Tuesday, January 4, 2022
5:58 a.m. Room N16 Nongsuch Resort
Ban Rak Thai, Thailand
I was aware of the correct date this time, and I typed out 2022 first time. As I’m sure many people have pointed out, 2022 has a very futuristic feeling. It doesn’t feel like a real year at all but some distant point in the future when robots rule the earth. I wonder if that is just a result of the times we live in. After all, we grew up with science fiction movies set in the far future, and they would pick years like 2022. And back in the seventies and eighties, 2022 felt very far away. But what about people living in 1922 or 1822 or 1322? If they were born in the 60s of the previous century, would the new year of whatever-22 feel like the distant future to them?
And I am in the village of Ban Rak Thai. I was successful in my plans to ride up here and find a place to stay. Though successful is not perhaps the most accurate word, as I’ll explain in a minute. My hotel is a bit of a mixed bag. I think that is true of all hotels here – basically overpriced for what they offer in the way of facilities. You’re paying for the setting, not the stuff in your room.
I was awake quite early yesterday morning, and I took my time packing up and getting ready. And then I tried to shoot a complicated video sequence of leaving the guest house. I tried out a few different techniques, and they may or may not have been successful. I did the usual thing of filming myself as I walked out of the door of my room with my knapsack over my shoulder and my helmet in my hand. I had already strapped my backpack to the scooter and otherwise gotten it ready. And then I already had plans to take one last look at the empty lake and the temple beyond it. So, I set up my GoPro in various strategic spots to shoot video of myself as I walked up the steps to the platform and then walked over to the edge to look at the muddy lake bed. That ended up being more difficult than planned because the man that owns the guest house decided to follow me around. He walked right behind me up the stairs for some reason, so he ended up in the video. And then when I tried to film myself walking across the platform, he ran into the shot to remove a pillow from a chair and then he was doing other things behind me. Therefore, none of the shots will actually match. This odd man will be in the background at different times in different places, and it will be clear that these video clips were not shot in sequence. It might look quite weird. I’ll have to edit around him or just not use those shots.
And then I filmed the sequence of riding my scooter up the steep driveway and onto the street. The one unusual thing I tried to do was film part of that from the ground. I put a GoPro flat on the pavement pointing upwards and then I rode my scooter right beside it. The idea was to capture an interesting perspective of the scooter going over top of the camera. But I don’t think it will work. I passed over the camera far too fast.
And then I made a snap decision to ride my scooter to the temple on a hill and have a goodbye coffee up there. The idea was to edit the opening sequence with music and then add a timewarp of going up to the temple and walking around it. And then I would switch into normal speed with audio as I drink my coffee and talk about what my plans were for the day. The trick here is that I used the GoPro on an Auto setting for the TimeWarp. And I don’t really know how that works. But apparently, it adjusts the speed to match your speed. So you can get that effect of moving fast and then moving slow all in the same shot. I reviewed a bit of that video, and some of it looked interesting. The problem is that it sometimes moves faster than I wanted. And when I lingered on a scene for what felt like a long time, it ended up being really short, because the camera was still recording at super speed. Sometimes it worked as I wanted it to, and sometimes it didn’t.
I then made another snap decision to film the next sequence back at the bamboo bridge I’d visited a day or two earlier. This bamboo bridge is right on the road to Ban Rak Thai, so it made sense. I shot a timelapse on my Hero 7 on the ride there. And then I shot a TimeWarp on the Auto setting of a walk across the bridge and then up the stairs to the temple and then around every single walkway in the temple. I filmed the whole place from beginning to end. And then I cut to me sitting at the coffee shop and sipping on my latte and talking a bit more about the village I planned to visit. I kept up this pattern when I left the temple, too. I was just curious what a TimeWarp would look like if the camera was pointed at me in selfie mode the entire time. So I held the GoPro away from my face and walked the whole distance from the coffee shop, down the temple stairs, across the bamboo bridge, and then to my scooter in the parking area. After that, I shot a timelapse with the Hero 7 mounted on the footpegs of the scooter.
I almost stopped here and there to film a sequence of me riding my scooter along the winding mountain road, but I felt like I had enough unusual footage for one video. Plus, I was tired. And there was a lot of traffic on the narrow road, and stopping and starting a few dozen times to film myself would have become annoying if not dangerous. As I got close to the village, I turned on the Hero 9 in normal vlogging mode, and I started documenting my arrival experience. My goal when I started the day was to end up with a visually interesting and punchy 20-minute video. But I think it spun out of control once more and will end up being at least twice as long as that and probably three times longer. I just can’t help myself.
Ban Rak Thai came as a major surprise. I knew that the village was something of a tourist attraction, but it is actually 100% a tourist attraction. If there was ever a tea-planting village here, it is long gone. There is nothing left of it. I would be surprised if there was even one normal home in the entire village near or around the lake. The place consists entirely of hotels and restaurants and coffee shops and tea shops and wine shops. There is nothing else here. And I’m not saying that that is a bad thing. I actually find the place to be interesting and fun. But that definitely came as a surprise. When I rode my scooter over the final hill into the place, I found myself in a traffic jam. I was wondering how busy or not busy the place would be now that the holidays were supposed to be ending. And I got my answer: it was busy! The place was jammed with day trippers and overnighters. And because of that, it was entertaining to walk around and see all the activity. But it also made it challenging to find a place to stay.
