Asia

Back To Thailand After a short time in Laos, we headed back to our home away from home, Thailand. We took three…

Laos is a communist country but the winds of change seem to be on the horizon. There are not any Western fast food restaurants dotting the streets, just local vendors. Laos is slowly making its way on the backpackers radar. Even then, the number of tourists are few.

During our trip, we filtered suspicious water. Apparently, the modification from filtered water to bottled water in Koh Tao and Bangkok, we stopped filtering and began buying regular bottled water, and that is where everything changed.

Every November, this small town in eastern Thailand hosts this amazing elephant round-up, the Surin Elephant Festival. Dusk quickly descended upon our arrival by train into the town of Surin. Six in the evening on a Friday night is busy . . . with pachyderms.

Like any big city, Bangkok afforded us the opportunity to watch movies, take care of some visa errands (here we come Laos and Vietnam!), and go to the driving range? Yeppers, we crossed a driving range and that subsequently became our next stop. A hundred balls later, my shots landed in the middle of the range 200 yards away.

As luck would have it, a local bus headed immediately to Ranong, the town where we could jump over into Burma for a daytime Myanmar Visa run. Fr. John pointed us in the right direction towards Burma. “Yeah, keep going until you hit the water, then start swimming west.” Once there, one could immediately see the change from a prosperous Thailand to a shy and poor Burma.

We’ve observed some interesting facets of Thai and South East Asian culture. Thailand hosted the World Toilet Expo and Forum where experts talk about poop. That made me think of all the toilets we’ve encountered so far. And there has been many. This is the point where I will describe in intimate detail to y’all all we’ve seen.

While in Koh Lanta, we noticed the beautiful green distant islands jutting out of the Andaman Sea, quaint little bungalows, and an overabundance of Thai massage parlors sitting idyllically on the beach. What a great idea! How about a little massage before dinner?