HERE I AM

I've been back in Phuket now for a number of days, I started my training to become a teacher on Monday April, 20th. I was relieved to find out when I got back to Phuket that we would be located far from the obnoxiousness of Patong Beach (No offense to those who love Patong Beach, but I'm trying to learn here, and Patong Beach is crazytown). We've been put up in a hotel on Nai Harn Beach, a little town on the very southern tip of Phuket. It's pretty nice, and it's definitely a lot more laid back then Patong Beach. There are about 30 people in my class with me, mostly Americans, a number of British, a few Australians, a New Zealander, and a Canadian. Good times. I will have more to report later, but for now this is a picture of me right now at this moment... it's dumb.

THANKS TIMOTHY!

Timothy flew back to San Francisco soon after we got back to Phuket. He has been a great friend over the last couple of weeks, I don't know how I would have made it around Japan without him. (Miki, Timothy totally spoke Japanese like a pro!)

He was an excellent travel buddy in Thailand. Even though we had to deal with extreme heat, exploding buses, mosquitos, and everything else that comes along with traveling in Southeast Asia, Timothy was awesome. More than anything he dealt with me being a weirdo in this transitional period of my life. Thanks, Timothy.

KO BU BU

We took a long-tail boat to Ko Bu Bu from Ko Lanta. (By the way, Ko means island in Thai. Phi Phi [pronounced pee pee] Island? Bu Bu Island? Boo Boo and Pee Pee? I don't know who came up with the names for these islands but they must have been like 8 years old.) Ko Bu Bu was tiny, all it had on it was a small group of bungalows, and the only people who lived on the island owned and ran those bungalows. Timothy and I explored the island when we got there and walked around it in like 20 minutes. There were probably about 10 people that stayed on the island that night. Swings, hammocks, swimming, and beach - that's Ko Bu BU. Pretty sweet. The next day we made the trek back towards Phuket...

KO LANTA

After catching a long-tail boat back to the tourist village on Ko Phi Phi, we took an hour and a half long ferry ride to the next island, Ko Lanta. This place was rad. As late April approaches the tourist season comes to an end, the monsoon season approaches, and islands like Ko Lanta empty out. The bars and bungalows that line the beach were barely half full. I relaxed on Ko Lanta so much that I forgot how to think, my mind went blank after sitting on a hammock for three hours, swaying to and fro. Just what I was looking for. I forgot how to use my camera, but somehow I managed to snap this picture...

RANTEE BEACH AT NIGHT

After a day of swimming, drinking beers, hanging out in a hammock, swimming some more, and eating... the sun went down. The beach faces east so the sun set over the jungle behind us. The sky was beautiful. The clouds in Thailand sit up high, and long after the sun goes down the colors remain projected on the them, a lot of pinks and purples and oranges, it's real nice.

We went down to this little bar on the beach where we split a little bottle of Thai whisky and drank some more beers. It was me and Timothy and a couple of British girls on holiday. The owner of the bar was a real nice guy, and his friends performed fire dancing for us. I will see a lot of this on Thai beaches, it seems to be quite popular. What a great evening.

The bungalow was hellish. The generator cut off at midnight... there went the fan. And for some reason there was a shitload of mosquitos inside my mosquito net. I sat up all night in the still heat, sweating, swatting mosquitos, and waiting for sunrise. When the sun came up I wandered out to a hammock on the beach and slept for two or three hours. On to the next island...!

RANTEE BEACH

We heard about a series of beaches on the far side of the island that were a little more secluded and a lot more quiet then the bustling port town on Ko Phi Phi. We scratched the option of hiring a long-tail boat to take us to these out of reach places and decided that we would hike. Our journey began with an extremely hot trek up to a viewpoint. The trail was all paved, mostly stairs, and it took us up to an overlook where we got a great view of the island facing west. The top picture in my last post is from this viewpoint. After a little break we took off towards the backside of the island, this is where the paved trail ended and the jungle path began. We stepped into the forest, led only by signs tacked to the side of trees. The trail at times seemed like a dried up stream bed, but after a steep decent through the jungle we eventually came out onto the beach. It was definitely a lot more quiet then the other side of the island... and primitive. We got a bungalow a stones throw from the beach, it was bare bones. We had our own bathroom, but as you can see from the picture it was, well... whatever. This was the Thailand I was looking for. Here we were a little after noon with nowhere to go but in the water or on the beach. With a couple small open-air restaurants and a lone bar on the beach, I was in heaven.

