Back from Bangers

It’s hard to believe that I’m writing this in Suvarnabuhmi Airport waiting for my flight home after ten weeks on the move during which I’ve been in the UK, Malaysia (for a couple of hours), Singapore, Australia and Thailand. Strangely enough, all countries where you drive on the left (more or less, in some cases).

Looking back on the trip and my first experience worth talking about of Asia, it has been a great success. The last three weeks in Thailand has really given me a liking for this wonderful country and I certainly look forward to returning here. As I mentioned earlier, the people are incredibly friendly and welcoming. I think that the strong influence of Buddhism here probably contributes to their placid nature and friendly smiles - for example, although the driving is a little haphazard at times, in three weeks I have seen only one minor traffic accident and have heard no raised voices and seen no signs of aggression. A few lessons there for other countries I think ! Even in central Bangkok, a congested and polluted city, there is a spirit of live and let live amongst all drivers which sees tuk-tuk drivers pausing to let limousines exit into the traffic. The traffic is never ending as this is a city which never sleeps - you can hire a tuk-tuk or jump on the back of a motorbike taxi at any hour of the day or night and while the streets and huge shopping malls are thronged during the day, there are also night markets for the insomniac shoppers.

Anyway, it’s now time to tidy up the photos, do the washing and prepare for what comes next…

After arriving home from Thailand (an 18 hour trip), I have exactly two weeks before leaving for Indonesia for my placement with VSO. During that time, I have to attend a five day SKWID (Skills for Working in Development) course at VSO’s residential centre in Birmingham, visit the dentist, get my anti-malarials, garage my car, apply for my visa, sort out my tax return for 2008 and generally tidy things up in preparation for a long absence so it’s going to be a busy fortnight !

My flight to Indonesia departs from Dublin on 8th February and takes me to Bali via London and Doha. In London, I hope to meet up with a Scottish volunteer who is going to work on the same placement as me on the island of Flores. When we arrive in Indonesia, our first eight weeks will be mostly taken up with a language and cultural training programme in Denpasar on the island of Bali before travelling to our individual placements on various islands. During this training period, most of the time will be spent living with a local family which should certainly force me to get on with learning Bahasa Indonesia ! I guess that Bali is probably also likely to give me the opportunity to buy any bits and pieces that I have forgotten to bring (including appropriate work clothes) as I believe that Maumere on Flores is rather limited in shopping opportunities so I‘m not too worried about forgetting things !

Sawatdee Khrab !

Apologies for the lack of posts recently but there hasn’t been much to report as we spent nine days chilling out in Good Days Resort on the island of Koh Lanta. This is a beachside bungalow resort with two swimming pools but, like most things on Koh Lanta, a rather unimpressive roadside presence. The nine days in the hotel were spent doing not very much - the main highlight was that Felix, my seven year old younger nephew, suddenly learnt how to swim without armbands and is now able to do a very impressive front crawl with good breathing technique. His first attempts consisted of swimming about a foot below the surface and coming up every now and again for gulps of air. He seemed quite happy with this but it was rather alarming to watch. Stage 2 was closer to the surface but only using his left arm in an impressively fast one armed windmill-like front crawl stroke, his right arm trailing by his side for some inexplicable reason. However, he’s now swimming faster than most of us in a more conventional two armed style !

On one of the days we stayed there I rented a moped for the princely sum of €6 (including a helmet and insurance, two concepts not understood by the first place I enquired) and did a complete tour of the island. Koh Lanta Yai (there is also a Koh Lanta Noi) is about 28kms long and has a permanent population of about 20,000. Most of the tourist activity is focused on the west coast as the island’s tourist season revolves around the (dry) north east season. In the monsoon south west season, most of the places on Thailand’s west coast in the Andaman Sea shut down and the tourist activity moves to resorts such as Koi Samui on the east coast. As you ride around the island, it’s easy to see how important a role tourism plays in the local economy and to understand how events such as the recent airport closures in Bangkok and the aftermath of the tsunami of 2004 must have devastated the local economy. It is almost as if the road has only one side to it, with every bar, restaurant and hotel having a beachfront presence which is far more attractive than the side facing the road. In addition to these, there are laundries, bakeries, cafés, motorbike rental places, to say nothing of the hundreds of stalls and shops selling DVDs, T-shirts, shorts, multicoloured crocs, etc. There are also more opticians than I have ever seen in one place with great deals in eye tests and designer frames (ask my sister for more details !).

