Satayday

It was time to head for Malaysia, so with a heavy heart we left Koh Lanta on a minibus for Trang, hoping to make it as far as Penang in one day. At Trang we got another bus and sat down. A fellow Englishman and I started chatting about the price of Pad Thai, and before I knew it we realised that we had spent most of our secondary school sitting next to each other as well. So here are a few pictures of Richard and I celebrating this unlikely meeting in Georgetown, Penang Island.

Malaysia does it's very best to make us feel at home, with 3 pin plugs, monuments to a portly Queen Vic, great Indian and Cantonese food, red post boxes and at least every second person speaking great English - they even named the town after a famous English lunatic. I was getting used to agreeing prices in Thai and learning new food expressions - I even had a stab at their alphabet. No such problem here - we are having to abandon our simplified, present tense, patronising English. My father obviously subjugated the locals well during his occupation in the 50s. They even wire things up like him, which is much safer than the Thais do, but with an excess of switches.

So after a hang over curing breakfast we took a walk round town. Town has more temples/mosques/churches per square mile than anywhere else, so we popped into the chinese temple. The blue house pictured belonged to a local chinese tycoon, Chong Fat Tze.

Towards midday, my body temperature and the outside warmth started to bid in a very dehydrating auction. I realised that here the sun has no qualms about boiling your head from above here and cowered in a covered market which Lou looked round while I tried to work out ways to cool down. We decided to go up Penang Hill - not very difficult as public transport here works superbly and there is a funicular railway to the top. I spent much of the journey persuading Lou that the train would not probably career down the 45 degree slope in the event of a failure, and it was well worth the views from the top. Just along from here is the enormous labyrinth Chinese Buddhist temple of Kok Lok Si. Here one can shop in a huge marketplace for replica football shirts and worship the buddha simultaneously. Far more noisy than the Thai brand of buddism!

South to the Islands

The journey to the south of Thailand was a long, delayed rail trip through rubber plantations, palm orchards and tropical storms. It started in Ban Pong, also the point where the Burma-Thailand Railway starts, and went south speedily past the mountains on the border with Burma to Surat Thani town. After arriving late we had no chance of leaving the ugly town, despite optimistic attempts by me to find a late bus, and constant nagging by taxi drivers to take us across the country for laughable sums.

After this setback, we decided to cut our losses and head straight for an island retreat to get as long as possible there before having to head to Malaysia. Another day's travelling gets us to Ko Lanta, where we have spent 3 days, the first of which was on the beach. I include a picture of our bamboo house by the sea, and some tropical scenes. The island is in the Andaman sea, and seems mostly inhabited by brown Muslim Thais, and red peeling Swedes (and some other europeans, but swedes love it here). We either get woken in the morning by a muezzin, or at night by music from the beach bar.

Yesterday we went touring the island on a moped, and visited the side of the island that hasn't got long sandy beaches, thus has traditional fishing villages, roads with occasional tarmac and mangroves by the sea. This will probably become developed soon though.

The sea life here is incredible, and today we broke the bank and went on a speedboat snorkelling on some islands south of here. Lou became intimately aquainted with the beautiful rocky coral gardens and required lots of iodine and a new pair of shoes to recover. I learnt how to use a pair of flippers and started chasing colourful fish around and picking up shells, thus also need some iodine. We bumped back to Lanta on the speedboat, driven by a Thai wearing an Arsenal shirt - which he assured me was only beacause his boss forced him to.

From Pai to the Kwai

Well, we headed into the mountains to to the home of Thai hippies in a place called Pai - where there happened to be a music festival on the night we arrived. This made getting a room difficult, but we still managed to find a room with a free pet (Permkroop the frog, pictured ready to jump out from sink overflow to welcome us). We started to get into the Pai vibe and explored the area, avoiding people offering expensive guided tours and enjoying the hills, waterfalls and hotsprings ourselves on bikes and a moped with nights on the town.

After this we realised that we had 'dropped out' for too long, and needed to head south sometime to eventually catch a flight, so spent a long day on buses to get to Sukhothai. This is an ancient capital city with temples and palace ruins spread around outside a newer town. Again we hired some rusty bikes for a laughable price and cycled around the ruins inbetween cold drinks and firey snacks.

We're now all the way down on the Kwai Noi River, and are going to travel up the valley on the railway tomorrow. The town of Kanchanburi has some large cemeteries of people who were forced to build the railway, whch includes the famous bridge just up the street which we walked across today - picture of a trains edging across very slowly to avoid knocking over the tourists. There is a very good museum here illustrating how hard the whole line was to build, and the stories of people forced to work here - and the view straight out of the museum over the large cemetery is poignant.

