Thailand: Hat Yai-Ko Tarutao-Trang
After a long, long overnight bus ride from Singapore, up through Malaysia, we finally crossed the border and entered Thailand, "The Land of Smiles". Likely the last country we'll visit on our trip (unless we make a quick trip into a neighboring country...Burma, Laos, Cambodia) and hopefully where we'll finally get married, we entered Thailand with promises aplenty dancing around in our heads...friendly people, cheap food, cheap accommo, great weather. None of these have so far been too far off the mark.

Our first stop here was in the southern city of Hat Yai. Not much of a place to visit, really, as its major purpose as a city seems to be simply acting as a transportation hub for the region. It's a bit dumpy, with not much to do other than get off one bus or train and on to another. We spent two days here though, trying to get used to Thailand and deciding our next stops. When we originally planned our itinerary we purposely made the decision to enter Thailand by land from the south rather than by flying into Bangkok. The idea was to give us a chance to acclimate ourselves to the Thai culture before being tossed into the madness that everyone has promised is in store for us in Bangkok. That doesn't mean that our first few days in Hat Yai were simple. In fact, the first thing that we realized was that for the past 7 or 8 months we've been doing some seriously sissy-ass travelling...with the exception of Europe, we haven't been in a non-english speaking country! And even in Europe things we're comparatively easy because all the languages at least share the same alphabet. Here though, as you may or may not know, the Thais have an entirely different alphabet...44 some-odd characters just for consonants...plus vowel sounds and dipthongs (whatever the hell those are)...basically lots of little squiggilies. It's a very pretty alphabet, but it's really hard trying to reconcile the english-like transliteration (i.e., the english spelling of how a word sounds) in your guidebook or map with the Thai spellings you find on store and restaurant signs, product packaging, etc. And perhaps it's because there are relatively few western tourists (i.e., compared to Bangkok or some of the islands) passing through Hat Yai, but there is hardly any signage bearing these helpful transliterations, agggghh...a sharp slap back into reality indeed after so many months of lingua-luxury.

So as I said, we spent two days in Hat Yai, learning to cope with the new language demands, and after some research, decided our next destination would be the island of Ko Tarutao (Ko or Koh means island in Thai), a small island in the Andaman Sea off Thailand's western coast. To get there we had to take a minibus...basically a van with 12 people crammed inside...to the coastal town of Pak Bara where we'd hop a boat to Tarutao. On our way to Pak Bara we were given our first insight into another aspect of Thai life...the driving. Maybe it's because they're all Buddhists and they fear death less than we do, but the Thais seem to have ZERO sense of orderly, considerate or even safe motoring...intersections are mostly free-for-alls, lane lines (well, lanes) are nonexistent and both sides of a road seem to be for travelling in any direction you please (especially for scooters). Pedestrians? Cars are bigger...nuff said (oh, and god help you if you happen to be a pedestrian...they will not stop for you unless you are actually standing in front of them, and even then they'll likely just swerve without slowing). Fabulously paradoxical, all of this, because Thais drive like this with seemingly no sense of the malice, anger or aggression you'd find in the West. They seem just as serene, composed and peaceful whether they're tailgating or being tailgated, cutting off or being cut off, blocking traffic or being blocked, as they do when they're selling you something in a shop or serving you coffee. Damn, but is it ever hard to be a passenger! Either keep your head buried in a book or spend the entire trip white-knuckled on the verge of a breakdown. I'd like to take a train please!

Anyway, so we get to Pak Bara and book ourselves onto the next boat out. Tarutao itself, once an old prision island, is part of the larger Tarutao National Park, which is made up of some 60-odd small islands. As it's part of a national park, all the facilities on Ko Tarutao are run by the guv'ment...i.e., hardly any facilities. The island is beautiful...awesome beaches with nice relaxed feeling (I think CBS filmed the last 'Survivor' show there), but it is way at one end of the crass-over-development vs. totally-serene-and-isolated spectrum. In other words, rather than a nice middle ground between too overbuilt and too isolated, we found painfully few amenities. The accommodation was really cheap ($8/night)...but we had to stay in these things called long houses...which should be called loud-houses, really, because every noise made by anyone in any of the 12 connected rooms reverberates throughout. Each room was basically four walls and two mattresses on the floor. No A/C (reasonable enough) but no fan either (miserable). We didn't have mozzie nets which meant we woke up every morning bitten from head to toe and occasionally had to contend with other creepy-crawlies sharing our beds. No hot water anywhere (not uncommon in southern Thailand...we haven't had a hot shower since we've been here) and only one restaurant, cheap but uninspiring. Well, like I said, the beaches were really great, but in the end we stayed only 3 days before the noisy neighbors, bugs and lame food sent us back in search of civilization.

Which we found to a reasonable degree in Trang, another small, not-too-interesting place sorta near the coast. Immediately on arrival in Trang we checked ourselves into the nicest hotel we could find...still only $12 for a double with A/C and satellite TV...the NFL, English soccer, CNN and HBO! Not much to do here, but we hung out for four days watching TV (hey, we're allowed), eating, drinking and doing our Christmas shopping...but mostly just waiting till we had to move on to our meditation retreat...

...more on that later.