I Heart HKG Food

Hong Kong, China - If Hong Kong is the mall of Asia, it wins first place for the best food court.  My friend tells me they have the Hong Kong 15 for new transplants to the materialistically driven port city.  Ironically, sizes in Hong Kong run like the rest of China (and pretty much Asia): XXS, XS, S, and Fat. Where does all the chow fun go? It's certainly not burned off climbing the Peak. Lazy Cantos built an outdoor escalator for that. Maybe it's like pregnant women drinking Castor Oil to speed up birth. Their intestine is like one giant slip 'n slide for greasy food.  

You know you're entering a culinary wet dream when even the airport has scarf-able cuisine. Zurich airport, I dined on wine. Frankfurt airport, I dined on bottled water. Heathrow, I threw up (turbulence). Hong Kong, I dined on har gow and 24 flavors of mochi ice cream. The two outliers has to be Charles de Galle and Lisbon, nasty airport food but pretty good indigenous nosh. 

Who's Got Varnish and is not Afraid to Use It?

Bangkok, Thailand - Holy shitake! This is where tacky goes to die. I now must issue my first retraction (even masters have a blemish). A few entries ago, I lamented over the varnished path to hell all historic Chinese buildings are doomed to traverse. I eat my own words. The refurbished Forbidden City is positively Gehry-esque compared to the Emerald Palace in Bangkok.  Hell, Walt Disney World is an icon of minimalist-chic compared to the aesthetic eye of Thailand.  To each is your confection-coated own I guess. But what do I know, Asian women have three colors in their wardrobe, black, grey and charcoal so I really have no right to comment on the technicolor of others.  

Every tour to Ayunthaya (poor man's Cambodia) involves a tour of the Summer Palace and it is apparently seen as rude to not want to see it. You have bigger problems than disrespecting your king's summer crib if you have to "trick" people into going. Effectively, you're putting the Summer Palace on par with all those stupid ceramic factories you make us go to. At least there were cute topiaries of elephants smelling each others asses.

The Safety Dance

Koh Tao, Thailand - How do we seek safety when we travel? What criterias define comfort? Are degrees of separation inversly porportional to isolation? Naturally, commonality builds bonds but does differences cause opposites to converge? Drops of oil don't mix naturally but when immersed in water, they cling to each other.  

Koh Tao is a small diving island in the Gulf of Thailand.  Every guesthouse or resort that dots the beach is a dive shop and all other businesses on the island support the diving community. You and all the other people from your ferry are in Koh Tao for one purpose only and that is to go diving. Now you don't just share a common culture and language but a common activity. In the backpackers' warped world of relationships, you might as well be blood brothers. The resorts are so communal that sitting down for a meal is like a high school cafeteria. You just pick a empty space and start chatting with your companions about what they saw on their recent dive. When the check comes, you each shell out an equal portion of Bahts.  (Marx couldn't have imagined in his wildest dreams that western tourists would be the ones to currently espouse socialist ideals in Southeast Asia.)

I can't imagine there are so many tourists interested in diving in Thailand. Yes, it is one of the nicest places in the world to dive but it's expensive, certification takes time and you can't really get drunk. In venn diagram of what 18 to 25 year old travelers look for, I'd suspect the union of those three characteristics to be empty. The dive schools does however offer easy access to friendships with people on similar paths and it offers safety to the traveler who is a little wary of diving (no pun intended) head first into a foreign land, culture and language. And to continue the trend of cheesy dive metaphors, it is a safety stop before going too deep.  

Ebb and Flow, Booze and Snow

[A creation story of the Full Moon Party.  Dramatization.]

Thongchai was the illegitimate son of a military junta and a student protest.  Because of his dubious birth, he was given the least visited island in the Gulf of Thailand, Koh Phangnan.  Eldest song Somchai was given Koh Samui, an already established port town of western holiday-makers and second son Supaporn was given Koh Tao, the spiritual mecca for divers.  Thongchai was sad and he cried constantly into his green papaya salad. 

Luck would have it, one day Thongchai stumbled upon the Spirit of Debauchery and the Spirit of Unrest fraternizing, even though his father had just decreed the two to enternal separation. Thongchai was just about to go tattle when the two Spirits made him an offer for his silence. They would make his island, Koh Phangnan, the most visited island of them all. Thongchai thought long and hard and finally conceded so long as the promise could be made true.  

The task wasn't an easy one.  As Debauchery knows, Koh Samui is already Daytona of the Oriet and even Unrest couldn't deter the avid divers from going to Koh Tao.  Finally, the had an idea.  From years of inciting student uprisings, they both knew to get people to show up, all that is needed is a little direction and a lot of marketing.  Thus, under a luminous sky, the Koh Phangnan Full Moon Party was born.

Revelers flocked to the island on the eve of every full moon to drink, dance and make merry. The Full Moon Party became so popular that Thongchai had to launch a Half Moon Party to house the overflow.  And that my gentle reader, is the creation of the Koh Phangnan Full Moon Party. Unfortunately for Thongchai, since selling his soul to the two spirits, he'll never see the day of a peaceful government but he's already drafting plans for the Waning Crescent Party to launch in early 2009.