeves for Hanoi, Vietnam so that I can meet up with Karl and we can go on the last legs of our trip through Vietnam and then into Cambodia before coming home on March 14th. It should be pretty sweet since we'll be in Vietnam for its biggest festival of the year called Tet which is their New Year. Apparently it gets pretty hectic, but I'm sure it'll be a great time.
Next entry from 'Nam.
