My Last Day in Thailand

Well, it’s all over. My Thailand adventures have come to an end for about eight weeks and I am now starting my “Laos Adventures.” I will be living in Vientiane, Laos for my official internship until the first week of August, at which time I will return to Chiang Mai for one final week in my beloved Thailand. Today was my final day in Chiang Mai. I awoke early as I had quite a few last minute errands to do before leaving for Laos (including sending out some postcards!). I convinced Zenia, Bobby, and Saem to go for breakfast at the Bake & Bite again, a last farewell to our Western Thailand fare. After breakfast we set out to accomplish some errands including mailing out postcards, picking up some groceries for our bus trip, finding a tube to hold the prints I bought at the night market the other evening, and eating some last good Thai meals.

I managed to get everything done, but it all seemed to take quite a bit longer than I anticipated, leaving me with very little time for any leisurely goodbyes to the city I have come to love. My running around did accomplish one amazing feat, however, it kept me from panicking about my upcoming traveling adventures. I’m not sure that I would have been panicked anyway though. It’s odd, but my travels to Thailand have immunized me from a great deal of the traditional travel worries and craziness. I seem to have calmed down a great deal about potential travel hazards and am now just rolling with the punches of traveling in SE Asia. After all, what’s the worst that could happen? I would have to take a later bus or a different tuk tuk. It will all work out and there is no point of panicking about it beforehand. This blasé attitude might also be based in the fact that I am traveling with nine other people. But we’ll just pretend that it doesn’t and that I have evolved and become a better traveler.

I am proud to say that my last dinner in Thailand was pad see ew. We decided to try a restaurant that all of us at PT Residence had passed every day on our walk to Uniserv, had always expressed an interest in, but had never tried. The food was good, but the service abysmal in that it took the waiter FOREVER to get our final checks to us. We had left two hours for dinner and time to get some last minute things over to BABSEA house for storage during the time we are gone to other countries. Unfortunately, the service took so much time, we didn’t have an opportunity to take our things over to BABSEA. Luckily, Vanessa (a different Vanessa than the one I went to Wildflower with), who lives at the house, ate dinner with us and offered to take the easily transportable items over to the house for us. We gratefully accepted and that task done, we returned to the apartment to await our red truck, which would arrive at 6:30 pm to take us to the bus station.

The trip to the bus station was uneventful. However, it is necessary to note that nine people traveling together take a lot of luggage. I know we are all going for two months, but still. Even with my “light” packing (one large backpack, made for backpacking, a purse and small day-hike bag) I looked like an overweight turtle, carefully carrying all her belongings, a shell pushing her over on her back. I’m sure I looked positively ridiculous, covered in bags, struggling under the weight a bit, but I didn’t want to leave anything behind. I have solid logic behind my desire to take all my worldly possessions here in SE Asia with me to Laos, so don’t think badly of me yet. You see, we came to SE Asia for three months, 2/3 of which we will be spending in this country; therefore, it makes the most sense to take all of our belongings to that location as we will be residing there for the longest period of time and that is where we will need our belongings the most. Had I come to Laos first and been able to drop off my stuff, I would have carried far less to Thailand for the abbreviated amount of time I would be there. Makes sense, right? I knew you’d see it my way.

We were dropped off unceremoniously by Tee (one of the native Thai interns) and left to fend for ourselves. Earlier in the day, when we retrieved our tickets from their captors at BABSEA house (“captors” is an accurate description, by the way, as they would not hand over the tickets until everyone was there and they had reviewed everything again), one individual from each group (Laos and Vietnam – they would be traveling with us for the first portion of our journey) was appointed the traveling document holder. This person was put in pseudo-control and we allowed them (Nate from our group and Bobby for Vietnam) to take charge of figuring our travel arrangements for this first leg. They did a superb job and at 7:30 pm our bus was identified and we had loaded up, ready for our departure at 8 pm.

I’m sure most of you heard of my overland travel by bus and had an image in your mind similar to Romancing the Store, just as my parents did. (If you haven’t seen this movie, go rent it because you are definitely deprived and missing an amazing experience.) In truth, I had this same image in my own mind and was a bit worried about how I would get on with a rickety bus filled with strange people, farm animals, and some creepy guy trying to steal a secret map sent by my sister and hidden in my purse (ok, maybe not this last one, but that would have been pretty cool). It turns out BABSEA did shell out some decent money for this portion of our journey (not as much as a train ticket or air ticket would have cost, but a bit of money) and we were on the “VIP” bus. I’m not sure if there is a regular bus or if they are all termed VIP, but it was an excellent bus overall (with a few fun quirks thrown in just for kicks). There was plenty of legroom for even the tallest of our group and the seats were more comfortable than any of us had expected.

