We flew through Thailand on our way to Nepal and India so we spent two weeks in Thailand in order to snorkel and have fun there and to regroup and get used to day being night and night being day. For example, right now it is 11:56 AM here but it is 1:56 AM tomorrow there already. So, it takes some getting used to the fact that your day is now your night tomorrow and your night is also your days back home.
When we flew into Bangkok Thailand from Narito Airport in Japan it was about 1 AM in the morning or maybe 11am here in California the day before when we arrived there. We were driven across Bangkok in two taxies for all our family to Sweety's Guest House there in Bangkok. They spoke enough English there for us to get them to make us food and for us to check in. They put us on the top floor with verandas, one of the verandas had a Thai Buddhist pagoda on it. (a miniature one which is common there about 4 feet high).
When we woke up the air was brown with car smoke and the sound was deafening because then no one had mufflers on their cars or trucks. We went out to get a Nepalese Visa for flying into Nepal. They gave us a 2 month visa. But, no one spoke English so we had a hard time getting on the right bus to get to the Nepalese Embassy there. We already had an India Visa because they had an embassy in San Francisco but there wasn't a Nepalese embassy in San Francisco then so we had to get our Nepalese Visa in Bangkok.
Then we didn't like the noise and air pollution in the city so we heard about Koi Samed Island so we took a bus after storing some of our gear at Sweety's Guest house. On the bus we saw two men carrying lumber on one shoulder on a motorcycle which seemed crazy to us but then again we didn't live in Thailand. So, we saw many many unusual things compared to the U.S.
By the night we got to the wooden Ferry which was small that had a man dressed up as a woman dancing on the bow. We later learned that this was a type of Local Shaman that blesses boats so they don't sink. Then the boat went aground on the sandy beach there was no dock so I jumped off the boat up to my waist in the water and carried my wife and daughter to shore. My youngest son was only 10 and jumped off and I didn't want him to drown so I lifted him up a little so I could get him out of the ocean. My 14 year old step son was big enough not to drown in the ocean jumping off the boat. We all carried our luggage through the water to the shore where we smelled garlic shrimp and rice cooking nearby so we bought some for dinner and rented a place to stay but the $2.50 a night grass shacks were too small for us on the beach so we rented a 4 dollar a night house on stilts near the ocean.
The next day we rented snorkel and masks and eventually we also rented a wind surfer which is sort of like a paddle board with a sail that you stand up on to sail around in the ocean.
They told us not to stick our hands or feet into giant clams in the ocean unless we wanted to die. they also said that there are little poisonous green sea snakes to stay away from and there are rock fish with poisonous spines not to step on. This was very useful regarding all these things because we saw with snorkels all these things while snorkeling (all 5 of us). There on Koi Samed island north of Bangkok.
In April of 1986 we returned from our stay in India and Nepal but by then 4 of the 5 of us had Giardia and so were not feeling very well. By the time i got back to the U.S. I was so skinny I looked like I had just come from a World war II concentration camp. We likely had gotten giardia in Kathmandu, Nepal then because most roads there were not paved and there was excrement of humans and animals in the dust everywhere and everyone I knew who went to Kathmandu also got giardia that year (1985-1986).
However, mostly my experience of Asia was complete "AMAZEMENT!" It was more like going to another planet than being anything like in the U.S. or Europe then!
Then the air in Kathmandu was clear enough to see Mt. Everest and all the major peaks then but now I hear you almost never see the Himalayas from Kathmandu, Nepal because the air is no longer as clear like it was then.
The Strange thing about the Himalayas is that they are sort of tropical up to around 9000 feet most times of the year. So, snow is common above 9000 feet into March and April. We trekked through some snow at around 9000 to 10,000 feet in the Himalayas in March before he headed home to the U.S. to San Francisco, California.
When your U.S. passports actually work again what we found useful was
No comments:
Post a Comment