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. 

The Further Adventures of Lauren - Nepal

Lauren’s flight to Nepal left on the Fourth of July.

It’s a long way from Istanbul to Kathmandu, which sounds like the first line of a Cat Stevens song but is an actual geographic fact, so she didn’t arrive there until the following day. Although when exactly that happened is a bit of a puzzle to figure out since while Turkey’s time zone is eight hours ahead of Wisconsin and therefore fairly easy to calculate, for some reason Nepal’s time zone is ten hours and forty-five minutes ahead of Wisconsin which makes no sense whatsoever. I suppose the Nepalese are fine with and it is their time zone after all, but while Lauren was in Nepal we just rounded it to eleven hours and figured we’d be close enough.

It's not like we needed to be that exact anyway.

Her flight required an eight-hour layover in Dubai – or, as it turned out, the neighboring emirate of Sharjah – and that was fine except that for some reason Lauren’s phone insisted she was in Iran for the whole time and you look at that and think … maybe? Did the flight get diverted for some reason? Did international politics get stupider than usual and I missed something? But no, it’s just technology being technology and eventually she was off on the next flight.

Also, all flights on Air Arabia start with a travel prayer, which is an interesting thing to know.

Lauren spent her first day or so in Kathmandu on her own, just exploring the place and generally having a good time in a new city. There’s a lot to see there.

The larger plan for this part of Lauren’s travels was that our British friend Ginny – who is Lauren’s age – would fly out to join her there, and then they’d go up to the Annapurnas for an extended hike around the mountains together. They’d found a tour guide for the journey since you’re not allowed to do this sort of thing without one anymore and you wouldn’t want to anyway because the reason you’re not allowed to do this without a tour guide is that the Nepalese government got tired of cleaning the bodies of tourists off their mountains and now they want you to have at least one person in your party that they know for sure knows what they’re doing out there so they can make sure people will get back safely. And once safely off the mountains Lauren and Ginny would go back to Kathmandu and be joined by our friend Richard, Ginny’s dad, for a few days before everyone split off in different directions.

It has to be said that this plan worked out very well.

Lauren and Ginny spent a day gearing up for hiking around the mountains, which is apparently a fairly easy thing to do in Kathmandu. A lot of tourists come out to Nepal with all sorts of expensive gear that they use just once and then decide they don’t want to go to the expense and trouble of schlepping back home so they sell it to second-hand shops. You can get some great bargains on things if you’re willing to do a bit of exploring.

It has to be said that there was a bit of nervousness regarding tour guide companies and mountains, since Lauren and Arden had had a fairly unhappy experience with the one they’d found to take them up a mountain in Guatemala in 2024 – a very long story that Lauren wisely waited until after she was safely back in the US to tell us – but this one worked out really well. The company that Lauren and Ginny hired is called Travel Maker South Asia, and if you ever find yourself in Kathmandu looking for a guide to take you up into the mountains we can recommend them wholeheartedly. The guide who went with them called himself Uncle and took very good care of them, to the point of bringing along fruit from the lower altitudes to share with them. They even made a little video where they stitched together a pile of photos from the hike and set it to music, which was really kind of cool to see.

Uncle is the guy on the left, below.

It was good that it worked out so well, because they spent over a week together on this trip in some pretty close quarters and it would have been fairly uncomfortable otherwise.

It was just the three of them on this hike – Lauren, Ginny, and Uncle – mostly because it was monsoon season and the tourist crowds tend to thin out around then. The whole time they were out and about in the mountains they saw maybe three other hikers out there with them, in fact. So if you’re not a fan of crowds, monsoon season is your jam.

