Besties Bangkok Beaches Bitches

PART I:

I have been to Bangkok countless times. I love Bangkok. I call Bangkok my boyfriend, my long-time lover, my home away from home. I can recall many distinct trips to Bangkok with specific humans and I hold those days and weeks dear in my heart. 

However. This was something new. 

I read a small opinion column recently about how the modern age of technology means that we hold onto our old connections more and feel less connected to the place where we actually currently are (skyping our friends in other countries instead). Of course, there is truth to this, but in an ideal situation I have time to skype my oldest, dearest friends at home and make exceptional new friends. This was the case in Hanoi, and this year in Bangkok I got to experience the singular joy of those two world's colliding.

Look at them all. Also, that is the skytrain rushing past in the background, my other boyfriend. We are seated at the Sky Train Jazz Bar, which I highly recommend. The urban views are amazing and the margarita is exactly correct. 

PART II:

After my brilliant Hanoian friends departed I was left with only these two idiots from New Zealand, from home.

First, the physicist Dr Barker: 

(or, as I constantly accidentally introduce him as: the physician, which he is not)

Then, this idiot who turns up in my life from time to time, Mr Valentine:

With these two vagrants in tow, I travelled to the touristy island of Koh Tao, famous for diving, backpackers and, more recently, murder and the possible framing of Burmese migrants. 

As soon as we arrived our dear Doctor fell ill and so I was left to explore the jungles of the island with old Mr Valentine. We rented a motorbike, but soon came across signs like that pictured below, and opted for a hike through the jungle instead. 

After a few hours bumbling through the undergrowth, we came across this deserted resort, set on an immaculate bay (Laem Thian). In case anyone is in any doubt about this, tropicana apocalypse is my favourite aesthetic so I was absolutely rapt to find this. 

Someone asks the real questions:

There they are, off in the distance

Excellent 'road' for motorbiking on. Recommend.

The rest of our time on Koh Tao was gloriously undocumented. Suffice to say we spent our days snorkeling in the sea, and our nights in the bars. It was sleazy. We saw a snake. I met a bunch of charming and attractive humans. I don't usually go to the more obvious 'tourist' spots when I go to Thailand, because I am a raving snob/ misanthrope/ neurotic loner, but on this occasion I did and I had a most wonderful time. Besides, as soon as you spend an hour walking somewhere, you'll be pretty much alone (TIP: most people don't like walking).

Part III:

Back in Bangkok, we returned to the Atlanta Hotel, wished our eccentric doctor farewell, and pushed him into a taxi to the airport where he would take a plane to Milan and continue working on lasers/ solar energy/ his beard/ saving the world.

Happy Birthday to you, too

As has been the case so many times before, I am alone again with Mr Valentine. We run a lot of errands, which is surprisingly fun when I have his company. He is maybe the only human I could say this about. I like running errands with you, old sport. 

We drink these over-priced but really quite nice drinks on a rainy night and look out over the city-beast. We talk about distance, and what it means to be in 'the tropics' and how much we love Dr Barker. I talk about how much I love my new friends, and how I will miss him. I feel a lot of things: melancholic, anxious and hopeful. 

I'm writing this now from Dili, Timor-Leste, where I moved in September, alone. I've moved places alone before, and I've always been fine. I was a tough nut. Well, not any more. Now I am older and now I just want community, I want the pictures in this blog post. I want the people I can spend days, and days, with, doing next to nothing, and be constantly, ceaselessly entertained. These humans are better than any geographical location, and they make any place fun. I arrived here, and I felt my isolation as a physical weight. I looked at these pictures of Bangkok, in the rain, from a distance and felt my heart pine. I feel like I've finally hit on the most obvious truth of all truths: I belong in South-east Asia. I return to it, again and again. I build a life there. I have friends in almost every major South-east Asian city and I feel at home and connected and real in those places. I feel like I can land, like a cat, and move to the correct beat.

So I am going back. 

Belated Farewell to Hanoi

A long and rambling post. 

I'm writing this from Dili, which you already know because if you're reading this you are my friend and you've seen one of my three dozen facebook posts about moving to Dili. So, anyway, it's warm, I'm very busy with work and I don't live in Hanoi anymore. I lived in Hanoi for one year (past simple, used for an event in the past which has finished). 

When I lived in Hanoi, I lived on a small island called Lang Yen Phu on the great big lake called 'West Lake' or 'Tay Ho' in the local parlance. Some people argued with my designation of Lang Yen Phu as an island and put forward that it was, indeed, a peninsula. As much as I love peninsulas (one in particular, Otago peninsula you absolute babe), I remain convinced that Lang Yen Phu was (and is) an island. It looks like an island, it acts like an island and it feels like an island. It feels completely different to the surrounding area. 

Above: some street scenes on Lang Yen Phu, including the division between two cafes (yellow chairs versus green chairs). 

Below: one of the local motorbike drivers saw me taking photos and grabbed my arm, taking me to this parked new Lexus and posing with it. I don't think the car belongs to him, but he was very pleased with the photograph. 

Of course, the hardest thing about leaving and also the hardest thing about setting up camp in a new place, is losing the incredible connections you find with people. I said to a colleague, and it wasn't a lie, that I have never before worked somewhere where so many of my colleagues are my kind of people. Where I would happily go to a work party. Where lunch breaks are glorious and your coworkers tell you tales of colonial piracy and adventures in rural China over your iced tea.

