Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

a travel blog by The Happy Couple

Michael's view on the trip. This blog is really mostly for me, so that I'll have a clearer memory of the trip when it's done, like a journal, so please forgive me my obsessions like sampling and photographing all the local food and the booze. It's just my thing!

Also please forgive all typos, spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes. I'm usually doing this in a rush, and most of the time it's on such a slow PC that it would take even longer to check for mistakes and correct them.

The blog is usually 2 to 3 weeks behind, but I try to keep next few locations on the map up-to-date. You can see the schedule dates associated with the map if you go to http://blogabond.com/TripView.aspx?TripID=4517 and click "Show Newest First" or, if the maps are causing problems try http://blogabond.com/TripView.aspx?tripID=4517&slow=1
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Similan Islands, Thailand

We didn't get much sleep the night before we left for diving as the room was incredibly hot. We've been saving money by not getting air-conditioning, but recently we had been in quite a lot of places with small wall-mounted fans instead of big ceiling fans, which was making me think twice about it. I woke up quite unhappy from lack of sleep, and very anxious about the diving. This was top-end diving and I was a relative rookie diver, with only about 35 dives under my belt. I hadn't enjoyed the diving in Cambodia, and I was still not convinced that diving was “my thing”. I still wanted to dive for Joanne's sake, who was thankfully feeling much better, but I was actually feeling irrationally scared. Just lack of sleep I think, but now I really was not looking forward to it.

The minibus picked us up early at the hotel, and we discovered the two others we were joining are quite senior UN personnel, who talked incessantly on the way to the port. I had hoped to get some more sleep on the journey so I now became even more unhappy, and now had the additional worry that we would also not fit in socially: everyone on the boat would be high-flyers and realise that we were just faking it. We were backpackers at the moment for goodness' sake, what were we doing getting into something like this? It would be us and the rich and famous! When we arrived at the port, Jeff and Catherine introduced themselves properly and Jeff was happy to join me in the urgent search for coffee, which immediately made me warm to him. At least I had something in common with these people. We were expecting to miss one dive on this, the second day of everyone else's trip, but it took a long time for the speed boat to get organised, and Jeff began to complain that he wanted to get at least one dive in today. The most dives I had previously attempted in one day was three, which Joanne had found quite tiring, but this trip was intensive: four dives a day. Jeff and Catherine had originally been scheduled to go on a trip that day, but it had overbooked, so the dive companies had got together and cobbled together an arrangement whereby one company would speedboat them out to their live-aboard with their group, and another company would dinghy them (now us, too) from that boat onto the one they would be diving from.

The speedboat was horrible. The sea was quite choppy and Jeff, who seemed to know something about speedboats, reckoned that the captain had not a clue how to use the something-or-other [I can't remember what]. Most people half-fell asleep not long after getting on the boat, and most of the rest just looked green and unhappy. Joanne was in the latter group, complaining that she felt terrible and couldn't take any more. As far as sickness goes, I actually felt fine, but I have not suffered from motion sickness at all really since I was a child. The only problem I was having was that every time the driver judged the whotsname wrong, we took off from the crest of one wave and crashed down onto the next one. These things must have impressively strong hulls, however my back is not so well designed and it every time this happened I could feel my vertebrae crushing closer together. After over an hour of this, the captain said called over one of the dive masters, who announced to the group that we were not able to go on because they had just received word from the live-aboard that the wind and the waves was terrible where we were heading, so the captain had decided we could not risk it. The speedboat turned around and started heading back to land. I wondered what would happen to the plan. At least we hadn't paid anything yet, I thought, but then I realised that I was also feeling very disappointed and that I had been sitting there on the speedboat getting used to the idea of the trip, and actually starting to look forward to it. Joanne told us later that, at this point, she had thought “hooray, dry land, let's go back!”. But then a miracle happened, or at least something rather unexpected: the captain turned the boat around again and started heading back towards open sea. “The captain has decided to risk it after all since we're so close, but we might need to go a bit slower” said the dive master.

After a total of over 90 minutes of thump-thump-thump against the waves we got to the live-aboard, which was floating near a small rocky island. The South Siam was quite a big boat, already full of people in various stages of wetsuitedness. Someone barked orders at the new arrivals (except people for the Colona, he said) to quickly write their name there get their gear there get ready there blah blah blah. I was starting to become a bit anxious again; would I be able to remember how to put my kit together, especially if we're expected to work that fast. After ten minutes or so a dinghy buzzed over from a nearby boat, which I noticed was called the Colona. The four of us were herded into the dinghy, but it was really quite difficult to get into the thing. The roughness of the sea had not been particularly noticeable on the big South Siam, and when we made the difficult transition onto the Colona Joanne complained that she was feeling sea-sick again because the Colona was small enough to be buffeted from side to side by the waves. Soon after we were on board, the captain moved the ship around to the other side of the small island and the rocking subsided a bit. Joanne felt sea sick for the rest of the day though.

Super turtle!

Swiss couple on the dry deck

Only the ship crew were around, so we realised that we had indeed missed the second dive of the day. At least it gave us some time to settle in to our rooms and relax a little without needing to get orders barked at us. Not long after we were back on deck the boat swept back around the island where people started climbing in from the water. The two dive masters introduced themselves as Torren and Steve and invited us to help ourselves to lunch which was just being laid out. As they dried off enough to come up to the dry deck, we met the other divers filing in for their lunch. It was too many names for me to remember in one go, but over the next few days we had a pleasant time getting to know them a bit better. There was another Michael, who had tattoos of Buddha and an om, so he clearly liked things eastern, and with him, his girlfriend [whose name I've forgotten], both Swiss. There was Gill from England, who told me that he had won this trip in a photography competition, so we weren't the only “fakes”; he was constantly lugging huge amounts of apparatus around with him because he was a professional photographer, and the waterproof casing for his rig made it even bigger. There was a German guy called Volker who was suffering from a cold and bad ears meaning that he was unable to dive for most of the trip, so he looked miserable most of the time but cheered up when he had a few beers and talked about his travels; he has travelled a lot.

