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# Much the same and playing time games
- URL: https://vaughan.ai/blog/much-the-same-and-playing-time-games/
- Published: 2000-11-28T21:52:16.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-07T23:19:17.000Z
- Author: Vaughan Fergusson
- Tags: Thailand, #medium-import

Did I mention our guest house in Phitsanulok? I think I did but I will say it again, absolutely fabulous! If you ever find yourself stuck in Phitsanulok and need somewhere to stay check out the Phitsanulok Youth Hostel. The atmosphere was amazing and after dinner everyone was sitting around chatting about their travelling adventures. On our last night over a few beers Mel and I got to talking to two guys from England and Germany. Jon, from the UK, was heading home and Mathias, from Germany, was heading south for the winter. That’s the funny thing about Thailand. It feels like the centre of the world. It’s like the halfway point for people from the north heading south and from the south heading north. The tourist dollars the Thai government must rake in! I am thinking about starting up my own country close by, I would be a millionaire within a week. The majority of people are heading south from the Northern Hemisphere and its only weirdo’s like Mel and I that like to follow winter around the world.

Anyway, over our beers we all exchanged advice about where to go and what to see in each of our respective countries. Mel constructed a fairly accurate map of New Zealand with keynotes, a legend, and had all the major tourist spots clearly marked. The only thing it was lacking was details of the main arterials, traveling times, and a bus schedule. Mathias kindly gave us the “Japanese” itinerary for Germany which covers the main spots in 2 days, and expanded the list so we might be able to spend a couple of weeks there some time. Not that we would do Germany with the brevity that the Japanese are capable of. Bus stops. They run off the bus take a few rolls worth of photos and back on the bus to the next spot. For Mel and I it’s more like walk into town. Check out 5–50 different guesthouses (depending on our mood), spend half an hour trying to decide what we feel like eating. Go out and try and find what we decided on. Realise they don’t have any pizza places (to Mel’s disappointment) and spend another half an hour deciding on the next place. Catch a couple of sights, take a photo if we can remember, poke fun at all the other tourists, decide we need a sleep, try and find our guest house again and decide we are too hot and tired to go out again today.

![](https://vaughan.ai/content/images/2026/11/ed98697657d4.jpeg)

The next day I read the news papers whilst the youth hostel kitchen blared out what would other wise be soothing classical music if they realised what the volume knob on the stereo was for and that there is not only two settings, off and so loud you can’t think about whether you prefer coffee or tea with your breakfast, but also in-between settings like a quarter turn of the knob. In the papers I was interested to find a resolution for the US elections. What an idiot I was. I forgot that once you get lawyers involved it never ends. The newspaper was covered with photos of protesters holding up banners saying “Kill Lawyers”. How much I concur with that sentiment I cannot put into clean words. Do they have to act like 5 year olds or is it part of the constitution. I am sure there are some valid points to be made on both sides but if they don’t sort it out soon Bill will have a second term in office before they do. The other day Mel and I were in a hotel watching CNN, the Candidate Nonsense Network, to find hour after hour after hour of expert interviews, candid street polls, and simply just talk talk talk about nothing nothing nothing, oh with the world news squeezed into a five minute segment every hour. The Florida Recount wars, Al Gore Strikes back and Return of the Cheds. Some idiot is going to make a movie about the whole thing I guarantee it and the funny thing is the movie will be released before we even know who the president is. You will have to see the movie to find out. I love America.

Back to Thailand now. Over breakfast we offered John and Mathias both a ride to Sukhothai as we were heading through it anyway and then threw all our bags into the car and we were off. We dropped Jon and Mathias off at the gates to the historical park after a free lunch courtesy of Jon and Mathias (thanks again guys) and continued on to Mae Sot, right by the border of Myanmar (Burma).

In Mae Sot a few years ago it was not unusual to see everyone walk around with guns and to be gently rocked to sleep at night to the gentle sound of mortar fire. This used to be the wild wild west where it seemed everyone was involved in shady dealings with contraband shipments across the border. Today things have settled down a little and there is a new bridge linking the two countries together. Beneath the bridge are the legal border markets where you can pick up a great deal on imported trinkets and crafts. Mae Sot isn’t incredibly huge but we still found it relatively easy to get lost driving into it. When I say its not incredibly huge I should say its tiny. There are like 10 roads. They like to camouflage the guesthouses so you can’t see them. Also we realised after a while that unbeknownst to us there was a one-way road system on the two main roads but no one seemed to care that we were going the wrong way up them. We only stayed in Mae Sot for one night but there were a lot of treks out of Mae Sot on offer and they looked much more interesting than the non-touristic ones offered out of Chiang Mai.

