Thailand

Ayu and I flew from Hanoi to Bangkok, picked up the blue duffel bag of souvenirs and gifts we had left in the airport, killed time for the rest of the day, and flew to Chiang Mai in the evening. We had really wanted to take the bus or train for the experience, but everything was sold out since Songkran was just around the corner. We spent two fun weeks in Chiang Mai, enjoying the four days of water fights of Songkran and lots of cheap Thai food and massages. As with last year, I didn’t dare take my camera out for fear of it getting water-damaged, but if you search YouTube, you’ll get a pretty good idea of what we were up to.

During our stay in Chiang Mai, we also went to Pai, a “chill, counter-culture, hippie mountain town”, to paraphrase the common sentiment echoed among Southeast Asia backpackers. My advice: don’t go to Pai. It’s overrun with the same types of people you’d find on Khao San Road in Bangkok, the tourist sites aren’t that great, and it’s a long, quasi-nauseous minivan ride to get there from Chiang Mai. Our 48-hour trip was, at best, completely forgettable; at worst, we wasted two days of our lives.

After Chiang Mai, we flew to Phuket, met up with another friend from America, and took a boat to Koh Phi-Phi, where we had four days of cloudy, but still awesome, beach and island time. I came down with tummy issues for the first time in about fifteen months, so I gave myself a small pat on the back for that. For about a day, I stayed within sprinting distance of the toilet and popped Pepto pills, activated charcoal, and antibiotics like candy.

We took a boat back to Phuket and spent three days on Surin Beach, a quiet beach far from the rowdiness of Patong, to savor our last few days in Thailand. There was lots of Thai food, sunsets, and bittersweet nostalgia (especially for me) before moving on to Indonesia.

Bali

We flew from Phuket to Bali by way of Singapore and once we landed, I left for Ubud for a few days while the girls went to Canggu. I thought Ubud would be a great place for me to be productive with a number of laptop tasks I had, but it turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’ll explain.

It wasn’t anything in particular, but rather the classic “death by a thousand cuts”. I had to walk around town in the heat for an hour to find a new power adapter because mine didn’t fit in those stupid circular outlets. Every WiFi connection I tried was unreliable. My guesthouse room had one of those stupid one-handed showers and daily power outages. The local coworking space was full at 10:00 in the morning and charging $20 a day, as if this was San Francisco. The streets were a constant stream of motorbikes and noise, as usual, and the road construction in front of my guesthouse caused more congestion and air pollution than normal. The sidewalks were full of slow-moving, day-tripping tourists. About once a minute, a tout somewhere asked me if I needed a ride. And those little fucking ants that you find everywhere in Bali got into my Toblerone bar.

Seriously, I lost my shit after that. Those little fuckers.

I suddenly felt homesick and tired. Very tired. Really, really tired of everything and everyone around me. Tired of dealing with third-world bullshit. Tired of constantly dealing with logistics. Tired of packing and unpacking my stuff. Dare I say it, but I became very tired of traveling.

Before arriving in Ubud, I was hoping that it would be a familiar home away from home, like Chiang Mai. And while it did feel familiar, it also felt weird and distant, like I was in a place that I should have left in my past and not returned to. On my first full day there, I called Ayu after I ordered lunch and all I could tell her on the phone was: “I’m tired and I want to go home. I’m thinking of leaving tomorrow.” We talked for a bit and after we hung up, I sat by myself in the restaurant, ate my food, and cried.

I remember talking to a friend last summer about his Southeast Asia backpacking adventure and he told me about how and when and where he hit his breaking point. For him, it was Cambodia; he had a bad day, flipped a (metaphorical) table, and bought a plane ticket home. For me, it was Ubud that broke my spirit. I realize that it isn’t fair to Ubud or Indonesia to say that since it could have happened anywhere, but that’s where it happened to me. I’m convinced every long-term traveler will reach his or her breaking point eventually and that happened to me after 638 days on the road.

