The Rest of Thailand

So it's mid-June and I'm about to finish my last post on my winter vacation. I'm making record time.
I left off last on accepting the spectacle that is Phuket, Thailand. All in all it wasn't so bad considering it was a rather entertaining place, but like I've said before I wouldn't recommend it highly to those who want something immersive and unique, unless you're prepared to look for it outside the designated areas that is.

We ended up getting ahold of  a couple of friends who also teach in Korea with us and agreed to try to meet in the party town we found ourselves in. Now, to find foreigners in Korea is about as easy as opening your eyes and scanning 360 degrees for a few moments. We stick out. In Phuket however, almost every single person is a foreigner. In general it's just a really busy place spatially and visually, so finding anyone is an extremely difficult thing to do when you don't have phone service to keep each other updated on progress. It's like we'd stepped back in time to the 90's or early 2000's to when most people only had a phone with them if they never left their living room. Times were tough back then. Add that into the fact that you can't really stop to get your bearings without someone trying to hustle you into their club to watch ping pong shows (the clever and skilled use of female genitalia to perform unusual shows involving markers, candles, live turtles, and of course ping pong balls).

After a while we found each other, grabbed some drinks and chatted for a bit on what we'd been doing. We hit up a hookah bar down the street, which we were lead to by a small Syrian or Lebanese person. We made some plans to meet up again the next day at Tiger Kingdom, and that's where I had a really good day. Before that however, we wandered through the town until pretty late looking for food and whatnot and decided to cut through a then poorly lit alley to the street on the other side where everyone and everything was. Now, it wasn't that we were in danger or anything but there comes a point in your life where you've walked too far down a street to turn back without looking like an idiot, and just far enough that you see that the street is lined with prostitutes who're basically on their last hopes for business that night. I won't over-speculate and say that all of them were or used to be men, but as you wade through a crowd of desperate hookers who're trying to get you to purchase their services you tend to become eerily aware that the strength in the grip of a few of them is beyond the norm for most females. Also they have Adam's apples and a 5 o'clock shadow, and also definitely a penis.

Tiger Kingdom is a place where you can pay to hang out, pet, and cuddle with tigers. I'm not sure if they're drugged, well-fed, or extremely well-trained, but they didn't kill me even once. For the most part they're just like regular cats, too lazy to do much even if you bother them. Tigers being my favourite animal, this was of course quite enjoyable. You pay for the size of the tiger, with babies of course being the most expensive and the largest being second most. Babies are cute, but if I'm paying to hang out with tigers I want it to be something that could make its disapproval well known.

He neither approved nor disapproved

I approved

Of course it could kill you any time it wanted, and that's part of the fun. The trainer was close by but there's not a whole lot of good that would do you anyway. I was between this one's tail and back legs and at one point it scared the hell out of me by moving his tail and legs together at the same time all of a sudden. The thing was his feet barely moved, it was mostly the tail, and he shifted me a little with what is most likely the weakest part of his entire body using only the effort that came from yawning. Needless to say, you get a sense of just how completely and royally screwed you'd be if it got annoyed.

This guy was napping pretty much through the whole thing

Cat napping in the sun. At one point she was having a dream about chasing something I think, getting the legs working in a short mock run.

That wasn't a homeless guy or anything, just a guy napping with another tiger cub that you can't see

These ones were awesome, definitely lively as hell. They all play exactly like house cats do, even the big ones. It's also weird to see a trainer dangle a basketball on a stick like an over sized cat toy and the full grown tiger go nuts like it's the greatest thing ever

The washroom at Tiger Kingdom had very specific criteria for who could enter

Some people do speculate that they're drugged to keep the tourist murder down, but I don't actually think that was the case. They slept for the most part, but all cats do that really and I saw one just get up from his nap at one point and move over into the sun as promptly and naturally as you'd expect a sober cat to do. 

After Tiger Kingdom we headed into Phuket Town and got a hotel room there for the night before going off and searching down the beaches for a while. 

