Koh Kood

My sense of Manhattan is that getting most places takes 45 minutes by subway. Here, it seems like everything takes an hour. An hour by songthaew to the ferry. Ferry to the island, about an hour. An hour to/from the airport. Flight from Udon Thani to Bangkok, from Bangkok to Trat, an hour, an hour. It's kind of funny to me. 

So, Koh Kood, I'm not even sure what to say. The water at the big beach was just so, so beautiful, the most perfect aqua I've ever seen. Long, long, slow deepening of pure sand into the Gulf of Thailand, light colored sand, if not actually white, gentle swells and small waves, totally my jam (Marc likes bigger, sharper waves, and kind of body surfs them). Everything about floating in that water was bliss, with one teeny, tiny exception. We got teeny, tiny stings from something that really did sting, but left no marks. They certainly weren't enough to keep us out of the water, or to ruin the experience, they were just the only exception to perfect in that water. In my mind it will remain the Platonic Ideal.

There was one strange thing on that specific beach: a large compound-type hotel of cabins that reminded me of a camp, that was All Russians All the Time. In fact, there was a sign on one of the buildings that said "We Shop Russia West," which we could make no sense of. They wrote in Russian in the sand, they got hefty Russian massages on the beach, they chattered in Russian and ate loudly in Russian. It really was unusual, and if we were more curious we might investigate, but it'll just linger as a bit of "huh?" for that beach.

Also on that beach, Marc's exploration uncovered a little restaurant at a hidden-away hotel of some kind that had the BEST food. We ate there every night but our first night, and of the four nights, I got shrimp curry three times, and of everything we tried, I think we both agree it was the best, and not just the best for their menu, but really perhaps the best Thai dish we ate on the whole vacation. The waiter spoke English and was the sweetest young man, with a very sweet smile. He pointed at an older man and told us he was the cook, and I don't know if maybe it was a family running the place? Anyway, it was just so delicious.

This shrimp curry was AMAZING. The first night,
the curry sauce was very thick and the other nights
it was a bit looser, perfect for soaking into rice. The
shrimp were perfectly cooked, slightly soft but not
mushy, and the curry had a bit of an Indian flavor,
with some kind of celery-tasting herb.

Marc got this fried fish with garlic, and while
it was hard to eat (and so, not for me), he said
it was really delicious.

These money bags -- a kind of fried
spring roll -- were perfectly fried the first
night we had them. I always think fried food
served on paper towels means they know
what they're doing. I think that's just me.

The iffy part was our hotel, The Hideout. As Marc initially said, they were very reluctant to help, but over time he modified it to say the help was substandard. (It was the first place we've been where the great majority of guests were Thai; there was a young couple from the Netherlands, who we met on the way from the Rimklong, and another western couple, but the rest were Thai, which might explain why the staff at what is advertised as a very highly-rated resort spoke very little English. But OK, we are in Thailand.) When we arrived, they went through the check-in process, handed us a key, and that was the end of it. So we stood there for a minute and Marc asked how we find our room, and with a seed of annoyance, the woman pointed out a golf cart that held our luggage and said we could follow him. 

So we walked behind the luggage cart to our "villa." VERY weird. I mean, it's hard to talk about that without sounding haught -- clutching my pearls, we had to walk -- and that's not my point at all. It's just that it was so weird. We have 18 years of experience traveling in Asia, and have stayed at places like this one (and fancier, and shabbier), and nothing like this has happened. Really, it was her being bothered by having to tell us how to get to our room that was the point.

We wanted to rent a motorcycle to ride away from the hotel for some dinner the first night, and there was a whole parking lot full of motorcycles. The website said they rent motorcycles. The front desk closed at 6pm, and we were there around 4pm asking to rent one. "For how many days?" she asked, and Marc said for four hours. So the implication was that sure, she'd rent us a motorcycle, how many days, but when he said four hours -- which is the fee segmentation -- suddenly there weren't any available, they were all rented by guests. After Marc pushed and pushed, she finally said we could take hers, but we'd have to have it back by 6, when she got off work. A minute later she said OK, four hours, but you'll have to leave the key at the restaurant. It was just a perfect indicator of their unwillingness to help guests. (Really, this was primarily a front desk issue. Staff in the restaurant were friendly and kind.)

