drewish.com

preliminary thumbnails are up for

preliminary thumbnails are up for everything but krabi (the upload crashed out) i'll add titles to the rest of the photos and get them updated as i go.

i've gotten most of the

i've gotten most of the thailand pictures uploaded to the website (http://drewish.com/photos/2002/thailand/) but there are no thumbnails or html pages yet so viewing them is a bit rough. i'm trying to get sam to install the program i need to generate the thumbnails. i'll let you know when that's done.

home now

i'm home now. i walked back from the airport and realized how much i miss thailand already. i dunno, i'll probably bury myself in climbing at the gym and work for a couple of weeks until i'm over it.

did i ever mention that my shoes got stolen? yeah, off the front porch of my bungalow about a week ago. it made the walk home kind of a pain in the ass, but with three pairs of socks and a pair of sandals on it was alright.

got a house full of new roomates: dan is living here again, james and his dog joey are in joe's old room, and little bob from boise moved into my brother's old room.

an israli editoral i happened to like

i'm packed up

i'm packed up--read completely overloaded--and in krabi waiting for the bus to bangkok, in something like 42 hours i'll be on a plane to the states. last time it got this close i blew off a ticket and stayed another 4 weeks. i can't really do that this time, i have neither the money nor the good will left with my family who've been taking care of my affairs back at home. next trip i'll cut all the major ties before leaving.

i don't think i'll be hitting the internet again until i get home so consider this good bye from thailand. i'll send out another email when i get all the pictures i took sorted out and up on the web site. please be patient it might take a week or so.

diving went well

well got back from the diving trip last night. it was 6 dives in two days with a night spent on the dive boat. my diving instructor phil on koa phangan will be happy to hear that i finally saw some fish. the visibilty was great, 15-30m. we did a night dive in maya bay, where the movie the beach was filmed, a wreck dive on a ferry that sunk 3 years ago (insurance fraud was probably the cause) and 4 other dives on reefs. very cool and definately worth the money but i think i'm burned out on diving for a while.

i've got about 4 days until i have to head up to bangkok. my friend add will be going with me, she's got a short vacation at the same time. we'll climb one day, the morning of the next and then grab a bus up. i'll have a day then a flight out at 09:00 the next morning.

jesus, some times i confuse bush's presidency with a tv sitcom.

just checking in

okay just checking in really. no new wildlife stories, just a few more toads hopping around my bathroom. got my bus ticket to bangkok today. going climbing again this afternoon.

i'm packing in the days of drinking two cups of coffee in the morning while reading the previous day's paper (they take a while to get here from bangkok), then either climbing or playing tacrow on the beach with the thais. round it out with a quick swim as the sun sets and then over to coco's for dinner and a couple of games of pool. i've pretty much quit drinking, it's too expensive here.

tomorrow i'm going to take the advanced open water diver course. two days and 6 dives, should be pretty cool.

climbing

two days ago there was a bat flying around in my room, i guess it's better than finding the meter-long grass snake in my shower like my neighbors did. the monkeys have finally stopped turning over my trash and my tacrow game is still improving even after taking 4 days off to climb.

speaking of which, climbing is finally starting to happen for me. the day after the last post, i went out with the british couple again and lead a 6b and a 6b+. the next day i went out with a scottish guy, named alex, in the morning and did my first multi-pitch climb only three pitches of 6a but i was really into it. In the afternoon i went out to thaiwand wall (yes that's how it's spelled) with this really cute filipino nurse from san diego (bite those knuckels) and did a couple of 6as. today my friend add has the day off so we'll go over and do the tonsai groove tube.

for reference here's a climbing grade conversion table, it's a bit softer than the one in the guide book though, it showed 6b+ as 5.11 something.

i'm a bit scared to be doing the count down to departure again. in less than 10 days i'll be on a plane home ahhhh!

monkeys

well the monkeys (ling in thai) turned over my garbage can three time yesterday and the little ones figured out how to squeeze between the roof and the top of the wall and get into my bungalow. happily though, my soap is still around.

i've gotten some real climbing in in the past two days. the first day, with the thai accountant named add, i made it up a 6b+ that i'd tried twice before and yesterday with an english couple i hit two 6as.

wildlife

the theme of this week seems to be wildlife in my bungalow.

i've been fighting a loosing battle this week with some kind of a rat or chipmunk over my soap. the first couple of days i was here, there were teeth marks on the bar of soap. then a few days ago, it disappeared completely. i went into krabi and bought a new bar, then upon returning showered and went for some dinner. i came back and found my soap gone again. now as close friends and ex-girl friends can attest i love a good feud. i'd developed all manner of whilley e. coyote-ish rat traps baited with soap but so far the third bar hasn't disappeared, the new menace is the monkeys.