The next day we grabbed a tuk tuk and headed down to the southern point of Phuket to see if we could find a boat to hire to take us to an island for a day or something. We ended up in this really small town, found a surprisingly awesome hotel, and spent the rest of the day on the shore since the tide was too low at the time for boats to safely leave or enter the harbour area. 

Also, always be sure to enjoy the local artwork

The next day we hired a guy to take us on his boat to the island across the way for most of the day. With a steady supply of beer and nothing but a beach to enjoy it was a pretty pleasant day all in all. 

Chickens love coconuts

We spent most of the time wandering around between two beaches and collecting shells and whatnot. To be honest the pictures don't show the pollution problem that was there, which was pretty awful. Just washed up trash everywhere, sometimes in huge piles. It was pretty sad to see, but they don't really have the resources for waste disposal that we have back in the west so it wasn't exactly surprising. We found a section of beach with warning signs posted, in Thai of course, and a small house boarded up and abandoned. It had a nice tree though so the four of us took a nap on the beach and dozed off pretty well. It was a great nap all in all, nothing but the sound of waves, coconuts falling through the jungle canopies in the forest, and the delightfully hazy wake up call to the words of "..What the fuck is that?!"

What it was was a 5 foot monitor lizard that had been walking along the beach toward us and had stopped in its path. It was probably a good 20 feet away, but between being in a state of confusion and surprise, and trying not to make any sudden moves before I got my camera out, we all moved a bit too much and it ran off into the forest. So the warning signs make sense in retrospect now, I guess.

The next day we played mini-golf and then we all went home. I'm thinking I'll do Cambodia and Laos next year for winter break, so perhaps I'll have some good monkey stories in future. 

Enter the Land of the Thais - Part One: On Sleazy Hotels and Beaches

Thailand has a reputation for all things kinky, illegal, and illegally kinky. You think of Thailand because you reminisce on nights spent buying cocaine from people who also sell balloons on the side (who ever got rich off of selling coke?) or one night stands that leave you with a lifetime of explaining certain medications in your bathroom cabinet to significant others or other one night stands. Or perhaps you think about Thailand because you wonder how easy it is to spot a lady boy (super easy if they spot you first) or just how blurred the lines between heterosexual and gay can get before your wallet calls it quits. Thailand is where you go to cut loose in ways polite society won't mention, but which the country has dedicated itself to. You don't take the kids to Thailand with you. Why would you? You can purchase some once you arrive.

Thailand is a mixture of beauty and mercenary attitude. Everything is for sale and there is no dignity when cash is on the table, but the landscape and ocean views are as good as you'll find anywhere from what I saw, and I've heard really good things about the more northern part of the country from other travelers. In Thailand was the first time I'd swam in an ocean (I think), and I'd be hard pressed to find a location that would outdo where I was. It also marked the first time I'd been swarmed by prostitutes in an alley at night, and perhaps not the last.

So we left Vietnam at some point (the details are hazy now) and got into Phuket, Thailand at around 6 pm, which I remember because there were some last calls for airport vans going around the island and we had arrived with no plan or idea of what to do. Why Phuket? I knew nothing about it, just that it was a popular place in Thailand for people to go and I was just looking for an easy and relaxing week at the end of our trip to hang out on a beach and maybe see some elephants. I didn't really care what we got up to, so we just figured we'd work out a plan on arrival. It turns out that I maybe should have looked a little more into Phuket. If a tourist destination could be a metaphorical asshole crammed with non-metaphorical sleazy, cheap tourists and frat folk wearing identical "I (heart) Phuket" muscle shirts, as well as a serious case of migrated genital herpes, then Phuket would go a bit beyond that. It's a total tourist trap, and most of the time I was surrounded by so many white people I never would have thought we were in a foreign country. Phuket is pretty stripped of culture at this point and seems to exist solely for the tourist industry. I'd heard a lot of great things about Thailand in general, and I intend on checking out more next year, but Phuket is really more of your things if your idea of travelling to another place means having ethnically different people tell you where Banana Republic and Burger King are.