Our daily lunchtime routine involved a visit to a lady we nicknamed Mrs. P, who ran a small stall on the beach selling Pad Thai with chicken, fried rice, pancakes with fillings and fresh fruit platters, all made up to order. Our bill for lunch (for five people including cold drinks) never exceeded 300 Baht (€6). In the evenings, dinner (starters, main courses and drinks) never cost more than €36 or €38 for the five of us and included some amazing fresh seafood, huge barbecued prawns, great curries, and more.

I’m writing this in the back of a bouncy minibus en route from Koh Lanta to Phuket airport, a journey of about four hours and two ferries which has already involved two unscheduled stops for tyre changes and puncture repairs so we have our fingers crossed that we make it in time. In Bangkok, we will have four full days to explore the sights, including a day trip to Wat Po, the reclining Buddha.

After two weeks in Thailand, my impression is of universally friendly people. Even when trying to sell you something, the people are 100% good natured, friendly, and welcoming and curious about where you have some from. There is no sense at all of tourism fatigue and even the tuktuk drivers who are not getting your business have time for a smile and a friendly “sawatdee khrab”.

To Thailand

When my long night in Suvarnabuhmi airport finally drew to an end, I took a short (one hour) flight to Phuket and then a taxi to Patong Beach to meet the rellies. This was my first exposure to Thai driving and is best left to the imagination. Patong Beach is a pretty dreadful place, reminiscent of Benelmadena or some such place in the south of Spain and the hotel was equally grotty so I was thankful to be only spending just over twenty four hours there.



On Saturday 3rd, we received a very warm welcome at the Sunsail base and picked up our home for the next week. Princess Christina is a Sunsail Odyssey 35, built by Jeanneau in France to Sunsail’s specs and so is custom built for charter use (which means, among other things, a smaller headsail than normal). We were given a very thorough briefing on the area and the possible anchorages and overnight stops before a somewhat manic visit to the local enormous Tesco Lotus where we charged around trying to identify what various items were before buying them.

We left the marina on the east side of Phuket later that afternoon and spent our first night at a rather rolly anchorage on an island east of Phuket. Dinner was in a lovely small beachside restaurant and cost the grand total of about Bht2,000 (3 starters, 5 main courses and a few beers) - that’s less than €50. From there, we started by heading north to spend a couple of days sailing in and around some of the amazing soaring limestone islands that plunge vertically out of the sea. Some of these islands have “hongs”, which are lakes or lagoons in the centre of the islands. Some of these hongs can be reached by a narrow passage in a dinghy at certain stages of the tide, others by swimming or crawling through tunnels but they are all spectacular in an eerie sort of way. One of the islands we visited in the first couple of days is known locally as “James Bond Island”, as it was used in The Man with the Golden Gun. It is now a major daytripper destination with lots of souvenir stalls selling the usual tourist tat.

As we made our way south during the week, we had spectacularly good weather, clean water, great food and even managed to teach the junior crew some of the basics of sailing. One of our concerns at the outset was that a week aboard might prove to be a little too long for a seven and a ten year old but that proved completely unfounded as the week was filled with new experiences - snorkelling for the first time (outside your bath, that is) in crystal clear water with hundreds of reef fish probably topped the list. Going ashore to different restaurants in a dinghy very night, being stung (very slightly on the bum) by jellyfish, jumping off the pulpit of the boat (the rail at the front) into the water in your armbands - all made the week a very memorable one and a great success.














Everywhere you go on the water in Thailand, you will see one type of boat operating - these are called longtails. They are of timber construction with a high prow, usually about twenty five feet long but their most amazing part is the engine. These are enormous petrol or diesel engines, often a V6 or V8 mounted on a pivot at the stern of the boat with a long propellor shaft sticking out the back which gives them their name. The engines are very heavy and require a huge amount of physical force to pivot them to turn the boat so being a longtail skipper is not for the weak of limb. They are used for everything from passenger and goods transport to fishing.

When we reluctantly returned to the Sunsail base, we then had an interesting four hour minibus (and ferry) transfer from Ko Phuket to the island of Ko Lanta, where we are staying in a lovely beachside resort with individual bungalows for the next nine days.

First impressions as I write this on the morning of day one are excellent ! The cocktail list is extensive and breakfast was ok.

Speaking of On the Beach, as it were: Ruth from Toronto has given me some more information about Neville Shute. Apparently, he was English and not Australian but attended Oxford with Ruth’s father-in-law. Another interesting fact about him that she provides is that “his father was head of the Post Office in Dublin and that Neville was a stretcher bearer there in 1916”.

Thanks Ruth !

