Today’s photo comes thanks to my brother in Thailand. It’s been a cold spring here in Colorado, and this photo makes me look forward to summer even more. We spent a few weeks hanging out on the beach loungers in front of Maya Beach Club on Koh Tao, and I have to say, they get some of the best sunsets nearly every night.
Mmmm….fried bugs. You can find carts full of fried bugs all over SE Asia. Apparently they are not only filling, but can be really healthy for you. Some seem like they’d be more horrible to eat than others (see the giant cockroach?) whereas others are so crispy that they just taste like a very well done french fry. One thing I didn’t know about eating bugs is that in Thailand, most of these critters are raised in captivity for the sole purpose of being sold as snacks. Yum!
Number of days spent in country – 19
Cities/towns visited – Bangkok, Koh Tao, Khao Sok, Phuket
Number of different lodgings – 7
Flights – 0
Bus journeys – 10
Boat rides – 4
Taxis – 3
Total US dollar amount spent – $1,642
Average cost per day, per person -$43.22
Average lodging cost per night, per person – $11.86
Most expensive lodging, per person – $32 at the Royal President in Bangkok. I had just gotten out of the hospital in Nepal and we decided to treat ourselves to a few days at a proper hotel. It was lovely.
Least expensive lodging, per person – It’s a tie at $6.50 for a fan room that was pretty basic at SB Cabana II on Koh Tao, and an air-con room at a dive hostel in Bangkok that was also pretty basic.
Average food/drink cost per day, per person – $17. Generally our meals were cheap street food in Bangkok, but we splurged big time with meals on Koh Tao and ate out many times at nicer places since my brother was there to give us some great recommendations. The alcohol accounts for probably half of this total as we made up for all that beer we didn’t drink through Turkey, Jordan, Israel, India and Nepal…
$1 Pad Thai on the street. Practically everywhere you look, you’ll find the super-cheap pad thai carts. They aren’t always great, but they are a great value for a huge pile of noodles with veg, and chicken/beef/prawn on request.
Barracuda on Koh Tao – This place is run by a chef who worked for my brother when he had his restaurant on Koh Tao, and it’s easily the best place for a nice fish meal on the island. Their appetizers are to die for.
Lung Pae on Koh Tao – It’s is a bit out of the way, high up on a hill with a great view of the ocean, which makes it perfect for a sunset dinner. If you don’t have a scooter, they’ll come pick you up. Interestingly enough, even though it’s a Thai place, they are best known for their steaks, particularly menu item # E4.
Portobellos on Koh Tao – Craving Italian? This is the place to be. Excellent thin crust pizzas and a decent wine list.
Sunday Roast at Banyon on Koh Tao – Obscene amounts of comfort food for when you are feeling particularly homesick. It’s a local’s hangout so you’ll likely encounter bar and dive staff from all over the island at this weekly feast.
Going to the movies in Bangkok –There are massive movie theaters at the tops of nearly all the big shopping centers in the Sukhamvit area. These are no ordinary theaters though, and they range from huge and classically decorated to enormous and lavish rooms filled with couches, soft lap blankets, and bottle service. You can choose your level of service/quality of seat (and believe me, even the regular seats are generally nicer than those you’ll find in the States). It’s a perfect way to deal with a rainy afternoon. Don’t forget to stand for the national anthem…for real…it’s the law.
Massage parlors literally line the streets!
$6 massages – Massage parlors are everywhere in SE Asia, and Thailand is no exception. They run the gamut from sleazy ‘happy ending’ factories, to luxury spas that will pamper you for hours. We stuck to crowded places with a communal area for Thai massages (no happy endings possible in these!) and if one massage wasn’t that great, we just went for another with a different masseuse! If you want a super luxury deal (so, not $6) at a fraction of what you’d pay in the States, head to the Jamakiri Spa on Koh Tao. They’ll come get you for free and you can spend the day getting pampered, and then relax by their pool that overlooks Sharks Bay.
Getting random jumbles of noodles with fish sauce at a ‘Pad Thai’ cart in Bangkok. This happened more than once. Watch the cart before you order to see if they are really making Pad Thai or if they are just dishing up mixed noodles and veggies to drunk tourists.
Khao Sok National Park, despite not having a coastal scene, has some of Thailand’s most spectacular scenery. We took a longtail boat through the lake, which is surrounded by incredible limestone hills that reminded us of Halong Bay in Vietnam and Yangshuo in China. It was stormy the day we arrived, but that only added to the mysterious appeal of the landscape.
Over the last two weeks, between bouts of lazing around on a variety of Indonesian beaches, I’ve had an overwhelming feeling of needing to do something. Something we can’t do back home. Something that will capture the essence of the foreign land we are in. The problem was that I couldn’t figure out quite what the something was.
