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After Koh Phi Phi, I took a 14 hour bus ride from Krabi to Bangkok, the capital of Thailand. The bus touched the east coast of Thailand at Surat Thani where the rainy season was in full flow. The rains came down in hard, fat drops and, what were dry streets ten minutes ago, were now under three inches of water. My bus dropped me off at 5am in a random looking road in the pitch black of night. Immediately, a flurry of taxi drivers and tuk-tuk drivers descended.

“Hello? Khao San Road? You want Khao San Road? Hotel? Guesthouse?” “No thanks, I‟m okay, not right now, thanks! KorpKun Ka!”

I took the next left and went for a quick coffee. I asked the girl behind the counter where the Khao San Road was and she pointed behind me at a non-descript street. I remembered the taxi-drivers offering to take me there from just one street away and I made a quick mental note to keep my wits about me.

The Khao San Road is the famous traveller ghetto in west central Bangkok. Seeing it in the early morning, I was reminded of the West End (the main street) in San Antonio, Ibiza, where we once arrived straight from the airport at dawn and were silenced by the view: broken glass and vomit on the streets; the sobering morning after the night before. Here, on the Khao San Road at 7am, it was much the same but now there were also hordes of aging, fat European-looking men with young Thai women. There was the odd argument and tired looking women going home for the morning. It was a different type of traveller here and there was no way I was staying.

After looking up my guidebook for other areas, I jumped straight into a tuk-tuk (a motorised three-wheel cab) to go to the river and catch an onward boat on a narrow canal called Khlong Saem Saeb. Bangkok has a network of canals feeding off its central river, Mae Nam Chao Phraya, and accordingly was once known as the “Venice of the East”. I love tuk-tuks! These are small vehicles, part car, part motorbike and very quick! My driver zipped around trying to get me to visit some travel agents for onward trips to Cambodia, darting across lanes when he wanted to, ducking and reversing into fast-moving oncoming cars; a wonderfully visceral start to the day! From the tuk-tuk, I jumped with my backpack and rucksack onto a canal boat, almost falling backwards into the water under the weight I was carrying, and chuntered off to the very centre of Bangkok where I stayed just off the major Thanon Sukhamvit road, in a great little hostel with dark panelled walls, low ceilings and bamboo stairs.

From the rural sleepiness of Krabi and the gentle pace of life in Koh Phi Phi, Bangkok is like an invigorating slap in the face. There are no trees or areas of greenery; it‟s all mono-rails, five-lane-wide highways and huge, brand-new commercial complexes. Like in Hong Kong, shopping is one of the major pastimes here; from the high-end luxury brands to every mid-range shop selling everything you can think of to the most shambolic and charming of street stalls. It‟s these street stalls that are the life blood of the Bangkok economy. There are pockets of stalls all over the city, wherever there‟s space, whether that be directly outside a shopping centre entrance, in a tiny alley or under an overpass. You can buy fake DVD players, DVDs to watch on your new fake DVD player, t-shirts, socks, pants, rucksacks, suitcases etc. and, to catch your breath, enjoy some street food of noodle soups and fried rice on the pavement whilst the throng seethes through the marketplace. It sounds like a cliché but you really are expected to haggle; it feels ridiculous when the opening price is still relatively low but if you don’t do it, you really are a mug!

Me – “Nice shorts.”
Any market trader in Bangkok – “Yes! Very good quality!”
“Got them in green?”
“Of course. What size?”
“30 waist. (I‟ll squeeze into them!) How much are they?”
“400 baht” (simply because you look like a mug and I want ten times what I paid for these!)
“Ooh! 400 is a bit too much!” (I pull my best pained face and try to judge what price to come in at without getting laughed out of town) “I saw these for 200 up there” (no I didn‟t but I still should have got these for less; I bottled it!)
“200? 200? No 200! 400 very good price!”
So she hasn‟t come down; what can I do?

“400 too much. The other place selling for 200 baht”
“This very good quality. Better. Better than other one”
Fuck! These guys are much better negotiators than me! I‟m rubbish at this! Walk away!
“Thank you! No Korpkun Ka”
Hope she comes in with a lower price…
“Okay! Okay! 350 baht. Very good quality.”
Yes!
“”250 baht”
“No 250. 350.”
“Okay! 280. No…300.”
“320.”
“Okay. Okay!” Done! 320. Bugger. Later…The shorts are a bit tight!