Catherine on the dry deck

There was Weijin, according to Steve and Torren, the only good Chinese diver. She slept almost constantly in between dives, although she was trying to study for her Rescue Diver course, so I assume it's not very interesting. Then there was Alexia the South African whose parents were from "Rhodesia". And finally Mimi and Sophie, a Quebecoise pair who Joanne judged from their tactile relationship were probably a couple. Catherine was also Quebecoise and Jeff was from Chicago, but had been living in Geneva for many years, and his children never knew America. By the end of the trip they had me convinced that a career in the UN would not be something to knock back. I think I got on with the two of them best out of the lot, and I don't think that it was just because we'd started off in the same boat together; they were both really nice. The underwater photos are all actually taken by Jeff, except for the turtle, which he lent me his camera for; several of them have a circular black boundry because he forgot to tell me that the wide-angle lens was attached and takes in some of the waterproof case if you don't zoom.

But we were not to be integrated in with the other divers yet: our first dive was to be an “orientation” dive with everyone else going with Steve and just the four of us led by Torren, who is American and seemed to be something of a narcissist; he liberally infused his pre-dive briefings with witticisms like “and you have nothing to worry about because Steve and I are the two best.... looking dive masters in Thailand”. However when he saw me looking a bit uncertain trying to attach my gear to the air cylinder, he came up and said “been a while has it?” which was exactly the sort of thing I'd been worried about all along. Joanne and I had gone diving a few weeks earlier in Cambodia, specifically as a refresher because we knew we were going to dive in Thailand, but it had obviously done no good. Then I realised that, although we had been taken through all the basic “skills” like clearing the mask if it floods, retrieving a dropped regulator (the device you put in your mouth which delivers the air), and what to do in an “out of air” emergency, out kit had been assembled for us then. All the other skills are essential, life-saving in an emergency, but they are not very difficult and, I find, so easy that they are impossible to forget. What I really need from a refresher course is “how to put your kit together”. I had the same problem when we went diving in Cuba several years before and I don't like it much because everyone else is an expert and this just makes you look like a complete novice even though you are supposed to be a licensed diver. But Torren didn't actually look too worried, he was just making fun of me. Then came the next stage of preparation before a dive, after you have put you kit together and put it on, you are trained that you should carry out “buddy checks”. You always dive with a “buddy” for safety (and fun, and so on, so goes the training manual). At this stage you are supposed to remember a short list of checks to carry out like making sure your buddy's air is turned on. The training manual suggest that you remember the list of tasks using the most ridiculous mnemonic I have ever heard, in fact at the time I was training to get my dive certification I told some of my friends that it would be easier remembering the actual list: Buoyancy, Weights, Release, Air, and Final-OK, than the supposedly helpful acronym. I tried, but could not remember it. Gavin, I have to say, wins the prize because I was able to remember his much more memorable, apparently, “Big Wankers Remember Acronyms Falsely” shortly after which Dorian's “Big Willies Rip And Fray” came to mind. It was much later that I remembered the awful original “Begin With Review And Friend”. Later Torren revealed one with a local twist: Bangkok Women Really Are Fellas. I thought of a few more, but none are appropriate here, suffice to say that one begins “Beautiful Women Require”.

Manta ray

The first dive was incredible. The water was 28C, and no sooner had we submerged than a huge manta ray passed within a few metres of the group. We were probably only five metres down. A bit further down and several more manta rays swam around us. I was very impressed, having never seen anything bigger than a barracuda on a dive before. We didn't go deeper than 20 metres, but we'd had a fantastic dive. When we came up Torren said “well that was some orientation dive, wasn't it?”. The next dive was in the same location and we saw manta rays again, but also sea cucumbers, and my personal favourite, an octopus. It was hunting and it kept changing its shape, colour, and texture, so that it looked like coral one second, sand the next, with brief flickers of octopus in between. It oozed from one location and shape to the next, while all around were fish, presumably its prey, that appeared to be completely hypnotised and staring at it. They were in its spell. And around the fish were a shoal of divers, equally hypnotised.

Someone diviing past brain coral

I could have watched the octopus for the entire dive, but Torren seemed keen to get on with the manta ray spotting. All these prize sightings were on top of a “usual” fantastic array of corals, tropical fish, crustaceans, and so on. I had really enjoyed these two amazing dives, but I still did not feel gripped by the obsession that most people who dive regularly, and certainly everyone on the boat , do. It occurred to me that diving is a bit like those Umbro books we used to get as children, where you tick off all the various things that you've seen, which are all worth different points; they came in many varieties: one book for birds, another for vehicles, another for trees, and many more. Diving is the same: after every dive people seem compelled to roll off everything the spotted on the dive and compare notes with each other, as well as their “best ever” spotting experiences. It's just the rules of the sport.

Joanne and me diving

Star fish

So for the record: manta rays (80 points for one, 150 points for several, 200 points because one swam really close past me); loads of sting rays (30 each); a couple of eagle rays (70 points each); puffer fish (20 points); box fish (20 points); octopus (50 points for one, but I'd give it 200); sea cucumbers (10 points, I'd give 30); leopard shark (100 points; all sharks are high-scorers, but this one is small); lion fish (50 points); scorpion fish (40 points); giant turtles (50 points, but 200 for swimming with one); tuna (40 points); porcupine fish (30 points, but I'd say 60); bat fish (20, but 200 if you swim in their shoal judging by the way Torren acted); loads of moray eels (25 points each); lobsters (30 points); and so on.

