The Further Adventures of Lauren - Thailand

Lauren’s original plan for the next part of her travels was to go to Bangkok, where she would spend a few days on her own before heading down to Phuket in the southern part of Thailand to meet up with Arden again. Arden had left Antalya, packed up her apartment in Madrid, and returned to the US, and from there she would be flying west across the Pacific to Thailand. It was an ambitious plan, but a workable one.

I will admit that Bangkok was the one part of the trip that I found a bit unsettling. I’m not really sure why Bangkok as a city just seemed more troubling than any of the other places that she was planning to go on this trip. It does have a reputation, but then most cities do in one way or another and I’ve learned not to take those at face value. You have to be careful in cities, but that’s part of what makes them interesting. Perhaps it was just because it is simply a very large and unfamiliar city a very long way away and she’d be there on her own. But she had a work friend back at Main Campus University who had family there, and I have a close friend who also knows someone who lives there, so she’d have people to go to if she needed to do so.

In the end she decided to skip it entirely, though.

The communities at hostels are fairly friendly and welcoming, the occasional underwear thief notwithstanding, and from what Lauren said they are happy to share travel tips and advice with their fellow guests. It’s a nice community that way, and often they end up seeing each other at various stops along the way so they can catch up and compare notes. Americans tend to be very focused travelers, going to one or a couple of places for short periods and sticking to a schedule all the while – probably because Americans get so little vacation time compared to most of the world that unless you’re fairly affluent, long-term unemployed, young and between semesters, employed doing travel-related things, or some combination of those things it’s not really possible for Americans to do otherwise. Europeans and Australians seem to live in more humane societies and Lauren noted how she saw a lot of them who were traveling for weeks or months without any definite plan, just moving from one hostel to the next on the basis of recommendations from peers. It seems a better way to live if you ask me.

The consensus that she got from her hostel community in Nepal was that Bangkok was a decent city but probably not worth the travel days on either side and she should just go straight to Phuket.

This ended up involving a number of changed and missed flights and a trip across Bangkok to get to the other airport in town because (of course) her original flight took her through Bangkok and (of course) a city that big has multiple airports, but the flights are cheap (around $30) and therefore easy to write off if you need to, and eventually she made it to her hostel in Phuket where she found herself surrounded by Australians. If you’re going to find a community there are definitely worse ways to do that than to be surrounded by Australians in a hostel in Phuket.

Lauren had a few days to knock about the place before Arden arrived and after all the hiking in Nepal and the traveling to get to Phuket she ended up sleeping a fair amount the first day or two she was there. It does take a lot out of you all this getting from here to there. You don’t think it will, since mostly you’re sitting still on a plane or bus or some such, but it does.

Phuket is one of the main tourist and expatriate destinations in Thailand, and it has the climate and amenities to match. It has pretty much recovered from the 2005 tsunami these days, and by all accounts it’s really gorgeous. It also has good food, and Lauren reported that this coconut soup was life changing.

Eventually Arden made it to Phuket, cleared Customs, and was reunited with Lauren.

They didn’t stay long in Phuket, as it turned out, but they had a pretty good time while they were there. The visited a Thai 7/11, for example, and I know from experience that 7/11s in other countries are a lot different from the ones here in the US, generally for the better. The Swedish ones, for example, are really nice, and I’m assuming the Thai ones are too. In the US they are basically the Waffle House of convenience stores – rough, ready, generally entertaining in ways that involve the phrase “as police later reconstructed the timeline,” and often fun in their way (I worked at a 7/11 for a summer when I was in college, and it was memorable in several different ways) – but abroad they’re often a bit nicer than that.

Also, Arden and one of their new Irish friends from the hostel (there were a LOT of Irish tourists in the hostels Lauren visited on this extended trip) took Lauren to a Muay Thai event while they were in Phuket. Muay Thai is a combat sport like boxing or martial arts, and the event they went to was outside in 90F/32C weather with 100% humidity, which is just a recipe for everyone involved to lose 10% of their bodyweight just from sweating. They needed a ring girl that night and that turned out to be Arden.

They also visited the beaches there, which is one of the main reasons that one goes to Phuket after all.

A couple of days after Arden got there, they left Phuket and went to Koh Phi Phi, an island about 25 miles away across the Andaman Sea, where their hostel was right on the beach. It was not the most luxurious place – “room to be desired; guests are lively” Lauren later summarized for us – but it was gorgeous. This was the entrance to it.

Koh Phi Phi is “very much a party island,” according to Lauren, but you can also have a relaxing time there if you’d like. They went on a boat tour of the place, for example, and enjoyed some beach time as well as some coconut time. One of the beaches is called, appropriately enough, Monkey Beach, and yes there were monkeys. No circuses, though.

Arden also had her very first Thai tea, and I have to admit that for me that would have been worth the price of admission all by itself. I love that stuff, though I have reached the age where I have to consider it a treat rather than a beverage. For a while there was a place here in Our Little Town that would sell it to you by the case and that was a dangerous bit of knowledge indeed. I suspect that it was even better served fresh in its original habitat, though.

From Koh Phi Phi they flew north to Chang Mai, which is another main tourist destination in Thailand. 

A quick internet search just now reveals that there are 117 Buddhist temples in the district as well as any number of ruins and other historical sites, so you can understand why people would want to go there. 

It also has some really great food, and in my opinion there is no better thing to say about a place than that. Other than that the people are friendly and there are cats. So it’s number three on the list, but still that’s pretty high up, I think.

Lauren did send me a picture of something that a restaurant where she was eating billed as “Thailand’s Best Philly Cheesesteak,” and you know? Maybe it was, but that is a relative thing after all. Lauren, who has extensive experience with the real thing, was smart enough to stick with the local Thai food because that’s what she was there for, but she did send me a picture of it. I think the chef needs to go on a field trip to my hometown sometime. Not saying that it’s a bad sandwich on its own! Just that it’s not a cheesesteak.

