The Dark Museum Off

When I started travelling, I considered museums essential destinations. I'd always had a passing interest in ancient history, so the art museums of Florence, the National Archaeological Museum of Athens and the charmingly run-down Egyptian Museum in Cairo took me on a fascinating journey backwards through time.

I didn't visit many museums after that, at least not many mainstream ones, as curiosity led me to develop a taste for something more niche. Over the past 18 months, I've made a hobby of tracking down museums that are sometimes sinister, mostly morbid and definitely dark.

Shit optimistic Khao San Road salesmen expect tourists to say

The Philippines' non-generous 21-day visa and the impending austerity festival of Passover taking Jackie out of action meant I was back to living the bachelor lifestyle for a couple of weeks and trying desperately to find something new to keep me occupied in this well-travelled part of the planet. As ever, that meant a flight connection in Bangkok with a few days of regeneration and hibernation in its irritatingly convenient tourist district.

Bangkok's Khao San Road area deserves all the criticism it gets, but I have to admit it's a bloody convenient place to spend a night or two before booking a bus to anywhere the hell else in Thailand. Walking around these packed streets and getting hassled by suit salesman and taxi drivers every five seconds is surprisingly non-stressful though, and my theory is that it's so annoying, it stretches annoyance beyond its elastic limit until it snaps and becomes funny instead.

Here are the scenarios I imagine these overly optimistic salesmen are imagining in their heads when they make their cold sales pitches to clearly uninterested passersby.

On the buses

Night buses seemed like the ideal scenario when I started out travelling on a budget - by getting your cross-country journeys out of the way at night time, you could miss out on the boring parts of travel while simultaneously avoiding paying for a night's accommodation, thereby killing two birds with one bus. The perfect crime!

It wasn't until I actually took one and realised it's impossible to sleep when there's no leg room and an inconsiderate DVD player screening realistic rape scenes at inappropriate volume at 1AM that I started to realise the night bus' false economy.

Even after I took on more work and stopped living on such a tight budget, I still fell for the night bus trap occasionally, but with the benefit of experience I made sure each trip was followed by a day with no tourism obligations so I could catch up with afternoon naps. Over time I've got more used to sleeping on buses and can now manage as much as two interrupted hours most of the time. At this rate, I should be capable of falling asleep on any given surface at the drop of a hat when I'm an old man, which fits in well with my retirement plans.

Here's an unreliable breakdown of night buses by country, based on my own experience that's usually with a single firm and may not be representative of countries as a whole. But let's face it, most of them are pretty bad.

A childish day out again again again again again again again again again again again

It wouldn't really be a trip to Thailand without seeing some helpless animals forced to perform for my amusement, so after getting off the boat at Sriracha I was delighted to find out they had a Tiger Zoo nearby. Let the animal rights atrocities commence!

I don't want Si Chang the world

I'm a sucker for an unnecessarily time-consuming challenge (examples here, here, here... actually just this blog in general), and when Thailand's wet season started to trickle away and I headed out to visit more islands, setting foot on all of them seemed like a satisfying and doable task. Then I found out there are 1,430 of them and it didn't.

I have all the time in the world, which in practical terms means as much time as a 30-day visa waiver gives me each time I come in and out of this country for the remainder of my mortal lifespan. Forever doesn't seem so long any more, especially when you take into account that I like to broaden my horizons and do different things now and again with this finite span.

All things considered, I've probably only got eleven or twelve Thaislands left in me. I'd better make them good ones. Koh Si Chang was a pretty good one.

Mm, that's nice too

Iiiiit's October 28th again, and you know what that means! No? It means I just noticed it's the pointless anniversary of a day when I presumably wasn't doing very much last year, so made a greatest hits compilation of photos of ace natural sights I'd seen over the previous year.

I'm not exactly running low on new things to show you - I've got almost two months of backblog scheduled in case I get hospitalised or something and can't provide you with your bi-weekly fix of disappointing, low resolution photos of things you'll have to trust looked spectacular when I looked at them with my eyes through slightly wrong prescription glasses. But a tradition's a tradition, even a pointless, non-existent tradition, so here's another year's worth of nice nature things.

Paradise is overrated

Travelling isn't all that stressful, it's life that's stressful. I get stressed at the drop of a hat, which is why I can never wear hats. I tried it once, let's never speak of that again.

Or at least I thought I got stressed a lot. It turns out all that time I was just getting a bit annoyed. Now I know what stress is, and what it's capable of doing to my formerly invincible body. I won't bore or sicken you with the details, but I have my reliably unreliable bank to thank for making an annoying situation steadily worse and piling on problems and bureaucracy like a stress Buckaroo until my digestive system couldn't cope any more. No, I don't have any formal medical training. Why do you ask?

The result was that I had to spend a lot longer limboing in Bangkok than I'd planned, or than Thai immigration allowed me, with a dwindling supply of emergency baht and no way of accessing my own money that I work for.