Giant anemone

OK, I'm being completely facetious, but this is really how it seemed to me. The points are inferred from how excited people get about their sightings and what people talk about. Obviously people have their own preferences too, hence my own scores, but there seems to be an agreed hierarchy of sightings. But the point is, I did see a huge variety of very interesting organisms, although my air was a bit lower than everyone else's on the dive where everybody saw a black-tipped reef shark at the point when Joanne (as my buddy) and I were just surfacing (250 points down – no fair!). The manta rays were beautiful and graceful, flapping slowly through the water, but my highlights were definitely the octopi, the porcupine fish, and the giant turtles.

Coral

The octopus I've already describe and I don't think I'll eat another one after that; they do taste delicious, but they are even better alive. Porcupine fish just look really cute, with square faces and big googly eyes they look a bit like boxer puppies or something, and on one night dive, where I buddied up with Catherine because Joanne wasn't feeling well, a porcupine fish followed us around for ages, hiding behind corals then reappearing. On that same dive we laughed (as far as you can underwater) at a bat fish which trailed along right behind Weijin for ages then started following me instead. This is apparently what bat fish do and Torren had decided to immerse himself in this feature by swimming with the shoal. He didn't tell anyone his plan and of course nobody else knew where he'd gone and we spent some time looking for him. When we came up someone said “That's the first dive I've been on where we've had to conduct a search and rescue for the dive master”.

Sting ray

“I was king of the bat fish” he said defensively. Last of my favourites are the giant turtles: they're just lovely. We saw one on the bottom, breaking up the corals with its fins then scooping the shards up to munch. It didn't look appetising at all. When we were surfacing another one swam past close to us and when we surfaced we saw why: one of the boat-hands was throwing pieces of banana into the water and the turtle was swimming around chomping them down. Having seen the other one munching on dry coral I can imagine how wonderful banana must taste to them, but wasn't this a little unethical? If you feed wild animals you change their behaviour and then they lose their fear of humans and forget how to look after themselves... forget all that! Because it wasn't shy of humans at all, a few of us took the opportunity to swim around with it. It was quite friendly and would swim right up to us. Apparently that's just the way they are, but I wasn't at all convinced that the banana played to part.

Giant turtle poses for Gil

Moray eel

The first night we were there, they played what I can only describe as a propaganda video about shark conservation and exploitation. Alexia said “I'm sure you played this last year” as she was now on her third same consecutive trip. “I play this on every trip”, replied Torren. It was the rather over-dramatic, I thought, tale of one man who wanted to start a “Save the Sharks” campaign, because he felt that they were not given fair treatment because of their unrepresentative bad public image, unlike seals, dolphins, or whales, which are all considered cute. Things could change, he points out, because in Jonah's day, whales were the baddies. He went to the Galápagos Islands and Ecuador (I think it was) to see how their fantastic shark protection laws worked, but while he was making his film they both diluted them when they came under pressure from the “shark finning” mafia, the arch villains, whose power base is Taiwan.

Nudibranch

This is why sharks are becoming extinct he reasoned: just the fin is taken to give the consumer “power” and the rest of the animal is thrown away. The figures are shocking: sharks are definitely on an extinction trajectory, so I agreed with the films's message, I just thought it was over-dramatised. Near the end of the film, there is a scene with him alone in hospital, the rest of his allies having abandoned the cause because of fears for their lives, and he has “flesh eating bug, Staphylococcus” caught from the tropical waters he was diving in, in search of sharks. If they don't amputate his legs, it may reach into his abdomen where there will be no stopping it. Not surprisingly the antibiotics work and he lives happily ever after, even if millions of sharks every year don't. There was some silver lining about pro-shark demonstrations in Ecuador, but I don't fancy the sharks' chances in the long run.

Lobster

Every day during the trip my hair seemed a bit shorter. I don't know if the salt water was causing the condition of the ends to get so bad that it was snapping, or if it was somehow encouraging it to knot up more so that it was becoming thicker and shorter, but after one dive I came up and couldn't take off my gear because one dreadlock was tangled fast around the valve of my air tank. Joanne was forced to tear me free, leaving behind a big chunk of hair. That one dreadlock is now significantly shorter than the rest, but I suspect all of them were getting tangled to a lesser degree throughout, and that's how my hair ended up several inches shorter by the end.

Puffer fish hides behind some coral

The food on the trip was also excellent. What a difference to any other “all inclusive” trips we've taken on our travels. When the cook (rarely) showed her face out of the kitchen, the two dive master insisted that we give her a round of applause, to which she looked very pleased and a little embarrassed.

Giant turtle swims past me

Giant turtle just after breathing

Not content with completely throwing our travel budget out of the window, Joanne and I decided to do a nitrox course while we were on the boat. Well, we might as well fill in our time between dives since the weather was so poor. It rained on three of the days so there was little opportunity to spend the time on the sun deck. In fact I never visited it, but Sophie managed to get quite badly burned during one of the brief sunny spells. Actually there were a few reasons for doing the course. One was slightly peer pressure: everyone else was already qualified to dive with nitrox or else doing the course, so every body except us would be diving with enriched air if we didn't do it too. In practice this meant that we wouldn't be able to go as deep or would not be able to stay down as long as everyone else, because nitrox reduces your exposure to nitrogen, which means that you can dive for deeper and longer without having the same risk of decompression sickness, or the bends.

