Arrived in Bangkok two days ago after a middle of the night flight from Kolkata. We were feeling sad to leave India, because we don't know if we will ever be back and really, really enjoyed our time there. It is such a dynamic, real, intriguing, and complicated country. We just saw a small part of it and feel really lucky to have seen what we did and have some small understanding for what will soon be the world's most populated country (approximately one in 6 people on the globe are Indian)...
I had been to Thailand once before, with my friend Kelly, for a couple of weeks in 2001. It seems very changed since then...or maybe it is just me that is very changed? Anyway, Bangkok is a really, modern-looking, futuristic city these days. It has new, fancy, public transportation lines with televisions on the trains and announcements in English. We went to the commercial, center of Siam Square in Bangkok and wandered around giant,glittering, all-white malls filled with the most exclusive of Western and Asian shops of the kind you think might be in Tokyo. And we ate great street food and drank beers sitting at plastic tables and chairs on street corners...Many, many people visit Bangkok for sex tourism purposes and we stayed in a part of the city where a lot of these tourists and businesses were located: awful and depressing.
After one day in Bangkok, we took off for the island of Koh Chang, near the Cambodian border in the Gulf of Thailand. It is a wet (nearly 100% humidity), very green, lush island that is mostly (not very well protected) national park, with a mountainous interior. Joe has never been to Southeast Asia or anywhere in Asia prior to this trip and he said yesterday that "Thailand is like travel for dummies." It is really easy to get around here. The language and alphabet are unintelligible and English is not widely spoken aside from a few words, but the tourist infrastructure is very well established and comfortable. Thailand receives more than 3 times the amount of international tourists that India does, though it is less than 1/10th as large a country.
We leave for Cambodia in the next couple of days. We have one stop before going to Siem Reap to see the ruins of Angkor Wat. I would like to get to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, by November 5th to watch the elections results with a group of Democrats Abroad there who are planning an elections-viewing party at a hotel there. Go OBAMA!!!!
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