After a lazy, unproductive day (to minimize the chances of something else annoying me) and another night of sleep, I was able to shake off most of my freak-out. No, I didn’t go home the next day as I threatened, but I did feel very checked out. I started to let others make most of the travel arrangements and my camera rarely left its home in my daypack. The only photo I took during my time in Ubud was of my (admittedly phenomenal) view of the neighboring rice paddy. Sadly, that view was the only thing keeping me sane; I especially enjoyed it when a thunderstorm rolled through and I could watch the rain and lightning from the comfort of my patio.

I left Ubud a few days later and met up with the girls on Nusa Lembongan, a small island to the east of Bali, appropriately described by some as how Bali was decades ago. We had six really lovely, relaxed days on the island: two snorkeling trips, lots of swimming in our hotel’s excellent pool, multiple movie nights at the open-air cinema/restaurant down the road, multiple meals of the biggest and best nasi campur I’ve ever had in my life, and lots of sunsets and sundowners.

Nusa Lembongan single-handedly restored my faith in Bali, especially considering my disillusionment with the popular parts of Bali that are overcrowded and overdeveloped. I owe Ayu a million thanks for taking us there.

And speaking of said overdeveloped parts, I spent my last few days on the island in Seminyak, enjoying Indonesian food, some shopping, and a three-hour treatment at a local spa. For better or worse, that’s how I wrapped up my time in Southeast Asia. (For now.)

Hopefully I’ll feel refreshed and energized enough in the coming weeks to write a separate blog post that summarizes the last year of my travels. This post feels too informative (and a bit too depressing) to serve as the final chapter, so I’ll make an effort to write that chapter separately in the near future.

Becca, Michael, and I flew into BKK on a pleasant Friday afternoon and the two of them were immediately introduced to the urban jungle of Bangkok as we suffered through the first of many hour-long taxi rides through the massive city with its dense, standstill traffic.

After finally reaching our hotel, checking in, and getting some food, we decided to go to the Chatuchak weekend market. Friday night at the market was very different from Saturday or Sunday; only a subset of the clothes shops were open and all the non-clothes shops were closed, there was very little food or drink, there were much less people than usual, and the clientele was almost exclusively Thais shopping for clothes. Nevertheless, we enjoyed the more relaxed atmosphere as we casually browsed the racks and got foot massages.

Saturday was the big tourist day. I took Becca and Michael to the usual spots – Chao Phraya, the Grand Palace, Wat Pho, and Wat Arun – and set them loose. The cliche continued into the evening as we went to Khao San Road to observe and partake in the spectacle. However, that plan came to a nauseating halt when both Michael and I started to feel ill about an hour and a half after dinner. Given that Becca was completely fine and that the content of her meal overlapped with ours, any potential theory (Was it the rice? Was it the chicken? Was it the Chang?) has a gaping hole in it. To our credit, we managed to make it to 1:00 or 1:30, which is when the junta started shutting down all the parties anyway, so we felt less bad about turning in “early”. We grabbed a taxi home and two-thirds of our group suffered through a restless night’s sleep filled with trips to the bathroom and the violent expulsion of partially digested food.

On Sunday morning we dragged ourselves to the airport for our flight to Siem Reap. On top of being tired and still partially sick, we had to deal with the worst immigration line I’ve ever seen. The “line”, a barely-organized throng of irritated travelers, took almost an hour to navigate. There were multiple rude Chinese tourists cutting the line, which resulted in another rude Chinese tourist scolding them loudly, which led to one of the Thai immigration officers losing face, standing up, pointing his finger, and yelling “SHUT UP! SHUT UP!” at the top of his lungs. It was not a fun morning.

Once through immigration, the rest of the traveling was uneventful and a couple hours later we were in Cambodia.

Siem Reap

I’m going to be intentionally cursory for this part of the trip since I’ve written extensively about Cambodia before. We spent three nights and two days in Siem Reap, which is probably the minimum amount of time I’d suggest to anyone thinking of going there. Before arriving in Cambodia, I had messaged Dola, my tuk-tuk driver during my previous visit, and he agreed to be our driver for two days. The discounted rate for being a returning customer was nice too.

The first day we visited only Beng Mealea since it takes about two hours to get there from Siem Reap via tuk-tuk.

