Well Mrs Columbus has bounced back from whatever was keeping her under the weather today, and so we have been able to venture out a little more and see some of the Bang Tao area.  This part of Phuket gets a little less traffic than the main beaches a little farther south (Patong, Karon, Kata) – I suspect part of that is because there is not really any sort of village or town here, mostly just hotels and resorts so I think that the people that come here probably are not as interested in any night life and/or just want to hang out on the property of where they are staying.  Certainly if you were staying at one of the big resorts like the Sheraton or Le Meridien they would have so much to offer in terms of amenities that you could just relax there and while the days away.

We like the slow pace here and the fact that there are not drunken partiers all about, but we also like to explore around a bit, so this afternoon we set off for a walk to Surin beach.  Surin is the next beach south of where we are, and is separated from Bang Tao by a headland that juts out into the sea, but a short 20 minute or so walk via the road and we are there.  The beach is a lot busier here than at Bang Tao, and there are a lot of little bars and restaurants all along the beach.  It is easy to see that while much smaller (Bang Tao is 8km long vs Surin at about 1km) this beach seems to attract more people.

It is a nice spot to people watch for a bit, and point out people who maybe should take a more honest friend along next time they are buying a bathing suit 😉  A little light lunch on the beach and then we decide to walk back to our hotel and soak in the pool a little.  We round the day out by stopping in at the River-side restaurant for a great meal – this is a place my parents recommended, and we had thought it was closed as we went by it yesterday and it looked like it was all rolled up for the season.  It turns out that they have indeed been closed for the last month, but tonight was their first night back, so we lucked out.  It was very good as advertised, so it was cool that we were able to try it out before we moved.

We are moving tomorrow morning to Kata Beach and back to the Kata Palm where we stayed last year.  We will likely stay there until it is time to come home, but we have a short list of things we want to do around there so I am sure the time will be gone before we know it.

We arrived in Phuket a couple of days ago, and decided to try out the beach at Bang Tao – this Beach is about 1/2 way up Phuket Island and just south of the airport. We have never stayed here before, but at the north end of the beach is where most of the high-end resorts are. Also, my parents put in a few weeks here on each of their last 2 trips, so we figure it must be worth checking out.

We are staying at The Kris Resort towards the south end of the beach, it is more of a boutique hotel than a ‘resort’ and Mrs Columbus is far too adventurous to go in for one of those frilly high-end resorts. The Kris is also where my parents stay when they are here, and they quite like the friendly staff and the location. This area is very quiet and peaceful and it sort of reminds us of our stay in Khao Lak last year. Certainly part of that is due to the low season we are traveling in, as I suspect it is quite a bit busier here in the high season, although even in high season I assume it is a lot more low-key than the more renowned tourist beaches towards the south of the island.

So far we have not done a whole lot – Mrs Columbus caught a bit of a fever the day we arrived and we have been trying to take it easy while she recovers, but she is not that great at being a sick person and keeps trying to get up and about. I suspect we will extend our stay here for a few extra days so we can get back ‘up to snuff’ and then do a little exploring, but such is the nature of traveling without a fixed agenda 🙂

Unfortunately our Internet connection here is a little spotty, so we may not be updating very often…..

We are leaving Chiang Mai today to head south to Phuket and try and take in some beach goodness.  I guess that means I would be remiss a little if I allowed myself to become such a slug that I did not get some comment on the blog about our last few days here!

After reconnecting with our friendly and super-helpful guide Riam from last year, and spending the afternoon with her looking at a few things close to the city we decided to book a couple of day trips with her to see some things we did not see on our previous trip, but that are far enough out of the city that you cannot really cover more than 1 in a day.

Our first day trip is to Doi Inthanon – this is the highest peak in Thailand, rising about 2500 meters above sea level and is the center of a national park bearing the same name.  The drive takes about 2.5 hours south-west from our hotel in Chiang Mai, and about the last 1/3 of the trip is a twisty road that climbs the mountain to the top.  At the top of the mountain is some sort of government research facility that is fenced off from the public, there are lots of signs around indicating that you should not take photos, and one sign says something about neutrinos, but I don’t read enough Thai to garner much more than that.

Even at this height the jungle is still very thick, but the temperature is a little more ‘moderate’ if you can say that about Thailand.  It feels like a nice warm summer day in Seattle, and Mrs Columbus comments that some of the plants and flowers we see here are the same as what she grows in her flower garden back home – I do however point out that we do not have any banana or palm trees in the yard at home…..  Just down from the summit there is another peak where the Thai people have built separate monuments to the King and Queen.  The monuments are quite impressive given their location and like everything else here they were built with manual labor.  Mrs Columbus suggests that we should have some like that for ourselves at home – I agree and tell her I will build hers right after she is done building mine 🙂  Further down the mountain we stop for a short hike up to see another waterfall – this hike is much easier than the one we did the day before!  Then it is back to Chiang Mai for what has become our evening routine – dinner, a massage, and a banana pancake before wrapping it up for the night.