The next 'long journey' is to the weather beaten south of Thailand, which we have to pass to get to Singapore come rain or shine. The weather forecast points to the former so better keep fingers crossed and feet firmly pointed away from the buddha whilst touching his enormous hands for good luck:-

Eating like Ganesh

I had a very pleaseant and fattening birthday, featuring bagels, kebabs on lemongrass skewers, gin, thai fish cakes, red curry and terminating in a final course of heavy steamed banana pudding before a nightcap. When we recovered from this the next day we decided to head out to an elephant sanctuary to see how much weight mammals can put on. Not only did we get a chance to feel elephants close up and have their brissley trunks snort smelly breath in our faces while snatching bananas from other tourists, we got to see them do some strange excercises, including a elephant penalty shoot out, and painting. Lou and I weren't sure of the morailty of getting elephants to play football for tourists, or buting painting by them for 2000Baht. However we were very convinced by the complete medical advice on offer for caring for sick elephants, exactly which antibiotics to give them for most conditions and how big the IV needle needed to be. Mother would have been impressed by the artificial insemination and midwifery advice too. I had forgotten that elephants can extend their pregnancy from 12 upto 18 months if they want to pick an auspicious birthday.

Yesterday we moved our knowledge of Thai food from passive to active by going to a thai cookery school. This included learning some new vegtables and rices that we didn't know about at the market, then heading out to a cookery class for the practical. We each cooked 4 dishes: a soup, a curry, a stir fry and a noodle based dish. Pyrotechnic pictures attached, Lou doesn't appear to be enjoying the moment though.

If the weather reported in the South of Thailand wasn't enough to convince to stay in Chiang Mai, then this frieze from the Rig Veda (I think) in Chiang Mai's oldest Wat reminded me of the dangers of Thai seas in storms. It even looks like the Gods don't really give a toss about the drowning passengers. So we'll have to explore the mountains a bit and hope the weather improves before we visit the South, or put a lot more money in the collection at the Wat.

No more Kip, Long live the King!

From Loaung Probang we went upcontry by boat along the Nam Ou river. Rivers in Lao are not navigable in a western way, so the boat has to power up rapids and around rocks on the way. The boat was wooden and contorted itself nicely up the river though. The scenery, although it was cloudy, was magnificent. Another set of limestone teeth came up behind each other, up into the clouds. The rain started, but as we were getting wet from the river swelling as we went upstream it didn't really matter. We really were in back contry Lao, and the scarce people there were along the route were fishing and tending gardens on the banks. Occasionally kids played around in boats or on the shore, some of them even wearing clothes - obviously an adult thing if you live in the middle of nowhere. We only once hit a rock, which was enough to make the journey more exciting.

After a full day we arrived in Nong Khiew, a village on the river where we got a stop over for very little in bamboo huts overlooking the river. The village had enough people to have a bar, and we caught a sang thiew (little open sided lorry with seats in the back and floorspace for pigs/rice/?) to get away. Unfortunately we had dresed like we were going to the beach and got a nasty shock as the Sang thiew fought up mountain passes to get out of the valley. A strong breeze made me want to put on a pair of socks and a jumper, and we were relieved to stop in a village and watch a pack of dogs entertaining each other for half an hour. It was clear to see that they were all related.

After taking buses accross Lao and finding the same grim weather everywhere, we decided against trekking in the hills - I had to be convinced by taking a mountain bike up to see a Stupa only to get is so caked in thick clay like mud that the wheels no longer turned. So we have now escaped to Thailand and managed to change all our millions of Kip without resorting to money changers. A quick boat journey accross the Mekong got us to Chiang Kok, and there we saw delights such as traffic lights, ATMs and multiple paved roads that we hadn't seen for a while. The best part of being in Thailand is the endless choice of fresh food - and we stopped in a market to get a cheap lunch before heading into Chiang Rai, the nearest big town. I threw caution to the wind and spent a whole two pounds on Dinner - a large fresh barbequed fish with rice and tub of sauce of a strength that would make your eyes water by its mere smell. Another distinctive feature of Thailand is the general veneration of the King, whos bespectacled face is everywhere, and has a shrine in every bus station I visit.

Today is my 30th birthday, so good food is high on my list of priorities and Chaing Mai is a good place to tick it off. You'll have to wait for the full list of what I've eaten as it will require a separate entry! I leave you with a proverb I found in a temple this morning (pictured) and some evidence that I am adhering to it.