The next day we headed up the west border for Mae Sariang, 200km north. We left early to give us plenty of time so we could take it slow. And a good thing too but I will get to why soon. After a little way we noticed a sign for a cave down a side road and decided to check it out. Thailand must be hollow. Everywhere you go there are signs for caves and waterfalls every 2km. In the end we had to check one out. A little way down the side road we came to a concrete block consisting of toilets and shade from the sun. He hopped out of the car and headed for the most logical place for a cave to be, the cliffs. Whilst en route we were approached by four Thai guys who were very insistent on showing us the caves. We agreed to be shown the cave and a couple of minutes later we were at a river which was being swallowed by the cliff face. Our new guides waded us through the river and into the cave with torches. And it was a big cave. We walked for ages into it until we could not see the entrance anymore and still we kept going. It was only at this point I remembered some advice given to me after hearing stories of tourists wandering off and being mugged by Thai hoodlums. I started to get slightly paranoid and made sure Mel was only 2 seconds away from me and I pulled out my torch. We were led up the walls and past ravines. We went through small passageways that you had to crawl on hands and knees to get through. We were shown all the rock formations that looked like chickens, frogs and people and finally found ourselves on the other side of the mountain where the four Thai guys pulled out guns and robbed us. No only kidding. The guides were great. At the start of the journey into the caves I questioned the guys about every possible fact about the cave and area and was replied to with all the information I was hoping to get. These guys knew their stuff and it was only when I was comfortable that they were in fact guides that we went through. But you can’t help but feel a little paranoid when walking in a cave with no light and with every opportunity for someone to knock you off and stuff your body down a ravine. I gave our guides some baht for their troubles (and for not knocking us off) and we were off again.

Now we left really early and this was a good idea we discovered, as the roads were kind of windy. Well picture a windy road. Extend that picture in your head by 200km. Add road works every 5km then mix in 30 or so mountains. This is kind of the road we were driving on. Then you need to add obstacles like the Burmese truck drivers. In Burma they drive on the right and in Thailand they drive on the left. It seems there are a few truck drivers who don’t realise they are not in Burma anymore. They sit on the right side of the road and must think we are taking a hell of a long time in passing them when we sit behind them on the left. But here is the killer, when traffic comes the other way, also on the right where they should be, the truck drives swerve to the left to avoid them and then promptly move back into the right (wrong) lane. This made us feel a little uncomfortable thinking about trucks coming the other way as we take the bends. Its time like these where the invisible middle lane between the left and right lanes becomes valuable.

In between dodging trucks we came across a massive hill tribe village totally filling a valley and the surrounding hillsides. It was just amazing. Bamboo huts one after the other for about 4km. We stopped by the side of the road on a hill to get a better look. Once stationary we found the more we looked the more hut we could see hidden in the hills. While we were snapping a few pics I spied a couple of kids and we played the waving game for 20 minutes, kids never get bored do they? With grins and giggles they each took turns at waving hello.

Onwards ho up the windy road. Every 5 minutes we came across signs warning of road snakes, you know the squiggly arrows that look like snakes symbolizing windy roads? Well there seemed to be an excess of them on this road. They really really didn’t need to have so many of them. You kind of get the gist of the windiness after the first hour. They had some signs with a road snake and a big 5 or a big ten beneath them. I thought that was a much better idea, letting us know how long the windy roads are. Well until we came to the next hairpin corner that is and realised that they weren’t distances but speed recommendations for the corners. A single sign when we left Mae Sot saying “Windy road for the next 5 eternities or until Mae Sariang, whichever comes first” would have sufficed. We pulled into Mae Sariang after 5 hours on the road and thankfully didn’t have the same problem finding our guesthouse as we did in Mae Sot. We stayed at the Riverside which oddly enough was beside the river. Shortly after we arrived and as the sun was getting low a herd of water buffalo swam past in the river, a sight you don’t see much back home. Very picturesque. Mae Sariang was very much like Mae Sot. Another great place to come to for trekking and such but little else to do there. We met one guy who had rented a scooter from Chiang Mai some 200km away and had driven it there with backpack on back and all. Man that must be boring and so uncomfortable. We were so spoiled with our rental car. We were very tired that night and slept well.

