Ancient Ruins, Medical Emergencies, and Harry Potter: A Standard Thai Vacay

The rainy season persists here in Nan - our mornings spent bicycling to school in soaked-through plastic ponchos, our nights filled with thunder that cracks and trembles over our tin roof, and afternoons at school with downpour outside the classroom windows so loud that I can't hear my own voice giving lessons. The sun does come out now and then and beats down heavily for a few hours - only to be followed moments later by a waterfall of clattering rain. It's the unpredictable, and yet very predictable, ebb and flow of summer here.

For the Khao Phansa - start of Buddhist Lent - holiday weekend last month, my roommates and I were able to briefly escape the rain, for our first official vacation of the year. After just one quick visit to the Emergency Room (for a mysterious allergic reaction that left almost as quickly as it came), and minor sunburns for all (sorry, Mom), we survived an incredible trip to the ancient city of Ayutthaya and Ko Si Chang, a quiet fishing island along the gulf coast of Thailand.

Ransacked City, Swollen Stephanie

Long before the city o' squala took rein as the bustling capital city of Thailand, the kingdom's center was Ayutthaya - just a hop, skip and today, a 20 baht (60 cent) train ride from Bangkok. The city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, for its series of sprawling ancient monuments and temple grounds - most of them crumbling and in ruin, a result of the Burmese invasion in the 1700s. (The Burmese decapitated Buddhas for sale to art dealers; burned libraries and art wares; and destroyed much of Ayutthaya's great monuments... Then peaced out, abandoning the ransacked Siamese capital a mere few months later).

The four of us arrived in Ayutthaya in the morning, after a 10-hour overnight bus ride - filled with the usual offerings of complementary prawn-flavored chips, and a bizarre Asian martial arts-horror-comedy-in-one flick played at an excessive volume. We settled into our guesthouse, grabbed a bite to eat, and in true Nan-ite fashion, rented bicycles to begin touring the city - a small, flat commercial town, surrounded on all sides by river, that just happens to have stunning historic ruins (and the occasional trained elephant giving rides to tourists) traipsing along its streets.

We spent the afternoon picking our way through the major temple grounds, taking our time in the sweltering heat and enjoying the shortage of tourists in most parts of the sites. At sunset, we hired a woman to take us out in her longtail boat for a river tour, then shopped and snacked on chicken satay and coconut slushies at the riverside night market.

On our way into our guesthouse room that night, Steph - who had been feeling a little unwell since we left Nan, and had sat out most of the temple viewing - felt something graze her head. She looked down to see that a tiny gecko had fallen on her from above - a very ominous sign in Thailand. We chalked it up to a belated forewarning of her feeling crummy on our only day in Ayutthaya... But of course, the gecko bad luck was still yet to come. The next morning, Steph woke up with her entire face swollen, forehead to neck, ears to lips. We panicked only slightly, packed up our backpacks, and had a tuk-tuk drop us at the Emergency Room of the Ayutthaya Hospital.

The "doctor" (or the semi-English-speaking guy wearing flip flops and oversized slacks who was woken from his nap to attend to the hospital's only morning patient) said Stephanie either had an allergy to all the Advil she'd taken for her headache the day before, a bacterial infection, or, possibly, dengue-fever... so prescribed medication for any and all of the above. When we got a hold of some Benedryl at the Bangkok bus station pharmacy later that day, Steph finally started to unswell and feel a little better.

Cozy Chang

Our next stop was Koh Si Chang - a small island in the Gulf of Thailand, south of Bangkok. It took us another crowded (and unexpectedly long) bus ride and a ferry to get there, but we were greeted by clear turquoise waters, quiet streets, green hills dotted with golden temples, and a town of friendly locals. We were some of very few western tourists visible, the island mostly filled with vacationing Bangkokians and full-time fishermen.

We ended our day on a beach along the western shore of the island, watching the sun set over a beach scene filled with banana-boating, fully-clothed and swimming, and beached-whale Vacation Thais - a breed all of their own. Katie and I attempted swimming, but quickly found that the mysterious clear-and-purple floating objects grazing us in the water were not in fact 7-Eleven bags, but hundreds of small jellyfish. We opted for cold Leos on the sand instead, and spent the evening chatting away with a group of middle-aged Thais from Bangkok, one of whom was a teacher. He learned that I could read a little Thai, and proceeded to have me read information from every ID card he could find in his wallet. "What is my name? ...WOW! Can you read this? WOW!" (This is the primary reason I study Thai).


The next day we took a day trip to an even smaller and more remote island to the south. Getting there required "bargaining" with the only boat owner hanging out by the pier that morning, who preferred to finish his nap and not go anywhere that day than to lower his price a little. Eventually, with the help of passing motorbike taxi driver who looked straight out of Starsky & Hutch, we found another fisherman with a slow boat who was willing to take us for a reasonable price... although he couldn't get us all the way to shore, and we had to be shuttled in the last 20 meters by a fortuitous Thai kayaker passing by. (And, despite being dropped off a mere foot away from sand by the kayak, I managed to trip over a wave while getting out and fall completely into the water anyway).  Travel in Thailand is never quite a "Point A to Point B" kind of situation.

On the way back to Bangkok, we couldn't resist that giant billboards advertising Harry Potter 7 scattered all over the big city - and so hopped off our bus at the first mega-cineplex we passed by. Backpacks in tow, we indulged in a rare afternoon of big city life - as experienced within a giant Asian super mall.

All in all, our trip was a success - and just as we get settled back in Nan, we're making plans for the Queen's Birthday (and national Mother's Day) holiday coming soon... details TBA!