John in China: Bangkok and Phuket, Thailand

OK, so I'm a little behind on entries... sorry about that. This one's been in the works for a few days now (since we left Thailand on the 22nd, actually), but I just now finished it up and am publishing it. Photos should be appended to this one shortly...

Our flight to Bangkok was uneventful and short. We arrived in the late evening, and took a cab to yet another hostel. This place was as good as the Siem Reap hostel in some ways and better in others. It didn't have a swimming pool, of course, but it was very new and clean.

We spent a little time walking around the first night to see what Bangkok was like. As with Malaysia and Singapore, they drive on the wrong side of the road, which makes crossing the street a slightly more difficult task. We managed to find a night market not too far from our hostel, selling the usual items--t-shirts, DVDs, watches, belts, etc.

The next day we met up with our friend Bing who was also on our Beijing trip. He had gone straight from Beijing to Bangkok to see family, as he's originally from Thailand. Having a fluent speaker in Thai, combined with the broken English that most Thai people can speak, put almost no pressure on me to learn anything in Thai. I spent a total of seven days in Thailand and can only say "Hello" and "Thank you". It's a lot more uncomfortable than China in that aspect.

Bing and one of his friends took the four of us to see the King's Old Palace in the middle of the city. I guess it was roughly similar in purpose to Beijing's Forbidden City, but the architecture and decoration were completely different. Instead of China's ever-present crimson, the walls of most of the buildings were painted gold. The low-lying buildings of China were replaced with towering spires of Buddhist temples. And next to all that was a very British-looking building that turned out to be the palace itself.

On our second night, we went out again, but this time ended up in a different part of town. And this is where we began to understand just how weird Thailand becomes at night. But more on that later, as Phuket was even more bizarre.

On our last day in Bangkok, we went to go see the new Batman movie at the first showing. Not something I couldn't do at home, I know, but it was well worth the $6. After that, we grabbed some lunch and bummed around the hostel until the evening, when we headed to the airport for our flight to Phuket.

We landed in Phuket around 9pm, and got to our hostel about an hour later. It's rainy season in most of Asia, which means prices are incredibly low for accomodation. The three of us were able to get a nice room with our own bathroom for $20 total, and it was only about a quarter mile from the beach. I say "the three of us" because it was at this point that one of the other three headed back home, having gotten a call about a family emergency.

On our first full day in Phuket, we went to check out the beach. It was completely overcast, but the water was extremely warm, so it was still a good time. Spent most of the morning and afternoon there, then headed back to the hostel before going out to dinner. We ate at an Aussie-owned Thai place on the beach, then headed back into town to look for some bars. While we eventually found a decent place, we ran into about a hundred tailor-made suit shops, massage parlors, and "dance show" solicitations along the way. Part of the fun, I suppose, was thinking up creative ways to say "no" to the nicely-dressed Thai guy who tried to lure you into his tailor/DVD shop.

The next day while eating breakfast in a local cafe, we ran into a guy about our age named Keegan. He's of Scandinavian descent, born in South Africa, and living in the UAE. Having been to Phuket many times before, he was able to help us out in finding some of the better bars at night. Later that night, we were playing pool and drinking 40 baht ($1.25) buy-one-get-one-free drafts. It was a significant improvement over the previous night, both in economy and atmosphere.

Each day, we had a late breakfast and headed to the beach for the afternoon. The weather progressively improved throughout our five days there, until it was perfectly clear and sunny on our last two days. The beach itself was much better than I expected, and wasn't too crowded. The shelf extended very far out from the shore, so you could walk several hundred feet into the water and still only be up to your elbows. That said, the waves were big and the undertow pretty strong, so it would've made for very good surfing had we chosen to do so.

But even our five days in Phuket passed pretty quickly, and next thing we knew we were off to the airport for a flight to Singapore on the morning of the 22nd.

Below are some selected pictures from Bangkok and Phuket (from the beach photo onward, they're from Phuket). The Singapore entry will follow shortly, and then I'm going to try and catch up so you can learn how I got from the southernmost part of Asia back to Hangzhou and then Shanghai, where this entry was posted from. Enjoy!