I was lucky in that I found a spot to park my scooter right away. And then I grabbed my knapsack and went for a walk. The main drag is dense with fancy coffee shops and restaurants. And one entire hillside has been taken over by a single complex. It has matching decor and architecture from street level all the way to the top of the hill, and I think it must all belong to the same company. The hillside complex put me in mind of Spirited Away.
I saw a place higher up on the hill where I thought I could get a nice view of the lake, and I went up there first. There were dozens, maybe a couple hundred, separate bungalows and rooms up there all over the hill. But, as often happens in Thailand, I couldn’t find any kind of office or front desk or reception area where I could inquire about staying there or how much it would cost. That was pretty much the theme for my entire walk around the lake. I saw lots of hotels and guest houses. In fact, that’s all I saw. Yet, I couldn’t find anyone to talk to about renting a room. This always puzzles me. I eventually tracked down a small office room that seemed to be attached to the famous Lee Wine Rak Resort. This is the place that has bungalows situated on a hillside of tea plants. Pictures of those bungalows are used in all the marketing for this village. When coming here, I thought Lee Wine would be the main place to stay plus two or three cheap and rustic guest houses. That’s all I thought was here. I had no idea that it was wall-to-wall guest houses. Lee Wine, with its rural setting, is something of an exception. Most places have no space and no greenery and no tea plantations anywhere in sight. I asked at this tiny office, and one of the girls in there told me that their bungalows cost 2,500 baht per night. That put them firmly outside my budget.
It was pretty clear that I wouldn’t be able to afford any of the places in this part of town. I walked instead down to the lakeside where the cheaper places were located. I saw quite a few places, but I still couldn’t find any kind of office or desk or reception for these places. I just wandered from place to place, and they all seemed to be empty and abandoned. At one place, I had a small amount of luck. I went down to see the rooms, but there was no one there. But when I returned to the street, I spotted a friendly-looking Thai man sitting inside a rustic streetside restaurant. He looked to be a visitor like me, and he had a Chihuahua with him. He smiled at me and greeted me, and we started chatting. He didn’t really speak English, but with his help, I was introduced to the people that operated the rooms below. The older man told me that the rooms cost 600 baht per night, and he showed me one of them. It was about what you’d expect: a dump. And as I often say in Thailand, I don’t mind a dump. I’m perfectly happy staying in empty concrete shells. Yet, I do find it a bit insulting when this dump costs 600 baht. That’s way overpriced. I would feel like I was being taken advantage of if I paid that much. I especially had that feeling when I was told that there was no WiFi at all.
I continued my walk around the lake, and I saw more and more places with a variety of styles of rooms. I remembered reading good things about a place called Ping Ping. People said that the owners were friendly and that they offered rooms with gorgeous views of the lake for 300 baht per night. That seemed more my speed. But when I went there, I couldn’t find anyone to talk to. There was just a very old woman kind of sweeping up a bit and clearing a table. She ignored me until I went right up to her. And then she started yelling into the air and she kept yelling until a young guy finally emerged from somewhere. And this guy showed me an even worse room than the first one I’d seen, and he said it would cost 1,500 baht. I just laughed when I heard that. That’s $45 US.
By this point, I was getting the sense that there were no reasonable prices in Ban Rak Thai. Everything was going to be expensive. And if I wanted to stay here, I should just grab a room and have done with it. There was no point spending hours trying to find a place that had an appropriate price. Every room was going to be badly overpriced. The next place I looked at seriously was the place I’m actually staying in: Nungsuch Resort. I had just seen the Wi-Fi-less empty concrete shell for 600 baht and an equally barren concrete shell for 1,500 baht, so I was inclined to be quite pleased when the woman at Nungsuch showed me a real hotel room for 800 baht. It was a big room with a king or queen-sized bed, furniture, bedding, hot water heater in the bathroom, a nice window, WiFi, and more. This room even had a nice verandah right outside with a table and chairs and a nice view of the lake. There was a restaurant and the room came with breakfast. With all of that, I decided to take the room.
Considering what I know about this village now, I’m lucky to have this room. And I’m glad to have it. But it didn’t come without its problems. For one thing, they wouldn’t let me move into the room once I’d paid for it. They’d shown me the room, and it was empty and clean and ready for occupancy. But they have a firm rule that you can’t check in until 2 p.m., and even though the room was sitting empty and ready, they wouldn’t allow me to check in. I had to wait an hour and a half. This made no sense to me, and it annoyed me.
