For those of you who got the first email I sent out, don't bother reading this, it's the same as that. But now you can get these updates over RSS or whatever you like, and I don't have to remember who to send things to :-)
Here I am in Chiang Mai sitting in Dada Kafe which is a little vegetarian restaurant on the east side of the old city. Chiang Mai is the biggest city in northern Thailand and is a sweet sweet place. The "old city" is the part inside an ancient wall built to protect the inhabitants from raids by the Burmese back when Chiang Mai was part of the Lanna empire. Or so Wikipedia tells me. Anyway, it's a nice city, much slower than Bangkok, more like a uni town. There are a fair number of little vegetarian cafe's and restaurants around here, and a multitude of markets. Sunday markets, Saturday markets, night markets, along with markets which are just generally open for business all the time. It just generally has a really nice and laid back atmosphere.
Maybe I should start from the start rather than going backwards. So the plane trip was just a plane trip. Except that I flew with Quantas this time and was surprised by the fact that they give you meals and booz for FREE!!! Now you're all probably laughing at me because you all maybe know this, but I'm used to flying the most poverty stricken airlines I can possibly find, so this seemed pretty sweet to me. So, while I restrained myself to 1 beer (Ben: a small can of James Squire golden), I did systematically devour as much food as was offered to me, and it wasn't even that bad. So the plane took around 9 hours, slightly more perhaps, and then there I was in Suvarnabhumi, Bangkoks main airport. I wandered around for a while in that kind of airport trance which hits you when you land in a foreign place having sat on a plane for a day without moving before I finally realised I'd missed the last airport bus into the city, which put me at the mercy of the local taxis. Those of you who know Bangkok can probably skip a lot of this email because I'm trying to describe it for those who haven't. In Bangkok nearly everybody who has anything to do with tourists is probably trying to rip you of in the happiest way possible. None of them ever mean any harm and will almost always help you with directions even if you don't buy anything from them, but they'll happily take as much of your money as they can get from you. Which is all cool, it's just not how we're used to operating over in Oz, so it takes some getting used to. So there I was feeling pretty fragile about the whole taxi situation, and hoping I could find some people to share with because the drive is actually quite long. That's when I hooked up with a bunch of other random boys: 1x American, 1x Japanese, and 2x Something Spanish, who were also going where I was going. So all 5 of us piled into a taxi and ended up getting to Khaosan road only about $4 lighter. Which is pretty good. Once again, for those who haven't been there, Khaosan road is not a place I think I can adequately describe in words. Circus and collective insanity come to mind, but don't really do it justice. The thing is that the rules are just different over here, so you just don't get anything like it in Oz. Just imagine a street on a festival day completely full of people at any hour of the day so you can't drive down it. Neon lights everywhere, load music blaring, and a million different outfits and accents from across the globe. Walking 10 meters down it you're guaranteed to be offered 100 kinds of booze, sex, massages, hand tailored silk suites, fried cockroaches and scorpions as long as your middle finger, clothes, etc. It's an experience. But I'd seen it before, and I was kind of expecting it, so while part of me was still in culture shock it was also quite welcome and familiar because it hadn't really changed from the debauchery I encountered last time.
Over the next few days I stayed in a different place each night for various reasons within a street or so of Khaosan road, once with those guys, and twice by myself, each night only costing between $3.40 and $5.40. I was supposed to meet a friend there who was flying out a few days after I flew in, but he was pretty scarce and we didn't end up seeing each other. So I ended up hanging out with the random boys for a day or two, along with a few Spanish girls they found along the way. That was pretty fun, but in the end I was into slightly different things to them and so I didn't go with them when they jumped on a train to Chiang Mai, even though I was going only a day later anyway.
So on Friday night after they'd all left I went for a wander and wondered what to amuse myself with alone that night. I ended up finding a park by the river with a big white fort and a little temple. There they were playing open air jazz into the night, local kids were break dancing which was really cool, and some travelers were juggling and spinning poi. It felt like a little piece of Brunswick or St. Kilda beach transported to Bangkok. Regretting that I'd left my devil sticks in my pack, I sat down next to a stunning American girl who had likewise just walked in and sat down to appreciate it all. She ended up being an extremely cool person and we had a lot of common interests so we hung out for a long time that night before going our respective ways.
The next day I got up and basically just mooched the whole day, organising things I'd forgotten to do before I left etc. Then went and jumped on the 1pm train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. That train sucked. My last experiences with the trains here were good, but this one was late leaving and about 4 hours late arriving in Chiang Mai making for about 16 hours all up. This strange temporal phenomenon is generally known as Thai Time and afflicts all things with a duration or deadline. Luckily I brought some fruit which (only just) kept me going until then. Once there I randomly jumped in the back of a ute to go into town because I didn't want to stay in the hotel they were showing me at the station. Far too expensive, I assume the major hotels maybe pay the Thai mafia for a day to monopolise the train station as there was only 1 hotel being advertised at the "tourist information center", and it was a different one last time. But regardless, after chatting to my ute buddies I found that one of them was going to a place with single rooms for only 120B per night ($4), so I ended up there with her and I'm still there. It's pretty dingy, 2 shared showers and 2 shared squat toilets with no squirt guns (toilets here have a water gun and you spray your bum clean with that, it's the way of the future people, it's only a matter of time). So I usually end up going to find cafe's which do have squirt guns.
So anyway, basically that gets me up until now. I'm here in this cafe with another random American girl who I met last night, along with a German girl who's now left and moved on after I shaved her head with my clippers. Now she looks like a crazy German Buddhist nun :-).
2 things: I now have a lot more time for Americans. The 3 I've met here have been absolutely fantastic. Extremely chatty (Extremely, I think I could say nothing for the whole time and they wouldn't notice), and fairly intense at times, but altogether a great deal of fun and super friendly. The second: The fruit here is so amazingly good, I remembered from last time, but I still get blown away by how good it is. Banana's are so creamy and almost taste like they come with cinnamon pre-sprinkled. Mango's are small but equally amazing, basically everything just seems to taste how I imagine it should but didn't realise while eating Australian fruit. And scarily, many of the western travelers I've known in Australia say that Oz fruit is better than in their home country. What are we doing wrong? How can so many people just fail to notice the gradual decline of anything resembling taste in any major fruit grocer?
Anyway, there you have it. My travelling life to date, all 5 days or so. I imagine these emails will shorten down as time goes on never fear.
Oh, one other thing: I can't get used to the use of water here. It's not that it gets wasted, but it's certainly used unlike we have in Australia for years and years. I went to a public park the other day and it was practically under water from the sprinklers and gardeners. This cafe has pipes strung up outside with fine mist constantly falling on you (and your electronic equipment). Not a problem I guess because they don't have a water shortage. But you get so used to noticing things like this that they jump out when you get here.
That's all.
Love to you all,
Frankie.
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