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9  impressions of Phuket

11/21/2019

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After 26 hours in three airplanes and one night in a Hong Kong hotel, we finally arrived in Thailand!
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Having only a week, we elected to spend our time in Phuket, mainly in Ban Karon (a more spacious and slightly less seedy version of Patong), with a few day trips to other parts of the big island.

These impressions are therefore limited to that context.

1. The Food is Awesome!

Anyone who knew I was going to Thailand advised me to “eat all the food”, and they were right! From street pad Thai to sticky rice and mango to banana pancakes and rolled ice cream and even authentic Russian cuisine... the food is fresh and just generally amazing!!!

On arrival our first night, we wandered out into the street not too far from our AirBnB to discover a lineup of street vendors selling various skewers for BBQ as well as a variety of pad Thai. We selected several of the former and two of the latter (a chicken and a vegetarian) to take back to our apartment.
Subsequent days in town and near the beach revealed additional tasty food selections, including fresh fruit smoothies in every flavour imaginable, waffles made to order, and sticky rice with fresh cut mango.

The best part was how affordable everything was: Most items cost less than 120 baht (the equivalent of about $5 CAD or less), and without taxes and tip added on (tipping is not really customary in many parts of Asia), our money went far!


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2. The Wiring is Lava

One thing I noticed almost immediately upon arrival and often after that was the number of wires hanging in the street. It was as though everyone had just added whatever they needed to the thick, electrical jumble.
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Surely there is some kind of safety guideline for electrical wiring there, but it just seemed to the casual observer like a fire or some other sort of electrical disaster waiting to happen!

3. Body Care Options Are Ubiquitous

Everyone who goes to Thailand talks about the cheap prices for awesome massages... unfortunately, many of these seem to be linked to “happy ending”.

But many places are legit, and offer a wide range of delightful body services at very reasonable prices. You can even get them right on the beach, which I did, three times, with the lady below. No attempts at a happy ending, thank goodness, but I was happy at the end!
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While in Phuket, I enjoyed two oil massages, some foot reflexology, and a Thai massage. On our final night in town, Alex joined me at a little spot tucked into a side street for a face massage and back and shoulder work. Unlike the fancy spas here in Toronto, most places there just have a row of hard mattresses with a curtain between each one (and no curtains at all at the beach). It’s not super private, but seems to be the norm.

The Thai massage in particular was fantastic, and if the prices were like that here at home, I’d get one every week or more, no question!


4. Laundry Service Rocks

Our Airbnb didn’t include a washing machine, and since we’d packed pretty light, by Day 3 we urgently needed to wash a load! Luckily for us, there was a place right around the corner (and indeed, they are pretty much everywhere), where you could drop off your clothes to be laundered, ironed and folded.

The charge per kilo was about the equivalent of what we spend on the machines in our laundry room at home, only we didn’t actually have to do the work, just drop it off any pick it up all clean and nicely folded!

Laundry service is definitely worthwhile (and necessary if traveling light and you sweat like a pig... as I do!) if you are visiting Phuket.


5. Thai Language and Google

The language in Thailand is super cool... and very different from English. The alphasyllabary of the Thai script contains 44 consonant symbols and 15 vowel symbols, and the language is mostly (though not exclusively) monosyllabic. There is also considerable use of gender endings when speaking, so for example the way I say “hello” and “thank you” would differ slightly from the way one of my sons would.

This vacation was my first trip to Asia, and unlike when traveling to other destinations, I hadn’t really done my homework beforehand in that I knew essentially no words in Thai. But I soon learned to say hello and thank you with the appropriate gendered language (as an aside, apparently most ladyboys - or “kathoeys” as they are known in Thai — use the female gender when speaking; I asked a local!)


Also, Google translate is alive and well! As well as a few Chinese, and the odd Brit or North American, the place seems to be crawling with Russians, and it is not uncommon to see “interesting” translations of Thai into Russian, English and Cantonese in many restaurant and on store signs, etc.