The next day sees us up again and ready for 9am when Riam is picking us up for a trip to Chiang Dao Caves.  To the north of the city about 1.5 hours is a complex of natural caves that go deep into the mountain.  It is estimated that there are a total of about 12km of interconnecting caves (about 8 miles) but apparently some of them go so deep into the mountain and are so narrow that they have never been fully explored.  There is a big temple complex here as well, and in days gone past the monks used to live inside the caves, but they have clearly moved up a notch as the caves do not seem all that comfortable to me.  As we walk up to the cave entrance you are a little in awe about the opening/entry way, and the smell of ‘cave air’ hits you almost immediately.  From the main entrance there are 5 ‘caves’ or caverns that are open to the public, the rest are closed off either due to the lack of oxygen in the air in those areas, or because of the tight spaces.  Two of the three caverns are lit with fluorescent lights, but the other three are only accessible with a guide and a camping lantern.  We head off with our guide to explore the ‘lightless’ caves first – the guide reminds us several times to watch our heads (for rock outcroppings and low ceilings) and to watch our step as it can be slippery.  It is not until we are in into the caverns that we realize about the slippery bit – as one might expect if they were thinking it through, the caverns make quite a comfortable home to bats, and the floor can be slick in places where the bats have deposited their droppings….!  The caves themselves are completely amazing – we were in a cave before in Krabi and had some idea what we were expecting, but we were in for a big surprise – some of the caverns are big enough to put our house in!  As we wander through the maze of passageways and rooms the guide takes time to point out various rock formations that resemble different animals or trees, etc.  Then we come to a small opening that I think means we have reached the end – wrong, it is just a small ‘door’ to the next ‘cave’.  We have to crouch very low for the 2 meter channel, but then it is back into the giant caverns like the last cave.  All told we are inside for about an hour and only see about 15% of the estimated full cave size, but walk away very impressed with what mother nature has carved out of the limestone here over several hundred years.

Outside the cave entrance there is a pond with a bunch of fish swimming about, and legend has it that if you can find the fish with the 3 fins on it’s tail then you will receive ‘chok dee’ (good luck).  We mostly don’t have a clue what we are looking for, but spend a few minutes searching before wandering off to look at another part of the pond – this is when our guide rushes up and points out Mr Lucky Fish himself – so chok dee mahk for all of us 🙂  On the way back to the city we stop along the road to see a rice field that is in the process of being planted.  Each ‘paddy’ is about 1/4 of an acre in size and is completely worked by hand.  The rice needs a lot of water to get started, so unless you are near a river or some other water source, rice is planted 1 time per year.  The ground is flooded, and then worked with a relatively primitive ‘plow’ into a nice thick muck. Once it is nice and gooey, the planters come in and plant the individual rice seedlings by hand.  As the crop grows, it spreads out (sort of like grass in your lawn) and the field drains and you are left with plants growing in soil.  After about 6 months the rice is ready to harvest and then is processed similar to wheat, with the seeds/grains being extracted from the top of the dried plants – this of course is also done by hand.

Our last stop of the day is at the local market close to Riam’s home where she goes everyday for fresh ingredients for cooking.  Between the market and her large garden they don’t need (or buy) a lot of goods from the supermarket like we do back home, and everything is fresh!  Finally to round out the day it is back to the city and another round of our usual routine.

Our last full day in Chiang Mai is almost completely a slug day – Mrs Columbus and I sleep in a little, and spend some time laying around the hotel reading books and catching up on emails and such.  We venture out sometime after noon for a little walk around the city and then head off to the Spa where Mrs C gets her hair done and then massages all around!

I should give a bit of a shout out here to an electronic gadget that I did not have last year – this year I am traveling with an Amazon Kindle.  When mom and dad came down to take over stewardship of the kids while we were gone, my dad asked if I wanted to borrow The Precious (as we have come to refer to it back home).  I had though off and on about maybe borrowing it, but at first was just going to go with ‘dead tree’ type books as I usually do, but dad offered and I figured I would give it a shot.  I think I saw a single tear form in my dad’s eye as he gingerly handed it over, but after using it for a week, I am a total convert!  I had tried to do a little reading on Mrs C’s iPad that she got for her birthday, but found it a little heavy for my liking in terms of reading books on it (she seems to quite like it though), but reading on the Kindle I find to be a great experience – I can use it one-handed, and there are more books on it than I could read in a single vacation and it consumes less size and weight in my bag than one of those large size paperbacks.  And of course if you ever run out of things to read, it can access Amazon via 3G wireless in like 80+ countries to download new books in just minutes.  Definitely a thumbs-up on my travel gadget list!!

