After 5 months of crowdedness in Singapore with the only escapes being a weekend of Bintan and a week of Bali, Thailand seemed like a perfectly good place to unwind from my exchange semester. Having heard many good stories about Krabi, we decided to go for that instead of visiting Phuket, like most people do. 
I have to admit I was a bit worried. Some people advised against going to Thailand, not only because of the recent political unrest and closing of airports. Of course Thailand is known for its sex industry (pingpongshows and ladyboys) and nightlife, but that’s not really something we were interested in. 
We had a nice last evening in Singapore in the ‘New Asia Bar’, the Stamford hotel’s bar on the 72nd floor with an awesome view, which costed enough to convince us we didn’t need any more drinks for at least one month. 
Krabi is supposedly the place where you get your good amount of relaxation. So that’s where we started, taking a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Krabi airport with AirAsia. We used hostels.com to book a nice place for around 15 euros a night, which is quite expensive. But the same amount of money that buys you a shitty hostel room the size of a bed in Singapore, bought us an awesome spacious room, with balcony, paintings, tv and bath tub in a hotel 700m from the beach, with swimming pool and breakfast.

And what do you do for relaxation in Krabi? We did nothing at all and it was awesome. A day at the beach, a day riding elephants and climbing stairs to a temple.
And of course eating. Thai food is delicious. We ate everything from plain rice with beef and garlic to crabs to fistsize shrimps to barbecue buffets. It costs practically nothing and it’s so damn good. And it puts your handling of spicy food to the test. I learned (or better yet was taught (or better yet was taught the hard way)) to appreciate spicy food in Singapore, but Thailand is in a whole different league. Especially hiding the incredibly spicy chili peppers in the not spicy and delicious Nam Pla fish sauce is a mean trick, that makes your eyes fill with tears. But all in all, the food experience is definetely worth repeating and recommended. 

The bad

Phuket is a shithole. I really can’t get why people would go there. The only things we experienced the first day were masseuses that actually grabbed my ass when I walked past them, with their whiney pronounciation of “massaaage” and the hundreds of tuktuk drivers going “tuktuk?”. Then there were the bars with scantilly clad women (or were they?) with old western guys ogling them. And to top it all off there was this one western guy with a 15 year old Thai boy around his shoulders chatting up other boys of the same age. Made me rage and that’s when we decided to get back to the hotel and not come back to see Phuket’s nightlife. The rest of our short 2 night stay we spent at the beach (as far away from the whole sex stuff as possible) and in the cinema watching the Thai movie Ong Bak 2. We could’ve done this practically everywhere, so in the end going to Phuket was not worth it. Good to experience for once, but not very enjoyable. 

Although in Phuket the filth was crawling around and trying to lure you to watch pingpong shows and get massages, throughout Thailand garbage is quite a problem. Even in Krabi, all of the streets were littered with garbage bags smelling up the place. It’s not really a problem, but it can be a bit annoying. 

Now 

After a one night stay in Kuala Lumpur we had our flight to Yogyakarta. The first day of Yogya is not really the way we imagined it would have been. Both a bit sickish with diarrhoea and a bit feverish, we have spent most of the time in bed. Because of this our plans are not fixed yet, but on our wishlist

 are visiting temples of Borobodur and Prambanan, climbing either the Merapi or Bromo vulcano and finding a nice place to have our Christmas dinner. We’ve got only one week, so it’s going to be a bit cramped, but it are all things you simply have to do when you are around here. And this is an opportunity that will not present itself anytime soon, so we have no choice but to grab it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 at 1:14 am and is filed under Singapore Exchange, Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.