KO PHI PHI

The next day we took off for Ko Phi Phi. We discovered on the ferry ride over that it's a very popular destination for tourists. It actually consists of two islands, Ko Phi Phi Don and Ko Phi Phi Leh, the latter being where the movie The Beach was filmed. There are no places to stay on Ko Phi Phi Leh, but day trips there are extremely popular. Ko Phi Phi Don has a little "tourist town" located on a thin strip of land that connects two mountainous parts of the island. Both islands, as with a lot of the islands in the Andaman Sea, are made up of huge karst rock formations, massive limestone cliffs that jut hundreds of feet up out of the water, it's awesome. The top picture is a view of Ko Phi Phi Don from a viewpoint that we hiked up to. The bottom picture in the collage is of Ko Phi Phi Leh that I took from the ferry. You can also see the thin strip of land in the collage where the tourist town is. This part of the island got destroyed by the tsunami in 2004. We got to Ko Phi Phi and decided that we needed to find a less touristy part of the island, so we began our hike to Rantee Beach...

PHUKET

We stayed on Patong Beach when we got to Phuket. I think another name for Patong Beach is Generic World Beach. We did a little walking around. I wasn't really feeling the need to explore since I would be spending the next three weeks there training for my upcoming job as an English teacher. Patong Beach was a little obnoxious anyways. This is a really short post...

BANGKOK

I've been in Thailand for over a week now. Timothy and I arrived in Bangkok on the 12th of April and were hit with a wall of heat as we left the airport, quite a contrast from the moderate climate of Japan. Tokyo and Bangkok, two Asian cities that seem to rest on opposite ends of the spectrum, and just as I was getting used to things in Japan... BANGkok!!!

Our arrival into Bangkok just so happened to coincide with Songkran, the three day celebration of the Thai new year. One of the traditional activities involves young people splashing water over the hands of elders as a sign of respect. Afterwards the children go out and play, sing songs, and splash water on each other. What this translates into in Bangkok is a rowdy citywide water fight with the epicenter being around Khao San Road, the typically touristy/backpacker area of the city. People walk the streets armed with squirt guns and super soakers, or hang out on the sidewalks with big buckets of water, waiting to drench anyone who walks by. They also carry around little bowls of runny white clay that they rub onto peoples faces, sometimes gently, sometimes not so gently. There was a reason why I didn't bring my camera out...

I was excited to experience Songkran, but unfortunately the day we arrived the Thai government declared a state of emergency due to political unrest, protesting, and rioting in the streets of Bangkok. We didn't hear about this until after we got to our guesthouse, but I had wondered why our taxi had to detour around a few roadblocks and why I had seen tanks parked along the streets.

The next morning we heard that there had been violence during the night resulting in a handful of injuries and even a few deaths, and that the Thai government was threatening to shut down the Songkran festivities along Khao San Road. We went out anyways. After a boat ride down the Chao Phraya River, we explored a temple, and then found a place to eat and drink along the river. We took off towards Khao San Road after lunch and within five minutes we were covered in water and clay. The closer we got to the Khao San Road the crazier it got, and the celebrating raged on despite the government warnings. It was like a big, soaking wet, block party. Timothy and I weren't armed with squirt guns, so we just walked the streets getting drenched with water and smeared with clay.

