My Own Planet

'Tis the season...for stress
On a somewhat insane Black Friday outlet mall shopping excursion, I made the excellent decision to take advantage of a Bath & Body Works sale to buy some Cinnamon-Clove fragrance-diffuser bulbs. Now when I walk into my apartment, the whole thing smells nice and Christmasy, despite the fact that I have not been able to put up my tree or do any other sort of decorating yet.

Also, I have been able to successfully recreate an awesome dish that I had a couple of weeks ago in Connecticut--a shrimp quesadilla with goat cheese, scallions and cilantro. (Which marks yet another success in the realm of dishes that combine goat cheese and cilantro. Honestly, sometimes I wonder why I even bother eating things that don't have both goat cheese and cilantro in them.)

Sadly, though, these two things (and the six-pack of Blue Moon I bought the other night to wash down the aforementioned quesadilla) are pretty much the only bright spots in my bleak existence right now. For, my friends, we have entered what some like to call "the holiday season" but what I think is more accurately described as "that time of year when I misguidedly decide that it would be a good idea to try to augment my already packed schedule of three jobs, seven TV shows and working out at the gym nearly every day by also trying to be Martha Stewart." After last year's cheesecake-induced meltdown, I'm making a conscious effort to curb the Martha Stewart impulse a little this year. But that doesn't change the fact that my job is twice as stressful now than it was last year, that I managed to gain 3 pounds over the week of Thanksgiving (adding to the 7-8 pounds I was already trying to lose and necessitating even more time at the gym), and that I'm still way behind on at least three of those seven shows (making me probably the only TV lover who's thrilled about the writer's strike). All in all, I'm not sure I'm going to come out ahead this year. If you don't hear back from me by January, send reinforcements.

Most expensive. Hot chocolate. Ever.
What follows is the tale of how I spent $40 on a cup of hot chocolate.

OK, except not really. It's more like the tale of how I was supposed to leave this one little town in northwest Connecticut at 11:00 to drive an hour to the Hartford airport in order to catch a 1:30 flight home, only at 10:30, I decided that I absolutely had to have another cup of hot chocolate from this divine Belgian chocolate shop in another little town in northwest Connecticut, which was at least 30 minutes in the opposite direction and therefore added a good hour onto my travel time to the airport, which, when combined with the fact that I also decided to take a shortcut that turned into a long-cut thanks to stoplights and traffic and lots of two-lane roads with slow speed limits, and additionally got a little lost in downtown Hartford, meant that I arrived at my gate six minutes after the plane was supposed to depart and they wouldn't let me on. Which means that in addition to the $4 that I actually paid for the hot chocolate, I also had to pay $36 to upgrade my ticket so I could get on the next flight. So there you go; $40 cup of hot chocolate.

But let me just say that if ever there were a cup of hot chocolate worth $40? This would be it. It was the best hot chocolate I've ever tasted. It might be the best anything I've ever tasted. If ever you find yourself in or near Kent, Connecticut, you simply must stop by Belgique for a cup of this hot chocolate. You will not be sorry. Even if you miss your flight and have to pay a $36 upgrade fee.

Anyway, if this does indeed count as the most expensive cup of hot chocolate ever, then the dinner I had later that evening with Autumn would probably win the prize for most expensive dinner ever, coming in at around $550. Although again, the majority of that was not spent on food, but rather on a post-dinner purchase of plane tickets to London over President's Day weekend. We'll only be there from Saturday morning until Monday evening, but by my count, that's plenty of time to do all the things I want to do, including shopping on Oxford Street, eating an omelet and chips at the West End Kitchen, having a drink at Cafe Society and, with any luck, tracking down Tim, my crushworthy former English professor. Cheers!

Saturday, 11.3: Bangkok to DC
After only a few hours of sleep, Bri’s phone rang at 3:30 in the morning—it was my dad, our pre-arranged wake-up call. We tried to be quiet while getting ready so we wouldn’t disturb the people who were sleeping in the bunk beds outside our room (and had nothing but a semi-opaque curtain separating them from our middle-of-the-night exodus). The taxi arrived right on time, and the ride to the airport was unsurprisingly traffic-less. Once we’d checked in, we decided to make a stop at Starbucks to bookend the trip with frappuccinos before heading to our gate.

Somehow, we ended up sitting in different rows on the flight to Tokyo—Bri sat next to a gay couple from Chiang Mai in the back of the plane, while I was toward the middle in what turned out to be a free upgrade to Economy Plus. (I didn’t realize it until Bri greeted me in Tokyo with a slightly bitter, “How was Economy Plus?”) All I knew was, I could recline as much as I wanted since the only thing behind me was the emergency exit, and I could stretch out considerably since there was no one in the seat next to me. Needless to say, I slept for most of the flight.

Once in Tokyo, we again killed time during our layover by eating sushi. The flight back to Dulles was fairly uneventful—we both watched Sicko, and I also watched parts of Ocean’s Thirteen and No Reservations, but neither of them could hold my interest under the fog of jet lag. Back in Washington, it took us a couple of hours to get through customs, get our bags, and make it back to my apartment via the bus and Metro. Once there, we ordered pizza and settled in to watch our favorite traveling companion in Crossroads, but our jet lag overpowered even our love for Brit, so we called it a night around 7 p.m.

And several hours later, in the middle of a deep sleep, I managed to stretch funny and pull a muscle in my neck, making it impossible for me to turn my head even an inch without inflicting serious pain. I got up to put some ice on it, hoping the injury would resolve itself during the night, but once morning rolled around, it was still pretty painful. Since I was due to take Bri back to the airport in a matter of hours, I had no choice but to get her to drive me to the emergency room, where they gave me a shot to ease the pain, along with a prescription for muscle relaxers (which will no doubt come in handy the next time I inevitably do this). I mention this incident only because: a) When the emergency-room paperwork asked if I had been to Asia in the last 30 days, I could actually answer yes, and b) The fact that I survived a trip to Thailand, where I could have caught any number of debilitating and life-threatening diseases, without more than a scrape on the knee, yet managed to sustain an emergency-room-visit-necessitating injury the moment I got home, is just too ironic not to mention. Also: Where are those cheap Thai massages when I really need them? I think I might have to go back.

Friday, 11.2: Bangkok
Although we woke up a little later than we’d planned the next morning, we weren’t really under a time crunch (our only must-do activity for the day being to visit the Grand Palace and Wat Pho), so we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast on the lovely shaded patio at Refill Now. I had happened to pick up a copy of Wallpaper that was sitting the lobby to read while we waited for our breakfast, and as I was leafing through it, I came across a sheet of paper with notes on it—it appeared to be notes the brothers had made when they were first thinking of opening their hotel. It made me happy to see how successful they’d been in achieving their dream.

After breakfast, we caught a taxi to the Skytrain station, then took the Skytrain to the end of the line at the river to catch a ferry to the Grand Palace. Having ridden the ferry before, we became the impromptu guides for an older American couple who were unsure about which boat to take. (Of course, we’d done so much since our last stint in Bangkok that I was worried we might accidentally lead them onto the wrong boat. But we managed to identify the correct ferry and get to the Grand Palace.) When we first walked through the palace gates, we saw a huge line that we assumed must be the line for tickets. But as we got closer, we realized that it was the line for improperly dressed tourists who needed to borrow clothing, which we couldn’t help but scoff at, having come dressed appropriately in long pants, shoulder-covering shirts and close-toed shoes. (Even after such a short time in Thailand, I’d already become self-conscious about dressing modestly, making sure to always cover either my shoulders or knees—or usually both—when I went out, no matter where we were going.) Anyway, we spent probably about an hour wandering around the Grand Palace. It’s so massive that it’s the kind of place you could probably spend all day (or even multiple days) at, but for our two road-weary minds, all the glittery buildings were sort of starting to run together. So after doing a lap around the main complex and viewing the must-sees (such as the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, Thailand’s holiest shrine), we headed out by way of the restrooms so that Bri could go before we headed for Wat Pho. However, soon after had she paid her 5 baht entrance fee and walked into the bathroom, she reappeared—apparently the only toilets available were squat toilets, and someone had had a “bathroom emergency” all over hers, so she’d decided she could hold it a little while longer.

After stopping at Wat Pho to view the gigantic gold Reclining Buddha (which we both agreed was one of the coolest things we’d seen in Thailand), we decided to get away from the tourist crowds and immerse ourselves in the shopping crowds at MBK Center, where we could at least have lunch in air-conditioned comfort. However, getting there from the Grand Palace proved to be a bit of a challenge. Our first plan of attack was to take the ferry back to the Skytrain station and then take the Skytrain to MBK—which would have been fine, had we been able to get on a ferry. When we walked up to the pier, I noticed a sign saying that the river would be closed on Friday afternoons for Royal Barge practice. While the current date was not listed as a river-closing date, no ferries seemed to be stopping at the pier, so we decided to give up and proceed to plan B—a cab or tuk-tuk. This, too, should have been simple, but because we were in the tourist hot spot, we couldn’t find an honest cabbie to save our lives. The drivers of the metered cabs refused to use the meter on the grounds that traffic would be bad going to MBK (isn’t traffic always bad in Bangkok?), and the tuk-tuk drivers quoted us prices that were so ridiculous we didn’t have a hope of bargaining them down to a fair price. We ended up walking the entire length of the Grand Palace/Wat Pho fence, then turning the corner so we were no longer right next to the entrance—and what do you know, the first cabbie to stop for us agreed to use the meter. We were finally on our way (and, more important, finally in air-conditioning).

Once at MBK, our first order of business was eating lunch, so we headed up to the International Food Hall, which was just as overwhelming as MBK itself, with station after station offering the cuisine of a different country. Finally, we settled on Indian—a chicken curry with rice and naan. We finished it off by stopping at an ice cream place we’d seen on the way in for scoops of gelato. Afterwards, we wandered the “handicraft” floor for a bit to see if we could find souvenirs for Bri’s brothers (we didn’t—it was all crap compared to what we’d seen in Chiang Mai and at Lumphini), then went down to the clothing floors to see if we could find some good travel pants for Bri (we were much more successful on that front). Our last stop was the electronics floor, but at that point I was getting a little overwhelmed and had to sit down and rest while Bri made her way through the shiny maze of fake cell phones and “iPop”s.

