Karst Raving Mad

This past weekend was pure chaos.

So I’ve been working a good bit over here and have yet to have the opportunity to travel the surrounding areas of Bangkok, but this past weekend I decided I really needed a brief respite from work so I started perusing Air Asia plane tickets. For those who don’t know, Air Asia is the cheapest transportation in the world. It’s like Spirit Airlines on crack. You can fly basically anywhere in Southeast Asia for the price of a sandwich depending on the day you want to leave. So I spent some time on there and discovered it would cost me a whopping $50 round trip to fly to Krabi. From there it was just a 3 hour ferry ride to Koh Phi Phi, one of the more picturesque islands in the area and a well known location for the fact that it was filmed in the movie “The Beach” starring Leonardo Dicaprio. Adding in cab fares and ferry tickets and the whole trip to and from cost about $100. That’s a friggin steal for a beach weekend.

However before I left for my island paradise, Thursday night was the last night of group stage for the World Cup (for the US at least) and I wanted to watch the game on a real television instead of a crappy internet stream. So I convinced the other team members to go to an American bar with me to watch the game surrounded by our fellow countrymen (so when I started chanting and shouting “I believe” it wouldn’t cause a ruckus with some bypassing German). However, when we got to the bar I had found on the internet (conveniently titled “American Bar”) they didn’t actually have the game on. WHAT? They had apple pie but no TV? TV and sports are like the most American thing ever. That is a misnomer and fraud and should be punished somehow. I was let down to not have other raucous USA fans to cheer with so we started looking anew. We ended up going to the street we’d watched the Germany-Portugal game at because it had a German brewhouse so we reasoned it might have an American themed place as well. We passed the beerhouse and I managed, through great restraint, not to make any aggressive statements to all the Germans gathered there but there was no American bar to be found. Worse yet, as we explored the street every bar was packed with Germans jerseys. The Aussie bar, the New Zealand bar, the Egyptian bar, all of them. It was crazy. Germans either travel en masse or BKK is just a high profile destination for them. Regardless, there was no freedom flying anywhere. Ultimately we decided to watch the game at the UEFA Champions League because it was the least packed bar even though it was still predominantly German in patronage. We later came to find out that the bar was owned and operated by a German guy, and I swear to God I’m not making this up, the WiFi password was 88888888. Eight 8’s. To those of you not in the know, 88 is neo-Nazi symbolism, the 8’s corresponding to H’s for heil Hitler. I’d been running round all night doing that obnoxious American thing where we brag about being back-to-back World War champions and then we ended up at a bar which, while not conclusively pro-Nazi, sure had some damning evidence.

And even that would not be the biggest coincidence of the night. While at the bar, there were only a few other American’s there and it turned out that one of them was a guy named Rob who graduated UGA with me as an English major and I had taken some lit classes with. He was good friends with my buddy from high school Zach Burch and had moved to Bangkok to teach English. (Literally every European person over here teaches English or is a tourist. If you see a foreigner you don’t even need to ask what they do here. Just ask them where they teach. It is 100% their profession.) Small damn world. We ended up watching the game together with a few other Americans who straggled in and though I was sorely tempted to be “that guy,” relations between the American contingent and the much larger German coalition remained cordial. In the end they won the game, but we advanced too so it was all okay (until those damn waffle eaters got involved). We all went home and I went to sleep, preparing for my upcoming weekend adventure.

Rob and his girlfriend in the possibly Nazi bar.

Friday afternoon I boldly set forth on a solo adventure to the beaches of Koh Phi Phi (pronounced P.P.) with only a loose idea of what to do and a hostel bed booked for 3 nights. The plane flight was only 70 minutes and very uneventful. Flight was a breeze and though it was super cheap, I didn’t feel like quality was lacking or that the plane was skeptical to make the whole journey in one piece. Definitely supportive of them going forward. After the flight the airport had a bunch of people providing cheap transport to the Krabi dock and to PP so I paid them some bhat and signed up. 3 hours later, I was on the last ferry to PP with 200 other adventurers. When we docked int he bay I grabbed my lightly packed backpack and started wandering. The dock is lined with people trying to take you to a hostel or on a tour but I mosied right past them and traipsed around the island until I found the alley my hostel was on and checked in. Centerpoint Hostel was exactly what I expected; a bed in a dorm room with not much else to speak of. There were 20 beds total in the place and they were near full my whole stay there. Among the 20 backpackers at the hostel, there was 1 bathroom/shower to share and a small lounge area. However, there was free WiFi in the hostel and the rooms were air-conditioned at night. The only issue with this was that most of us didn’t return to the hostel until 4-5 AM so we only got a couple hours of air condition each night. But since most of us weren’t in a state to care whether we had AC I suppose no harm no foul.

Air Asia is the jam and toast.

