The vacation was far too long and stuffed with events to describe in one go, but fortunately I have the emails we sent home from Thailand & Nepal. There are 4 of them, and together they tell the story of our vacation well enough.

** First email - “Hello from Bangkok!”: 02.10.2005 **

Hi all!

So it’s the end of our third day here, tommorrow we’ll be on a plane to Kathmandu. So far everything is great and we are enjoying the trip and having a great time.
Bangkok is very different from what we’ve seen so far, anywhere. The city is amazingly polluted. When you go out to the street, you get a hot smelly sensation all over you.
The city is a mixup of old and new. There are many modern skyscrapers here, and one look away - small ancient temples. The transportation is highly developed here - a subway, taxis, tuk-tuks, buses, river taxi, and a sky train. We tried most of these transports :-).

By the way, tuk-tuks are small 3 wheeled motorcycles that have a place for two passengers. It’s the fastest way to travel in the city since their drivers are worse than Israeli taxi drivers - they cut through lanes, drive on the opposing lane some of the time (generally it seems that the lanes on Bangkok roads are recommendation only, people don’t really pay much attention to them), and with the tuk-tuk being small and maneuverable, it’s easy to reach your destination quickly.

We’ve been very busy trying to visit as much of Bangkok as possible. Yesterday was a particularly packed day - we visited some temples and the royal palace, cruised on the river on a boat-taxi , went to the weekend Chatuchak market (it’s so big that in 5 hours we went through a very small portion) and finally the rain sent us hiding into MBK - a shopping mall that would make Grand Canyon blush - 7 huge floors. Generally, there’s a major rain at least once a day here, and so far we ended each day very wet - although it doesn’t interfere with the touring much. The rain usually starts in the evening and lasts a couple of hours - turning the streets into rivers. Source (Shoresh) sandals are mandatory here - now we also understand why most Thais wear beach slippers

The food here is very diverse and amazingly cheap. You can eat a satisfying meal of Pad Thai for 15 baht (1.6 NIS), and even restaurants cost very little (today we paid about 16 NIS for a lunch for two). We are trying to be careful with the food and drinks, not consuming anything that looks [too] dangerous, and so far it’s paying off - we are not experiencing any major problems with our digestion.

** Second email - “Hello from Pokhara”: 05.10.2005 **

Hi all,

We are currently in Pokhara - a small (and very beautiful)
mountainside town from which all the Annapurna treks start. We already
have everything organized for the trek which we start tomorrow
morning. It is a good place to remind you (especially the parents)
that during the trek (that is, in the next 10-12 days) there will be
no contact with us whatsoever, so please don’t worry.

We arrived to Nepal two days ago. It’s quite a shock ! This is a third
world country, everything looks just like in these movies about the
third world. Nevertheless, it has good facilities for tourists. The
people here are very nice, they look different from the Thais (more
Indian-like) and speak English much better (which was a pleasant
surprise). Israel is quite popular here because of the many trekkers.
In Pokhara every third shop has something in Hebrew written on it.

Kathmandu looks from the plane like a small village (with 700,000
residents…), and so it looks when you are in the city itself. The
streets are narrow, without sidewalks, and extremely crowded. Enormous
number of merchants try to sell all kinds of useless stuff to you like
violins, fake bracelets, tiny chess sets, miracle tiger medicine, etc.
In the evening someone might come quietly from behind you and offer
you “something to smoke” (we were offered 5 times only yesterday!).
Add to this a lot of noisy rikshaw and taxi drivers, frequent
electricity black-outs and loud Indian music and you get the picture

We went around the city, visited the “monkey temple” and Durbar
square, managed to get lost quite a few times which luckily gave us a
good opportunity to see some of Kathmandu outside the Thamel (the
tourist district, similar to Khoa-San in Bangkok).

Today early in the morning (7:00) we got on a bus to Pokhara on the
“Tribhuvan highway” - Nepal’s primary road. Road-conditions-wise it’s
somewhat worse than the road from Daliyat el Carmel to Osafiyah, but
scenery-wise it’s the most beautiful road we’ve ever seen. It goes
through and between high green hills, rice terraces and low clouds and
just leaves you gazing with an open mouth sometimes. Also, on the road
we met a very friendly Tibetian guy and spoke with him a lot, and a
nice German guy with whom we’ll be trekking. At about 2:30 PM we
arrived to Pokhara.

We wish you all a happy new year and an easy fast, forgive us for all
the bad things we did to you this year (for instance, that we couldn’t
have been there with you for the holidays).

** Third email - “Back from the trek”: 12.10.2005 **

Hi guys,

We are back from the trek, tired, but very satisfied.
We saw all of the mountains from up close, went many kilometers by foot (on average 7 hours each day, when 10 hours was our longest day), slept in shabby lodges, and in general had a great time.
Our porter was also semi-guide, he led our way, and helped with translation to the local people.
When walking, every new person you meet, should be greeted with a “Namaste” (a local ‘hello’). It’s very nice, and gives the feeling that everyone is friendly. The nepali people on the way are of (mostly) 2 sorts: porters, guids, and carriers: people who carry a lot of heavy baggage on their backs (and often with a bandage attached to their head), or people who try to sell you something: either merchandise, food, or offer you a lodge to stay.

