Everything Works Out When You Plan and Don’t

We’re in Bangkok! How that happened was a large amount of planning and no-planning at all.



Since my last post, we’ve travelled to Borneo, Malaysia to check out Kota Kinabalu, and then to Thailand. The highlight of Kota Kinabalu was our biggest hike yet, Mt. Kinabalu. But that’s a different story. Afterwards, we followed our plan to fly to Phuket, Thailand. We didn’t have much of a plan for Thailand and that’s a good thing because when we arrived, we found that the weather wasn’t good.



In the two months since we’ve left Vancouver, we hadn’t had a single day where the rain stopped us from doing something exciting. Sometimes the drizzle made it cooler or the sky was overcast but that just changed the lighting of our pictures and we rarely got wet. When it did rain, we were usually inside resting or doing indoor activities. So, all in all, the weather was great and conformed well to our plan.



Then we got to Phuket and we had no plan. That’s a good thing because on our first day we went to Karon beach and the wind was blowing in storm clouds. Watching a few windsurfers battle the surf, we took pictures of the coming storm and then it poured rain. Soaking wet and standing in a phone booth, Yuki says, “see what I mean when I say Vancouver rain is derppish?”

This is a beach day?


So this is what the beginning of the wet season looks like in the tropics. Well at least the rain is warmer and being soaked doesn’t make us shiver. When we got back to our hotel, And ate ice cream in a hot shower to warm up (Try it!), we found out that the weather was forecasting thunderstorms for the next 14 days. Well it’s a good thing we didn’t plan to stay here long, beaches and monsoons don’t go well together.



So, spending five or so hours on the hotel computer, we found that most of SE Asia near the coast was going through the same weather system. We started trawlling through skyscanner and the interwebs for a new destination that was near enough to fly but far enough to be out of the weather. Finally we found that Taiwan was okay and were ready to go. Yukis travel agent cousin even found a better deal than us that would have put us in Taiwan for a week and then Bangkok for only 460$ each. We were ready to go, even posting on Facebook, until we started looking for a place to stay. We would have arrived at 11pm and would have trouble getting into the city. Then it seemed that all the cheap hostels were either full of guests or cockroaches and still beyond our budget range. Late at night, we decided to pull out and go to Bangkok for some family time and see if we could plan something properly. This is, funnily, just like a blog post I read (Wandering Earl) the day we arrived in Phuket.



The next day, Yuki’s birthday, we transferred to Phuket Town and spent the afternoon and evening there. For her birthday, we spent hours in a book store, ate at a Japanese restaurant called Fuji, and then watched “Monsters University” with ice cream and popcorn.



The next day, we flew to Bangkok where we have spent the last few days hitting up all the big malls including Asiatique, Paragon, Central World, and Terminal 21. The last is an 8 floor mall we were told about by a friend and where each floor is decorated after a city. Those cities include: Tokyo, San Francisco, Istanbul, Rome, London, Paris, and the Caribbean. We haven’t gotten anything yet except for notebooks to write in our journals but we’re expecting to hit up a large outlet type mall soon that should be pretty cheap.



So far, it seems that Bangkok is shopping and temples, the latter of which we’ll be checking out in the next few days as there’s still lots to see and do here and in nearby regions.

Shopping is good but traffic sucks. Take a boat not a bus :P