Then I remembered I was in Thailand, where there are loads of idyllic islands designed for just these situations, and sought to counteract the most stressful experience in my life with the most relaxing. It was going quite well for an afternoon until the typhoon struck.

Monkeytropolis

Another flight connection in Thailand meant another chance to finally get round to things I'd pointlessly missed out the last six or seven times I passed through immigration's revolving doors. The monkey infested historical town of Lopburi was one of them, and you could ask why this wasn't my first destination in Thailand back in February '11, and why I haven't been living here permanently in the nineteen months since.

Oh yeah. That's why.

Siamese twins

When does a model village stop being a quaint tourist attraction and require its own postcode? When does a doll's house stop being a creepy kid's toy and become a viable dwelling requiring planning permission and a broadband connection?

I'd heard about the Ancient Siam open-air museum on previous visits to Thailand, but I wasn't prepared for the scale of its reconstructions of significant historical landmarks from around the country, which in many cases are 1:1. When you build a faux-dilapidated facsimile of a temple or shrine as close to the original structure as possible, what prevents that from being equally revered? The virtues of age and location?

I was a fool to spend two months travelling around Thailand last year, when I could have just cycled around the world's largest open-air museum and ticked off the sights in one afternoon. Plus, some of them are painted in gaudy colours, which is more eye-catching than just loads of old brown. Bo-ring!

I've made it even less hassle for you - you just have to look at my photos and you've basically done Thailand. Is there a difference? I don't understand anything any more.

Bye bye baby

I'm back in Bangkok for a bit, before taking another flight at the end of the week. For all its faults, Bangkok is a much better place to kill a few days than Kuala Lumpur, where I would have been otherwise, and this at least gave me the chance to tie up a loose thread from my last visit here in November, when the morbidly fascinating Siriraj Medical Museum was closed following the flooding. It was worth the wait.

Bangkok is many things to many people - for some it's a sex tourism paradise or a convenient place to get a realistic-looking driver's licence without having to go through the tedious process of learning how not to run people over. In my case, it largely serves as a Deep Space Nine-style spaceport connecting my trips around various parts of Asia - a Bangkok Nor, if you will. If you're such an irredeemable nerd that you understand the reference.

This city isn't so renowned for the quality of its museums, but what they may lack in educational value and dinosaur skeletons they make up for with a commendably non-squeamish approach to death and deformity. Readers of a sensitive disposition and pregnant women (or anyone who doesn't really like seeing dead babies) might not want to read more. Seriously, this could be a bit upsetting.

Hey ma look, it's me!

I was gathering together some photos of me from this blog recently after someone requested them, so I thought I'd share them with you. This is the most self-indulgent post I've ever made, even by this blog's usual Onanistic standards, but this chronological collection could at least be useful for nutrionists interested in charting my weight loss throughout my travels (apparently I got fat before I left Edinburgh and was a shrivelled wreck again by the time I got to Thailand - really? How did I not notice?)

Putting this together, I noticed that I really don't take that many photos of myself any more - like I don't feel the need to get in the frame as evidence that I actually visited a place (unless it seems funny). Either the novelty of having a camera was finally worn off, or I've become less vain over time. Says the guy who just spent a couple of hours compiling a blog post all about himself, consisting entirely of images of himself.

This is just photos of me that you've probably already seen (though some are from slightly different angles - exciting!) It might be me next to a thing, me doing a thing or me wearing a thing, but the subject is still me. Seriously, there are about 50 of them - this is the equivalent of my Facebook tagged images or something. If you're not interested in me, don't read more.

Macaques all, folks!

Bereaved macaque

One of the advantages of keeping up this travelling and OCD blogging well beyond most people's attention spans and memory capacities is that I can pass off re-contextualised pictures from older blogs as new material. Like one of those budget-saving episodes of American TV shows where the characters get trapped in a lift and reminisce about their antics back when they had funding.

My own funding situation should soon improve, so I'll be able to hire back the green screen technology, guest actors and CGI artists needed to keep up the sophisticated illusion that I'm travelling all over Asia, when in reality I never left Scotland. It probably would have been cheaper to actually go to these countries and do these things for real, now I think about it. But I can't eat that foreign muck.

Anyway, better get on with fabricating a tenuous segue to introduce these old monkey photos. Hey, do you remember when I was in those other Asian countries where they had macaques roaming around all over the place? What was all that about? I'd love to go back and revisit some of those adven... oh dear, the lift seems to have broken down. Well, we might as well pass the time remembering some of those kerrazy monkeys and their wacky antics. Do you remember... remember... remember... (Overlay warbling sound effect)

Literally everything I spent last year

In 2011 I visited eight countries and spent GBP 9,421.37

(average £785.11/month)

Is that a lot? An achievement in thriftiness? I'm not sure, and I don't really care either way. I'm still earning more than I'm spending and I can't put a price on the freedom my freelance career gives me (not because it's priceless, I'm just rubbish with numbers).

