Goodbye, Koh Phi Phi!

I'm pretty convinced that Cipro is actually just magic in pill form. It almost makes me question the validity of science because it's unfathomable that science alone could transform me in just one day from the petri dish of death I was yesterday into a roughly 90% whole human again today. I don't really know what sorcery this is, but I for one welcome our new supernatural overlords because I feel SO much better today.

The plan was for FL, the random German girl from yesterday, to meet me back at my hostel at 8am. I got up too late to shower which... is going to be unfortunate for her spending the whole day with me. Sorry! I promise I'm basically always on point about showering at least once a day.

Right around 8am I saw FL walk up, and surprise of all surprises, she had BE (the Australian girl I randomly re-met a couple days ago) with her! I honestly thought there was a 0% chance I'd ever see her again, but here we were. Again. For the third time. So a la Wizard of Oz, the three of us set off down our own yellow brick road, which happened to be a beautiful Thai beach, on our way to see the wizard. Or, you know, whoever it is that lives in a monastery. I just assume it must be a wizard. And for the record, as we were walking down the beach, BE turned to me and very enthusiastically said in her wonderful Australian accent, "[R], you smell delicious!" I'll take it. Maybe I need to shower less often.

We made it out to the boat and took it back to the mainland. Goodbye, Koh Phi Phi! It's been real. Buddhist monastery, here we come!

Give Me Cipro or Give Me Death

There are worse places to spend a day being sick

I woke up this morning and I was deathly ill. I felt absolutely miserable. I got up and headed over to the girls' hostel to let them know that I couldn't make the boat tour we had planned. Then I went back to my hostel for a bit, grabbed my stuff, and brought it back to the girls' hostel because that's where I'm staying tonight.

Before I left for my trip to Asia, I saw about 6,000 doctors who gave me a million shots and lots of travel advice. I also got some Ciprofloxacin (aka Cipro), a hardcore antibiotic, for "just in case you're in the middle of nowhere and finding medical care is as common as riding a unicorn that shoots rainbows out of its... hooves." Well... turns out that "just in case" is right now. I've gotten sick plenty of times on this trip, but I only have so much Cipro and I wanted to save it for when I realllly needed it. But I'm going on a meditation retreat in a few days, and I can't, can't be sick for it. So I popped my first Cipro and waited for it to do it's thing. I spent the rest of the day hanging out at the hostel. Which was actually amazing because the bungalow is RIGHT ON the beach. I'm literally lounging here looking out onto the water. I also met some awesome Australians also hanging out for the day with me in the bungalow.

So it's mid-afternoon. I'm basically asleep. And I get woken up by a random girl I've never seen before:
Random Girl: Richard? [with a thick German accent]
Me: [in a sleepy stupor not having heard what she said] ...what?
RG: Are you Richard?
Me: No, I'm Rishan.
RG: Oh... are you going on a meditation retreat tomorrow?
Me: ...Yea [...totally confused]
RG: Oh cool, me too. Do you want to go together?
Me: ...Yea, sure, sounds good. Wait... what? Who are you?

So it turns out this girl was staying in my old hostel and had been talking to LI (the mysterious Norwegian girl with whom I came to Koh Phi Phi) who mentioned to her that I was going to a retreat tomorrow. It sounded to her like the same one she was planning on going to, so LI told her how to find me. But even still... I'm shocked she was actually able to do it. Props to her. We chatted for a few minutes, I was still in a tired/deathly ill state, but together we managed to figure out how to get off the island tomorrow and start our journey toward the monastery. I'm actually really glad she did because I had been putting off the logistics of the whole thing and honestly, I might not have even gotten it together enough to make it out tomorrow, which meant that I might have missed my retreat.

I spent the rest of the day at the hostel not doing much of anything. The other girls came back from the boat tour and said they had an awesome time. It still would have been a huge mistake for me to go; I made the right choice. I was going to go out with them later that night, but I was still feeling miserable, so I called it an early night at 8:30pm. There was music blaring outside but it didn't matter to me at all. It just felt great to be in a bed.

CONTINUE ON to Koh Phi Phi Part 3: Goodbye, Koh Phi Phi!

The Biggest Beach Party of My Life

The boat ride from Phuket and Koh Phi Phi was pretty uneventful. Toward the end of the trip, we saw some beautiful views of other islands though:

Cliffs. Vegetation. Standard.

With my "yes, I belong on this boat" sticker and rolled-up
pants, I was FOR SURE the coolest kid on the boat

Koh Phi Phi harbor. STUNning.

