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September 28, 2005
You will be assimilated
This here is the World Famous Chiang Mai Night Bazaar. (Nothing to do with Infinity Broadcasting, mind you.) Here I’ve picked up some TBT200 Teva knock-offs, a really nice and cheap TBT170 cotton shirt, some cute outfits (TBT200 and TBT280) for my groovy nieces, a Thai SIM card for my phone (TBT200) and this picture of the Starbucks invasion. Sadly, it is a very popular place.
Posted by stu at 03:25 PM | Comments (2)
Past few days in Chiang Mai
Over the past few days I've been getting into the Chiang Mai commuting scene. This bike here is my transport to/from work and about town. The first day was quite hair raising—the controls of the bike are a bit awkward, my knowledge of the streets of Chiang Mai were limited to what was visible while driving on a tourist map, and the totally new rules of the road that need fast learning.
Firstly, the bike is an old Honda Econo Power moped with a semi-manual gear box. (I like to call it ‘Tiptronic’, just like Porsches have.) It’s got some power, the brakes work, but the idle is a bit too low and the engine stalls at traffic lights every now and then. There is a front basket which I used to put my backpack while riding, but now my paranoia of theft has killed that.
Chiang Mai is an old ass fucking city. Over the past few several years the population, people’s economic buying power, and of course traffic have all boomed. My impression is that the authorities have since converted many streets to one way fairways to help things out. Many streets. This means traversing twice the distance theoretically necessary, forced going directions you don’t want to go, and getting lost frequently. But, hey, it’s all good!
Traffic behavior is pretty interesting. Physical, government-defined rules are pretty much considered ‘advisory’ by most drivers. This includes lanes, passing rules, stop signs, and traffic lights. That said, there is an unwritten, generally courteous order to the flow of traffic. As fast as you can is not the rule, but the exception. Bigger doesn’t not result in automatic right of way. Any significant open space between you and the vehicle in front is soon filled from behind and the sides. Horns are only used when someone behind you thinks you are wasting the opportunity to go faster and be more courteous of other drivers by pulling to the side so they can get through.
All this does not seem to make it really dangerous, per se. But other habits do—such as families of three, four and even five all riding a single scooter; talking on mobile phones, holding umbrellas with one hand, and the occasional sneaky habit of driving against traffic if it is convenient.
Posted by stu at 02:36 PM | Comments (0)
September 25, 2005
Checking things out
Today was spent checking out the general area near my guest house know as 'the new city'. Stop one my walkabout was a little used and new book store on Chaiyapoom Road. The first thing I noticed was that they had a full page dedicated to Naom Chomsky! Cool, huh?
After picking up two books, a forgettable SciFi book and some non-fiction on aircraft safety, I headed back to the hotel for a splash in the pool, a few chapters of reading, lunch and a nice nap. Once up again it was time to buy a gadget to help get the pictures from my camera to my laptop. Then it was back to some walkabout fun down where the famous Chiang Mai Night Bazaar is. After a few hours and a 1L Beer Chang at a little tourist joint, it was time to head back for the hotel. Just after crossing Loikhor Road Lane 4 along Sri Donchai Road, I was startled by the collision of two mopeds just 2m behind me. A family of three, including a small 3-ish year-old child, hit the rear tire some woman turning left across traffic. I turned quickly enough to catch everyone tumbling off the mopeds. Fortunately they were all at low speed by the time they hit--nothing more serious that falling of a bar stool. The little girl started to cry after about five seconds but quickly gave up after she realized nobody was paying her any attention. Cwazy sheet, mon.
Posted by stu at 01:03 PM | Comments (3)
September 24, 2005
And on to Chiang Mai...
OK, after a fairly terrible journey north to Chiang Mai, I am finally settled in. Once I left Bangkok, my mobile phone went missing along with my LP Chiang Mai and Northern Thailand book, one of the CHF199 Meindi trekking shoes broke, and the train ride became quite tedious after six hours, painful after nine, and finally arrive an hour late after twelve hours of fretting. Stu, believe it or, was super grumpy by the time he made it to CM. Blah.
Once arriving, it was off to the first guest house that would have me--The Royal Guest House. This has turned out to be an unexpected uplift to my fortunes. While the TBT250/night room is very basic (no air conditioning, five flights up with no elevator) the rest of the premises is great. The food is good and cheap (TBT110 for coffee, OJ, and a bowl of fruit, yogurt and muesli. Yummy! There is also a little pool out front of the open air reception area/bar/restaurant. Oh, and the beer is only TBT40 each--or just about USD0.97. Life is good.
