First half of Thailand

“Mai pen rai” – “It doesn’t matter.”
My new motto in life.

Thailand was the best port experience I have had so far. Nothing can quite measure up to the level of craziness, absurdity, wonder, joy, fun and pure goodness I experienced in this country. I had one of the best adventures of my life because I was willing to take a leap and make a crazy decision, but in the end it was the best decision I have made on Semester at Sea so far.

The first day I hop right on a bus to head to the Bangkok airport. Our port, Laem Chabang, is an hour and a half outside of Bangkok. Large ships have to dock there because the inner port is too shallow for them. We stopped halfway at a rest stop with all sorts of crazy food, orange eggs, dried out whole squid, just crazy looking stuff. We’re in Asia now!

Bangkok airport is a spaceship. It is huge and so futuristic. It reminded me of Epcot/Spacecamp, which I remembered my Dad and I went to when I was younger haha. We were in this airport for like four hours before our flight, sucks but we really had no choice, so I bought a couple of books, one on the huge sex industry in Thailand and Asia in general and another about a guy who was put into a Bangkok prison for twelve years for smuggling drugs. I’m a few chapters through the sex slaves book and it is very interesting and informative indeed. It also gave me a good background for what I was to see and experience on the streets of Thailand.

The flight was fine, I took my first double decker plane ever.

We arrive in Phuket (pronounced Poo-ket) a little over an hour later. We checked into our hotel, the Duangjitt, which was gorgeous as always, SAS always hooks it up. I was rooming with Marlee again, we often do as they usually set us up alphabetically. And Lexi was on this trip which was awesome because I haven’t been able to hang out much with her in port yet.

Smith, Lexi, Lynsey, Claudia and I all met up to go eat. We had our first taste of real Thai food at this sketchy restaurant, but the meal was cheap and delicious. I am in LOVE with Thai food, I am going to eat it all the time when I get home, “pad thai” is a little piece of heaven and everyone should experience it at least once. After eating we stopped back to the hotel for a little while to get ready to go out. I got cute and we hopped on a tuk-tuk (three wheeled car, tricked out with speakers lights and videos playing if you are lucky), which will apparently be everywhere we go from now on, and are my new favorite form of transportation, over to the main bar area.

This night, this city, this bar district, the Thai people in this area were surreal.

The sex industry in Thailand is prolific. It is everywhere and completely unavoidable. You will see it on any street. Phuket is a huge tourist destination and is naturally a huge area for the sale of sex. Prostitutes line the street everywhere you look. There are massage parlors that are not really massage parlors. I learned a new word, “ladyboy.” There are men dressed as women everywhere, very openly, and we were never sure who was pre-op or post-op. Every five feet someone else is beckoning you to come to a ping-pong show. You honestly don’t even want to know what that is.

All of this was hard for me to see, especially as a young woman, especially knowing that the large majority of these women are forced into the profession by many different things. Some out of desperate poverty, just to feed their families, some are raped then seen as worthless by their families and society, some are offered jobs in the city then are unknowingly sold into a brothel by friends and family members. And these women are not Thai women. 95% of them are shipped in from other, poorer countries. Mainly Burma. And this goes on all over the world, but it is an epidemic across Asia, including India. Mom, thanks for not selling me into prostitution, because a lot of parents do.

What was even more heartbreaking was watching many of my fellow classmates walk into these shows and pay money in these establishments, and even hearing of one or two partaking in more than just a show. Disgusting, disturbing, heartbreaking. I would never step foot in one of those places to see women be completely exploited in this way, even by other women.

I would see the sale of sex all over Thailand, but it was the worst in Phuket.

Anyways… onto the rest of the night. Other than that Phuket was a great place, filled with tourists from all over the world. The bar district is HUGE and a total blast, kind of what I might expect a New Orleans bar street to look like. The shopping is phenomenal as well. We started out the night at a hookah bar, as Smith and I love to do, then headed from there down the main bar walkway. We stopped all over the place at a bunch of different bars, trying to find the best deals. Thailand was more expensive than I expected, the most expensive place I have visited since Spain probably. But that is because I have been turned into a chintzy Scrooge on this voyage and have gotten used to my dollar stretching a long long way in most places. 35 Thai baht = 1 US dollar, but most things, including drinks and food, were only a little cheaper than they would be in the US. Partly because of all of the going out and traveling I did, I spent more in Thailand than I have in any other port.

All of the bars had very pretty women working in them, most of which I expect work on the side as prostitutes as well, but they were all very nice. Every bar had these little games to play, like brain teasers, connect four, separate this metal piece from that one. Weird. I got invited to go pole dancing at one bar so I brought Smith up with me and he climbed up the pole and wrote our names on the ceiling to be immortalized forever, “Pookie and Pookie-bunz.” Hahahahahah.

After our bar stint we all went skinnydipping in the ocean. I skinnydipped three night in a row in Thailand. I am skinnydipping around the world hahaha.

After that, who knows what time it was, definitely late, and we all went to bed to prepare ourselves for our 6:30 wake up time and next day of adventure.

Woke up in a stupor and threw my stuff together for a day of boating adventure. This day was basically a day of houseboating, and everyone knows how much I like that, so it was pretty much the best day ever. We drove an hour, hopped on the houseboat, about thirty of us to a boat. We putted through this amazing Thai bay, miles wide, gorgeous random tropical hills jutting out of the water here and there. We paired up on inflatable canoes and a trained canoe paddler paddled us around. Me and Dan’s guy was named Mik. He was a pretty quiet guy, but the rest of the crew was crazy fun. They were pushing us and each other in the water all the time, running around and joking with us, they made all of us these really cool roses out of straws and reeds.

