Brian Felsen

Tweet F 4/12 In the morning we went to the Queen Saovabha Memorial Institute and Snake Farm’s 11AM snake milking. The Institute was founded in 1923 and is one of the largest herpetological research facilities in the world, not a tourist trap at all. Since Thailand has 160 varieties of snakes, 48 of which are [...]

Tweet W4/10 We get reservations in the morning for a bus from Krabi to Bangkok. We find an internet café to make online reservations for the Maxx hotel (their rack rate is $40 but it can be had on the net for $20), but it takes a day to confirm, so we’ll show up and [...]

Tweet The longtail boat took us through Phang-Nga bay today, which was wonderful. We saw a cave with thousand-year-old paintings. We saw limestone cliffs, took the boat between them, went in and saw some more caves (at Kao Tapu and Tham Lod), where we walked barefoot through water to see amazing stalagmites and stalactites and [...]

Tweet Well, we woke up and had a nice fight with Ooi Shie Ching, the manager of the Imperial Hotel. We complained that there was no hot water, brown sewage came up from the tub, and there was rat shit all over the side of the tub, which we hadn’t noticed at 1 in the [...]

Tweet One of Mr. J’s servants picked us up at the guest house and took us to Doi Suthep, a wat from the 1300′s on top of a mountain. You walk up 300 steps to get to the complex. Very nice views, lovely cloister, but it’s another wat. An Asian tour bus came and its [...]

Tweet We hired a tuk-tuk to take us to the ruins around the city. The ones downtown are all walkable, but it was too hot, and we wanted him to take us outside the city to go to the ruins of Wiang Kum Kam. It was hard getting him – he waited for us while [...]

Tweet We’re at the Laotian border just ten miles from Vientiane, its biggest city, and we don’t go. I do the math; I want to see Sala Kaew Ku (Wat Khaek, meaning “Indian Temple”) here, and it’s an hour and $30 a person to get visas for Laos, and then there’s transportation to Vientiane, and [...]

Tweet We went downtown to Udon Thani‘s only taxi lane, and ran into a very Thai problem. In the Kusturica film “Black Cat White Cat,” Dadi says “There’s a saying they have at the Bulgarian border: if there’s a problem you can’t solve with a little money, solve it with a lot of money!” Well, [...]

Tweet F 3/29 At 6:15 we gave Tang what turned out to be a wake-up call. He said he thought we’d said “between 6 and 7.” He said he had to shower and he’d be right over. He came a half-hour later. I realized that although I’d asked if the car would hold up, I [...]

Tweet In the morning we took a bus to Ayuthaya, which was the Siamese royal capital from 1350 until 1767, when the Burmese sacked it. Its name is Sanskrit for “unassailable” or “undefeatable” – and for a long 400 years, it was. The Siamese had control over many of the countries surrounding it, and its [...]