Their first task was to drive from Kathmandu to Chame, a journey of about ten hours according to the itinerary they gave her. From there they’d slowly hike around the Annapurnas – going up but not summiting them as the Annapurnas are statistically the most dangerous mountains in the world with about a 30% fatality rate among climbers. The plan was to go to Pisang, Manang, Yak Kharka, and Thorong Phedi, with the ultimate goal of crossing the Thorong La Pass and then working their way slowly back down. There’d be some acclimatization time built into this schedule as well to get used to the altitude, since by the time they got to the Thorong La Pass they’d be at 5416 meters elevation and doing that in a straight shot would have required some actual training. 5416 meters is nearly 18,000 feet in Bald Eagle Units, and that’s about as high as the travel insurance would cover.

The dividing line for travel insurance, by the way, is carabiners. They ask if you are going to need them, and if you say yes then your rates go up. There would be no carabiners on this trip.

It was a long hike, but fortunately the monsoons mostly stayed away while they were there. It did give them some interesting cloud cover, and they saw a lot of really gorgeous scenery out there in the mountains. 

In the photo below you can almost see Pisang peak, which is obscured by the clouds. But you can see Lauren clearly and that’s a very nice thing.

Not everything was pure nature, though. People build things there, and that’s worth seeing too.

Some of the things that people build are bridges, which you need to have in a place as mountainous as Nepal. And if you have bridges, chances are you will need to cross those bridges when you get to them. This can be scenic. Yes, scenic is a good word. We’ll stick with that.

Along the way they stayed in tea houses, which were fairly basic in most ways but which seemed to be comfortable if often cold. When you’re that high up in the mountains it doesn’t matter that it’s July in the northern hemisphere – it’s cold. The people they met in those tea houses were friendly, and the tea houses themselves were nestled in some of the most beautiful places on earth.

Lauren is pretty fit – she goes to the gym regularly and walks pretty much everywhere on campus the way college students do – but Ginny runs ultramarathons though mountains and sometimes it was hard to keep up with her on these hikes.

Uncle took good care of them.

After much hiking and more than a few tea houses, they made it up to the Thorong La Pass. The Travel Maker people gave them certificates for this accomplishment when they got back down and really, that feels right. It’s quite an accomplishment, and it’s good to recognize that.

From there it was a long hike back down to Chame, but it went smoothly.

When you’re on a journey like this you have to keep yourself amused however you can, and they found ways to do that as well.

My favorite example of this, though, was when they were at one of the tea houses, relaxing and browsing the web as one does when there is actually an internet connection, and found a very old photo of the two of them on Dartmoor in England from the blog archives here – they’re both about ten years old in the top photo below – and decided to recreate it. And that’s why I write these posts, so the stories get remembered and, perhaps obliquely, relived. 

It has to be said that Lauren was not very happy in that older picture – Dartmoor is very wet, which meant that by the time we got to this point so were her feet – but she persevered, and one dryer load later all was well again. Lauren was much happier in the mountains of Nepal, but you can’t pass up a photo opportunity like that, really.

The original itinerary that Lauren got had them flying back to Kathmandu once they got back down to Chame, but in the end they drove because, as Lauren pointed out, during the monsoon season the flight path from Chame to Kathmandu is one of the most dangerous in the world and they just weren’t in that much of a hurry anyway.

There were cows along the way, which is just music to a Wisconsinite’s ears.

They met Richard in Kathmandu and he treated them to an actual hotel instead of the hostels and tea houses they’d been staying in. Lauren called us while she was there and gave us a brief video tour of the place, noting the beds and western-style bathrooms as particularly luxurious. The three of them had a good time together from what we heard, and we really do need to get back to England to visit Richard, Ginny, and Magnus again. Soon!

Eventually the Brits would return back to the UK, but Lauren would press on with her adventure.

Lauren sent us a lot of photos from her time in Nepal and we loved seeing them. It’s a gorgeous place, and she was very happy there, and there is no better combination of things you can see in photographs if you’re a parent. I think my favorites were these two, because they’re just beautiful photographs in every way. These are the ones I’d show people when they asked how she was doing. It is a strange and lovely thing as a parent to see your child half a world away having marvelous adventures when you remember them being so little even though that was a very long time ago, and when I’d look at these pictures I could see the young kid she once was and the adult she is now. I think we’ll call that a win.