End in sight

Since my last post, I finished up my time in Thailand in the island of Phuket. I got better at surfing, (finally managing to catch the open face of waves!), and learned a new sport called paddle upright surfing.
The wind during my time there wasn’t sufficient for picking up kite-surfing, instead I was very happy to have progressed to the extent that I did with conventional surfing. Thailand was fun, but I don’t know if it deserves the nostalgic sense of ecstasy people seem to go into when they talk about their experiences there. Maybe I’m not young enough to enjoy it as a complete party animal, and not old enough to enjoy it for the idyllic sense of relaxation available in so many parts of the country. The Indonesian island Bali has both of these in a smaller area, so if you ever consider an exotic getaway, give this one due consideration as well.

Now I’m in France, the last stop on my itinerary. The first week I stayed in an apartment in Montmartre. I was gratified to be able to “cook” and store my own food in the apartment since, with the dollar-euro conversion being what it is these days, eating out daily was becoming an expensive prospect. I’m glad to be joined now by one close family member, and we’re visiting Paris, northeastern France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and northwestern France around Strasbourg together.

After getting to practice yapping on so many itinerant French in recent travels, communicating in the language has become easy here. Today I found myself missing the adventure in China of communicating over the course of daily activities, trying to form sentences in poorly-toned Chinese, like in the grocery store: Wo yao na ge dong xi, yong chi chi fan. (lit. I need that thing, used for eating food) spoken while I make a pinching motion. And so I get led to chopsticks, and I learn, kuai zi. And then to make it easier to eat rice, Yao ying guo de kuai zi (I need ‘English chopsticks’) and now I have a fork! As far as languages go, Chinese is definitely my next focus, especially for business. Although I think I’ll be learning characters for the rest of my life . . .

With the end of travels in sight, I find myself spending most of my time moving forward with the next steps of my life and career. Soon, this blog (being a travel blog after all) will by all rights come to an end. Going forward though, I will treat it as a medium to update folks, wherever I am, (even home!), in order to describe new experiences and my reflections. If you don’t already get “push” notifications by email or otherwise of updates to the blog, email me and I’ll add you to the update list. Should you choose to tune out completely (and who could blame, given the frequency of updates!), it’s been very fulfilling to post my experiences and thoughts. Perhaps you’ve been enticed to wonder about the world some more, or just to hit the beach. Either would justify my purpose in posting. The travels have been meaningful to me on approximately twenty thousand different levels, and I hope some of that has rubbed off. If via this medium you’ve been accompanying me, I thank you.

Thailand

One goal I had with coming to Thailand was to see what all the fuss was about with
people who've come here reporting that it shouldn't be missed. So I'm here, finally
not-missing it, and . . . well it's a very pretty place. White sandy beaches are mildly
developed, providing a happy balance between seclusion and access to services and
activities. Addressing the fuss, I'm afraid I can provide no nutshell response on whether Thailand should or shouldn't be visited except through the anecdotes that follow. I will preface that Thailand's
seemingly magical effect on most visitors seems to have only mildly affected me. Like I told at least one person before I left, I'm a very bad tourist, so I can only enjoy
pure uninterrupted recreation and relaxation for so long, an inconvenient character flaw
in a place like this.

First, I completed my 18-meter depth dive certification in the waters off Ko Tao, which was so much fun! The water was as clear as any postcard picture you've seen of diving in a tropical resort region. The instructor, comfortable with my classmate's and my level of relaxation, took us into some narrow caves, making for a real lesson in buoyancy control

I've spent the past week and a half on Ko Pha-Ngan island off Thailand's east coast. My bungalow is very inexpensive, so I've spent a lot of time using it as a base to explore different parts of the island, finding beaches each with their own traveler culture. And that's the funny thing about much of Thailand that I've seen. The culture of common tourist locations is more driven by travelers than by locals. To hazard a guess, I imagine that in busy times the island's transient foreign population swells to at least match the local population in size. So touring here is like touring the populations of the developed countries, if vastly overrepresented by the British.

Ko Pha-Ngan's culture and economy is centered on the Full Moon event. Some would call this event a festival, others would call it a party, and still others would call it a 10,000 person beach rave complete with trance techno, florescent paint, drinks with dangerously unidentifiable ingredients, and more unabashed hedonists than you can shake
a glowstick at (and who could say if I wasn't one of them?). I could describe it as a one-night Burning Man minus the sense of responsibility to selves and environment. And the average age is about ten years younger than Burning Man's (the British pre-university gap year hordes strike again). If you don't know what Burning Man is, you'll have to do a few minutes of web searching to understand this as a reference point for the Full Moon Party. And if you're not familiar with what Gap Year is, well I think I'll touch on
it next post, or you can search on your own.

What follows is a moderately stream of conscious listing of things I've been up to around here. If you're looking for a post that is well tied together, I'm afraid you'll have to wait until I've exited the Thailand mindset. At least I didn't write in pidgin.

-I recently finished reading The Beach by Alex Garland, a book about backpackers finding a secret lagoon community in a nearby island to Ko Pha-Ngan. It follows the popular trouble-in-paradise plot line, except like Lord of the Flies, it's a real downer of a novel, so it's put me in a sour mood.

-I took a Thai cooking class, making coconut soup with chicken, Pad Thai,
green curry chicken, and for dessert, coconut-milk fried bananas. I served the
food to some Thai I live near, and they didn't retch, so I felt good.

-Unfortunately for a still growing tourism industry, the islands are floating liabilities
when it comes to the likelihood of many kinds of injuries. Roads are in deplorable condition, compounded by unfenced ditches by the roadsides, frequent rains, and drunken tourists on two wheels. On the flip side, wound dressing is big business so it’s justifiably pervasively advertised. Sometimes more frequently than I can believe, I see travelers with glass cuts from walking on the beach (even wearing sandals), motorcycle accidents, and rock cuts from vaulting between cliffs (under the influence of some narcotic). Also, in the local hot, moist climate, the threat of infection is always looming. For all this, unlike in India, I'm avoiding motorcycles like the plague here, which by no means absolves me from the odd cut or scrape. I've gone into my med kit at least twice as frequently as in India, though thankfully through much more mundane causes than described above.

-I'm trying to manually remove a virus from my laptop again. I first got rid of it while
I was in China, but it looks like it's been hibernating on my memory cards in the meantime. Here's hoping it's not on my phone's memory itself. Not a very good use of time in the islands, but I'm getting some work done as well on the computer so I need it clean. Otherwise my computer gets too hot, and risks getting damaged.

Now I'm itching to see a different part of Thailand. I'm planning my escape by air to the island of Phuket for more surf lessons, and then back to Bangkok with plenty of margin of time to fly for France.