Another thing we'll remember about Koh Kood is an in-our-face continuation of a thing we've noticed elsewhere in our SEAsian travels: all the posing and photo-taking of young women. At the water's edge, there were 10 sunbeds -- my favorite place to pass the day, listening to the quiet sounds of the water coming in and out. It was also one of the prime locations for this photo-taking business. A couple would go to one of the picturesque spots and spend 30-45 minutes with the young woman posing, this pose, that pose, glancing over her shoulder, back to the camera fixing her hair, facing the camera making the peace sign, FOR SO LONG. On, and on, and on, and on. All the young women ran through the same poses, it seemed, as if they had received a guide or manual. And they'd return, day after day, to do the same thing, even though the view didn't change, nor did their poses. We couldn't figure it out. The young man would take photos for a few minutes, then he and the young woman would review the photos and she'd return to posing. Given the uniformity of the poses, you'd think some could just be taken off the web and claimed as their own -- back to the camera, playing with her very long black hair, hat on head (and always the same hat). One young man had a tripod and SLR for his daily photo sessions. The young men were never in the photos, not even with the young women. It was really, really strange, but so common that it must just be a cultural thing we don't understand.

The room (our "villa") was so bizarre. Taking up almost the entire room was a high concrete platform, with a bed on it. The night tables were on the platform, too. So to get on and off the bed, we had to take a giant step onto the platform, and I had to walk on it to get around to my side of the bed. It left very little floor space. At the foot of the platform was a narrow couch that took up the length of the platform, and it was really the only place to put our suitcases -- which meant that if we wanted to be in our room, we had to just be up on the bed. It was just so weird. Each "villa" was a concrete stand-alone small building, but they'd added some kind of bamboo structure around them to disguise that. It was actually a clever design solution. When we were looking at the hotel website before booking our stay, we kept wondering what the bamboo cages were around the buildings, and that's what they were about. The daily maid service took five minutes, although on the fourth day they didn't even do that. The steps up to our villa were rotting and dangerous, so to get up to it, I always held on to the column and took the giant step up to the porch, instead of the two rotting steps. Weird, for the kind of hotel they are pretending to be.

And again, it's hard to find a way to talk about it without it sounding haughty and offended -- it's really just that it was so WEIRD.

But oh, the setting was so beautiful. Most days I spent the whole day lounging at the water's edge, listening to the sound of the water and reveling in the long, flat horizon that my spirit craves.

Sunrise/set were to our far left and right, so we only got them
obliquely, but the haze often made the colors so beautiful,

Lovely after dark, but I always got eaten up by bugs. Who
seem to adore me.

I'll miss this daily spot.

The pool captured at the bottom of the shot, bar on the right.
Stunning palm trees at dusk.

Marc wandered around a lot, explored our part of the island,
but I couldn't get enough of just being in this spot. I mean it
when I say I'll miss it so much, but I sat there enough hours
to get the quiet surf sound embedded in my inner ear.

Each "villa" had one of these things.

Just, LOVE.

I got so much color! I'm just about the same 
color as Marc, who always gets nut-brown,
but the undertones of our skin are different so
it looks a little different. But I now have a 
beautiful tan. 

There was a tree right next to the spot I always
took, and I spent so many hours with my legs
propped up on it like this.

When it was time to leave, we got on a songtheaw, just us (cool, I thought!), until the driver made a stop and so many young people got on that their luggage had to be piled on top, and we were all wedged in so tight. The kids at the end were surely at risk of falling out, and I was wedged so far against the edge that my left leg went to sleep. They were VERY loud -- no louder than young people anywhere, I think about the NYC subway -- but along with the heat, and the headache I had so many days, and the bouncy ride, it was a lot for me. We got to the pier (a different pier than the one we'd arrived on) and just had no idea what to do. A young Thai man helped us, and we got on the smaller but faster boat than the one that had brought us to Koh Kood, and when we got to Trat, a beautiful, cool, quiet car driven by a sweet young Thai woman took us the hour-long drive to the airport (everything is an hour away!).

the waiting area :)

The Trat airport is so tiny, so charming and strange, like an airport run by a few kids who decided to have an airport. We finally realized we weren't in the departure area just as it was time to board the easy flight to Bangkok. The taxi ride from the airport to our hotel took -- guess what, an hour -- and we settled in for our last hours on this trip.

