Fleeing the Nest

Let me just tell you about my first ever Southeast Asian travel adventure. The day was November 9th, 2016…this day might ring a bell for one reason or another...perhaps you made a really good sandwich or watched paint dry on your favorite wall in your house. We left Boston around 17:00 to catch our 19:30 flight from BOS to JFK. We planned on taking the bus and the subway but we heard that both candidates were going to be in Manhattan that night so we decided to fly in case there was an unreal amount of traffic in NY. That part was pretty painless, minus the soldiers standing with M4s at the JetBlue baggage claim…supppp fellas?, our flight got in around 21:00 and we had to go collect our bags and re-check in for our international flight at 0:00 to Taipei. We flew EVA airlines which I had never heard of before, but apparently 62,000,000,000 other people have because the line was about an hour long to check-in. At the time that we were boarding our 16-hour flight Trump was ahead in the polls but they hadn’t called the election yet. If my mother wasn’t freaking out enough about my international endeavors, Trumplestilskin was actually in the lead…I legit thought she was going to implode.

We flew for 16 hours not knowing who the president was! It was wild, I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. You can imagine my enthusiasm when we landed and found out that David S. Pumpkins had been the leader of the free world for several hours. I wonder if we will even bee allowed to re-enter the US? EVA Airlines was pretty awesome, and definitely affordable. They give you a blanket, headphones, earplugs, free movies/TV/Music and three meals. A bit of advice if you do find yourself flying this airline-when you pick your seat online it asks you to pick a meal, if you don’t pick one of the selections you still get fed. It seems like they are asking you to choose but they are really just asking if you have any dietary restrictions. So…we ended up with vegetarian oriental for breakfast, lunch, and dinner...which was interesting to say the least.

The Taipei airport was sooo cool! Every terminal has a different theme, it’s like a giant funhouse. Our terminal was like a movie theater, there was a forest themed one, Hello Kitty theme, etc. The flight from TPE was easy, about 4 hours total.

Arriving in BKK was a doozy, thank goodness everyone in Thailand is so unbelievably nice. It was at this time that I informed my two friends that I did not have a plan to get us to Koh Pha Ngan. In my head I thought it would be like our first adventure. Which sounds a lot better when you can speak the language and know that you are going to have Wifi (everyone who traveled before internet is probably reading this and rolling their eyes in a serious way). I had a vague idea, I just needed to get us from BKK airport to this bus station on Khao San Road in Bangkok-which I found out when we got there is about 45 minutes away. I asked an airport employee what I should do and after she was done laughing at me with her co-worker she told me to get on the train. At this point my friends were not totally thrilled with me. We stopped for a beer in our airport safe haven then hit the ol’ dusty trail.

I think everyone sort of thought once we left the airport we were going to step out into some 3rd world country mixed with a backcountry horror scene. Maybe no one would speak English and we would get on an old rickety train with no idea where we were going...who's to say? To our ignorant American delight, it was quite the opposite. The train station is so easy to navigate, way more modern than Boston, clean, everyone speaks English and is incredibly friendly. We took two trains to get to the office where we needed to buy our bus tickets, which is not located on Khao San Road-but at the time everything was foreign and confusing to me. We found our way to the 12Go Asia office in Bangkok and we were apparently very lucky to be getting on a bus that evening because everyone typically books in advance. We had this grand idea of walking around Bangkok for the 5ish hours we had until our bus. Until we realized we were inundated with baggage and flipping exhausted from traveling for 24 hours at this point. So we sat in an air conditioned café with Wifi next to the bus ticket office and had beer instead. Little did we know we still had quite the adventure ahead of us.

Bangkok

Getting a cab in Bangkok when it’s dark out with a 40L pack on your back is no easy feat. Or maybe it is and I’m just seriously challenged. After running into traffic several times, trying to enter a cab with a terrified Thai woman already inside (seriously you should have seen her, I thought she was going to cry when a big craaaazy Caucasian girl tried to get in her taxi), being unable to pronounce the bus stations name where I am going, and asking for help from an extremely nice woman on the side of the road we finally got in a cab on our way to our destination. We had to check in for our bus about an hour and a half before take-off at 21:00. They told us we could leave our baggage there…which was on the front steps of a store front on Khao San Road. So we took our valuables and ditched our big bags there and hoped for the best.

The babes. Phoebe (left) and Rhiannon (right) at dinner in Bangkok

We went as far as across the street to get food, we were all starving and exhausted by that point. I think I almost fell asleep into my Pad Thai dish at the restaurant. When it was “time” for our bus we had to walk to another busy road in Bangkok, on which I proceeded to fall asleep on the side of the road for about 40 minutes until our bus arrived. I was so exhausted at that point, someone probably could have walked up to me and said "I'm taking your passport and laptop" and I would have said "enjoy". Our bus wasn’t too bad, we had some friendly Dutch guys sitting in front of us. One of them turned around and said “Hello! Are you from the states?” I said “Hello! Yes, I am” and he said “Donald Trump is a clown” I responded by saying “actually…I’m from Canada”. Which is an interaction I am now very used to. I sat next to a Norwegian guy named Auto who was traveling for several months on his own. I woke up hovering above his shoulder drooling a number of times. The bus itself was called VIP and may have been circa 1945 when it was built but it was definitely tough to shove my 5’11” frame in the seat. I felt bad taking the aisle but there was no way I could put this big baby in a corner for that long.

Stay tuned for my "legs in Asia" album

Fast forward about 5 Advil PM’s and 5 hours later at our “rest stop”. We were fortunate enough to have the VIP wake up experience, which was full lights on at the same time the bus came to a screeching halt at a small covered market place. The digital clock at the front of the bus read 14:00 and I was so confused because it was pitch black out and certainly not mid-afternoon. The market way waaaaaay too much for me to attempt to navigate so I settled for a potty break and was very thankful to stretch the long stems out. We got back on the bus and set off for another few hours. We arrived at the ferry dock, very groggy and confused. This was our first experience of Thailand’s very effective “sticker method” for traveling tourists. Your ticket for your ferry/bus/etc is a sticker on the front of your shirt. Actually more effective than you may think…until you lose if after putting on and taking off your backpack 39 times. We had about an hour at the dock where I ordered fried rice at 7am because…Thailand, why not?

2AM Rest Stop

My first encounter with the scoop n flush

7AM Fried Rice...sorry for the weird placement of pics

The ferry ride was a couple hours long, fairly painless. We had to put our backpacks in a GINORMOUS pile at the front of the boat. It made me a little uneasy at first because apparently I read the same Osprey reviews as 20+ other travelers that had the same backpack as me. But let me tell you, this mess was off the chain organized. It reminds me of when really messy people (me) say that their shit storm of a room is “organized chaos”. Like…that pile is the wore-it-once-but-doesn’t-smell-too-bad-yet, that one over there is cardio-shirts-that-smell-but-you’re-just-doing-cardio-in-them-again-anyway but they can pinpoint every shirt in their room to its exact latitude and longitude. One guy REMEMBERED WHICH BACKPACK I HAD, which is so insane to me.

Sunrise at the ferry dock

So we made it to the island around 10am…totes forgot to think about the fact that I wouldn’t have any way to get in touch with our friends that were already there aaaand we didn’t know where we were staying. Low and behold while I am fumbling around on my phone, our Puerto Rican Knight in Shining Armor, Dave, pulls up with a wonk-wonk of his motor bike horn. And so begins the Koh Pha Ngan adventures…stay tuned :).

The world's first Puerto Rican Tuk Tuk Driver, Dave