The next day, we woke up very early to catch sunrise at Angkor Wat, then went to Angkor Thom and Bayon, then called it a day in the mid-afternoon.

In the evenings, we enjoyed Khmer food and Pub Street, stopped by Asana for a drink and to see my friend Lala, and watched the always entertaining Phare circus.

The next day was a long and exhausting travel day: woke up early to get picked up by a minibus (with a temporarily flat tire), transferred to a coach, drove for several hours to the Thai border, disembarked and went through a slow-moving immigration line, waited in the sun for a while, got picked up by another minibus, drove several hours to the ferry landing at Laem Ngop, boarded a massive vehicle ferry, and took that for an hour to Koh Chang. The ferry ride was legitimately pleasant once we found a spot overlooking the bow, felt the ocean breeze against us, sipped beers, and watched the sun sink behind the horizon.

Koh Chang

Once on Koh Chang, we had to hire our minibus driver to take us directly to our resort, which meant another outlay on transportation and another 45 minutes of driving. Koh Chang is the second-largest island in Thailand (behind Phuket) and very, very developed, especially on the western coast. As we drove in the dark, I was amazed at the amount of businesses and lights that whizzed by before we finally reached our bungalows. After checking in, getting situated, and thinking the day was just about over, the staircase to Michael’s bungalow buckled and collapsed as he and Becca were standing on it. Luckily no one was hurt (too badly).

Just as with Siem Reap, we had two full days on Koh Chang. Though it’s highly developed on the coasts, the island is lush and gorgeous and very beautiful, especially when viewed from the water. We spent most of the time relaxing and going to the nice beach up the coast from us.

Our only real excursion was going to an elephant park (appropriate for Koh Chang, which translates as “Elephant Island”) on the second day, where we rode and swam with the elephants. I’ll fully admit that I’m not sold on the morality of such places – especially since the mahouts tried to secretly sell us pieces of ivory jewelry during our tour – but swimming with elephants and riding on the back of one in the water is pretty freaking awesome.

The next day we suffered through another exhausting travel day: a 45-minute minibus ride to the pier, a one-hour ferry ride to the mainland, an all-day minibus ride to Bangkok (with a borderline maniacal driver who made several mysterious package pickups and deliveries along the way), and then the obligatory one-hour taxi ride in Bangkok, mostly spent staring silently out the window in anger and frustration.

Bangkok

The reasons for going back to Bangkok were three-fold: Michael was flying back home for Thanksgiving, Erik was arriving from San Francisco, and Bangkok is where I wanted to be for my birthday since I had rooftop bar demands that had to be met.

We booked bunk beds at Oneday Hostel, a fantastic, upscale place in Sukhumvit that is a slice of San Francisco in Bangkok, complete with a fancy cafe and coworking space (of course). Normally, I don’t stay in hostels since I’m a light sleeper, don’t want to deal with strangers’ sleeping habits, and prefer my own private space, if only to have more security for my things. However, since there would be four of us, we could book an entire room just for ourselves and live it up slumber-party style.

The overlapping time of the four of us was less than 24 hours, but we managed to fit in a fun night out at a girlie bar on Sukhumvit Soi 4, a solid afternoon at the weekend market the next day, and a surprisingly delicious farewell dinner for Michael that night at an unassuming restaurant in our neighborhood. As per Erik’s request and custom, we got one last cheek to cheek (to cheek to cheek) photo.

After lots of window shopping at a couple malls the next day, we hit the town for my birthday. After a delicious Thai-Lao dinner, the first stop of the evening was Moon Bar for amazing views and an equally amazing rooftop experience. And just as astounding as the views are the prices, so after a drink we bounced to Maggie Choo’s, an underground spot that I’d describe as “opium den meets San Francisco cocktail lounge”. We had a couple delicious rounds while listening to a French jazz quartet, as you do in Thailand.

After Maggie Choo’s, I believe we went back to Sukhumvit Soi 4 for more shitshow-watching, but my memory is fuzzy so I’m not going to say much about that. I do believe we turned in shortly after the bars closed since we were traveling the next day.