After spending a little while in the heart of the festivities we made our way towards Wat Saket, or Golden Mount, a hilltop temple with great views of the city. All of a sudden a fleet of army trucks pulled up next to us and hundreds of soldiers began to unload. I young Thai man ran up to us and in broken English told us turn and go the other way. We looked back to see that the street we were on had been barricaded, the traffic was stopped. We ran out into the middle of the road, it was a pretty big street, an offshoot of a large square with a sculpture in the middle called Democracy Monument. We stood in the median and looked down the street, a sea of soldiers swarmed around a bus that had been lit on fire, black clouds of smoke rose up into the sky. We watched for a little bit as the bus went up in flames, and then got the hell out of there. Three blocks away the Songkran festivities raged on, the only sign of the nearby violence was the black clouds of smoke rising up from behind the buildings. Water gun warfare on one block, civil warfare on the next.

Bangkok was a little crazy to say the least. Since I left my camera behind, the only pictures I took were back at the guesthouse - the aftermath of Songkran.

The next day we left for the islands...

TOKYO

After Lake Ashi we took the train into Tokyo for our last weekend in Japan. I didn't take many pictures, Tokyo was a bit of sensory overload, and they just wouldn't have done justice. Our first night we stayed in a capsule hotel in the part of Tokyo known as Shibuya. It was nuts. It's a very young part of the city and since it was a Friday night, the streets were especially crowded with people going out. We went to a few different bars, but mostly did a lot of people watching. Even just watching everyone wore me out...

The next day we walked around Tokyo, checking out different neighborhoods. Timothy was a good tour guide, he has a pretty good handle on Tokyo, and let me tell you, the train system is like a maze. The highlight of the weekend, and one of my favorite parts of the trip, was meeting up with Timothy's inlaws. Timothy's wife Miki is Japanese, and her parents, Akira and Chiyoko, took us out to dinner to eat shabu shabu, it was amazing. "Numbah waaan shabu shabu in Japaan!" said Akira, as he ordered me plate after plate. And drink after drink. Holy shit was I full and drunk. Then we went out for karaoke. I sang Feel Like Makin' Love by Bad Company, I think people liked it, or at least they pretended to? We stayed at their house that night, and they got up and took us to the airport in the morning, bringing a close to our adventure in Japan. I'm not really sure it's possible to see as much of Japan as I saw in ten days. On to Thailand! Oh yeah, that picture is of me in Japan, I'm drinking sake and thinking about life.

BLACK EGGS

We snacked on some black eggs before we left Lake Ashi. That's a gondola for eggs in the upper left picture, they send them up by the dozens to a little shack on the side of the mountain where they dip them into piping hot sulfar springs. When they pull them out they are black! They say it will add seven years on to your life if you eat them. They also say it smells really bad up there because of the sulfar springs, but obviously it's because they're pulling rotten eggs out of the mountain. I ate three of them.

LAKE ASHI

We took the train up into the mountains to Lake Ashi after we left Osaka. Lake Ashi is a popular weekend destination for people from Tokyo, and when it's clear out you can see Mount Fuji off in the distance. The trains got slower and slower the farther we got up the mountains so it took us a while to get there. We stayed in a ryokan that night, a traditional Japanese style hotel, it was cool. We wore Japanese style robes around, drank sake on the tatami matts, and rolled futon mattresses out of the closet and slept on the floor.

The next day we walked down and caught a ferry across Lake Ashi, the views of Mount Fuji were stunning! After eating some soba noodles for lunch we explored an old shrine, and then found a trail that took as around the lake shore. We hiked a little ways to a town and caught a bus back that took us around the lake to a ropeway, or gondola. Half way up the ropeway we got off to snack on some eggs...

OSAKA

Osaka was awesome. We took the train there after Okayama and got in just after lunch. We had a hard time finding our capsule hotel at first so we decided to take a break and sit in a park. I went to a 7 Eleven and got some beers and some snacks and we enjoyed the afternoon, people watching and resting our feet. I think I would live in Osaka if I lived in Japan, or maybe it would be cool to live there fresh out of college or something, it seemed very colorful and hip. We found our hotel and went out to dinner for some okonomiyaki, it was extra tasty. I didn't take any pictures in Osaka... oops. We left the next day for the mountains.

OKAYAMA

Okayama was interesting, not the most charming of places we'd been, but with cherry blossoms in bloom it was still very nice. We spent a half a day there wandering about, exploring an old fort and a park full of old Japanese people. I bought a massive can of Asahi beer from a vending machine on the street to quench my thirst, I had to get the biggest one. And they say that everything in Japan is small, whatever...

