Waiting for my visa

We went almost straight back to Bangkok from Laos after we got out of our arrest problem there. We were waiting for an immigrant visa to Australia that we applied for. The Australian embassy kept telling us next week, next week and the weeks were piling up. To kill some time I was invited to play bridge by the French embassy for their team that played in an embassy league. I really enjoyed playing with them. Each day we would play at a different embassy. The hosting embassy supplied food and drinks before and during the games. It was pretty a pretty high class affair usually. The quality of the competition was high and my French partner and I did very well. I had to speak French all the time but I improved my French doing that and my French mistakes were always entertaining for my fellow players. The games were duplicate bridge with most teams playing some variation of Goren but my partner and I played the precision method so we didn't miss many slams. If I ever made mistakes my partner who was a French woman thirty years older than me, would give me hell in French. I kind of liked it when she got pissed at me because she was so sexy when she got angry at me. She was the wife of one of the embassy officials but she was always coming on to me when we won our matches and if we lost she would always blame me. All the food was great. It was normally like a formal dinner with lots of fancy dishes.

When I wasn't playing bridge I was playing chess at the Hotel Atlanta where were were staying. Otherwise Kirsten and I would wander around Bangkok at the market or the temples. Sometimes we would go out for massages together. It was kind of hard to find a real massage since most of them were fronts for prostitution. I loved the Thai massages with the tiny girls holding on to the ceiling and walking on my back. We also ate out all the time and talked with other travelers about where to go and what to do.

We went down to Malaysia to go to Penang for a short side trip. We only carried small hand bags with us because we wanted to buy some things to carry back with us. We hitch hiked to the border with Malaysia and went through on the Thai side without a problem but then the Malay side would not let us in the country. We looked too much like dirty hippies they told us and I didn't have any clean underwear in my bag. I tried to bribe my way in but it didn't work and we were turned back around to the Thailand side. When we went to go back into Thailand they told us we couldn't enter without an exit stamp from Malaysia which we did not have because they didn't let us enter. I had to argue for a long time with them to be allowed back into the country. We spent the night in a hotel and got all scrubbed up with clean new clothes on and some new underwear in our bags and tried again the next morning. We got a different immigration person that let us right through this time. We went down to Penang and hung out shopping in their big duty free area for a few days. We had a lot of fun in Penang with the other travelers there. Penang is in Indonesia so we had to take a ferry over there from Malaysia but we had no more hassles with the Malay officials. We took a bus back to Thailand when we were finished with our side trip. The bus was stopped on the highway by armed robbers. They stopped the bus and boarded it with their machine guns ready. They told us that anybody that resisted would be shot. Then they went down the aisle and robbed each passenger one by one. They made them stand up and they searched them taking all their ID and valuables. They robbed everybody on the bus like this except for Kirsten and I. They just politely smiled at us and moved to the next person. I was kind of surprised by this and after the robbery was over and we were back on the road I asked around to find out why they didn't rob me. The other passengers told us that if they robbed us then the Federal police would come into the case but that if they just robbed the locals then only the local police would investigate and the local police were probably splitting the loot with them. It was a frightening experience for us even though we lost nothing.

We got back to Bangkok and did some more waiting for the visa but then we asked if the embassy could forward the visa to Singapore and we would just pick it up there and they said no problem. So we took off to do some more traveling. We slowing hitch hike though Malasia to Kuala Lumpur. Just before we arrived in the city there was a big riot with the Malays against the Chinese and 80 people were killed in the fighting. We arrived in downtown Kuala Lumpur to our hotel but there was marshal law declared so we were pretty much confined to our hotel. I didn't like that much and we left town as soon as we were able to leave without seeing much of the area at all. The Chinese have lived in Malaysia for generations but they were not accepted by the Malaysian people as being Malaysians. The Chinese stuck together without assimilating into Malay culture and they controlled a lot of the business there. The local Malays resented them and started the violence to kick them out of the area. It worked to some extent quite a few of the Chinese left after this incident but they really had no place to go because they had been raised in Malaysia. Most of them just went to Singapore where they were accepted with no problems.

We did take a trip over the mountains to the East coast of Malaysia. We went to Mersing to watch the sea turtles laying eggs at night on the beach.

We arrived at the beach and found a nice little family run restaurant where we put up our tent next to. Then we made friends with the family and their children that ran the little beach restaurant. That night we sat around until we heard the shouts that some turtles were coming ashore. We raced down the beach to the location of the shouting and watched as several very large sea turtles came out of the water and up on to the beach. As the turtles got in the shallow water and started to walk they were attacked by swarms of small sharks so that when they walked up on the dry sand they were bleeding from small shark bites. The bleeding usually stopped in a couple of minutes and did not seem to bother the turtles much at all.

They would walk up to the high tide line of the beach and walk around feeling the sand with their feet. When they found a place they liked they would stop and start digging a hole with their back foot. They were very careful and precise with how they dug their holes. Often they would stop in one location for whatever reason maybe the sand was too wet or too dry or something like that and they would move and start digging again in a new location. when the hole was just right for them they would go into a trance like state and start laying eggs. The eggs looked like soft ping pong balls as they dropped into the hole. Most of the eggs were immediately collected by official egg collectors for the government run hatchery on the beach. A certain percentage were allowed to be sold.

Turtle eggs were considered an aphrodisiac by the locals. They would mix tomato juice and hot chili sauce in a shot glass and then crack in a raw turtle egg and guzzle it down. I tried it and we did have great sex on the beach that night but I don't think the turtle egg had much to do with it.

The next morning we met some other travelers and we all decided to rent a boat to take us out to spend a few nights on one of the beautiful offshore islands. We gathered some supplies of food and water and had one of the local fishing boats take us out to the uninhabited island. We were dropped off with a promise to be picked up later by the same boat. There was a degree of trust required that we were not completely convinced with their returning. We were a tad nervous that we would be abandoned out here and die on this beautiful island. It was beautiful too. There were tall palm trees leaning over the beach of pure white smooth sand. The moon came up at night and it was just so pretty to watch with the moon coming up between the trees and the light from it illuminating the waves gently lapping on the beach while we sipped our wine and lounged around in a romantic bliss. We made our food for a few days and swam naked and sunbathed all day until it was time for the boat to return for us. we were afraid it would not show up but it did and we went back to the mainland safely.

We hitch hiked down to Singapore next. On the way we saw some wild orangutans and stopped off to see some primitive tribes that gave us blowgun demonstrations. We also had a great meal at a fancy restaurant near the top of the pass over the mountains. We ate a lunch that was called a steam boat. A big metal dish with charcoal burning below a circle of water was in the center of the table and small dishes with meats, poultry, seafood and various other vegies and things were spread in front of us. We would place some of them on skewers and place them in the boiling water until they were cooked and we would eat them. Then we dumped all the leftover items into the broth left over from our cooking food and let it cook into a soup which finished off our meal. Our host showed us how to do it all. We enjoyed the meal and our company. We then went the rest of the way on down to Singapore and checked into a hotel.