Phuket

After a slow morning, tolerable taxi ride to the airport, and uneventful flight to Phuket, we checked into our guesthouse in Patong and began gearing up for Birthday Night Out Part II. As you do on a night out in Patong, we went straight for Soi Bangla, a bright, loud, chaotic, alcohol-fueled maelstrom of bars, clubs, touts, ping pong shows, thumping Vegas-style music, working girls, ladyboys, and drunk tourists of all types.

My demand for the evening was shisha, so we found a very fun shisha bar and spent many happy hours there indulging in the obvious, with a healthy side of beers, buckets, cocktails, and free tequila shots from some random guy at the bar. Our entertainment consisted of scantily-clad women dancing and showering on the bar and a room full of single white men and their Thai companions who had been purchased for the evening.

The culinary delights of the evening deserve a mention as well. The bar continually supplied us with snacks to keep us around, which was appreciated, but the foods themselves got weirder over the course of the evening. The initial goodies of popcorn and peanuts turned into cotton candy, which melted all over me within seconds due to the heat, then became hard-boiled eggs later in the evening. I’ve never considered eating hard-boiled eggs while drinking… but I will from now on!

The final, beautiful culmination of the evening – and also the perfect union of drinking, food, and entertainment value – was Erik devouring a bag of roasted bugs while totally hamming it up for the camera. Out of respect for him, I won’t post that video here, but you should bug him (hey-ooohhh!) to show it to you.

The next day (our last in Phuket) was much more mellow and our big accomplishment was wandering the night market by our guesthouse. The day after that, we hopped on a ferry to Koh Lanta, my recommendation for some very relaxed island time.

Koh Lanta

Upon arriving on the island and checking in to our bungalows, our thoughts turned to food, it being Thanksgiving. We walked the beach a bit from our resort and stumbled upon Moonwalk, a spacious, uncrowded seaside restaurant hanging over dark, rough rocks with beautiful views of the beach, the ocean, and the distant lightning that was flashing occasionally on the horizon. As we went around the table and said what we were thankful for, we enjoyed a terrific dinner of bruschetta, barbecued snapper, massaman curry, Thai beer, and mango sticky rice. The massaman curry was particularly full of spices (no, I don’t mean spicy), giving it a very autumn-like taste, which was appropriate and appreciated.

We spent the rest of the evening, as we did all our evenings on Koh Lanta, lounging in chairs next to a bonfire by the ocean, sipping on drinks, talking, and looking at the stars. We also had to dodge the daily thunderstorms when they rolled through, but they always passed fairly quickly.

After a few days of standard island activities, it was time to part ways with Erik since his time was at an end. As he took his transfer to Krabi for a flight to Bangkok, Becca and I took a ferry to nearby Koh Phi-Phi.

Koh Phi-Phi

First and foremost, Koh Phi-Phi is the most beautiful island I’ve ever been on. Before going, I was worried that it had become too developed and crowded and overpopulated with backpackers. These fears are validated if you stay in Tonsai Village, the loud, dirty party center of the island, but if you stay on a beach away from the village, the island is beautiful and peaceful. Our resort (Phi Phi Hill Resort) was two beaches away from the village and at the top of a hill, meaning it was peaceful, relaxing, and had stupid beautiful views of the island below. We could watch both sunrises and sunsets from the top of our hill.

That said, we did dip into the village occasionally – via either a delightful long-tail boat ride or a hot, sweaty trek through the jungle – for shopping, food, or sunset drinks. One evening, we went to the village and Lo Dalam beach, the nightlife center of the island, for drinks and people watching. Oh man, did we get what we were looking for and more. It felt like a smaller version of Full Moon, except this party happens every night. Becca and I grabbed some beers, buckets, and shisha and sat down to watch the show, which included, but was not limited to: the usual drunk backpackers, Thai boys playing with fire poi, full frontal male nudity (in conjunction with fire poi!), a drunken soccer mom in soccer mom clothes dancing by herself in the ocean, strip Jenga with what appeared to be a rugby team, and a backpacker soap opera that unfolded right in front of us for at least half an hour.

But wait, there’s more.