Friday after checking in and dropping off my bag I decided I should take a look around the island. Coming in you could see the karsts and the bay but it was inhabited by a lot of boats so the water wasn’t as nice as expected. However, the island is shaped somewhat like a capital H with the docks on one side of the cross section. A short walk straight from the dock takes you to the other side of the island and a much prettier bay with only a few boats anchored to the beach and much clearer, prettier water. This was the bay where all the beach bars on the island were and most of the partying went down. It also faced west so it had a killer sunset at night with the sun setting between the two outcroppings of the island on either end of the bay. It was a delight.

Koh Phi Phi being all boss and stuff.

After getting the lay of the land it was time to get down to business. My primary impetus for coming to the islands was to get my scuba license. I’ve loved marine life since I was a small child and the last time I got to really see some was on family vacations as a kid with my sister, grandfather, and cousins in the British Virgin Islands. I still remember how fun snorkeling those waters was and I just assumed being able to stay underwater for extended periods of time instead of being stuck at the top would be infinitely better. Thailand has some of the best dive sites in the world and, like everything else over here, getting certified is significantly cheaper than in the States so I knew it was something I couldn’t pass up. The only issue was which dive school to choose from. PP is a small island but there were legitimately 50 dive schools on it. This island is basically entirely composed of dive schools, restaurants, hostels, and tour guides (with of course, the ever ubiquitous shop keepers selling wares). Some regulatory rule means all the dive schools offer the same services at the same prices so choosing between them is basically impossible until you’ve met the people and seen their equipment.

I ended up choosing a place called The Adventure Club because they looked like they had their act together and they had a very good website (marketing at its finest right there). So I approached their stand and started asking questions. I ended up signing up to get my scuba license then and there and would start my confined dives in the morning. That night I opted to do all my theory work so I went upstairs to their room and watched all the mandatory videos and filled out the quiz (100% across the board!). When I finished I met Julie who would be my dive instructor. Julie was from Canada and was new to PP, only moving there a month ago. Prior to that she was a dive instructor in Honduras for 5 years so she definitely knew what she was doing which reassuring. We planned on me coming down Saturday morning at 9 am to start my pool work. She asked several times if that was too early and I assured her no, that it was fine. I was wrong.

You see, PP is a perilous place. You may go to PP having no intentions of partying hard or going out all night, but PP doesn’t care about your intentions. She is an evil temptress and she ruins the best laid plans of mice and me. After leaving Adventure Club I went back to the hostel to grab my camera and then had every intention of eating dinner somewhere and spending a few hours walking around the night life before going to bed. However, upon returning to my hostel I finally met some kids camping out over there (the place had been empty when I checked in). They were all backpackers traveling SE Asia for different amounts of time who had met up randomly in places and decided to ride it out together for a little bit. George was from England and he had been abroad for 26 months just kinda floating around everywhere and Davey was also from England and he was traveling for a bit before heading to Australia for work. They had met up with 2 girls in Malaysia who were French Canadian and whose names escape me.

Sidebar: I’m genuinely shocked I remembered George and Dave’s names. I’m absolutely horrible at remembering names and over the weekend as I was meeting dozens of new people and partying with them. I ended up just calling most people by their country of origin. This worked out surprisingly well and it was unilaterally adopted by everyone else which meant I spent a good portion of the weekend walking around being called “America” which is probably the proudest moment of my whole life. It would be like naming your baby Freedom. You just feel like a winner.

Dave and French Canada draining some laughing gas at the beginning of the evening.

Anyway, so when I met these kids we sat around and chatted for a bit and then they asked me if I was coming out with them. How could I refuse my new friends? I couldn’t that's how. It would’ve been rude. Having been dubbed “America” I was honor bound to uphold all the principles of America including hospitality and stupidity. I won’t let it be said that I let our great nation down in the realm of international affairs so I gathered myself up and followed my new compatriots out the door and towards adventure. To start the night off we met with a gaggle of other backpackers who I barely recollect and we all purchased beers from the 7-11 around the corner.

Sidebar: a note on 7-11s. Those of you reading this back in the states may be confused at such an outdated reference instead of just saying “convenience store” since 7-11s have been gone for years. However, I don’t mean 7-11 as a catch-all term for convenience store, I mean actual 7-11s. Contrary to my previous belief, 7-11s are not extinct rather they are EVERYWHERE over here. They’re basically the only convenience store I’ve seen in Thailand and we have frequently joked about the potential for a 7-11 drinking game where you go into one and buy a beer and have to finish it before you get to the next one, repeat until you reach your destination. Sadly, this game is unplayable as nobody involved would make it more than a block. They are that prevalent over here. Like Starbucks in the States only more insidious.