Getting sucked into yet another guidebook…
In the last 6 months our travel has been faster paced than we are used to. We’ve focused on visiting some really historical places, some of which we probably won’t get the opportunity to visit again, and we wanted to make sure we really used our time well. The problem with this that we lost track of how we usually like to travel, which is slowly. When I imagine a perfect day I see myself sitting at an outdoor café all afternoon just people-watching. Or perhaps I’m wandering through the neighborhoods, checking out the houses, peeking into the local restaurants, or drifting around in the market. This doesn’t mean I don’t also want to take a walking tour in a new city, or check out the museums and galleries, or hit up the famous towers and temples and churches, but I need there to be a balance between these different kinds of days. Unfortunately, somewhere between dashing around to ancient holy places in Israel to making our way all over India by train and then being hospitalized in Nepal, we let ourselves get pretty unbalanced.
By the time we got to Thailand I was feeling some serious burnout. Yes, that’s right, I was burned out on travelling, which is something I never really thought I’d say. I’ve read about other long-term travelers having this problem, and I figured it would just take a few weeks of lazing around to get myself back together. Having already been to Bangkok a few times, I didn’t feel too much pressure to go sightseeing, though there are a few sights I’d missed in my previous trips and we figured we’d hit up one or two of those so as not to seem like lazy travelers. We ended up seeing none of them. Instead, we spent our days eating absurd amounts of Pad Thai, having massages, and going to the huge and fancy movie theaters at the top of the big malls in the downtown area. Once or twice I’d feel a pang of guilt at not being motivated enough to do something more, but I justified it by reminding myself that it had only been two weeks since I had been released from the hospital so I really should just be taking it easy still.
As we made our way out of Thailand and into Cambodia, then back into Thailand and down to Indonesia, we felt a bit like we were on a huge pendulum, swinging back and forth between bouts of frantic ‘tourist stuff’ and complete sloth. The thing is, with the exception of Angkor Wat, none of the ‘tourist’ stuff was really impressing us anymore. There comes a point when you just get so templed and museumed out that you can’t imagine having to go to yet one more of them. I know, these are not pressing issues compared to most of life’s problems, but it was unsettling because we felt like we should be enjoying ourselves more. One of our problems was that the cost/interest level wasn’t balancing out. In Cambodia we had paid something like $35 to go see a village built on stilts, but we both walked away feeling like we had totally wasted our time and our money. $35 isn’t much by Western standards, but keep in mind that for us, that’s one half day’s allotment of our expenses. We paid this to essentially be scooted along in a boat for 30 minutes through this village which, while interesting to see, just wasn’t $35 for 30 minutes interesting.
For nearly a month we tried really hard to figure this out because time and time again we simply weren’t feeling the love with our sightseeing choices. What could we see that might re-energize us? What could we do that would make us feel like we were getting our money’s worth out of the visit?
Eventually we gave up and just went to the beach. I kept arguing with myself that we are all the way across the world, in this place that’s nothing like where we live usually, and we can’t find anything better to do than lay around at the beach?
Who wouldn’t want to lounge about here?!?!?
There are plenty of things you can do as a tourist here, but what we kept running into was that pesky cost/pleasure problem. Do we really want to pay $200 to hike up a mountain at three in the morning to see the sunrise with 35 other people? Do we want to pay $80 EACH to ride an elephant for 30 minutes (especially when the same thing costs $20 in Thailand where we just were)? We neither dive, nor surf, so that takes away another chunk of options. I get wildly seasick, so the boat trip to Komodo and Flores is a no-go. We intended to go to Sulawesi, but that island is huge and we’d only have a few days there, which would definitely make us feel frantic and rushed.
I felt like I was losing my mind. Here we have the trip of our lives and I already felt like we’d been lazy travelers in Thailand so I didn’t want to just waste time while we were in Indonesia. Then, finally, it hit me. This was the trip of OUR lives. Ours. Who said a ‘good’ trip is filled with non-stop sightseeing, especially if that’s not what you want to do? There are other ways to experience a place, and they don’t all involve a tour guide or a rushed itinerary. We totally knew this, but had somehow lost track of it along the way. We started looking at our options through a different lens.
Why were we beating ourselves up over lounging on the beach when that’s something we love? Colorado doesn’t have beaches with fabulous turquoise water, so it’s not like this is something we can do back home. We decided to give ourselves 5 more days to explore the beaches around southern Lombok. When we’re done with that we’re heading back to Ubud, in Bali, where we’ll take 5 or 6 days of introductory yoga classes and at least one cooking class. In our spare time perhaps we’ll rent bikes and ride through the rice terraces, or maybe we’ll just find a lovely café and read.
It was incredible how much better we felt after that shift in perspective. Making these decisions served to remind us, as we head into the next few months of travel, that this trip is for us and we will only be making the most of this time if we do things because we are interested in doing them, not just because they are in the guidebook under someone else’s list of ‘must see’ items to check off a list.
We’ve spent the last week lounging about and stuffing our faces on Koh Tao, in Thailand. My brother has been living on this little island for nearly 10 years, and even though we’ve been to visit him before, we never get tired of watching the sun set from one of the many local beach bars. After three days of clouds and rain we finally got a hot sunny day and were happy to sit at my brother’s bar, Maya Beach Club, sipping mojitos and checking out the longtail boats as they bobbed around on the tide.
The Parallel Life 