Tim’s Nomad Diaries

Blessed with some picturesque beaches in the South, a high concentration of jungles and several unique hill tribes towards the North, as well as very affordable prices and excellent infrastructure throughout, Thailand has developed into the tourist mecca of Southeast Asia, with some eleven million travelers coming through every year.

And even though most of my past six months on the road had been spent trying to get away from the comfort and ease that this tourist path offers, I was starting to get fatigued–both physically and mentally–and the idea of a vacation in Thailand for the holidays sounded particularly appealing.

Coming from the bitter winter cold of Northern Lao, I headed Southwest to meet old friend Kev in Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second biggest city. As Kev lives in one of the most rural areas in Japan, his dining options are really limited, so understandably one of our top priorities as tourists on holiday was to stuff our stomachs with as much Western food as imaginable–”So how about a burrito for appetizer, then some sizzling T-bone steak and mashed potatoes for main course, and let’s get some Hawaiian pizza and chips and salsa for dessert”. With all the Western culinary options that Chiang Mai offers, we were both like wide-eyed Jim Breuers in the pot-smokers cult classic movie “Half Baked”, when he’s stoned out of his gore in the convenience store trying to decide which snacks to buy, and he ends up walking out carrying half the store in his arms. Everything just looked so good!

The normal itinerary for most tourists in Thailand is to arrive in Bangkok, head up to Chiang Mai for some type of guided jungle trek outside of the city, then shoot down South to the islands. This is exactly what I did.

I set very low expectations for the trek initially. For one, many of these guided tours tend to be open to everyone, meaning the tour agency normally has to accommodate for all different skill levels and experiences. Secondly, as I have been doing a lot of independent trekking on my travels, I have come to really value the sense of exhilaration that one finds from discovering things on their own–that’s why I often choose to see things on my own over with a tour group even if prices are more for the latter. But, as is often the case when you set low expectations, I ended up having a really good time on the trek, hiking through forests and stopping off at waterfalls, elephant riding, bamboo rafting, and staying with an ‘indigenous’ village.

Next Kev and I took two extraordinarily comfortable “VIP” buses down to the islands. Even though we spend a total of 28 hours on bus to get there, it was still paradise for me coming from my ventures in Lao, where, besides for the buses/trucks being so crowded that people where literally often sitting on top of each other, one would sometimes find the random bag of dead fish or cage filled with hens clucking about right underneath you. “Take a deep breath in. You smell that in the air? That’s the absence of dead carcass–such an invigorating aroma!”
The first half of my stay in Southern Thailand can best be described in two words: sheer debauchery. To the probable surprise of many old friends, my consumption of alcohol while on the road has declined significantly from my Barcelona days, and probably, with the exception of a few instances, is at one of the lowest levels since pre-university days. I have transformed from someone that rarely if ever went to bed before 3 a.m. while living in Barcelona, to now being a relative early-bird. In this one week, however, I reversed this trend completely, more than making up for any of my alcohol abstinence and likely increasing my future risks of liver disease exponentially.

After regaining my senses and consciousness from the Full Moon party on Ko Pha Ngan, I set off on a ferry to the tropical Island of Ko Tao for five days of detox time and to do an Open Water scuba diving course. Even though we experienced near monsoon like conditions and visibility of generally under a few meters underwater until the boat ride returning from our last dive, (in normal conditions the visibility is close to 30 meters!), the course was still good fun and prepared our team well for future dives in any conditions.

All in all my few weeks in Thailand was a very pleasant ‘vacation’. Now though, I am eager to continue that travelers trail, as I’ll be heading down peninsular Malaysia staying with Hospitality Club friends for the next month plus. Not since traveling through China have I had the opportunity to utilize this wonderful resource of Hospitality Club, as there are simply very few members to be found in the previous SE Asian countries that I’ve visited.