yesterday while i was down on the beach playing tacrow (like hackey-sack but with a bamboo ball) a troupe of monkeys swarmed through the bungalows turning over trash cans and stealing anything they could eat. not yet sufficiently wary of the wildlife i'd left my back door open. in they went and stole the food that was left over from my last supply run to krabi. fortunately it was all pretty gross so i didn't mind the loss, the annoying part was that the monkeys thought it was pretty gross too so they just sort of scattered it around.

krabi

well shit. i finally made it into krabi town on a day that the northwest office wasn't closed and got through to them. baaaad news. my ticket expires tomorrow, they're not nice on the phone, it's non-refundable and none of this was printed on the ticket. after pricing around a bit i've found (and purchased) a one way ticket home leaving on the 21st for 17710 baht. you do the math. let's have no comments on this bit of bad planning, i'll be thinking about it when i'm working those extra hours to pay for it.

oh well, the thing to remember is that i am in thailand and there are a lot of worse places to be. bouldering is free and with new year's behind us everyone is leaving so the prices of bungalos should go down. i should be fine cash wise, it's just going to be tight when i get home.

the ny times has a good article on the untold side of bush's missle defense system

nothing's up

okay so a week since my last update. not much has happened, climbed some (rock mostly, but i want to get a couple meters up one of the coconut trees), worked on my thai (i can say the numbers up to 999 (i can't remember the word for thousand)), ate a lot of food (as long as you stay away from the faranag (foriegner) food it's cheap), and relaxed.

oswald will be okay

The cat should be taken care of. Still haven't heard back from NorthWest but at this point it's academic, I'm two days from Bangkok. So the only questions are how much will it cost and when will the flight be. Some Canadians told me that I'd be lucky to get out by the 10th, I've gone into fullbudget mode just in case. That means no Chang, two meals a day and no excess internet.

Either way I'm totally stoked. Today I went climbing with these two Thai girls who are accountants at one of the hotels. Climbed my first 6a (they use the french system of measuring climbs here) but the sand from the beach, which you climb off of, got in my shoes and gave me a couple of of blisters. Not to mention my hands and arms are trashed. Afterwards we went swimming with their friends and i got schooled on some Thai.

I'm putting my name up on the message boards again so who knows who I'll be climbing with tomorrow. You all have a merry Christmas and New Year.

raile beach

okay i'm on raile beach and it's unbelieveable. i'm changing my ticket tomorrow so i can spend some more time here. as a sign in front of one of the climbing stores says "climb now work later". anyone want to take care of my cat? i'm serious i'll trade you a couple of beer changs or something, email me.

i did a half day with a guide and this israli guy, it was great. first time sport climbing and it was a blast. i want to pepper every sentence with the word unbelievable. ahh i'm speechless oh and the internet is REALLY expensive here try 5 baht a mintue on for size. stings eh?

made it down to krabi

made it down to krabi, the boat ride was great. i had plenty of time to think on the way over, came up with some good commentary that would have made an interesting post... and then completely forgot it.

finished diving

well i finished up my open water course today. got stung by lots of the tiny jellyfish again and the visibility was crap but i'm reasonably comfortable with the gear and in the water. tomorrow i'm catching the ferry to the mainland with and then a bus down to krabi with an irish girl from the bungalos. maybe i'll actually get to do some climbing before i leave.

my diving partner is a sweede named michael, he's offered a place to stay in sweeden for a couple of days if i do my big trip. at this stage i'm trying to chain up a ton of places to stay, that'd make the trip realistic in spite of the high cost of living in europe. so far i've got a place in england, the netherlands, germany, (possibly) poland and sweeden. from there it's just getting acrooss finland and into moscow.

the hard part will be staying focused once i get home, to get the money together i'll end up working full time but'll have to cut out trips to the bar and most of the eating out. i'm pumped right now, hopefully i'll still be pumped in 3 months.

first open water dive

i took my first open water dive today, two of them actually. it was like swimming in a milkshake. i'm still pretty stoked though. two more tomorrow and i'll have my cert. then it's off to krabi.

i've been sharing a bungalo with these two british guys, they're both really fun. done quite a bit of drinking and eating, listened to a lot of bad asian pop music and wishing i could stay longer. i spent an entire evening trying to talk myself into changing my ticket so i could go rock climbing and then head into laos and cambodia. then i realized that my parents leave the day before i get back and the cat will expect someone to feed him for the week they'll be gone. probably for the best.

