Picking a favorite day/weekend trip in the past 4 months is not easy.
I have no classes on Fridays, Thursday classes that end at 4:00pm, and Monday classes that start at 12:00pm. If you leave school at 4:00pm, you can be packed, ready, and at a bus station or airport by 5:00pm-6:00pm, traffic permitting.
An overnight bus will get you to your destination by the next morning, saving one night’s stay in a hostel, and you’ll have Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to travel and then come back (overnight on Sunday again to get back in time for Monday’s class.) An airplane is more expensive, but saves time and is necessary for longer trips. If you have 4 absences allowed in each class, you can work out your traveling so that you have a couple 6 day trips.
Travel is cheap. A round trip flight to Singapore is about $100, Taiwan $200. A VIP bus through Thailand, north or south, will run about $25-30, including a meal, water, blanket. Singapore, Taiwan, Cambodia, and Laos all have visas on arrival, so you can book a flight last minute and go immediately.
All of the above are some of the reasons why traveling in this area is incredible, and that’s without mentioning the virtually unlimited destinations. I don’t think I can pick a favorite, but here are two trips that stood out to me:
A month or so ago, a few friends and I went to Krabi, a province in southern Thailand, for a couple of days. We wanted to stay in Ton Sai, a specific beach within the province. To get to Krabi, you take a bus. Then to get to Ton Sai, you take a boat. As cliché as it sounds, I can still remember stepping off of the boat onto Ton Sai. You get off the boat, a little hesitantly because it’s fairly fair from the ground and still rocking from the waves, and step onto the beach. If I had to guess, the beach is a few hundred yards long- not very big at all, and both ends easily visible from any point. The beach is immediately followed by jungle, with one road leading up the left side. We walk up the road, see very few people walking around, nod to whomever we pass, and keep looking for a place to stay.
The entirety of Ton Sai lies within a 2 minute walk of that first beach. There’s the beach, the layer of jungle behind it, then a road (very generous term for this dirt path,) then a line of bars, massage parlors, restaurants, and bungalows. The bungalows were 200THB (~$6) a night for 2, and were pretty much a few planks of wood surrounding a bed, which was also surrounded by mosquito netting. My shower was a tree growing through the floor, with a shower head leaning on a branch.
The best part about Ton Sai was the atmosphere. The people were incredibly friendly- despite the majority of money coming from tourists, the workers were not looking to scam us or squeeze as much money out of us as possible- they seemed genuinely interested in us, and were very happy when we sat at their bar to strike up a conversation with them. The amount of foreigners was so low that, in our 2 days there, we began to recognize people and say hi whenever we walked by. On the way to the beach, you passed a cliff face, lit up by spotlights, with rock climbers setting up shop and climbing, in between bars and the ocean. It was the perfect place to relax for a weekend, sleep in a bungalow, and forget that there is anything more beyond the ocean.
The second trip that stands out was more recent. There’s a very well-known festival in Thailand, Loy Kratong in Thai and referred to by westerners as the lantern festival. When people think of Thailand, they often generate an image of the lantern festival- the hundreds and hundreds of paper lanterns floating into the sky at the same time. Friends and I decided to use the majority of our absences to go north to Chiang Mai for the festival, and explore Northern Thailand.
The festival itself was unbelievable. It was electric to feel everyone together and looking towards the same goal. I talked about it in my previous blog, so I won’t get into too much detail here, but if you’re ever in Thailand for the festival, you need to go.
After the festival, we rented a pick-up truck and spent the next 4 days driving through northern Thailand. We didn’t have much time to stop and get a feel for the cultures of the towns that we passed through, but the drive itself was unbelievable. Rolling hills, beautiful farmland, winding roads and switchbacks. It was really and truly breathtaking, and it was a very nice change of pace from the other traveling that we do, which typically involves much less flexibility than having your own car, and generally don’t have the same rural feel. I also had Thanksgiving in Mae Hong Son, a town in northern Thailand, and it was an incredible way to spend it with friends.