After we knew we were done for the evening, we found a road leading from the beach that was lined with stalls of delicious drunk food, so of course we stopped by. Interspersed among the restaurants and food vendors were a handful of tattoo shops, which were just as busy, as backpackers of various states of sobriety decided that yes, now was the time to get that tattoo they’ve always wanted. Unlike normal tattoo shops, which promote cleanliness and privacy, these shops were wide open and in plain view of anyone walking down the street. We took full advantage of this and gawked in amazement like children at a zoo watching the caged animals.

At one particular shop, we talked to a few of the guys who were getting inked. The man to our right took swigs from his bottle of Chang as he proudly displayed the large rain cloud and lightning bolt being hammered into his bicep. Yup, a rain cloud. The real gems though were the two kids to our left. The first one had just finished getting a hah taew tattoo (one of these), which are very popular in Thailand. In fact, they’re so popular, especially for backpackers, that this shop had a printout, making the process of getting a basic tattoo in Thailand as simple as pointing.

However, this kid didn’t want all five lines; he wanted only three. Because I guess he believes in only 60% of Thai proverbs? And he didn’t want straight lines; he wanted them arranged in a circle. Because… why not? When we asked him what the lines meant, his verbatim answer was: “Um, something, something, and… something.” Bravo, my friend. Bravo.

His friend wasn’t much better. We asked him about the tattoo he was getting, and he responded with: “It’s the tattoo from The Beach.” I was really confused about this initially – and for the rest of the night – since I had read that book fairly recently and didn’t recall anything about a tattoo. It wasn’t until a day or two later I figured out what he meant: in the movie adaptation, Richard (Leonardo DiCaprio’s character) has a small tattoo on his arm. I know this only because a Google search reveals a single frame where the tattoo is visible. In summary, this kid was copying a forgettable, meaningless tattoo – that was completely irrelevant to the story – from a shitty Hollywood adaptation of the most cliche Thailand backpacker book of all time. You get a slow clap too, buddy.

I’ll also mention that all the shops used the bamboo method instead of the machine method for tattoos, which is common in Thailand. I’ve read that the bamboo method is much less painful and supposedly results in better color and faster healing. I can’t vouch for the color and healing claims, but every customer we talked to that night said that the tattoos didn’t hurt at all. Granted, they were all liquored up, so I take their testimonials with a grain of salt.

At this point, we had seen enough and were ready for a long-tail boat ride back to our beach. As we were leaving, a round of tequila shots suddenly appeared and everyone in the shop – customers and tattoo artists – had one. That’s just perfect. Have a fantastic night, gentlemen.

Having gotten our fill of the party scene, Becca and I resumed our usual beach activities for the rest of our time on the island. On our last day, we split up: Becca went on an around-the-island boat trip and I went on a death march hike through the jungle to Hat Phak Nam, a beach on the eastern coast. I stumbled upon one of the island’s viewpoints on the way and stopped for a while for some photos and to change my sweat-drenched shirt.

After extending our stay for one more precious day in paradise, we boarded an early morning ferry destined for the Trang islands, a loosely-related clump of islands to the south-east that are a bit far from the normal tourist track. Based on Lonely Planet descriptions, we settled on Koh Kradan, a very small, quiet island that is still conveniently serviced by the Tigerline ferry. After a couple stops at other islands, the ferry stopped again at a seemingly arbitrary spot in the middle of the ocean, where we transferred to a waiting long-tail boat for an hour-long ride to the island itself.

Koh Kradan

Koh Kradan is a very small island with only a handful of resorts, the vast majority of which are on the eastern shore. The island has no permanent inhabitants besides those who work in hospitality. Upon landing, we walked nearly the entire length of the main beach to get to our bungalows, which were simple bamboo huts with no aircon, no hot water, and thin mattresses on the floor. Why would we pay $35 a night in Thailand for such a place? Because we were literally on the beach, heard nothing all day but the gentle sounds of small waves, and the water’s edge was only ten feet from our front porches at high tide.

Our four days there were awesomely lazy and once I stopped shaving, I felt myself really slipping into island bum mode. We spent all of our time eating, drinking, sleeping, reading, sunbathing, swimming, and sitting on our porches during the brief storms, not only because we wanted to, but because there was nothing else to do.

