Ah Thailand! We left on very good terms 3 years ago so I was happy to be back when I got dropped off the boat from Langkawi onto a floating platform on your soil. I was not so happy when I nearly tipped backwards and overboard from the weight of my luggage when trying to board the longboat to the beach. But I’d almost forgotten that embarrassment when we cruised 100m onto the white sandy shore of Koh Lipe on crystal clear turquoise water, passing colourfully decorated longboats under the bright sun shining from a cloud-free sky. No other border crossing has been (or probably will be) as beautiful. Ever.

I’d emailed ahead to a dive school on on the island that offered free accommodation if you do a Padi course with them so I got checked in there and went to the dive shop to get everything sorted so I could start my AOW the next day. There is no written test for that course but there are review sections to complete and I unfortunately don’t quite know how to do things by halves so I got my full-on study-mode on. Those notes will probably come in handy never.

After 2 1/2 days of proving my buoyancy is still ridiculously positive, that I’m apparently less likely to get as lost underwater as I regularly get on dry land and that I still have a long way to go before I stop calling all the clownfish Nemo and the moorish idols Nemo’s friend, I can officially claim to have completed my advanced open water certification. Yeah, that diving bug I was never going to catch? That’s not how it’s working out…

My awesomely patient instructor had to go on a visa run after I’d done 4 of the 5 dives so I did the last dive of the certification with the other instructor at the dive school. Thankfully, the Thai princess who had just arrived on the island wasn’t shutting down the dive site he had mind – it was one he hadn’t visited yet (having been on Koh Lipe less than a month) as it is only dive-able a few days each month because of the tides and currents. He pitched it to us as ‘if its true what they say about this place, this will probably be the dive of your lives’. Way to manage our expectations. But it was beyond stunning – corals, fish, plants in all kinds of colours and shapes and sizes. Even at 28m, there were pretty blue ones . It’ll be a little sad if my 12th dive will never get matched again but if ever there was an experience to cement how awesome diving can be, that dive is probably it for me.

I stayed an extra day on Koh Lipe. Partly because I needed to do a visa run of my own (I’ll elaborate below) and partly because despite the average level of tan among the tourists being a little too close to Donatella Versace, it was just too lovely to leave! Beautiful white beaches all around the island (one just on the doorstep of the hostel), mango rice, not-so-cheap-but-very-good fruit smoothies, awesome massaman curries, 100 bht mojitos on Sunset Beach and awesome people to hang out with made for a place that was a little hard to leave. But after 5 days I packed up and headed south – the opposite direction of where I wanted to go.

The reason I had to detour from Koh Lipe is because Thai immigration only gives you a 15-day visa on arrival overland or by boat and my flight was 20 days out from my date of arrival. I went through several options of how to fix that, one involving just overstaying my visa and paying the fine on departure, but settled on spending a day returning to Langkawi and then booking a boat to Satun on the Thai mainland and then heading to Bangkok from there.

I thought I would be able to catch an overnight bus from Satun to Bangkok but the boat arrived too late to catch the last one so I was stuck in Satun for a night. Annoying waste of time but I found a hostel for the night and then the next morning I took the bus to Hat Yai (the one they say takes 2 hours but actually takes 4), struggled to get anyone to understand ‘train station’, didn’t help my case when every time someone seemed to understand where I wanted to go, I replied ‘si!’ and eventually caught the express overnight train to Bangkok (the one where there are no beds left so you book a seat in 2nd class because it’s only a 13-hr train ride after all but then it gets delayed 2 hours and you really start to wish you’d booked the 17hr train that did have beds free).

Since I’d lost a day in the transport/visa-run inefficiency debacle, and I suddenly had those 2 hours to spare in Hat Yai where they have an advance booking office, I decided to head straight for Chiang Mai and booked the overnight train north for the same day I arrived into Bangkok.

When I got to Bangkok, 3 hours late because congestion apparently also affects the Bangkok railway lines, I left my bag in the luggage storage and spent just 9 hours in town before I was back on the train again. Just enough time for the straps to snap off my not-so-sturdy-afterall leather backpack from Uruguay and to replace it with the world’s most boring-but-practical-and-relatively-cheap alternative. I took a dislike to it pretty much instantly.

The train to Chiang Mai was pure 2nd-class-sleeper luxury and I was at my hostel by 9, drinking coffee and waiting for check-in. I spent just 2 full days in Chiang Mai. Not because it isn’t a place with lots (lots!!) of activities on offer at the many (many!!) travel agencies but because I’m a little over the whole ‘organised day-trip’ thing. I’d rather spend my time somewhere a little less dominated by tourists doing the usual tourist things. And with it being Chinese new year, there were SO many tourists in Chiang Mai.