Chang Mai was also where the second crisis of the trip happened (after the food poisoning adventure in Turkey) when a Thai ATM ate Lauren’s debit card.

We’d set up the debit card so that it would work everywhere she went, a simple if rather extensive process of walking into our local credit union and explaining precisely where and when Lauren intended to use it over the course of the summer, and it had been working fine up until then. So we’re not entirely sure why this particular machine decided to go all Hungry Hungry Hippo on her card at that moment. All we know is that once that decision was made there was no getting it back.

Fortunately, when we were in Sweden together Kim had sent Lauren off with her travel wallet – one of those secure pickpocket-resistant things that are good to have when one is far from replacement cards – and she’d forgotten to remove her own debit card from it so Lauren had that as a backup. Kim had thought about canceling her card once she figured out what had happened when we got home but fortunately she never got around to doing that since we knew where the card was and she thought it might come in handy. And it did! It worked like a charm, though it did give Lauren nerves every time she’d try to use it because it wasn’t her card after all. Also, Lauren had a credit card as well for another backup, and that was still working fine. We told her she could use both cards and we’d settle up when she got home. It’s good to have some financial backup on these adventures.

But she’d saved up for this trip and wanted to do it on her own dime as much as possible, so I went to the credit union here in Our Little Town to see what I could do about getting her up and running on her own money. This process played out over several visits and took about two or three days. They got to know me quite well. I think they enjoyed the process, to be honest, since it probably isn’t something they deal with every day.

The first thing I did was cancel the debit card, which I could do in person since they could see my ID and I could explain everything to them. Lauren has had this account since she was six and children that age cannot open bank accounts on their own. They need a parent to be on their account as well, and that parent was me. So as a co-owner of the account, I was able to convince them to cancel the old card, though this did require me to show them all of the WhatsApp messages from Lauren to prove that the card had been eaten, and understandably so. Lauren could track any the charges on the card through her phone app and nothing unfamiliar had been added, but since the card wasn’t coming back there wasn’t much point in keeping it. That was the easy part.

The next part required some maneuvering, and I got to know Noah, the teller at our small local credit union, pretty well over the next few days. First, we had to arrange a new debit card for Lauren, which took some time and some authentication which is (again) why I went in there in person. They were really good about that and they agreed that they would just send it to the address they had on file (rather than anything I might supply, since hey – security) and that was good except that would take some time and wouldn’t be all that helpful in Thailand. 

And then I had a thought. I am, as noted, on this account too, and this meant that if I wanted to do so, I could also get a debit card for this account, one that they would issue to me on the spot if I were standing there in person with my ID in hand. I could then fire up the WhatsApp machine for a voice call and read Lauren the digits and she could then enter it into her Apple Pay and all would be restored!

This also worked like a charm until she got to the Apple Pay confirmation, because they need to hear from Lauren and Apple Pay does not do WhatsApp and none of the other methods available to Lauren in Thailand seemed to be working. So I went back to the bank to see how this could be resolved, and in the end it was me and Lauren on speaker on a WhatsApp call at the bank along with Noah and one of the managers, both of whom could also speak with Lauren on my phone, working to get all of the Apple Pay authentication done through the credit union itself since the bank can also provide authorization to Apple Pay even if Apple Pay really, really hates it when you do that.

Eventually that too got settled and she used that debit card on Apple Pay without incident for the rest of the trip, especially once I remembered that this too needed the travel memo and went back and cleared it for all of the various places she’d be going and when, a process that required several updates as the trip got extended and changed and then a belated approval for some charges that didn’t go through the first time because they weren’t being made in Our Little Town.

It’s a process.

Every time I go into that bank to do anything these days I always look for Noah and he always asks how Lauren is doing. It’s nice to do business locally.

From Chang Mai Lauren and Arden were supposed to go to Vietnam and eventually they did, but that took a bit longer than expected. Apparently you can only pay for a visa at the airport when you arrive in Vietnam if you are part of an organized tour. If you’re just traveling there on your own you have to get your visa in advance, and that ended up taking some time.

So they went to Pai.

If you’re going to be stuck in Thailand waiting for a visa into Vietnam, Pai isn’t a bad place to do that. Pai is apparently the stoner capital of Thailand – a tropical Colorado, as Lauren put it – and it’s a really nice place to just relax and hang out. You can also ride around the place if you want.

Getting a visa from the Vietnamese government on short notice proved to be a tricky task, and they were starting to get a bit down about it when an Irish traveler staying at their hostel gave them a phone number and said “Talk to this guy.”. And, as Lauren later reported to us, one phone call and a Venmo payment later, they had their visas in hand.

The funny thing about that is that during the spring semester Lauren actually wrote a paper for one of her classes on exactly this kind of productive corruption, where you have to pay bribes to get anything done but actually do receive the services that you pay the bribes for once you do, and the whole thing works pretty smoothly once everyone understands the system. I really hope that she has since gone back to that professor and told them how she put that into practice this summer.

This was also when the idea of extending the trip past the original return date started to become more real – I won’t say that it originated at this point, since I am fairly sure that temptation was there from the beginning. But Vietnam was one of the lodestars of this trip and Lauren felt that she had been shortchanged out of a few days there and wanted to get her time in, and as she explained in a phone call one evening (our time), she was already in the region and it would be a lot easier to extend the time than return. And as much as I was looking forward to seeing her after all of her travels, I had to admit she was right about that.

In the end she extended the trip another seventeen days and added a whole other country, but that is a post for another time.