After all that craziness, we were both jonesing for one last Thai massage. There was apparently a spa on the top floor of our hostel, but when we went up to check it out, we found the room stuffy and deserted. We headed down to the front desk to see if we could find one of the brothers and figure out how it worked, but they were nowhere to be found. While we were hanging out in the lobby, though, we struck up a conversation with an Australian guy, who recommended that we go to the Health World spa instead, where we could get a two-hour massage for 450 baht (about $13). He’d been there the day before and assured us it was great. He happened to be waiting for a cab to the Skytrain station, and offered to drop us off at Health World, which was on the way.

That sounded good to us, so we wasted no time in jumping in the taxi…with a driver who was apparently the craziest taxi driver in all of Bangkok, which is quite a feat. When we told him our destination (the Ekamai Skytrain stop), he kept yelling, “Ekamai! Ekamai!” That is, until he became agitated with some pedestrians standing in his way and the Australian guy taught him how to say, “Out of the way!” So then he interspersed that with shouts of “Ekamai!” pretty much non-stop until we finally arrived at Health World.

Fortunately, the atmosphere at Health World was much more serene. We signed up for the two-hour massage, and after a brief wait in the lobby, were ushered down a candle-lit hallway to the treatment room, where we were given the traditional poking and prodding for two full hours. The girl at Health World didn’t get quite as acrobatic as the one in Chiang Mai, but there were still a few moments of the massage that were more painful (or ticklish) than relaxing. However, she capped it off with an absolutely awesome scalp massage, so I ended up feeling quite blissful by the end.

I had originally wanted to end the trip by visiting a rooftop bar at one of the city’s fancy hotels, but it was pretty late by the time we left Health World, and our backpacker wardrobes weren’t exactly suited for fancy hotels, anyway. In the cab on the way back to the hotel, we had passed a small night market with a bunch of food vendors, so we walked up the road to check it out. However, we couldn’t really identify any of the food, and the night before a 20-hour plane ride didn’t seem like the best time to be culinarily adventurous, so we decided to head back to the hostel and have dinner there. As we were dining (and downing our last Thai beers of the trip), our Australian friend came back, so he sat down and chatted with us for a while. Finally, around 10:00, we had to pull ourselves away, as our taxi was arriving at 4:00 the next morning, and we still hadn’t showered or packed yet.


Continue to Day 13, Bangkok to DC

Thursday, 11.1: Ko Lanta to Bangkok
Given my eagerness to get back to Bangkok, I wasn’t terribly grumpy about having to wake up at 6 the next morning to catch the ride that would take us to meet our minivan back into Krabi. I had settled my bill with Bamboo Bay the night before (it was less than $100, so fortunately I had enough cash on me to cover it), so I dropped off my key and headed over to Baan Phu Lae, where Bri was still getting ready and hadn’t yet paid her bill. Given that the kayak tour and most of our meals and drinks were on the Baan Phu Lae tab, we were a little nervous that we wouldn’t have enough cash to cover it. However, the Baan Phu Lae people assured us that our driver could take us by an ATM on the way to the minivan, and we could just give him the balance. Which is a good thing, because the total was way more than either of us had expected—just over 8,000 baht, or around $250. Such is the danger of charging things to the room. However, when we looked back over what all we’d done in the past three days, we agreed that $350 split between the two of us was a pretty good deal for our beach vacation.

Our minivan back to Krabi wasn’t nearly as crowded as the one there, but our driver was considerably more insane. When we got stuck in a long line at the first ferry, I was a little worried that we wouldn’t make it to the airport in time to catch our flight, but I needn’t have been, given that our driver was a speeding maniac. I saw him run at least two other cars off the road before I decided it would just be best to not pay too much attention and pray that we made it to the airport in one piece.

Which we did—although I can’t say the same for my backpack. When loading it onto the luggage cart outside the airport, I noticed a hole in one of the pockets that appeared to have been chewed by the mouse I’d seen exiting the previous night. Bri was still unconvinced, saying it had probably just ripped when being tossed on a flight, but when I reached into the pocket and pulled out a partially chewed deck of cards, it was pretty obvious that the mouse was the culprit. We could not get back to Bangkok fast enough.

While waiting for our luggage at the Bangkok airport, I put in a call to Refill Now, a brand-new hostel that I’d run across online that looked pretty cool. The guy I talked to assured me that they had a room available, so we hopped in a taxi and headed there. The hostel turned out to be exactly what I needed—clean and sparkling, with impeccable modern design. And the owners (two Japanese brothers who had previously lived in California) were wonderful, helping us get on the Internet (for the first time since we’d left Chiang Mai!) and showing us the best places to go shopping. I’d wanted to check out the boutiques at Siam Square (which is where all the students go to get trendy clothes), and they also suggested stopping by the Siam Paragon mall and then heading to the night bazaar at Lumphini Park, as we still had to stock up on a few more souvenirs for people back home.

The only downside to Refill Now was that it was located kind of out of the way in a residential neighborhood, which meant we had to take a taxi to the Skytrain station. But when we set off on our shopping expedition, we had the good luck of finding a taxi whose passengers were disembarking at the end of our street. Once we boarded the Skytrain, we recognized a girl from our hostel in the same car, and we chatted with her on the way to the Siam station. She ended up getting off the train with us, but we lost her in the crowds as we made our way down to the street.

I was looking for a soft T-shirt to wear on the plane home, and after meandering through the rows of boutiques for awhile, we came upon one that had neon-colored, graphic-printed tees on sale for 99 baht. We left Siam Square shortly thereafter, heading for the upscale Siam Paragon mall, where we thought we might be able to find some cheap noise-canceling headphones for the flight home. However, we took a wrong turn into the Siam Center mall (surely you can see how it would have been confusing), which seemed to be more of the same relatively expensive trendiness that we’d seen in Siam Square, so we didn’t browse too long. We did stop by Boots, where I picked up some much-needed after-sun lotion, and we also finally decided to see whether Black Canyon Coffee’s ludicrously high opinion of itself was deserved, which we quickly decided it was not. (And believe me, by that time, we’d had enough iced coffees and teas in various places in Thailand to make a well-informed decision.) We finally made it over to Siam Paragon, where we quickly deduced that everything in the mall was going to be way out of our budget (it was the floor of luxury-car dealerships that tipped us off), but we took advantage of the swanky mall location to use the restroom before heading over to the night bazaar at Lumphini Park.

Things at the night bazaar were much more in our price range (i.e., really freaking cheap, although not quite as cheap as the Saturday night market in Chiang Mai), so we spent quite a while wandering through the aisles, picking up our remaining souvenirs and stopping in every single shop selling funky T-shirts. (Our Engrish bag, combined with my T-shirt purchase earlier in the evening, had set of something of a Thai T-shirt obsession.) After we’d done a few laps of the bazaar and fortified ourselves with French fries and beer (embarrassingly American, yes, but at that point I think we’d had just about all the Thai food we could handle), we got in the taxi queue to get a ride back to Refill Now. Because the hostel’s location was so obscure, I had a map with me that I’d printed out before we left home. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to do much for our taxi driver…after scrutinizing it for a little while, he called the guy running the queue over to have a look at the map (borrowing his glasses in the process so he could get a better look at it). Finally they managed to figure out where we were going—well, sort of. In what would soon become standard for every taxi we took back to the hostel, our driver managed to find the main street it was off of, but not the side street it was actually on. So we’d have to do what we did that night: keep a lookout for the building as we drove down the street, and as soon as we saw it, yell for the driver to stop, get out of the taxi, and walk back down the street to the hostel. (Not the most perfect system, but it seemed easier than actually having to direct the driver to the hostel’s driveway.) It was pretty late by the time we got back, so we went right to sleep in preparation for our big day of Bangkok sightseeing the next day.

Continue to Day 12, Bangkok

Wednesday, 10.31: Ko Lanta
The next morning, I again woke at a reasonable hour (because the sun set and came up so early in Thailand, my internal clock was a lot more conscientious on vacation than it normally is; go figure). I had breakfast at my resort (I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, so there was no more pregnancy confusion) before heading over to Baan Phu Lae, where Bri was waiting for me, along with the driver who was taking us to meet the kayak tour. As soon as we got out on the dirt road, we saw (or rather, felt) the effects of the previous night’s rainstorm—gigantic ruts. In some places, the road looked almost impassible, but somehow our driver managed to navigate the sudden ditches, and we bumped our way along to where the road was paved, where we transferred into the kayak company’s truck.

Although Bri had specifically asked about a trip through Seaborn Ventures (recommended by our guidebook) the previous day at Baan Phu Lae, they had booked us instead with Lanta Kayak, which pissed us off a little because Bri had been lead to believe that we were indeed going with Seaborn Ventures. But after seeing the Lanta Kayak slogan on the staff members’ shirts (“We care about your holiday”), we figured we’d be fine. We set off down the road, stopping at a super-posh resort to pick up a German couple, then at a newspaper office to pick up an older Thai woman who turned out to be the German couple’s guide for the day. Soon, the truck stopped at a canal in the middle of a mangrove forest, and we walked along a slightly rickety wooden walkway to a dock where several longtail boats were tied up. One of the Lanta Kayak guys explained to me and Bri that we would ride in the longtail boat first, stop off to feed some monkeys, then travel on to Ko Talabeng for kayaking, then ride the longtail over to Ko Bubu for lunch and some swimming. I noticed a distressing lack of snorkeling in this itinerary, which was the main reason I’d wanted to go on such a tour, and when I asked the guy about the possibility, he said that we could take some masks with us, but it was doubtful that we’d be able to get in any good snorkeling. I was pretty disappointed (snorkeling was one of the things I’d been looking most forward to when planning the trip), but there wasn’t much I could do about it at that point, so I told myself that seeing monkeys would have to make up for seeing fish.

