There are plenty of airlines flying to Bangkok, but how to be sure you’re getting the best deal? Flight comparison site Kayak (or Kayak UK if you’re in the UK) provides a good starting point for finding the cheapest flights to Bangkok. There’s also useful advice in this article – Cheap Flights: Where To Find Them Online.
Just put together a new website called Apartment-Bangkok.com which is aimed at giving a quick guide to renting an apartment in Bangkok. It follows on from my previous article Finding Cheap Long Term Accommodation in Bangkok.
Here’s a round up of the various posts I’ve been writing on Travelhappy, broken down by country. Bangkok gets its own category as I am still living here at the moment. One article I want to highlight is Seven Reasons To Go Travelling Solo
which got picked up by social news site Reddit.com, which meant that thousands of surfers came to read it, which was very gratifying. I’m planning to write a couple more articles like this with some more helpful advice.
Bangkok
Thailand
Myanmar
Cambodia
China
Japan
Miscellaneous
I’ve been writing a fair bit about backpacking in Thailand over on my travel blog Travelhappy during this year. I’ve just published a long article called Thailand Backpacking: A Quick Guide which gives a handy summary of most of the things I think are worth seeing and doing in Thailand when you’re travelling here. Follow the link for more.
I’ve also been writing a fair bit about Thailand on my scuba diving blog Divehappy.com. Here are the most popular posts about Thailand from Travelhappy and Divehappy:
There’s even more useful travel information about Thailand at TripAdvisor, including 1000s of opinions from other travellers about what to see and do.
Talking with Greg in the pub the other night. He’s a couple years younger than me but has lived in Thailand for the last four years, has a Thai fiancee and also speaks the language pretty fluently. Hence his understanding of Thai culture is a lot more than mine simply because he’s a lot more involved with it. We were having a spirited, booze-fuelled conversation about Thai monks Becoming a Buddhist monk is an institution which all Thai men are expected to do even if only for a few weeks – it’s a symbolic ritual of entering into adulthood and it also makes your parents very proud.
Inevitably, as Greg pointed out, some monks fall far below what’s expected of them. I took umbrage with this, defending their place in Thai society and their importance – not necessarily what Greg was arguing against, but I bent it to my needs all the same. We went back and forth over this for quite a while – the argument culminated with me wailing, “But I just want monks to be nice!”
Not, perhaps, my finest oratory moment.
If you want to read something more considered about this, there’s my review of Phra Farang, a great book about how a British businessman became a Buddhist monk in Thailand.
More on Thai monks:
Spike | Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia
Open Directory | Technorati: Thai monks
The Bangkok Post has been carrying an ad for the last couple of days advertising for an native speaking English teacher to go and work in an international school in Myanmar. The position is for 5 months, possibly longer. No mention of which city the school is based in. My girlfriend Lindy is an experienced English teacher – having taught English in Japan, Thailand and Korea) – and we were discussing the possiblity of her applying for this job. (We were talking via MSN Messenger as she’s currently teaching English in Korea throughout this month).
I suggested it to her as a bit of a joke, but the pair of us were quite taken with the idea. We reckoned that living and working in Burma, even for five months, would be scary but undeniably interesting. Access to anything was a big question – it’s unlikely we could use the internet to stay in touch with Friends or keep this blog updated because most international sites are blocked; we probably wouldn’t even be allowed to take our laptops in. That sort of disconnection is very disconcerting. On the other hand, five months off the grid could be very restorative, and of course, the chance to live in Burma and see a little of how people live – and have some surreptitious conversations about people’s ideas for the future – would be a unique one. It’s unlikely to happen, but it’s an intriguing idea.
More on teaching in Burma:
Spike | Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia
Open Directory | Technorati: teaching in Burma
It’s January the 8th but it seems in my local branch of the Au Bon Pain cafe, it’s Christmas forever. The decorations may finally have gone, hung at the perfect height to whack my cranium every time I went to place my order, but Christmas’s rotting, soulless corpse still moulders within this place in the form of the shop’s background music. Before Christmas it was Norah Jones on infinite loop, which faded suitably wallpaper like into the background – but for the Christmas period it’s been Christmas carols. Christmas carols sung in some vile jazz-lite jaunty style, full of fake emotion and over-expressiveness – “Santa shooby dibbity Claus is coming to shwaddy waddy townwwwwn shooby shooby do” – and pitched at just the right volume and tinniness of speaker to bore into my skull like a freshly unwrapped Black & Decker from under the tree. It’s relentless – as soon as one stops and blessed silence descends, a rendition of Silent Night that is anything but starts up and sends me running for the cafe’s garden. Better to deal with 35 degree heat and traffic noise than that.