I did decide to head out of town to the Doi Suthep temple (supposedly one of north Thailand’s most sacred temples) one day. I didn’t trust the advice from my hostel on how to get there (seemed too expensive) so I went searching for a cheaper alternative. Which exists in the form of one of the songthaews just outside the north gate. Once I found that, I did have to wait 45min for the driver to drum up enough other passengers to fill it but that’s just part of life as a solo traveller. It took 40min to get there, not too long to climb the 300 steps to the temple and even less time for me to decide that that temple was just not worth the time or money. It’s not as impressive as, for example, the palace in Bangkok and there were just far too many tourists. So my most overwhelming impression of Chiang Mai was basically too many tourists, checking off too many travel agency boxes. But I still got stocked up on a few souvenirs, negotiated so hard for a birthday present for my brother that the woman at the first stall eventually waved her hands at me and refused to continue (I got it with a much more reasonable stall owner on the other side of the road), took loads of photos in the many, many temples and enjoyed stumbling across the odd hipster cafe/community-based tourism platform. Their description, not mine. Yeah it might also be a little too commercial…

Next, I set off for Pai, northwest, near the Myanmar border. On a 3 hr minibus ride through some pretty stunning scenery.

Things started out pretty well in Pai; someone started a conversation with me randomly in the street the first afternoon, just because I was wearing my Loki t-shirt and he had stayed there too so I figured the backpackers in this place were seeming pretty alright. I had a look for trekking options at a few agencies but a lot of them only offered the typical small hike/bamboo rafting/ride elephants option which I was not interested in. Instead I joined a British guy at my hostel who had been given details of a less-visited area outside town with local villages and some hot springs. We rented scooters, tried (and succeeded in) not to overpay for petrol and headed out in the direction we’d been told it was. The road conditions once we turned off the main road were questionable though but we made it to a little village (with no shops) and a bit up the hill beyond it before turning back (I was rather low on petrol). Unfortunately, my years on a Vespa in London gave me a little too much confidence and coming down one of the sandy hills, I was heading a bit too far to the left, braked a little too hard and tried a little too much to correct my steering and I crashed (well, at the speed I was going, more like tipped over), scraping my foot and my hand and bruising my knee. Not badly so really this mostly bothers me because it means I’m now a stereotypical tourist in Thailand. And I don’t really want to be that.

Back in town, I was planning to just fill up the scooter with petrol and then keep it for a bit more sightseeing around town the next day but then I passed an agency that advertised a 2D/1N trek starting the next day. So I went in to ask about it and ended up signing up and returned the scooter instead.

We set off from town at 9am the next morning and drove for a good hour before getting to where the trek would start from. The paths on day 1 were pretty rugged but we made it to the Lisu village where we were spending the night and even got a little swim in at the slightly cold river. If it wasn’t for all the blankets we were given, it would have been a cold night in the little bamboo hut, sleeping on a very thin mattress with the family pigs and chickens hanging out underneath the raised floor of the hut. On day two, we trekked some more, crossed way more rivers than my balance would have preferred to but eventually arrived into the Karen village that was our pick-up point for the ride back to Pai.

After a well-earned beer over dinner back in town turned into a late night at a place called ‘Don’t Cry’, I caught an early bus to Mae Hong Son where I had to spend 4 hours hanging out at the bus station before the connecting bus to Mae Sariang arrived. By the end of the day, I was sitting at a little riverside restaurant, looking out at the sun setting over north-western Thailand at a place with very few backpackers but impressively fast wifi.

The buses from Mae Sariang to Bangkok were fully booked for several days so I ended up spending a day longer in Mae Sariang than planned. Which was just fine by me because it’s chilled out, surrounded by beautiful hills and rivers (ok, a bit more water in them would have been nice) and a little bit off the beaten path which was nice to experience in a country that is very well-travelled.

Back in Bangkok, I had just enough time to go to the weekend market, catch up with someone from my Inca Trail group who was in town on a work trip (awesome catch-up and awesome sky bar view of the city) and post a parcel home.

Now I’m just about to leave bustling Bangkok behind and I’m going to try my damnedest to get this posted before I leave the functioning wifi of Thailand behind.* I’m flying to Kolkata this afternoon but connecting straight to Port Blair on the Andaman Islands after a night at the airport but I don’t trust Indian island wifi so my chances to do it over the next 2 weeks might be limited.

I’m leaving Thailand with different but as many happy memories as last time. There are still parts of this country that don’t revolve around alcohol consumption from buckets and where you don’t keep losing your place in queues for street food to Chinese package-holiday tourists. And those are just some of the reasons I’ll continue to love this place. But I hope to be back before those buckets reach any more of this country’s gorgeous islands and anymore high-grossing Chinese films get shot in (and make a holiday destination of) too many places in its beautiful countryside.

 

Today I’m listening to: Local Natives – ‘Heavy Feet (Live from Spotify)’
*obviously I got distracted by drinking coffee and chatting to some people at my Bangkok hostel and did not actually get this posted before I left for India. But the post is back-dated so just pretend you’re reading this on that date