|
January,
1998
 Although
far from home and a bit homesick, we had a great Christmas dinner.
We anchored the yacht
in a
beautiful, small Thai island called Ko [“Ko” means
“island”] Rok Nok (you could have some fun with
knock-knock jokes, think) with five other yachts (GINSENG, ODYSSEY
II, NED KELLY, PATSY, and LAZY BONES), a combination of
Australians, Americans, Brits, and a Canadian.
We did a giant feast on the beach. Turkey, leg of Iamb,
roast beef, and lots and lots of trimmings: plum pudding, pumpkin
pie and apple pie. We all sat around from about noon to about 8
o’clock eating, talking, and trying to digest all the food
we’d overeaten. It was a great day. The
beach was lovely white sand, the water was crystal clear (best
we’ve seen in years), the island was uninhabited, we were
delighted. Peter’s
obsession with McDonald’s resulted in his getting a
battery-operated fan in the form of a triple-decker hamburger for
a Christmas present. I got a calendar, probably because I’m
forever asking people what day, date, month it is.
When
we checked out of Malaysia we knew we were sailing to meet the yachts at
Ko Rok Nok. Thailand only gives people a one-month visa, but
everybody wants to stay there for months or years, so they make
the run back and forth to Langkawi, stopping at the
offshore Thai islands, such as Ko Rok Nok.
It stretches their time in the clear clean Thai waters to about 2
or 3 months each circuit. We
couldn’t check into Thailand until after the first of the year
because everything is closed the week after Christmas, so we could
hang around Ko Rok Nok with a clear conscience.
We
went to Patong bay in Phuket Island for New Year’s Eve
festivities. We are
amazed by the incredible volume of European and Australian/NZ
tourists that are here in Phuket. And the prostitutes! Sitting
at a sidewalk café we watched all the men, many drunk, being
towed down the street by the hookers.
There are lots and lots of white men walking around with
Thai ladies, so many
that we just figure that the guys rent them for their vacation.
It’s a bit off-putting. In
one anchorage a sailboat anchored near us with three older (one
quite old) white men with their Thai women (it was a bit strange, the
sailboat had no country flag, no name or port of registry, we
have to assume that it’s a boat chartered for their vacation). Peter
snickered and joked, and babbled on about where he could find some
like them. But when
he got a good look at them later, he said he was nauseated; the
“women” were just very young girls, Peter said they looked to
be around 12 years old. The sex tours for pedophiles are so common
that Australia has made it illegal for Australian men to travel to
Asia to have sex with children (though it’s pretty nearly an
unenforceable law -- how are they ever going to catch them?).
Some of the travel bureaus in Phuket have signs saying
“We do not book child sex tours”.
It seems that they must have had an awful lot of inquiries
for them to put up a sign discouraging them.
For
all the complaints about the puritanism of the Moslems, we did not
see anything like this in Indonesia or Malaysia. A fellow in
Langkawi was complaining that the Moslems were ruining tourism,
with Moslem ladies harassing the bathing-suited women on the
beaches for exposing themselves (Moslem women bathe fully dressed
-the long pants, tunic, head covering, all).
I haven’t seen that; they didn’t bother anybody when we
were all swimming at the Freshwater Lake (the only time we’ve
been swimming somewhere with Iandlubbers), so we can’t speak
from experience. If
true, it’s a bit extreme, though in general the Moslems we’ve
encountered (and they’re everywhere in Malaysia) pretty much go
their own way. In my
opionion, though, a
little puritanism is preferable to the sex industry in Thailand.
Criticism
of the hookers aside, our first impressions of Thailand are quite
favorable. Of course, at present the strength of the American
dollar makes staying here incredibly cheap.
Four of us ate dinner at a little Italian restaurant.
Peter, Phil, and Helen had individual pizzas (about the
size of a Domino’s medium pizza, larger than a Domino’s
individual pizza), and I misunderstood and wound up ordering two
meals: a curried beef and a vegetable dish.