Unsurprisingly, I hate Christmas. Or rather, I suffer it, because it’s hard to avoid. Living in Thailand certainly helps dispel all chance of Chrismassy weather, which is a good start. But the Thais make up for it by festooning every public surface with festive baubles. I don’t even care about the god awful Christmas decorations whose only saving grace is that they present an interesting fire hazard – but the music; please please please, for the love of God, stop the Christmas music. This idea that there has to be shrill tinny loud musak accompanying every activity – eating, walking, shopping – is the bane of my existence. And at Christmas, that reaches its pinnacle. It’s why I can’t stand Christmas either at home or here – besides all the usual reasons, it’s the sodding music that finishes me off.
I often wonder how the staff cope with this in the background. They must blank it out, otherwise there would be a mass suicide behind the sandwich counter after the first three days of the festive season. And indeed, Christmas in Thailand is a weird affair because, while it provides a great excuse for a piss up and holiday along with New Year’s Eve, it also represents the worst aspect of monoculture. It’s a holiday wholly constructed and popularised to generate more money for big business. Disconnected from Buddhist culture as it is, there’s not even a pretence of religiosity or significance to Christmas in Thailand – it’s simply a time to buy stuff and consume more.
My girlfriend and I headed to Borneo for Christmas last year, expectant that a predominantly Muslim country wouldn’t be indulging in such gaudy gluttony. The impeccably dressed staff of the elegant hotel we’d splashed out on greeted us wearing Santa hats. You just can’t win.
More on Christmas in Thailand:
Spike | Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia
Open Directory | Technorati: Christmas in Thailand
My summary of last year. Late, as ever, posting this. It feels like a thousand years ago when we first moved to Bangkok. I think that’s a good sign…
Lindy and I lived in Bangkok in January 2005, moved to Hua Hin for a couple of months and then moved back to Bangkok where we’ve lived ever since. (I’ve written about my impressions of the city previously in The Big Mango, Going Underground and Bangkok Shock, and there’s also my reminiscences of arriving in BKK for the first time three years ago as a terrified backpacker).
We went back to Khao Lak in February, six weeks after the tsunami, and dived with our friends at Phuket Diving Safaris in the Similan Islands. That dive trip led to me getting my big break with Asian Diver magazine, where I wrote about how the Similans’ dive sites had escaped major damage in the tsunami. Subsequently I made dive trips for the magazine to Lankayan in Borneo in March, Koh Lanta in April and Pattaya in November.
I also got some freelance work from The Nation newspaper here in Bangkok after an editor spotted my Plain Of Jars article online. I’ve written about my friend Dan’s volunteer company Starfish Ventures, diving in Borneo, the spectacular Buddhist statues and temples of Sukhothai and also the exquisite FCC Angkor hotel in Siem Reap, the Cambodian town near to Angkor Wat.
I returned back to the UK during August to see friends and family – Lindy sadly had to stay in Thailand due to work commitments. It was a real shame, because England was having a spectacular summer. My parents and I spent several happy days driving around Dartmoor, going to country pubs and admiring the bleak, beautiful tors and valleys. Being a Florida girl, the three of us reckoned Lindy wouldn’t have seen anything quite like it. My dad and I also went scuba diving together on the wrecks of the James Egan Layne and the Scylla that lie just off Plymouth. My dad’s a life long diver and something of an authority about shipwrecks around the Devon coast. For him it was a pretty special moment, finally getting to dive with his son on the James Egan Layne. For my part, I’m just glad I didn’t embarrass myself using a drysuit by doing a feet first ascent…
The highlight of the year was my parents visiting Lindy and me in October. We took them to Angkor Wat, then back to Koh Lanta and all around Bangkok and out to the tiger temple in Kanchanaburi. It was such a thrill to be the unofficial tour guide and to show them so many of the places that make Thailand magical for me. The fact that my parents and Lindy got on well, not having met before, was a pretty huge relief too. Just prior to my parents’ arrival, Lindy’s friends Katie and Todd had come over from the States to see us as well, so we had a full month of travelling around. I can’t wait for other good friends of mine to come and visit from the UK.