Bangkok has a seedy reputation that is fully deserved. I was staying in the centre of town in the main Sukhumvit area and at 7pm the streets are already lined up with prostitutes. Along Thanon Sukhumvit, the market-stalls selling fruit and clothes at inflated prices are in business next to prostitutes standing shoulder to shoulder. It’s sad but you quickly get bored of saying “No thank you. No Korpkun Ka!” after the tenth time in as many seconds. You develop a twenty yard stare. There are pimps, prostitutes and sex tourists; of the latter, the vast majority are aging, balding, overweight white men. These men are generally not shy. They sit in bars and openly discuss the prostitutes. It sounds exaggerated but it‟s literally like a cattle market where the prostitutes parade to be sold. There are so many prostitutes on the streets that I think it must be a buyers‟ market; prices driven low by the huge surplus in supply, with no trade unions to prevent competition. The issue is widespread and so embedded that hostels have to explicitly sign their receptions with „No sex tourists‟. The sex trade is so prevalent in Bangkok and Thailand in general; it seems that almost everyone is trying to sell you sex, from your moto-driver to the people selling fake DVDs; it is one of the images that Thailand as a country projects and does nothing at all to curb. I‟ve since read that around 2.7% of Thailand‟s GDP comes from the sex trade. More mindboggling is the statistic that maybe 10% of all tourist dollars spent in Thailand goes on the sex trade; it brings no credit upon the Thai nation at all.

Koh Phi Phi is eye-wateringly beautiful with beach and bay views to make you weep. The natural beauty of the island also provides welcome relief from the less attractive feel of Phi Phi Don‟s centre which feels like a tourist village resort with masses of diving shops, travel agents, tattoo shops, clothing stalls, hawker food stalls, bars, massage shops and internet cafes. It‟s not what I expected at all. It‟s as if an 18-30 holiday from Ibiza had been transplanted to the Andaman Coast. By this point in my trip, I knew the different types of traveller. There was the backpacker who was your archetypal “hippy”, very tanned, flip-flopped, newly tattooed, 3 week old matted hair, beads and crafted bracelets. There was your “lads” backpacker, in a group of other guys. There were also your “couple” travellers, far more prevalent in South-East Asia than anywhere else I’d been. I’d heard one story that a couple had been on the plane to start a year‟s travelling and actually split up before landing! The funny thing was that for all the non-conformist yearnings of travellers, there was a very definite “look‟ in common. Whatever the fashions of the time happened to be were completely driven by the market stalls around the classic backpacker haunts. This year, it was Trilby hats and scarves. Which type of traveller was I? Of course, I thought I was a unique, one-of-a-kind traveller (ahem!)

The resort feel of Phi Phi Don is reportedly much like the other Thai Islands such as Koh Samui and the nightlife is appropriately hedonistic. Buckets are immensely popular in Thailand and consist of generous amounts of alcohol and mixers (or not) in a small plastic „bucket‟. This isn‟t drinking in moderation! In one of the bars on Phi Phi Don, I saw audience participation taken to another level. Bar-goers were asked to fight each other in refereed bouts in the muay thai (Thai Boxing) ring in the middle of the room. The best fight I saw was between these two tourist women just kicking each other in the shins for three 3 minute rounds!