I expect 2012 to be similar in terms of aimless wandering, but it'll probably be more expensive now that I've left South East Asia. But there are other parts of the world where living is cheap, and that I haven't been to yet. Those two criteria are enough to put South America on the I'll-think-about-it list for 2012 - but not before I've been through the more expensive South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand on my slightly illogical odyssey.

That said, now I've added up and taken a look at these figures for the first time, it turns out some of these Asian countries really weren't as cheap as I was giving them credit for.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Chang is

...an island, a beer and a Klingon played by Christopher Plummer in Star Trek VI. But let's start with the island.

This was my final destination in South East Asia, so I was determined to make the most of it. By doing as little as possible. It was nice. Here are my photos of absolutely nothing.

Sufferin' Sukhothai

Like the high-profile temples and tombs of Egypt (and pretty much all the temples in Bali), much of what you see in the Sukhothai Historical Park has been reconstructed in the last few decades, in the interest of nicer photos and not getting sued by clumsy American tourists falling over stuff.

Would you rather walk around crumbling, perilous, dilapidated ruins? I would, actually. That sounds great. Fortunately, you can still find plenty of these when you stray from the pack into fields of overgrown grass and barbed wire.

Crime and gunishment

Dave curbs his enthusiasm at meeting Uncle Tow

When I was a kid, I loved dungeons, haunted houses and the Chamber of Horrors section of wax museums (I still know the sequence of torture instruments at the Brading Wax Museum on the Isle of Wight like the back of my severed hand). I'm happy to report that I've never grown out of this.

It's no so much morbid curiosity or a disturbing gore obsession as the amusement of someone putting hard work and care into creating dummies and dioramas to really scare the shit out of children - especially when they contain more gore than is strictly necessary (Haw Par Villa in Singapore is the best example I've found in the world, so far).

I've been trying to find 'unusual' attractions in Bangkok on my most recent visit, so I was delighted to find out that there are a few museums devoted to death and suffering in various forms. Excellent! I was going to categorise these next few blog posts as The Dark Side of Bangkok, but then I remembered there are much darker things around here than that, which I have no interest in seeing. No matter how often tuk tuk drivers make the sales pitch.

They're grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-good

Not Photoshopped

I'm very glad I finally got the chance to visit Wat Pa Luangta Bua Yannasampanno Forest Monastery (popularly and slightly misleadingly known as the Tiger Temple) on my day out in Kanchanaburi.

Not only for the unique chance to recklessly hang out with these dangerous predators as if they were just oversized cats (though really it's the other way round), but also because I'd read mixed things about the ethics of the place, and needed to see it for myself.

Kwai-t a nice bridge

After the unpleasantness of the floating market, I needed to lift my spirits somehow - which meant a trip to Kanchanaburi to see the iconic landmark Bridge 277 of the Burma Railway, constructed by slave labour, POWs and Alec Guinness under the occupying Japanese during the Second World War.

Or the Death Railway, as the more sensationalist history books like to call it. Or the Bridge on the River Kwai, as tour companies are only too happy to inaccurately call it.

Like a rubbish Venice

That was my market-weary verdict when I arrived at Damnoen Saduak Floating Market, the most famous floating market in Thailand (or at least the closest one of any significance to Bangkok, for the lazier sightseers) and apparently the most popular tourist attraction in the country (again, probably due to laziness).

Don't you like spending sleepless, uncomfortable nights on long-distance buses where the staff go through your bags and steal anything of value? What's wrong with you?

Anyway, spending an hour and a half in this floating tourist tat trap didn't do much to change my opinion, though I could at least look forward to the better things coming up later on my package day tour. (Who's the lazy one now?) The floating market was just the reluctant extra - like all those damn butterfly gardens in Malaysia.

Missing pieces

I'm almost done with South East Asia now. I'll almost definitely come back to this fantastically cheap part of the world at some point in the future, but my clinical, bridge-burning approach to life means it's time to move on before I get too bored - as reluctant as I am to start spending real money again. My next destination is the more expensive South Korea, followed by the even less frugal Japan - still, I'm looking forward to experiencing a cold winter and actual weather again.

But before I leave, I wanted to tie up a few loose ends that I didn't get around to earlier, for whatever reason. Usually this reason was Thailand's unfair immigration policy that meant I had to pack everything into just 30 days in February and March (extended by another 14 days with a desperate visa run).

If Thailand had allowed me to stay for a less picky 90 days I certainly would have taken them up on it, like I did in Malaysia and Taiwan where there wasn't even as much to see. But I decided to leave Thailand when my second visa ran out, to see what the rest of South East Asia had to offer. Do you know what? It wasn't quite as good.