May 12, 2008

Emma and I arrived in Bangkok this morning after a boat/bus ride from Koh Samui (an island in the south of Thailand). In Bangkok we met up with my fellow CYITer Brad, who will be flying out on the same flight as Emma. It's crazy to think that my month long adventure with Emma is coming to a close and even more crazy that i will be coming back to the states in a little over 2 weeks. But I have decided to not think about that yet.

During the past week Emma and i were sun bathing on Koh Pha Ngan and Koh Samui. They were both beautiful islands but in the end we felt very mixed about our time there. We had a few too many bad interactions with the people on the island, who treated us poorly just because we were farang. We had many discussions about what tourism can do to an area, and both the negative and positive effects it can have on communities. In my eyes tourism has really ruined the south, both environmentally and socially. It was difficult to come from Chiang Mai, northern Laos and Siem Reap, where people were really nice to us and didn't treat us badly (to our faces), just because we are farang. To say the least, I'm very excited to be going to back to Chiang Mai in a day or so.

As for now, brad, Emma and I are wandering around Bangkok waiting for our flights home. Today we visited Jim Thompson's house. Jim Thompson is an expat from the US who moved to Bangkok and started a Thai silk company, lived in a beautiful teak house in the middle of Bangkok and was a collector of Asian antiques. In the 1950's he went to Malaysia and no one ever heard from him again, so the Thai government turned his house into a museum. Tomorrow we will continue to wander, maybe in search of some interesting markets or something like that. I will see you all soon.