One evening, we walked through the jungle across the island (no more than a 15-minute walk) to catch the sunset over the rocks. Afterwards, we backtracked to Paradise Lost, the only resort not on the coast and home to the best restaurant on the island. As we devoured massive bowls of mouth-watering massaman curry, Wally, the American owner, played the role of “Dad” as he flipped through dozens of satellite TV channels, deciding what he – and therefore the entire restaurant – would watch. The iron fist with which he dominated the remote control was evidently a twitchy one, as he changed channels every minute or two, greatly disrupting the flow of whatever mediocre movie we were getting sucked into. That said, we were quite happy to hang out for a while and be couch potatoes, downing large Singhas until it was time to walk back through the dark jungle to our moonlit beach.

After four beautiful, lazy days, it was time to get Becca on the journey back to her first-world life. Since we were on a more isolated island, the trip back would have to be split into two days. The day before her flight out of Bangkok, we took a long-tail boat through a heavy storm to the mainland, then transferred to a minibus to Trang, one of the provincial towns in the south, where we spent the night. The next day, we flew from Trang to Don Mueang (AirAsia) Airport, took the free shuttle to BKK, and had a bittersweet goodbye in the departures hall.

Traveling with my friends from home – especially through places that I was familiar with and could be a tour guide for – was wonderful and perfect and something I had been looking forward to for a long time. I’ve had a great time making new friends and travel buddies everywhere I’ve gone during my sabbatical, but there’s something really special about traveling with good friends I’ve known for many years.

It was, of course, effortless and joyful to travel with Becca for so long and I’m excited about this new annual tradition of going on an international, multi-week backpacking trip. Where to next, boo?

With that, I’ll leave here a short montage of some footage I took on the islands with my phone.

The story of my attendance at this festival actually goes back almost a year. During my last trip through Southeast Asia, I had read about the vegetarian festival, but after it had already happened. Once I learned more about what happened there and saw some photos from it, I immediately put it on my list of things to see if I was back in Thailand at the right time. Conveniently, my last wedding obligation of the summer was only a couple weeks before the start of the festival, so I took it as a sign that I was meant to go.

You might be wondering what the big deal is regarding a vegetarian festival. It sounds pretty benign, if not downright dainty, right? Read on, my friends. Read on.

Other resources on the Internet can offer more details, but I’ll give the abridged version here. The origins of the festival are nebulous, but the most popular story concerns a traveling Chinese opera group that fell ill with malaria while on Phuket. They adopted a strict vegetarian diet to appease the gods and, miraculously, everyone made a full recovery. Today’s hybrid Chinese-Thai festival pays homage to that history and is also a chance for people to purify themselves to gain good favor from the gods for the upcoming year. In deference to the nine emperor gods, the festival is held during the first nine days of the ninth month of the Chinese lunar calendar. All the shrines on Phuket participate, but most of the action is in Phuket Town.

It’s also worth mentioning that this festival is mostly limited to Phuket and incorporates Chinese culture as well. Other parts of Thailand don’t celebrate this and I’ve yet to meet a non-Phuket Thai person that’s actually been to this festival.

As the festival name suggests, many people adopt a vegetarian diet for the festival; veggie food is found in many restaurants and offered by hundreds of street vendors. Truth be told, the diet is stricter than simply vegetarianism; it’s actually a jae diet, which forbids all animal products and foods that are too pungent (e.g. onions and garlic). There are various other purification rules too, such as no sex and no alcohol. Everyone wears white, except the mediums.

During the festival, many people (mostly men, but a few women) act as mediums for the gods. For the nine days, they are possessed by spirits, sometimes go into trances, chant, bark, shake, crack whips, dance, participate in the ceremonies, and are treated with the utmost respect by everyone in attendance. Each medium is always accompanied by an entourage. For the processions, families will arrange small, red-tablecloth-covered tables on the sidewalk along the procession route; these tables will have small offerings (food and drink), incense, Buddhas, and the like. The mediums walking in the procession will occasionally stop by these tables, partake of the offerings, possibly leave some small gifts for the family, and offer blessings.