Tours around the islands are immensely popular around here and every operator tries his best sales pitch to snag your cash. For not much more money, I hired a longboat and its fifty-something skipper (a dirty old salt! He didn‟t have much English bar trying to recommend me some local girls he knew. Despite these faintly pimp-like tendencies, he had a gentler, nobler side to him as I saw during his rescue of a bird bobbing in the sea, its wings caught by some plastic. He fetched it out of the water, released it from its bondage and tended it. The bird gratefully and compliantly remained as a passenger until we were back in port) for the day and set off around the islands to explore the cliffs, the caves and, hopefully, hidden beaches by myself. It was just me and my boat. I headed anti-clockwise around Phi Phi Don past the cove at Long Beach to a deserted beach that I had all to myself – awesome! After two or three hours, I‟d gone all the way around Phi Phi Don seeing fantastic limestone cliffs and jagged rock faces jutting out onto opal coloured clear waters; I went across the strait to Phi Phi Lay where I found an amazing lagoon with the clearest waters and masses of beautifully coloured tropical fish in a bay surrounded by huge cliffs of limestone; just idyllic. All you had to do was to throw some rice into the water and, immediately, hundreds of small, exquisitely-patterned, fish would appear from nowhere to snaffle the food. Behind this is the legendary Maya Bay, as used in the movie version of Alex Garland‟s The Beach. It didn’t quite look like it did in the film but was still incredibly stunning. It points dead west and so faces the sunset; which itself is framed by the big, cliffs on both sides. It‟s the kind of view that makes you stop for a moment and then grin a big, wide smile. I still think Railay Beach has been the best beach view I‟ve seen so far though. After Maya, I stopped in the surprisingly still waters between the two islands to watch the sunset, where we bobbed gently with several other longboats, everyone just gazing at the dipping sun.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn‟t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Mark Twain

I TOOK AN OVERNIGHT BUS from Ipoh northwards to Hat Yai, a town on the Thai side of the Thailand/Malaysia border. Whilst in the queue at immigration, I accidentally broke wind (must have been the long bus ride). To my dismay, who should be behind me, but a bespectacled middle-aged Buddhist monk in full saffron robes! Shit! Hopefully, I’ve got enough credit in my karmic account to bode me well in Thailand, the “Land of Smiles‟.

Geographically, Thailand is at the heart of the South-East Asian region; it’s bordered by Malaysia to the south, Cambodia to the east, Myanmar to the west and north, and Laos to the north and to the east. It‟s a large country with more than 62m people and is probably the most popular backpacking destination in the world. About 75% of the population is ethnically Thai, 14% of Chinese origin, and 3% ethnically Malay; the remaining 8% accounts for minority groups including Khmers and various hill tribes. The ethnically Thai speak the official language of Thailand, Thai, which is part of the Kradai language family, as distinct from the Austro-Asiatic language family. This distinction is one of the main differences between the Thais and the Cambodians who are mostly ethnically Khmer and whose language, Khmer, is part of the Austro-Asiatic language family.

My first impression of Thailand (Hat Yai at least) was that it was much more chaotic than Malaysia. It was early morning (about 7.30am) but already it was steamily hot. The water on the streets was already drying and I noticed dead cockroaches on the pavements. Tuk-tuks, buses and motorbikes were already honking and beeping down the narrow streets. Vendors were already on the street trying to entice you in for breakfast. There‟s not much in Hat Yai though; it‟s really just a border town that‟s used as a jumping off point for heading to the islands further north and to Malaysia and Singapore to the south. I decided to leave as soon as I could, and when buying a bus ticket out, I stumbled over the currency exchange adjustments; going from the easy mental currency exchange of Malaysian Ringgits to Sterling to working out the (slightly more taxing) Thai Baht (TB) to Sterling rate of about 55TB to 1GBP. Within an hour of arriving in Hat Yai, I was in a minibus headed northwards to Krabi.

Krabi

The minibus looked like it had been through an episode on the Thai version of MTV‟s Pimp My Ride; its seats were fully decked out in beige leather, there was an extensive stereo system with multiple speakers, a large flat screen monitor, a mini-fridge and tinted windows. The other passengers were middle-aged Thai women who immediately grabbed a couple of song catalogues. Thirty seconds later, the first ballad came on screen and there followed two hours of full-blooded karaoke love songs! (Unfortunately, there weren’t any English songs, because of course I was mad keen to show these girls how it was done (ahem)). Karaoke, evidently, is immensely popular in Thailand and it definitely brightens up a bus journey.

