I've written before about the excellent and inexpensive medical care at private hospitals in Thailand. My experience at Bangkok's Samitivej Hospital reinforced my overwhelming positive impression of medical services in Thailand. Samitivej is one of two hospitals in Bangkok where I could get the exam required by my cruise line employer.

Medical certificates for cruise ships are good for two years, and crew members joining a vessel must present one that will remain valid for the entire duration of their contract before going aboard. The medical certificate I had from my previous two contracts expires in March 2009, seven weeks before the end of my upcoming contract. So I need to get another one. I asked my agent to see if the cruise line would let me get the exam in Thailand, where the price would be a fraction of the cost an equivalent exam in the US, and he reported back to me that I just needed to get the exam with one of two approved physicians.

I chose Samitivej Hospital merely because it was closer to the hotel where Duk and I stay in Bangkok. After a trip on the Sky Train to the Phrom Phon station and a 1.5km walk through a posh residential neighborhood down Sukhumvit Soi 49, we showed up at the appointed hour of 8am on Nov. 3. First, some paperwork, then I was whisked back to the lab where a nurse drew a little blood and handed over a cup for a urine sample. I made a trip to the bathroom, and after a short wait, I was taken to another room for a chest X-ray.

Comment (103) Read More...

Somewhere far above Vietnam, I sit in the tail end of an Airbus A340-400 watching Mamma Mia! on my in-seat entertainment console. I have left behind Thailand, which faces an uncertain future as factions vie for political power in the capital and ripples from the unrest and the global economic crisis wash up on the country's shores as diminishing prospects for a stable and prosperous future. I'm headed toward an American that less than a day ago elected Barack Obama as President, opening a hopeful new era in my home country. As my taxi pulled away from the hotel off of Petchburi Road where I first encountered Bangkok nine and a half months ago, my boyfriend of the past 15 months stayed behind and hailed his own taxi to return to his family's home on the other side of the city. We will be apart for a minimum of six months and quite likely as long as 10 months.

It has been a momentous day on many levels.

I have already chronicled the changes in my life that brought me to Thailand, settling in Phuket to work as editor of a fortnightly English-language newsmagazine. I suppose this post opens a new story, the beginning of another adventure.

Whatever. I'll try not to pontificate as much this time around. Keep it light. Learn to write like a blogger rather than a print journalist filling space. Work on suppressing my Protestant tendency to explain myself.

Comment (7) Read More...

During the Vegetarian Festival, each of Phuket City's several shrines mounts a parade into downtown, and the prime weekend days are reserved for the two biggest. Duk and I had intended to arrive at the Bang Neow parade much earlier, but we caught some exciting moments at the tail end.

Though the Samkong shrine's parade two days earlier had plenty of firecrackers, the insane din from firecrackers during this parade was a couple orders of magnitude heavier. It was painful to walk up the street to get a look at what was going on. Young men carrying the sedan chairs for the Chinese gods were revelling in firecrackers, setting off huge strings of them in the middle of one street and making a public show of withstanding the noise and many small burns on their bare torsos from flaming shreds of firecracker paper flying around. When we came across them, most were covered in spent gunpowder, looking a bit like they had just come off a battlefield. When they had set off all their fireworks, many of them posed for a group picture in the middle of the street.

As we left, we saw a couple more scenes parade by -- much more sedate. A non-exploding group of young men passed by carrying what must be the last of the sedan chairs. And one more maa song tonguing a huge saw.

Comment (3)

Yes, of course this is quite late and out-of-sequence. But once the Vegetarian Festival got really going, I was out most nights and didn't have much time to write up my observations, much less process my photos. In the next day or so, I'll finish posting my account of this year's festival. And down the road I hope to have more time to dedicate to blogging so I can have more timely content.

Not much happened on the second day of the festival, except that Duk told me I should take care not to wear black. So I donned my Thai-style white clothes for the festival, which we purchased, of course, from the seasonal merchandise racks at the Big C Supercenter where we shop. We heard on the third day of the festival that people would gather for a big invocation at Phuket City's Saphan Hin complex, so that's where we headed after work.

Unfortunately, we  got there just as the ceremony was breaking up. The gathering drew several thousand people, a good number of whom were banging drums and cymbals or lighting off fireworks, and it was meant to invoke the Chinese gods who would be celebrated during the festival. We motored away from Saphan Hin to the nearest shrine, Bang Neow, which was a kilometer away, pretty much in downtown Phuket City.

Comment (8) Read More...

First off: a warning. I'm gonna get medical on your ass. Or my ass, rather. This post details my second experience in a Thai hospital, and the result is overwhelmingly positive. But the back story and the details are a little -- well, not so much gory as unpleasant.

This morning I dropped into Bangkok Hospital Phuket to see about what I thought must be a hemorrhoid on my ass, an external growth that had been getting larger during the past year or so. I first noticed it while I was on the ship after a bout of constipation. My diet is heavy on fiber and roughage, and I almost never get plugged up. But from joining the ship and processing food from the crew mess and passenger buffet, my innards got totally stopped up. After a couple of days, I saw the ship's doctor, who gave me a fiber drink that managed to get things moving again.