Which it kind of did—I’d never seen a monkey outside a zoo before, and while there was something sort of zoo-like about how the monkeys all congregated in this one particular spots because they knew that boats of farangs would inevitably stop and feed them bananas, it was still pretty cool. Well, until the monkeys started trying to board our boat. I wasn’t really feeling that. Fortunately, they stayed on the roof, although one of them did poop onto the railing in a spot where Bri just happened to put her hand while trying to get a better angle for shooting a video. After the Thai kid who was with us had distributed all of the bananas from his bag, we continued toward the ocean and Ko Talabeng.

As we pulled up to where we would put in the kayaks, I could only marvel at how gorgeous the scenery was—the island was basically a huge limestone formation rising out of the bright green ocean, with a few deserted, unspoiled sandy beaches scattered here and there. We pulled up to one of the beaches and disembarked from the longtail, and Bri and I pulled on our lifejackets and got our stuff into dry bags while our longtail driver and guide unloaded the kayaks. Bri and I rode in one kayak, while our guide rode in another by himself. He led us all the way around the perimeter of the island, pointing out wildlife (including what looked like a brown-and-white-polka-dotted jellyfish), letting us paddle into a few caves (in the first one, he tried to wake up the bats, until Bri and I assured him it was just fine to let them sleep) and take a couple of photo-op pit stops. The coolest thing we saw, though, we didn’t have a chance to capture on film—while paddling around the back side of the island, an enormous sea turtle swam by, only feet away from our kayak. By the time we both had a chance to marvel at the turtle, it had already disappeared down into the emerald-green depths.

By the time we had circled around to the pull-out location (a gorgeous beach that I probably could have lounged on all day, if not for my horrible sunburn), we were more than ready for lunch, which was next on the agenda. First, though, we had to ride over to Ko Bubu (needless to say, we had tons of fun saying “Ko Bubu” in a Yogi Bear voice), an island in the bay between Ko Lanta and the mainland, where the water was a little clearer (though still quite green) and very calm. We met back up with the German couple, who had spent their time exploring Ko Bubu with their guide. As we feasted on shrimp fried rice, we exchanged travel stories. (All I can really remember now is that they mentioned that their room had been invaded by a lizard, an occurrence we’d already had plenty of times. Bri and I later looked up the resort where they were staying and discovered that it cost something outrageous, like $500 a night, which in my mind should probably buy you a little more lizard protection. But anyway.) After lunch, I made a halfhearted attempt to snorkel but soon gave up when I realized that, even though I could see through the water at Ko Bubu, there was really nothing to see. Instead, Bri and I just swam for a little while, then walked along the shore until it was time to leave.

Tired and windblown, we pulled back into the dock, where the German couple’s guide gave us a pomegranate to eat on the way back to our resort. Once we’d dropped them off, we continued down the road until it turned into dirt, where we parked and waited for our ride to come from Baan Phu Lae. Only it never actually materialized, so finally the people from Lanta Kayak just sent us off in the back of a pickup truck that was going that way anyway, where we tried our best not to be thrown out as the bumpy road sent us jostling around. By the time we got back, the sun was just starting to make its descent and, even though we were both tired after the kayaking adventure, we decided that we should go for one last swim. Apparently late afternoon is a popular swimming time for the locals, because the beach was packed (well, relatively speaking). I indulged in what had become my new favorite ocean activity: diving into a wave and doing a flip just as it crested. (Seriously, you should try it some time. So much fun!) A couple of the Thai guys who were swimming near us saw me doing this and tried to attempt it, too, but they were having some problems flipping all the way over, so I motioned to them that they should use their arms to help propel them. This appeared to do the trick, and thus the Clare-and-Bri-patented technique of wave-flipping was passed on to a new country.

We had intended to swim until sunset, but the lower the sun got, the colder we became, so we decided to call it a day and head over to Baan Phu Lae for an early dinner. While eating more spicy seafood (I don’t think I’ve ever eaten as much squid in my life as I did those three days at the beach) and washing it down with elaborate fruity cocktails, we finally got to witness the famous Ko Lanta sunset. After dinner, Bri walked me back over to Bamboo Bay so she could borrow a magazine from my stash. As soon as I walked into my bungalow and turn on the light, I saw something scurry across the floor and dart out a hole in the corner of the room. I told Bri what I’d seen, and she assured me it was probably just a lizard, although my instincts (pretty well-honed at this point, let’s be honest) told me it was a mouse. Still, as I’d actually seen it leave the bungalow, I didn’t really have anything to worry about—although that only added fuel to my desire to leave the rustic-ness of the beach behind and get back to the civilization of Bangkok. When my mysterious night visitor was even more vocal that night (although the fact that I had not yet been attacked had made me a little more nonchalant about the noise), and when, just before dawn, I heard noises that had me convinced a bat was trying to break into the bungalow, that desire was pretty much cemented.

Continue to Day 11, Ko Lanta to Bangkok

Tuesday, 10.30: Ko Lanta
When I awoke the next morning, I was happy to see two things. One, that the large animal I had feared I would find in my bungalow upon waking was nonexistent, and two, that the sun was shining. The latter compelled me to drag myself out of bed at a fairly early hour, since Bri and I had agreed to meet at Baan Phu Lae at 9:00 to head to the beach. I pulled on my bathing suit, slathered on some sunscreen and topped off the ensemble with the long, floaty dress that I’d bought at Target specifically for this trip. I knew the dress wasn’t particularly flattering (which is why I had relegated it to a beach cover-up), but I was about to find out just how unflattering it actually was when I headed down to the Bamboo Bay restaurant for breakfast.

I sat down at my usual table, pulling a book off of the nearby bookshelf to read while I ate, and when the waitress came back to take my order, she took one look down at my billowing beach cover-up and asked, pointing to my stomach, “You have baby?” I let out a surprised laugh and said, “No!” Her hands shot up to her mouth, and she immediately started apologizing profusely. (And also giggling profusely, once she saw that I was laughing, too.) As I tried to explain (“No, no! Big dress! Big dress!”) she grasped my shoulder, doubled over in a combination of laughter and embarrassment, repeating several more “sorry”s before slinking off to put in my breakfast order.

Even with all of this commotion, I still managed to arrive at Baan Phu Lae right around 9:00, only Bri was nowhere to be found. I walked up to her bungalow to discover that she was still asleep. While she got ready for the beach, I lounged in her hammock, making sure to keep my hands crossed over my stomach to dispel any further pregnancy rumors. Finally, Bri emerged from the bungalow, and I sat with her on the Baan Phu Lae patio as she ate breakfast. After she finished, we headed down to the beach, where the sea was considerably calmer than it had been the previous day. That fact, plus the presence of a few other people on the beach, had us feeling brave enough to swim out past the breakers and jump some waves. Of course, once we’d done that, we were feeling super-brave, and began flipping into the waves, body surfing into the shore—basically just goofing off and enjoying the fact that we were playing in the warm waters of the Andaman Sea while the rest of our friends were back at home, braving the cold and going to work.

After playing in the ocean for a little while, we played on the shore, taking crazy pictures of ourselves and writing messages in the sand. Finally, we were ready for lunch, so we headed back to Baan Phu Lae, where we scarfed down pizzas and fruit shanks. We both noticed that we had turned a little pink after our time out in the sun, but it didn’t look too terrible at that point. We were both sticky and gross after being in the ocean, so we decided to go our separate ways and chill out in our respective bungalows before dinner and the big dance party that was planned that night at Baan Phu Lae. Before I left, I went up to Bri’s bungalow to get her issue of Spin, as I had already exhausted all the fascinating reading material in my British tabloid.

As soon as I got back to my bungalow and had showered, I began to notice that my skin was not so much resembling a pale pink shrimp as it was a bright red lobster. Uh-oh. I spent the rest of the afternoon either napping or lazing around on my balcony, reading about Rilo Kiley, listening to my iPod and trying to jot down notes about our adventures thus far in the notebook I’d bought in Chiang Mai. As the sun started to go down, I began to think that I should start heading toward Baan Phu Lae…but no sooner had these thoughts entered my mind than dark clouds began rolling in and a thunderous rain started pouring down. It wasn’t too late at that time, though, and I’d heard that monsoon storms tend to peter out pretty quickly, so I figured I’d just wait it out and head over to Baan Phu Lae once it started raining. Only it kept raining (and thundering and lightning, which I’d erroneously assumed didn’t happen in Thailand), so hard that eventually the power went out. And so I did the only thing one can do when trapped in a dark bungalow in Thailand: I sang out loud along with my iPod, of course! (What were you thinking?) However, it soon became clear that an evening of singing to myself was not going to be incredibly thrilling, so once the rain had died down a little, I pulled out my umbrella and Bri’s flashlight and tenuously made my way over to Baan Phu Lae.

When I arrived, the restaurant area was packed, but through the candlelight, I could make out Bri sitting at the bar. The dance party had obviously been called off due to the lack of power (bunches of balloons still hung kind of sadly around the restaurant), but the atmosphere still hummed with the sort of energy that can only be created by people during a blackout. I ordered a beer, and Bri and I split a plate of spring rolls (neither of us were very hungry after our huge lunch only hours before) and chatted about what we’d done with our afternoons. (Turns out I wasn’t the only one singing out loud with my iPod in the dark!) After I’d put away about three Singhas, the power came back on, to much rejoicing from the assembled guests. Of course, after the three beers, I was pretty tired, and Bri was as well, so we decided to skip the dance party and head for bed--a wise decision, considering that we had to be up bright and early the next day for the kayak tour we’d booked.

Continue to Day 10, Ko Lanta

Monday, 10.29: Ko Lanta
Even though I was awake relatively early, I knew that, with her cold, our harrowing travel day had taken even more of a toll on Bri than it had on me, so I let her sleep until she woke up on her own, around 10 a.m. Besides, the day was cloudy and gray, so I wasn’t exactly missing much by not being on the beach. Once she woke up, we headed down to the Bamboo Bay restaurant to get some breakfast. While eating, we decided that, in spite of the overcast skies, we would head to the beach anyway.