No More Long Unwinding Roads

Firstly, apologies for not wishing you all a happy and peaceful New Year in my last post. I know that for me anyway, this year is going to be a very different one in almost every way and I hope that for all of you (including those of you who appear in my hit stats from Chile, The Canary Islands, Philippines, and other far flung places, whoever you are) it brings you whatever you want (within reason, of course).

The main reason for forgetting to include New Year greetings yesterday (especially regrettable as for most of you it was still 2008 while I was posting in 2009) is connected to the difficulties of uploading posts while on the move. Although I have been carrying my little Advent laptop around with me since I started this trip, I have been surprised (especially in Australia) by how hard it can be to find wireless access in some places. In Katoomba, for example, the hotel in which we stayed did not have a wireless network available for guest use (even for a fee). There was one café in the town which had free wireless access but they weren’t open on New Year’s Day and, even though I could pick up their network in the street when the restaurant was closed, I didn’t have the access code which is only divulged to paying customers. However, I am getting more used to hunting down unsecured wireless networks and spotted the public library just up the road (also closed but their network was available outside and no access code required). However, what I didn’t spot was that the only parking space outside the library was reserved for disabled drivers. At least, I didn’t spot it until it was pointed out to me by a member of Katoomba’s constabulary who also told me about the AUS$400 fine for violation. As a result, I had to pack up and move rather quickly and hence the lack of New Year greetings.

What I normally do is write these posts in advance whenever it occurs to me and then copy and paste when I can get online so that probably accounts for the disjointed nature of some of these ramblings - sometimes they are written a day or two before I can post them.

While I’m at the apologies, I’ll throw in one about photographs. I’m getting more and more frustrated about the way in which photographs appear in these pages - despite a deceptively simple tool which lets me upload photos and choose their size (small,medium or large) and their alignment (left, centre, right or none, whatever that means), the position in which they actually end up appearing seems to be more or less random and my ability to do anything about it almost non-existent. So if any of you can shed any light on this or give me some pointers, please let me know. The problem is most noticeable in posts with multiple pictures so please forgive the rather scattered and untidy layout you will see from time to time.

Anyway, I am writing this just after 1 a.m. sitting in Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport after an eight and a half hour flight from Sydney. I’m pleased to report that the airport is open for business again after the protests last month which closed it for some time and there is no evidence of any trouble, apart from a noticeably heavy security presence. My onward flight to Phuket is at 0750 hrs and so I need to stay awake until then. The airport is still quite busy as flights depart more or less continuously with just a brief lull between 0330 and 0600 and most of the restaurants look like they stay open 24/7 so there is plenty of activity. It also looks like some of the airport staff sleep on the floor in the airport rather than going home as three guys in airport security uniforms have just unrolled their sleeping bags on the floor opposite me. However, as per above, there doesn’t seem to be any public internet access here so I’m not sure when this will get posted, maybe in Phuket later in the day.

We are planning to pick up our Sunsail yacht on Saturday 3rd December so I expect to be out of contact for a week or so while we sail our way around the charter area. I am also back to having no mobile phone as my Vodafone pay as you go scheme won’t work here so no phone until Ireland. Having just completed a week’s charter in Australia, it will be interesting to see how the Thai operation compares with the Australian experience.

Katoomba & The Blue Mountains

The Blue Mountains are about two hours’ drive west of Sydney and the town of Katoomba is in their heart. The name for the region comes from the distinctive blue haze that the gum (eucalyptus) trees give to the air when it is hot although the temperature up here (about 1000m above Sydney) is much cooler than on the coast, up to 26 degrees at the moment with a refreshing breeze most of the time. This whole region is a natural park and there are numerous visitor information centres, marked walks, etc. One of the most well known views is that of the Three Sisters rock formation in the Jamison Valley and the best view is from Queen Elizabeth Lookout,which was “visited by her Most Gracious Majesty in 1954". There is no mention of Her Most Gracious Maj undertaking the walk we did, which involved descending the Giant Stairway (900 steps taking us down about 250m) and walking around the bottom of the Three Sisters and ascending again (thankfully) by the Scenic Railway, claimed to be the world’s steepest railway with an incline of 52 degrees. Well worth the AUS$10 (€5) not to have to climb back up 900 steps !




Katoomba is a similar sort of place to Airlie Beach, lots of backpackers and places selling tour tickets, but this time the focu is on mountain walks and treks rather than island visits and dive trips. The youth hostel, conveniently located to the large police station, was one of the biggest buildings in town.

Anyway, that's the end of Phase 2, the Aussie Odyssey.  Now we're off to Sydney Airport where Michael & Jane return to a cold London and I'm off to Thailand to meet Rosemary, Helmut and the two terrorists.

More from Thailand....