And then I realized that I’d only paid for one night, and I definitely wanted to stay in Ban Rak Thai for at least two nights. I assumed this wouldn’t be a problem, and I returned to the hotel to pay for a second night. However, the room was available for just one night. It was already booked for the next night. It wasn’t looking good. But then they rummaged through their books and found a second room that might be available. It was touch and go, but I eventually managed to get this room for the second night. I think it is an older room and not as nice, and it has two single beds rather than a big queen or king, but it costs the same. Luckily, it is just two doors down from my current room. I can see it now, and it actually has a locked padlock on the door. So it might have been empty last night, too. If I’d known that, I would have checked into that room from the beginning. Then I wouldn’t have to bother moving. I’m worried that when it comes time to check out of my current room and move into this new one, they’ll make me wait from noon till two homeless before I can move in. I’m sort of pre-annoyed about that, though it hasn’t even happened yet.
Two other problems bug me about my current room. For one, the hot water heater in the bathroom barely works. It is half broken and seems to kind of warm up the water if you play with the settings and water flow for a long time, but that is about it. And it bugs me that I end up complaining about these things. I’m normally fine with stuff like that. It’s a bit of a novelty to have any kind of hot water at all. My past life of budget rooms usually came with cold water bucket baths. There wouldn’t even be a shower. It’s just that this room costs 800 baht a night. And for that price, you expect things to work.
But the worst thing is something that happens a lot in Thailand: the towels, bedsheets, and pillow cases are saturated with laundry detergent. I don’t know exactly why this happens. Maybe they put in way too much laundry detergent to begin with. Maybe they overload the washing machines. Maybe the machines simply have terrible rinse cycles. Maybe it’s all three factors working together. The end result is that the towels and bedsheets come out of the laundry with a ton of laundry detergent embedded in the fabric. It’s so bad that I find it difficult to breathe when I get near them. The air is toxic, and it burns my eyes and throat and nose. And it burns my skin when I lie down in bed or dry off with the towel. It is essentially the same as rubbing my skin with laundry detergent. There’s a reason people wear rubber gloves when handling detergents. That stuff burns skin. I found it impossible to get any sleep last night. The smell of the soap was overpowering, so I had difficulty breathing, and my skin was crawling and on fire. I was lucky that I had my own sleeping sheet. In the end, I removed all the hotel bedding, put on my orange jacket and then wrapped myself up in my sleeping sheet. That at least put a barrier between my skin and my toxic environment. That helped a bit except that the pillows and the mattress themselves had absorbed a lot of detergent over time as well. I managed to drop off to sleep sometime around 2 and I woke up at 5 with my throat and my eyes burning. It was a pretty awful night.
On the positive side, I had a good time in the village in the evening after my arrival. I went out walking as the sun was going down. And I found a nice place to have dinner on the other side of the lake. The lake is so small that you can walk all the way around it in just a few minutes. And that is kind of cool, because you can see the sunrise and sunset and every other sun position all the time from everywhere just by walking along the lake. And though hotel rooms are crazily priced, the food was reasonable. I had a really nice bowl of beef noodles at the lakeside that ended up costing just 50 baht. It was so good that I ordered a second bowl. I started to feel so good about this village that I began thinking about extending my stay even longer. But to do that, I’d want to find a cheaper place. I saw a bunch of low-budget-looking places on my walks, but, as always, I couldn’t find anyone that worked at these places to ask about prices and availability.
I find that I have no idea how Thai people do things. They have a different rhythm than I do. It feels a bit like my time in Taiwan when I’d routinely go to completely empty hotels, and they’d tell me the place was fully booked. I always had the feeling that they were lying and just didn’t want to deal with a foreigner. But the truth was that the Taiwanese, and now the Thai, seemed to book hotel rooms but then only show up late at night. The hotel would be empty when I arrive and seem empty all evening. And the place would seem empty in the morning. Yet, it was clear that every room had been occupied at night. All the local people showed up late at night and then left early in the morning. So, I never saw them. This hotel is the same. The place was empty all day when they were telling me that it was fully booked. And it remained empty even into sunset. But when I got back to the hotel later at night, I found a large group of people sitting together and having a big picnic meal on the verandah outside my room. These were my neighbors. It’s now seven-thirty in the morning, and these same neighbors are busy loading up their trucks and getting ready to leave. As far as I can tell, they spent no time here at all. They arrived in the dark and are leaving just as the sun is rising. It’s a different rhythm. And I have no idea how they reserve these rooms, how they locate staff, and even how they can afford these expensive rooms as well as the fancy vehicles they drive.
I was thinking about how I wanted to capture some video of this day in Ban Rak Thai, and I decided to start with a timelapse. I’m sitting outside my room on the verandah right now, and I’ve been here quite a while. I have the Galaxy Note 10 on a tripod filming a timelapse of the lake. I started it quite a long time ago before sunrise when the lake was covered in mist. The sun is fully up now, and the timelapse is still running. I didn’t choose any settings. I just used the Auto setting, and I’m hoping for the best. I don’t know how to use this feature on the Note 10. It’s been filming for nearly an hour, and it recorded nearly two minutes of video. I also have the GoPro Hero 9 recording a time lapse. I think it is set to take an image every second. It also has nearly two minutes of video. So it looks like they both have the same settings. The boats on the river have been running this entire time, and I’m hoping the time lapse will look interesting. And it should. It will have the mist flowing and then clearing, the sun rising, and the boats going back and forth. I will let it complete the full hour, and then I guess I will have breakfast.