As we walked down to the end of the beach that was safe for swimming (the area just outside Bamboo Bay had way too many rocks, even in high tide), we passed by Baan Phu Lae, which looked just as cute in person as it had on the Internet, and we regretted that we hadn’t been able to get in touch with them and had already told our parents we were staying at Bamboo Bay. However, while frolicking in the waves (which were still a little too rough at that point for any quality frolicking, especially considering that we were the only ones on the beach) and walking along the beach, I formulated a plan: Provided that the rooms at Baan Phu Lae were cheap enough (between 300 and 500 baht), one of us could stay there and one could stay at Bamboo Bay. That way, we could not only get the alone time we both desperately needed after spending every moment together for more than a week, but we could also charge our meals to the room at both places. Not to mention, we could also sort of avoid snubbing the Bamboo Bay people, who had been so nice to us the previous night. Bri thought this was an excellent idea, so on our way in for lunch, we stopped by Baan Phu Lae to check out one of their rooms.

As soon as we walked up to the restaurant/lounge area, we could tell that the atmosphere at Baan Phu Lae was more convivial than next door, where we were, as far as we could tell, the only guests. Bri had been feeling weird about being the only people staying at Bamboo Bay, so she decided to take the 500-baht-a-night bungalow at Baan Phu Lae, while I would move into a similarly priced fan room at Bamboo Bay. There was just one problem: Trying to explain the situation to the staff at both resorts, which we had to do many times, given that the staff members seemed to easily outnumber the guests at both places. Before long, I had developed a standard monologue that I could pull out every time I heard the inevitable questions of “Where your friend?” or “Why you not stay here?” It went something like this: “My friend is sick. She snores. [Insert exaggerated snoring impression here, which Bri didn’t seem to find as funny as I did.] I do not like to stay in the same room as her.” If only those particular phrases had been on my conversational Thai learning CDs!

Anyway, after we ate lunch, we explained the situation to the folks at Bamboo Bay, and they agreed to let me move to a fan room further up the hill. They couldn’t show it to me, however, because someone from the resort had taken the key into Krabi to have a copy made. They told me to check back in a little while, so I helped Bri move her stuff over to Baan Phu Lae. I also decided to walk around the grounds of Bamboo Bay a little to see if I’d rather take a 300-baht-a-night bungalow even further up the hill, but after making the trek up to the topmost bungalow and seeing the not-so-great view, I decided the extra 200 baht would be worth it. When I checked back with the reception desk later that afternoon, though, the key still wasn’t back, but they’d gotten someone to open the room for me, so I could at least move my stuff over. By the time I’d moved, showered, indulged in the luxury of taking all of my stuff out of my backpack, and spent a little time taking in the view on the balcony, it was getting close to dinner, for which I’d agreed to meet Bri over at Baan Phu Lae. I still didn’t have the key, and I wasn’t too keen on leaving all of my stuff (especially my camera and iPod) unlocked in my bungalow, so I decided to just lock the door on my way out, figuring that surely the key would have arrived by the time I returned from dinner.

When I got to Baan Phu Lae, Bri was already on the patio enjoying a Thai whiskey and coke, and I wasted no time in ordering a cocktail of my own. For dinner, I had seafood in a panang curry (my go-to curry at Thai restaurants back home), and it was the spiciest dish I’d had so far on the trip—thank God I had a steady supply of Singha beer at my disposal. After we finished eating, we had a few more drinks as the sun set (not that we could really see it behind all the clouds), after which one of the guys from the resort went out to the sand to do a fire-twirling show for the small group of Baan Phu Lae guests that were hanging out. It was pretty cool, but immediately afterward Bri confessed that she couldn’t really get into it because all she could think about was him practicing his fire-twirling routine and berating himself when he got it wrong. I dare say I will never look at a fire-twirling show the same way again. Soon after the show, the fire-twirler himself approached our table with a game of Connect Four and asked if we’d like to play. We played a few games on our own, and just as we were setting the game aside (I’d decided I was ready to head back to Bamboo Bay for bed), he approached us again. I told him I was getting ready to go to bed, but he asked me to play just one more game with him. I gave in, and he warned me before we started that he wasn’t very good. But after he swiftly beat me and then Bri, I was pretty sure we were in the presence of a Connect Four hustler. We were having fun being hustled, but as soon as a cockroach skittered across the patio and got a little too personal with me (as in, crawled under the cushion I was sitting on and looked like it was about to make a break up the leg of my shorts), I decided it was time to call it a night and headed back down the dark beach toward Bamboo Bay.

My first stop was the reception desk—I hoped that both someone would still be there, and that they would have my key. My first wish was granted; the second was not. However, Siyan assured me that he could let me into the room as long as the balcony door was unlocked. I told him it was, and then followed him up the path to my bungalow, where he, using some feat of gymnastics, managed to climb up onto my balcony and open the front door for me. I felt a little uneasy knowing the ease with which someone could break into my bungalow, but at least I wasn’t locked out.

Once I’d gotten settled in my new bed under the mosquito netting, I fell asleep pretty quickly…and stayed asleep until a few hours later when I awoke to a very loud noise. I have no idea what the noise was (I’d never heard it before and haven’t heard it since…well, not since leaving Bamboo Bay, as the noise happened, like clockwork, every night in the middle of the night), but I was pretty sure it was an animal, and I was also pretty sure that it was coming from inside my bungalow. I sat up in my bed with a gasp, terrified at what could possibly be lurking just beyond the safe reaches of my bed. But since turning on the light to investigate would require dislodging the mosquito net, I wasn’t about to remove the only barrier between me and my mysterious invader. Instead, I could only try to quiet my overactive imagination—and the more minutes that ticked by without a recurrence of the noise, I was finally able to drift back to sleep.

Continue to Day 9, Ko Lanta

Sunday, 10.28: Chiang Mai to Ko Lanta
Sunday was our designated travel day, set aside for the purpose of getting from the northern, mountainous end of the country to the beaches down south. By my estimation, we should have arrived at our resort in Ko Lanta at around 5:00 in the evening, just in time to see the sun set over the ocean and cap off the day with a relaxing drink. But then, what fun would it be if everything went according to plan?

At 6:00 a.m., Bri’s cell-phone alarm sounded in our dark room in Chiang Mai. Honestly, I don’t know if I was grumpy about having to get up so early after a terrible night’s sleep or relieved to finally be leaving the horrible Eagle Guest House behind—I suspect it was a little of both. Once we were both dressed and packed, we headed out into the relative quiet of early-morning Chiang Mai to flag down a tuk-tuk to take us to the airport. The first difference between Thai airports and their American counterparts was apparent the moment we stepped in the door: In Thailand, you have to go through a security checkpoint before you can even set foot inside the terminal. However, unlike the three-ring circus that American security checkpoints have become, theirs are still fairly simple: Just put your bag through the X-ray, walk through the metal detector and go. Our check-in at the Air Asia counter was just as effortless, and soon we had our boarding passes (which were little more than receipts) in hand and headed over to 94 Coffee to get some breakfast.

The rest of the boarding process was just as efficient as check-in had been—as a frequent American flyer, I was particularly impressed with how quickly and easily all of the Thai people seemed to board the plane. There was none of the dawdling in the aisles and fiddling with carry-on baggage that seems to make the boarding on most American flights take forever. Despite Air Asia’s notoriously bad on-time record, our 8:20 flight left Chiang Mai right on schedule and arrived in Bangkok just over an hour later. The bad news was that, since I had built in a sizeable cushion for our layover time in Bangkok (which was a good idea—although our flight arrived on time, the new airport is so massive that we never would’ve made the connection to the earlier Krabi flight), we had to sit and wait for about 30 minutes before we could even check in. Once we did, we headed downstairs to grab some lunch before making our way to the gate.

The one famous Thai dish that neither of us had tried yet was mango and sticky rice, so when we saw a picture of it outside one of the airport restaurants, our decision about where to eat was made. We both got bowls of spicy coconut chicken soup and an order of the sticky rice for dessert. Considering our airport location, the food was delicious (especially the sticky rice—I’m salivating right now, just thinking about it), but after spending a few days in Chiang Mai, we were in for some sticker shock when the bill came. After lunch, we did a little shopping in the stores just outside our gate, where we bought a couple of magazines (Spin for Bri, a hilarious British tabloid for me) to read while we were waiting for our plane. During the wait, I also tried to call a couple of the resorts we had scoped out before we left to see if they had any rooms available and could pick us up where the minivan would drop us off. I couldn’t get through to the resort we liked best, Baan Phu Lae, so I tried our second choice, Bamboo Bay, which was located next door. The woman I spoke to assured me that they did have a fan room available, so I told her that we would be there around 5.

However, we soon learned that our flight had been delayed about an hour. Fortunately, there was a pretty entertaining women’s boxing match playing on the flat-screen TV by our gate, so that kept us entertained until it was time to board. While getting onto the plane, we happened to be in line next to a young couple, who asked if we knew how to get to Ao Nang. Even though we weren’t going there, I thought I remembered from my research that it was only accessible by boat from Krabi, and told them so. After we were seated, though, I decided to verify this information in Bri’s Rough Guide. The Rough Guide confirmed that, indeed, the only way to get to Ao Nang was to take a boat from the main pier in Krabi. It also said that the only way to get from the airport to the pier (which was also close to the 7-Eleven where my Let’s Go guide had told me the minivans departed) was to take a taxi, at a flat fee of 350 baht (about $10). To Bri and I, already suffering from what I like to call Southeast Asia Sticker Shock Syndrome, this was an exorbitant amount of money to pay for a taxi (never mind that, less than a week earlier, we’d paid 5 times that amount to get to Dulles), and we decided to see if the couple we’d talked to earlier would share a taxi with us. Of course, we assumed that all the backpackers on our plane would be armed with the same information and would also be trying to procure a taxi share, so we made a beeline for the couple as soon as we got to baggage claim. I explained the situation, and they agreed to share a taxi with us, but said they wanted to stop by the tourist information booth first.

I’m not sure where I gathered the idea that all travel agents and/or tourist information stands in Thailand are complete rip-offs, but let’s just say that by that time, this idea was firmly implanted in my mind, so Bri and I hung back and waited while the couple visited the information booth. They came back a few minutes later and told us that they were taking a bus straight to Ao Nang and therefore wouldn’t need to share a taxi. I shrugged skeptically, and we made our way toward the exit. By this time, most of the backpackers had dispersed, so Bri and I decided to just go outside to the taxi queue and see if we could find anyone there who would be willing to share. One problem, though: There was no taxi queue. In fact, there seemed to be no taxis anywhere in the immediate vicinity. After talking with a couple of American guys who seemed equally confused about the transportation options, I decided to go back inside to check on the bus the couple had taken, leaving Bri outside with the bags so we wouldn’t have to put them back through the X-ray machine.