Krabi (pronounced Gra-bee) is a town on the Andaman Coast, on the West Coast of Thailand. Krabi Province is known as the global Mecca for the sport of rock climbing, where enthusiasts come from all over the world to test their mettle on the famous limestone cliffs, and the epicentre of Krabi climbing is at Railay beach. Never having rock climbed before, and seeing as I was in one of the finest sites for the sport, I simply had to give it a try. To get there, I took a traditional Thai long boat from Ao Nang, a beach near Krabi Town. Ao Nang was my first sighting of the Andaman Coast, famed for its beauty. The beach at Ao Nang is massive; it’s a beach that absolutely blew me away; the bay must be nearly a kilometre wide. The jetty in the centre is at least 500m long and just goes straight out into the deepest blue sea you’ve ever seen, and, in the distance, are more limestone karsts and islands, just poking out of the waters.

Railay itself was no less beautiful; it has almost the perfect beach: blindingly white sands gently curling round to forested limestone cliffs on either side, with mirror-still blue waters and moored longboats bobbing gently on the sea: idyllic. This was the beach where I was going to start learning how to climb. Much like Bolivia, health and safety is fairly broad-brush here in Thailand! It‟s just put your harness on, slip the rope into your harness with a quickly demonstrated figure-of-eight knot, pat some chalk on your hands, and off you go! At its simplest, rock climbing is about scaling a rock-face to a projected target. The rope you‟re attached to is connected up the rock-face through drilled-in hooks and, eventually, near your target, it goes through a final hook and comes all the way back down to another climber who acts as the anchor in what is, effectively, a pulley system. The rope doesn‟t hoist you up to the target but it does act as a safety net. Just getting started is often tricky as you have to heave yourself onto the first bit of rock, which due to erosion, is often six feet clear of the ground. You find nooks and crannies in the rock for your hands and feet. It’s generally easy enough to remain stationary as both your hands and your feet have secure holds in the rock. Some people describe climbing as similar to chess, in that it’s strategic, tactical and requires forward planning at each step. It‟s moving to the next correct position and so on up the rock-face that can be so demanding! Routes vary in difficulty according to the distance between holds, the depth of those holds and the overall gradient of the cliff. As to technique, you‟re supposed to rely more heavily on your feet for upward propulsion than your hands; easier said than done! By the end of my first successful climb to about 15m, my hands and forearm muscles were seriously aching! By the end of my third successful climb (this time to about 25m), the muscles in my hands and fingers were shot to pieces and I could no longer sustain any weight on my fingers at all. I couldn’t even apply any pressure when shaking my instructor’s hand goodbye!

After the jungle of Taman Negara, I jumped on a 12 hour bus ride to Ipoh, the capital of the State of Perak, in the western centre of Peninsular Malaysia. I stayed here for a few days with my godmother, Yoke Mooi Chan (who I hadn‟t seen for more than a decade, since a visit to the UK. She used to live with me and my family when I was a baby before moving back to Malaysia some 25 years ago), and her family (including her sister, Yoke Yin Chan, and their two nieces, Szn Yi Chan and Kit Yi Chan), who all very kindly let me stay in their house and took the time to take me all around Ipoh (a huge thanks to my godmother and her family).

Ipoh is known as the Bougainsvillea town, after its abundance of the flower of the same name. In contrast to Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh was a glimpse into the real Malaysia. It‟s more rural, more agricultural, more sprawling, more low-rise, and more laidback. Ipoh has a large Chinese community, immigrants of varying degrees of generation, primarily from Hong Kong and the Guangdong province in southern China. The Chinese community has retained many of its long held traditions such as the reverence paid towards dead ancestors, with incense being burned and Taoist and Buddhist imagery throughout the house and garden. The culture here is very much family-orientated, with perhaps four generations of a family under the same roof or living very close by.

Ipoh is also rich in that feature so prevalent in this part of the world – huge limestone karsts. These are often massive mountains jutting out of the landscape (not unlike Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio) mostly covered in lush vegetation with some bare limestone showing, like magnificent cliffs. I loved just looking at these out of a car or bus window. Within these limestone karsts are some truly enormous caves – even bigger than the Batu Caves I saw in Kuala Lumpur. The Gua Temperung Caves, just outside of Ipoh are tens of millions of years old. I was lucky enough to be the only person in the cave system when I visited; unfortunately, as the caves are only lit by a few lamps, it was too dark for my photos to come out properly. The height of the largest cavern must have been close to 100m tall over a space big enough for four football pitches; whilst the smallest was a damp, smothering and suffocating 6m by 6m; with the silence and ever-present touch of damp in the air, it was more than eerie, and more than a tad alarming, giving off a persistent low-level fear. It was like walking through the mines of Moria in The Lord of the Rings. At one time, millions of years ago, the entire cave system was filled with water, still present today in the form of a small river at the bottom of the system.

