A geek speaks
3/23/06 8:59 PM, Portland
By my calculations I have now been awake and traveling for 30 hours, during which time I have slept for about twenty minutes. I want to go to sleep before the hallucinations start but I know the best way to adjust to a different time zone is to stay up until the local sleep time and get up at a ‘normal’ hour. It is good to be home, though I must admit I am already thinking of the next trip.
3/23/06 2:59 PM, Los Angeles Airport
After the neat and efficient organization of Hong Kong LAX is a total mess. I have shown my passport to and been looked at suspiciously by six to eight people, only two of which seemed to have any actual purpose (the immigration check and the check in counter). When you arrive from overseas in the USA you have to collect your bags and then check them back in, in case customs wants to make sure you are not smuggling anything (one assumes). Trying to make my connecting flight I received no less than four different answers on where I should take my bags, the last of which assured me that even though they were ‘checked through to Portland’ they would never had made it there had I not ended up at the Alaska Airlines check in counter. At this counter by the way I arrived (in a huge hurry because my connecting flight was an hour and a half late) first in line but waited twenty minutes to be attended (this while people who had just gotten there got attended to in a much shorter period of time). Then there were two local homeboys who skipped to the front of the security lines and when questioned by another flier just replied ‘hey I work here’ with total attitude. All in all, far from clear, not efficient and not at all friendly. Our flight from Hong Kong by the way was delayed in takeoff by an hour because they could not find a passenger who was supposed to be on-board. I have to wonder about the logic of messing up the connecting flights of a few hundred people because one person is not making it to the gate. I fortunately had a good amount of time to make my connection (which by the way is delayed, we were supposed to have started boarding by now) but I overheard a few people who had missed their flights and were trying to figure out other ways to get to wherever they were going. All in all I think I am ready to quit traveling for a while.
Oh, by the way the flight from HK to LAX played a rather cool trick. We left on Thursday the 23rd at around 5:30 PM (was supposed to be 4:00 PM) and arrived in LAX at around 1:30 PM, also of Thursday the 23rd (yes it took an hour and a half to make it to the next gate). Because of time zone differences my eleven hour flight took me about four hours back in time. Pretty cool huh?
3/23/06 3:14 PM, Hong Kong Airport
I staid up last night and set an alarm for this morning with the theory that traveling while tired would help me sleep on the plane. I did not need the alarm; I woke up around 6:30 and only managed to doze a bit afterward. I thought I would be wide-awake all day but am having a hell of a time staying awake right now. The last glass of white wine probably did not help matters any.
I walked Kowloon this morning, mostly along the waterfront. The haze I saw last night has grown to a cloud that obscures all the building tops. I was not hungry this morning either but did have some Dan Dan Mien (soda noodles in a peanut sauce with chilly oil) for lunch. As I checked out of the hotel it started to rain pretty hard. I am glad I got my walk in while it was cool out but still dry. Speaking of cool, the rain dropped the temperature a whole lot. For the first time on my trip I have been wearing my fleece jacket.
3/23/06 2:27 AM, Hong Kong
After the chaos of Bangkok, Hong Kong is most impressive. Wait, amend that to simple ‘Hong Kong is most impressive’. From the airport to the highways, to the city streets everything is very neat, well organized, well signed and controlled. There are police, security guards and cleaning people everywhere making sure everything stays nice and tidy… for the most part.
3/22/06 8:27 AM, Bangkok near the airport
Woke up early this morning. I would have preferred to sleep in but the curtains are crappy, there are aircraft taking off over the hotel every two minutes and well, I went to bed early. I lounged about some then had one of the worst breakfast at the hotel restaurant. Incidentally the worst breakfast I have had in my life was in Hungary. They served green peppers stuffed with sweet cream for breakfast. I did not eat it but did look around to see if the locals were peeking from behind doors to laugh at the foreigners.
The hotel has Internet access but only accessible through VPN software loaded on their computers, no use to me. The English speaking TV channel has been all financial reports all morning long but I did find a Japanese school kids soap opera dubbed to Thai that is really amusing. When I get back to Portland I think I am going to have to look for a book to explain to me the Japanese obsession (not interest, not infatuation, no much more than that, more of a fixation) with cute.
2:53 PM
God I love traveling business. Decent food, comfortable chairs and internet connectivity and that is just the waiting lounge at the airport. I think I will go back for another one of those little Chinese dumplings now.
3/21/06 8:35 PM, Bangkok
OK so as it turns out the 17th was not my last day in Bangkok, but tonight and tomorrow hardly count. My hotel is right by the airport, which puts it smack in the middle of nowhere. If I were to walk out the front door I would be able to walk to a highway and not a whole lot of anything else. Guess this building and I will become acquainted tomorrow. There is a small restaurant, a beauty salon and two computers by reception that adversities internet connections for 100 Baht / 15 minutes (it is usually 1 to 2 baht a minute with a ten or twenty minute minimum). Tomorrow I will see if I can borrow a network cable long enough to post some travel log updates and send/receive emails.