At the shuttle bus stand, I found that we could take the same shuttle bus to the pier at Krabi for 90 baht each…funny how that wasn’t mentioned in the guidebooks, huh? I bought our tickets, and we boarded the crowded bus, which took off just moments after we got on. When we arrived in downtown Krabi, I was ready to jump off the bus and start making our way to the minivan departure point at the 7-Eleven. Only before we could take more than two steps, we were accosted by a travel agent who asked where we were going. I tried to just ignore her and walk away, but Bri told her we were going to Ko Lanta, and she said that she could sell us a ticket on a minivan for 350 baht each. My suspicion was already raised by the mere fact that she was a travel agent, and the fact that our books had quoted the price for minivan tickets at 250 baht pretty much cemented my ill will toward this lady. Even though this was a difference of only $3 or so, I had recently realized how much we’d gotten ripped off on our tuk-tuk ride the previous night in Chiang Mai, and I wasn’t about to let it happen again. But the travel agent was persistent, telling Bri and me that the last minivan to Ko Lanta was leaving at 4:00, and since it was already 3:30, if we didn’t buy tickets now, we’d have to spend the night in Krabi. That was enough to convince Bri, and although I was still pretty skeptical, I finally relented and let the agent sell us what she claimed were the last two tickets to Ko Lanta that night. However, after we’d purchased the tickets, I insisted on using our 30-minute wait to try to find the 7-Eleven, just to prove that we’d been ripped off. However, before too long we were heading down the wrong street, and once we got back on the correct path, we realized that the 7-Eleven was much further away than it appeared to be on the map. I decided that it wasn’t worth the trek—even if we had been ripped off (which I was beginning to think we hadn’t been—the travel agent told us that 250 baht was last year’s price, which could have been true since we both had 2006 guidebooks), there wasn’t anything we could do about it anyway. After eating an ice cream bar from a nearby convenience store and seeing a pudgy Thai guy at the travel agent’s in a “Sex Instructor: First Lesson Free” T-shirt, I felt a lot better.

I felt better when we got into the minivan, too—it was just the two of us, the driver and another Thai guy, plus a German couple and their teenage daughter, which, although it seemed to belie the agent’s claim that we had snagged the last two minivan tickets, at least meant that the van wouldn’t be too crowded. But of course, this was the day when nothing was as it seemed, and we soon stopped to pick up four male backpackers, filling the van to capacity. Or so I thought. Shortly after we picked up the backpackers, the van pulled over on the side of the road, and two Thai Muslim women, one of which was carrying a small baby, squeezed in. So, to recap, in a relatively small van, we were carrying the driver, his friend, four backpackers, me, Bri, a German family, two Muslim women and a baby. It was clearly going to be a long ride, so I put on my iPod and settled in.

It was dark by the time we got to the first car ferry, and the driver motioned for everyone to get out of the van while we waited in line to get on. We hung out at a makeshift convenience store on the curb, where Bri and I struck up a conversation with the Canadian guy who had been sitting next to us in the van. We all got back in to drive onto the ferry, then piled back out as we crossed the water. Getting out of the crowded van seemed like a good decision until tons of black exhaust from the ferry began pouring out near where we were sitting, and Bri and I had to dart through the cars to the other side of the boat so we could breathe again. We finally docked on the other side of the bay and returned to the minivan for a short drive to the next car ferry.

Knowing that we were getting closer to Ko Lanta, I decided to call Bamboo Bay and see if I could arrange a place for them to pick us up. I spoke to the same woman as earlier, but this time she insisted on speaking to the driver so that she could tell him where to meet us. Given that we were sitting several seats back from him and that he was already driving erratically at best, I wasn’t sure it was a wise decision to just pass him our phone. I told her I didn’t think I could get him the phone, so she asked to speak to another Thai person in the van. I tapped the shoulder of the Thai guy sitting in front of me and pointed to the phone. He looked confused, so I pulled out the only Thai phrase my tired brain could muster: “Pasa angrit?” or “English?” He nodded, so I explained the situation to him and handed him the phone. He chatted in Thai for a few minutes, then handed the phone back to me. But when I put it up to my ear, there was no one there. I tried to ask him what the lady at Bamboo Bay had said about where we should be dropped off, but he just looked at me, confused. Even though our cell-phone battery was almost dead at that point, I had no choice but to call the lady at Bamboo Bay back and get the story from her, since clearly this guy either didn’t understand English or had no intention of helping me. When I spoke to her again, she immediately asked to speak to a Thai person. “I just put a Thai person on the phone with you—what did he say?” I asked. She responded by asking again to speak to a Thai person, and I repeated my inquiry. We went back and forth like this for a while before I realized that it wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I turned around and just handed the phone to the Muslim woman in the seat behind me. She chatted with the Bamboo Bay lady for a while before handing the phone back to me. Fortunately, the woman was still on the phone this time, and she told me that they would meet us at Lanta Sunset. Only my travel-addled, culture-shocked brain was so wracked at that point that she had to repeat it about 10 times before I could understand that the words she was saying were English and not Thai (and even then, I wasn’t completely sure). I was already at my wit’s end, so it didn’t make things any better when the four Thai people in the van, who up to that point had been pretty quiet, began talking loudly to each other and laughing. Given their liberal use of the word “farang,” I was pretty certain that I was the subject of their conversation.

While waiting for the second car ferry, Bri managed to cheer me up slightly by playing Abba and Britney Spears for me on her iPod, but my joy was short-lived when we finally landed on Ko Lanta. I still wasn’t sure that I had the correct name for our meeting spot, and as we dropped off the backpackers at their resort, I turned to the German family to ask where they were staying. They told me they’d booked at Baan Phu Lae through the travel agent, adding that the resort was picking them up. The fact that they seemed to be so confident about their meeting place only added fuel to my nerves, but I was calmed a little by the fact that, when I told the driver to drop us off at Lanta Sunset, he seemed to recognize this location. We drove a little further down the road before pulling beside, as far as I could tell, nothing that said Lanta Sunset. But maybe “Lanta Sunset” is a landmark only known to the locals, because the Bamboo Bay truck was definitely there. Bri and I climbed out of the van, claimed our luggage and got ready to drive off with the guys from Bamboo Bay…except the Germans had also gotten out of the van, claimed their luggage and were trying to get the Bamboo Bay guys to give them a ride, which they refused to do on the grounds that the Germans weren’t staying at Bamboo Bay. Which, although the resorts were right next to each other and they were going that way anyway, seemed pretty reasonable to me. Really, I was just pissed that after everything I had been through to try to arrange this ride back to the resort, the Germans were just going to swoop in and try to claim it, too, even though minutes before they had acted so sure about how they were getting to their resort. But my attempts to explain the subtle differences between the words “Baan Phu Lae” and “Bamboo Bay” (really, whose idea was it to give two resorts located right next to each other on a remote bay such similar names?) fell on deaf ears, as did the efforts of the Bamboo Bay guy (whose name I found out later was Siyan) to keep the Germans out of the truck. They just piled right in with their bags, so we had no choice but to take them with us.

Fortunately, a mile or so down the road, we spotted their actual transportation, so Siyan and Nik (who was driving our truck) transferred them into the Baan Phu Lae truck. After a quick stop at the 7-Eleven (during which I asked Siyan whether Thai people called 7-Eleven “Jet-Sip-Et” since those are the Thai words for seven and eleven; they do not), we finally arrived at Bamboo Bay at around 9:00. The lady I had talked to on the phone (whose name I either didn’t get or don’t remember) greeted us at the restaurant/reception area and immediately brought us plates of shrimp fried rice (and a beer for me), which were quite welcome considering that our last meal had been way back at the Bangkok airport. Although I had asked for one of the 300-baht-a-night fan rooms when I had talked to her on the phone, she insisted on putting us in the 900-baht air-con version, explaining that the fan rooms were further up the hill and that we wouldn’t want to climb all the way up there. The price (around $26) seemed completely exorbitant to us after paying 240 baht (about $7) for our rooms in Chiang Mai (not to mention that we didn’t even want the air conditioning in the first place on account of Bri’s cold), but we were too exhausted to argue. Siyan and Nik helped us carry our bags up to the room, and Bri immediately fell into bed, while I plugged in the cell phone so we could call our parents and let them know that we’d arrived safely. But as soon as the phone began to charge, I noticed that we weren’t getting a signal. I let the battery fill up a little more, then unplugged the phone and took it down to the driveway to see if the signal would be better there. It was still nonexistent, so I walked over to the reception desk to see if I could find out what was going on. I had clearly interrupted Siyan and Nik’s bedtime preparations, as they were both only wearing towels when I arrived, but I knew I couldn’t go to bed without calling home first. Nik informed me that the SIM card we were using, Happy, did not get service in this part of Ko Lanta, but he told me I could use the resort phone to call and charge it to the room. I was a little worried about how much that would cost, but at that point, I didn’t have another choice. I gave him my parents’ number, and had a quick conversation with my mom to let her know that we were staying at Bamboo Bay, and that they would have to call us there if they wanted to reach us. By the time I got back up to the room and got ready for bed, Bri was already snoring away, so I took out my earplugs and tried to make the best of it. I managed to sleep pretty well until the light started to come up in the morning, and by then the combination of her snoring and the stuffiness of the room due to not being able to run the air conditioner or open the windows (there were no screens or mosquito netting) finally got to me, and I headed out to the balcony to doze for a few more hours. Once I got my first good look at the mist rising over the hills and the green sea rolling in over the rocks, I knew that all of the trouble to get to Ko Lanta had been worth it.

