Thailand by Bicycle

Waiting nervously for a midnight bus to Bangkok…

[Tommy]

We’ve just got done screwed, the night train I was planning on catching to Bangkok to arrive on time for my research conference tomorrow morning has been sold out this being a couple days after Buddhist lent, a major holliday in Thailand with lots of people travelling. Sally and I are currently waiting for a midnight bus to Bangkok as we kill some time blogging and checking email at an interenet shop. For those of you who don’t know, The reason I have been fortunate enough to visit Thailand is because I, and my research mentor Dr. Brian Perry, convinced (fennagled) the Society for Study of Evolution to pay for an airline ticket to present my thesis research at the International Conference on Fungal Evolution in PathumThani (outside Bangkok). I will have to be in conference mode in less than twelve hours where I will be introduced to people as “Thomas,” and am looking forward to five hours of sleep in a bus (more on this below). I sure hope that shady travel agency in town comes through with a bus that arrives before 7AM tomorrow morning. Wish me luck, It’s all part of the adventure.

It’s been a while since my last blog, so maybe a recap is in order. My last dispatch was from before Khao Sak National Park, where we were hoping to stay in a “treehouse.” Well friends, the term treehouse was a bit optomistic, as our “Tree Top River Hut” was actually a shambly shack on concrete stilts with a perpetually clogged toilet. We did however, find a random treehouse in the woods on the side of the highway (see photo from last week). After some hiking, swimming and hanging out in the woods, we had a tough couple of days riding through the interieor mountians of the ismuth which Sally does a great job describing. Some of my favorite highlights from those couple of days ( just so you don’t get the idea that it was all bad) in no particular order:

Hanging out with the naughty hood rat kids in the bus shelter during the mighty dounpour. Yes these little 10-12 YO brats were totally talking shit in thai and smoking cigarettes trying to act super bad ass, but they were freakin hilarious.

Giant frogs on the highway after the downpour.

Saffron clad monk hitching a ride on the back of a speeding scooter on the Mountian Highway.

Giant spire-like mountains full of caves and stalactites lining the road.

Wandering into a Buddhist temple festival in a small town in the mountains. We stopped at this lively festival for some food and discovered that it was a temple festival or fundraiser of something. There was a booth with monks chanting prayers over a microphone and a PA. When the monk on the PA saw us in the crowd with our bikes he immidiately hollers “Hallo!” “Welcome!” into the microphone. (They don’t get many foreigners in these parts) Then he says something in the mic in Thai of which we only recognize “farang” and the entire town turns collectively around to greet us in Thai. We ended up lighting insence for an offering and making a cash donation to the temple with everyone staring at us, all the while with the monks in the booth cracking up. Afterwards I’m handed a mortarboard and invited to fill in some of the masonry in the part of the temple under construction. I guess it is a great honor to help with the manual labor of temple construction. I clumsily fill in a spot where the workmen instruct me to with everyone staring and laughing at the goofy farang. Good times.

Getting to places where the road signs stop having English on them.

After all that we finally made it to Surat Thani to the overnight ferry where the story left off last time. By the way, my Thai “hello” must be getting pretty good because people are begining to answer me in a rapid string of Thai after I greet them, to which I smile, shug and say “no Thai.”

After almost a week in Koh Tao, I am certified as a night diver, and only two more dives away from earning my advanced open water diver certification. Wo hoo.