So we got off the plane and chose a beach town to head to, just so happening to be the biggest on the island I think. I forget what it was called, but it doesn't matter. We get on this bus and headed out, but the trip included a stop at a "tourist hospitality" building, which I put in quotes because I have no idea what the intention of this place was, but I strongly suspect it was to confuse me. Anyways we didn't have reservations so we got hustled. End of story. It was the least professional office I've ever seen and they all made calls on cellphones rather than a land line, so I get the impression they like to keep options for quick, fly-by-night mobility open at all times. We didn't get hustled that badly or anything but we were told the place we were going to stay was pretty nice, hence the price being more than usual (I think it was about 50 bucks for the night). So long story short we get into the town, which was crazy, and find this hole in the wall place where we proceeded to check in. The guy at the desk seemed confused as to where he was or to what extent he was employed. All the pictures we'd been shown had looked really nice, but at the actual place everything seemed a bit.. off. I decided at one point that what they probably did was take pictures off the internet of nice hotels and then mimicked them from the pictures in a way that was cheap, half-assed, and almost certainly done in a state of heavy intoxication. Once I'd gotten over the initial displeasure of the whole thing it was pretty clear that this was going to be an entertaining place to be. Phuket is many things but it does not lack for hilarity and some of the best people watching imaginable.

So you look at this and you might say, "Tom, this doesn't look all that bad. Look, there're no less than three gold-painted wooden sculptures fixed to the wall. That's living". To that I say, everything was sticky with sin.

So house keeping probably never changed the sheets between guests because that's expensive, I guess, and someone had left behind a bit of their blood on it in case the next guest was feeling a little low on iron. Everything had a coating of spilled liquor and cigarette ashes, and a nice touch on the decor was the used condoms in the garbage can. Also a nest of mosquitoes lingered somewhere, which gave me cause to hunt the room for a while with an electric bug swatter I'd taken from the guy at the desk. That was sort of fun. The guy at the desk was even nice enough to offer a soundtrack while I did that, obliging until about 4 am just in case I was in for the long haul.

The next night we found new lodgings, but made the grave error of having not burned this one down to the ground upon leaving. Anyways here's what Phuket looks like. Oh also we arrived on the eve of election day, so no alcohol was allowed to be sold for some reason. I had no escape.

The blur is actually there in real life if you do Phuket properly

Need a souvenir? Give the gift of racism

I don't know if these were fake or were in a state of suspended animation, or perhaps were just puppies needing a place to practice being dead, but they were creepy and anyone who buys them should be arrested at the airport and probed rectally

So the next day we went down to the beaches to check it out, since that was apparently one of the primary draws of Phuket, and I guess it must have been because damn, was it packed. It was also popular with older Europeans who had no idea that tiny bathing suits stop being a good idea after oh, I don't know, let's say 60 just to make them feel like they didn't miss the mark by too much. That was if they graced the world with the decision to wear one. A topless beach should be a place of wonder and joy. Life is cruel though, so what we got was more akin to several pairs of what looked like sun-baked leather tube socks filled with a handful of nickels. That describes a few of the men too. 

Anyways, we decided to just kick back and take it all in, rest on the beach for a few days and hit some islands or something. Once we got into this mode of thinking Phuket got a bit better. It's all about enjoying the spectacle that is humanity. Next post I'll talk about tigers and monitor lizards. 

Ho Chi Minh City Part 2

So the things that we wanted to do in the city of Ho Chi Minh itself ran out within a couple of days, but we still had a few days to spend before out flight to Thailand, so we decided to check out the Cu Chi tunnels out in the countryside, which worked as a day trip tour you could take. It was way the hell out there in the middle of nowhere but the scenery was pretty nice for most of the way. The Cu Chi tunnels are a network of underground living areas and troop movement tunnels that the Vietcong used during the war with the Americans as well as with the French earlier on. In terms of what's preserved enough to be able to wander through yourself, there isn't much, but it's still cool to wander through the tunnels for a bit to get just a rough idea of how enclosed it might have felt, without the tourist regulation safety measures of course.