Continue to Day 8, Ko Lanta

Saturday, 10.27: Chiang Dao to Chiang Mai
Bri’s parents called to wake us up the next morning at 7 so that we wouldn’t miss our elephant/rafting tour. I’m not sure why they thought we needed so much time to get ready, since we weren’t due to leave until 9:30, but once I was awake, I couldn’t get back to sleep. I was still thinking about the convenience-store woman and the baht we owed her, so I decided I’d take an early-morning walk down the road and deliver it to her.

It proved to be a good decision (although the woman seemed totally nonplussed when I showed up with the missing baht), as it allowed me to witness the town as it was just waking up. I got more than a few stares from people as I passed by (a common occurrence in Chiang Dao, where the farangs are obviously few and far between), particularly from a little girl who was walking with her mom, who stared even more intensely when I tossed a cheerful “Sawatdee-ka!” her way. On the way back, I decided to take a detour along a road that I remembered seeing a temple at the end of on Wicha’s map. I found the temple, which was set back in the forest, and took a moment to enjoy the peace and marvel that I was spending my morning wandering around temples in the middle of Thailand.

Once I got back to the Nest, Bri and I headed to the dining area for breakfast, where we both ordered the “chef’s breakfast,” the highlight of which was a glass of “drinking yogurt” spiked with lime and wild honey. It was delicious. So delicious, in fact, that we probably could have stayed there all day, drinking glass after glass of yogurt with wild honey and lime, had our driver not arrived to take us on the elephant/rafting tour.

We drove for about 20 minutes, leaving the relative civilization of Chiang Dao for the really rural Thai countryside. For some reason, I had thought we’d be going to the Chiang Dao elephant camp, so I was kind of surprised when we just sort of pulled off onto a dead-end dirt road in the middle of some pastures, where there were several cows to be seen, but certainly no elephants. We were at some sort of pavilion, but the only things inside were a) a really old guy who didn’t seem too concerned that we were there, and b) a calendar with a topless Thai girl on it. There was at least a platform in the field behind us that looked like it might be used to get on and off an elephant, so that seemed like a good sign. Not really knowing what else to do, Bri and I sat down at the table in the pavilion to wait for the elephant to arrive.

While we waited, our guide decided to get up on the platform and antagonize the cows in the neighboring field across the stream by mooing at them, which in Thai sounded more like “Buuuaaaaaa!” Naturally, Bri and I cracked up at this, and our driver seemed pretty pleased with his comedic prowess. Next, he went over into the bushes near the pavilion and began hacking into something with his pocketknife. A short while later, he presented us with sticks of sugar cane and showed us how to eat it by biting off a huge chunk, sucking the juice out of it, and then spitting the pulp into the trash. We couldn’t bite off quite as big a chunk as he’d indicated—although Bri gave it a valiant try—and therefore had to take smaller bites, which seemed to amuse him. I asked him how to say sugar cane in Thai (“awy”) and taught him how to say it in English. Before long, we could hear someone off in the distance singing in Thai. The singing got closer and closer until finally we saw its source: our mahout (the Thai term for someone who works with elephants, although I prefer Bri’s term “elephant whisperer”), who was steering the elephant toward us.

The elephant was much smaller than I’d expected, and I was a little bit worried that both of us in the basket might be too much strain on the poor thing. (I should probably stop here and say that I had a few misgivings about this whole elephant ride to begin with. The more research I did, the more I found out that the baskets they use to carry tourists, in addition to being really uncomfortable for the tourists, aren’t that great for the elephants, either. The proper way to ride an elephant is to sit on his neck, like our mahout was doing. But I couldn’t find anywhere in or around Chiang Mai that would let you do that, and I really did want to ride an elephant, so I figured that at least we could go to a place where the elephants weren’t made to perform tricks and could play and have a normal life in between carting tourists around in uncomfortable baskets. Basically, it wasn’t the ideal elephant experience, but it wasn’t the worst one we could have had, either.) Anyway. Our driver helped Bri and me onto the elephant, and we set off down the stream and then onto a dirt road, our guide singing the whole time.

As we were riding down the road, past people working in the fields (whose stares made me feel the most conspicuous I felt the entire time we were in Thailand), we suddenly heard the same song our guide had been singing, only…more electronic. Yes, it was his cell phone, which he promptly answered and began chatting away. After he finished that call, he made a couple others, which amused us to no end. No sooner had he hung up from his last call than a calf darted across the road in front of us, startling our elephant. Fortunately our driver was able to settle the elephant (who may or may not have been named Chile, judging by the frequency with which he yelled “Chile!”), and when we made some comments about the cow, he responded by laughing and saying “Barbeque!” This seemed to be his standard response to every animal we pointed out, including a mother chicken and some chicks that ran in front of us, as well as a piglet I spotted in a pen once we got to the village. As we veered off into the forest, the elephant whisperer not only took the opportunity to take more calls on his cell phone, but also to simultaneously roll and smoke a cigarette. Somewhere in all this, he also found time to jump off the elephant and take pictures of us. Unfortunately, Chile (let’s just say that was his name, OK?) decided to act up and not bend down to allow the elephant whisperer to get back on, which earned him some whips from a bamboo switch, which didn’t do a whole lot to quiet my remaining misgivings, especially considering that the blows were delivered in the immediate vicinity of my right leg. But by that point, the ride was almost over—we just had to go down and then up a fairly steep hill, where I managed to drop my camera bag (along with the shirt I had tied to it) and send it tumbling partway down the hill. It was then that I discovered the beauty of riding an elephant rather than, say, a horse, as Chile was able to pick up my bag with his trunk and deliver it back to me.

We disembarked the elephant at a Palaung village, where our driver was waiting for us…but first, the women and children of the village rushed out and unfolded blanket after blanket of handicrafts for us to browse. It was kind of a weird situation, what with us being the only “shoppers”—we were definitely getting the hard sell. In fact, I noted with some interest that the women and children spoke perfect English, but only when employing phrases that would be useful for selling. One little girl seemed particularly fond of the phrase “Buy one,” and she spoke it in such clear, unaccented English that I naturally assumed she would know some other phrases. So, as I purchased a small carving of an elephant from her, I asked her how old she was. She looked at me, confused, and our guide rushed over to translate. She told me “sip-song,” and I was finally able to use some of the Thai I’d learned to deduce that she was 12. After buying a few trinkets (and turning down all of the other trinkets that were being pushed upon us), we headed back to the truck to drive to the bamboo rafting location.

Once there, our driver handed us a small bag of fruit wrapped in tissue paper for a snack, then mentioned that we’d have a few minutes to wait if we needed to use the bathroom. I sort of had to go, and I figured that it wouldn’t be good to really have to go when I was on a bamboo raft in the middle of the river, so I made my way into the concrete bunker that was the bathroom. Given that riverside bathrooms are always pretty nasty, you can pretty much imagine what riverside bathrooms in Thailand are like. I began to have second thoughts, especially when I realized that I’d forgotten to tuck a packet of tissues into my camera bag, but I figured that at least I’d probably have better luck with this squat toilet than the one on the train, given that I was now stationary. But it turns out that my squat-toilet ineptitude is pretty much universal, and this time I had no choice but to roll up my pant legs to cover up what I desperately tried to convince myself was some of the water that seemed to be all over the floor.

After leaving our socks and shoes with our guide, we boarded the bamboo raft, which involved climbing down the riverbank and then walking over several other bamboo rafts until we got to the one that would take us downriver. Our guide wasn’t terribly talkative, other than pointing out the occasional snake or bird’s nest on the riverbank, and the scenery wasn’t nearly as spectacular as what we’d seen from the elephant, so we spent most of our time on the river talking about people from high school. Hey, why not? The guide poled us down the river in the manner of a gondolier for a few miles (“I think they could really benefit from the concept of a paddle” was Bri’s comment) before we met back up with our driver. The four of us headed back to the Nest, where Bri and I had one more fabulous meal before taking a songthaew back into town to catch the bus to Chiang Mai.

This bus was considerably more crowded than the one to Chiang Dao had been, so Bri and I weren’t able to sit together, but at least we managed to get seats—several people were standing in the aisles. It was on this bus journey that I discovered that Thais are apparently unaware of the concept of personal space that Americans hold so dear, as I spent most of the journey with a Thai woman’s butt basically on my shoulder. I also learned the purpose of a stop we made just outside Chiang Dao, where uniformed soldiers came onto the bus to check IDs. I started to pull out my passport, but the man sitting across the aisle from me explained that the ID check was not for farangs, but rather just to make sure that no one was trying to come across the border from Burma. After the bus started rolling again, he asked me a little more about our travels, and I found out that he had lived in America for 10 years. When he began to tell me about his time in America, the dangers of trying to learn a bit of Thai became apparent: He kept saying “Hua wai,” and I was wracking my brain to figure out what that might mean in Thai, but I just wasn’t getting it. Finally, he tried a different tack, saying, “America in the middle of the ocean!” Suddenly, it clicked—he’d been trying to say “Hawaii.” I still never figured out if that’s where he’d lived or if he just wanted to know if I’d been there (he was very soft-spoken, and the crowded bus was quite loud), but I felt relieved to at least have gotten past that language barrier.

While eating lunch in Chiang Dao, we’d made reservations at the Eagle Guest House in Chiang Mai, which came highly recommended in Tricia’s e-mails to Bri. (We’d wanted to stay at Julie’s again, but they wouldn’t let us make a reservation, and since we were arriving in late afternoon, we figured that all the rooms would’ve been claimed by then.) We took a tuk-tuk there from the bus station, and the girl at the desk showed us to a room just off the main reception/gathering area. We accepted it before we realized just how crappy it was, particularly compared to our plush accommodations at Chiang Dao: The furniture was shabby at best, and the mattress was like concrete, covered with only a scratchy blanket and pillows that appeared to be stuffed with cotton balls. But it was clean and had a Western-style toilet (I really didn’t need to be ruining any more pairs of pants), and since we were going to be leaving at 6 the next morning to catch our early-morning flight back to Bangkok, we decided that it really didn’t matter.