A few weeks later, when I first discovered the tiny growth on the outside of my O-ring, I thought I had blown it out. Which was unexpected. About 15 years earlier I had gone through a painful bout of prolapsed internal hemorrhoids. I'll spare you a rundown of the several types of hemorrhoids since Wikipedia has a clear explanation (with a nifty graphic). Suffice it to say that prolapsed internal hemorrhoids are very uncomfortable, and there's almost no relief from the dull, throbbing pain, whether seated, lying prone or floating in a bath of warm water.

Comment (4) Read More...

Duk and I went out to Samkong shrine last night to pay respect to the gods as part of the Phuket Vegetarian Festival. As always, I drew special attention from local Thais manning the various stations where we knelt to pray and offer incense. A farrang following rituals at Buddhist temples or Chinese shrines is very conspicuous.

At the final station, the helper asked me where I was from. When he heard that I was an American, he spoke in halting English. "American banks," he said, making a falling-down gesture with his right arm. "Over."

"Yes," I replied. "American banks all over."

Comment (2)

Since we live along the main route from Samkong to the center of Phuket City, the first of the several traditional parades for the Phuket Vegetarian Festival ran right past our apartment. Even more conveniently, it came by just before breakfast as I was getting ready for work. It had stepped off from Samkong shrine at 7:19am, an auspicious moment, and covered the 500m or so to our apartment in about 15 minutes.

Leading the parade were school children carrying yellow flags, the emblem of the festival. Behind them were trucks hauling images of minor gods and young men with sedan chairs for the more important ones. I don't know if it's a traditional part of the festival, but at one point a number of motosai saaleng (motorbikes with sidecars and awnings) came down the street distributing coconut ice cream cones.

The shocking part of the parade came at the end. I had seen pictures and braced myself for the sight of the maa song, who mutilate themselves to take on all the bad mojo from the devout followers of the festival's purification rituals. But the reality of young men with huge spikes hanging out of their cheeks or, in one case, several curls of flex tubing winding in by the cheek and out by the mouth, was a little unsettling. Plus, there was visible blood. Each maa song had a handler to guide them and to care for the wounds. Many were quivering and apparently in some sort of ecstasy, oblivious to the scene around them.

Comment (1) Read More...

Up the street from our apartment, about 300m to a T-intersection then left for another 100m, sits the Samkong Shrine, a Chinese temple and one of the focal points of the annual Phuket Vegetarian Festival celebrations. I didn't have any sense of how big a deal the festival is for Phuket until the couple of weeks beforehand when workers erected booths lining the street in front of the shrine. Lights were strung across the street. Yellow flags, a traditional symbol of the vegetarian festival, started appearing along every major road. By the beginning of the festival Sunday, the area surrounding the Samkong shrine was decked top-to-bottom in yellow and red and had taken on a carnival atmosphere.

As with all Thai festivals, food is very important. In front of every shrine I have seen in Phuket City, the streets are lined with food booths. On sale are amazing all-vegetarian foods, from egg rolls to noodles, soups and spicy main dishes made from bean curd.

Not wanting to miss any of the dozens of ritual celebrations, I had planned to be on-hand at the Samkong shrine for the raising of the Ko-Teng pole, a symbolic conduit that the god can use to transit from heaven to Earth, and the hanging of lanterns at the top (presumably to light the way). Unfortunately, we missed it. I had thought the ceremony at the Samkong shrine would be at midnight, but one of the maa song, or "enchanted horses", told us that they finished the ritual earlier in the evening. If we waited around, he said, we could see them usher one of the gods into the shrine. We were pretty tired, so we took some pictures and talked more to the maa song, who are responsible for the rituals and who will perform superhuman feats, like firewalking and piercing, later during the festival. Then we headed home.

Comment (0) Read More...

I did eventually make it to Ranong, and I got my new entry stamp. Much of the van ride up and back was a blur, as I slept the whole time with a heavy head cold coming on. But the ferry ride was quite spectacular.

We arrived at the dock after having lunch in town and had to get exit stamps before we boarded our boat -- the only one with an enclosed cabin, thankfully, among a flotilla of longtail boats with no shade. The immigration checkpoint is the most laid-back one that I've ever seen, and there was no real security, just two separate queues, one for departing and one for arriving. Locals streamed past, coming and going from longtail boats that pulled up to the large concrete dock.

We boarded our boat and sped up river, or out into the bay. I'm not sure of the geography of Ranong, so it could also have been across the sound or river inlet. It was very beautiful, with typical wooden shacks built on the waterline, here and there a tall, golden image Buddha set among the buildings. We had to motor slowly past two further immigration checkpoints on the water, both of them shacks with wooden piers. After another 15 minutes or so, we were in Burma.

Comment (0) Read More...

On a gloomy, overcast morning, I stood outside for an hour beginning at 6:30am. I read RSS newsfeeds on my iPhone while I waited for the minibus to pick me up and take me to Ranong, Burma so I could get a new 90-day entry stamp on my visa.

But the minivan never showed. I called the company that arranged the visa run at 7:30am only to learn that the driver of the minivan thought I had cancelled and never stopped at the pickup location. So no visa run for me today. I hopped on my motorbike and drove back to the apartment feeling totally frustrated.

The morning set off a bout of culture shock, and for much of the rest of the day I just slept at the apartment, listening to jazz and reading news of the presidential campaign back home.

Comment (1) Read More...