Beach to City

Hello all.  Guest writer Lisa here today.  Aidan didn't have much to write about so I am filling in with my summary of Thailand.  We spent a few hours at the beach today and then flew to Singapore.  We had to get back to a major United serviced city in order to fly home and decided to visit Singapore instead of going back through Bangkok.

Last day relaxing by the pool

So for my summary of Thailand...
First off, Bangkok.  I knew it was a big, busy city but I wasn't prepared for how big and busy.  The chaos and grime was hard on my OCD type personality.  I don't have any good pictures to demonstrate the odd differences everywhere.  For instance, we traveled by river shuttle boat and saw shopping centers next to shacks (no exaggeration, barely four walls with cut outs for windows).  The streets are narrow and traffic is crazy.  But the sky train runs efficiently and is very clean.  And strangely, though there appears to be a lot of poverty (based on the number of dilapidated buildings), we didn't spot any homeless people or people begging for money like you see in other big cities. One of my favorite places wasn't any place we set out to see.  When heading towards the hotel shuttle boat station we came across this.

This was called a Thai Spirit House.  They are placed in the corner of properties.  This was a very large one with a beautiful tree but smaller businesses will have smaller ones too.

Chiang Mai was a more spread out city and not quite as chaotic.  But it was still far from organized.  Nobody seems to follow any traffic laws such as stopping at red lights or staying in their lane.  The sidewalks, if they exist, are narrow and overrun with street vendors.  One really cool thing about the city is that it has an old town area with parts of an old wall remain and the old moat has been turned into ponds and fountains.  We took a tuk tuk back to our hotel one evening and it was a highlight of our trip.  They no longer use pedal powered rickshaw like vehicles.  Instead they have moped powered tuktuks.  They are open on the sides and have neon lights and blasting music, the antithesis of the old fashioned type.

View from our TukTuk

The beach resort was beautiful.  There were a lot of European travelers there since there are direct flights to Phuket from some European cities.  We were surprised at the number of creatures we saw every day.  Just on a ten minute walk on the beach this morning we counted eight hermit crabs and 34 sand crabs.  There are many lizards also and prehistoric sized bugs (often dead, likely due to a serious pesticide program).

So we are in Singapore now.  Back to efficient taxi queues and not having to worry about being ripped off.  Aidan will blog about our one short day in Singapore tomorrow.