Every morning, there was at least one temple ceremony somewhere on the island, always followed by a procession, usually through Phuket Town. In the evenings, there were usually multiple temple ceremonies, often accompanied by processions. In short, there was always something going on somewhere.

To set the mood a bit, here are some photos I took at the ceremonies or around town. Old Phuket (a specific part of Phuket Town) is described as having Sino-Portuguese architecture and almost has a French Quarter feel to it (especially at night), which is very different than anywhere else I’ve been in Thailand.

One of the more prominent aspects of the festival was the use of firecrackers. Constantly. By everyone. It wasn’t unusual to see children playing with some legitimate explosives. Talk about hands-off parenting! If Songkran is a 4-day water fight, then the vegetarian festival is a 9-day firecracker fight. There were certain places in town (the traffic circle with the clocktower comes to mind) where teenagers would gather in the evenings and set off firecrackers for hours, but the processions were the main sites of pyrotechnics. It’s customary to throw firecrackers at the mediums, the small thrones being carried by the participants, and the participants themselves. And what the hell, while you’re at it, throw firecrackers at your friends too. And farang. Basically, anyone and anything.

Surprisingly, the firecrackers don’t hurt that much, even if they explode next to you; you feel only fleeting pricks of heat on your skin, like embers from a fire. That said, covering up with clothes is probably smart, as is bringing ear plugs, a mask, and sunglasses.

All of the video I shot comes from two of the processions and most of the footage is from the last night of the festival. Parts of Old Phuket felt like warzones; the smoke was so dense, you could barely see across the street.

Now onto the good stuff!

First and foremost, everything that follows is pretty graphic. Nothing is censored and some of the material is a bit gruesome.

Continue at your own discretion.

This is NSFW and probably also NSFL.

Maybe you want to look at some puppies and rainbows instead?

Seriously, you’ve been warned.

Alright, thanks for joining!

The most infamous aspect of the vegetarian festival is the mutilation. Again, it’s not clear how this tradition started, but it falls within the same realm of purifying the body and appeasing the gods. The rituals take several forms: self-inflicted wounds, firewalking, climbing the “knife ladder”, and body piercing. The piercing is by far the most popular activity and is also what tends to appear in Google Images search results. Most of the piercing is done through the cheeks with metal spikes, after which another object is inserted into the hole. It seems that the mediums try to outdo themselves and each other every year with crazier or more intense piercings. A few mediums were pierced through the tongue, neck, or arms instead of (or in addition to) the cheeks. The piercings happen at the temples early in the morning and then the mediums walk in the processions for everyone to see.

On Monday, I woke up at 5:00 so I could make it to Bang Niao, one of the temples in Phuket Town, by about 6:00 for the piercings. There were a lot of people, including a lot of photographers and videographers (Thai and farang), but it was still fairly easy to see a lot of the piercings up close since there were so many mediums. A lot of the men who were administering the piercings had noticeable scar tissue in their cheeks from participating in years past.

And finally, my favorite: a handgun (hopefully not loaded).

Whenever I look at those three photos, this always pops into my mind:

1. Cut hole in cheek and insert gun.
2. ???
3. Profit!

And now that you’re acclimated to seeing the rituals in still photos, check out how things looked in real life.

Shockingly, the mediums didn’t appear to feel any pain. Not a single one of them winced or flinched or anything, even when having a massive spike rammed through his face. Also, there wasn’t as much blood as I was expecting. Sure, there was the occasional puddle of blood on the ground or pile of blood-soaked tissues, but not as much as there should have been, considering what was happening. Not surprisingly, the same guys who participate in this also subscribe to tattoo culture. As you can see in the photos and videos, a lot of them have detailed and artistic full-back or full-sleeve tattoos.

I’m still surprised at myself at how quickly I became desensitized to everything; after a little while, it was totally normal to see weird objects being thrust through gaping wounds or getting caught in the middle of a loud and explosive storm of firecrackers. The whole week was bizarre, moody, grotesque, fascinating, and surreal. And totally worth it.

Oh yeah, and it was awesome to have super easy access to delicious vegetarian food for an entire week. Funny how I keep forgetting about the food at the vegetarian festival. I wonder why?

