My Thailand Experience
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Travel diary from March 2010: no language tips in this long post
My time in Thailand had ended, and I was back in Europe after two months away. I learned quite a lot in terms of general life lessons, as well as about my own approach to languages, but this post is the travel summary that followed my first impressions.
Ko Phi Phi – my favourite island
Just after my last travel update (in Phuket), I made my way to Ko Phi Phi (pronounced gaw pee-pee; yes, romanisation in Thai is very misleading). I stayed for about a week, and it was by far the best week of my entire Thailand experience!
Phi Phi was a magnet for young party seekers and those with dreams of finding their Beach. In fact, the Leonardo DiCaprio movie The Beach was filmed on an adjacent island.
However, coming here to find an unspoilt paradise would leave you disappointed; the island is extremely touristy and chaotic, and quite expensive for Thailand. Although I was immediately struck by how clear the water was when getting off the ferry, I wouldn't call what I had seen to be the most beautiful destination.
I actually did want to just party for a week and I got that and more! Open-access areas on the beach have music and a sandy dancefloor, and there are amazing fire shows; a fire skip-rope, fire limbo and fire juggling. Anyone can participate, and most do! I'd love to say how brave I was, but to be honest I only did the fire limbo when it was at the highest level and skipped the rope when the flames were least strong. Quite a few people got burnt!
What made this destination such a great party for me was how friendly the other tourists were there. It's amazing, but even the attitude of other travellers changes between the islands (see below). I had absolutely no problem making some cool new friends; for weeks afterwards I would be elsewhere in Thailand and would be recognised by someone I had met in Phi Phi (although, I have ways of making myself easily recognisable that those who've been out with me know about!)
Parties aside, the main reason this island gave me the highest quality experience of the trip was the people I had met online and ended up spending most of my time with there: fellow bloggers and “tweeps” Dan Andrews, Tom, Sean Ogle and his friend Ryan, as well as Baker and his family. They hugely enriched my time in Thailand. I had some amazing conversations, learned a lot from them, and finally got to spend time with other location-independent workers, which is something we all had in common.
We worked together on my video, and both Sean and Baker interviewed me. Sean described Phi Phi as where the productive go to die, because getting any work done there was quite hard. I was also lucky to spend more time with him in Bangkok during my final weeks.
A note from the Fluent in 3 Months team before we get started: You can chat away with a native speaker for at least 15 minutes with the “Fluent in 3 Months” method. All it takes is 90 days. Tap this link to find out more.
The inexperienced tourist
After Phi Phi, things kind of went downhill for the rest of my Thailand travels before I decided to settle in Bangkok. As initially stated, I was trying out being an English speaking tourist while in Thailand.
There are advantages to that style of travel, and it may be preferable for some people, but it really is not for me. Don't get me wrong, I can be viewed as just as much of a tourist even when living in a city for several months and speaking its language, but pure-English-speaking tourism is not something I've ever experienced outside of countries that don't have English as an official language. For my own curiosity and for the purposes of giving a rounded view on this blog (as I'll be writing here for quite a while!), I really wanted to experience the other point-of-view.
This meant that learning Thai was purposely given the backseat and very little time commitment (once again, I had already said I'd be doing this when announcing the mission; some people seem to have misunderstood that I was aiming for fluency in Thai). I don't regret this decision as I had wanted a new experience; even if it was bound to lead to some disappointment. I also think that a break from intensive language immersion and allowing myself to get to know so many English speaking travellers has been nice, especially since I will be speaking almost no English for the entire rest of the year starting in a few weeks time.
I have genuinely learned some important things from this experience.
Full Moon bucket-drinking session?
I went to Samui and based myself there for about a week surrounding the Full Moon party; one of the most famous parties in the world and on so many people's lists of things to do before they die. To be totally honest, I was quite disappointed.
It didn't seem to have anything special in it, and I wonder if people enjoy it so much simply because of the number of buckets of alcohol (yes, alcohol is served in buckets in Thailand) that they've consumed. As a non-drinker I have a different perspective on such things, and I never shut up about how amazing Burning Man or the Brazilian Carnival or other large festivals or events are, even though there is clearly a lot of drinking going on in such events too.