Today I met up with Marc and Daniel from Child's Dream for some coffee and to drop off the 8KG of goodies from Switzerland that have been weighing down my pack: two Compaq laptops, three tubes of Tomi mustard and a single tube of Tomi Mayonnaise. We also discussed the logistics of my stay which seems good so far, chatted about Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Swiss people in Thai jails (lots) and the general drug problem in this part of the world. They also promised to loan me a motor bike for getting about town and a old Nokia phone. :D
Tomorrow I hope to explore the city...more to come.
Posted by stu at 02:12 PM | Comments (0)
September 20, 2005
Entry into Thailand
Immigration was absolutely hell in Bangkok. It was about 0015 when I first got into the immigration hall, and it was fairly chaotic--poorly defined lines, tired and aggressive passengers, and not enough staff to keep it all together. I was lucky and moved quickly to a newly opened queue which probably halved my waiting time. Afterwards, I was met by the Asia Airport Hotel guy who whisked me away to the safety of a cold, quiet room on the 17th floor of the hotel.
The plan over the next few days is to get train tickets to Chiang Mai, get some contact lens refills, pick up some flip-flops cheap, go to the hospital and have this minor red spot next to my nose removed (purely a vanity thing), purchase a 'losable' wallet, and visit a dentist for my six month cleaning. All of this should be dirt cheap.
Bangkok is just waaaaaay too big for my tastes. And too crazy. And too polluted. And just so completely overrun with hordes of package tourists, sex tourists, and aggressive merchants. Blah...counting the seconds until my train for Chiang Mai.
Posted by stu at 06:13 AM | Comments (1)
September 18, 2005
Exit Hong Kong
Alice waited with me inline for my flight, Emirates' 2220 flight EK385 to Bangkok and onward to Dubai. The queues were huge! We were in the queue beside the biz/first class check-in desks which was generally empty. Out of the hundreds of people waiting to check in, I was selected to jump into the biz class line! This must have saved me a good thirty minutes of standing about with my heavy packs. My theory is that because Alice was with me, the check-in woman gave me/us the secret insider Chinese woman-to-woman queue jumping bonus card. I am not complaining.
After that it was time to say 'bye' to Alice, whip through immigration and security, and hit the biz lounge to write some post cards before boarding at gate 66.
The aircraft was a Boeing 777, my least favorite wide body aircraft. The overhead compartments are just so hard to reach. The onboard veggie food was great. The elderly couple beside me were from Thailand on returning home from a holiday in Hong Kong. Nice people, not so chatty.
Posted by stu at 05:58 PM | Comments (0)
Hong Kong: First Stop (long post)
My trip to Hong Kong was fantastic! This is about the fourth or fifth time my passport has been stamped there, but this trip has totally changed my impression of the place.
First of all, my early trips were with finances that only the gainfully employed in IT have, once with family, and none with no local friends to show me about--the hands down best way to learn a city. These earlier trips involved going every where in taxis and limos, lodging at four and five star hotels, and staying on the beaten path in general.
No more. I'm unemployed now and watching the cash flow--more so thanks to (that evil fucking bank) UBS. I have my old friend and fellow victim of Virtualplus (John Pitcher's shady, now defunct dot com in London), Hoi , and my new friend Alice to guide me around and show me the ropes.
The first night after my arrival and check in at the North Point Ibis (~HKD450/night inclusive), Alice and I had dinner at a Chinese Vegetarian restaurant in the Causeway Bay area of Hong Kong Island. Alice, despite my meager protests, paid the bill. Then we took a tram (cool, old double-decker electric jobs with big open windows) down past Happy Valley and into Central.
There we had a pint (me) and half (Alice) of Guiness at Dublin Jack's before turning in for the night. Afterwards I went back to the hotel and slept...until two or three in the morning. Bloody jetlag. Finally made it back to sleep at 6AM.
After sleeping until three in the afternoon, surfing the net, and buying some basics at the 24-hour "7-11" store, Alice and I met up and went for Indian food in Sia Kung at Dia. This is a big fishing area, and there are plenty of famous fish joints, but that is not my thing. Food was great. Weather was a bit shit, so nobody was about. Alice, again despite my stronger protest, paid the bill. The Third day saw myself, at Alice's advice, heading out for 'The Big Buddha' on Lantau Island near the new-ish Chek Lap Kok airport. After tacking the orange line MTR train out there (HKD25) I hopped onto the local bus #23 (HKD16) towards the Po Lin Monastery, Vegetarian Restaurants and Tian Tan Buddha. Wow--what a crazy road. Apparently, before the new airport was build, this island was pretty sleepy by any standard. The island is very mountainous and the road winds its way up and down very carefully. At many points the traffic converges into a single lane for several tens of meters or more, usually on a curve. Anyway, the Big Buddha is quite a sight. Before walking up the steps, I plopped down HKD100 for my own private dinning table at the premium Vegetarian joint offered by the monks. Then I went up the stairs, checked out the Buddha inside and out, took some digi-pics, and headed back down.