Now, as I've mentioned before, the Vietnamese have a very awkward fixation on preserving vivid images of atrocities and documenting the full extent of murder, war crimes, and general animosity. No judgement about it or anything, they've gone through a lot and it's their history, but man, if you're a westerner being told about all the ways they brutally killed American and French soldiers then after a while you can't help but feel like they're sort of just saying shit to gauge your reaction. It was actually sort of funny in a dark way and it was a very unique cultural experience having your tour guide explain things to you while all the while possibly imagining your gruesome death at the hands of his grandfather. I didn't take any pictures because it felt really surreal seeing a bunch of tourists gathering around taking photos to show their families of death traps and the remnants of destroyed American military vehicles with labels indicating how many soldiers were killed inside of them. It's one of those moments where reality and the social conventions of tourism reach a particularly uncanny gap.

So to start out they grouped us all into this sunken bunker so we could watch a video on the history of the tunnels and of how the villagers in the area spent their days farming and their nights ambushing and executing American soldiers. It was so fucking awkward. You could feel the collective tension between every single person on the tour as we all looked at each other as if to say, "Is this tour a front? Are they going to shut the doors after tossing in a couple grenades for good measure?", and nervously laughed every time we heard something particularly racist or propagated. The funny part was that while it sometimes felt like the guides were just messing with us, I have come to believe that they genuinely thought we'd be super impressed by how good they got at killing Americans.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't impressed though, because the way they lived in those tunnels, the ingenuity of accessing fresh air, water, resources, and the way they used them to co-ordinate troop movements was inconceivable. Apparently if the American soldiers found a vent in the forest for the tunnels using search dogs, they loved nothing more than tossing down something poisonous that turned the tunnels into gas chambers, so the Vietcong found a way to mask the scent of their vent openings so the dogs would avoid them. The ingenuity was staggering and the accounts of how units would move in to ambush American soldiers in the night only to vanish the next moment into a tunnel system whose openings were rarely ever found makes it all too clear why Vietnam veterans were famous for coming home with particularly extreme cases of PTSD compared to previous generations of war veterans. But even today you can tell that the Vietnamese saw demons in uniform rather than scared, conscripted teenagers, so the tour was a very one-sided  account of history that was very much alive and vivid in the country's memory.

I also got to fire a gun. A Vietnam War era AK-47 to be exact, using ammunition left over from the war that the government was looking to use up. A few of the rounds were duds from age, but that thing packed a kick.

So back in the city we at some point checked out a Museum dedicated to the American War (as they of course refer to it), and it was simultaneously one of the best and most depressing museums I've ever seen.

The museum was essentially dedicated to the war crimes of the Americans during the war. Naturally there was a bias present, but all in all it was done particularly well because it was far more balanced and fair than I'd expected it to be. It chose to focus on exposing the crimes of the American government and its various military contractors rather than misdirect blame onto the soldiers themselves, often even exhibiting a few who chose to refuse to obey orders or help the Vietnamese citizens by preventing war crimes rather than partaking in them. All in all I actually learned a fair bit from this particular museum that I hadn't even heard about before. Apparently there are/were a few political figures in the U.S. who'd committed some pretty horrific acts of violence from massacres to torture of civilians and Vietcong soldiers who basically got a free pass when they got back. I did some fact checking as best I could and it all seemed to have been legitimately documented. I suppose the lesson I really took with me was that facts don't make it into history if we don't like the way they make us look. It's also amazing what you can get away with if you have the right connections. 

While that was all depressing enough, the main focus of the museum was the effects of all the chemical testing that took place during the war. I guess military developers used Vietnam as a consequence-free testing ground for everything horrible they could think to throw at them in irresponsible volumes. If a few ounces of a chemical could poison an entire village down to a genetic level, they'd throw down a few tonnes of it for good measure. Pictures, documentation, chemical weapons canisters, and everything was cataloged in a way that was more than just damning evidence against the American government; it was somehow compassionate toward everyone who suffered the consequences, from Vietnamese to Americans who were exposed in different ways and lived with the damage. If anything the museum was really all about the collateral damage of war, showcasing reporters, photographers, humanitarians, doctors, and everyone from everywhere around the world who gave something during the war. It was an amazing contrast. One wall might have been a condemnation of the government while the next was all about celebrating the heroics of American soldiers and citizens who took a different stand and lost something for it. 

