Ian Scuffling
Well-known member
Isan looks so beautiful. Have any of you guys been?
I want to go to Thailand
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shakahislop
Well-known member
i've been in 2006. first time outside of the west. got to bangkok and it felt like hell. it was april and the heat and hassle was relentless. i'd never seen people from rich countries in a poor country before. one of the main things i remember is the shock of that power dynamic. watching other people be a part of it, watching how thais relate to it, being a part of it myself. i was always skint growing up, it was the first time i'd had more money than the other people in the environment. we went to what i think was called the death museum which was full of jam jars with picked body parts in. english politeness met tourist-land when tuktuks would never take us to where we wanted to go but would take us to gold shops instead. it was a big hot city and i had no way to get my bearings. i'd been to london before and briefly sydney, those were the only two big cities i'd set foot in at that point i think. maybe paris briefly. it wasn't legible to me, i never knew where i was or how to understand the basic geography
somewhere in the north, nong khai i think or something like that, i got on the back of a flatbed truck for a ride to wherever i was going and looked up at the stars. everything like that felt liberating. the way that you could do this practical thing of sit on the back of a truck in the open air and there were no rules to stop you. motorbikes with three people on and no helmets.
somewhere in the north, nong khai i think or something like that, i got on the back of a flatbed truck for a ride to wherever i was going and looked up at the stars. everything like that felt liberating. the way that you could do this practical thing of sit on the back of a truck in the open air and there were no rules to stop you. motorbikes with three people on and no helmets.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Went circa 2002
I had a great time, but I was 19 and an idiot
We visited a couple of places that got absolutely totalled by a tsunami not long afterwards
Bangkok wasn't nice but the North (Chang Mai) and South (Ko Pha Ngan, Phi Phi) was more relaxed and beautiful. Crawling with odious backpackers like us. But that meant a lot of drinking and if I hadn't been a scared little wallflower probably some sex.
I would like to go back again, actually, mainly cos I've absolutely fallen in love with thai curries.
I had a great time, but I was 19 and an idiot
We visited a couple of places that got absolutely totalled by a tsunami not long afterwards
Bangkok wasn't nice but the North (Chang Mai) and South (Ko Pha Ngan, Phi Phi) was more relaxed and beautiful. Crawling with odious backpackers like us. But that meant a lot of drinking and if I hadn't been a scared little wallflower probably some sex.
I would like to go back again, actually, mainly cos I've absolutely fallen in love with thai curries.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Being that young I don't know if I saw anything at all clearly, I was obviously quite the moron, I wonder if I'd have been more disturbed going there at my current age?
E.G. We rode an elephant which at the time seemed really hilarious and cool but even then we must have known these animals were kept tied to stakes in a field sooo. Maybe there was a patina of 'we've saved these ex circus animals' about it?
We also shot real guns (e.g. a glock) at a range, which was unequivocally cool for a 19 year old
Truly was the most headspinning time of my life, having never much left my VILLAGE before
E.G. We rode an elephant which at the time seemed really hilarious and cool but even then we must have known these animals were kept tied to stakes in a field sooo. Maybe there was a patina of 'we've saved these ex circus animals' about it?
We also shot real guns (e.g. a glock) at a range, which was unequivocally cool for a 19 year old
Truly was the most headspinning time of my life, having never much left my VILLAGE before
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
I had this tremendous sense of liberation which obviously came from being 19 and out in the world for the first time, but also was to do with the place I'm sure
This freewheeling spirit was brought to a halt by me crashing my moped at the bottom of a hill we were going to ride up in order to get onto THE ROADS at the top (no helmets).
Ian Scuffling
Well-known member
Perfect, I'm primarily interested in the north. Looks like it's fairly easy to get an english teaching gig so that may be the move in a year or two. Did you see any temples or go to any national parks?
shakahislop
Well-known member
We went to that massive golden buddha in Bangkok. I would hardly have known what a temple was at that age. The main thing I remember about that is looking down on the city and seeing miles and miles of reinforced concrete.
We did go to a national park a couple of months later on our way back to bangkok from vietnam. That was in nong khai i think. i'd been on the road for six months by that point and i remember feeling this at the time strange and unfamiliar feeling of well, this is in theory great, but i am so sick of this shit and i don't care. We were being driven around in a kind of van and i remember a lot of time driving from place to place trying to find elephants, which we didn't find. we stopped because there was a venomous snake on the road and the thai guides spent a lot of time trying to catch it, for unknown reasons, which they did manage in the end. i hate being on rails like that, being on tours and not being able to do things yourself, i never did much like that again.
my brother was an english teacher in vietnam for a couple of years and absolutely loved it.
Murphy
cat malogen
Yep
shakahislop
Well-known member
i can't remember. i remember there being prostitutes everywhere in vietnam and unexpectedly in shanghai. pretty open. i was walking in shanghai in about 2008 and there on the street was this brightly lit building full of girls beckoning me inside. it was quite striking, that it would be so obvious and open. i carried on walking a bit embarrassed. in bangkok my girlfriend wanted to go to a ping pong show and i comprehensively didn't want to, so we had a massive prolonged argument about sex work sitting on a kurb on the khao san road instead. i can't remember what either of us was saying. probably all a proxy battle for her wanting to go and me not wanting to go, dressed up as something else
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Takes one to know one
shakahislop
Well-known member
there's a certain collision of young energetic western youth and money that happens in southeast asia. or at least happened 20 years ago. but i saw a film about vang vieng this year and literally nothing seems to have changed. it's pretty ugly really. people suddenly being thrown into power and not knowing how to act. a foreign place as license. a sudden freedom as corpsey said. the protective bubble of money that shapes the place and the people around the desires of your demographic. i don't think i've been anywhere where that is as stark as southeast asia.
Ian Scuffling
Well-known member
So it seems like I should bring a white woman with whom I have a tense relationship, got it
Ian Scuffling
Well-known member
Yeah I just heard an ex of mine who had a tourist mindset disguised as spiritual curiosity went somewhere in Southeast Asia and I'm very much curious about her experience. Seems like there's many such cases
I wasn't old at the time
shakahislop
Well-known member
it's alright you can find one when you get there