Kuala Lumpur

I flew from Langkawi back to KL for a few days to take care of some errands, the most important of which was getting a 60-day tourist visa for Thailand. I slightly fouled up the application process my first time at the Thai embassy – I didn’t have a photocopy of my passport – and the embassy was closed the following day because of a national holiday, so I stayed in Malaysia for a couple days longer than I had intended. I ended up doing a little shopping and enjoying the nightlife a bit more to fill the time, including a pretty fun rap and hip-hop party called “Ghetto Heaven” that happens every Tuesday night at Zouk. Tough life, I know.

I thought I needed a second Japanese Encephalitis shot, since that’s what I was told when I received the first shot a month ago. However, after some confusion, paper rustling, and a phone call to who knows, the doctor at the clinic informed me that the shot I had already received was of the 1-shot variety, not the 2-shot variety, so I didn’t need a second shot. I’m still a bit concerned that there was so much uncertainty regarding what shot I had actually received. On the outside, I was nodding and listening, but on the inside, I was wondering: “What the hell did you inject me with lady?!”

Also, given that I had some free time and access to an extremely fast and stable Internet connection (a rarity in these parts), I overhauled my online photo portfolio. I pruned the collection a bit, added the online-worthy photos that I’ve taken on this Asia trip, re-edited some of the older photos now that my Lightroom skills are a bit better, and, most importantly, migrated everything to a proper 500px account. I feel like a real photographer now!

Here’s the link: 500px.com/kylegetz

Phuket

Upon flying to Phuket, I met up with Omar, a friend from San Francisco, who is on holiday in Southeast Asia. We spent the weekend in Patong, mostly to enjoy the city’s world-famous (read: infamous) nightlife. I’m not going to transcribe anything that happened that weekend; you’ll just have to use your imagination.

After the weekend in Patong, we took a boat to Koh Yao, a pair of small islands about halfway between Phuket and Krabi that are known for being very quiet and peaceful. It’s a good thing this was the plan all along because I came down with some kind of illness and spent the next three days almost entirely in bed with a high fever. Koh Yao is a great place to do nothing though, so while I’m bummed that I didn’t get to go cycling or kayaking or see James Bond Island, I’m grateful I had the time to rest before Chiang Mai. I may try to make it back to Koh Yao at some point for a do-over.

Chiang Mai

Some backstory is necessary for the Chiang Mai trip. For some time now, I’ve been planning to go to Chiang Mai in November to experience the two lantern festivals, so I also started researching volunteer opportunities there (of which there are many). I settled on a volunteer organization called Friends For Asia, which runs volunteer projects in several countries, including Thailand. They have a lot of great projects and I applied to a few, eventually getting accepted to be an intern at Citylife, the premiere English-language magazine of northern Thailand. My job responsibilities may include web design, graphic design, photography, layout, and writing.

Seeking out an unpaid internship in the middle of a holiday may seem borderline crazy, but I have my reasons:

• After a few months of very free-form, unscheduled living, I was craving some structure/routine.
• Some of the job responsibilities (i.e. web development) match up with my professional experience and some (i.e. photography) match up with my personal interests.
• This is a perfect opportunity to try a different and more creative career without actually committing to it. I can extend the internship on a week-by-week basis if I want; otherwise, it’s over after one month, which is enough time to develop an opinion on whether this kind of work could pan out long-term.
• This is also a perfect chance to get some insights and exposure to a foreign culture that wouldn’t normally be available to a tourist. I will have a commute, coworkers, a boss, meetings, business lunches, happy hours, and all the other normal things that working folks around the world have. I’m really interested in the prospect of having those things in a foreign culture.

I’m actually writing all of this at my desk on my first day here since there isn’t much for me to do yet, which goes to show that first days everywhere are sort of the same. I’m heading out tomorrow to take photos of a new art gallery and a new shopping mall for a couple spreads in the next issue of the magazine, so I think that things will be ramping up very quickly.

The orientation activities for all the new volunteers this past weekend included a tour of a couple temples in the city, so in the interest of not having a picture-less post, I’ll include some photos:

More on the lantern festivals later.