Scribbled on the back of a train ticket: Bangkok – 7/29/09

Background information…

 

We are off.  Just over a year on the road with no set plans other than having to stick to around $60 per day for the family and that means staying with

 friends and family or staying exclusively in developing nations.  No Europe no major cities, minimal air travel.

The long and short of it is that my father, who had been ill for a while, died last summer and that triggered two events: first it made me realize right then and there how quickly life goes by, how fast my two daughters are growing up.  Hana is 11 and Maya is 10 – in just about five years from now they will quite likely be over spending time with their father and in about eight years they will be gone.  I have to spend time with

 them now.  The second realization is that we as a family had spent all our free time in Oregon each summer and Christmas for years to spend time with my father.  That tradition was gone, so what to do?  It took about five minutes max before I realized that I had to try and put together a backpack traveling journey with the family.  My wife, Jenni, and I had spent years backpacking around Asia when we were not only younger but B.C. (before children).  This was our chance to show the girls around all the places we used to go and a chance for us to look back in time a bit and 

return to the places where we got married, honeymooned, and got to know each other.  It is true that once you set your mind onto something it often just happens.  Don’t think about going to Easter Island.  Buy a ticket, get a visa, pack a few things and go.  

Everything will largely stay the same while you are gone – we are not as essential as we would like to think, maybe.  For us it was a matter of selling almost everything, renting out the house, paying off bills and scratching together some savings and we’ll see you again in August 2010: Broke, tan, and hopefully glad we did it.

And away we go…

Lines and lines at LAX which is good prep for the trip.  Everybody might as well get used to sitting on the ground, leaning against their packs, and just people watching or breaking open a book.  It is going to happen a lot on this trip.

Spent about 20 hours flying and EVA Air was great – if you are not familiar with them they get the Charlie Thumb’s Up.  I had never heard of them before but 

they are a Taiwanese airline and everything was just first rate.  Watched movies, the food was actually edible (always stick to the Asian menu choice though), and slept very little.

My Thailand is gone…

Arrived and Bangkok just isn’t the Bangkok of yore. It’s much nicer, cleaner, much less traffic, and, well, not as cool in many ways, not as rough.  I remember 20 years ago when there were French quarters where all the old Nam era (and earlier) Frenchmen strung out on heroin were living and that was where the cheapest guesthouses and the filthiest restaurants and whores were.  The days of opium and freaky strip shows are clearly long gone.   Now it is tourists and taxis (the tuk tuk is largely a tourist attraction rather than useful daily transportation) and everything all built up.  You can’t go home again, especially to Bangkok.  Thailand is now the most beaten path in all of Southeast Asia. 

First thing off the plane was getting a taxi and within two minutes the price went from $30 to $13.  That hasn’t changed.  The next issue, especially for the kids, has been the heat and humidity, which can be astounding at first, but quickly you get used to just sweating a lot.   Feels pretty good in some ways.

Our plan is to spend just one night in Bangkok, and buy tickets for Ko Tao on the overnight train for about $40 each which should be fun.  Sat there waiting for the train tickets to arrive, drinking a Singha beer, feeling like Graham Greene, and watching the parade go by.  The tourists are a lot whiter and softer than they were in my time but the one constant is that younger male British whilst drunk are still about the worst tourists around.  Carrying my mace and baton in case of trouble on this adventure and the most likely source is a sodden Limey.  Disclaimer:  all this being said probably the best people I meet on the trail are the British, especially Scots.  The other good group is the Kiwis from New Zealand.  The worst are Americans.  By far.  They are embarrassing to be associated with IMO.

It is super cool to be showing the kids the same places I was 20 years ago before they were on the scene.  Bangkok is still exotic, still just sketchy enough to be interesting and still deeply funky.  I love it so far and, more importantly, so do the girls.  All of us are together literally 24 hours a day and there have been zero arguments (a slight fear of mine going into the trip – what if everybody is at each other’s throats after a week?) and although we are all very short on sleep it is so far so good for us.