Love you long time

So I've landed on Planet Bangkok, finger still attached, and managed to negotiate the local buses to my new pad. Like the old man that I am I've ended up about 10km from the action of the Khao San Road, but mainly cos tomorrow I go to the Indian Embassy - just round the corner - and try to get a visa to visit their fine country. It'll cost me about $100 and take five days. I think I might just go to Nepal instead.

Even though I'm on the other side of town, there's still plenty of space for the ubiquitous Thai massage joint. I think that the neon-lit, dingy places here may be a bit different to the open-air, palm-fringed ones on the southern islands. Only one way to find out, I suppose.

Sad to leave the islands though. Very very touristy, maybe the most touristy place that I've ever been in my life. Whole islands that weren't even inhabited twenty years ago and now only exist as stops on the (mostly Swedish) tourist trail. Of course I can't really cast the first stone, in fact I quite like tourists. But down south it's pretty easy to forget that you're in a foreign country, let alone one where most people have to do things like queue up to by tickets for a bus, or speak Thai.

It reminds me a bit of Cuba - where you're (voluntarily) insulated from the real world and you almost believe that everything works really well, cos everything works really well if you're a tourist. Of course the difference is that in Cuba the people are really moody (so would I be) whereas here they're mostly really sound. Except for whoever nicked my flip-flops the other day. And of course here they're living a corporate capitalist dream, whereas in Cuba they enjoy the corporate socialist one.

But anyway. I am sad to leave the islands. Beautiful places and maybe the last beach/ snorkelling action for a few years. Also the best place to watch English-language movies, with subtitles that have been translated back into English via Thai. My favourite was the new Rambo movie, where the line "I've seen some shit but I've never seen this" became

"Collapse puply mother, collapse here freely"


PS. I wasn't quite right about Malaysia, but almost...