After disembarking, the four of us (LI, the mysterious Norwegian girl of Iraqi descent; BK, the Texan who carries around her beer bong with her everywhere she goes; and NS her French friend) started walking in the direction of BK's and NS's hostel. But the time LI and I had decided to join them on this island adventure yesterday, there were no spaces left for this first night. LI assured me that it was no problem and we could just walk around to find one once we got there. I was skeptical but she seemed pretty confident, so I went with it. About 20 minutes later, we reached BK's and NS's hostel. Which. was. AWESOME. It was literally a bodega ON the beach. LI and I continued walking around the area and made plans to meet up with the girls in a little while. LI and I then proceeded to spend roughly the next hour trekking from place to place with our huge backpacks trying to find a hostel. Let me revise that, a hostel that was up to her standards of price and quality. We found lots of hostels. With open rooms. But there was always something wrong with them. To be fair, some of them were terrible, but others were totally find, but like... more expensive than she wanted to pay. To put this in perspective, the total spread between most and least expensive was probably on the order of a $5 difference. ALSO, for someone who comes from Norway, which is literally the most expensive country on the planet, ...$5? Really? I definitely hitched my wagon to the wrong horse on this one (yea, I said it). Finally, we found an acceptable place. Which happened to also be the first place we looked it and then decided we'd come back to if nothing else panned out. I was perfectly happy with it. It was also a whopping four-minute walk to the other hostel, which was perfect.

We headed back to the girls' hostel, but they were no where to be found. We waited a few minutes but LI and I were starving, so we ate some food at the hostel. It was meh but it was food, which was the important part. Eventually, the other girls came back and we all went to the beach together. To be clear, we were already on the beach, but we went out to find a place with some beach chairs and more people. Which was a maybe five-minute walk down the beach. THAI ISLANDS. This is awesome.

Hanging out at the beach was glorious. The sand was beautiful. The water was incredible. NS and I went to go swim while the other two stayed behind. This was pretty much the first time she and I had a real conversation and it turns out she's awesome. She's just traveling around for fun right now before heading back home. And she's super funny, with a "whatever, I don't care what people think" attitude a la Jennifer Lawrence. As I was admiring this picturesque scenery around me, I realized this was another one of those "this doesn't happen at home" moments: I'm swimming in the water on a Thai island with a French girl that looks like she should be a model talking about how awesome our respective life choices were that brought us here. [Update: turns out she actually may have done some modeling.]

After spending some more time on the beach, the four of us walked around the little town. There were a ton of shops, but absolutely zero haggling here. Prices are prices. The vendors all had an attitude of "meh, I don't really care if you buy this stuff or not." Which was so weird! But only weird because everywhere else it is the polar opposite of that. We also booked tickets for this boat tour of some of the surrounding area for tomorrow, which sounds awesome.

Thailand is famous for it's Full Moon Party, a huge party that happens on Koh Phangan, one of the islands here. By huge I mean HUGE. Unfortunately, I'm going to be back in the U.S. for the full moon party. Luckily, on Koh Phi Phi they also do a Half Moon Party, not quite as crazy, but still crazy, and luckily, it was happening tonight! There are a bunch of bars/hostels that are right on the beach, and a handful of them put on shows to lure people to their section of the party, but basically the entire beachfront is just one contiguous party scene. It started maybe around 10pm. There was a massive amount of people there, and everyone seemed to be having a great time. This felt like the spring break I never had.

We ended up hanging out in front of one of the places with a huge fire show. They had amazing fire dancers, some of the most incredible I've ever seen.

Fire spinning!

After the fire show, they lit this huge ring on fire and people could jump through it. Which.. obviously I did (sorry, Mom!).

Then they lit the perimeter of the dance floor on fire so we went to dance for a while. You can't not dance on a dance floor of fire, come on.

You would think fire and thousands of drunk people is a bad combo but
somehow I didn't see anyone severely burned or horribly disfigured.
Only minor burns and slight disfigurations.

Our group ended up getting split up over the course of the night. Which was bound to happen with a party of this size. I ended up hanging out with NS most of the rest of the night. We had a long heart to heart which was... not what I expected to happen in the context of this massive party happening around us, but it was nice to have a real conversation with someone and not the typical "where are you from, how long are you traveling, where have you been, etc." conversations that are pretty standard among travelers.

I had not been feeling so hot since the beginning of the day and it got slightly progressively worse as the day went on. Nothing awful, but I still decided to call it a night at around 4am. It honestly didn't even feel late. This place is amazing.

Ain't no party like a Half Moon Partaaaaay!

