Pattaya Natural Environment

Walking what seemed like two or three miles to the far end of the beach road for breakfast this morning almost killed me! I have absolutely no idea what the temperature was but if I'd had a spare bucket, I'm sure I could've filled it with my sweat. About half way, I stopped at a petrol station to buy a drink and get out of the sun for a couple of minutes. While I was there, I sent the woman behind the counter into a sudden fit of activity by presenting her with a 1000 Baht note - evidently more than she had seen in a while - and this gave me an excuse to stand under the air conditioner in the doorway for an extended period while she hunted for change, cleared out the till and then popped next door for extra cash. Wandering along the road in a crazed manner, staring into the blazing sun, I began to imagine that my drink was evaporating - it seemed to be getting lower every time I went to drink some of it! I nearly lost the contents twice, anyway, dashing out of the way of oncoming trucks. No pavements, you see. Most drivers here should be sought out and shot - The motorists overtake on both sides, or if there is a car in both lanes of a dual-carriageway and somebody wants to pass they just force them apart and drive down the middle. I've never seen such aggressive driving - Everybody honks for the sake of it every few hundred yards, even if there's nothing in sight, which really does totally scare the crap out of poor passing tourists such as me! I've even seen cars driving quite happily on the wrong side of the road because the correct lanes were full - Oncoming traffic doesn't seem to regard this as remotely unusual, and just drives around them like any other obstacle. Anybody arrested for careless driving in the west should direct the police to come and see what it's like over here; they'd have to shift the definition of "careless" quite substantially. Finally I fell into a seat in the local cafe, laying out my map on the table and examining the area for local interest - but apart from sun, sea, sand and sex, there doesn't seem to be a lot on offer in Pattaya (the sex isn't actually marked on the map, although from what I've seen in the evening there probably wouldn't be much paper left for anything else if they did), so I decided to spend the day being generally touristy and browsing the shops. In the shopping centre there was a big Ripley's Believe it or not museum, something I certainly hadn't expected to see in Pattaya, so I spent a good couple of hours wandering between the exhibits and marvelling at the man hammering nails into his head, the guy who makes his living putting three snooker balls in his mouth, and all the other thousands of items from around the world that you come to expect from these places. I've now been to two or three Believe It or Nots - there's one in Brighton - and there always seems to be a new selection of nutters willing to have their talents put on show every time I visit. I was accompanied by a group of Japanese tourists, who buzzed from exhibit to exhibit going "Oh" and "Ah" occasionally, but not really actually looking at anything. I wondered why they hadn't stayed at home.
Arriving at the exhibit for the world Face-Pulling champion, a notice invited me to try and pull a more ridiculous face than the one shown into a convenient mirror. Having spent a good ten minutes letting out all my tensions, sticking out my tongue, rolling my eyes, blowing raspberries and contorting my face every which way, I turned the corner to discover that lots of people were laughing at me. It was a one way mirror into the hall next door. Ripley seems to particularly favour optical illusions and the like, and there is one exhibit to especially look out for - It turns up in all of his museums, but still manages to catch me out even though I now understand that it's all done with lasers or mirrors or some such: As you approach a beach scene at the end of a corridor, there appears to be a young lady standing on the sand with her back to you - She is naked. Of course, you rush around to the front to get a good look, but the sand is empty. No naked lady. Nothing. Just a deserted beach scene. You can actually sense the frustration in people as they bob their heads back and forth around the side wall - Lady, No lady, lady, no lady... Theres also the horse with three legs and the baby with two heads. There's the collection of head-hunters tools from darkest Africa, complete with shrunken heads. There's a room where the walls, ceiling, floor, tables and chairs are all totally out of perspective with each other - and the brain just cannot sort it out: You put something on what appears to be a flat surface, and it rolls off.
Yes, Ripley's is a brilliant place to go for an afternoon of mind-bogglingly good fun - and at the end, there's a complete collection of eleven thousand letters from one guy in Boredom county, Iowa who gives a new meaning to needing to get out more and who seems to have spent most of the last forty years of his life writing off all over the world to authenticate every item he read about in Ripley's magazine.You can read my full travel journals at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer

How does the idea of riding a three man miniature submarine under the gulf of Thailand grab you? Yeah, me too. Now, I have to confess at this point that I've never posed any real threat to the British Olympic swimming team, neither am I likely to do so in the foreseeable future. Come to think of it, I could go the whole hog and admit that if you put me in a 100 meter swimming race against a large house brick I'd probably come in second. One of my most treasured memories, and I mean that most sarcastically, is being called to the front of assembly in front of some 500 primary school children in my final year to be congratulated on achieving my bronze swimming certificate - something which everybody else had managed to do several years before. However, having previously had the pleasure of SCUBA (1) diving the barrier reef the last time I was down under and BOB diving in the Canary Islands (2), I am certainly no stranger to the ocean, and imagined that a miniature submarine would be the perfect way to have a look around the perfect blue oceans of the Gulf of Thailand before moving on to Phuket. My breakfast was finished off in a state of some excitement. I had really high hopes for the day and wasn't going to let anything spoil it - I was only slightly fazed, in fact, upon discovering that this morning's crispy bacon did, in fact, double as a projectile weapon upon contact with a fork and that I was able to single-handedly put several people in hospital without moving from my table. Koh Larn is a small island that can clearly be seen across the bay from the hotel. It is so small, in fact, that it's difficult to find it on any map and the mapping facility I'm using to track my journey refuses to believe it exists at all and insists that I point out where it is myself. Although only a few miles away, the quality of the sand is much cleaner than Pattaya and it has become a popular destination for day trippers and locals alike, who go back and forth at the not unreasonable