The city is also justifiably famous for its food; fantastic news to me! My godmother and her family ensured that I got to taste as much of it as possible such as classic Ipoh-style chicken ho-fun noodles, braised chicken feet, egg-gravy ho-fun, steamed bean sprout chicken, fat aubergines stuffed with fish and pork, silky congee with the chewy “top-layer‟ of beancurd, crab with “sohoon‟ style vermicelli noodles in a claypot (delicious!), “la-la‟ clams steamed with spring onion, ginger, and red chillies, huge (biggest prawns I’ve ever seen) deep-fried salted egg-yolk prawns, sensational yams stewed with spare-ribs and cuttlefish in a claypot, delicious popiah (like a wrap or uncooked spring roll with chicken, crispy pork and vegetables), more-ish ice kachung (a refreshing dessert of crushed ice with evaporated milk, sweetcorn, kidney beans and jelly), classic satays at a proper satay house, fried oyster cake (deliciously sweet and ozone-y fried oysters fried in a batter omelette), small “mouse‟ noodles and larger egg noodles fried with crispy croutons of finely diced pork-fat (yum!). Also, the selection of fruits available in Ipoh was awesome and eye-opening. In particular, I loved rambutan, a generally red small fruit with very soft spines on its skin; to eat it, you have to break it open by twisting it hard to reveal a white centre, not unlike a lychee; a dozen or so are great for breakfast. Another delicious fruit I‟ve never seen before are mangosteens, a generally purply apple-sized fruit with a white interior segmented like a clementine or a mandarin and has a slightly sharp yet sweet taste. However, my favourite fruit of all time is still my newly discovered and beloved durian. Malaysians are completely obsessed with durian (the King of Fruits) and are fiercely proud of the Malaysian variant as opposed to the Thai type normally found in supermarkets and stalls across Asia. Malaysian durian (and there are several different sorts) are generally smaller than their Thai counterparts and have smaller thorns. However, the Malaysian varieties are known to have a sweeter taste and a firmer texture. The durian I tasted in Ipoh was delicious; I think slightly spicy (though some would disagree), very creamy, sticky and sweet – it’s a messy thing to eat but completely delicious and satisfying. You can even eat it for breakfast on its own just with some rice. Unfortunately, apparently I was about a month too early for the durian season to fully kick in during which time the whole of Malaysia becomes even more durian obsessed, with countless stalls and masses of people lining the streets for their share. Oh well; next time, eh! It was at one of these roadside stalls that I was asked a question in Malay; my failure to respond (I didn‟t even think he was talking to me) led to questions of rudeness on my part. I realised that I definitely looked Malaysian, explained by the fact that my mum is from the Philippines (where the indigenous people are part of the wider Malay peoples). I remembered this perception for the future and planned to use it in the next few countries that I’d be visiting; claiming, for example, that you’re Malaysian when in you’re in Thailand helps to explain to people why you can’t speak their language (when they fully expect you be able to) and the fact that you‟re from the same region(ish) reduces any possibility that you’ll be dismissed as just another tourist.

I enjoyed my time in Ipoh immensely; so much fantastic food, some truly spectacular caves and it was great to spend some time with my godmother and her family, getting to know them better. After a few days in Ipoh and about two weeks in Malaysia, it was time to leave for Thailand.

After Kuala Lumpur, we hired a car and went north to the Cameron Highlands, a region in the interior of the Malaysian Peninsular. It was a long, windy road up to the Highlands which are around 2,000m above sea level. The air is much cleaner here and the temperature was a far more refreshing 20 degrees. This whole area was once dense jungle up to just only a few decades ago, but has since been heavily developed, with almost 70% of this huge rainforest cleared for logging and development; a huge concern amongst conservationists.