6. The Islands are Plentiful and Beautiful

Some of my friends who who visited Thailand before for longer periods of time advised visiting at least some of the smaller islands, of which there are many, surrounding Phuket and Thailand generally. They have been made famous from the filming of James Bond movies as well as “The Beach”, starring Leonardo DiCaprio (we did not see Leo while there).

Since we only had a week, we opted for a day excursion to Koh Phi Phi, a string of small islands about a two-and-a-half-hour boat ride way from the pier. This adventure served to be an incredible day of diving and snorkelling, and we marvelled at the nature both above and below the water (only got photos of the former, though)!


I imagine that a week spent on one of the smaller islands would provide a considerably more authentic flavour, in some cases, than the crowded tourist beaches of Phuket.

Perhaps one day....


7. Elephants

While Tats wanted to do some diving, my main interest in Thailand stemmed from a desire to visit the elephants, and learn more about these magnificent creatures.

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I’ll write a separate blog post on our magical day at the Phuket Elephant Sanctuary, but for now, suffice it to say that there are many opportunities to spend time with the elephants on they island of Phuket, and one should research very carefully to ensure one is not supporting the many abusive/fake “elephant experience” tourist traps that continue to exist under the guise of “sanctuary”.


8. Burmese presence (Myanmar)

I noticed in Ban Karon that some of the locals were wearing a sort of face cream in large circles - mostly women, but also some men were wearing this, and I wondered about it.

As I learned during our visit the elephant sanctuary, they are Burmese (as they refer to themselves, rather than saying from Myanmar) - apparently this people group constitutes Thailand’s largest migrant population. And the creamy paste on the face is actually called “thanakha”, and is both cosmetic and practical: Made from ground bark and a little water, it cools the skin and provides protection from sunburn as well as being an effective anti-fungal.


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An interesting aside: Several of the Mahouds at the elephant sanctuaries are Burmese, and have to learn Thai for their jobs - the retired elephants don’t understand Burmese!


9. Traffic is insanity

In order to get to the beach (or anywhere, really) from our AirBnB, we had to cross a main road. Traffic lights are few to none, and scooters and busses whiz by on the sidewalk-less streets. Congestion in Thailand, which has the unfortunate notoriety of having the world’s deadliest roads, is infamously bad, and Phuket is no exception!

On the days when we had arranged outings and excursions by car (van), we learned to anticipate long delays as a result of traffic. These delays were made more unpleasant by the often sharply winding and hilly roads, which caused me personally a fair bit of car-sickness.

With so many beautiful sites to see, traffic was really one of the most annoying features of our time in Thailand, and all things considered, I guess we shouldn’t complain about something so insignificant. But I do wonder how people who live here full-time manage!


In Conclusion

During our week in Phuket, we enjoyed many exciting adventures and also had a chance to swim in the ocean and relax at the beach.
The time we spent seemed just right, though I do wish we had had a chance to visit Phuket Town and maybe see a fishing village on the other side of the island. We did not get to Bangkok or any other part of Thailand, and I know our visit to Phuket gave us just a small glimpse of this country’s beauty, history and culture.
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Early Morning on the Jordan Road

11/10/2019

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Our night in Hong Kong was never intended to be the focus of our 10-day vacation... Headed for Thailand to do some snorkelling/diving and visit an elephant sanctuary, we were looking for a quick place on route to stop over for one or two nights, mainly to recover from the foreseeably long flights through multiple time zones before settling in at our intended destination for a week.

I knew little to nothing about Hong Kong, and was admittedly ill-prepared for this leg of the adventure. Other than exchanging some Canadian dollars for local currency and looking up a bus route from the airport to our Airbnb before we left Toronto, I’m ashamed to say I knew virtually nothing about this part of the world.

I have been (mostly) pleasantly and embarrassingly surprised throughout our little stopover.
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The city offers a fascinating contemporary urban architecture against a backdrop of millennia-old geography, infused with a curious combination of ancient and modern cultural quirks. The view from Victoria Peak at night is unbeatable, and the wide variety of food, entertainment and available tourist accommodations is laudable.