Giant turtle escape Gil's spotlights

Another reason is that Joanne's main diving ambition is to dive in the Red Sea, where most of the good sites are at a depth that you really need to dive with enriched air to get the most out of it, so I thought we may as well get trained now, since that will probably be our next diving trip. Finally, it meant that we would be able to get the most of this trip, and a few people reported that they felt less physical strain on their bodies when there was less nitrogen in the mix. So we did it, and half of our dives were nitrox dives, and we are now both qualified to dive with enriched air. There's not really much to the course: in practice all you really need to know is that you have to check that the air mix is what it says on the label, and then to set your dive computer to match whatever mix you measured.

My poor toes

Giant turtle swallows a lump of banana

Unlike everyone else on the trip, we needed to hire all of our equipment, because we didn't want to be carrying it all around the world with us. Luckily James had organised that we could hire the equipment for free, but the dive computers were not included. Unfortunately the type of fins they had for hire do not fit me well. [Divers insist on calling flippers – fins and gas bottles – cylinders.

Giant turtle eats from Joanne's hand

For some reason they get very upset if you get it wrong. I've never been able to work that one out]. I've rented them before, but they've not been too bad, however this was really intensive diving and my feet suffered badly. After a couple of days people were saying “ow that looks sore”, but by the last full day of diving I was in agony and had to miss the last dive. I did the final dive of the trip, which was first thing the next morning because we had to be back early for Jeff's flight. To make up for that, there had been five dives in the one day two days previously. Five dives in day really is a crazy amount, and is really only possible if you are diving with nitrox. Five dives is really a bit too much in one day; it gets boring, and actually I think five days of diving in a row, even if they're not full days, is also too much. I would have been quite happy with three days. Gill who was on the freebee also said that he found his trip too long, but he had six days. So, the diving was excellent and I saw some beautiful, incredible things, but I still don't think I really have the passion for it. The rest of the people on that boat seem to only dive when they go on holiday: I know there are many people who go to another country, and all they experience of it are dive sites, dive resorts, and the places around dive resorts. It's too much! Diving is great, but it's not life.

Joanne and Catherine play with the giant turtle

written by

The Happy Couple on May 6, 2009 from Similan Islands, Thailand

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

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Ban Karon, Thailand

After our final dive, we had a much more pleasant return journey on the Colona than the ride out on the speedboat had been. After we dropped Jeff off at the airport and some people off at their posh hotels, for example Jeff and Catherine had been staying at the Hilton, so Catherine was dropped there, we were dropped at our budget guesthouse. “Oh well, back to being backpackers, no more luxury” I said as we left and everyone wished me the best with my now very swollen toes. Back in the room I felt like I should shower to get the wounds clean, but when I came out I was in real agony. I couldn't even stand up. Joanne told me she had just been reading that you should not use hot water on swollen feet. I could not handle the pain, which was not subsiding. I thought I should maybe go to the doctor, although this seemed a bit of an over-reaction to a few abrasions, until I noticed that I was feeling a bit hotter than the room temperature merited. Thinking that this was a sign I may have some sort of infection I decided I really did have to go to the doctor.

I fought through the pain to get to my throbbing feet. I'm not being over-dramatic here: at the time it really was the most painful thing I could remember. Joanne supported me as I hobbled to the same doctor who had given me the all-clear to dive a few days previously. “The abrasions are infected with Staphylococcus” from the tropical water. I noted that he did not say “flesh eating” at any point, but he did agree it was serious if it was not treated with antibiotics. He did not seem overly concerned though, since that's exactly what he was prescribing me: antibiotics and antibiotic cream. My feet were so sore, and our plan was to leave the next day to go to Ko Phangan for the “world famous Full Moon Party” the day after that. I wasn't sure we would make it. I didn't even know if I'd be able to get to the bus, but decided to leave the decision until the next morning when I would have an idea how the treatment was working.

Back at our guesthouse there were a couple of guys, one Swedish one English, sitting outside drinking Hong Thong, a very cheap Thai “whisky” I had not yet tried. There are apparently a lot of Swedes in Phuket. They invited us to sit at their table and offered us some of their drink. It actually wasn't too bad, but the Swede was a true believer, an evangelist. He had clearly had a few already. He told us that he was being allowed to stay for free as long as he entertained people. He had a job in a nightclub which seemed to consist mostly of entertaining people. I got the impression his job was to get drunk and get other people pissed on cheap whisky, probably bought on expenses, and then take them along to the nightclub. Probably a nice job for about a week, but he had been doing it for several months. He had tale after tale of woe and I couldn't help think that Hong Thong might be playing a part: he had been swimming one day and he'd had his wallet, credit cards, and motorbike keys stolen from his clothes, but to make matter worse he had still done nothing about any of, except buy a new wallet. His bike was sitting unused and he still had no credit cards. His final crowning tale of disaster was that a few days previously (it was actually the day before we went diving – I had heard him telling some of the story to someone else the next morning) he had taken a gorgeous girl home only to discover there that she was in fact a man. “You're not gay if you didn't know, right?” he kept asking. What I don't understand is how you can live for months in Phuket, which is infamous for ladyboys, and still not be on guard if it's not your cup of tea. They were intent on buying another bottle of hong Thong and heading off to his club, so we made our excuses and hobbled up to bed.

written by

The Happy Couple on May 7, 2009 from Ban Karon, Thailand

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

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Ko Phangan, Thailand

Fire

The morning we were due to leave for Ko Phagnan and the “world famous” Full Moon Party, we were up early so I could work out whether my feet were up to me moving. It seemed the antibiotics had worked some magic and I was actually able to walk again and the swelling was noticeably down, so we caught the first Songthaew to the bus station, where we found out we could get a bus and ferry combined ticket to leave soon after. At the bus station I picked up an interesting looking banana parcel for the journey. It turned out to be very sweet fishy coconut stuff and sticky rice.

