A Blast of Wind in your Ear

Where to begin…its been so long since I have done an update I don’t know where to start..after Bangkok, it came time to do some island hopping…the first place we all decided to visit was Koh Phi Phi…its apparently one of the most beautiful islands and one that was most devastated by the Tsunami…not that you would know it when you got there..we took a train from BKK to Surit Thani…possibly the worst trip so far…what a nightmare…the train was comfortable and you had your own private bunk but when I decided to go to bed and closed up the curtain, it appears that a little bugger of a mosquito got trapped inside my boudoir. It took 10 minutes before I realised what a pissed off little bugger he was when he had taken about 20 bites out of me…I got munched…the train staff after much forced encouragement changed the sheets (in case of bed bugs)…luckily Jess had industrial strength anti histamines and magic sleeping pills which helped me get to sleep afterwards..

After arriving on Phi Phi, I realised fairly quickly it was not the place for me…it’s no longer an island paradise but a place filled more bars that you could shake a stick at…the island is now so commercialised that it has ruined which I am sure used to be an idyllic paradise..the one thing that really hit everybody was when going to the beach, the heat of the water was unbelievable, hot enough to have a bath in 

At this stage it was time to move on, as John, Jonny and I came in by land we only had a 15 day visa so we needed to go to Phuket to try and get our visas extended. As the lads were leaving Thailand before myself and I needed longer I had to make the trip to Kuala Lumpur to try and get a proper visa..the beginnings of a nightmare trip not helped by the fact that our comrades in arms for the previous 6 weeks (the Jamies, Celine and Jess) were being going elsewhere and we wouldn’t meet again…I flew there and straight to the embassy..it was a Friday and it turned out the lazy buggers wouldn’t accept a visa application after 11.30…and they only opened at 9..i arrived at 12.15…hell, damn, crap…cue having to stay in KL for the weekend to try and get a visa on the Monday morning…one thing I have to say for KL…the local food was bloody crap…of everywhere else in Asia I have been it was by far and away the worst..horrible…I ended up in McDonalds…and I hate McDonalds…that’ll tell you how bad it was… also as it was in the middle of the 6 nations I had the awkward task of finding a pub which was showing the game..finally found a bar called Finnegan’s Irish bar….it was a lifesaver…..

I was staying in an area of Chinatown..the cheapest part of KL…basically it’s a street packed..and I mean packed with stalls…it’s a shopping street..4 stalls deep by about a bazillion stalls long..and they are really persistent..almost up there with the Chinese in the silk markets…it was a nightmare trying to find the hotel there as the stalls were covered and blocked out all signs and encroached onto the pavement outside the hotels..you could nearly never find the damn place where you were no matter where you were dropped off… the other major league culture shock after being in south east asia was how expensive everything was compared to everywhere else…nothing was cheap..taxis expensive, food expensive and hotels bloody expensive…just what I needed…a couple of nights in an expensive dump…and the bloody rain…it rained all the time…and not like the weedy rain that we get at home…proper bucketing it down…the first rain I had seen in god knows how many months…the first night it was a novelty..the second night it got to be a pain..you couldn’t go anywhere…and all I had with me was shorts and t-shirts and flip-flops…I hadn’t banked on the damn embassy closing applications so early and only brought enough for one night…adding to my nightmare… at the same time some things in KL are very impressive..the Petronas Towers are massive..people may remember them from the movie Entrapment (I think)…but you can only go up to the 42nd floor…of 100 odd…another place was the tv/radio tower…but it put me off when I heard that at the very top they have a bloody McDonalds…is nowhere sacred anymore..I thought that the Coca-Cola sponsored benches in Vietnam beside the temple were bad but a McDonalds at the top of a really impressive building was a joke..

Anyways I went back to the embassy on Monday morning early…applied for the visa and got told it would take 3 days…that was the final straw…i took my application back and took a taxi straight to the airport…by flying back I would get a 1 month visa automatically….that would do…screw it…the journey back from Phuket was then a pain in the ass…the travel agent sold me a one day trip back to Koh Tao where John and Jonny were, who had my backpack with all my stuff…then I get the ferry and get to Koh Pha Ngan by ferry…I got told then that there was no more ferries to Koh Tao until the next day…that travel agent will get his ass kicked if I ever go back to Phuket again…on top of that John had booked me a room on Koh Tao…again a bloody nightmare, more money down the drain…anyways I stayed on Pha Ngan for the night and got the first ferry in the morning…finally to Koh Tao and clean clothes…unfortunately it was for only one night…I had to get back to Koh Pha Ngan to meet up with Dan for a weeks detox….yeah you read right…a weeks detox…I agreed with Dan back in Vietnam in a drunken stupor I might add, to do a weeks detox once we reached Thailand…and the deal included a no back out clause..so again it was another ferry back to Koh Pha Ngan where Dan met me off of the ferry, then it was a scary and I mean scary ride on the back of Dans moped with a 20 kilo backpack on my back to the little resort where the detox was happening….more about the detox next time…

Hope all is well
hughie