We met many interesting travellers on the way: canadians, chinese, japanese, irish, danish, german, south african, and many israelies. All have interesting stories to tell, and all want to see the great views around.

On the way we saw rice fields, flower fields, many waterfalls and rivers (and some shabby bridges above them), forests (like in the fairy tales), small villages, and of course 8-km high mountains.

Our average day went like this:
6am - wake up and order breakfast
7am - eat breakfast (the nepali people are very slow…)
7:15am - start walking
12:00 - stop at some village and order lunch
13:00 - eat lunch
13:15 - start walking again
14:30 - 16:30 - stop at some village for the night.
20:30 - 21:00 - go to sleep.

(Now is 21:25, way past our bedtime, we are tired ).

We plan to have a day of rest tommorow, and go for rafting a day after (for 3 days).

** Fourth email - “Back in Thailand, Koh-Samui”: 23.10.2005 **

Hi all,

Thanks for the emails, we read them all, although didn’t have the chance to reply.
We are now back in Thailand, back in civillization (although a non-English speaking one).

The last thing we wrote about was the ABC trek, after which we took a day off in Pokhara to rest and do some laundry (2.5 NIS / Kg). The day after we went to a 3-day rafting tour on the Kali Gandaki river, with a group of 28 people from all around the world. It was a great experience, although the rafting itself wasn’t very hard and was rather less exciting than we expected. But we slept in tents on the river bank for two nights, ate camping food and made bonfires, talking with lots of interesting people. The guides were all Nepali, very experienced and professional - so we felt quite safe. They did everything from steering the rafts, manning safety kayaks, cooking our food, helping establish the tent camp, and even supplying “something to smoke” in the evening. Actually, when they ran out of Hashish, they rushed to a nearby village to get some more (from some grandmother, as one of the guys who went with them said). In the meantime, the people were not neglected as it turned out that an English couple that was in the group had a supply of their own. This was all really entertaining, though of course we didn’t take anything (Shabak - are you reading ?!). We were 8 people in the raft (plus a guide named Saila), 3 Israelis, 3 Germans and two Canadians (father and son who actually live in Nepal). Our boat didn’t turn over during the whole rafting and only one guy fell off in the rapids (the other Israeli) and bruised his legs a little. Naturally, in calmer waters we pushed each other out of the raft quite a lot

Afterwards we took another day off. Pokhara is a really great, calm place for relaxing. The lodges are cheap (ours costed 17 NIS per night), food is cheap and you can just walk around, staring at the lake and the surrounding forests and mountains, doing nothing.

Then, we went to the Royal Chitwan National Park, in the south of Nepal, to visit the jungle and ride on elephants. We managed to do quite a lot in the day and a half we spent there - we visited an elephant breeding center and played with baby elephants (which are born weighting 100 Kg), sailed in a canoe along the river seeing a crocodile, walked in the jungle for a few hours with monkeys jumping from tree to tree all around us, and rode an elephant for about 3 hours under a rain (besides, the elephant decided it would be very funny to throw mud on us !). During the elephant ride we saw two rhinos (both of them lying lazily in small ponds) and one tiger (hiding from the rain under a bush) in the jungle, which is quite rare (we can consider ourselves very lucky to have seen a tiger). So our visit in Chitwan was short, but fruitful. On the 20th we hurried to Kathmandu for the flight back to Bangkok, which took off at 8:30 on the 21st.

Just after landing in Bangkok, we tried to book a bus to Koh Samui (the most popular of the tourist islands in southern Thailand - especially after Koh Pi Pi and Phuket were damaged by the tsunami last year) in one of the travel agencies in Khoa San. Not surprisingly, it turned out that booking a 18:00 bus at 16:30 is quite difficult, and after checking with 4 different agencies, we realized that all the tourist buses from Khoa San are full. We didn’t dispair though, and bravely rushed on a Tuk Tuk to Bangkok’s southern central bus station to try and get a bus from there. This turned out to be a completely different Bangkok - one where no one speaks English, all the signs are in Thai and there is barely one western face in one hundred. To make a long story short, we did manage to get our tickets eventually, for 19:30. This is a night bus (with a toilet, seats which fold back at a 135 degree angle and plenty of space for the feet) which reached Surathani (a southern coast city about 800 Km from Bangkok) at 5 in the morning, and after another two buses and a ferry we finally arrived to Koh Samui at noon.

Our plan here is mainly to relax and rest. We found a great lodge (akin to an Israeli tzimmer) on the Lamai coast strip just 20 metres from the sea, and we see the beach from the porch. Last night we got to see a Thai-boxing fight show. The weather here is not perfect, with weak rain from time to time, but it’s still warm and very nice.

We already booked our bus back to Bangkok - our flight takes off on the night between the 26th and 27th, and on 27th morning we’ll be back in Israel. So see you then !

This entry was posted on Friday, November 4th, 2005 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.