Boats

Malaysia Visa Run

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Sunday (probably your Saturday) I spent 12 hours ferrying onto the mainland and going in a van 400km to Malaysia and back for new visa stamp. I have a multi-entry year long visa that cost me $120 ($54US) but they still make me leave every three months! Three caravaned vans with 10-12 people in each…and there are companies all over Samui that offer the same runs.  I thought I would get 3 more months but they gave me only 2 because it is all up to the particular border office what they will give you!  Now if I wanted to stay a third month I would have to go to the local Samui immigration office and pay 1800 baht ($54US) for 1 more month! Imagine how many expats all over Thailand or people on long-term stays who are doing the same thing!  Way to bring money into Thailand!  I think if I had flown out and back in I would have gotten 3 months.  But I’m leaving before the third month anyway.

The run was quite an experience as my son Doug who lives here warned me.  I think the Austrian trip leader belonged to the gestapo in another life! Maybe even a cousin of Hitler’s! :)) Driving 150km an hour (90mph) with only a half dozen near misses, we got only two 5-minute potty stops on the way and on the way back.  And at the border there was a HUGE local week-end market where we were told by the gestapo NO TIME FOR SHOPPING!  But some of the guys (and they were ALL guys) sneaked some food. And on the way back at the last stop we only got 2 minutes because the gestapo wanted to make the 3pm ferry to Samui instead of waiting until 4pm.  At the border office we got yelled at because we were standing as a group, as we had been told NOT to do, and not lined up one after the other like the SS. Wonder what would happen if he tried to do this in China! :)) Oh well…it was all quite organized.  He knew all the border guards and did a good job greasing the whole thing for us.  And wonder of wonders he pronounced my last name (Goetz) right!  I told him it was the first time ever!  Usually people who don’t know me say Go-etz or Goats instead of Gets! Ha!  But had never been on the Thai side of the Thai/Malaysia border so it was nice to see how tropical it was.  Southern Thailand has been racked in recent years by a Muslim separatist movement but like with all the negative media attention in Oaxaca…no bombers were seen! Ha!

The pony-tailed gestapo trip leader had visited most of the States and worked for two years in Florida as a tour guide. “Did you know Central Florida is the second largest beef cattle producer in the States?”  No! I exclaimed.  This is an interesting phenomenon.  Often foreign tourists know more about the sights than the local people.

I was tucked into the very back seat (seats were assigned by the gestapo) with a young guy from The Netherlands who at one time had a band in NYC…writing the lyrics and producing the music and who now was writing a book about Thai culture and the law to be entitled “RESPECT” targeted to all the young Western guys who are here for “Happy.”  Since he was married to a Thai,  I asked how long he had been living here. “16 months,” he says.  Oh, good, I thought!  And you are writing about Thai culture!  Guys don’t realize how dangerous it can be here, he says. Give a Thai the middle finger, he said, and you will be killed.  And of course everyone should know what happens if you are caught with drugs of any kind.  And 8 people are killed every week on the sandy ring road around Samui. Well, it will be better for young guys than reading “Bangkok 8” so it may do some good.  I hope.

Visa Run Misery

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Every month my son Doug has to cross into Burma and come back into Thailand to get another 30 day stay in the country. If you are late it’s a $12 fine per day. It’s a racket. So this month he and Luk, his wife, took a bus south to Krabi town to get a crown placed on his tooth. Then he had a hell of a time on the bus getting north to Ranong where he crosses to Burma on a boat and back through Thai immigration to get his passport stamped. The bus stopped every few km and he got there too late to get across the border yesterday….so he had to wait til this morning and get a fine, which is a lot when you are living on the local economy.

I think he depends on Luk to get reservations etc. but she didn’t check if it was an express bus. When I have watched her ask for information I need, I notice, when I question her, that she hasn’t asked any detailed questions…just too polite to press for information. She appears very uncomfortable to ask again…too hesitant to “confront” even though she will use a very nice voice.

Late this morning I get another call from Luk complaining that Doug is angry with her. He left her in the hotel to do his three hour crossing with a request that she arrange for the bus to Surat Thani where they catch the ferry to Samui. Instead of going to the bus station for the ticket, she called and found out that there is a bus leaving every hour. But she didn’t ask if there was room or make a reservation for the next available bus. So when they got to the station at 11am they were told the buses were full until 2pm. Of course they didn’t bother to tell her that when she called. This would put them into Surat Thani too late for the ferry to Samui and meant that they would have to pay for a night in Surat.