Lastly, returning readers may have noticed that my postings contain much less photos than last year.  This is partly due to the author being a bit lazy in getting his photos sorted 🙂 but also because the connectivity to upload things has been a little spotty so far.  I have finally been able to start uploading stuff this evening, and they can be seen in the gallery here.

And we are off to Phuket…….

A lot of people we talk to about our trip(s) to Thailand ask us why we like it here so much – it is always hard to quantify the whole rationale because it is not one thing that is the ‘gotcha’, but a bunch of things working together in concert.

One that is on the top of my list though is the relaxed pace of life here.  Don’t get me wrong, people work hard here, and most of what they do is done manually, but the sense of urgency that we seem to be wrapped up in back home just does not seem to exist here.  Sure we are on vacation so care a little less, but even in the mannerisms and actions of the locals you can tell that the rat race we are exposed to every day is a lot more subdued here.

I had almost forgotten how easy it is to almost shutdown here and completely relax, but it is just a few days in and already I feel like the treadmill has been dialed back from 11 and is set at a zen inducing 3 🙂 Time for us is now measured not by what day it is, but by how many days we have left at this particular hotel before we check out.  We get up in the morning, have breakfast (some time between 8am and 10am when it ends), and while sitting outside enjoying our morning meal decide what we are going to do with the day.

For the last few days this has consisted of just walking around the city and getting a bit of exercise while doing a little shopping, and seeing some of the old city.  The big decision of the day so far has been if we should go for our massage before dinner, or after dinner, and I guess what sort of massage to get – Thai massage, back massage, foot massage, etc.  With so many options I guess I shall just try as many as I can 🙂 Rachael in fact has asked me to get 3 or 4 a week for her, so really I am just following orders.

We finally connected last night with our tour guide from last year (Riam).  We had thought we might bump into her again at the temple where she found us last year, so had walked through there a few times, but finally resorted to the cell phone.  She agreed to meet us at our hotel in the morning to suggest some things we might like to see outside of the city.  We have a few ideas including a trip to Doi Inthanon – the tallest mountain in Thailand – but they are full day trips, so we chat for a few minutes and decide to stop at a couple of ‘factories’ on the way to one of the smaller national parks and a short hike in the jungle alongside a waterfall.

Along the way we stop to see a place where they make silk fabric, and there is an area where we can see them extract the silk threads directly from the silkworm cocoons and spin the fine filaments into a larger thread that is cleaned and then dyed into the various colors for weaving.  All of the work here is done by hand right from the spinning of the threads to the weaving of the cloth.  A weaver doing a solid color/pattern can do about 5 meters (about 15 feet) of cloth per day, but someone doing one of the many intricate patterns slows down to about 5cm per hour (about 2 inches).  The cloth and the patterns are quite exquisite, but Mrs Columbus is more in sightseeing mode than shopping mode, and after looking around a bit we move on.

Our next stop is at an orchid and butterfly farm.  I had no idea how orchids were grown, and that they were quite a tricky plant to grow and get to flourish properly.  There is apparently a large number of these farms and they spend a lot of time trying to grow ‘crops’, and cross pollinate different species of plants in order to try and create completely new ones.  In addition to growing and selling the flowers there is quite a market to sell the plants to tourists who take them home in a special bottle (where they can apparently thrive for a few weeks), but they also have a process for encasing the flowers or the petals in a lacquer to make pendants and ear-rings out of them.  They also do this with butterflies (hence the butterfly part of the farm) and the array of jewelry is actually quite impressive.  I don’t escape this place quite so lucky as the last though because Mrs Columbus has managed to get her shop on and pick up a few items to return home with.

Our next stop of the day is at Mae Sa National Park to hike up the waterfalls – there is a series of 10 waterfalls cascading over each other along about a 2km hike.  The scenery is amazing, and hike is very serene and peaceful, but it is about 90 degrees out and we are in the jungle, so for us it is damn hot!  By the time we get to the top Mrs Columbus and I have shed about 5lb each in sweat, and we both look like we just walked through a car wash!  Some relief is found at the top though as we wade into the refreshing water and cool down a bit, that and of course most of the trip back is all down hill 🙂

On the way down our guide Riam offers to take us to see her garden on the way back to Chiang Mai, and this is a bit of an honor for us to be invited to see some of their personal world so we feel very fortunate.  Her ‘garden’ is really more like a small farm (sorry Rick she has you beat by about 2 acres).  They grow lots of vegetables as well as some fruit trees, and some of the local Thai spices like lemongrass and galangal.  We get to pick some Longan right off the tree as it is very close to being ready to harvest – this is something we don’t see in the USA but can perhaps be described as like a grape but with an outer skin you peel off to expose the fruit inside.  It is very popular all over SE Asia, and we are lucky to get some fresh off the tree.  We end the afternoon with a short ride back to the city and a plan to meet again in the morning for a trip out to Doi Inthanon.