The next day we headed back to Chiang Mai to drop our car back. I won’t bore you with the details but I will just say that I got us a little lost getting to the airport. But needless to say I got us there in the end. We did our Christmas shopping in Chiang Mai and picked up a couple of things for us too. We were very eager to get out of the north and back down south for our last week or so in Thailand. One thing we have discovered about ourselves as New Zealanders is that we don’t like being away from water for very long. We are kind of agoraphobic like that. Mel and I were growing more and more restless each day. Every mountain we climbed had a view of nothing but more land and we stood there scratching our heads going, “where has the water gone?” We were getting a little stressed out in Northern Thailand as we were constantly on the move. We yearned to be on the coast again so we decided to hop on a train back to Bangkok and then catch a bus to Ban Phe, just south east of Bangkok some 300km. Well I am going to talk about trains again but I am not going to say much this time except I HATE THEM. We left Chiang Mai in a second-class sleeper bound for Bangkok at 7pm. 10km’s out of Chiang Mai the train stopped for an hour for no apparent reason which had us slightly concerned. Guys with radios were walking up and down the trains talking very loud and with strange intonations in their voice. At one point one guy was near us somewhere in our car and a voice broke out across his radio. Now my Thai is not the best but I swear he was screaming something like “Oh my god the engine is on fire and she is going to explode. WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE”, well it sounded something like that. It was so funny to hear and my verbal translation created a few chuckles through our car. I don’t think it was a scheduled stop partly because the train was stopped across a main road and the ever-increasing queue of cars on either side of the train just didn’t look planned. Also the occasional surge and crash as the train leapt 5 meters down the track at ten minute intervals didn’t inspire me to believe it was a scheduled maintenance stop either. But we did get underway much to the delight of the 30 or so cars on either side of us. That night Neither Mel on I slept one single minute. Second class sleepers are arranged so you body is in the same direction as the train is heading. Now trains tend to wobble just a little as they go down the tracks so when you are trying to lie on you side and get some sleep you find you face being planted into the mattress one second and staring at the ceiling the next. At 2am Mel and I decide to pop a couple of sleeping pills. The only thing the sleeping pills managed to do was keep us awake more. We slid off the train in Bangkok, grabbed a cab to the bus station, hopped on the next bus to Ban Phe, rode for 3 hours, hopped off the bus and onto a boat to Koh Samet (our new home for the next week), hopped off onto the pier 30 minutes later then into a pickup crammed full with 100 other tourists and down to our resort. Lets just say we were a little tired but we managed to cram in all the available methods of transport in Thailand in 24 hours (including the tuk tuk we took to the train station).

Koh Samet is one of the original resort island in Thailand and is very popular with the Thai’s themselves. It was a long holiday weekend in Thailand when we got there and we were looking forward to being in a resort overrun with Thai people having a holiday. It was a side of Thailand we haven’t seen. How do Thai people have a holiday? We got to Koh Samet on the Friday so as to beat the rush and to find accommodation. We arrived to our overpriced resort very grumpy and very upset at what we were getting for our money. I think it had something to do with the amount of sleep we had not had. Things were a little over priced on Koh Samet, well that’s kind of an understatement. For example the standard price for an Internet cafe is around 1 baht per minute. That’s usually a slow connection to the Internet and you have to wait 5 minutes for each page to load. Well on Koh Samet you get the same speed but its 10 baht per minute for the privilege. We were not too convinced spending our last week in Thailand here was the best idea. It appeared to be more stressful than up north but after a good night sleep and a better breakfast in the morning we felt a little better and looked forward to the prospect of being surrounded by Thai holiday makers. It never happened. Well there were a lot of Thai people on the island holidaying but the foreigners still definitely outnumbered them. So we settled with lying on the beach making our skin go nice and brown instead.

The second day we were there we decided to have a little exploration of our surroundings, mainly to find a more reasonably priced place to stay. Mel came up yet again with the brilliant idea of renting motorbikes. She has all the best ideas, and this time she wanted one of her very own. I can’t say how excited I was at the idea of having my own bike that I could ride faster then 10km per hour and do skids and things on purpose instead of feigning it as being accidental. We noticed a couple of places that had motorbikes forrent, what a forrent of motorbikes looked like we didn’t find out but they had some bikes for rent. Thailand has a very interesting style of English. It doesn’t matter how flash the place is you are staying at or how many years the shops have been in business. No one can spell. In restaurants you can have some fried French with your order or if this didn’t tickle your cannibal pallet you could try some of Gordon Blue. A shaese sandwich, and some really obscure things that you cant even imagine what they are. A Frend Roll or some bells? Huh? A boat trip was offered in a glass tom boat at the place we were staying and the boat even had glass tom painted on the side. Anyway we picked a couple of bikes from the presumed forrent, with automatic transmissions and we were off with our motors running. All we needed now was a highway. Well we didn’t have a highway just a single lane road. We practiced a bit until Mel was comfortable with her new bike and then we set of on our expedition. The roads turned from concrete to sand within 5 minutes. We both had a great time. Sliding from side to side, climbing hills dodging rocks. Well we were having a great time until Mel had a bit of a dispute with a rock which ended in Mel throwing her bike at the rock. Twice. It was a very steep hill and this rock just didn’t want to let Mel pass. In the end I picked up her bike and walked it down the hill. We kick started the bike to find it didn’t go. I kicked 10 times and finally it started. “Fhew” I thought. We rode on for 5 minutes until Mel’s bike decided it was going to stop all by itself. We wheeled it into the shade to find petrol leaking out from underneath the bike whenever you kick started it or turned the throttle. Something got bumped in the carburetor or in the pump (well with my extensive motorcycle knowledge that’s what I thought). Eventually we got the thing started again and I rode it back to the shop battling time before the leak leaked its last leak, if you know what I mean. We made sure to wash the bike first to get all the dirt off it and when I got back to the shop I convinced the guy it had been leaking all along. He had a quick look at the bike and concluded that the easiest thing to do was to give us a new bike, a bigger faster and a manual bike! Whoo hooo well Mel kept my bike and I had the new and improved dirt bike. Of course the guy didn’t tell me it was a manual and I figured it out the hard way. But after I did get the hang of it Mel didn’t see much of me for the rest of the day.