Koh Pha Ngan

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Doug Luk and I took a break from Samui and put the car on the ferry for the two hour trip north to the island of Koh Pha Ngan for a couple days. Almost no car and truck traffic, motorcycles or pot-holes=bliss! This is the island, two-thirds the size of Samui, of the legendary full-moon parties but luckily we were there only during the post-half-moon party…the southeast beaches full of 20-something Europeans in dreadlocks and a slew of Israelis. We stayed on a serene northeast beach…me in an aircon bungalow and Doug and Luk in a 300 baht fan bungalow facing the Gulf Of Siam.

A drive up to the end of the paved road landed us at sunset in a sandy beach restaurant watching the sun go down while eating fresh-caught baracuda and spicy Thai salad…and we are leaving all this on the ferry in two days?!!

Stamp-Out to Burma

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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“Stamping out” consists of leaving Krabi Thailand at a border crossing…in the case of Ranong the border is with Burma…and then “stamping” back into Thailand. To do this they went to the Thai immigration office at the port in Ranong to officially exit the country called “stamping out.” Then they hired a boat ($12) for a 40 minutes ride across the estuary to Burma. They paid $5 US (had to be a US bill) at the Burmese immigration office for a stamp in their passports to enter Burma. They walked around the little dumpy Burmese border town trying to avoid the sellers (the big sales item was Viagra…probably from India) for 30 minutes and then took the boat back across to Thailand where they returned to the Thai immigration office to get stamped back into the country for another 30 days.

In my case I had purchased a 60 day Thai tourist visa in Kunming China so I had another couple weeks in my passport. While Bob and Doug were monkeying around with this, Luk and I found a nice air-con hotel that would accept their little Shimizu “Ting Tong” (the name means “crazy”) for the night…having take-out dinner purchased from the local night market and eating it in our room … one of the best meals we had in Thailand…all of us feasting for about $3.

The next day we drove east to Surat Thani on the east coast of the Thai peninsula …visiting a famous Buddhist meditation teaching center (in English) on the way. Had strong thoughts of being dropped off here for a month but there was no air-con or even fans in the rooms and that even I was not ready for. I just settled for my good old TM mantra in my comfortable air-con room in Krabi.

Christmas In Patagonia 2003

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Bob begins his Patagonia leg…making his way through through Baliroche and Califate Argentina. He visited the Los Glaciares National Park by bus, which is an area of exceptional natural beauty, with rugged, towering mountains and numerous glacial lakes, including Lake Argentino, which is 160 km long. At its farthest end, three glaciers meet to dump their effluvia into the milky grey glacial water, launching massive igloo icebergs into the lake with thunderous splashes. Then he moved on through the Pampas to Puerto Montt, Chile.

The Magellanic “Jackass” penguins swimming out of the sea to mate were fascinating, he said.

It was cold, visibility was zero and tours into the Andes were expensive so Bob elected to take a lonely boat trip through the Fjords of Tierra del Fuego. He took a short hop down to Punta Arenas, the southernmost tip of Chile, at the strait of Magellan, where he spent Christmas watching it snow through his guesthouse window. Then two days on a boat chugging through the Fjords back up to Puerto Natales. Then flew back to Buenos Aires.

Off The Boat…Where?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Back on the boat from the little gorges tour, a woman appears at our cabin door…in her little English she says “I have a hotel for you…a bus will pick you up and take you to the hotel…Yichang is small…it might be hard to find a hotel room at 11pm.” Later, Jana reads in Lonely Planet that the city has nearly 4 million people! We think she may have meant that the city isn’t as developed for tourists as other cities are…or she is just touting. We would get to Yichang, our ticket destination, by 11:00pm she said.

At 8:30pm we received a knock at the door…”quickly, quickly”…as we frantically packed our things, not expecting to be off the boat until 11pm…and then stood at the exit with our backpacks on for 20 minutes. Finally out the doors and up the ramp, we were led to a waiting bus where about 15 Chinese were frantically elbowing each other to get on. I have never seen anything like it in my life. The company apparently overbooked the bus-we think probably with the last minute addition of the three foreigners! To make room for everyone two poor Chinese guys were forced off the bus by the driver and tour operator after much sustained yelling and waving of arms…controlled rage, Jana called it.

We did not know for sure where the boat had let us off until we passed the lights that covered the construction site of the dam and the locks. It would be another couple hours to Yichang where the bus let us off at our hotel…no third bed as promised…this time the foreigners were fooled.

Down The Yangtze

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Side Trips on The Way
At 6:05am a tour guide knocked at the door…follow me, follow me now, he says! We saw the ghosts…a series of temples in the dark of morning called the Abode of Ghosts or Fengdu Ghost City…also called the Nether World which is said to be the place of devils…Disneyland, Bob says…a series of temples combined with a hokey carnival-type ride.

