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Vacation #2: The Thai Islands

After volunteering in Thailand, hell-bus riding in Laos and frenetic Cambodia with my mom, it was time to relax. For those of you who think traveling for a year is a giant vacation, please refer to every other entry we've posted. Being the quasi-intelligent couple that we are, we had planned a couple of "vacations" within our travels so we don't wind up strangling each other in another fetid thatched shack on some mountainside in the middle of nowhere. It was definitely time for a little R&R, and we were in the right place to do it: a stone's throw from the Thai islands.

The last time we were in the Thai islands was on our honeymoon, so yeah, we've got some pretty good memories of the area. This time we wanted to get somewhere a little more remote, so we found a place on Koh Lipe, one of Thailand's southernmost islands close to the Malaysian border. It took a full day of travel to get there because it's off the standard tourist track, but after an early morning flight, a cab to a bus station, a bus and a four hour ferry, we arrived towards the end of the day to a spectacularly beautiful island with palm trees, long white sandy beaches, and brilliant turquoise blue water. Ah, paradise. With Koh Lipe being off the western coast of the Thailand peninsula we were a little concerned whether we would see damage from the December 2004 tsunami, but we were told that as close to the epicenter as it was, Lipe was spared because of the direction the waves traveled.

There are only a few places to stay on Koh Lipe, and most of the accommodation is pretty simple, like, grass huts with a hole in the ground out back. But we had found what was supposedly one of the finest places on the island, which it must have been, because they called it a RESORT. It was on top of a bluff with breathtaking views of the channel between Lipe and an uninhabited island belonging to a national park about a half mile away. Well, finest is relative to what else is available, and on Lipe, just having running water pretty much puts you at the top of the list. We had an individual bungalow with the unheard of luxury of air-conditioning, but I guess on Lipe they've never heard of sinks, because we couldn't find one in our bathroom, or anywhere else on the premises. Not to worry though, the hose that sprayed from the wall provided water, a lot of it, all over the bathroom and with the warm weather and all, it really didn't need to be hot.

Maybe the people of Koh Lipe are making every effort to defect to Jamaica, because a definitive Rastafarian feeling seemed to permeate the island. More likely, someone there figured out that backpackers think dreadlocks and reggae are cool, and now you can't get away from it. Within a few days, after trying every restaurant on the island and hearing every reggae song ever recorded, we decided to move a little closer to civilization, becoming a little bored with the sparkling blue water and endless supplies of seafood. Maybe it was because we knew this was supposed to be the vacation part of our travel, we wanted something with a little more comfort.

We chose to head over to Koh Lanta, an island off the west coast a little closer to the much more famous Phuket, and found another resort. This was more like it, a place we didn't even have to leave, with full days by the pool requiring a massive effort to relocate to the restaurant a few feet away at the end of each day. The place was apparently pretty popular with the Swedish, as it seemed the entire place was booked with them, so we had a lot of fun doing our best "Swedish chef" imitations all day. We spent the next week laying around by the pool, too lazy to go the the beach a full 30 feet away, watching sunsets and eating more seafood.

The last time we did serious beach time was in Myanmar, and as close as the two countries are geographically, they couldn't be more different. While the tourist infrastructure in Myanmar is really in its nascent stages, it is extremely well developed and westernized in Thailand, making it easier to get around. It's not like we could go off to the next town to see "real" island life because the whole place was pretty well developed. Being closer to Phuket, Koh Lanta had suffered marginal damage from the tsunami, but most of the damage had either been repaired or was under construction.

Of the very few things we actually did, one of them was to reconnect with our German friend Christian whom we had traveled with in Mongolia and had last seen in Beijing. He was in the area with his girlfriend, and after exchanging emails he surprised us by showing up at our hotel one afternoon. It was great to see him, and we spent the next day riding around the island on scooters and comparing funny travel stories. We ended the day over a long dinner and wished each other well, knowing we probably won't see him again for a long time.

Interestingly enough, after a few days we began to tire of the place. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that there was actually nothing to be experienced culturally in the Thai Islands. We were planning our next move onto Mauritius and Madagascar, and were so looking forward to a completely new experience we really wanted to move on. After about as much relaxing as we could take, we took a ferry to Phuket to catch a plane to Bangkok. We essentially went through Phuket as quickly as possible and made sure not to split up so I wouldn't be mistaken for a sex tourist. The island has become pretty much everything we don't like about overdevelopment, and from what we've heard, a lot of developers took advantage of the 2004 tsunami to rebuild at the expense of the locals. We weren't sticking around long enough to research the subject, and we got to the airport with plenty of time to sit around feeling sorry for the old German guys thinking that the 20 year old Thai girl on their arm actually liked them.

We returned to Bangkok and stayed at a nice guesthouse in the Silom Road area, which has a busy shopping district where we could get a lot done without traveling all over the city. As we ran our many errands, we kept passing by a store named Rotiboy which seemed to be some sort of bakery at the end of our street, with an ungodly good smell and a line a half block long every time we passed. We kept thinking we'd pop in when the line was shorter, but it was never less than 100 people long. After a couple of days our curiosity got the better of us, so we did what any self-respecting American would do in a city of ultra-polite people; we asked a couple of westerners at the front of the line to buy us a couple of whatever they were getting. Five minutes later we were in possession of the most decadent rolls we've ever had. It can't really be described accurately, but it's essentially a coffee roll pretty much soaked with butter, and whatever they're putting in them, it makes you not think twice about standing in line for 45 minutes for one after you stop feeling sick from the last one you had. Which is what we did each of the remaining days we were there.

Despite our new Rotiboy habit, we spent our last few days in Asia reorganizing, getting travelers checks and various other supplies that might be hard to find in the months to come. It was really hard to leave a place that we'd become so comfortable with, but it is an around the world trip, and we had some traveling to do. Nervous, excited and anxious to move on, we boarded our flight to Mauritius, one step and three time zones closer to our return to the U.S.

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