Picnic Electronica

On my last night in Hanoi I met my dear friend Charles in the Old Quarter and promptly dropped my tele lens in an empty bar - the sound of the crack was startling to all. In Vietnam, if you lose or break things in August it is good luck and means you have warded off any bad ghosts who had you in their sights, so I tried to take this happening with good humour. In any case, I took the lens into a shop in Bangkok and got it fixed for ... $4. So. 

Below, photos taken with my broken lens. 

Inimitable Charles

Leaving home

On my final morning before heading to the airport I took a quiet walk around the island with my cup of coffee and my camera. It must have been about 5 a.m. so the light is just starting, and it's raining. I didn't mean for my final pictures of Hanoi to be so brooding and melancholic, but that's the way it was. And it's pretty accurate in the end. 

Too Cool for Halong Bay

One of the main annoyances tourists leave Vietnam with is the tours. In Vietnam, it's common to be told that a tour is the cheapest/ best/ only way to see a certain place. And, in the case of Ha Long bay, that's largely true. The problem is that the tours make you feel like you're simultaneously at a British boarding school, circa 1950 ("Now you relax for twenty minutes!"), and that you're getting unscrupulously scammed. I would hazard a guess that badly organised and dishonest tours are one of the major reasons for Vietnam's pitifully low tourist return rate. 

I didn't want to show my friend that side of Vietnam (authentic as it may be), but I had to admit that Ha Long bay is indeed incredibly beautiful. Solution: Just north of (in)famous Halong bay is it's nerdy, quiet little sister - Bai Tu Long bay. 

What are you looking at Tobias?

Oh. 

On the day we were due to "get up at six a.m., I mean it" in order to catch the bus to catch the boat to Quan Lan island, we found ourselves old and hungover. Tobias looked miserable and I shared my ancient wisdom with him, namely: "I don't believe in torturing yourself on holiday." We went back to sleep and left the house a cool six hours behind schedule, meaning we had to overnight at the little port town of Cai Rong. The views we woke up to are pictured above, so our sloth was well rewarded.

                            

The days in Quan Lan were exceptional. It's school holidays, so the place was packed out with Vietnamese families throwing themselves into the sea and adorable, happy children. Westerners were few and all had to touch on the horrors of Ha Long at least once. There is something pretentious about being the kind of traveller who actively avoids the places other tourists go, but there is also something enjoyable about it. It never ceases to amaze me how you can have a tourist hub like Ha Long and less than one hour away you have a completely other world. Tourism is incredibly condensed and site specific. Years ago, my friend and I walked about 500 metres from Khaosan Road in Bangkok (a street I no longer stay near, but still find fascinating) and found a bustling, local market where the factory workers were eating their breakfast. They forced us to join them and try their food, and told us they'd never eaten with a white person before.

In any case, Quan Lan is big enough for a good few days of motorbike adventure, but also small enough to 'understand.' I find islands so relaxing in that I can, after a few days, visualise the whole space and orientate myself in relation to the things around me. 

It feels deeply comforting. 

What is that in the water?

One Tobias, joining in the day-time karaoke

Minh Chau beach: two competing families sing karaoke at each other. 2pm.

The drives we had aren't really done justice by my photographs or my words. Above, Tobias rolls along a dirt road. Below, the earth bursts with green after some rain. The trip back into 'town' was over rough mud roads, with a bit of sliding and nervous laughter on my part. In general, we had the kind of holiday which is absolutely wonderful to have and which leaves you not much to tell: a holiday where you swim in the sea three times a day, eat fresh grilled fish and motorbike in the rain past children who yell "hello!"

Colonel Mustard ready to vamos

Storm rolling in

Quan Lan beach

Some back roads

Hidden behind a hill: the yin/yang

And if you still really want to see Ha Long bay, you can always take the boat from Quan Lan direct to Halong city, via 1.5 hours with the cutie pictured below and Ha Long bay serenely drifting past, out the window, without comment. 

Colonel Mustard visits imperial Ha Noi

I can't tell if this post is a love song to my dear friend Tobias (alias: Colonel Mustard) or to what appears to be the official colour of the Vietnamese state.

Either way, it is embarrassing. 

Looking dapper in the dapple

My favourite cafe is near my house on Yen Hoa (a lane which winds around grand old Tay Ho/ lake). The gentleman who runs it is pictured below, in the fatigues, with his vast and impressive stereo collection, from which he plays the greatest hits of the 20s, 30s and 40s. 

We also had the good fortune to luncheon with David McCaskey (I want to say 'esquire') at one of the best (and, incidentally, well known) pho places in Hanoi. Pho is usually served for breakfast and dinner, and not lunch, but no one tells us what to do. Also, David is a man who literally wears sock garters on a normal office day. Inspirational. 

Before Tobias arrived in Hanoi I described him to my local friends as 'Colonel Mustard' - given his dual qualities of wearing a lot of mustard coloured clothing and his general Colonel-like demeanor (this really came through on our rural island adventure, featured next). In any case, on this particular day he was wearing my favourite of his shirts so I made him stand in front of various government buildings/ the Presidential Palace. The end.