After looking at the lunch food provided in the small cafe on the boat we munched on our bag of snacks…oranges, dried apricots, boiled eggs, crackers, dried plumbs and tamarind…chocolate kisses…

The lady came back in to try to get us to pay for the whole compartment…they think we don’t understand the way things work and they are right, Jana says. We gestured to the lady that a compartment mate was welcome but he/she couldnít smoke. But money…no more, no more…I said as I sliced my hand sideways through the air…ok, ok, ok she muttered as she left. The funny part is that a fourth person was never put into our compartment…my guess is that no Chinese would have wanted to be in there with us. But still trying to fool a foreigner.

Another knock at the door in the afternoon…follow me, follow me now, the tour guide said again as the boat pulled into the dock. So up the ubiquitous Chinese wooden steps Bob and Jana went to the 12 storey wooden temple called the Stone Treasure Stockade built next to a huge rock bluff which is supposed to look something like a stone seal. It was built in the 17th century during the Qing dynasty. It will become an island when the water level reaches its full height.

For the rest of the day we played house, tried to stay warm in our comforters and with our hot water bottles in the heaterless cabin, and watched the mountainous left side of the Yangtse go by through the big windows of our compartment…banks full of vacation apartments for the Communist Party cadres we think…factories…huge Mandarin characters telling the locals not to cut the newly planted second growth of trees. Jana sang Old Lang Syne along with Kenny G…Bob read and I worked on this story. We never saw any wildlife…no birds…the Chinese ate them all Bob says. Look at those big white buildings up there on the hill I asked idly…they look like prisons…they sell insurance up there Bob says…they sell insurance? Itís probably a good thing this trip is almost over…

Massive Relocation
About 6pm we passed a ghost city…one of many…huge empty factory buildings hanging on the mountainside in the fog like a fantasy city drawn in a childrenís book…no people or roads or cars in view. Whole cities are being vacated and taken apart…to be reassembled higher up the mountain out of reach of the water or moved elsewhere…people cutting and collecting bricks from the rubble and carrying them away on their backs.

You Can Always Fool a Foreigner

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Down the Yangze River
From it’s origins in Tibet through Tiger Leaping Gorge to Chonqing every Chinese calls China’s longest river Chang Jiang and at 6300km is the third longest in the world. From Chongqing to the North China Sea just north of Shanghai, this river is known as the Yangze by Westerners. Along the way lie the three gorges, regarded by many as one of the great scenic attractions of China…at least for now.

By 2009 when the mega Three Gorges Dam is completed, the gorges will become part of history…nearly 2 million people will have been dislocated…the water will back up for 550km and flood an area the size of Singapore. The dam is five times as wide as the huge Hoover dam. The wall swallows up 26 million tons of concrete and 250,000 tons of steel. It will yield the equivalent of 18 nuclear power plants…four times more than an power station in Europe and eight times the capacity of the Nile’s Aswan Dam and half as much again as the world’s current largest river dam, the Itaipu Dam in Paraguay. and it is said that it will prevent flooding and relieve the region’s environmentally damaging dependency on fossil fuels. It will cost as much as $36 billion generating electricity that will have cost $2000 for every kilowatt of capacity.

The dam will be an epic show, Lonely Planet says, of the new 21st century Communist might and definitive proof of man’s dominance of nature. Li Peng needed a project of this magnitude, and stature says Simon Winchester in his “The River At The Centre of The World,” to revive his image and the morale of the Party, still shaken by the aftermath of Tiananmen Square tragedy.

Chinese Saying: You Can Always Fool a Foreigner
Foregoing the expensive luxury boats for foreigners, we managed to negotiate a ticket for a local Chinese boat down the Yangtze…paying two guys a dollar each to carry our luggage and lead us down the dock to the right boat which we never would have found by ourselves…although we later had our doubts about whether we were on the right boat anyway…doubts nurtured by other travellers’ stories about scams designed by smaller boats to cash in on the more expensive tickets.

Our tickets were for a four passenger compartment…so small all four people had difficulty all standing up at the same time…our fourth compartment mate being an older well-dressed Chinese man.

Waiting on the boat for an 8pm departure, we were immediately offered the entire compartment to ourselves for an additional 200 yuan (about $25) which we declined. When the older gentleman lit up a cigarette in violation of compartment rules we had our suspicion that he was a pawn in an effort…assuming we wouldn’t want a smoking partner…to extort extra money from us. But they can always fool a foreigner.

