Saturday 21 December 2013

khao lak - and home

Such a good place to end our tour, just lazing about in the pools or long walks along the beach.   
Behind our hotel the jungle rises up, a great green wall of pristine forest, from which a continuous range of sounds emanates, changing with each hour of the day.  Now the sound of doves, now an upwelling of chirruping insects.  At half past four on the dot every day, the evening shift starts up with what sounds like a hundred circular saws, provided by the crickets.  Then as darkness falls, it’s the frogs’ turn – redoubled if there’s a rain shower. As soon as the sky darkens, a waxing moon appears, dappling the still water with a trail of light.  The tide recedes, leaving a wide glistening strand of firm sand, onto which the crabs emerge for a busy few hours of feeding and arm wrestling.

Just north is Bang Sak Bay, an even more pristine stretch of white coral stand, with big shady pine trees at the back, and a lambent green sea.
We also took a day trip to Khao Sok National Park about 60km NE.  This is virgin forest, well protected it seems, draped across a mountainous landscape.  Said to be the oldest rainforest in the world (though this is also a claim made by areas of Malaysia and Queensland), it is well worth a visit. 

So I’ve had almost ten weeks away from home, and it begins to feel like travelling is my life.  I will be glad to be back for Christmas, but this has been the most varied and rewarding trip for me for a long time – meeting many very different people, visiting varied and stunning countryside and cultures.  I am more and more comfortable with the scenery and the leisurely rural walks, and less and less interested in the cities as I get older. In Asia the cities mostly are unthinking, badly planned, polluted and traffic-jammed, and the cultural offerings – at least those accessible to a foreigner – thin on the ground.   

London for me is everything that a city should be, and nothing compares.  I look forward to getting back to the theatres and pubs, to long walks along the river or through the parks – though not to the weather and getting dark by half-past four!

Tuesday 10 December 2013

david cameron copycat

I reckon that David Cameron must have been reading my blog.  A few weeks after my visit to Chengdu, and he goes to  all the same places including Du Fu's garden and the same hot pot restaurant.  Not to mention the pandas... which gives me an excuse to post another picture of the baby pandas!  Awwww!
Now Mr C is back in London and trying to compete - but not a patch on the real thing!

Pandas, Chengdu
Not pandas... not Chengdu

Tuesday 3 December 2013

south to the isthmus of kra and beyond

My Thailand destinations
 If Thailand is a sleeping flamingo, Khao Lak is the knee.  This was our destination for the last leg of the trip, driving down from Bangkok, with a couple of stops on the way. There is this long trailing slice of the country that slides past Burma then emerges onto the Andaman Sea, with the foot resting on Malaysia.

After negotiating Bangkok’s urban expressways with only one misrouting, we continue through the capital’s hinterland.  One of the ugliest things about Thailand is the way its cities sprawl out along the highways for mile after mile, endless factories and shophouses and mean looking road towns with vast advertising hoardings signaling the next fuel station or hyperstore: seemingly no planning restrictions at all and the architecture uniformly grim.  This stretches almost all the way to Hua Hin, so it was a relief to check into the Dusit Thani there after the first day’s drive: nostalgia for me as it was only the second grand hotel I ever stayed in, twenty years ago (the first being its sister hotel in Bangkok, a few days earlier). 

Though now perhaps showing its age a little – but in the way of a grand duchess, still magnificent and stylish and unconcerned by modern trends – its huge public spaces, all marble and vast chandeliers, embrace us.   It also has extremely good restaurants – we ate Thai and Italian very profitably.

Route 4, squeezed between the Gulf of Thailand and the Burmese border, continues down to Chumphon, our next stop.  We arrived at a strangely deserted Novotel in a gale, that continued throughout our two night stay.  Apparently this goes on here from November to February every year.  The endless wind agitates the sea so that the white-topped waves are brownish with churned up sand.  In the open lobby for dinner we seem to be the only guests; huge canvas wind breaks flap and crack: it’s like being on the Marie Celeste at full sail.  On the beach there are a few fishermen in their makeshift huts, but they seem to be staying put on dry land as the waves crash ashore.  Otherwise the shore is deserted: then we see a quick flash as a huge lizard over a metre long makes straight for the water.  In it goes, swimming very effectively, head up, and seems to surf the crashing waves, then dives under the water again. 

We continue on, and Route 4 now crosses the Isthmus of Kra (which sounds like something out of Frank Herbert) to the Andaman coast, through beautiful mountainous countryside, lush and green, with many waterfalls, towards Khao Lak.  A much more pleasant coast: gentle sea breezes at most, soft sands and a blue calm sea.

We’re hearing the sad stories of the riots in Bangkok, as two oligarchies slug it out once again, using the poor duped people as pawns.  We were intending to spend our last few days there, but may have to divert if this continues.