The 42 trip: Week 1 – Khao Yai, Pattaya (TH)

The 42 trip: If you have read or heard about the famous book Hitchiker’s guide to galaxy, this number is a pun to that book. To provide more context, in the book a really super super supercomputer is built to answer the question of life and it emits the answer 42. Now the problem is to understand what the question is?

I decided to take this trip recently at pretty much a week’s notice to go off and figure out the meaning of life. I decided to do this trip solo and I have been in Thailand about 1 week now on my trip. It’s been a mind-bending experience in a way, and yet familiar in other ways.

I did something very similar yet different about 8 years ago in March 2014 when I travelled solo across Thailand for about 3 weeks. I was seeking answers to different questions then and my financial situation was orders of magnitude different then.

Why Thailand?

So the first question: Why Thailand? I had 3 options to choose from: Costa rica, India and Thailand. These were countries that seemed easy to get to and covid rules were manageable. I decided to skip India for a soul searching trip because I speak the language and there is something to go somewhere where you are completely on your own, with language barriers and all. Also India is significantly more expensive and less tourist friendly. A last minute good hotel in a random city might be $100 and there’s almost no motorcycle rental infrastructre in India so to speak. Add to that the travel challenges from one city to another (flights are expensive, trains booked and poor roads for buses).

Then on to Costa Rica, I really had planned to go there but it had same challenges. It can be very expensive, infra is poor and you need to rent a car to get around. It had almost no covid restrictions so I could have just taken a flight and landed. I had still decided to go there but a last minute travel booking issue meant that I ended up spending a lot of time to parse through Thailand’s various covid rules and navigate them and ended up landing in Bangkok end of March.

Thailand is great for it’s public transit, easy tourist infra, motorcycle rentals, amazing beaches, great hospitality, cheap hotels and Airbnb. And this time I found out about the cooler and amazing mountain / forest nature park called Khao Yai.

Why solo?

It’s a little hard for almost anyone to understand or digest traveling solo. Isn’t the fun of travel to hang out with other people and do things? Isn’t it weird to leave your partner behind? There are a lot many reasons you can provide on how stupid it is to travel solo. And I get it. I don’t usually do it.

But this trip was meant to be about focusing inward, focusing on what I am thinking and feeling. When you travel with people you have to make plans, coordinate, align on what to do, where to stay, when to go etc etc. I just wanted this trip to spontaneous – wake up and make a plan, or check-out in middle of my stay and go stay somewhere else. I wanted to make the decisions where the consequences of my decisions are limited to me.

It also forces me to focus inward. When you are around people invariably you get engrossed in other things, there’s a lot more to do and it’s easy to shrug the task of looking inside because it’s hard and just going to some new place with someone is easier. Not being able to have conversations with others (both because you travel solo and because of language barrier) means that you have to have a conversation with yourself.

Khao Yai

My first step of the trip was Khao Yai. I was randomly browsing for mountains and found this area while searching for hotels on Agoda. I had planned to stay at a hotel but then while exploring Agoda I found an airbnb (Agoda Homes) that seemed to be a studio apartment built into the hill and forest itself. Something about it captivated me so I ended up booking it for 5 nights.

It had no major ratings (and I generally look at ratings quiet a lot). It seemed to be out of the main city pak chong so I got to Pak chong from bangkok via bus and then rented a motorcycle and drove the 30-40KM to this place. All I could see was the mountain and no house so I was a bit freaked out but the owner had provided detailed directions. So I drove up the mountain and found a house 0.5KM up where the owner lived. Then we went up another 0.5KM to the top of the mountain where this studio home was. It was like the perfect thing I had wanted.

There was not a human for 500m, I had the mountain and forest and all it’s wilderness to myself. I could sit in the balcony or look out the glass windows and I could see the land and forest in all directions. It felt like I was healing by being in nature for 3 full days. It was just perfect.

Then I ended up spending a couple of days to explore the Khao Yai natural park and it was amazing. I got to drive up and down mountain roads, nature all around me, very few people and got to see some animals as well. It felt like things were happening to me that I could not predict but these were the things that had to happen to me.

Pattaya

I had a few options after Khao Yai. I was thinking of going down south to Phang nga, or a friend had gone to Krabi – so I thought I might go there and then to Koh Yao Nai island. But then I had some hotel points to burn and saw this very nice looking Intercontinental hotel in pattaya on the beach. And it was ridiculously cheap on points so I decided why not? I ended up coming here and it was a quiet part of Pattaya (my biggest worry was that I would end up in middle of pattaya’s hustle and bustle, even though covid has quietened it a lot).

The hotel was on a hill with nothing much but a couple of hotels and condos in the area. It’s also set in this nature type colonial feel so it didn’t feel like a giant monster condo. And my room had a sweeping ocean view so I could sit in the balcony and just zone out or write or do nothing.

I plan to just hang out at the hotel in Pattaya for a few days and walk around to nearby cafes to see if something inspires me even more.

Travel in Thailand

The infrastructure here of buses and minivans is so amazing. Just go to van station and say the name of a city and within an hour you will be on a cheap bus trip to that city. Usually about 120-180 THB (3.5-5.5 USD) for 2-4 hour trips. They have cheap flights as well most times. Usually 20 USD to go from Bangkok to Phuket or upto 60 USD at peaks. And finally you can rent a cheap motorcycle for 250-350 THB (8-10 USD) a day. And with that no part of Thailand is too far away or complicated to get to.

Thinking and Writing

I had kept writing down questions I would like to answer before I started this trip. It felt like it would take me the entire 3 weeks or more to answer them. These were existential questions but for some reason being here away from the world, in the nature, I have been able to do a lot of good quality thinking done.

And I have been writing like I have not written in the longest time. I have written 5-6 blogs (not yet published) and maybe 10+ long emails to people. It’s like everything was just waiting for the moment that I put pencil to paper.

Food

I am in love with the instant noodles and instant coffee here of course. But the café culture is much better than 8 years ago and I found so many amazing little cafes with good coffee. And of course I am no longer a vegetarian this time so I am indulging on the amazing Thai food. It’s so good and so cheap! My staple on this trip is called pad kra pao pork ผัดกระเพราหมู. I eat it about once a day and usually it is 60-100 THB (2-3 USD).