My room is huge, I mean freaking huge in all directions (height, width and length), has a comfortable bed and not a whole hell of a lot more. The view out the window is of a wall (keeping the drapes closed), the TV is not cable (i.e. only one news channel not in Thai) and the furnishings are pretty minimal, but hey it’s a place to wait for my next flight and seems pretty comfortable for that. I am very glad that I brought a couple of books and some movies and TV shows on DVD, I expect to make good use of them tomorrow. I have pre-loaded firefox pages with tab after tab of news items to read offline. I also plan on sleeping as much as I can.
I just went to brush my teeth and a Samui Cockroach walked onto my hand. God I hope there aren’t any more of those suprises waiting in my luggage. I also tried to take a picture of the room to illustrate what I mea with huge and the batteries I bought in Pattaya died. I had meant to buy another set but forgot while I was in Samui.
3/21/06 12:34 PM, Koh Samui
I am checked out of the Chewang Pearl Cabana and wasting time on the strip waiting for my flight out. Right now I am sitting at the Curry Pot Indian Restaurant where I have ordered a five-piece meal for 200 Baht. I am not sure how they will prepare everything since the island has lost power again, but they seem confident they can fulfill my order. I guess there are advantages to coal fired ovens and gas stoves. Still, don’t they need a blender for the Mango Lassi?
After a long day of diving and a beer I fell asleep early last night and rather than figure out the time and go out again when I woke up I just rolled over and kept sleeping. The sleep was interrupted at one time by eurotrash yelling at each other so they could carry a conversation across opposite ends of the hotel area and at another by high-pitched squealing. I think I found out what the cause of the squealing was this morning when a five-inch cockroach scurried out from under one of my bags.
From this point the adventure travels become a lot less adventure and a lot more travel. I booked a new flight directly out of Samui airport but found all the morning flights on the 22nd were full so I had to book to leave this evening. I will arrive in Bangkok around 8pm and intend on finding a hotel near the airport since I have to be back by 2pm tomorrow to fly to Hong Kong. Coincidentally I arrive in Hong Kong again at 8pm and have to again be at the airport by 2pm to fly out to Los Angeles. The hotel I booked in Hong Kong is about 5 miles from the airport and promises to be ‘Conveniently located in the heart of the shopping, dining and entertainment district’. I am hoping this is true as I would hate to just sit in my hotel for a day.
P.S. That is one damned tasty Mango Lassi.
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3/20/06, Koh Tao
I got up early this morning for a diving trip. I thought I would have a bowl of fruit before my pickup but there was no-one at the desk or bar of the Pearl Cabana. It turned out to be just fine as it allowed me to sit and listen to the ocean in the quiet of the early morning. Eventually a local came walking through that turned out to be my driver.
The dive boat to Koh Tao had about a dozen divers from four different dive operators. I was the only person signed up from Captain Caveman Diving, which meant the dive instructor was my dive buddy and gave me his full time and attention. On the one hand it was good to be looked after, especially since it had been some time since my last dive, on the other hand he was a bit too careful and checked in on me as though I were a student… even though I equalized well, set my buoyancy with no problems and, well in general dove well and comfortably. True I have not dove much in the last few years but warn water diving is SO much easier and more comfortable than Pacific Northwest diving that it is a breeze. Just the fact that you are not fully encased in thick neoprene gives an unaccustomed degree of movement.
3/19/06 10:43 PM, Koh Samui
I took a shower then had a nice nap this evening in my air-conditioned bungalow. I watched a bit of The Simpsons in between shower and nap… ah it is good to be on vacation. Afterward I went to an internet café and then to ‘The Islander’ where I proved that Guinness does indeed taste different in different countries and had some dinner while watching the first half of Liverpool vs. Manchester United. I started walking the strip again but realized I have cuts on my feet, which I assume I got from stepping on rocks while swimming in the ocean this evening so I headed home after a while. I hope the cuts don’t bother me too much while diving in the morning.
The WTF moment for the evening was a cute little girl working the tourists. She could not have been more than six years old and was wondering the streets in a cute little dress and pigtails. She would pick some Farang woman, go up and just wrap herself around the woman’s legs, then peddle flower necklaces for 20 Baht. I think the technique was working because I saw her make a few sales.
3/19/06 4:24 PM, Koh Samui
I enjoyed sleeping in this morning. I then went out for a beach walk going inland to buy water and schedule a dive trip. The fellow at Captain Caveman Dive Center was very friendly and pointed me in the direction of local food stalls. For lunch I had Pad Thai, realizing it is the first time I have had the dish on this trip, along with a mango shake. Incidentally while they are referred to as milkshakes, they are almost always ice slushies. I think I have only a couple of times had a milkshake include any kind of milk, and one of those was with coconut milk. Incidentally the stalls with food for the locals are off the strip, which is also where the girlie bars are so I got solicited for ’special massage’.
After lunch I went out for another beach walk and took time to read my book while sipping on a soda. I then went back to the Cabana, showered and went out for a swim in the ocean. I did not stay out long because my back and chest have not seen much sun and are Oregonian Pale. Incidentally I think I need to get more of the waterproof sun block as the last bottle I bought was moisturizing, not waterproof and I am sweating buckets out here. The Chaweng beach is quite beautiful, but it there is the annoyance that you cannot get more than a few feet without being solicited for food, tattoos, or massage.