But what really interests me is the “real“ life in a city, not what the tourists come to see, but what happens “behind the scenes”, as an almost invisible yet ubiquitous part of the fabric of a place.

As it turns out, I had the opportunity to catch a small glimpse of this on our second morning here.

Still horrifically jetlagged after our arrival from North America the previous morning, I awoke multiple times throughout the night, and eager not to wake my sleeping travel companions, I quietly dressed myself and snuck out of the apartment around 5 AM.

The streets near our Airbnb at the intersection of Nathan and Jordan Roads downtown were quiet, but nowhere near deserted.
In the distance, the golden arches beckoned, as they do now in virtually every city of every country around the world.

Eager for some free Wi-Fi and curious how their breakfast items compare to those in Canada, I wandered inside.
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It’s quiet, but already filling up with early morning meal seekers. Several folks sit sipping their coffees and nibbling on globally recognizable fast food breakfast items at a large central table, their faces buried in their mobile devices.

But a second, shocking “sub-population” makes up the periphery of the restaurant: Every bench of every table booth is filled with what appears to be sleeping street people!
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A quick Internet search reveals that the 25 or so homeless folks I count at this McDonald’s are — sadly — not an anomaly. With increasing rent prices, the increase in homelessness has also soared, and a study published in March 2018 indicates that the number of homeless spending the night in 24 hour McDonald’s restaurants has doubled in the past three years!

I’m reminded of how fortunate I am to be a visitor here, and how lucky, irrespective of where “home“ is, to have found a path in life that has afforded me a steady income with regular access to food and a decent apartment, as well as the ability to travel. I’m also intrigued by the reaction of the food-purchasing locals. No one seems to bat an eyelash at their less fortunate neighbours, many of whom are still fast asleep on their benches when I leave an hour later, heads resting on backpacks presumably containing all their worldly possessions. (I consider that in Toronto, where both the climate and the mindsets towards such public integrations seem to be much colder, such sleepers would surely have been evicted from their temporary posts rather than left to find a few hours of relatively safe and peaceful escape from the elements.)

Hong Kong is similar to and yet significantly different from how I imagined it.

As I stumble out from my early morning of blogging at the familiar restaurant-come-homeless shelter and back into the street to wander “home” with the sun finally rising in the distance, my mind turns to our afternoon at Kowloon Park yesterday.

Filled with greenery, Asian “kitsch” and some impressive accessibility features for the visually impaired, this urban park tells the city’s story from a different angle.
And as I return to the older building where we’re staying for the night, I realize again how lucky I am, this time with timing: About 20 police officers are milling about with face masks and hard helmets, commuting with one another by radio. I can’t understand what they’re saying of course, but as more of them pull on their masks, I infer they’re preparing for yet another protest, and I’m grateful to have arrived safely back at my Airbnb before that erupted!

How glad I am that we had the opportunity to spend a day in this bustling metropolis. Like all travel, this experience is one that expands the mind and provides opportunity for reflection, both on life‘s big problems, and ones personal contributions to either the problem or possible solutions.
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The Great Thailand Adventure, Part 1: In Transit

11/10/2019

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I had forgotten how hard long haul travel can be (well, for those of us pions who can’t afford first class, anyway).


Full Disclaimer: This blog post is full of whining and complaining about what a former colleague of mine would call “FWP” or “first world problems”!! I so get that I am super lucky to have the ability to travel as I do, both in terms of having the luxury and privilege of being employed in a job that offers annual paid vacation time and also in terms of having the means to pay for accommodations and standby travel; even though it’s cheaper than how some people travel, I fully recognize that most people don’t get to travel like this at all. That said, within the context of said travel, I am going to get my complain on. So if y’all can’t handle it, you should stop reading now and go back to consuming whatever more worthy online crap you were consuming before the internetz rabbit hole led you here.


So my partner is a pilot with an airline in Canada. And even though it’s a small regional airline, it’s one that has some awesome reciprocal agreements with partner airlines, which means we (her partner and kids) can all travel much cheaper than market value, and she even more cheaply (and in some cases even free).


