Wednesday, March 23, 2022
5:39 a.m. Room 1102, Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
I am back in Mae Sot and back in the same room at the Phannu House. It’s early, and I shouldn’t be awake and out of bed. I can feel that I am still tired. I haven’t gotten nearly enough sleep. But I couldn’t sleep. I tried, but I eventually had to give up. I’m now waiting to see if I still have the neighbor that retches all morning long in his bathroom. When I checked in at the Phannu, I asked for a different room so that I could avoid that guy, but my old room was the only one available. Maybe it is always empty because of this guy. Perhaps other people have learned to avoid it as well.
I was happy that a room was available at all. It could easily have been that all their rooms were full. So I was not upset when I got my old room back. There are quite a few advantages to this room as well, since I spent so much time giving it a deep cleaning and fixing things. If I’d gotten a new room, I’d have to clean it and rearrange everything there as well. Unfortunately, this room has presented a new problem. The air conditioner doesn’t work. That’s one of the reasons I couldn’t sleep. It is incredibly hot and muggy in here right now. It’s quite annoying, because I paid the full room rate, which includes air conditioning. I didn’t pay for a month in advance. And after a lot of hours on the scooter in some quite hot weather, I was looking forward to basking in some air conditioning. But it was not to be.
I’m annoyed because I will now have to talk to the owners of the Phannu about this. And I hate causing trouble. I just want things to go smoothly. I noticed when I moved into this room that the kettle and the coffee were also missing. Last time I was here, this room included a kettle, and they provided some complimentary instant coffee. The kettle in the room short circuited and nearly set the hotel on fire and they replaced it. But I guess they’ve changed their policy and now the cheaper rooms don’t include a kettle. I wonder if my experience with the kettle nearly electrocuting me had something to do with them changing their policy. Of course, the lack of a kettle doesn’t affect me much if at all. I have my lovely Benka cooker/kettle. And I got my stored bag back from the hotel, and my other big cooking pot/kettle was in that bag. I am nothing if not well supplied with kettles.
I’m not in the greatest of moods this morning. I can probably blame that on how hot it is in here and how tired I am. But I’m also a bit worn out by the small details of life not cooperating. I guess a life can be seen as taking place on many fronts, and it seems like little things have been going wrong on every front lately. It’s silly to complain about them because they are so trivial, but they start to add up over time. I’ve had so many problems on the technology front. The latest is how my GoPro will no longer connect with an external microphone. Nor will it connect with my expensive GoPro Media Mod. And that sent me back to my Panasonic G85. And that camera is broken as far as exposure goes. And the autofocus in video mode still won’t work. This MacBook continues to drive me a bit nuts. It’s the most powerful and most expensive piece of technology I’ve ever owned. Yet, it’s the one device I have that won’t connect to WiFi for some unknown reason. It’s a little thing, but it gets to me. I hate having a MacBook instead of a Windows-based laptop. It complicates so many things. I’m still editing video on my smartphone, and there are so many annoying issues there as well. A strange glitch is that the phone will stop operating when it goes to sleep. Therefore, when I export a final video, I have to monitor the phone the entire time to keep it awake. I can’t just press the button to export the video and then wait an hour for it to finish. I have to keep the phone beside me the entire time, and every couple of minutes, I have to tap on the screen to make sure the screen doesn’t go to sleep. And if I happen to forget and the phone goes to sleep, the export will freeze, and then I have to start all over from the beginning again. It’s so annoying. You’d think that I could go into the menu and tell the phone to never go to sleep and never turn off the screen. But, for some reason, Samsung does not provide that option. It’s insane, but they don’t. In terms of the screen turning off, I can choose between two minutes, three minutes, and five minutes. But there is no “NEVER” option. I’ve never had a phone without the “never” option before. Why isn’t it there? I can’t tell you. I’ve had WiFi issues at all the hotels lately. That is annoying.
And I’ve had all the small issues with hotels lately. Every hotel has been a problem in some way or another. This entire last trip has been a struggle from that point of view, and my hotel life has been unsatisfying. This goes all the way back to my very first bungalow in Ban Tha Song Yang. I had arranged to meet the people at the bungalow at a certain time, and they were two hours late. And then the bungalow was so hot as to be unbearable. It was so overpriced for what it was. It was essentially a wooden shack in the woods with nothing. Yet, it cost more than most hotel rooms I’ve stayed in. I didn’t get the room I was expecting at the PLP Guest House in Mae Hong Son. It didn’t have any of the facilities that I was expecting it to have. The bungalow in Bang Mapha was nice in its way, but the lack of WiFi just about drove me nuts. That pattern continued with the lack of WiFi and the extreme heat at Mr. Jan’s Guesthouse in Pai. I finally got WiFi at my bungalow in Chiang Dao, but I was disappointed there to find that the friendly Dutch owner was gone. I guess it was the low season for tourists, and every year, he goes south to the beaches and stays there and leaves the place in the hands of this young Thai guy. And that meant that basically there was no one there. That’s the standard at Thai hotels, I find. There just aren’t any staff anymore. Their idea of customer service, hospitality, and welcoming guests is to write down a phone number on a scrap of paper and Scotch Tape it to the wall. There just aren’t any people around. I just felt abandoned at this hotel. And the fan-only bungalow was so hot that it became oppressive. If there had been any staff around or any kind of a front desk or reception, I probably would have upgraded to an air-con bungalow. But there was no one. Stuff like that kind of annoys me because I know that I could never live the life that other people seem to achieve so effortlessly. I know that if I ran this set of bungalows, I would be working 24-hours-a-day to make it a great experience for guests and to keep improving the facilities and the setting. I wouldn’t be able to help myself. But the Dutch owner, he can just disappear to a beach for months at a time and leave the place largely abandoned. And the money still pours in, apparently. He lives in this giant house and I counted at least four brand new trucks and cars plus multiple motorcycles and scooters. I could see inside his house from time to time, and I saw wall-sized state-of-the-art flat screen TVs and computer systems. It seems to me that a hotel so neglected would naturally fail. Shouldn’t people go broke? But they don’t. I see so many people that never do any work at all and yet the money pours in. I don’t seem to have that knack.