Now, back to decision time – massage before or after dinner…….?!

I had to take a few days to mull this post over and get back into more of a zen state before writing it all down – it will likely help keep the curse words out of my rant 😉

It feels to me like in our ongoing chase for the loot, we continue to excel at lowering the bar.  As we outsource more and more ‘menial jobs’ we sugar coat it by talking about our intellectual property and our strong service industry.  Sadly it seems to me that on the service industry side the expectations of actual service get lower and lower all the time.

As Mrs. Columbus and I were setting out on our summer adventure we were all prepared to get the show on the road.  We had used some more of our affinity points to book business class tickets so that we could enjoy the trappings of ‘the good life’ on the flights and not have to endure 30 hours of economy class discomfort (often referred to as ‘cattle class’ by members of the family).  We show up at the Seattle airport with our bags in tow (1 checked and 1 carry-on per person), all our documents at the ready, and eager to step into the business class check-in for the ‘large domestic carrier that starts with a U’, thus bypassing the long line at the regular check-in and one of the ‘perks’ of flying business class….  You are first prompted to use the self-serve kiosk, but realistically for anyone not traveling domestically only, you are going to have to see an agent – as the kiosk re-affirms for us after going through the full process to try and check-in: Please see an agent to check-in.  After standing at the front of the line for about 15 mins, I figure out that there are 2 agents that are servicing the elite status check-ins, however, one seems to be fairly busy with a single lady – it turns out that the lady is some sort of travel agent, and the counter agent is doing the check-in for a ‘large group’.  The large group is not actually present, and are all flying economy class, so it turns out that these people, who are not even at the airport yet, and who would normally have to stand in the regular check-in line, are actually getting better service than all the other people waiting in either the elite status line, or the regular line!! I ask the lady if there are any other agents working the business class check-in and get rudely snipped at: “I am working on a large group and going to be a while, you will have to wait for the next available agent.”  The other agent is/has been working with a group of three other business travelers who’s flight has been delayed for several hours and are trying to find another route home.  Apparently the delay is ‘weather related’ so the ‘large domestic carrier that starts with a U’ is not interested in trying to transfer them to another flight.  We finally get frustrated enough waiting in line (about 20+ mins) that we actually go to the economy class counter, where a more pleasant agent apologizes a couple of times and checks us right in.

So finally we are checked-in, make our way through security, and are off to the gate to wait about an hour or so for the flight to board (us being some of the people who actually show up early and prepared per the recommendation).  Now we are about to take advantage of the 2nd perk of our business class status – the business class lounge.  The business class lounge was always the utopia for fliers – free drinks (sodas, cocktails, etc.), snacks, light meals, and a quiet relaxing place to step away from the chaos of the general departure area.  In the ongoing lowering of the bar, the lounge has been ‘cutback’, and no longer offers much in the way of food service besides a light snack, and clearly the supply of peanuts and pretzels that used to be given out to the cattle class passengers.  But still offered is the complimentary libations and sodas and the lure of a more comfortable chair – or not…  I get to chuckle to myself as we walk up to the door to see that the lounge has temporarily has it’s liquor license suspended by the state and the refreshments are now limited to non-alcoholic beverages.  Not really a big deal to me as I am not planning to get loaded for the flight, but seriously – how does a business class lounge in an airport get it’s liquor license suspended?!  The joke is really on me though as when we actually walk through the doors, the one ‘agent’ working the front desk is swamped and there is actually a line to check-in.

Now you might ask, how does all this relate to the lowering of the bar of the service industry – well all of the frustration to this point aside, you get through it all and start to relax, and then we cross the invisible line that is the international carrier – it is like walking from a black and white photo to a full color frame complete with rainbows and sunshine!  After our jaunt from Seattle to LA on the ‘large domestic carrier that starts with a U’ we transfer to our international carrier (Thai Air) – the business class check-in is fully serviced with 3 agents, the service is polite and helpful, and customers seem to be treated with regard.  We have a 6 hour lay-over, but the lounge is large and roomy – there is hot food, cold beverages, and actual attendants passing through from time to time pre-announcing the boarding for flights so that you can pack your belongings up and walk comfortably to the gate.  And then in the final slap in the face of our domestic experience, we board the plane with lots of smiling, helpful flight attendants (6 I think for the business and first class cabin).

If all you ever did was travel domestically, you would think that we have it as good as it gets, but in reality we have fallen sooo far.  The level of service we have come to accept as ‘OK’ is nowhere near what it used to be, and miles behind what many other parts of the world offer. All in the name of progress?!?

/rant off

PS: This is of course not at all unique to the airline industry, but very representative of most of the service industry that we live in.  🙁