Fishy coconut

By the time we arrived in Ko Phagnan it was already quite late. The Full Moon Party is on Haad Rin (the beach), and our friend Freya had recommended a smaller less noisy beach, two bays up, called Haad Thien, which she said cost 50 Baht by boat from Haad Rin a couple of years ago. We found the boat taxis and asked how much it would be: 150 Baht if we waited until the boat was full, or 250 Baht per person if we wanted to go straight away. One of the reasons we had wanted to avoid staying away from Haad Rin was to save a bit of money because we expected the accommodation there to be very expensive round about the full moon, however paying 600 Baht return for the two of us was easily going to wipe out any gain in accommodation cost. We left our bags with a friendly Scottish guy working behind one of the bars on Haad Rin and went in search of a room locally.

Walking around Haad Rin town I recognised nothing from my last visit six years previously. I didn't remember there being all that much of a town, just a few restaurants and lots of beach huts, but the place seems to have undergone a period of massive development. And horror of horrors, there are lots of restaurants selling pizza and showing Friends or Family Guy. Just like Vang Vieng. Not a sign that things have developed in the right direction, I thought. We followed a road that should have taken us past some mangroves to the beach hut I stayed in before, but there were no mangroves, only large concrete buildings. The beach huts too, I suspect, have long been bulldozed. Nonetheless we found a reasonably cheap room at 350 Baht and headed back to the beach to get our bags and see what was going on there. I was reassured that there was still plenty of fluorescent art and people playing with fire on the beach, but I was not at all sure that the incredibly ubiquity of the buckets was a good thing.

Ko Phangan "culture"

We spent most of the next day being shocked how expensive everything is on Ko Phangan. When I was there last it was, and as far as I had known it still was, a backpacker-hippie kind of island. Now the prices are generally far above what a backpacker can afford. Transport around the island is ridiculously expensive and, unlike most of Thailand, there is no bartering: prices everywhere are fixed; as in price-fixing and cartels. The internet costs 180 Baht per hour, which is astonishing considering the very expensive Phuket only charges 60 Baht per hour, and the Rough Guide, which was only printed in November last year, said it would be 60 Baht on Ko Phangan too. It's 20 Baht per hour in Bangkok. All the souvenirs were also pricey, as were the food and the beer. Only buckets seemed a sensible purchase. I had read that Phuket was the most expensive place in Thailand but it seems that Ko Phangan has leaped-frogged by some margin in just the last year.

Miles of buckets

Fluoro!

In the early evening we watched them starting to set up for the party: row upon row, hundreds and hundreds, litres and litres of buckets. We left and returned later when we thought things would have got going. What a load of rubbish! Awful Moon Party, more like! I had been expecting lots of hippie types, more interested in dope and magic mushrooms that alcohol, wearing tie-dye, dancing to psychedelic trance and other similarly trippy electronic music, rambling on about crystals and Gaia if they stopped to chat. Instead it has been completely taken over by the mainstream: mindless drunken idiots sprawled all over the beach while hip-hop and other atrocious, not to mention totally inappropriate, boring mainstream music pounded out. Hardly anyone was dancing: almost the entire beach was covered with people sitting down in big groups, drinking buckets through straws.

Lights

No atmosphere at all. In an attempt to recapture the mood, we decided to experiment with a mushroom shake, after all they must be OK if they sell them behind the bar but, wary of warnings about them often being much stronger than people realise, we thought we should just share one. When after nearly an hour we felt nothing different, we decided it was safe to share a second one. Rather than it being so strong that we lost control or something, we still felt absolutely no effect. And they had not been cheap: 500 Baht each, but we had decided it would be worth it for this once-in-a-lifetime experience at the Full Moon Party. In fact it was yet another Ko Phangan rip-off. We re-joined the drunken hoards sitting on the beach, many of them now actually passed out in the sand. When we lost each other among the 30000 for half-an-hour, our already bad moods darkened further and we thought we should call it a night. Leaving the Full Moon Party early?! We should have been up all night; it should have been spiritual, sacred even, but instead it was like the main strip on Tenerife's Playa de las Americas: just a load of vomiting young people on a culture-free package holiday.

View of Haad Rin from "Mushie Mountain"

The next day I gave in and went into one of the internet places to upload some blog. I typed it in advance on the laptop to save some money. The place was almost empty, but the few people that came and left were all on Skype, and literally all of them were apologising for talking such a short time, complaining about the cost of the internet and Ko Phangan in general, and saying that they were leaving the island as soon as possible. I overheard one girl saying “It was fun, but there are just thousands of white people here, so I'm going to leave as soon as I can”.

We thought we'd try an discover the “real” Ko Phangan, starting off with the place Freya had recommended, before making our way north to the non-touristy part of the island, so the next day we gritted our teeth and took the expensive boat to Haad Thien. What a mistake! The beach there was awful: lots of little pebbles rather than sand, which wasn't very nice for Joanne, but my feet were preventing me from going in the water anyway. Everyone on the beach was complaining how expensive the island is, and saying that they would definitely never return to the island, and maybe not again to Thailand. I started to wonder if the drop in tourism the Thais are complaining about isn't actually to do with any political problems or the airport blockade, but in fact down to them having become very greedy and overcharging. To be fair Thailand's islands are still slightly slightly cheaper than Europe and it probably doesn't seem expensive if you are on a short holiday, but one of the great things about Thailand used to be what good value it was; in the Islands it is no longer at all the case.

Commercial Hippie nonsense

Our humble abode in Haad Thien

Haad Thien turned out to be even more expensive that Haad Rin. It was full of “wellness centres”, yoga classes, and ayurvedic massage. Here was the hippie scene I had been looking for, still surviving as a grotesque commercialised pre-packaged theme-park version of what I imagine it once was. Most of the accommodation has a sign up saying that people who are fasting have to pay double the normal room rate. And the whole place was swarming with dengue mosquitoes. I eventually found a reasonably cheap wooden shack (at least they still have the beach huts!) and we headed back down to the beach in search of power for the laptop, since our accommodation had none. In one wellness centre we found power.