Whilst descending the steps, this American guy told me that my backpack was open. One thing led to another, and we ended up having lunch together. (They gave me a refund so that I paid the normal, group table HKD60 each.) Mark and Jing (sp?) are from Sacramento, California. Mark works for Intel and was only in Asia for a few weeks. Jing, like myself, has stopped slaving away for The Man and is off on a semi random three month long Asia trip. Good for him. :D He has my email, we may cross paths again this fall/winter.
So, on the way back we saw one of the three prisons on the island. Took a photo. Cool.
Once back on Hong Kong Island, the plan was to meet up with Hoi at Central Station. "Exit G...as in girl" says Hoi. He is late, so I find the nearest beer--The Mandarin Orient Hotel lobby. This is supposed to be one of the finest hotels in the world, and I was wondering if they would even let me in with my trekking outfit. Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster, they did. After two Guinness’s in a bottle (HKD66 each), Hoi shows up. We head of for SoHo a few minutes away where we spot a table outside without deafening music. We had a great time catching up--have not seen each other for nearly five years. He's married now, working for a utility company in Hong Kong and generally happy. Fan-fucking-tastic. :D Several beers later I'm getting drunk and hear my rock hard Ibis hotel bed calling my name around 11pm. We part ways, and the bastard pays for all the beer. I've been foiled again!
Saturday morning I wake up and attempt to meet Alice at Central for our planned trip to Lamma Island. But I have this silly habit of getting off of trains one stop too early. So there I am waiting for Alice outside of exit B of Admiralty station when we had agreed to meet street side of exit A at Central station. Duh! Regardless, we meet up and took the ferry to Lamma Island--a cute little curvy land mass with a few fishing villages, no cars, some hiking trails, and two or three ferry piers. We roams the touristy section of Tak Kok Tsuen, get lost in "the 'burbs", or at least the equivalent, buy trinkets for family, have lunch at this totally out of place and very touristy organic vegetarian friendly book shop which I loved to pieces, walked out to the Pavilion (local touristy spot), got lost again in the local ghetto, got soaked in torrential downpour repeatedly, warmed up in the local library with English language books and periodicals (!), and then headed back for 'home'. Great time, want to go back under different conditions.
After the ferry back to Hong Kong island, we took a bus to Stanley. I have always heard it was one of the most touristic things you can do in Hong Kong. The weather was shit, so there were few people about. That made it easy to pick up a cute little Chinese-style dress for Atabei, my younger niece, amongst other stuff. We also walked down to the sea, saw a guy's happy-go-lucky dog dive into a cesspool of waste (everyone laughed, owner resigned to fate). Ha ha. Then it was a Thai food dinner over looking Stanley bay.
My final day, Sunday, turned out to be a real world wind tour of Hong Kong. Alice and I met at my hotel, then headed for her home town, Yuen Long in the New Territories. After dropping some stuff of for her father, we went to this park in town that had this really cool six or seven story 'bird house' (34 species, ~125 birds) that sat atop a hill surrounded by flatlands populated by highrise apartment buildings. Truely picturesque. But the wind was crazy hard, the rain sporadically heavey, and conditions were generally hot and hummid. Lunch was at a Nepalese place in town near the bus stop. After lunch we took the long route to my hotel where I needed to get my stuff before flying out. We took the scenic, yet food-induced sleepy bus to Taipo Market, then switched to a train bound for Kowloon Tong, where we transferred to the MTR to get back to North Point where the hotel is located. There we grabbed by bags and headed for the airport via bus. To make a long story short, if there is a bag over the bus stop sign saying in English 'service halted', that means the bus will not pull over for you.
All in all, this trip to Hong Kong was better than the previous trips combined! I cannot wait to come back.
Posted by stu at 11:16 AM | Comments (3)
Packing round up, the sequel
OK, so five days into my trip and I'm discovering more faults with my three weeks of planning and packing:
- Recently purchased locks for my Explorer 65 backback don't quite secure it. There are no dual zippers for the top part, so essentailly I have a house with locked back door, locked shed, locked external garage...but the front door is open. Duh.
- The USB and charging cords for my Sony DSC-T1 digtial camera are sitting at home in Zuerich still connected to my computer. Nina, thankfully, is going to post them to Chiang Mai some time soon. Good thing there is an extra battery to fall back on.
- My new, big, fat 512 SanDisc Memory Stick Pro DUO, which replaced the old 32MB Sony Memory Stick DUO is not compatible with my Sony R505 laptop. Once again, those pesky model name discrepancies have come back to bite me in the arse. Good thing I have my handy Belkin Camera-to-iPod thingy, which I can then transfer to the laptop. But...
- Apperently, also forgotten was a USB cord to connect my Belkin thingy to the laptop. Crapola with a capital 'C'.
Posted by stu at 11:03 AM | Comments (0)
September 14, 2005
Hong Kong, here I come!