But it’s standby. That means not confirmed. As in, you could be waiting a gazillion years before a seat comes up on a flight you want/need to get where you’re trying to go. And the more people you’re traveling with, the less likely it is you will get your first choice. Especially when traveling with a partner airline, because there’s a whole ranking system, and if you’re the family of a person working for an airline other than the one you’re trying to travel on, you’re basically at the bottom of the list. A third (or fourth or fifth) class citizen, as it were.


Below an illustration of how this played out recently. We were lucky in that it’s a fairly seamless example, but hard travel nonetheless.


Three of us had decided to use our 10 days of vacation time (and in the case of our kid who was joining us, his 7 skipped days of school) to try and get to Thailand. Unless we wanted to pay upwards of $1000 a person for a guaranteed seat, we had to figure out which partner airlines (that have the agreement with my bae’s airline) fly from Toronto to somewhere in Thailand, or to a place that has other qualifying flights to Thailand.


We quickly established that we’d likely have to go through Hong Kong, staying a night or two in an AirBnB there before trying our luck with a flight to Phuket, where we had rented an apartment for a week and arranged for some diving and snorkelling.


There were a few options, the “easiest” of which was a non-stop Cathay Pacific flight from YYZ to HKG. It leaves in the afternoon on Friday, and arrives in Hong Kong sometime on Saturday evening.


The only problem is that it was oversold, and already had three people (who were not us) on the standby list. So we decided not to risk it.


Flying standby successfully depends largely on one’s ability to predict the likelihood of finding an empty seat on any given flight. Knowledge is power. But knowing the loads means requiring access to inside information not usually available to those outside of airline staff. Out of this necessity, and thanks to the power of modern technology, an online network of inter-airline collegiality exists in a way that most people outside of the aviation industry cannot possibly imagine. Even if you don’t directly know someone who works for the airline you want to fly with and can check the loads for you on their internal systems, chances are you know someone who used to fly with someone who flew with a friend of someone who works for that airline. And if not, there’s always the apps and the facebook groups, the ones where you plug in your desperate plea, and some bored keener with inside information will give you the best available intel at that time.


So my partner obsessively googled and texted.


The next best options where all out of Newark, which conveniently is a destination her airline frequents. Lots of available connecting flights to Hong Kong there.


Alas, not a lot of space to get from Toronto *to* Newark.


So back to researching.


We finally decided to fly United to San Francisco, and try our luck with a connecting flight departing 45 minutes later to Hong Kong. If we were successful in getting on both flights, it would mean 22 hours of flying through multiple time zones over the subsequent 24 hours, but it looked like our best option, meaning that we were more likely to be doing 22 hours of flying than 40+ hours of sitting around an airport! The loads for the first leg were looking VERY good, and the second leg (assuming we could make it from one plane to the next in time) seemed to have just enough seats for us, based on the latest intel from an airline colleague.


With some free pens and chocolate, and a little sweet talking to the United CSRs in YYZ, we landed ourselves some adjacent seats on the first flight, and spent the next 6 hours strategizing (with support from an eager flight attendant) how we would manage our assorted carry-on luggage for the run from one terminal to the next, in order to attempt our luck with the connecting flight. It was an uncomfortable 6 hours, but the adrenaline from our first foray into international standby travel was flowing, and so the pain that lay ahead did not really sink in until much later.


The standby gods were smiling on us as we raced from one terminal to the next in San Francisco, arriving just in time to board the connecting flight to Hong Kong — we’d all three of us successfully obtained seats on this flight, too.


Middle seats.


And the flight that lay ahead was 16 hours. The longest I’d ever been on a plane in one stretch.


As I squeezed into my allotted 18 square inches, the burden of long haul travel sunk in. I had not slept more than about 20 minutes on the preceding flight, largely because my sweet but largish teenager kept leaning against me in his own pursuit of the elusive unconscious. And now I was squeezed in between two strangers, both of whom seemed to have little concept of physical boundaries, as I soon discovered. Encroaching elbows, arms and legs turned from mildly annoying in the first several hours to claustrophobia-inducing through the middle third of the flight.