Ho Chi Minh probably won't ever make it onto my list of places to recommend people to see, but that museum probably will and there's a pretty good restaurant for wings, so there's that too.

Moving Down To Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)

By the time we'd gotten back to Hanoi from Ha Long Bay, we'd seen everything we'd set out to see in Hanoi and although the city itself is a wonderful blend of madness and beauty, we had heard a lot of good things about our next destination, Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. As the biggest city in Vietnam how could it not be at the very least just as good? There's a tonne of history there, and it's the hub of modern life in the country to boot. We hadn't bought a flight in advance for the sole reason of not wanting to feel restricted in where and when we decided to go, so first thing in the morning we headed off to Noi Bai airport to buy tickets to HCMC on the fly, as it were. If anyone is under the illusion that Canada and particularly the US have the worst airport efficiency ever to exist, they should try Vietnam, where we barely made our flight with a minute to spare owing to the single security line being backed up and painfully slow moving. It also included strange rules of who gets to butt ahead of everyone based on how nicely they were dressed I guess.

We arrived in HCMC with a bit of time left in the day to find the hostel district and get ourselves situate for the night. After finding a couple places booked up we landed in one that had some space left and got a couple of bunks for the night. We dropped off our stuff, had a brief conversation with some Germans about how the bed I'd been assigned was full of bedbugs [it wasn't, but that wasn't determined to be true until later that night], and went downstairs to get my bed switched for the night before heading out for food and to check the place out.

The first thing that struck me about HCMC was that it wasn't at all like Hanoi had been. What rustic qualities it had were really more from grime and pollution than the well-worn but clean atmosphere of our previous city. Sadly, the posts of countless photos are almost over, as I took very few pictures in Ho Chi Minh. There just wasn't as much that struck me, and aside from being surrounded by Vietnamese some parts could have passed for Toronto. At the end of the day I simply felt that it was just a big city like almost any other, robbed of uniqueness and local culture by the ever-expanding influence of global culture. That said, there were still some interesting things.

We arrived in time to see the preparations for Tet, but weren't around long enough for the actual celebration. Lots of flowers. 

This is taken from behind  the cool flower horses because as you can't notice, in front there was a sign that said something like "Pictures for 50 000 VND", which is like $2.50, which wasn't a lot I guess, but it's free when you go around back and security as you can see wasn't exactly on high alert

Notice how the roots of the plants themselves are made to look like fish too. Nifty

I don't remember when this happened chronologically in the our time in HCMC, but at one point we started talking to a coconut vendor on our way to finding a museum and he let us see what his job felt like for a couple of minutes. It's not insanely heavy, but you can see why they're in a rush to sell them all quickly. Harrison models it well

This was taken near our hostel area one night as we sat and had dinner and watched everything go by. This place was tourist central but it only made for a more entertaining sight. Lu Lu here is a prostitute bar, one of many, where a gentleman sits down for a drink and a young woman comes up and sits with him, talks for a while, flirting of course, and perhaps if you're lucky a really amusing display of publicly inappropriate physical behaviour. It was some of the most fun I've had in terms of people-watching, trying to figure out who was there by accident, wondering how they'd became so frustratingly attractive to young Vietnamese women, or who was there with the full knowledge of what it all entailed and played it up shamelessly. At one point a fat old guy with one leg had a table of five or so young hookers around him as he drank and smoked away before walking off with a couple of them. That was the best part, watching them all leave together and the look of guilt and confusion on the faces of some of the guys. Also it's worth noting that we eventually figured out that the servers and owners of the place we were eating at were the pimps for the hookers across the street, often walking across with menus that were not so subtly filled with cash and brought back across the street before a waiter got on his moped and casually kept an eye on the patrons who'd left with a date. It sounds a bit tacky perhaps, and it was, but man, it was downright classy compared to prostitution in Thailand, so stay tuned for that because it's really funny