Udon Thani and Trat

We had two transition cities in a row, getting us from Chiang Khan to Koh Kood -- one was wonderful, the other was really, really not. The really-not one first:

Lee, at our great hotel in Chiang Khan, arranged a private taxi to take us to Udon Thani, a 3-ish-hour drive on multi-laned highways. Udon Thani has a history with the US government, which had an important military base there during the Vietnam War. The Royal Air Force Base there is also a CIA "black site," and was used to interrogate one of bin Laden's top guys. One of the first things we noticed was all the western white guys, first at our hotel pool, and then clogging all the small bars around our hotel. Like, exclusively white guys, and without accompanying white women. Our hotel was OK enough, it only needed to give us a place to sleep and it did that well enough.

Urban pool, very different from our lovely Chiang Khan pool!

As always, Marc had done a lot of research to find us a good place to eat dinner that night, and he scouted out the location before we both headed over. It looked a bit strange, in a kind of mall at the edge of some outdoor food stall kind of malls, but we couldn't argue with the ratings and the photos of the food and menu we'd seen. (But we learned a pro tip: it's not enough to see the menu and recognize that they also provide English, without pausing just a second to see what the English is. A simple English version of the Thai name for a dish tells us nothing if we don't know what that dish is.) (As we would realize.)

The interior had extremely tall ceilings and a kind of .... ballroom feel, maybe? But then they had utilitarian tables and chairs, like you might get at Office Depot, and the mismatched vibe was really strange. They handed us menus and here we went -- what is Tom Blah Blah? What is it, exactly? What's in it? We couldn't figure anything out, and there was no English spoken by staff, so we kind of picked stuff and hoped for the best. We wanted two waters, and they brought one but kept it on a little trolley away from the table. I reached over and got it and put it on the table, and the waitress put it back. Only she was going to be serving water. Each time we'd take a sip of water, she'd swoop in, take away our glass, slowly top it off, and then put it back on the table. But here's the thing: the food was so, so awful that we needed water available at all times. We ordered one thing that seemed to have quadruply fermented crab coated in fermented fermentation something and then the whole thing rotted and fermented. At first, the loud crunch of what we think might've been crab legs was hopeful: maybe it would be as great as the meal we had our last night in Chiang Khan, that had super crunchy pork belly. But then the rancid, putrid taste hit us. I'd also ordered Pad Thai, just to be safe (the only dish name I recognized), and it was serviceable but if it touched a microscopic bit of juice from that rancid crab thing, the bite was disgusting. I put my napkin over the untouched food on my plate, and we paid and left. The taste in our mouths was so gross we found a 7-11 (ubiquitous!) and got ice cream bars. Back at the room I brushed my teeth long and hard, trying to get the taste out of my mouth.

Just looking at this nasty-ass dish is enough to activate my gag reflex

Udon Thani was just so strange. One the one hand, it felt like Fake Thai, for westerners, but at the same time it was really Thai, inaccessible to westerners. I still can't figure out what or how to think about Udon Thani, but I don't need to waste any time trying to understand because we'll not be going back. We asked the front desk of the hotel to arrange a taxi -- a thing they readily do, everywhere we go -- and the crazy price made sense when we saw that we were being taken by the hotel's van. For just the two of us. 

To get to Trat, we flew one hour to Bangkok (BKK), where we had to retrieve our luggage, check in to another flight and check our luggage, then go through security. Luckily they'd delayed our second flight to Trat so we didn't have to stress out -- especially since dealing with BKK always seems to mean walking from the farthest end of the terminal to one spot (baggage claim), then eventually walking to a different farthest end for the next thing. We flew on Bangkok Airways, the only flight available to Trat, and we really enjoy BA. They have private airports that are kind of precious. In Sukkothai, the BA airport also has a zoo, and the employees wear pith helmets. In both airports, you are fetched from the plane by trolleys that are kind of station-wagon golf carts, and driven from the runway to the airport building. Luggage arrives in little wagons, and the guy take it off the wagons and put it on the platform, where you retrieve it. At Trat, every employee salutes you.