So went exploring caves on canoes. The first cave was called Bat Cave. It had a lot of bats in it. And Batman was there. The caves got extremely low, so low that Dan and I had to lay down completely flat while Mik deflated our canoe a little to be able to fit us through a very small opening. My nose scraped the rock above, until suddenly we were outside again in a jungle lagoon. Monkeys were perched on the trees, they didn’t mind us at all. We were only able to stay in there for literally two minutes because Mik said if we didn’t leave now we wouldn’t leave because the tide was coming up. So we laid down again and repeated the process, this time with the water an inch or two even higher. I can’t wait to show you video of this so you can see for yourself how really crazy this was.

Next we went to Oyster Cave. There were a lot of oysters there. We repeated the scary laying down process again and were in another breathtakingly gorgeous Jurassic Park-esque lagoon.

We explored this lagoon and another area for awhile then hopped back on the ship for lunch, which was AMAZING. Have you ever had fried pineapple? I have, and it is delicious. After lunch we all jumped off the top of the houseboat a few hundred times, swam around, then the boat took us over to a little beach area, where we lounged and watched the crew play a sort of hackey sack game except with this hollow wicker ball.

Bus ride back, showered and slept for a little waiting for Lexi to get back. Little did I know this would be the night that would alter the rest of my Thailand experience. In a good way. In a GREAT way.

Lexi and I got ready and set out for our next night of debauchery. I love Lexi. I have so so much fun with her and it is crazy how chance brought us together again. In case my readers forgot, Lexi went to USD, rushed sorority with me, was my BFF in AXO, then transferred to U of Oregon halfway through sophomore year. And now we are on SAS together and loving it!

So her and I basically tore up the bar district together. We went all over the place, talking, eating, drinking, discussing. I think we hit up eight separate bars, at least. We danced like crazy in all of them and had a blast. Finally we ended up at this bar called Seduction.

The minute I walked in I spotted this amazingly cute guy. We locked eyes and I saw him make some sort of motion toward me. So I smiled at him, walked back, and asked him to dance. He said yes. And the rest of history. We decided to elope.






KIDDING MOM CALM DOWN.

But yeah I spent the rest of the night dancing with him and hanging out with him and his AMAZING friends. His name is Stas, he was born in Serbia or Slovakia or Slovania or something like that, and he lived in San Francisco for ten years or so. He is twenty-four, finished a two-year stint in the army, went to school for two years, has a semester off and is applying to schools, and is now in Thailand training to be a Muay Thai fighter. And so are the rest of his friends, who are also from all over the world. The one from Bulgaria and the one from Romania, who we called Bulgaria and Romania, were straight up models. But my favorite person was Andrew from Laguna Beach. This guy was fantastic, charismatic, hilarious, friendly, just a great guy in general, and we are best friends and plan on hanging out when we are both back in America. But yeah, muay thai is traditional Thai fighting, and all of these guys from all over the world are at this camp for at least a few months, and a few girls too. And I happened to stumble into their midst.

I spent hours with them, laughing dancing and talking. I asked Stas what that motion towards me had been when he first saw me in the club. He said he and his friends play “point and shoot,” which is basically point out the gorgeous girls you see, and he shot at me. The feelings was mutual.

Finally it was getting to be light out and they had to get home because they had an early ferry to catch over to Phi Phi Island (pronounced Pee-pee). Google it. One of the most beautiful places in the world. Stas invited me to meet them there in the morning and spend the day with them. At first I was like, no way can I do that, I’m supposed to do stuff with the SAS group tomorrow, I know no one will go with me because no one else knows them, I can’t do all of that traveling by myself, blab la bla. And then I was like… YES. YES I will go. This is my chance to have one of those crazy experiences that everyone always talks about. HERE IT IS! I’M GOING FOR IT!!!

The main thing that pushed me into this decision was the fact that if I stayed in Phuket with my SAS trip, I would be taking a three hour bus ride there and back, and only doing activities for two hours. The activities would be fun, elephant riding and jungle trekking, but the six hour bus ride was like another entire day being stripped away form me. Also, I knew I would have a blast hanging out with these guys.

I slept for about forty five minutes then woke up to get a taxi to the ferry. I was nervous about my decision, going back and forth about it. But what if they aren’t there when I get there? Well then I’ll just meet other people and hang out with them. Okay, stop thinking about it, just do it!

I hopped on a motorbike taxi and basically slept on his back for the forty minute ride. He woke me up when we stopped at the ATM, then he helped me buy my ferry ticket. The ferry didn’t take off at 7:30 am, it took off at 8:30 am. First roadblock. I was supposed to meet the guys at Reggae Bar at 9 am. Okay, oh well, I’m taking this ferry. I slept the entire hour and a half ride as I am surrounded by Chinese and Japanese tourists.

Oh another phenomenon of Thailand! Couples match. Everywhere. Matching tee-shirts, shoelaces, shoes, jackets, shirts with cute cartoons on them. It was insane. I was like, yeah maybe I would do that as a joke, but these people are more than serious.

Anyways, I wanted to make note of the Swedish woman I met sitting next to me who had the most gorgeous green eyes I have ever seen. Almost forest green, almost solid. Beautiful.