It turned out that the vegetable dish was a vegetarian
meal, so all told I had far too much food. The
entire meal, with soft drinks, came to 590 Bahts (at 43 to 45
bahts to the US dollar, that’s about $13 total, or $4.00 per
person. That’s
cheaper than McDonald’s and if I’d ordered better it would
have been cheaper still. Another
night we went to an upscale restaurant.
I had filet mignon and dessert, Peter had medallions of
pork and a beer, the total bill was about US $25. At
the street stalls one could eat a meal for probably less than
US$1.00. It’s all too cheap, we feel we can’t afford to eat on
the boat. The down
side is that one worries constantly about sanitation.
I get tired of harping about it, but the smell of sewage is
everywhere.
Patong is a town on a huge (2 miles or longer)
beautiful beach that exists solely for tourists. There are dozens
of tailors advertising 24-hour service:
two custom-made men’s suits, two shirts, an extra pair of
pants, and three silk ties, all for US$190.00. And every kind of
ticky-tacky tourist thing one could imagine.
Wrist watches -- take your pick from thousands of them. I
figure that they’re part of the same operation we saw in Kuta
Beach in Bali, but the vendors in Thailand are much lower key with
none of the harassing we suffered in Indonesia.
What a New Year’s Eve party they threw! I
couldn’t believe how many people there were in town.
The streets were thronged with people - there had to be
thousands of people out. Everywhere, the street vendors were selling fireworks -- lots
of, every variety. They
were being set off all night long by everybody. There was a
pottery pot that, when lit, sent a fountain of sparks shooting
about 15 feet in the air. People were setting them off in the
streets, stopping traffic. The streets here are narrow, one lane
one-way streets. We were walking along the street when everybody
just stopped to watch a fellow set off a string of firecrackers
about 10 feet long. There
must have been more than 1,000 firecrackers in the string. Nobody
wanted to walk past while it was going off. There were roman candIes, and everything else you could
imagine, set off by the people in the street, including all the
stall vendors. The
streets were carpeted with small bits of red paper left after the
firecrackers exploded. The hotels (and there must be 20 or more of
them along the beach) had their own fireworks displays.
We sat on the boat watching for more than an hour as they
set big chrysanthemums and other really elaborate rockets. We
didn’t know where to look, they were going off everywhere! They
really outdid Boston in the size and sheer volume of monster
rockets. Wow! Of course, with all this pyrotechnical exuberance, accidents
did happen. Various yachties set off parachute flares, one of
which landed in the cockpit of a yacht and burned the teak a bit.
It bounced off the sail cover, landed on the skipper’s
leg before landing on the teak cockpit sole.
Had the owners not been on the boat I think they would have
come back to a badly burned boat!
A bit stupid of the yachties to be setting off flares in
such a crowded anchorage. They
burned down a building in town.
It was a rather spectacular end to a spectacular evening. Just
think, we have two more celebrations:
Chinese New Year is the 28th of January (they really
like fireworks), we figure we’ll go back to Malaysia for
that.
Ramadan, the Moslem month of fasting, started
December 30th, so there will be a celebration when that ends.
Strict Moslems cannot eat or drink anything during daylight hours,
but once the sun sets they can gorge themselves. To go 12 hours
with nothing to eat or drink, even water, must be a terrible
hardship. Islam is a
tough religion. The start of Ramadan seems to have put a damper on
some people’s celebrations this year.
The newspaper reports that in Indonesia all bars and night
clubs have been ordered closed.
I wonder what the non-Moslems did for New Year’s Eve
there? Traveled to Thailand?
We
went to a show in Patong, Simon Cabaret, starring female
impersonators, with one or two transsexuals among them. A couple
of the performers were absolutely fantastic, the comedian of the
group was great. The costumes were spectacular, the sets elaborate -
aspirations of Las Vegas, I think - and it was fun. Some of the
men were gorgeous - I would have sworn that two of them were
really women (shades of Victor, Victoria). It didn’t have
the energy that we’re used to, but it was pretty good for this
part of the world. And we went to a go-go bar - that was terrible.