Scorpion in the toilet

They seemed to specialise in wheat grass and they had loads of very expensive drinks on the menu for “energizing”, “cleansing”, etc, and a group of Americans at the next table were talking very earnestly about things like energy, nature, and peace until a large insect flew into the restaurant whereupon they all started screaming “Kill it! Kill it!” to the barman. A Scanner Darkly came to mind. When we got back to our place Joanne spotted a very large spider spider in our hut. Despite not paying thousands of Baht to sit around talking about the beauty of nature, I elected not to kill the spider but to sweep it out the hut and off the patio into the forest, while Joanne waited in the restaurant. When we returned we were greeted by a very large cockroach crawling under the door. I flushed that down the hole in the bathroom floor where the shower drains. Later that night I found a scorpion in the toilet, but did not tell Joanne about that. Periodically, throughout the night, what must have been a very large gecko sitting on our roof called out very loudly.

Big spider

Dengue mosquito (note stripes)

In the morning we got ready pretty quickly, so that we would not miss our chance to leave the bay. I noticed that the same spider had found its way back from the forest floor to just above the bed; or else a very similar spider had appeared. Joanne had not noticed it so I made sure I stood in between her and the spider at every opportunity and we got completely packed and ready to leave without her noticing it. The first she will know of it is when she reads this. We caught the boat, which hung around until he had nine people in it, but he still did not lower the per person fare. By this time we had decided not to bother with the north of the island because, even if it is “non-touristy” we were still going to have to pay over the odds to get there and back, and we were both pretty sick of the island anyway. We caught a songthaew towards the port and once we were moving I said to everyone “hands up who'll be coming back to Ko Phangan in the future”, to which the answer was a resounding “no way”. One couple said that they have been travelling all over Thailand and Ko Phangan is the worst place they've been. They had been on Ko Samui previously, which is infamously expensive and over-developed, but they said they had found it much cheaper. How is it that Ko Phangan prices can overtake both Phuket and Samui, which are known for being overpriced, yet the guide books are still describing it as a “backpacker haven”? I hope they set the record straight in the next editions. It's just not for backpackers any more.

Lovely breakfast in Haad Thien

written by

The Happy Couple on May 12, 2009 from Ko Phangan, Thailand

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

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Bangkok, Thailand

We were a bit apprehensive about our transport from Ko Phangan back to Bangkok because the end point of our boat-bus combo was Khaosan Road, and after all the stories we had heard about people being robbed heading south from Khaosan, we were concerned that it would be the same heading north to there. We would have taken other transport but it was all full. We weren't as daft as some of the travellers we had met, to leave valuables in our hold luggage, but when we arrived and got booked into a place in Bangkok (well off Khaosan this time), Joanne discovered that her luggage had definitely been gone through; her belongings were all packed in a different way now. I discovered that I was missing clothes, but I soon realised that they probably just didn't come back from the last laundry we had done in Ko Phangan. This was a shame because I was already low on useful clothes, so losing a shirt, three t-shirts, and a pair of shorts was more than my mobile wardrobe could cope with.

We wanted to get the important stuff out of the way so we would have time to go somewhere else, or relax properly in Bangkok, so right after we checked in we headed off to the Indian Embassy to hand in our passports to get our newly approved visas stuck in place. The traffic was so bad getting there that we nearly missed the passport hand-in time and since we were so late we just decided to hang around that part of town until we could pick them up again, rather than sit in traffic all the way to Khaosan and back. Unfortunately there wasn't much to do in that part of town. The embassy is just round from Soi Cowboy, so we took a walk down there: closed “girly bars”, not very exciting. In fact all round that area was the same. After a few boring hours we collected our passports with Indian visas and returned to the Khaosan Road area. It was nice to be back in Bangkok with Bangkok prices: 10 Baht for a chicken kebab instead of 20 or 30; 20 for a coffee instead of 50; 20 Baht per hour internet; the Thai people seem much friendlier in Bangkok than the islands as well. I was happy to be back there.

Thai Telly Tubbies (Telly Skinnies?) near Indian Embassy

We had intended taking a boat trip up the river, or a canal trip; we had thought about going to Patpong to see one of the infamous ping pong shows; we had thought about going on a couple of day trips, or going to another island like big Ko Chang, but my feet weren't really ready for beaches, so the island was out, and we just didn't get around to the rest. We shouldn't have been in Bangkok for so long at the end of our trip, but the Thai islands had been a big disappointment and we wanted to leave Thailand early, however BA told us we could not reschedule our flight as the earlier ones were full. I quite like just hanging around Bangkok though, and I had a lot of blogging to catch up on, so that's what I did. And a bit too much drinking, One night when Joanne was in bed with stomach problems again, I got chatting to a Swedish guy and two Swiss girls, which turned into another night of flavoured tobacco in a shisha. The next night Joanne and I had a few drinks with a Japanese guy, an English guy, a Lithuanian, and a Polish guy, The first three faded in that order, but we ended up staying up most of the night with the Pole. The following night we were just coming right when we were passing the same bar, and there was Bart the Pole. So we very stupidly stayed up even later drinking with him again. If he is a typical example then Polish people can certainly drink!

