Greetings! We will now be turning to the phase of our trip we affectionately like to refer to as our Adventures in Developing World Political Chaos. Over the span of a couple of weeks in May, we managed to stumble into not one, but TWO countries on the verge of meltdown as their respective political crises essentially shut down big portions of both countries, leading us to wonder if we were carrying some kind of contagious political chaos disease.
;)
With cars banned, Nepalis took to the street on footThe first affected country, Nepal, was in such a state of disarray due to the Maoist-led general strike when we arrived from Bhutan that we decided it was best if we scrapped our plans to hike the Annapurna circuit and get out of dodge as soon as possible. We won’t go into detail about the background on the strike (in part because, like most of the chaos in Nepal, we don’t fully understand it), but if you’re interested in learning more about it, there was an excellent Op-Ed in the NY Times in May that provided a really helpful and personal overview of the situation and the recent history leading up to it.
Fortunately we were able to change our flight out of Kathmandu relatively easily, and since we had to get back to Bangkok anyway to continue on the next leg of our round-the-world ticket, we figured the easiest “plan B” would be to spend the next 10 days on a beach in Thailand. I mean, what could possibly go wrong in stable, friendly Thailand, right? Well, actually, we knew what could go wrong. The “Red Shirt” protesters had been stirring things up in Bangkok over the last couple of months, and while things seemed to have settled down for the time being, we knew that there was a chance the protests could flare up again at any time.
And flare up they did. As in, giant flames burning up the commercial district of downtown Bangkok. We were never really affected by the protests or the increasing violence that accompanied them during our 10 days in Thailand because we spent our time on the islands in the southern part of the country (Koh Samui and Koh Tao), but it was a little surreal drinking mai tais in a tropical paradise knowing what was happening only a few hundred miles to the north. Ironically, the Red Shirt protests provided an unexpected upside for us — the resorts we stayed at were virtual ghost towns, and we were able to get incredible last-minute deals on rooms that would’ve normally been WAY outside of our price range.
;)
We’ve posted three small albums from our brief visit to Thailand: Koh Tao, Diving Koh Tao, and Koh Samui. The diving album includes our first foray into underwater photography thanks to the underwater camera case our friend Jayson carried all the way to Nepal for us (thanks again, Jayse!). As for the actual diving in Koh Tao, although we’d heard that Koh Tao is a kind of mecca of the diving world, we realized once we were actually underwater that its reputation probably has more to do with the fact that you can get PADI-certified really cheaply there, and less with the actual quality of the diving. It’s not that the visibility of the water or the health of Koh Tao’s reefs was bad — it just wasn’t as mind-blowing as we were expecting it would be (and it couldn’t really compete with what we’d seen on our dives in Vanuatu or would soon see on our dives in the Red Sea.)
Anyway, we had a very lazy, relaxing 10 days in Thailand. It was insanely hot and humid while were there (probably the hottest we’ve been on the entire trip), so we spent a lot of time relaxing indoors in A/C, but it turned out to be a pretty ideal plan B despite the chaos that was raging on the streets of Bangkok and Kathmandu.