Tag Archives: maikusasi

On a long trip like this, it is normal that you have good moments and bad moments – and very bad moments. I guess we have hit the bottom now.

It seems that we are either getting too old or physically too tired of traveling since after every long trip, especially night buses one or both of us is having fever. As it happened, after a night bus from Bangkok to Phuket, 14 hours, we were totally, completely, fully done. Tired like never before, and getting fever. Sasi got very ill, fever more than 39C for several days, and I got truly worried. I was having a bit fever myself, but worse was that my upper back was cramping really badly, there was a lump of a size of a baseball in there and inflammation in the muscles.

It wasn’t all. We were at that point totally broke. We had barely money to have one meal a day, and there were days I got food only to my poor feverish husband to get him better and was left hungry myself. Obviously, we had to buy also medicines, which wasn’t planned in the strict budget. I had to stop smoking to save money (well, my mum was probably happy with THAT), and we couldn’t do anything. Not that there would have been much to do anyhow with a feverish husband in RAINY Phuket. Yes, it was raining most of the days, which didn’t make it any easier.

And Christmas was on the way, which is really hard for me to be away from home. It doesn’t matter how old you will get, I still want to be home on Christmas. I love the season deeply, and normally decorate the first tree already in the end of November. Now I don’t get any of that, and that made me feel blue. Dark blue. And homesick. (Oh, mind you, I have bought Christmas fairy lights from Bangkok, and have been putting them to every hostel room we have stayed. It helps a bit.)

Those days were miserable on the level we seriously thought of going home, simply giving up. There were moments when we were asking from each others the question over and over again: Why do we travel? But when Sasi got better, we figured that we were already so far that we might as well continue to Bali, which has been my dream for years, and to Malaysia in between, which have been Sasi’s dream.

I got the money from my sold articles eventually (although I have to thank my parents of helping us over the hardest part), and all started to be better. Sun was shining again, we managed to go to beach, and Sasi’s fever was finally down, thanks to the strong Thai medicines. We got over with the worst burst of homesickness by eating meatballs, dark bread and other Scandinavian delicacies in Phuket’s Karon Beach, which is almost like a small Nordic village. Thousands of Swedish and Finnish elderly couples or families with children comes with tour operators to this small paradise, so you hear Swedish and Finnish in the streets more than Thai. Normally, I would avoid places like that like hell, but now it felt homey and made me feel a bit better.

Another thing that made me a bit unbalanced was the fact that the last time I had been in Phuket was the tsunami time, when I was working to write the news of the horrible accident. The first days in Phuket, I was having some flashbacks of that, some sort of post-traumatic stress order, but luckily it didn’t got so bad as I was afraid. Like a friend of mine, who got also through all that, said to me: just go to swim, and it will all be good. And so it was. I don’t think I need to think about all of it, ever again.

We decided then to go to Phi Phi island, which was supposed to be a true paradise. I guess it had been, long before the famous movie The Beach was filmed in there. Like one guy said: “After that, there was about five Swedish blond girls on top of every palm tree in the island to look for Leonardo di Caprio”. I don’t know if they ever found their Leonardos, but there definitely was plenty of them still.

We were still a bit strict on our money, so we planned to stay in a dorm in a hostel. A mistake, huge. I got attacked by bedbugs, AGAIN. But worse still was to listen to the Swedish and Australian teenagers having party all night IN the dorm room, having loud (bad) music and smoking pot. I am obviously getting seriously old, but I just couldn’t stand it. Am getting an old, nagging hag. Bless me.

Maiku, now in balance both with bank account and mind.