Rock Bottom

Thank god for internet, this writing is a much needed release after the past few days...

So my last post was from Ayuthyya which was a few days ago, since then, I have spent 3 nights in Sukothai, one night in Phangna Bay, one night on the coast of Phuket, and now I have spent one night in Koh Phangan (an island in the Gulf of Thailand).

Sukothai was really great, we were staying in a traditional Thai hotel, which comprised of a handful of private suites in the middle of a pretty rural city. Sukothai was basically out in the middle of nowhere and the only reason we went there is because the study abroad program that is offered through my school stops there. The hotel was a little piece of heaven in the center of this rural, technologically undeveloped city. There was a lovely national park there which offered wonderful traditional Thai temple ruins. There was a really cool Bhodi Tree that had engulfed a severed Buddha head with its roots, this elevating it to about waist level. It was quite creepy actually because it had stayed straight up and down and it really looked like the Buddha head had grown out of the tree. The forest was quite serene, my mom and I rode dilapidated bikes through the trails, seeing all of the old structures and Buddhist shrines. I spent the rest of our time in Sukothai relaxing at our hotel, because we really haven't stopped for anything but sleep since we started out trip. Since Sukothai, I have been reading the book The Namesake, which is a lovely page-turner about a young Bengali man and his interactions with his family and America culture. My boyfriend is Bengali so for me the book has really been a reminder of home, an uplifting thought at this point in my trip. I have been clinging to e-mails from family and friends on this trip because I am having quite the time with culture shock.

From Sukothai, we took a plane to Phuket, what was supposed to be the start of our tropical-Thailand experience--also the last week of our trip. Oh boy, I learned my lesson about getting my hopes up about American conceptions of what this country is like.
We arrived in Phuket around 3 in the afternoon, it was a pretty short flight from Sukothai. We had read the travel magazine in the pocket of our seat on the airplane and they had mentioned that while in Koh Samui (which was not where we were heading) it is advisable to rent a car to put around the island in. I mentioned it to my mom simply because I thought it would be fun to drive around Phuket since it's like England, you drive on the left side of the street. I didn't actually think we would need a car. OK, well as it turns out, it was the best decision we could possibly make.

I'm just going to let everyone know that I was a horrible to my mom, yelling at her for getting to close to the left side of the road, basically criticizing her on her every move as we drove around the city. I wanted to drive and she wouldn't let me (understandably since it was a rental car), I was cranky and tired from traveling and was lashing out. Basically the definition of a spoiled cranky teen. Ugh, regrets... When we arrived at the hotel 4 hours later, a trip that should have taken maximum 1 hour, we checked into our hotel room. We were escorted to our room by a man who didn't speak English but was very friendly. We set our stuff down looking around our room at the curiously large open space next to the solitary queen bed (romantic, I know). As we looked closer at the white duvet, we lifted it up to find that there was no top sheet and it was definitely not the kind of comforter that you can machine wash. As my mom looked closer, in her usual obsessive way, she noticed a dull blood stain on the un-washable comforter. She brought me over and we inspected the gross comforter all over, only to find that there were (what looked like) period blood marks all over it along with obvious bodily fluid marks. My mom FLIPPED out, she had to hold her mouth to keep from retching all over the bed and I started questioning the bellboy who didn't understand a word i was saying. We had read in the airport about how men pay extra to take the virginity of Thai prostitutes, and about how rampant and common prostitution is in Phuket. Understandably, we were conjuring all sorts of assumptions about what had gone on in that hotel room. After having such a hard time finding the hotel, our emotions and patience were frayed to say the least. We went down stairs and ripped the hotel manager a new one, refusing to pay for our reservation, demanding a refund. Thank god we had a car to get the heck out of Old Phuket Town.

We were going to stay in that hotel for 2 nights, so we decided that we would trek up to where we were planning to spend the next day, Phanga Bay. We were hopeful that it would be kind of a resort-y city, going off of what the guide books had said about the wonderful scuba diving and the Island that James Bond was filmed on. Again, we let our hopes of American misconceptions of Thailand beaches cloud our minds. Once we had driven an hour and a half to the city, it turned out to be a town not a city, that puts many scary movies depicting ghost towns to shame. It looked like Phangna Bay had been devastated by some invisible force, creating the feeling of dire emptiness in the town. We were horrified, no hotel reservation, no map, the panic set in. I don't even know if the word panic even begins to convey what we went through. The towering mountains with sheer steepness lined the highway road that went through the town. There were no streetlights, there were no lights in any of the towns buildings save for the occasional convenience store/food cart/home decorated with plastic furniture and blue florescent lights that dangled uncovered from the ceilings.
In hopes of finding some sort of lodging that didn't appear to be simply a hole in the wall "guest house" frequented by prostitutes, we followed the side road down to "James Bond Island". All we found there was another stretch of creepy-lonely street that had a large, looming, and quite out of place hotel. Yes it was a hotel with maybe 100 rooms, but it looked so horrifyingly creepy we had to drive by it a couple times, wondering if we had the guts to enter the blue-florescent lit lobby. We had no choice, so we swallowed our fear and parked the car. We booked a room and were escorted once again by a non-English-speaking bellboy. We took an elevator with a girl-i emphasize the word girl (she was around my age, maybe younger)- who was dressed in short shorts and tiny heeled sandals who strangely knew the bellboy. As he walked us down the hall to our room, the girl walked in front of us, behind the bellboy. I knew she was a prostitute, because why else would a young Thai girl, dressed quite inappropriately for her culture, be in a skeezy hotel this late at night. My mom wasn't sure, but we kept exchanging looks communicating our suspicions. The bellboy banged on the door for the girl yelling something that jeering in Thai, and the door opened by a youngish Thai man, fresh out of the shower in just a towel. The girl walked in a manner a bit to provoking for her age, confirming our horrors. The bellboy opened our room for us, the one right next door to the toweled man... A lovely way to end our evening.

As expected, my mom and I fought for about an hour, mostly about how this trip was seeming more and more to be a mistake and about how horribly I treated her that day, the one day we really needed to stick together. I felt like I ruined our trip for good and we considered leaving the hotel and flying home that night. We realized that we had hit rock bottom, wished that Steve was there to be our strength, we were scared. We worked through it though and knew that we needed to stick together in order to overcome, we are stronger than all this. We couldn't resign to quitting, not after all this.
We thought about our cousins who traveled around the world, just two young women, and from what we recalled had no housing reservations in the cities they traveled to. My mom told me a story about them crossing a busy street in China, the beginning of their long trip, and how they really had to overcome their fears and work together. We decided if they could do it, we could do it. And we did thanks to their inspiring ability to stick together and be strong. We owe them.