The flight was 45 minutes, but they served us a hot lunch
of chicken and curried rice, and it was a thousand times 
better than that gross food in Udon Thani.

So funny, the trolleys from the runway.

luggage pickup

We were picked up by a songthaew, arranged by the Rimklong Hotel for us for the 40-minute ride into Trat. We'd stayed at the Rimklong seven years earlier, and liked it a lot. It's small, convenient to things we're interested in, and we were in luck with our Saturday night stay because it was the monthly big fancy street market on the street in front of our hotel.

The hotel lobby -- a huge espresso machine, but
cappucinos served in tiny tea cups.

the street in front of the hotel, empty for now, but
soon packed with stalls

The sweet guy who runs the Rimklong (and who would talk your right arm off and whisper in the hole) advised us of a good place to eat, so we wandered a little bit, down the street to see a wat. 

Entering the grounds of Wat Phai Lom --
I love that big beautiful tree (and my
travel partner)

these doors!

The restaurant seemed to be a family-run place -- the grandma and grandpa seemed to greet us as we walked in -- and while the interior wasn't fancy, the food was a relief, because it was passably good enough. After that terrible food in Udon Thani, we're kind of burnt and shy about it, but the menu provided brief English descriptions of each dish so we at least knew what we were getting. My shrimp curry had way more pineapple and way less heat than I'd have preferred, but it was good!

My shrimp pineapple curry

Marc's fish, with a good spicy sauce

And this salad, which was really so, soo good, but I
don't now remember what it was, for sure. Besides good.

After dinner, we walked through the night market, where Marc got us some banana pancakes ("Honey, it's a good thing you didn't watch her making them to see how much oil she used.") We ate them in our room and then wandered out to the street market going gangbusters. It's a monthly event, and it seemed like a chance for friends, families, to catch up with each other, for young people to see each other, for musicians to play, and for people to do all kinds of shopping, not just for food and snacks, but for clothing, jewelry, purses, shoes, etc. We noticed an endless amount of sushi for sale -- booths with essentially sushi buffets set up, and as I told Marc, "One thing I'm not gonna do is eat street sushi on a hot, steamy night in Trat."

My traditional spot: waiting on a curb, somewere outside of
the general hubbub, while Marc explores the market looking
for something for us to eat. And sure enough, he brings
something delicious for us to eat, as he did with our
banana pancakes.

It's a real scene!

Just so much delicious-smelling street food.
Plus lots of street sushi.

The next morning we were sharing a songthaew with other Rimklong guests to the ferry (40 minutes, everything seems to take 40 minutes to an hour!), for the ferry ride (an hour) out to Trat. They were a sweet couple from the Netherlands with a 3yr old son, and we had a very nice conversation about the terrible state of politics in the US and the Netherlands. It's often the case that we're in a "we'll figure it out when we get there" kind of thing. When we left the songthaew, while we had pre-purchased ferry tickets, it was a big scene and nothing was clear. We went to a window and showed the image of our ferry tickets, then were handed two white tickets and pointed to a different area. It seemed we were going to get on a songtheaw kind of thing to be taken to the pier, so we got on, and yep, dropped at the pier. We kind of saw that we'd need to get our luggage from the wagon and carry it onto the ferry, where someone took it, and we found seats, and off we went. 

These life jackets were the MOST confusing things! The 
ferry staff had to keep showing people, one at a time, how to
figure it out. I still couldn't tell you how to do it, and when 
we leave, I'll have to figure it out all over again. Ridiculous.

When the ferry stopped on Koh Kood, it was a reverse version of getting on. Standing on the pier, we figured out that they were going to unload our suitcases in some way, and then we got ours and now what? We saw a ramp, walked over there, lots of songthaews, no idea what to do, how to get to the hotel (Marc had asked them ahead of time and got no reply), but we finally learned that there was a woman with a clipboard who'd tell us which numbered songthaew we should get on. Our Netherlands friends were staying in the same place, so it was nice to see them and their adorable little boy.

But the hotel itself is for the next post because WHOO BOY.