But the Full Moon party was just a beach party that happened to have a lot of people. The moon was especially bright that night, but you would barely have noticed it because of all the lights coming from the bars and nightclubs. I hate to sound like a nostalgic traditionalist (I like my cities and development), but I imagine it would have been a very different event in its early years.
The previous year, I had been on a secluded beach in India with no artificial lights during a full moon, and it was one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen. The whole beach was lit in an eerie black-and-white way by the moon, and seeing my shadow cast in such contrast was something I had never experienced before. The Phangan-based event could just as well have been called the monthly beach drinking session in my opinion.
Also, unlike in Phi Phi, a lot of the tourists at the FMP are on an extremely brief (between one weekend and one week, for example) trip to Thailand specifically for the party. It was quite hard for me to make friends with those crowds and the people I already knew at the party were extremely difficult to find in the chaos. I think if you are a big drinker or go with a group of people, you would enjoy yourself much more than I did, but you could have a beach party anywhere; to me, the FMP was pure quantity rather than quality.
After that I caught a bug and was bedridden for several days in Ao Nang. Hopping between major tourist destinations was getting old, and I had put almost no work into learning Thai, so it was time to go north. I spent a few days in Chiang Mai and found that the pace of the city and its university population reminded me of things I liked in other cities where I'd lived, such as Valencia, Salamanca and Toulouse.
The Northern Thai speech I heard seemed very different from the Central Thai covered by the beginner resources I had used. Since I had done so little study, I decided to return to Bangkok for my final weeks rather than start adjusting to another variety.
Bangkok
It's ironic that I came back to Bangkok for its own version of Thai because I ended up just spending most of my time indoors and didn't even begin speaking or practising it until my final weekend. Once again, looking at my finances grimly reminded me that I needed to do another 3-week stint of double-time work 7 days a week. Such a work commitment has actually prematurely ended one of my previous missions, but luckily what I was aiming for in Thai was much simpler and I'm happy with what I achieved in the very little time that I put into it.
As you can imagine, I am getting quite sick of being locked in my room for such long stretches every few months. Despite enjoying my work, that experience is still quite stressful and extremely antisocial. I'll be discussing an idea with you soon to hopefully get me out of that pattern.
There was one extra thing to make my Bangkok experience even less authentic! I wanted to find an apartment quickly, so I chose the first place I saw that was modern, efficient for working in, right by a skytrain stop and near lots of restaurants. The flat itself was perfect for my purposes, but I hadn't noticed that it was a two-minute walk from, facepalm, Nana Plaza, a well-known red-light district.
Whenever I went out for food, I was approached by sex workers and sometimes grabbed or propositioned. Seeing how many visitors were in Thailand for sex tourism was infuriating. This was not the impression of Thailand I had hoped to leave with, but choosing that location was my own mistake. I certainly wasn't going to claim that I “knew Thailand” after such a short and superficial experience.
In the few breaks that I did take from work, I got to spend more time with some more location independent workers. Bloggers seem to like doing video interviews, since I had been invited for several other ones, including with Cody McKibben and David Walsh (that I'll also include in a video summary post), both amazing individuals that I've learned so much from in our brief chats!
Bangkok seems to be some kind of centre of gravity for so many interesting people, and despite my own lack of congruence with the English-speaking travellers' world, I got to appreciate a whole new different type of culture through them. English speaking expats in themselves have something special that they share, which can't easily be associated with the country that they come from. There's an anglophone culture in Bangkok that simply can't be overlooked, and I can understand why so many people are flocking here to experience it.
So having said all of that, this 2-month stay in Thailand has been an eye-opening and extremely different experience for me. I've had my ups and downs, and I have learned way more than I was expecting to, and am still processing and reflecting on my short but intense visit there.
Most important of all, I did genuinely make some excellent friends. On my last full day, I went (artificial) wakeboarding with the guys and had a great time with them. I will miss them a lot, but I'm still a nomad at heart, so it was time to move on. It feels good to be back in Europe where things make a little bit more sense to me 😛
I followed this travel diary with my conclusions from the language side of the Thai mission, including the mistakes I made and what I learned from trying my first Asian language.
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