After sobbing through “The Art of Riding in the Rain” (I digress, but you gotta see this movie! So sweet!! I’d read the book some years back, and they did a really nice job with the film version) and attempting for a few hours to sleep upright in my narrower-than-I-remember economy class seat, and failing to do so, despite my comfy memory foam pillow, eye patch and noise canceling headphones, I decided to go for a walk and find my partner.


I soon found her, luxuriously stretched out and fast asleep, in the middle of aisle 40, a few rows back on the other side of the plane.


Granted, hers was also a middle seat. But whereas I was sentenced to 16 hours between two man-spreaders in a standard, narrow row of squishy seats in in inadequate armrests, my skinny little girlfriend who can sleep in any position anyway had been assigned to an exit row, the one right next to the lavs, so that she had BAGS of room. Moreover, her seat was ensconced on either side with a solid half wall that firmly delineated her space from that of her neighbours’, hence protecting her from wandering lower limbs.


I considered waking her up and demanding a seat exchange for the remainder of the flight, but I figured it was better for one of us to get a decent night’s sleep than for neither of us to. (My motives were partly selfish: I knew that she would be better equipped to deal with my inevitable meltdown at some point later in the journey if she had slept a while at least.)


So instead I rummaged through her bag for a cheese sandwich I knew she had packed for me earlier, left her a hastily-scribbled note begging her to come find me when she woke up, and ventured to the back of the cabin, where one of the flight attendants indulged with me a cup of hot tea and surprised me with the fact that she was in her 53rd year of working as an FA with United!!! I was very impressed, and stayed a while to shoot the breeze with her and her colleagues, learning a little more about the secret lives of cabin crew on long haul flights such as these. She was gorgeous, by the way. Bright eyes, beautiful white hair and an engaging smile. I can only imagine the adventures she’s had over the years.


My tea and chat finished, I returned to my partner’s row to see if she might be awake now, so that I could have some reprieve from my cramped quarters for a while. Alas, she was slumped forward in her seat, legs splayed out in front of her, with her hood drawn low over hear eyes to block out the light. And still asleep. Blast it!


So I decided to make a quick pit stop on the way back to the man spreaders.


But there is no “quick” on an aircraft of this size. Despite having three lavs right there in the immediate vicinity, all three were occupied, and remained so for the next ten minutes or so. What the temporary inhabitants where doing in there for that long, I don’t even want to imagine, but suffice it to say that by the time one of the tiny stalls finally became available, my bathroom visit of boredom had become one of necessity, and I actually had to pee!!


Sleeping beauty was still, well, sleeping, so I returned to my row, climbed over the lightly snoring man spreader in seat C, and crawled back into my 18 inches. I was unpleasantly surprised to find that the last 8 hours had begun to produce a body and mouth odour from my neighbours that was less than desirable. Convinced I would never sleep again, I resigned myself to writing down my adventures thus far, my typing abilities more than marginally hindered by my tight quarters.


Only 8 hours to go.
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    About Vera...

    Vera & her Sons, April 2021
    After writing for several teacher and multiple birth publications, including ETFO's Voice Magazine, Multiple Moments, and the Bulletwin, Vera turned her written attention to prolific blogging for some years, including BiB,  "Learn to Fly with Vera!"  and SMARTbansho .  Homeschooling 4 was her travel blog in Argentina.  She now spends more time on her Instagram (@schalgzeug_usw)  than her blog (pictures are worth a thousand words?!) 
    DISCLAIMER
    The views expressed on this blog are the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the perspectives of her family members or the position of her employer on the the issues she blogs about.  These posts are intended to share resources, document family life, and encourage critical thought on a variety of subjects.  They are not intended to cause harm to any individual or member of any group. By reading this blog and viewing this site, you agree to not hold Vera liable for any harm done by views expressed in this blog.
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Vera C. Teschow, OCT, M.Ed., MOT
Toronto, ON & St Peter's Harbour, PE
www.verateschow.ca 2021
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