Check in was smooth, no queue what so ever. As I may have bragged to some of you already, my accumulated frequently flier miles with Swiss allowed me to upgrade my Zurich-Hong Kong return tickets to Biz Class. Yipee! After check-in I spent an hour or so in the lounge (tomato soup, two Heinekens) and then headed for my gate, E23. For the first time in my bloody life immediately after boarding the aircraft, the stewardess directed me to the left where my seat (5B) was. Oh, I have arrived! It was an newer Airbus 330 with all those wonderful new toys that make flying almost fun: cameras in the nose for take-off and landing, 10" LCD screen, on-demand video system (my two picks were The Hostageand The Interpretor) and some pretty kick ass Biz class seating.
They guy beside me was a Dutchman who had grown up in Holland and France, worked for Roche in Basel, lived across the boarder in Germany with his German wife, and was on his way to Shanghi for a four day visit. Nice guy, well traveled, amazing language skills and a fellow warm-blooded human being (aka anti-Bush). We also spoke about digestive problems with food while traveling in Asia, malaria drugs, CNN goof ups (like the image going around the net where CNN has labled the Czech Republic as Switzerland) and how dry the air is on aircraft--we were dry coughing in synch for half the 13 hour flight.
Arrival was a breeze too. Only one person ahead of me at the Hong Kong immigration queue (normally it is way longer.) Took the airport express train (HKD180 return) to Hong Kong Island station, and from there I took a taxi (HKD50) to my hotel, the Ibis Hong Kong at North Point (HKD380/night). Thanks to Bogey and Kay for recommending this...good deal, great location. And I was upgraded to a harbor view for free!
Posted by stu at 10:32 PM | Comments (2)
September 13, 2005
Packing round up
(Warning: No spell check available.)
OK, a few notes about the planning and packing to finish this topic off:
- UBS is almost history! On Monday I closed four of six accounts with them (savings, two pensions, and USD) and did so with pure joy in my heart. The oppertunity to publicly riducule the teller who created this mess came up because closing most accounts is done at the teller windows. When I was head of the queue the same woman who caused all this stress called me to her window because she was free. I, oh so childishly, said loudly to the guy behind me "No...she is too stupid...you go." Everyone in the lobby stopped and stared first at me, then at her. Two minutes later I was closing my accounts with a young, somewhat frightened teller who I treated with friendly respect. To those who thing I'm being overly childish about this please note that it has been 27 days since the deposite was made...and I still don't have my money!
- Last moment purchase of a pair of treking shoes to subsitute for my full blown hiking boots: It's warm here and everyone on the forums seems to recommend against boots unless my trip would involve some hard core hiking.
- Child's Dream (the Swiss NGO I'm helping out, see About) asked me to ferry two laptops donated by the Swiss Stock Exchange with me to Chiang Mai. Thinking nothing of it I said 'sure!' Now my pack is about 8kg heavier, or about an additional 30-40% more than without them. "It is all for a good cause" I keep telling myself but my back begs to differ ;)
- So, I take the 19:58 S8 S-Bahn train to the airport, dump my heavey (22kg) Explorer 65 rucksack onto the ground, and proceed to wrap it up in my newly purchased PacSafe 55. It doesn't fit. In the back of my mind I had always wondered about the 55 vs 65 discrepancy between the model numbers...and now it's come back to smack me in the face at zero hour. Fuck. Thirty or so quid down the tube. How could I have been so stupid as to not have tested this out beforhand???
Posted by stu at 09:46 PM | Comments (0)
September 06, 2005
Rants and Thanks
I’ve got about a week left before my big departure. The packing and planning is nearly finalized, but a few problems have occurred. Specifically, my evil fucking bank, UBS, has managed to cock-up a $17,000 transfer from my US-based bank, Bank of Hawaii. This money is supposed to pay off my Iceland holiday induced credit card debt, pay rent and medical insurance while I’m away, and provide a source of cash while on the road.
I am livid.
Last Friday, after having heated words with my account manager at the bank, I became resigned to the fact that the money will not be available until two or three days into my trip at the earliest--four weeks after making the deposit. Hopefully things will be ok. Regardless, I’ve vowed to close out most of my accounts at UBS and transfer them to Credit Suisse before leaving for Hong Kong.
OK, rant over. My friend and former colleague, Nina, has graciously agreed to water my plants and check the post for bills. Three cheers for Nina!
The packing is just about complete also. Today I bought a cotton sleeping bag liner that is great for using in hostels and other dodgy sleeping venues. The guy at Ochsner Sport on Bahnhofstrasse tried to upsell me to a silk liner for three times the price, but that seemed a bit too kinky for my tastes. About the only thing left is to buy some gifts for the people I’ll meet up with in HK and Thailand.
Posted by stu at 11:01 PM | Comments (1)