rate of 20 Baht one way (I can't remember what the exchange rate was at the time, but this is something akin to taking a train from North London to South London for a couple of pennies). Of course, having booked a considerably more expensive excursion (IE: The tourist option), I was privileged to be driven to the beach at Jontien, a little south of Pattaya, and taken by speed boat out to the pontoon from which the submarine launches. The motor launch jumped and tossed about all the way: the sea was quite rough today, but even the threat of seeing my breakfast again wasn't going to put me off what I was about to do. At the Pontoon, the submarine was being prepared - so the speedboat continued on to one of Koh Larn's beautiful white sandy beaches where I was able to spend an hour or so relaxing in the sun. The beach here was a totally different experience from Koh Samet the other day - There was the same long sandy beach, but this time no sign of restaurants or any other tourist activity other than a couple of Jet skis out in the bay. Instead, there was a native hut, with a campfire and hoards of locals scurrying about, and a row of deckchairs. My guide was a local guy, although he had a very strong American accent and explained that this was because of the many years he had spent there before waking up one morning wondering why he had left in the first place and coming straight back to set up the submarine business. He told me that the locals would happily look after me while I waited for the launch, so I sat on the beach under the shade of a palm tree being terribly British and drinking tea! Nobody looked as though they had left the island in years - and it was refreshing to have a guide who spoke perfect English - despite the amount of western visitors, most people here really have a hard time understanding my accent! When the sub was ready, and the local women had given up asking me about my life back in England and trying to fix me up with their daughters (who, for the record, were something more than stunning), I hopped back into the speed boat and raced out to the Pontoon - The guide took my camera and said that he would take a couple of pictures for me, although when I got it back later he had taken 15 and one of the female tourists with us had borrowed it to take a close up photo of her breasts, which came as something of a surprise when I got the film developed later, I can tell you. There were two other guys waiting on the Pontoon, stereotypically gay to the point that they could almost have been winding us up. They seemed to be under the impression that the top was going to come off the submarine so that they could climb in from above. When they saw that they actually had to get in the water and duck down underneath to get in they suddenly had a remarkable change of heart. The rest of us stood there, genuinely bemused by the conversation:
"Oh, But Davey - You know I don't like the water"
"I thought you'd be like this. You're always like this when it's something fun…"
"You go. I'll stay here and watch you"
"No, If you're not going then I'm not going…"
I had to cringe, thinking about the trouble these guys would've been in if the pontoon had been filled with unsympathetic British lager louts. As it was, the small group of us tried to do anything we could to persuade these two really nice guys to have a go, but they really weren't having it and ended up leaving on the next launch... There was a great long list of questions and disclaimers to be filled in before I could get in the sub, mainly saying that if I was to have an argument with a great white shark while I was down there then it wasn't anybodies fault but the shark - that sort of thing.
On my trip, the pilot turned out to be a "Driver under instruction". My English speaking guide sat there the whole time telling him which buttons to press and saying useful things like "Watch out for that rock" and "Remember that things look closer than they are through this glass". All the same, we developed the disturbing habit of sinking to the bottom and hitting the rocks just a little bit too much for my liking. Mind you, it was a superb experience and I would do it again in an instant: The coral and the little coloured fish are just something else to watch swimming around in their world down there, but on reflection it's probably just as well that we didn't have two neurotic guys having a panic attack along with us as well... It was a great experience in the sub, although nothing to equal SCUBA diving the Barrier Reef in Cairns. In fact, the brochure for the submarine trip even goes so far as to point out that you shouldn't expect it to live up to the Barrier Reef - so they must have quite a few visitors from that part of the world. On the way back to the mainland, I saw my first sign of rain on the trip so far - And boy, did it rain! I mean, never again will I step out of my house at home in England and say "I can't go out today, It's raining". Until you have experienced a tropical rainstorm like the one here this afternoon, you simply cannot imagine what it is like. There were trees opposite the hotel, but I couldn't see them from the lobby as there was basically a sheet of water in the way.
Nevertheless, I had to find an ATM that would accept my card so that I could take out some money for the next few days. Struggling against the wind and the rain, I got down to the beach road before one of Thailand's ever present Tuk-Tuk's (a sort of electric rickshaw with the bicycle replaced by a driver hunched over in an open cab while you sit on a narrow seat behind) pulled over to the side of the road, honking furiously for my attention.
Unfortunately, it was the one time that I really could have used a ride, but I didn't know where the ATM was and so wouldn't have been able to direct the driver. It's hard enough to get a Taxi driver to go where you want at the best of times, especially when they don't speak the language and just want to take you to a Go-Go bar where they are on commission! Yeah, I toyed with the idea of trying to explain that I wanted to go to the nearest ATM cash point that would accept my CIRRUS card, but I think his head probably would've exploded. He leaned out of the Tuk-Tuk, showed me a not very subtle photo of a beautiful girl inserting a banana into an orifice not originally designed for that purpose, and offered to take me for a massage. But since the beautiful lady in question was obviously Cindy Crawford courtesy of Photoshop, I had reason to doubt the authenticity of the photo - so I politely declined, and hurried on into the rain! I did eventually find an ATM machine, and took out some cash for the days to come. To be honest, with the weather turning the way it has today, I think it's about the perfect time to be moving on to Phuket... (1)SCUBA stands for Self Contained, Underwater Breathing Apparatus for any you who have been dying to know for years! (2)A BOB is a sort of underwater jet-pack which you guide about while safely concealed inside a plastic bubble - you may have seen them in underwater movies such as The Deep and Titanic You can read my complete travel journals at www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer