The World in 100 Words or Less

Day 3: Today I decided that I would leave the comfortable, air-conditioned abode of my friend Naomi and commune with the other poor travellers on the famous Khao San road. To ge there, I would yet agani have to go through the traffic of Bangkok. TO be cear, BKK traffic is among the worst in the world. The drivers are crazy, the motorcyclists even worse, and the lights can have you waiting 4 minutes for a green. The taxis are always interesting, because either the driver is fast and nearly gets you killed every minute or painfully slow attemtping to conserve gas (my least favorite). Of course, on my longest taxi trip as of yet, I got a slow one. Mr. Khaison, as his identification card said, was ex-military and a fan of street racing, thuogh you wouldn’t know from his sloth-like driving skills. After 45 minutes of holding my tongue about narrowly missing lights and taking extremely congested streets, the man has the audacity to stop at a store and get a bottle of water, and he didn’t even get one for me!!! I was furiuos, and told him to chop 50 baht (39 baht=1 us dollar) off the taxi ride, which was about a third. Surprisingly he agreed, because he sure as hell didn’t want me walking off withuot giving him nothing. SO after an hour, with the air condiitoning surprisingly “no work” for the time after our argument, I arrived at Khao San.

I found myself a nice little room on the main street that was clean enough, but not great. Atleast it was better than one of the rooms i checked that had cockroaches the size of your fist running along the floor. The place ended up saying has been great though. I quickly made friends with 4 of the other travellers: Aaron, Max, Remco, and Svenna (USA,USA,Holland,Germany). I spent he rest ofthe day hanging out with them, just walking around buying stuff at the many markets, which turned out to be great. The road really affords good friends, and travellers are always more than happy o introduce themselves. Meeting people has become one of my favorite parts. LIke on Day 2 when I ended up getting sloshed with a bunch of thai guys and their girlfriends at this local’s place not far from Naomi’s house. Not that I remember all of the night, because they were kind enough to buy the last 8 rounds (the beers are about a litre big and are 6 point. whew!!)

Day 4: Today I’m off to Chinatown which is supposed to be great and I’ve also booked bus tickets with Aaron down to Surat Thani, which is far in the south. The bus will take all night, but we got a good deal, which ended up costing as much as one night’s stay at the hostel, so not bad all things considered. From Surat Thani (pronounced s-ir-a-t t-a-n-ee) we’ll be heading off to Khao Sok, a beautiful natonal forest preserve with great hiking and from what Naomi tells me, great culture.

Tags: Thailand

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2006 at 8:08 pm and is filed under Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.