We had seats in a large group on the top of the bus (it was a double decker) in the very front. These turned out to be good and bad seats. They were good, because being in the front of the bus is always preferable to being in the back (usually the shocks are better in the front and if you are prone to motion sickness or car sickness it is better to be in the front than the back), but bad in that they leaked. About an hour outside Chiang Mai it started to rain. At first no one thought anything of this occurrence; this is, after all, Thailand during monsoon season. It soon became clear, however, when the bus began to drive on a curvy road that this was a very bad thing indeed. When the bus turned toward the right all was well, however, as soon as the bus turned to the left, a stream of water from the ceiling would shower down on Laura’s seat. Luckily she took this turn of events in stride, with a lot of laughter, and ended up abandoning her seat and making a nest out of her blanket and our bags that were stashed in a little open area at in front of her seat, at the very front of the bus. We laid down a raincoat to catch the falling water and by the time the rain stopped about thirty minutes later, we had collected enough water to fill a medium water bottle with about three inches of water. Everyone then donated the small head coverings on their seats to put down on the slightly damp seat, and with some rearranging of the seating arrangements (one of the boys was good enough to take the damp seat) everyone was able to once again sit down.

While I hadn’t heard and wouldn’t expect most Thai buses to have leaky roofs, there are some things that I had heard before our journey were standard about Thai buses and which proved true by our travels. The first rumor was that Thai buses are kept very cool, in fact, practically arctic. We found this out immediately. After the sweltering evening heat of the bus station, the air conditioning on the bus felt good and we all breathed a sigh of relief. Unfortunately, this satisfaction did not continue long as the temperature in the bus continued to plummet. I had prepared for this potential issue after hearing about the probability from several sources by wearing my tennies (to keep those little feet warm), my hiking pants (so I could zip the legs back onto the shorts to keep my legs warm), and my rain jacket. Even with all of this protective gear, I needed to wrap the small fleece travel blanket the bus provided around myself so that I was fully cocooned in a nest of warm clothes. It was very odd; whenever the bus stopped at the various stations along the way, the people outside would be sweating in their shorts and t-shirts, while we were battling “death by a severe chill” on the bus. (That was a harder reference, did anyone get it?)

The second rumor proven true was that Thai buses play movies. I can now state, unequivocally, that this is true. The bus does play movies, but first, it plays Thai music videos at full blast throughout the bus. By full blast, I mean loud enough to blow out your eardrums. The only thing that saved my sanity was my amazing pair of noise canceling headphones. I sat in my seat with my headphones on, now able to hear the music at a regular volume, while everyone around me cringed and groaned in agony. (Is it bad that I enjoyed that a little?) :) After we had been bombarded by Thai power ballads, the movie was put on the main screen. It proved to be an American film, a stupid one, but still…American and it would have been watchable, but it was dubbed in Thai. They did not even bother putting English subtitles on that sucker. The poor English speakers were left watching a movie in poorly dubbed Thai. It was a funny experience. I provided some sarcastic improvisational dialogue to Saem for a while, but soon checked out entirely and put on my headphones to listen to a book-on-iPod. I listened to my book until I was too tired to continue, sometime around 10 pm, when I turned off my iPod, left my headphones on to deaden all noise, and “went to sleep.”

Unfortunately, I am not a good night traveler as I find it very hard to fall asleep in airplanes, trains, and buses. I did manage to sleep for most of the night, but in short bursts, waking every hour or half-hour and then quickly falling asleep again. A clock high on the wall at the front of the bus kept count of the slowly moving hours. I would like to say that I saw a good deal of the Thai country-side and was able to see more of Thailand by virtue of my bus journey, but the truth is that on a night-bus, traveling at speeds I don’t even want to contemplate beyond the term fast, on super small roads, the best policy is just to fall asleep and call the countryside a wash. I took this policy and slept through our journey from Chiang Mai to Udan Thani, a city about two hours from the Thai-Laos border. But that portion of the journey was another day and is another story…