Living next door to Ellis

At first glance the old Smokie song may seem like an odd title for a blog post about Thailand. In fact you may even be thinking ‘Ellis? Ellis? Who the f#%k is Ellis?’ but all will be revealed in due course.

To begin, I flew from Cairns to Bangkok via Brisbane and on arrival took a bus from the ‘big’ airport to the second one, home of all the budget airlines, and from where I was catching a plane the next morning on the first leg of my trip to the island of Koh Phangan. Had I not had a final destination, and plane, bus and boat tickets to get me to it, along with a room booked for my ‘one night in Bangkok’, I think I’d have felt quite intimidated and overwhelmed. The Thai capital seemed to stretch forever as I hung off a strap and peered out the window – a huge, hazy city where it was difficult to figure out where the centre was given that there seemed to be clusters of soaring skyscrapers in every direction.

I entered the airport and exited almost immediately as part of the snaking taxi queue, brandishing my booking for Montri Resort and Spa, which sounds fancier than it was, though it was fine: nice place and nice people and a bit of an oasis of tranquility amongst the construction work, endless traffic and elevated roadways of this mega city. It was also the home of the tabletop beagle and the chatty mynah bird of the Animal Kingdom post.

I thought this multicoloured shrub had to be either fake or a few different varieties planted together but it was all the one gaudy plant.

Early the next morning I was on-board for stage one of that day’s travels but before we take-off here’s a line of low-cost carriers at the somewhat chaotic Dom Mueang airport.

I don’t know who these guys on the tail of this Air Asia plane are but I hope it’s not the flight crew. 

A nice touch at the tiny Nakkhon Si Thammarat airport was this rack of umbrellas as you descended the stairs from the plane. I didn’t take one as the weather was neither fair nor foul enough to need it but a lot of the other passengers did.

Sitting in the mini-bus, my fear of being en-route to some teenage party island was compounded by a Canadian leaping on-board and loudly enquiring ‘Hey guys! Cool! So what’s the plan? Are you gonna party or chill out? Yeah, cool!’. Luckily there were a couple of less exuberant Canadians on-board and I chatted to them for most of the trip to the pier and then across the sea to Koh Phangan.

If this island or headland is not called Shark Point or similar then it should be … 

It was quite a long trip to the island, about four to five hours, but very pleasant standing up the front of the boat and looking at buoys, other ships, waves, the sea and nothing in particular. The sunset was gorgeous, but the photos don’t do it justice, and it was dark by the time we pulled into the pier where an adjacent fishing trawler was loading up on ice.

On arrival Š took me to the place he’d rented for me – a small bungalow a few kilometres from the port. I’d told him, repeatedly, that I was about 30 years too old for hostel life so this little place in a patch of jungle seemed a good compromise even if the cooking facilities were a bit battered. Still there was a saucepan for boiling water for tea and coffee, a fridge for beer, and with all that Thai food around not much more was required.

The backyard buffalo and his owner share a contemplative moment …

Mine was the one on the right …

… and on the left lived Ellis, a nice Israeli guy who had lived in Thailand for about six years and on Koh Phangan for as many months, and hence the title of this post.

But back to food where I doubt I’d get little argument when I state that Thai food is great. Fresh, sometimes fiery, colourful, tasty. Here’s a selection, from the Uncle Chin’s chicken rice I had on the flight to a few more memorable meals, including some of the selections from the nightly food market in Tong Sala, the main town on the island.

The days soon settled into an easy languid rhythm of morning teas and evening beers with a swim at a beach or a motorbike ride in between. Here’s some pics from random points around Koh Phangan. That cleared spot on the top of the hill is the site for the airport, the completion of which will no doubt bring more tourists and more money, which is good I guess for most of the locals but which makes me glad I got there before Air Asia did.

Thanks to Š for taking the picture below. It was of a water monitor, which you can just see the head of on the extreme mid left, but it turned out nice in any case.

Yes, I liked the buffalo …I didn’t even notice the crash helmet on top of this telegraph pole until someone pointed it out to me later. Which in turn makes me wonder why I took the photo in the first place.

The blue bike never obeys the signs …

The beach below is Haad Rin, site of the first and now world-famous full moon parties which see the population of the island explode every month. 

… and every mid-month too. 

Around 50 000 people disembark from the ferries and as they descend the gangways up go the prices and down goes the room availability. A few days later and the vast majority of them have gone again, scattered to all corners of Thailand and south-east Asia. The sad part of it all is that each month about a dozen or so who walked off a ferry are carried back onto one in a box, dead from drowning, falling off cliffs and, most often, motorbike accidents. There’s an interesting article in that tragic statistic I reckon, if one could come up with a better title than ‘The Dark Side of Paradise’. Any suggestions? 

So to more upbeat thoughts, one night we went to a Thai festival that was taking place near the bungalow. Here we tasted a more confronting type of Thai food – some grubs and grasshoppers. In the photo below we tried the little grasshoppers that you can just see on the extreme left and the maggoty looking grubs positioned front and centre. Mostly they tasted like soy sauce and were not bad at all though a couple of each was all we could muster the courage for. There was no question though of giving the big cockroaches you can see back left a try: the little fellas could be got down with a couple of quick chews and a swallow but those big suckers would have required more work than my Western gag reflex could have coped with.

