Thailand

Our time in Asia has come to an end and tonight we head onwards to New Zealand. It has been nearly three months spent in Nepal, Thailand and Indonesia, but as is always the case it doesn’t feel like it has been that long and I am little sad to be leaving. 

The region has contradictions that dwell in my mind. I often have heard Thailand and Bali described as ‘paradise,’ and they do have great beauty and warm climates but for some of the people living here there is also poverty and a lack of access to basic resources with no obvious route to improvement. I came to the region thinking about the conservative nature of the governments, for example the restriction of speech against the King in Thailand, and internet censorship in Indonesia, yet the day-to-day experience is the exact opposite: business based on conversation and trust, loose adherence to laws (e.g. traffic) offset by patience and goodwill, and in general a sense of ease rather than uptight-ness.

After Nepal we headed across to Thailand, with a few days exploring Bangkok before travelling to the island of Koh Yao Yai. Coincidentally we were in Bangkok the week preceding the King’s funeral and the preparations underway were on a monumental scale, and every street was lined with photographs of the king taken throughout his life. He himself was an avid photographer, it would appear, and in most of the photographs he has a camera hanging from his neck and he often took photographs of the people he met on his tours, which appeals to me as a most unusual role reversal.

If there is a paradise on earth, I believe its centre to be the Gulf of Thailand! We first stayed in ultimate luxury on Koh Yao Yai in the Santiya resort: a huge room and balcony perched on the cliff edge looking west to the sun setting over the ocean and an infinity pool of perfect temperature. From there we travelled by car, by speedboat, by long-tail boat, by scooter and by golf cart to arrive in Ton Sai beach to more basic accommodation but even greater natural beauty. 

Ton Sai was devoid of ‘regular’ tourists and pretty much everyone was a climber, yoga practitioner, or BASE jumper. Food from the handful of restaurants or street vendors was super tasty, and the beach bar is possibly the best location on the planet for watching the sun set over the sea. The sea is warm, the climbing excellent and the internet decent.

I really, really want to return to Ton Sai for a much longer period of time. Climbing gear and a laptop, and I would be able to spend many,many productive weeks there.

We moved on to Phuket, staying in Patong, a destination chosen primarily for being close to a pole dance studio for Ugne. Google ‘Patong’ and you will find many articles describing it as a classic tourist trap, and in many respects it is with a multitude of bars, sweaty and sunburnt tourists, and horrible traffic. But it’s actually also a pretty good base from which to explore Phuket and the apartment block we stayed in was wonderful – tucked up on the hill with a tidy room, a swimming pool and a gym.

I met an interesting guy during this time – an ex-professional poker player and currently full time crypto-currency trader. I know little about crypto-currencies, but it turns out that professional poker players were early adopters of Bitcoin as an easy way to move money between players and across jurisdictions. Talk about an unexpected windfall when your cash transfer mechanism turns into the hottest traded instrument of the century, and makes you more money than the job that earned the money you wanted to transfer in the first place! 

Since then I have spent a small amount of time understanding crypto-currencies. Who knows where the underlying block chain technology leads. I doubt Bitcoin is the final answer in the same way that AOL was not the final answer for the internet boom, but in time block chain will create entirely new ways of running some businesses. Who knows the price where Bitcoin settles, or if it will blow up as many predict, but for the near term I think demand will continue to outstrip supply and prices will rise, on the basis that there are still many individuals and institutions that are not participating in cryptocurrencies but who desire to join the party. 

I will write about Bali as well at some point, but these are already words a-plenty and fairly random thoughts strung end on end, so thank you reader if you have ploughed through to this point.