singapore, koh samui and bangkok

Me, the travel girl.. always loves adventure and new countries… well this trip wasn’t my favorite, amazingly. Singapore I loved. I didn’t feel it was “so clean” like everyone says. It felt like a normal American city - cleanliness wise. It was a nice city, but expensive. I think we could easily live there, but get bored out of our minds after about a year or so.
Mostly we just walked around, did some shopping and took photos. We loved the esplanade area where they were having a huge music festival with bands from 17 countries. we had just missed a few American indie rock gigs too we will be keeping up on whats going on there for other shows in the future thats for sure. Thats one big plus of life there - individuality, a music scene that is coming alive and for folo - guiness.
then we headed off to Koh Samui via Phuket. I did not like Koh Samui from the moment we got out of the adorable airport. it was a city almost with a few small stretches of beach. not the ideal island escape we had wanted. We had originally planned to go to Koh phangnan, but ditched it at the last minute b/c we didn’t want to move around hotels and with an early flight on sat we’d have to either get up at the crack of dawn and hope to get a boat over to samui or just stay in samui… so we figured we’d stay.. it couldn’t be so bad!
Well, it wasn’t great thats for sure. Our hotel wasn’t on the main beach, which was good and bad. It was a fabulous hotel, great bungalows facing the sea, etc but the beach it was on was terrible. it was all rocky and even the sea was full of huge rocks (which immediately sliced folo’s leg open within minutes of getting in — needless to say that was our last dip in the ocean!)
And..Folo was sick the entire time we were there and it rained for two of the 4 days. Folo attributes his illness to the changing weather patterns since it kept getting hot/sunny and then rainy with thunderstorms. but i think it was probably the 48 hrs straight of working before we left India!
We were a bit irritated with the rain, but it actually was ok since folo was sick and i can’t handle too much sun before getting sun poisoning (which happened about 4 hours of total sun time with 40 SPF on!!). The thai food on the island was pretty crap as well — except this really great place called the Spa Resort where we went for Folo’s bday. It had excellent thai/vegetarian food which made our stay on samui worth it! It seriously was the only redeaming thing about the island. The water was beautiful, but the beaches were more like goa than what we had experienced in malaysia. Guess next time we’ll have to try some real “beach paradise” like the Maldives or the Andaman Islands!
I was looking forward to getting back to the city - thinking that perhaps I just had too much “down” time and needed some real site seeing and good thai food! But even our time in Bangkok wasn’t as inspiring as it was last time. Perhaps we just had built it up too much in our minds of being our next possible destination (to live).
we didn’t do much there really. folo still wasn’t feeling well and it was boiling hot, even by our India standards and teeming with old white men with sleezy thai girls. yuck. (i really do not understand this phenomena that is huge in SE Asia — old white men trapsing around with skinny barely over 18 thai girls! What do the girls see in these guys? money?? what do the guys see in them - well thats probably obvious.. but still… yuck!)
did a bit of shopping in the malls, went to the chatachuk weekend market and the grand palace. i was ready to get back to mumbai though. we arrived at the airport super early… ready to come home. (i was worried about my kitties.. hadn’t heard anything from the people watching them so wasn’t sure if i still had cats or not!)
so.. not sure if our dreams of moving to bangkok are still intact. its a bit too modern, too organized and unchaotic for us I think. i think we are too addicted to chaos that we either need a place like dubai/singapore that is fully westernized or a place like India that still has a good 20 years to go before even reaching bangkok standards!
so… we did enjoy ourselves and loved being able to do nothing for days on end. so perhaps given that it was a fantastic holiday. we really needed some down time to just relax, read and spend time together which had become a rarity in our hectic work schedules. but given my love of travel and exploring unknown cities, it wasn’t my favorite trip. next time we need to just go to burma, laos or vietnam!
now i am back, getting back into the swing of work and planning a work trip that folo might join me for which would be fun. otherwise, just looking forward to our trip to the US this summer.
oh and another friend has now just left mumbai. our friend mickey who we met in his first week in mumbai — he’s headed to brazil where another friend from here is as well… maybe that will be our next destination?!?! sounds like it has the chaos of mumbai and of course the latin culture which i love. any good films coming out of latin america?! hah.