MIYAJIMA

This was the was the most beautiful place I went to in all of Japan. We took a ferry to Miyajima late in the afternoon, and after walking around and exploring the charming old village, we joined the crowds of people that line the shore to watch the sunset. We sat on the shore well after the sun went down and drank sake. Shrines, cherry blossoms, temples, sake... Japan is especially choice!

HIROSHIMA

We left Nagasaki for Hiroshima. Our first destination was the old castle, it was a beautiful old fort on a river. Like Kyoto, people were out enjoying the cherry blossoms, sitting under the trees, drinking and having a good time. After lunch we caught a local train down towards Miyajima, an island off the coast of Hiroshima.

NAGASAKI

After leaving Kyoto we caught the bullet train as far south as we could to the town of Hakata. It was kind of late when we got there and the city was pretty quiet, probably because it was a Sunday night. Hakata is a pretty modern city, quite a change from the traditional Kyoto. We stayed in a capsule hotel there. Capsule hotels are weird, you should totally stay in one if you go to Japan, it's a very unique Japanese experience.

We left Hakata the next day after walking around the city for a bit, there wasn't really too much to see. It was about a two hour train ride to Nagasaki and it was already kind of late in the afternoon when we got there. Once we got off the train we found the ropeway to the top of Mt. Inasa where we caught the sunset and watched the city turn from day to night. The views from up there were amazing.

KYOTO

Holy shit, I was lucky enough to be in Japan when the cherry blossoms were in full bloom. Man was I lucky. Timothy and I caught the train to Kyoto on a Saturday afternoon after a sushi breakfast at the fish market in Tokyo. When we got to Kyoto it was rainy, and apparently we got the last two empty beds in town at a youth hostel. Kyoto is one of Japans most traditional cities, and a very popular destination when the cherry blossoms are in bloom, so finding a place to stay was tough. The youth hostel kind of sucked, it had a 10:30 curfew so we sat across the street outside of a Lawson convenient store and drank beers until we had to be back inside.

The next day was amazing. We explored Kyoto by foot, first walking over to an old temple, and then hiking up a path to this park on a hilltop where there was a garden full of cherry blossom trees and sweeping views of the city below. After that we hiked back down to the city and found the Philosopher's Trail, a cherry blossom lined path that runs along a little stream. There were tons of people there. We got some sake from a vending machine and drank under the shade of the trees. Next, we caught a train across town to this island in a river where we had a traditional Japanese dinner, or more of a late lunch. After that we jumped back on the train to our next destination. Kyoto was amazing.

JAPAN

I was in Japan all last week with my friend Timothy. Timothy and I are hanging out and going on adventures before I become a teacher.

We got to Tokyo on the evening of April 3rd. Our plan was to get a seven day train pass and explore the country, so we only stayed in Tokyo for one night with the intent to come back the next weekend. Timothy has been to Japan a bunch cause his wife is from Tokyo, so he kind of knows the city, and a little Japanese, which proved to be especially helpful. With one night in Tokyo we decided to explore this neighborhood called Golden Gai. It's a series of small alleys with hundreds of really tiny bars, most have but five or six seats. We found a place to get some dinner and drinks and ordered some okonomiyaki, which I have decided now is my favorite Japanese food. After a few more drinks in another bar close by, and some lively conversation with some drunk Japanese dudes, we called it a night. Tomorrow we would catch the train to Kyoto...

GOODBYE SAN FRANCISCO

This is my first blog posting and I've already been gone for more than a week. I left San Francisco with all of my belongings packed into my backpack and a small piece of luggage. I got rid of most of my possessions, and left a few things behind with friends to hold onto while I am gone. I will return to San Francisco. I love it there. But for now I will be an English teacher in Thailand. Jesse Kipp - English Teacher. Weird. Too bad my spelling is horrible. Just kidding, not really. So, I start a three week course on April 20th that will certify me to teach, as well as provide me a job in a school, I'm not quite sure where in Thailand that will be...