In November, my good friend Paul arrived from the UK to live in Bangkok, here to do legal research about South East Asia. He and his girlfriend Rachel are two of my oldest and best friends, and to have them living here in BKK – just over the road! – just seems completely surreal. I’ve met a lot of fascinating people this year – Chris Moore, Emma Larkin, Nic Dunlop – and become good friends with several more. Underwater photographer extraordinaire Jez Tryner and I hit it off as soon as we met and we’ve already worked together on several articles for Asian Diver and are now looking to collaborate on something more chunky. Lindy and I also managed to slope off for a long weekend in the bewitching city of Hanoi this month, a gastronaut’s dream town for sure.
For me, the defining thought about 2005 is that it’s the year where I finally knuckled down and started being serious about doing the stuff I care about. So far, it’s working – I’ve managed to get my independent travel, South East Asian scuba diving and travel photo websites all up and running as well as keeping Spike going. By actually getting stuff out there, even if I’m not 100 per cent happy about the quality of writing or the look of the webpage design, I feel a lot happier. I’ve realised I get bored so quickly that I have to write immediately, even if it’s sloppily, otherwise my brain just moves on. Plus I also seem to be developing an early version of Alzheimer’s as I go blank everytime I try to call anything beyond my immediate past. Hence the need to write everything down, fast, now.
In 2006, it looks like we’ll be moving to Tokyo for four months from May as Lindy will be taking up another English teaching job in Japan. I’m a bit concerned about the cost of day-to-day living there and whether she’ll wind up beating me to death if we’re living in a tiny apartment for that long – but I’m already getting excited about returning to Tokyo. After that, we’re not sure. I’d like to come back to Bangkok – I need the stability of being anchored in one place to work most effectively. On the other hand, it might turn out that we stay put and don’t got to Japan at all. Either way, I’m looking forward to what happens next.
The guidebook Bangkok Inside Out has recently been banned by the Thai Ministry of Culture, citing it as portraying a negative image of Thailand’s capital city. The book is a glossy photo-led overview of Bangkok in the 21st century, providing an alphabetised take on every aspect of urban Thai life in the metropolis, from the amulets that every Thai wears to alms-giving to ladyboy cabarets, all the way through to shopping and the city’s notorious sex trade. The chapter about Patpong, Bangkok’s sex strip, was deemed as particularly offensive. (Publishers Equinox have cleverly made this Patpong chapter available as a free PDF download for readers to see for themselves what has caused such a fuss. They also have a complete round up of the various reviews of the book and the articles about its subsequent banning).
Bangkok Inside Out is not a guidebook per se – it’s more inspirational than practical, a bit like Very Thai, another great photobook that explains Thai customs and lifestyles. If it references Bangkok’s go-go bars and massage parlours, it doesn’t celebrate them – and indeed, a cursory browse of the books available at any branch of Asia Books, Bangkok’s biggest bookshop, will turn up a slew of titles that unabashedly chronicle the exploits of sex tourists and sexpats alike. Check Sex, Lies And Bar Girls as an example. I don’t have a problem with these sort of books being on sale – but they do make the Ministry Of Culture’s decision to insist on Bangkok Inside Out’s removal from all shelves under threat of prosecution all the more baffling – a wholly arbitrary decision.
Asia Times has its original, glowing review of Bangkok Inside Out, plus the eloquent response from its two authors to the book’s banning. Here’s hoping that the ban will be rescinded early in the New Year.
Bangkok Inside Out is still available to buy from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com
More on Bangkok Inside Out:
Spike | Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia
Open Directory | Technorati: Bangkok Inside Out
Over on Travelhappy I recently published an article about the Tiger Temple in Kanchanaburi, a couple of hours drive from Bangkok. Tigers rescued from poachers live within the temple grounds, looked after by the monastery’s monks – who also let tourists have their photo taken with the tigers and even touch them. It’s a tourist destination that’s not been without controversy, but seeing these tigers up close and personal is quite spectacular. Full report and photos at Travelhappy.