So... this really crazy thing happened next. I walked back to my hostel and as I climbed the stairs onto the porch, this blonde girl asked me for a lighter. I looked up at her and told her I didn't have one and realized she looked really familiar. It took me a second but then it hit me, she was the same Australian girl from airport bus ride in Phuket! What?!?! Her name is BE, and we hung out for a while on the porch. She was incredulous that this was actually happening and asked me some more questions about the retreat I was going to. When we first met in the bus a few days ago she seemed really interested in it, but in a "that's so cool, I'd love to do that but... let's be real I'm just lying to myself and I'm never actually going to do that" kind of way. I told her that I was leaving in a couple days so if she wanted to come, she'd know where to find me.

After a while, I was off to bed. I'm really excited for our boat tour tomorrow!

CONTINUE ON to Koh Phi Phi Part 2: Give Me Cipro Or Give Me Death

Out of Phuket and Not Soon Enough

Can you say sunscreen? Because I suuuuure hope these people can.

I was out of the hostel pretty early the next morning along with LI, BK, and NS. Our shuttle came to the hostel pretty much right on time. I was exhausted, but happy to be getting out of here and going to my first Thai island.

About 20 minutes later, we arrived at the dock and boarded the boat. It was totally full of European tourists, which was unexpected.

See you in Koh Phi Phi!

CONTINUE ON to Koh Phi Phi Part 1: The Biggest Beach Party of My Life

Finally, a Nice Beach!

Awkward camera pose in front of the

Patong Beach sign. You're welcome, internet.

This might seem hard to believe, but travel is exhausting. Cry me a river, right? I'll be the first to admit this is totally a first-world problem (despite my presence in the third world at the moment). Don't get me wrong, it's incredible. But exhausting. Today was my first real vacation vacation day. I mean... this whole thing is kind of a vacation, but today was the first day in long time without tons of traveling or a crazy schedule of sightseeing, without a schedule at all really,  just a day to relax. And it. was. awesome.

That big, yellow thing in the sky is a parasailor. So. Cool.

I woke up on the later side and met up with MM and his German friend and we grabbed a quick bite to eat on the street before walking down the whopping, grueling five minutes to the beach from our hostel. Life is hard sometimes, you know?


The beach here is gorgeous. I mean... I'm on a beach in Thailand. There's absolutely no comparison to be made between this beach and the ones I saw in Bangladesh and India. We walked down a ways and found a good spot a little bit away from the crowded area (though none of the beach was really all that crowded). We paid to rent some beach chairs/umbrellas which was well worth it. The water looked fine and it felt great. The sun was pretty strong today so we definitely felt it. The water was warm enough to feel good being in but cool enough to help with the heat.

The beach was full of people trying to sell stuff. Mostly food and trinkets. But there were also these women carrying buckets of aloe. Not aloe in a bottle, but actual leaves (are they called leaves when they're aloe? They're huge.) of aloe. What they do is cut the aloe leaves, and this disgusting slimey ooze leaks out which they then rubs all over your body. You come out looking like a dinosaur just sneezed on you (and I'm not talking a dainty sneeze here, I'm talking the kind where your friends get super grossed out because you don't have a tissue or even a tissue substitute that could handle the quantity of snot you just inadvertently ejected from your body), but I imagine it feels great.

We spent a few hours on the beach, mostly lying down in our chairs, but I also went for a walk for a while. On my walk, I ran into LI, the mysterious Norwegian girl from the hostel last night. We chatted briefly about my upcoming meditation retreat and there was a glimmer of "ooo maybe I want to do that with you" so we decided to talk more about it that evening.

When I got back to my friends, I discovered that the German girl was Icarusianly fried to crisp. Which, ok here's the thing, if you're complexion leads you to often be confused with Casper the Friendly Ghost in your daily life, and you've been that way all of your life, shouldn't you know how to apply sunscreen by this point? I guess not. As it so turns out, one of those Thai aloe ladies was getting aloe handsy with the three European dudes sitting next to us, and when she saw the sad state of our German friend, she took pity and decided to use her last two aloe leaves on her for free. Which was incredibly generous of her and something I'm sure our German friend very much appreciated (and needed). Soon thereafter, we all headed back to the hostel.

Also this was a thing I found on my walk.
Which, obviously I had to share with
the world.