We checked out the other resorts to find our one was the best priced after all. We couldn’t decide if this made us happy or mad but in the end settled on happy as we were on holiday and all. In the end I ran out of gas (cause my fuel gauge didn’t work) and we decided we had had enough excitement for one day so we returned the bikes, after Mel and I went for a quick detour to the gas station to fill a plastic bottle with gas for my bike.

Let me tell you about the beach as it was where Mel and I lived the next 5 days. We worked out this routine that we stuck to for the whole stay. Get up (always a good place to start), get breakfast, go to the beach, sit there until 2PM, get lunch, play cards in the shade decide we can’t be bothered sitting on the beach anymore and check out the movie being played in the restaurant. Watch the movie (if it was anything good) get dinner then go to bed. That was our life for then next 5 days. We made some minor refinements like take our beach stuff with us to breakfast so we didn’t have to go to the room again, and small things like that but otherwise nothing changed. We reasoned it was the lack of routine in our lives. On the beach we watched the jet skiers and as they came roaring in too close to the swimmers we wished we had a rifle to knock a few jet skiers off for fun. Man I hate them. Probably real fun to ride but all day blokes would jump on the jet skis and motor up and down the beach so close so as to be able to be seen by all the girls. If they go too far out then who can see them? And the funny thing is jet skis are illegal. They were outlawed in Thailand for that very reason. Stupid tourists showing off and killing people. But even though the police station in not 100 meters from the beach nothing happens. I have been told stories where the police get paid by the operators and sometimes as the renter of the ski comes back in he is greeted by a cop who spot fines him thousands of baht for driving an illegal jet ski. The operator rents out the ski to the next show off and makes lots of money. Hello!! Oh yeah I forgot, this is Thailand. I find it funny as well as frustrating to be in a country where there appears to be no laws except some enforced to punish the tourist. Well in the case of the jet skiers I couldn’t agree more with slapping big fines on them. Boy, am I ranting? Okay I’ll shut up now. Otherwise on the beach Mel and I kept ourselves busy with a Frisbee and a big inner tube. Do I need to explain the fun you can have with either of these two things? Frisbees you throw at each other and inner tubes you push each other off of.

One the last day, just as my tan decided it was going to peel off we left Koh Samet and headed back to Bangkok where we are now. We planned to be back in Bangkok in plenty of time for getting a couple of suits made and to do our last minute shopping, are we organized or what? Well I would go for the “what?” option because we made one small miscalculation with our flight. As we were going around all the tailors with a whole 48 hours to spare before our flight we found a couple we liked and Mel went to one to measure up for her suit which they could make for her before we left and I went to another. It was while I was in the process of negotiating how long it would take them to make my suits and whether they should send them to me in London that Mel and I realized a small flaw in our timings. You see we are due to fly out at 1am on the 9th so we went to the suit shops on the night of the 7th. Now if you are leaving late at night on the 9th you automatically conclude that you are going to be up late that day. Actually you are going to be up late on the 8th and you are only going to see one hour of the 9th in Bangkok. Oooops. So as we were planning everything around the fact we will leaving late at night on the 9th we were actually leaving really really early in the morning. My suit is being sent to me and Mel’s wonderful tailor has had a team of people working on hers so it will be ready 2 hours before we leave. Aren’t we silly? Well obviously not because I had a long and involved conversation with a lady at our next hotel in Dubai about the same subject and whether the car should pick us up on the 10th or the 9th, how many ‘real’ nights we are staying, how many hours there are different between Dubai and Bangkok and just generally astrophysics and concepts in time travel. Four hours to go and I think its time to wrap this one up. Thanks for the replies and I will try and keep writing to you all. Thanks for the corrections such as the skytrain is not a monorail at all and various different variations on my spelling. Hopefully I will write again from Dubai, Mel and I are both excited.

V