my new day dream (that may yet become a plan) is to go home and make enough money that i can do a trip across europe into russia, take the trans-siberia railway drop into china, teach english for a while. tour southeast asia, then down to australia try to work for a while, hit new zeland and then back up through the islands and then home.

okay, so the bus from

okay, so the bus from pai to chiang mai was pretty much full and i ended up sitting in the doorway.

cons:

• i couldn't sleep because i was affraid i'd fall out of the bus
• i couldn't read because i kept getting car sick
• when we made the 20 minute stop everyone stepped in the mud while getting on the bus and tracked it across my spot

pros:

• because i couldn't sleep or read i saw a bunch of beautiful scenery
• the mud dried quickly
• i had plenty of time to think about everything i've seen in the last week and a half
• sitting in the door way of a bus moving 80km/h down twisty mountain roads is the kind of fun/halfway stupid thing they'll only let you do in a third world country

okay so i really enjoyed the bus out of pai. and i did a bunch of good thinking.

i'm hanging out i bangkok today, i've decided to try to get some pictures posted, here's annie and joseph.

down here is me at the cooking class, nice appron eh? god i'm starting to talk like all these canadians.

the connection here sucks so i'll try to upload more from a different place.

today i head south

today i head south, i'm going to try to chain together several overnight bus/train trips so i don't have to get a guesthouse on the way down. i'm going to chump??? where i'll take a boat to koa tao and do the scuba thing then head down to krabi and do some climbing before heading back to bangkok for the flight home.

pai

first the news: washington post has an interview with one of the us special forces commanders who was in afghanistan.

i'm in pai, i've met up with annie and her boyfriend joeseph. it's very relaxed here and if i was staying in the country longer i'd spend a week or two here. as it is there's a lot i want to do down in the south, besides climbing i've heard that you can get an open water scuba cert in 4 days for something like $150. a couple of the people i met in chiang mai were going down there so i'd like to meet up with them and do that.

i've almost filled the current cd in my camera, once that's done i'll start posting a couple of pictures and mailing others to people i've met along the way.

touring chang mai

yesterday i went with martin and joyce, a dutch couple, to the bus station to buy tickets to pai. we took a tuk tuk there and walked back. on the way i got what i hope will be several good pictures of thai businesses. we stopped at a soup stand and just told the guy to bring me some soup, it showed up with beef intestine in it. i ate a bit (if i pretended it was mushroom, i was able to chew it a bit and swallow) and passed the rest to martin. most importantly i was able to purchase t new china dolls cd, it's some of the best asain pop music out there, and they listen to some pretty horrible pop music here.

that evening i went out to dinner with the dutch couple and a girl from seattle. at the restaurant we met up with some people from the guesthouse and their friends. most of them went back to go to sleep but i ended up with a canuck and another dutchman and we hit all the girlie bars in our block. i woke up with quite a headache but thankfully, no thai prostitutes.

i spent the day at a cooking class. we first did a tour of the market where they explained what all the different ingredients were and then started cooking. first were spring rolls, then green curry, green papaya salad, pud thai noodles, finally some fruit and then fried bananas and ice cream. i'm still full. included in the price was a cook book with all the recipes so maybe i'll try to cook some of it when i get home.

tomorrow i leave on the 09:00 bus for pai, it'll be 3 hours on a windy road so i'm not really looking forward to it.

i'll let the real world intrude for a bit: the british journalist who was attacked in an afgan refugee camp tells the story.

well it's a little disappointing

well it's a little disappointing when you go through the server logs to see if anyone has been looking at your site and discover that most of the people just look at the photos then the dirty mouth and the oubliettes pages the leave. i want you all to be checking this religiously, like ever half hour.

the overnight bus was much

the overnight bus was much nicer than i expected, i sat on the asile between an israli guy and an irish girl. they were pretty cool, the israli was telling me how he was jewish but believed in jesus and that everything was going to work out--i couldn't tell if he'd been drinking, the irish girl had just come up from australia where she'd been working for most of a year.

the bus dropped us off at some gas station and then we all hoped into the vehicles waiting there. i (wrongly) assumed that they were all going to the same place. hanging off the back of the songthaew (a pickup trucks with a sort of camper shell on it), driving through the cool empty streets watching the very start of the sunrise one of the moments i'll probably remember for the rest of my life.

that warm happy feeling quickly wore off when i ended up at this guesthouse a couple klicks south of town. everyone else on the songthaew didn't really seem to share my desire to be at a different guesthouse. so i just started walking north, trying to find something that was on my guide book. i stopped along the the way and had a breakfast of soup at a random street vendor's stand before endingup sitting in front of the gap guesthouse with a british couple who'd taken the night train up from bangkok.

they'd just been maried three weeks before, sold their house in london, and left on a year long around the world trip. he walked down and found another guesthouse that was already open, so i walked with them to see if there was another room. i have to say it's the nicest place i've stayed in on my trip. the owner is like the thai grandmother you never knew you had, clean rooms, great price (250 baht (say $6 us) a night for a single bed) and good location.

five of the other people staying at the hotel, including the wankers (brits), hired a songthaew and did a half day tour around chiang mai. we'll probably go out to dinner and the night market tonight.

hey look here nevada is

hey look here nevada is now home to the armpit of america.

okay well i leave at 18:00 for chiang mai. i'll probably spend a week or so up there and then head south to krabi and do some climbing.

here i am sitting in

here i am sitting in front of my hotel in bangkok two days ago (the thumbnail kind of sucks).

i think i'm going to catch the bus up north to chaing mai today. it's an over night deal so i won't have to get a hotel.

[this is pretty much what

[this is pretty much what i sent out in an email today so if you got that you might not want to bother reading it]

today against my better judgement i got into a tuk tuk (the motorized rik shaws) for what should have been a short trip to wat pho (this really cool temple with a hunormous reclining budhha. i couldn't really understand what he was saying but I ended up at this other temple and got ran through the same kind of scam thing as the last time i was in thailand. there's a guy in the temple who is supposed to be some out of towner, say from singapor, and he tells you about this exposition that's going or or some such line (you'd only understand about half of it anyway). then when you get back in the tuk tuk the driver just happens to mention that he can take you buy the exposition on the way to where ever you want to go.

i walked up to this temple saw the guy sitting of the floor and said to myself, dude there's no way. and just walked back out to the tuk tuk, and told the driver that i didn't want to see any expos lets just go to wat pho. well he's not stoked, when i got in we'd agreed to 50 baht (with him planning on an expo commision) and now he's driven me compeletely across town. his buddy who speaks better english comes over and we get to haggeling, and i say that i'll stop at two of the places if he'll do it for free.

that's were i made my mistake. once you get into those places it's almost impossible to get out with out buying something, and it's all over priced. i'll just say i paid 1000 baht (i'm too embarased to show it in dollars) for a tailored shirt. what got annoying was after geting ripped off on this shirt, my driver still isn't happy. he's trying to tellme that i didn't spend enough for him to get his ticket (for free gas) and can i go to one more place. "hell no" i grimace through the biggest smile i can muster (for some reason the thais won't argue with you if you're smiling) wat pho plese. well he drives me back across town toward the temple--that was a lot closer to my hotel than i realized--and dropps me off half a kilometer away. i'd wasted at least an hour and a half, but i learned to ask "how much to go to x with no stops at expositions".

i was thinking i did all right on the shirt until i stopped for some food from a street vendor while i was walking back to the hotel. while she was cooking it i started looking at this tailor's shop. he got me inside and i ended up having two shirts made for 1200 baht and a pair of wool pants for 1300 baht. shit, i'm going to be all kinds of swank.

bus tour

i ended up spending the day on a bus tour, we saw way too much stuff related to the bridge on the river kwai. back in bangkok i got really drunk and then endup typing away in an internet cafe...

well i made it over

well i made it over here. after spending all of the 4th flying and then and all of the 5th flying i arrived in bangkok (during all of that flying i dropped the handspring visor i'd brought cracking the screen, i'll try to warrantee it when i get back). i took a bus from the airport in to the cheap backpacker's part of town. then wandered around with a sweedish guy looking for a place to stay. eventually i found a 190 baht room (4 dollars us) it was a bed table and fan.

my sleep schedule was so screwed up that i woke up at 04:00 and went for a walk. i ended up sitting in a restaurant watching some european soccer game dubbed in thai. that ended and i came over to this internet cafe to check my mail. i got an email from anne york, my friend who's going to school here, so hopefully i'll get to meet up with her at some point.

the other side of dropping that palm is that i don't have addresses to mail post cards, so if you want a post card email me your address.

i finally got my thai

i finally got my thai visa. i guess i screwed up the date on the form so it expires feb 13 2002. fuck. we'll i guess i'll be pushing up my plans.