We six yachties were the only people in there, watching two
girls bump and grind while holding onto a floor-to-ceiling steel
pole. They were bored, we were bored, it wasn’t an enlightening
experience, We were curious about how they made any money if
nobody came in there, but not enough to stay for longer than one
short drink.
One
small down side here in waters on the West side of the Malay
peninsula: there is a
rather annoying swell in every anchorage we’ve been in since we
left Batam in Indonesia, except when we’ve gone up one of the
dirty rivers. This
is not like in the S. Pacific or Caribbean, where a southern or
western anchorage is prone to swells.
The swell seems to come from every point of the compass
here. The night before we left Ko Rok Nok, the swell was so
violent that one could hardly sleep, and a boat that arrived after
we’d left suffered terribly from the swell, the wives even got
seasick at anchor. I
can’t figure out where the swell is coming from or how to avoid
it. I think I’m going to like the offshore, smaller islands
better. The ones we’ve seen so far here in Thailand are
absolutely spectacular.
Some
other impressions of this area of the world.
In Surabaya, Java (Indonesia) we saw the most
humongous statue of a man that we assume it was either former
president Sukarno or some other military leader.
It was so huge that it was almost laughable. Then in Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia (a country with a population of about 20
million) we saw the world’s tallest building, though without an
observatory or tourist/visitor attraction at the top. Rather ambitious, these Malaysians. In Langkawi in the park right on the waterfront there
is a huge statue of an eagle, beautifully done, but positively
enormous. Do Asians
have a monument complex?
The
dirtiness here is appalling. We stopped at a brand new marina in
Lumut, Malaysia. The building is just gorgeous, the grounds are
rather lovely, the swimming pool was so inviting. The showers were
so filthy that one wouldn’t dare go in them. It makes you wonder
how carefully they manage the pool’s hygiene.
In Langkawi the entire tourist area near the ferry terminal
is brand new. They have a gorgeous park (with the giant eagle
statue), lush, posh new buildings…. and open sewers running into
the sea. The smell of
sewage in this part of the world is pervasive and inescapable. In PaTong, probably because of all the tourists, they have a
pretty good garbage disposal system, and the streets and sewer
covers are in good repair, and yet as we’d be walking along one
would get a sudden whiff of sewage that sometimes
would take our breath away.
We just heard the story of an Australian yachtie who
was walking along the street in Ambon (Indonesia), not paying
particular attention to where she was going.
She stepped into the
sewer (the lid was gone - a common sight all around Ambon and
Kupang). They got her right back to her boat, cleaned her up, and
within 24 hours had flown her back to Australia for medical
attention. Even that
quick, they say she came close to losing a leg. Yechh! Remember
we said that the dirt and sewage in Kupang was a bit off-putting?
According to ODYSSEY II Kupang is really clean compared to
Ambon. I guess I’m glad we didn’t go there after all. The filth
we did see was disturbing enough.
We’re having an interesting time. We’re meeting
some people we haven’t seen in years out here. I think that for
many yachties the cost of living here in SE Asia is so low that
they feel that they can’t afford to leave the area. There
are a huge number of yachts leaving in the next two weeks to cross
the Indian Ocean and on up into the Red Sea and the Med. Looking
at the sheer number of foreign yachts here in Pa Tong harbor, it
looks as if it’s going to be a huge exodus. It will be
interesting.
We have slowed down. I think that in another week or
so we’ll be really settled down and not particularly ambitious. NED
KELLY leaves for the Med in about a week or two, and they
have been our motivators for going ashore and doing something. Without them around we might not move so fast or so busily.
Now that we no longer have deadlines to get somewhere, we
should be able to relax and stay in one place for longer than a
couple days. It’ll be nice.
Link to some photos from Thailand:
http://www.fototime.com/inv/C5240BBD7428C74
|