I wanted to explore Phuket a little more, so I headed out on my own to go for a walk later that afternoon. There are few things more striking walking the streets than the sheer number of massage parlors there are here. All of them have between two and eight women standing or sitting outside of the doorway trying to entice you to come inside. In front of one of them, one of them actually grabbed my arm and wouldn't let go when I tried to pull free. Aggressive. And then they acted like I was the weird one from wanting her to let go of my arm. This is a totally foreign culture to me. While I was in Cambodia, a fellow traveler told me that she had talked to one of the massage women there, who told her that they actually hate foreigners. Which struck me as odd at first, because... doesn't most of your money come from rich foreigners? But she said that they hate them because those dudes are terrible, terrible people who treat them with no respect. Oh, right, that, yea, okay I get it now. It's a sad commentary on and reality of the global sex trade. The other thing that struck me as I walked through the streets here is that, aside from the massage parlor women, the vendors here weren't nearly as aggressive in their sales tactics compared to the people I had encountered in Cambodia, which made for a much more pleasant experience of just walking around the city.

A little slice of home.
Again.

That night, I went out to dinner with BK (the Texan) and NS (the French girl). Remember how I said the French girl had given me a super cold reception? It turns out it was because she thought I was someone else! Apparently the night before last, someone who had been staying in my room got really sketchy with her friend BK. Womp womp. Mistaken identity at its worst (...probably not it's worst, but definitely not its best). It struck me as odd that two girls who were so young from totally opposite ends of the world were traveling together, but I think they knew each other from college. Yet another reason why it's worth the investment to send your kids away from college if you can. I doubt this would have happened if they had been living at home. I'm a little biased here, but I stand by my point. Dinner was fine, good company, meh food. BK and NS told me they were traveling to an island off the coast called Koh Phi Phi (hehe) tomorrow. Today hammered home the fact that I definitely didn't want to spend another three days here, so I decided I was going to join them on their island adventure tomorrow.

We walked around a little after dinner. And much to my surprise (though I guess I shouldn't be surprised by this anymore), we found another Swensen's!

We also explored a little bit more of Bangla Road. Remember that go-go bar I mentioned yesterday? Here's a closer look:

Note the creepy, old, white dude with two young Thai women at the table.
Sadly, this is not an uncommon sight here.

Inside the go go bar. It turns it's this place is
enormous. There for sure were over 100
of these "tables"/dancing poles.

Every so often, a huge chuck of bubbles
would go flying overhead

Back at the hostel, I met back up MM, LI and some other people in the hostel. One of the guys in the hostel has been staying and working here for a few months and he suggested heading to this famous rooftop bar place... called Famous, which sounded pretty cool. So about six of us headed over. We were a pretty eclectic group: American, Norwegian, Chinese, English, and a couple others in the mix. The place was about a 10-minute walk from our hostel. When we got there, we took an elevator to the roof and found... a kind of empty rooftop. Which was fine. We got drinks and headed over to a table. True to it's word, there was a foam party area, but with absolutely no one in it. The place was beautiful. I bet during the high season when there are a lot of people here, this place is probably awesome.

The bubble room. Doubles as an inflatable
boxing ring and the spare air mattress for all
of the Jolly Green Giant's friends from out of
town.

A few minutes after we got there, it started POURING rain, so we moved to a covered section. And then the power went out. Ha! Of course it did. Which meant that the bubble maker also stopped working, so about 10 minutes later the foam room was just a giant wading pool. No matter. We hung out for another hour or two, waiting out the rain and having an incredible cultural exchange. It turns out the Norwegian girl is also Muslim. And China isn't necessarily the totalitarian state you think it is. But sometimes it is. And even among educated people in Sudan, there's debate about whether or not a genocide actually happened. The fact that that's even a question seems ridiculous to me. This was probably the thing about the whole evening that surprised me the most.

After the rain let up, we walked back toward the hostel. But we weren't really ready to call it a night, so we headed out to the beach. Which was still beautiful and mostly empty. I was talking with LI about my plans to join the girls at Koh Phi Phi tomorrow and she decided to tag along as well. Then she dared me to go into the water. I'm not one to back down from a dare (... questionably true at home, but always true when I'm on a year-long adventure to explore the world), so I stripped down, got rid of my phone and wallet, and ran in. Even at 3am, the water was warm and incredible. Here I was, in the Indian Ocean, under the stars in the middle of the night. And it was amazing. This was one of those "life is good moments" that I won't soon forget.

I eventually made my way back out of the water, and joined my friends who were hanging out at a nearby bench. We hung out for another hour or so before heading back home for the night.

Goodnight world, you continue to surprise me in the best possible ways.

CONTINUE ON to Phuket Part 3: Out of Phuket and Not Soon Enough