Once we got settled in, we developed a plan of attack: We would rest for an hour or so, then go have dinner at “Myrna’s,” which was within walking distance of the Eagle Guesthouse, then take a tuk-tuk over to the massage place near Julie’s for another awesome massage before heading down to the Saturday night market for some shopping. Only in the process of resting, we both began to feel a little sick to our stomachs (I deduced that it might have been from the sugar cane), which delayed our plans for a little while. When we finally set out for Myrna’s, we happened to pass a stand selling pad thai for 20 baht (about 60 cents) a plate on the way, so we decided to eat there instead. We hadn’t eaten any street food up to that point, mostly because we could never figure out what was what, so this seemed like a good place to try it since we knew what we were getting. It proved to be a good decision—the pad thai was delicious. After one plate for me and two for Bri (my stomach was still a little iffy; otherwise I probably would have gotten seconds, too), we flagged down a tuk-tuk to take us to Julie’s. However, once we made our way to the massage place, we saw that it closed at 9:30, rather than 11:30, like Bri had originally thought. It was just past 8:30 at the time, and since we knew an hour massage would force the people working there to stay past closing time, we sadly decided to press on to the market.

In retrospect, this was probably a good decision, considering the amount of shopping we were about to do. I’d imagined that the Saturday night market would be pretty small, since it only encompassed one street rather than several blocks like the regular night bazaar. Boy, was I wrong! I couldn’t actually tell you how big the market was because, after meandering down the street for a couple of hours, we still couldn’t see the end of it. Once we realized the length of the market, we quickly abandoned our “look first, buy later” philosophy and began snapping up everything that caught our eye. And I do mean everything: We bought silk scarves, shirts, pants, flip-flops, lamps, bags, jewelry…by the time we started to make our way back, we were each laden down with several plastic bags of various colors and sizes. Our decision to restrain ourselves at the night bazaar had proved fortuitous, as this market was much better—we were practically the only farangs around, so the prices were lower and the selection was broader. We even had to make a pact with ourselves not to spend any more money as we headed back to catch a tuk-tuk, which we soon broke when lured by some some sparkly scarves at a booth right next to the exit. When all was said and done, though, I only spent about $30 for all of my loot. While we loved everything we bought, the find of the night was definitely a tote bag featuring several hilarious “Engrish” phrases, which we picked up for 100 baht in what appeared to be a secondhand store. (We also had to break a self-imposed “no more bags” rule to get this one, but we’re making up for it by sharing custody of the bag—plus, we both loved it so much that it didn’t seem fair to just let one person have it.)

When we finally managed to tear ourselves away from the market, we tried to find a tuk-tuk to take us to the Eagle Guest House. This proved to be a bit of a challenge (we tried pointing it out on Bri’s Nancy Chandler map, but that didn’t seem to get us anywhere), so finally I just asked the driver to take us to the centrally located Tha Phae Gate, since we could easily walk back to the guesthouse from there. I suppose our brains were fried from too much shopping, because we didn’t even try to bargain with the quoted price of 60 baht, which was a total rip-off for so short a distance. Once we were dropped off at the gate, we had to walk across a rickety wooden bridge to get across the moat to the side of the city where our guesthouse was located. (I asked a Thai girl walking by if it was OK before we attempted it—the last thing I wanted was to find myself and my new purchases at the bottom of the Chiang Mai moat.) Back in our not-so-charming guesthouse, we modeled our new purchases before trying to catch a few hours’ sleep before we had to get up to go to the airport. It was during these crucial hours of sleep that I made two important discoveries: One, the cold that Bri was coming down with was causing her to snore at an increasingly louder volume, and two, the walls at our crappy guesthouse were paper-thin, a fact that became painfully apparent when some other travelers decided to ignore the posted quiet hours and have an impromptu party at the reception desk just outside our room. Somehow, I managed to finally drift off to sleep.


Continue to Day 7, Chiang Mai to Ko Lanta

Friday, 10.26: Chiang Dao
We were supposed to be in Chiang Dao (about an hour and a half north of Chiang Mai) at 2:00 for an elephant/bamboo rafting tour we’d booked, so we wanted to catch the bus there by noon, just to be on the safe side. So after eating a leisurely and delicious breakfast (banana pancake…mmm) at Julie’s, we headed out to the main road and caught a tuk-tuk to the bus station. We happened to arrive just as the bus was getting ready to leave, so we were able to buy tickets and climb on board just before it pulled out of the station.

The bus was…interesting, to say the least. First of all, it was very colorful with its green walls, silver ceiling and red light fixtures. And the seats were quite small—Bri and I were a bit cramped sitting in one of the two-seat rows, but after almost a full week of traveling together, we were more than used to close quarters by that time. We were also impressed by how efficient the bus was—although we made several stops to pick people up alongside the road, we arrived in Chiang Dao exactly an hour and a half after we’d left Chiang Mai.

Once we got off the bus in Chiang Dao, we could immediately tell things were different. Other than a couple of other backpackers who had gotten off the bus with us, we were the only farangs around, a fact that was all too apparent when we decided to get something to eat. We walked into a restaurant along the main drag where they had some sort of buffet lunch sitting out, but we weren’t quite sure how it all worked. Should we order from the people at the buffet? Wait for someone to take our order? What we ended up doing was sitting down at a table and looking around helplessly for a little while until finally a woman who spoke a tiny bit of English came over to help us. With her tiny bit of English and my tiny bit of Thai, we were able to order plates of chicken curry and rice, and bottles of water. When we got up to pay, we finally figured out how the system worked (there were little colored cards you were supposed to pick up when you came in, which you then gave to the buffet people, who would deliver your food to your table). Anyway. While we were eating, a songthaew driver had approached our table and offered to take us to the Nest, so after we paid our bill, we went across the street and got in his truck. We started along the road, but after about 100 yards, he stopped, got out of the truck, and came back to tell us something. I had to ask him to repeat himself several times before I realized what he was saying, but thanks to my considerable research, I finally realized that he was listing off names of hill tribes, and offering to take us on a hill tribe tour on our way to the Nest. I told him that no, we only wanted to go to the Nest, and he took us the rest of the way without any further upsell attempts.

When we arrived at the Nest, we headed toward the open-air dining area, where most of the action seemed to be taking place. It was there that we met Wicha, the owner, who dispatched one of her staff members to get our bungalow ready for us. We waited for a few minutes near the fire pit, taking in the unbelievably gorgeous mountain scenery, before being shown to our room. It was, in a word, fabulous. The beds were soft (a rarity in Thailand—Wicha later told us she’d had to special-order the mattresses), with plush down comforters, there was a little box on our dresser filled with handmade soap and shampoo, and the bathroom had an actual shower, delineated from the rest of the room not only by a small step down in the floor, but also by a shower curtain, which we already considered a luxury, having spent the past few days showering over the toilet, as is the custom in Thailand. (It’s an efficient system, I’ll grant you, but a messy one. It took me a while to adjust my perspective to view the bathroom not as a bathroom, but as a shower stall that just happened to have a sink and toilet in it.) Anyway, suffice it to say that it was love at first sight between us and the Nest.

There was one piece of bad news, though—apparently there had been some miscommunication about our elephant/rafting tour and, since the elephants were out playing for the day, we weren’t going to be able to go that afternoon. We rescheduled for the next morning, and after a quick drink (banana smoothie for me, iced coffee for Bri), we set out to explore the surrounding area with the aid of a hand-drawn map that Wicha had given us when we checked in. We started by looking for a “nature trail” that would take us roughly from the Nest to the area’s biggest attraction, the Chiang Dao cave. After initially heading the wrong way, we figured out our mistake and got back on the right path. However, the nature trail, despite being marked by a large sign, didn’t seem to be much of a trail. After a few feet of trying to push our way through the jungle-y undergrowth, we decided it didn’t seem worth the fuss and decided to just walk along the road instead.

First, we headed to a monastery at the end of the road that Wicha’s map assured us was very beautiful. Which it was, but it was also very, very small. In fact, I don’t believe we saw the actual monastery, but rather just a small temple outside of it. There seemed to be more to it behind a gate, but the gate appeared to have some sort of “Do Not Enter” sign on it, and we weren’t sure whether that pertained just to car traffic or also to curious and somewhat ill-attired American girls. We decided not to risk it, and headed back down the road in the direction of the cave. It was there that we met our newest friend, Hermie the Worm-Eating Dog, named after one of our favorite songs from our camp days, “Hermie the Worm.” When we first came upon Hermie, he was eating dried worms off the road. In fact, every time we came upon Hermie, he was either doing this or just sitting on the side of the road (probably counting the minutes until his next dried-worm meal.) Curiously, Hermie only seemed to like the dried worms, not the fresh ones—on a walk the next morning, I tried to point him in the direction of several live worms, but he was having none of it. He must’ve seen that Ron Popeil food dehydrator infomercial as many times as I have.

As we walked along, we noted that one of the landmarks on Wicha’s map was described simply as “Carl’s House.” We had no idea who Carl was or why Wicha felt the need to tell us the location of his house, but we had great fun arguing about which house might be his. (“Do you think that’s it? I think Carl might have a garden like that.” “No, there’s a blue polo shirt outside. Carl doesn’t seem like the type to wear a blue polo shirt.”) We got lost a couple more times trying to find various landmarks, and finally ended up at what the map referred to as a “1,000-year-old chedi.” Near the chedi, we saw a dirt road leading up into the woods, and we decided to follow it, thinking it might lead to the cave. Instead, it dead-ended in a clearing, where we saw a monk walking around amongst a pack of dogs. Bri wanted to take a picture of the monk, but wasn’t sure she should, which led us to make a Steve Irwin-style video (“Here we see a monk in his natural habitat…) of the moment instead. After making a few more random videos, we headed back out to the main road.

We passed a couple of ramshackle roadside convenience stores, and decided to stop at one to get a snack and something to drink. The total for two snack cakes and one drink came to 24 baht, but digging through our pockets, we could only come up with 23. I motioned for Bri to put the juice she’d selected back and pick out something cheaper, but before she could, the shopkeeper made a gesture indicating that it was OK. We thanked her and apologized and went on her way, but I felt bad about it. I mean, I doubt that one baht was going to make or break her, but I just felt that she shouldn’t be the one getting the raw end of that deal, you know? Anyway, we pressed on and finally managed to find the entrance to the cave, but by that time it was getting too late to go in. Instead, we just took a few pictures of the ruins and temples surrounding it and then started the trek back to the Nest.

