Trat, Thailand

I'm now in the little town of Trat, about 5 hours by bus southeast of Bangkok, and pretty close to Cambodia. Yesterday morning I had to decide whether to go into the concrete jungle of Bangkok (since I was in a hotel on the far eastern edge of it) or head this way for the islands (just some of the islands, most of the Thai islands, and the more popular ones, are due south of Bangkok a ways). Although Bangkok sounds extremely interesting, I decided to save it for later in my trip and go straight for a mellow island.

So I packed up, got some good directions for catching the appropriate bus here from someone at the guest house, and then arrived here about 5pm. So far I'm definitely impressed by Thailand, even though I really haven't seen much. The drive here was inland, cutting across diagonally from Bangkok, so I didn't have the ocean to look at, and it was fairly uneventful but pleasantly green scenery, going through smallish towns. But it just has a good feel to it, and the notable thing, after going to India, is that it's way cleaner, mellower, less crazy and less third world than India. I would say that it even seems about halfway between second world and first world, maybe close to the equivalent of Greece, from what I remember of it (although it may have changed a little in 17 years). There are lots of private cars, they mostly seem fairly new, there's almost no garbage on the streets, almost no beggars or homeless, people are dressed pretty similarly to people in the west, nice but pretty casual, you see few animals around other than stray dogs, I didn't even notice any cows until a few right before I got here.

So all considering I'm pretty amazed that it's as cheap as it it. When I got to the bus station here in Trat someone came up to me with a card to recommend a guest house. So I decided to check it out, and it's quite nice, although a much simpler room than my other one. It's very small, like barely larger than the double bed that's in it, with just a fan and small table, but a quiet neighborhood, clean (other than lots of geckos, but I don't mind them) and it's about $3.50/night. They have a nice restaurant that's reasonably priced and really quick internet for about a buck an hour. The town is really mellow, about 15,000 people and I was walking around last night and it feels really safe, there were young kids out and about after dark and families going to restaurants, etc., but the streets weren't packed at all like India.

I'm on a small side street that's a short walk from the center of town and the market. The only thing is that grapes are apparently quite expensive, unless someone was giving me the inflated price. I went through the market last night, and asked about some grapes at one of the stands. She put a fairly large amount on the scale, maybe three handfuls, and then asked for 150 baht. That's about 5 dollars. That probably doesn't sound like much, until you figure that my hotel room is $3.50. And my budget is 10 bucks a day. So I passed on the grapes and instead bought some bananes, which were about 40 cents for a rack of 16 of them. That isn't quite as good of a deal as it sounds though, because the bananas were literally only about two inches long, and I had 10 of them in a row. They're usually pretty small in India as well, but not that small. But the thing is they taste a lot better than larger bananas.

Well anyhow I should probably wrap things up here. It's now about 10am, I've had breakfast and am planning to just explore the town here a little today. It sounds like there really isn't all that much to do around here other than see some temples, maybe rent a bike and go out of town a little ways, or just hang out and read or whatever. The reason this is a popular tourist town with lots of guest houses is simply because it's the jumping off point for the nearby islands. It was overcast yesterday and so I was thinking I might hang out here (rather than go straight to the island of Ko Mak) for a few days since there's no reason to rush to the beach when it's cloudy (and accomodations are going to be more expensive there). But then today is nice and sunny so I might just stay here one more night and then go tomorrow, but I guess I'll just see.