The rest of the festival photos below were taken by Maria: as you’ll see when you come to the end of the night I was too busy winning a novelty cushion in a darts game at sideshow alley to take pictures! Thanks for these M – and I’m taking the liberty of including the link here to your blog, where the writing and photos make me want to strive harder. http://www.mariafleon.com/

Shirts galore …

Some far less frightening food …

The festival was literally across the road from the bungalow and the musical entertainment had thumped its way into my colonial era gin and tonic, Somerset Maugham fantasies each night so it was good to see where that infernal drumming had been coming from: these guys and girls. Balkans turbo-folk is usually less than excellent music but Thai pop would give it some stiff competition, says the man who loves country, ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ and Jesus Christ Superstar.  

And then it was on to sideshow alley and the aforementioned darts game. Like when you are playing pool well and you just know the ball is going to roll into the pocket, I kind of knew I was going to get the five balloons with the five darts. Well to be honest after balloon three I was feeling confident and when dart five flew straight to its target it seemed like it had been inevitable all along. Anyway, I’ll let a couple of photos convey the moment.

While on the subject of unexpected success, my aim was obviously true in Thailand as I turned out quite the shark at beer pong too, a drinking game where you try to get a ping pong ball in your opponents’ partly filled glasses, thereby forcing them to scull the contents. This being Thailand I hasten to add that hands were used to project the balls.

Another fun game, made even more-so after many games of beer pong, was Heads Up, a similar-to-charades app where you place the phone on your forehead and each time you guess what the others are acting out you nod your head and it changes: anything from easy (marching) to obscure (windscreen wipers). Maybe you ‘had to be there’ but it was a hoot.

As things turned out, I enjoyed hanging around the hostel and the company of the ‘young people of today’ very much. Nomad House, the place where Š had been working and which his friend co-runs, is a great place and the regulars there a great bunch of people, even if they aren’t so good at beer pong. Give them time.

As part of his ‘a bit of anything and everything’ job description Š had painted a mural extending around the lobby ceiling, some photos of which are below.

Putting the finishing touches to the last thing to be painted …

And so that was Koh Phangan, a beautiful island of beaches, buffalos and backpacks, markets, monkeys, motorbikes and quite a bit of madness, lean, tanned youngsters with gravel rashes from bike spills (known as a ‘Koh Phangan tattoo’), the yin and yang of full-on full moon parties on a place that 30 years ago was a tranquil little drop in the sea. In some ways it all reminded me of The Beach, that search for the perfect place and the holiday that never ends, but in others it felt very ‘Thailand’, especially the interior of the island which seemed much more local, or at least the little bit I saw did. And the festival was almost totally Thai – we three, a few other tourists, and loads of locals. It can often be hard to make ‘sense’ of a holiday place, the various forces that tug at it, and you, so maybe it’s best to just enjoy it for what it is ‘now’, not what it might be or once was.

So it was time to board a boat once more and head back to the mainland as the first and most pleasant part of the long trek up the peninsula to Bangkok.

 The ferry called at Koh Tao on the way, another very pretty looking place and one that’s noted for its excellent diving and snorkelling. Standing on the deck it was hard not to feel pangs: of regret for not having made it there and of jealousy for those heading down the gangplank.

All too soon we reached the mainland …… where we boarded a comfortable but somewhat psychadelic bus to Bangkok.

So, back in Bangkok, with 24 hours or so to fill in before the long flight to Belgrade. The whole trip was itself a bit of a trip: arriving at 2 am, getting a taxi to Charlie House Hotel which the driver claimed to know but soon showed he didn’t, ending up in a police station to try and enlist their help to find the place, the driver stopping and asking a street sweeper, as if she was likely to know the location, getting there and finding we couldn’t check in for another 12 or so hours, filling in the time with a trip to a floating market (great) and Khao San Road (grating). 

My first impression of Bangkok from a fortnight prior wasn’t much changed by trying to explore it while dog tired and just wanting to be horizontal but as M said, it works. For such a big booming city it functions and if I found it all a bit much, maybe that’s me, or at least me on that day, and not Bangkok. Anyway, here’s some floating market photos which were taken while floating around it in something of a haze.

A few photos at and around a temple on the way to Khao San Road …

… and the only one I took there …

And by now you must be exhausted – I’m sure we could all do with a few of those street cocktails. So I won’t tell you about the 13 hours spent in transit at Abu Dhabi airport. About how we wandered round and round for hours before realising there was a much bigger transit area, which turned out to be much the same as the one we’d explored side to side, only larger. Or how my highlight, after about 12 hours, was filling in a feedback form with ‘Your lights are too bright and your announcements are too loud and there’s no comfortable seats’. Instead I’ll finish with a couple of snaps of some sculptures in a little exhibition there that I liked very much and a few photos of my housemate Š travelling the world without needing to leave the airport.

 

 

 

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