As soon as we arrived, Wicha greeted us by saying, “Want to try some local whiskey?” What could we say to that but yes? She pointed us in the direction of the construction workers who had been adding on to the property—clearly they had just gotten off of work and were celebrating with a little of the aforementioned local whiskey. They poured Bri and me each large tumblers, then motioned that we were supposed to drink it all in one gulp. I looked at my tumbler—which contained at least three or four regular shots—skeptically, but they egged us on. I had to stop about three-quarters of the way through and regroup, but Bri downed hers like a champ, and even took another tumbler-full when they offered. I politely refused, however, as my throat and stomach were still burning from my first gulp.

Thanking the construction workers, we headed back to our room to take showers and kill some time before dinner. After a few games of cards, we decided to head for the dining area, where we had an absolutely amazing dinner. Seriously, this was the kind of dinner I usually only eat if someone else is paying for it, because otherwise I’d die of sticker shock when the bill arrived. But we were in Thailand, so the whole three-course meal cost less than $30 for both of us. We both had butternut squash soup and fresh bread dipped in olive oil and balsalmic vinegar to start; for her entrée, Bri had steak in roasted garlic sauce with fries, and I had blue-cheese-stuffed pork tenderloin in white wine sauce. And although we were nearly stuffed, we couldn’t resist dessert—chocolate cheesecake for me (it almost edged out the Pasta Factory, but not quite), and devil’s food cake with ice cream for Bri. Needless to say, there wasn’t much to do after dinner but roll our exhausted and food-comatose bodies into bed.

Continue to Day 6, Chiang Dao to Chiang Mai

Thursday, 10.25: Chiang Mai
We didn’t have any reservations in Chiang Mai, but we had a few places in mind where we wanted to stay, including Julie’s Guesthouse, a popular backpacker hangout. However, we had no idea what was the best way to get into town from train station, so when we spotted the Julie’s tout outside the station, we went with him. We shared the Julie’s songthaew (pick-up taxi) with a girl from Germany who had been traveling for six weeks. This was the first time we experienced a pang of envy at the luxurious amount of vacation time given to non-Americans, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last. Anyway, we arrived at Julie’s, where they had a double room available, but we’d have to wait about an hour before we could get in. So we killed some time at the Internet café down the alley, then had another breakfast at Julie’s, before we checked into the room and took much-needed showers.

After spending the night on the train, we decided that getting a massage should be the first order of business. We dropped off our laundry with the lady down the alley (who only charged 10 baht per kilo to wash and dry, which is the best deal we came across our entire time in Thailand), then headed to a massage place around the corner from Julie’s. For just 140 baht (around $4), we got our feet washed, had a delicious cup of iced tea, and then were poked, prodded and pulverized for the next hour until we could do little more than murmur contentedly.

Once we’d returned to a more lucid state, we set out to do a little shopping. Only it turned out that the shopping street that had sounded really awesome was actually sort of a dud. (Or it was once we found it, at least. We got a little lost on the way, thanks to two streets having similar names, and there being a Gecko Books on both of them.) Anyway, we decided to stop to have a bite to eat at what turned out to be a great little restaurant (now known to us as “Myrna’s,” because that’s what Bri mistakenly called it when we returned to Chiang Mai). We were just finishing up our meal (yummy pumpkin curry and a Thai iced tea for me) when we spotted this guy across the street wearing white Jerry Seinfeld sneakers and toting a Lonely Planet. Bri guessed that he might be Italian, but when he came into the restaurant and sat down near us, it was apparent that he was a fellow American. He struck up a conversation with us, during which it became obvious that his Lonely Planet was only for decoration, since he clearly hadn’t read any of it before setting out. Or maybe he just had really bad luck—either way, everything he described about his trip thus far was followed with a, “But I wouldn’t recommend it,” to the point where I joked that perhaps he should write a guidebook about where not to go in Thailand. (Later when we were rehashing the conversation, I mentioned to Bri that I thought he’d said he was on a business trip. She corrected me by responding, “No, what he’s on is a poorly researched vacation!”, which still cracks me up when I remember it. Because seriously, you guys, this dude was clueless. Hopefully he figured things out and his trip got better after we parted ways.)

Back at Julie’s, we decided to relax for a while before heading out to the night market. We remembered that, in addition to the restaurant/hang-out area on the ground floor, there was supposed to be a rooftop terrace with hammocks, so after having a beer, I decided to check it out while Bri napped in the room. Something about the combination of the beer, the hammock and the playlist I was listening to on my iPod finally lulled me to sleep. Unfortunately, though, it was one of those poorly timed evening naps where it just seems easier to go ahead and keep sleeping than to get up for a few hours—and Bri was having one, too. But we eventually dragged our tired, grumpy selves out of the guesthouse because we knew this would be our only chance to visit the night bazaar, and we didn’t want to miss it. Once we got there, though, I was suddenly ravenously hungry, so before we could do any shopping, we found a restaurant, where I ordered way too much food (pad thai and spicy coconut chicken soup—the latter was way better than the former).

After eating (the nap-induced grumpiness had subsided by this time), we headed back out to the market with our best bargaining game faces on. Fortunately, the first stall we stopped at—so I could look at a pair of green drawstring pants with Chinese characters on them—was being manned by quite a jokester. When he saw that we were looking at the pants, he came up and quoted us the price, saying grandly, “One billion baht!” We both laughed, and Bri pretended to reach into her purse, saying, “Oh, sure, let me just get that out!” He was quite fun to bargain with—every time I’d give him a lower price, he’d pretend to be wounded, and I’d do the same when he quoted me a higher price. We finally agreed on a price, and I bought the pants (which, in fact, I am wearing as I type this). We walked around a lot, but we didn’t buy all that much since we knew we’d be heading to the supposedly better Saturday night market upon our return to Chiang Mai. Once things started to shut down, we caught a taxi back to Julie’s and went to bed.


Continue to Day 5, Chiang Dao

Wednesday, 10.24: Bangkok
After a restless night (at least on my part), we woke up and partook of the delicious organic vegetarian breakfast at the Phranakorn-Nornlen (spicy mushroom soup, a vegetable omelet and fresh melon juice), then set out to try to find an ATM. The first one we came across wouldn’t let either of us withdraw any money, and the second one we found also denied Bri’s card. We briefly panicked before realizing it was Visa-only, so it thankfully worked with my Visa check card (and Bri was able to get a cash advance on her credit card). With money in hand, we set off for Thewet pier to take the Chao Phraya ferry down to the Grand Palace area. We knew we couldn’t go into the Grand Palace or Wat Pho because we weren’t dressed properly, so we just kind of walked around, trying to get our bearings. It was pretty hot, so we stopped for an iced coffee at this little riverside coffee shop that had a lovely view of Wat Arun (The Temple of the Dawn) across the river. After that, we decided to head back to the area around our hotel, because Bri wanted to look for some sunglasses at a nearby market, and I wanted to see the temple with the giant gold Buddha.

At some point while walking around, I developed a craving for mango, so when I saw a woman outside the temple with a big cart of fruit, I immediately walked up and asked for mango, only noticing the sign on the front of the card that said “fruit shank” afterward. As the woman began tossing the cut-up fruit into a blender, it became apparent that the “shank” was really a shake. (In one of the many conversations about “fruit shanks” that we later had, Bri admitted that she had seen the sign, but thought that “fruit shank” meant a hunk of fruit.) Anyway, because we had made a vow not to eat “fruit shanks” off the street because of fears about contaminated ice, we each took a small sip of the shank (which was pretty good, actually) and then tossed it out. I did find someone selling slices of mango (or what looked like a mango at first—it actually tasted more like an apple) on down the street, so I bought a bag.

We were both getting kind of hungry at that point, and still had about an hour to kill before we had to leave for the train station to pick up our tickets to Chiang Mai, so we wandered up and down the street outside our hotel for a while before deciding to be brave and just go in a place. Although we were the only farangs (foreigners) at the restaurant where we stopped, they did have an extensive English menu. I decided to forego the snake and serpent dishes, and ordered some fried rice. As we were waiting for our food, I ate a few more slices of mango/apple. I wasn’t eating the rinds, just in case, and they were slowly accumulating in my plastic bag. So I was happy to see what I assumed to be a small pink trashcan on our table, and I immediately tossed the rinds in. It wasn’t until our food came and Bri wondered aloud where the napkins were that I looked around the restaurant and realized that the pink trashcans were actually napkin holders! Embarrassed, I fished the mango rinds out of our napkin holder, trying not to attract the attention of the woman who appeared to be in charge.

After lunch, we walked back to the Phranakorn-Nornlen to retrieve our bags and took a taxi to the train station. After picking up our tickets and dropping off our bags at the luggage storage area, we took the subway and Skytrain to the MBK Center, one of Bangkok’s legendary shopping malls, to kill time before the train left and attempt to find a prepaid SIM card for Bri’s cell phone. If we didn’t want to be overwhelmed on our first day in Bangkok, hitting MBK probably wasn’t the best idea, since it’s pretty much the textbook definition of “overwhelming”—floor after floor of tiny stores, loud music and tons of people. But we managed to persevere, and ended up with both the SIM card and a cute new dress for me, bought on sale for 250 baht (about $7). On our way back to the Skytrain, I bought an awesome maple and almond waffle from a street vendor, and we hung out on the elevated platform for a while, watching the craziness of Bangkok below us.

Back at the train station, we grabbed dinner (and a DQ Blizzard for Bri) before boarding our train to Chiang Mai. Our private first-class compartment was pretty sweet; what was not so sweet was the fact that the only bathroom in our car had a squat toilet. If you’ve never used a squat toilet before, let me assure you that a bumpy overnight train is not the best place to learn. (Let’s just say that I was abundantly pleased to see so many laundry places when we got to Chiang Mai.) Other than my toilet issues and the fact that I still seemed to be unable to sleep, the train journey was pretty uneventful. In the morning, we were served a pretty gross breakfast, which we ate while we watched the lovely countryside of northern Thailand speed by outside our window.

Continue to Day 4, Chiang Mai