HAECF Travel Blog

Thailand is branded the land of smiles.

A lot of people were smiling when they saw my crappy efforts to walk out of that bus station and I didn’t appreciate it at all.

The rest of the 4 days of that trip, I was famous up and down the street I was staying. My ankle had ballooned to such extreme levels I had children stopping their mothers and pointing at it, numerous Thais stopping me and pointing at it - as if I somehow hadn’t noticed - and every massage place within cooee offering to help fix it. No dice - there was no WAY anyone was going near that ankle. I even had a British cyclist go past me and when he saw me he broke hard to a stop, waited for me to limp up to him and then asked about it.

The worst part was sleeping. The hotel had the air-con on and two nights I woke up shivering. Normally this is ok. But when your busted ankle is shivering it causes amazing levels of pain.

I neevr went to a specialist because I didn’t trust the medical services of Bangkok. Then, 4 hours before I was due to go to an airport I was stopped in the street by a Canadian. She was the physio of the Hong Kong Rugby 7s team and said to me that actually, there were a lot of good places in Thailand that could have fixed me up real good.

Geez.

Coming back to Australia, the X-Rays showed I had broken a bit of my bone off but it wasn’t anything important so they just left it.  Another thing the X-rays showed was I had already broken bone off before but didn’t know it…

When I got out of that boat, I could barely walk. My left ankle was swelling hugely. I just wanted to go back to my hotel so I limped over to a bunch of the motorcycle-taxi guys and asked the price to the bus station. They quoted an outlandish figure and I said no. I negotiated. They didn’t budge. I negotiated. They didn’t budge. Then I tried to walk off as any good negotiator should do and…  made less than 10m in 30 seconds of limping. No negotiating was going to happen that day.

As I sat on the back of the motorbike I was nearly passing out. My brain was swimming. I actually put my head on the back of the rider to go to sleep then realized how insane that was on the back of a motorbike doing 35mph.

So I kept it together. And arrived at the bus station in one piece. I cannot describe how terrified I was of the upcoming bus journey, given the extreme amount of bumping around experienced on the way down to Pattaya.

Luckily it was the express bus this time. I passed out for an hour and a half and came to while the bus was entering the outskirts of Bangkok. cont…

I took the boat out, did the parasailing and .. it was probably the lamest “extreme” thing I have ever done. I have the photo from it which is cool but overall, my crotch hurt, it didn’t last very long, and it wasn’t scary at all. I guess nothing is after sky-diving…

When I came down I was so desperate to make something of the day I had been having that I asked them to go up again. And get this, they said no! Even at the rip off prices. They just wanted to go home as the day was getting kind of late for day-time businesses.

I had to get back from the jetty onto the boat. What happened next will stay in my memory forever.

As I jumped the 1.5m the jetty the boat pitched massively and I landed hard on my left ankle, twisting it and shooting a massive bolt of pain through my body.

After recovering from their bouts of laughter, they managed to ask if I was ok. Through wounded pride and gritted teeth I lied - “Yes.”  I knew my day had ended in that moment. But the fun wasn’t over, not by a long shot. Cont next post

I’m fine with delays. I’m fine with bumps.

But when your bladder is nearly bursting and it feels like you only need the slightest jolt to set it off, you start getting worried. It was 3 hours like this.

When I got off in Pattaya I took one of the sweetest pisses ever. However, the fun wasn’t over. It turns out I had gotten off at the wrong place, 15km away from my real destination. It also took 30 minutes of trying to talk to no-English Thais to figure this out. (I’m in no way insinuating that Thais should learn English for the purpose of helping lost tourists.)

That was ok. Arriving in Pattaya central on the back of a hired motorbike-taxi thing (and that was so much fun) I was stunned by the huge amount of prostitution. The rider took me down the main prostitution street and we’re talking hundreds upon hundreds of prostitutes all jammed into a 500m strip of bars. It was quite depressing. Overall, Pattaya was a sad, depressing, place because of this. The beach was ok but not anything special. I sat down to a barely warm meat pie that cost me $5 and looked forward to my day getting a lot better.

I promptly got massively ripped off by a Thai bar owner and paid nearly double for my parasailing gig that I should have. This happened because I couldn’t find the parasailing people anywhere and had to ask this guy for help. Part 3 coming up

Disaster story.

I went on a trip to Thailand a couple of years back for business. Actually, for a failed business but we’ll forget that. The real fun of the matter was ruining my ankle in a foreign country, on a trip all by myself, and 3 hours away from my stuff and my hotel.

That day had one goal. To go parasailing.

I took a bus from Bangkok to Pattaya looking forward to a great day. Soon after leaving, the niggling need to hit the toilet struck me but I wasn’t too worried - 2 hours of freeway would save that one. But this wasn’t the express bus I had asked for. This was the extreme non-express bus. So instead of cruising down wide, flat, roads, we were NEXT to that beautiful highway on a small, rutty two lane road as the bus trundled along picking up passengers. Part 2 coming up.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!