We stayed in Tanah Rata, a pretty hamlet at the heart of the Highlands, deep into the cloud forests. The influence of the former British colonists is immediately evident in much of the architecture, with terracing, balconies and faux Tudor exteriors on much of the village. Today, the area is most famous for its tea plantations and its strawberry farms. With the atmosphere of tea everywhere, I had the feeling of being in England but also, unmistakably, of still being in Asia. We headed straightaway to one of the most famous plantations, the Boh, and to its tasting room. The tasting room was a modern glass structure of the kind you see at some vineyards; it just jutted out suspended over one of the valleys giving us magnificent views across the plantation. Despite the rain, the plantation is one of the most beautiful landscapes I‟ve yet seen. Everywhere is not just green, but a patchwork of different hues of verdant greens, rich and lush from the soils and the recent rains. We tried several black teas, one spicy, one sharper, one smooth, one full-bodied and rich – all delicious! That afternoon, however, high in the Malaysian Cameron Highlands, I also started to crave a good, strong cup of English builders‟ tea – PG Tips or Tetley‟s! Perhaps a sign of homesickness.

Taman Negara

I said goodbye to the guys in Tanah Rata; they were heading to the island of Langkawi further north for a few days, whilst I was heading east to Taman Negara, a National Park in the middle of Peninsular Malaysia. It was an 8 hour bus ride to Kuala Tahan, a shanty village and the “base camp‟ to the Park. Taman Negara is 130 million years old and is primary rainforest jungle; it may well be the oldest rainforest/jungle in the world. It was my first time in jungle conditions; I’ve seen it on television and I wondered how I’d cope. As expected, the jungle was intense. It was super-hot (in the late 30s), super-humid and, in May, it rains incessantly. You literally sweat all day long. The heat and humidity gets into your brain; it got to the point where I was even thinking more slowly and everything from washing to eating to mentally processing anything became a great effort. I stayed in a shanty hut where I found 8-inch lizards (geckos that were to pop up everywhere in South-East Asia – they’re quick little fuckers! They‟re amazing creatures that can stick to walls and might not move for hours until, suddenly, they zip off!) and tiny frogs in my toilet (a little unnerving when sitting on the gents); there were animals on the roof and mosquitoes everywhere.

On my first evening in the Park, I took a night safari tour around one of the palm plantations that border the jungle. A group of us sat on the back of a pick-up truck and, with powerful flashlights, went looking around for local wildlife. We didn‟t turn up much, except for a few monkeys idling in trees, the odd wildcat cub hiding in bushes and a fairly bewildered wild boar. Despite this lack of visible wildlife, the forest at night is psychologically intense; it‟s incredibly noisy with high-pitched sounds from crickets, lizards and birds; it‟s incredibly claustrophobic and suffocating; and being constantly alert to a hostile, unfamiliar environment is thoroughly exciting but mentally exhausting.

The next morning, I went into the jungle proper. It was wet, muddy, boggy, hot and smothering; in fact, everything I was expecting. I hiked through mud trails, past massive ancient trees and trampled through thick, jungle undergrowth. I walked across the tallest (45m) and longest (510m) canopy walkway in the world; a series of swinging rope bridges suspended by wire from treetop to treetop across the tops of the jungle; 45m is sooo high! It sways and swings when you walk across and you would have no chance if it suddenly snapped! It does give you awesome views both across the jungle and looking downwards. Afterwards, I took a longboat across a quick-flowing, muddy-brown river straight out of any “Vietnam War‟ film; I wouldn’t have liked to have fallen into that.

The jungle isn‟t my ideal environment; (give me mountains and deserts any day of the week) but it was fantastic to see it for the first time and walk through a small part of the oldest rainforest in the world. With more time and money, I would have taken a flight to Sarawak province on Borneo Malaysia, where I would have liked to have met the Iban tribes-people, who reportedly have a headhunting history. Apparently, they have a fascinating culture of body-art and, whilst I don‟t have a burning desire to get another tattoo, it would have great to have one designed and inked by an Iban, using traditional methods. I’d also liked to have attempted Mount Kinabalu but then I suppose, when travelling, there’s always something more you’d like to have done.