Leaving Southeast Asia
Monday, January 28th, 2008It’s been a while since I wrote anything in this space, and it’s been a bit of a whirlwind tour for us in that time.
We flew to Bangkok about 2.5 weeks ago and spent the next 10 days or so in Thailand. We visited a floating market an hour-and-a-half away from Bangkok, which was actually better than we expected, as we stayed the previous night in Nakhon Pathom and woke at dawn to walk to the market area along the town’s canals. There were plenty of produce boats about, making for a picturesque scene and plenty of good photos, and the tourist trade hadn’t really started yet. By nine o’clock, the buses started to arrive from Bangkok and our day was over…
We spent the next few days in Kanchanaburi, which was unfortunately a bit of a disappointment. There’s a ‘Tiger Temple’ nearby where monks live with rescued tigers – it featured on National Geographic or another similar TV channel two or three years ago. But there’s not really a temple there anymore (or at least you’re not shown where it is), and the odd monk or two you see are just there for show – it’s basically a tiger zoo run by international volunteers, and nothing like how it was portrayed in the video clip and how it’s continuing to be portrayed by the current management and Bangkok/Kanchanaburi tour companies.
Our second disappointment was that we took a bus for more than an hour to walk along one of the most interesting stretches of the infamous WWII Death Railway from Thailand to Burma, built by Allied POWs and local slave labour at the hands of the Japanese. But the 4km route was closed for a three-day period for maintenance, so the trip out there was wasted. We still took the train part of the way on the Death Railway line back to Kanchanaburi, but this was a tourist trap and a disappointment, and the bridge on the river Kwai is not nearly as impressive in real life as the one depicted in the 1957 movie.
With Wendy’s birthday approaching, we took a bus south and wound up celebrating on a small island called Ko Chang on the Andaman coast, close to Burma (not to be confused with the Ko Chang on the Gulf coast!). It was not paradise-like but was a quiet, untouristy island with maybe 7-8 bungalow operations, and we spent a peaceful day there drinking cocktails and swimming in the ocean. The following day we returned to the mainland and continued south, taking a boat trip on the Phang Nga bay (near Krabi) which was the highlight of either of our two recent sojourns in Thailand. The bay is similar to Halong Bay, but a mangrove forest at the start of the trip (prettier than it sounds) added an extra aspect to it, and I was able to get lots of great photos.
With the timing of the start of our next jobs uncertain, we gambled a little and decided to continue south to Malaysia. We only managed to spend three days there unfortunately, but it was enough to explore the island city of Georgetown, which is a fabulous melting pot of Indian, Chinese and Malaysian cultures that, I suppose, represents Malaysia as a whole, and also spend a night in Kuala Lumpur, a pretty interesting large city by Asian standards.
On Tuesday night we flew out of KL, and we landed in Sydney five days ago, an unexpected trip that is a bit of a bonus for us as we get to visit family and friends here. We’re going to be based here for the next few weeks, doing what work we can from here while waiting for the green light to go to Beijing, where we’ll live for the next seven months as part of a planning team for the Olympic News Service for Beijing 2008.
I’m starting to put up more pictures from all of the countries we visited in Southeast Asia, so you can check them out here.
Nick