After grabbing some Chang’s (a local beer which has an alcohol content that can range from 5-12% depending on the batch you get) we headed off into the night. There were so many bars to choose from I’m not sure how we decided where to go but we ended up at beachfront bar called “Slinky’s” which was actually a phenomenal party spot. It's on the beach so that is an obvious plus but aside from that it had a mechanical bull, this narrow tower that people would climb to stand on and dance/get rowdy, and a fire show including fire-dancers, a flaming hoop for bystanders to jump through, and flaming limbo. All of this was against the background of raucous club music and EDM lighting. And the best part was that the bar had no real boundaries and was right next to a, you guessed it, 7-11 so instead of buying overpriced drinks at the bar everyone just went to the 7-11 and got them half-price. All of this combined created one wild party and it seemed like half the island ended up at Slinky’s before the night was over.

Total power move. Carrying another guy under the flaming limbo. 

Not Chang's. Tastes a little better though.

Sidebar: Now some of you might be thinking to yourself: “Self, did he just say lots of alcohol, young people with mediocre decision making skills, tall towers to climb up with no nets beneath, and copious amounts of fire? Not to mention the ocean right there. That sure doesn’t seem safe. That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.” Yes. Yes I did say all those things and I would certainly agree with you on all counts. There is no way that bar has a good safety record. It’s just not possible. There was minimal security or oversight and they were actively trying to get very inebriated people to do physical activities with a whole lot of flames involved. This is an absolute disaster scenario for a worrying parent (love you Mom!) but all the rules just seem to be a lot more lax over here. Maybe it’s because suing someone is tougher over here or maybe it’s because suing poor people generally doesn’t yield a lot of results or maybe the legal system isn’t as conducive to the overly litigious as ours is, I’m not sure. But I do know that half of the things I see here daily wouldn’t be even sort of okay back home. Before I started law school my cousin, whose an attorney, told me that it changed the way she thought and that now she walks around seeing all the angles for suing somebody. Instead of driving down the road and seeing a fallen tree branch and thinking damn, now she thinks “tort!” My time in law school has conditioned my mind similarly and everyday I walk around Thailand I am barely able to have a coherent thought for all the TORT!’s (mine is in caps because I’m more of a loud, obnoxious child than my cousin is) in my head.

This guy was an absolute monster. Aside from his shirt which is quietly the best thing ever, he was straight jacked diesel. He kept climbing up support beams and doing the waving flag. Dave tried to prove he could do it to but Dave was wrong.

Back to the point though which is that Slinky’s on KPP was absolute anarchy. And also incredibly fun. The DJ was pretty good and everyone on the island seemed to be hell-bent on having the best time of their life so we all just joined the party and as many of my friends will attest to, when the drinks start flowing so too do my dance moves. Well the drinks were ample in PP as were the lovely ex-pat ladies and our little backpacker group raged through the night with me dancing aggressively the whole time. Over the course of the evening I lost my shoes, jumped through a flaming hoop, found my shoes, limbo’d a flaming limbo bar (which I was an idiot about because by the time I decided to do it the bar had dropped from shoulder height to waist height making the difficult task of balancing whilst heavily inebriated infinitely more treacherous. Not falling over backwards during my Friday night limbo is one of the top 5 athletic achievements of my life, which should speak to the difficulty of execution but more likely speaks to the woefulness of my athletic achievements) re-lost my shoes, climbed on the roof, and showed all those good foreigners a little bit of what America is about by dominating the mechanical bull. If you managed to ride the bull for 2 minutes (an absurd mark consider professional bull riders only have to hit 8 seconds) you got a free shot from the bar. Well since America invented bullriding along with freedom, I felt it my civic duty to show the visitors to PP what the Red, White, and Blue is all about. So I saddled up and through sheer force of belligerence and braggadocio I rode that bull until the bar was one shot poorer. I then explained to everyone around that that was not my first rodeo when, in actuality, it was.

My dastardly foe.

French Canada 2 getting thoroughly demolished by the bull.

Post bronco-busting, the night gets really hazy and starts teetering into the realm of unacceptability for this family friendly blog so I won’t go into any details here. If you’re really that interested you’ll just have to wait until I write the book of my adventures over here. The only thing I will say is that I genuinely have no idea how I made it to bed that night considering I barely knew where the island was much less my hostel and lost track of my group after a short amount of time. But somehow I woke up Saturday morning at the hostel, significantly hungover but physically alright other than some heavily busted up knees and ankles. I had had the genius forethought to set an alarm before we went out so my phone alerted me to the fact that I was due at the dive shop in 15 minutes. I gathered myself up and got ready to dive, feeling like hot death wrapped in a turd sandwich.

This post has gotten too long by far so I’ll end the weekend tales there and continue them on the morrow. Thanks for reading everybody. You keep reading, I’ll keep posting.

Jed