A Swede and two Swiss girls

The next day we tried to make ourselves feel better by going for a Mexican meal which wasn't too bad, but all the things I consider central to Mexican food like salsa and guacamole were listed as “extras” you had to pay more for. So it turned out very dear. Just as we were leaving the restaurant we bumped into Ben, the French guy who'd been staying in our guesthouse on Ko Chang. It never ceases to amaze me how many people we see again and again. That day we also got an email from the Dutch girls, Sia and Willemijn, saying that they had been to Ko Tao and Phuket, and that they had found Ko Tao very expensive and Phuket cheap, which was a relief because Ko Tao was one of out first choices for moving on from Ko Phangan, but someone had warned us that it was dear too. We took a few days with no alcohol and I caught up with lots of blogging, but we didn't do anything properly touristy like we'd planned. It rained heavily every single day we were back there.

Frozen margarita with our mexican meal

Finally the day of our flight to India arrived. We went round the book vendors trying to off-load our travel guides. We got a (quite stingy) discount on a Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali phrase book in exchange for our Thailand Lonely Planet, but nobody would offer us anything at all for our Rough Guide to South East Asia. I just can't understand it at all. Nobody would offer us a Baht. Some people laughed and said “Only want Lonely Planet”. This is all the more infuriating when these are the same vendors we had searched carefully for a Rough Guide to India, but had to make do with the Lonely Planet, which I really did not want to do. In the end we had to donate it to our hotel library. One of our last tasks in Thailand was to post home some more stuff. This time it went much more smoothly than in Laos. Unfortunately I had been blogging so much that I hadn't had time to buy many people presents, but there are plenty more countries for that!

Quail eggs

Joanne had booked the shuttle bus to the airport “to make things easier”. It was absolutely crammed full. More proof, I thought, that the more you pay, the worse things usually are. This was 150 Baht, but the nice local bus would only have cost 20 Baht, and we would have been travelling with Thais and it wouldn't have left 20 minutes late because of picking up all of the other tourists after us. They played Dire Straits the whole way to the airport to remind us that we were all white.

At the airport I was ready with my VAT refund form from the purchase of the mini-laptop. I had the “Credit card Refund” box ticked, as well as all my credit card details filled it, the stamp from the shop, and the stamp from the office before you go trough customs. When we finally made it to the VAT refund desk on the other side, the woman just handed me over the cash, completely ignoring all I had done to avoid this. Thai Baht, just as we are about to leave Thailand. What was I supposed to do with it? So I was forced to spend all my VAT refund and the rest of our remaining money on a litre of Glen Livet from the duty free. I had been missing real whisky so this was the perfect excuse!

On the plane, the guy next to me was sniffing constantly throughout the flight. He looked really unwell. Then they handed out swine flu declarations for us to sign, stating that we had not been in Mexico, USA, UK, or Spain in the last seven days, and that you are not feeling unwell; otherwise you would be required to submit to a full medical examination on arrival in India. I wonder if the guy next to me admitted to feeling a bit under the weather. When we did land in India, we still needed to queue to have our declarations stamped by medical staff, who were checking what we'd written and presumably dragging people off for full check-ups where required.

written by

The Happy Couple on May 19, 2009 from Bangkok, Thailand

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

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Mumbai, India

We had read in our new Lonely Planet that Mumbai is relatively expensive, so we didn't want to hang around there too long. Also last time I'd been in India, I didn't go to Mumbai but the Indians I asked in Delhi said there is no reason to go to Mumbai, it's just crowded and polluted; considering the state of Delhi this sounded quite horrifying. Anyway, the plane arrived late enough that we weren't going to have to pay the pre-5am surcharges for the taxi that we'd read about, however we decided to wait about in the airport until a more sociable time. There was nothing at all to do at the airport so at 7am we set off for our hotel. Joanne was a bit worried about coming to India so she had done quite a bit of online research to ensure we found suitable accommodation. Most of the even vaguely budget options in Mumbai seemed to receive consistently bad reviews: “typical Indian place, full of bedbugs and cockroaches”, that sort of thing. Joanne had sorted through them all and come up with the one budget place which had received a good average score: The Salvation Army Red Shield Guesthouse. When we arrived I tipped the driver 25 Rupees, which was nearly ten percent of the fare, but the driver just took it an grumbled, then, before we got in the door of the hotel, we were accosted outside by a young Indian man who asked us if we wanted to appear as extras in a Bollywood production. I was a bit suspicious so I asked for some identification, which he produced in the form of a posh business card: “Bollystars, specialising in Westerners”. We explained that we were exhausted from an overnight flight, so would not be doing anything but sleeping today. He told us that tomorrow would be fine, so we agreed to phone him if we felt up to it. Inside, we agreed it sounded like fun so we would phone him later. At the check-in we were first ignored, then told brusquely to wait in the dining hall. A sign said “Check out 9am. Check in 10am”, which meant that we had to wait for about two hours, nodding off, leaning on our bags, while around us people ate breakfast. Every single person who came into the hall looked miserable and nobody was talking to anyone else. So far all the Indians we'd dealt with had been cold and unfriendly and now it seemed as if the tourists were all going to be the same. And if the dining hall and breakfast were anything to go by, this place wasn't going to be very nice.