Then they came around again and wanted an extra $40 each for three side trips…only one we knew for sure we wanted…the trip down the three little gorges which is said to make it all worthwhile. The first trip was at 6:00am the next morning so we crawled into our bunks early. Waiting for sleep amid the constant noise and activity on the boat I thought about “The Gorge,” the music amphitheater in central Washington that sits absolutely on the edge of the Columbia Gorge. I really didn’t think anything I would see here could beat that. But you can always try to fool a foreigner.

A Chinese Adventure With Three Foreign Devils
Then at 2:30am…we hear banging on the door which swings open and the lights go on…a lady engages in lively conversation with our Chinese roommate of which we understand not a word. The Chinese man pulls out his ticket…it wasn’t clear who wasn’t where they were supposed to be.

The three of us responded typically the way we usually have on the whole China trip: Jana groans, oh it can’t be 6am yet as she pulls out her ticket and tries to figure it all out. I’m not moving, I said. Bob lay motionless with eyes closed…waiting for it all to sort itself out.

The lady leaves. Amid our confusion…and explanations to us in Chinese…our roommate suddenly says “bye bye” and flicks the light out as he leaves…but we had just gotten back to sleep when he came back and pointing to his nose delivered more explanations in Chinese. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with his nose. Then he pointed to his watch…oh, I thought…he points to his nose to indicate himself! Then he points to the door. He was to go at 7am. But you can always try to fool a foreigner.

On top of all this, during the night my heavy rubber slippers provided by the boat had fallen off the end of my upper bunk and hit the Chinese gentleman below me on the head…so before he left in the morning our Chinese friend pointed to my slippers and then to his head…sorry, sorry, sorry I begged him…later-peels of giddy laughter. Next time he sees Westerners on a tour he’ll probably get as far away from them as possible! Couldn’t fool a foreigner on this night.

Lovely Lao

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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My favorite country so far…the people are sweet but very natural and direct. Flew from Siem Reap Cambodia to Vientiane, the Capital of Lao. The “s” was added by the French so many travelers now use the word Lao like the locals do. I stayed a couple days in Vientiane and then flew north to Luang Prabang in the mountains where I stayed in the new Mano Guesthouse for a couple weeks at $5 a night…a home away from home…having many wonderful conversations with newfound traveler/ friends coming and going again.

I was usually the only foreigner in the morning market getting my noodles for breakfast at 7am. Lao massage, and herbal steam bath down the street at the local Red Crosswas $3 an hour. Heaven. I began to think maybe this is all I needed to live a good life.

Bob, in the meantime, had worked his way to northern Thailand from Bangkok and took a slow boat for two days down the Mekong River to meet me in Luang Prabang. A few days later we flew back to Bangkok where we would spend time running errands and getting ready to fly to Hong Kong.

He Ho & Inle Lake

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August 26 2002
It is possible to take a ferry up the Irrawady to Mandalay but we chose not to do this because we heard the ferry was government-run and we tried very hard not to support government-run operations and second because we heard that Mandalay is a big, noisy, tout-filled beggar-filled city that we have had enough of over the course of this journey. So we took the one hour flight from Bagan east to HeHo and from there a taxi through Shwenyaung to Inle Lake.

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Inle Lake is 22 km long and 11 km wide and outrageously beautiful.
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After exploring the town of Inle and it�s markets for a couple days we took an all day boat trip around the shallow lake. Our Intha boat paddler stood in his longyi (length of cotton loom-woven cloth wrapped around and tucked in at the waist) on the stern of the flat-bottomed boat onone leg and wrapping the other leg around the oar slowly plied the calm black water dotted with floating islands and water hyacinth.

Hills rim the lake on all sides; the lakeshore and lake islands harbor nearly 20 villages on stilts mostly by the Intha people that are culturally and linguistically separate from their neighbors in the rest of the Shan state around them. The people use the same long flat boats to navigate to and from their homes and small lakeside businesses. Our paddler predictably stopped at a silk weaving factory and an umbrella cottage business. I bought a piece of silk the design of which was developed by the grandmother of the owner so it felt very special.
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I bought a piece of plastic to cover myself for 50 kyats (pronounced chat; there are about 980 kyats to the US dollar which everyone trades on the black market-about 10 times the official rate at the bank).

Burma�s incredible ethnic diversity means a wide range of handicrafts and we came away with several beautiful Shan shoulder bags, some pictures of the beautiful Pa-O and Palaung ethnic people in their colorful clothes. and some wonderful Shan food in our bellies. The Pa-O�s wear black with red trim and colored towel swrapped around their heads.
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