While we were waiting, another waiting couple came into the dining room, but we were determined not to let them jump the queue. Then when people started to check out, we watched for any couples leaving, who might have had a double room rather than the dorm. It wasn't looking good until the two English boys who had been two shacks up from us in Don Det, having motorbiked through half of Laos, walked into the dining room. When we had said goodbye to them in Don Det, they had said “maybe bump into you in India”; I had thought “don't be daft, India is a huge country, it's not like Laos or Vietnam”, but here they were in the first place we turned up in India. It was their last day in India and as luck would have it, they were vacating a double room. “You might want to get them to clean it before you move in”, one of them said. After they left, Joanne said “Johnny's skin is looking bad isn't it?”, and so it was, but we put it down to them living a rather unhealthy lifestyle. We went back up to the desk and the grumpy concierge said I could look at the room to decide if we wanted it. The boys were not kidding: what a mess! There were socks all over the room (the room was honking), paper and plastic rubbish everywhere, a wet towel on one bed, and even though drinking (and drugs, etc.) are against Sally Army rules, there was an empty litre bottle of whisky. Back at the desk, I said we'd take it, but that it needed cleaned. “Don't worry, the boy will clean it now”, he said, as a man of at least fifty, with a mop, collected the keys. “Boy” is presumably used by Hindu chauvinists to refer to lower caste employees in exactly the same way as it was used in Apartheid South Africa (and still is to some extent, by racist whites there). He did an impressively quick job cleaning up the room, but it still smelled of socks a bit when we moved in. Exhausted, we decided we deserved a Glen Livet, and we too broke the rules by having a wee whisky to help us catch up on lost sleep. But this is Asia, so of course there was a building site nearby, in this case people were banging the floor above with mallets (it sounded like) all morning, so we had to abandon the idea of sleep and settled for a shower instead. The shower room / toilet opposite our bedroom was awful: it was very dirty by the (SE Asian) standards we were used to, and not all that clean by Indian standards, as I remembered them; neither the sink nor the shower could be coaxed into producing any water; and even the toilet did not flush. I believe this was our “private” bathroom. The one next door did have a flushing toilet, but no bin for the paper, which blocks toilets all over Asia, and the shower produced only a trickle. A bit further around the floor we found one with a functioning toilet and shower, so we were at least able to get clean.

At lunch time we returned to the dining room where, having seen breakfast, I was not expecting much for lunch, but it was included with our very pricey Rs600 room, so we were going to eat it. It turned out to be very nice actually. The other couple who had been waiting for a room had also checked in, but had only been able to get dorm space. Matthew and Jessica had travelled quite extensively in India already and reassured us that Mumbai did seem to be much more expensive than anywhere else they had been. I hadn't remembered people being as unpleasant as every Indian we had so far dealt with, so I said “Indians aren't typically like that concierge are they?”, to which Matthew replied “Well I don't want to put you off, but lots are; not all, but they ALL try to rip you off, which makes it quite difficult to trust people or befriend them”. After lunch I decided to make use of the internet facilities in the guesthouse, where I was amazed to discover that you are required to produce your passport before and after using the internet. Indian bureaucracy. I headed out to check out the neighbourhood and look for somewhere to get SIM cards, leaving Joanne behind to get some sleep. Immediately children start hassling me for money. I decided to see if I could find somewhere to drink because, apart from anything else, my friend, John, who I last went to India with was sending me texts asking if I'd yet had a strong beer, so I felt duty-bound. I found a rather nice looking cafe, called Leopolds, of the sort I did not know existed in India after the last trip, and went in to order a beer. There were more whites in one place than I saw the whole time I was in Delhi before. Unfortunately they did not have any strong beers on the menu. Indian licensing laws divide beer into “mild”, which has “no more than 4.5% alcohol”, and strong, which has “between 4.5% and 8% alcohol”, yet they cost almost the same. I had not checked the cost, so perusing the menu as I drank my beer, I got quite a shock when I saw that it cost £2.80 and decided to find somewhere less pretentious. Only when the bill arrived did I find out that the cost on the menu excluded tax and service, which hiked the price up to trendy Glasgow bar levels. Later I discovered that Leopolds had been one of the targets in November's Mumbai attacks, from which there are still bullet holes in the walls, although I didn't notice them. I left and discovered just two doors up and place much more like the Indian drinking dens I remembered: no whites, no women, no attractive décor, no atmosphere, and the general appearance of a dirty cafe, rather than a pub, oozing depression from every dingy corner. This was more like it! They did have strong beer, which cost less than half what Leopolds charged for the weak beer before tax and service, so I had two of them in John's name, and a delicious and cheap stuffed nan bread. On the way back to the hotel I spotted a stall advertising SIM cards, so I went over to purchase a couple of Indian SIMs to save on texts and calls. Amazingly they required for each of us, a photo, copies of our passports and Indian visas, and a hotel bill. Just for a SIM card! Helpfully, the guy at the kiosk told me I could “bring them later in the day, or the next day, but definitely no more than five days”, so I got the SIM cards and went back to the hotel where we phoned Bollystars to confirm we'd be taking part the next day, then I slept for fifteen hours, yet still had a hangover when I woke. Indian strong beer.

Strong beer

Having spent a bit more time in India since that first day, I can add a bit more. India was a big change after Thailand, where people are very friendly and warm, in fact the same is true of most of SE Asia. Our experience of India so far is that people are very cold and unfriendly and Matthew is right about them always trying to rip you off. In SE Asia I was cheated maybe twice in nearly four months; in India I have been cheated several times every day, and each day you could lose count of the number of times people try to cheat you, and they don't even bother to smile while they're doing it. Yet this was not my experience last time, however from this short visit they seem to be a nation of cheats, queue jumpers, and litter bugs. The place is filthy: rubbish is everywhere, and nothing ever seems to be clean; toilets are filthy, and it's often hard to find running water to wash your hands, but you can forget about soap unless you have your own; and of course depressing poverty is everywhere. Yet there is still something compelling about the country, although I've not really pinned it down yet; the madness, the busyness, the challenges are all part of it, but I'm sure there's something else apart (obviously) from all the beautiful architecture. We'll be returning to India soon, so hopefully I'll be able to put my finger on it then; of course I'll then have to disinfect my finger with alcohol gel!

More strong beer!

written by

The Happy Couple on May 20, 2009 from Mumbai, India

from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

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Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon

a travel blog by The Happy Couple

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Arrival in India

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