With all these disappointments, I decided to treat myself with a nice, air-conditioned room at the Lilu in Pai. And I guess that kind of worked out. There was just the confusion at the beginning that ended up with me getting old and broken-down Room 3 because my room, Room 5, wasn’t ready yet. And that was kind of my choice. I could choose between waiting two hours and getting a nicer room and getting a worse room right away. I chose to get the two hours of extra time in the worse room.
From Pai, I rode to Mae Hong Son, and that’s where I had the issue of reserving an air-con room and they gave me a fan-only room instead. There was that whole thing. I ended up coming out ahead and getting a much nicer room than I had actually paid for. But that was at the expense of feeling uncomfortable the whole time I was there. And that hotel kind of bugs me, too, because of the extremely poor customer service. The woman was angry with me the entire time I was there. And her husband wasn’t much better. He was the one usually sitting at reception in the lobby area. But he sat with his back turned to the world the entire time. He held a phone in his hands and had earbuds plugged in and just sat there facing the wall all the time. I fail to understand behavior like that. How do you get through a day with that level of boredom and lack of interest in your work and the world around you? I know that I’d be up and active the entire time if I ran this hotel. I’d be looking for ways to make the place better. And I’d be greeting guests as they came and went and seeing if they needed anything. Why not do that? But in the vast majority of these hotels in Thailand, staff either don’t exist, or they simply sit there looking grim while ignoring everyone.
From there, I rode to Mae Sariang, and I booked a room at the no-nonsense Mitaree 2 hotel. I knew what I was getting at this place. I’d stayed there before. It’s an old hotel. Everything is kind of worn out and broken. And for that reason, it’s quite overpriced. But it is still the best bargain in town, and I was confident that even if the facilities were old and rickety, stuff would work. The WiFi would kind of work. The air conditioner would kind of work. The hot water heater in the bathroom would sort of work. And that turned out to be largely true, but the hotel still bugged me. As I said, it’s way overpriced, and the Agoda listing really is a kind of fraud when you dig into it. They do some tricky work with photographs and room descriptions to make the place seem much nicer than it is. And then you get a cold slap of reality when you are handed your room key and you march down a dark and grim hallway to a door that looks like it is about to fall off its hinges. The door is old and dirty and barely opens and closes. And right away, you start to feel like you are being taken advantage of. The room I had booked was listed as having a Garden View. I could have made an issue out of that because the garden in question was an ugly parking lot facing a row of seedy massage parlors surrounded by grey cement walls and piles of garbage.
And, finally, there is the Phannu, where the air conditioner is broken and they took away the kettle and complimentary coffee. Just overall, it feels like I’m constantly giving money to people when they don’t deserve it. Where is the goodwill and effort on their part to make their hotel a nice place for guests? And, more to the point, how is it that all these hotels never seem to suffer any consequences for their faults? They’re all full night after night despite their poor customer service and poor facilities.
As I mentioned before, it is kind of risky to be so critical in a place like Thailand. People can always make the excuse that Thailand is a poor country, and you shouldn’t expect much. But I humbly beg to differ. Thailand does not seem like a poor country at all. At least not anymore. It’s not poverty that leads to these problems. It’s simple negligence. And people can tell you to just stop complaining – that you are being overly-sensitive. But that isn’t my situation at all. In fact, much of my life has been spent choosing deliberately to stay in places that are disgusting hovels compared to the hotels in Thailand. I never complain about the hovels. The difference is that they were priced accordingly. I’m perfectly happy to stay in a dirty, hot closet with a concrete and metal shed filled with spiders and cockroaches in the backyard serving as the bathroom. That’s often been normal for me. But those places don’t pretend to be anything else, and they can cost as little as $1 a night. Here in Thailand, I am living practically a life of luxury by comparison to my past. So I’m not complaining about the level of comfort. In fact, these rooms are far more comfortable than I want or need. Because of the lack of choice, I’m forced to stay in nice places when I don’t want to. And then, when you pay a relatively higher amount for a room that is supposed to have WiFi, air-conditioning, and other comforts, you kind of expect them to be there. If they aren’t there, then you should be able to complain about it.
Having said all that, I got away with one big, big mistake on my part. I was so lucky, and it could have gone so badly. This mistake happened at the Shangsin House in Mae Hong Son where I had the issues with the owners about the lack of air conditioning in the room. I was so flustered by the whole experience of having to confront the owners that I wasn’t my usual methodical self when it came to unpacking and unloading the scooter. I woke up in the morning to begin my ride from Mae Hong Son to Mae Sariang, and I was horrified to find that my scooter key was not in my pants pocket, where it always is. When it comes to situations like that, the horror and fear can descend instantly. And that’s because I don’t usually vary my habits. The scooter key is always in that pocket. Always. And so, when I reached into that pocket, and the key wasn’t there, the only other place it could be is in the scooter ignition. I knew that instantly because I wouldn’t have left it anywhere else. It’s not like it would ever be in a different pocket. Nor would I have put it on the table or hung it on a hook. I don’t do things like that. I never have to go looking for my keys ever because I don’t just toss them anywhere. I always put them in the same place. And I was horrified to realize the key wasn’t in my pocket. I knew it could only be in one other place.
The parking area for this hotel was very public. It’s right on the street, and my scooter would have been in full view of everyone going by. And it’s not like the owners of the hotel would be out there keeping an eagle eye on their guests’ vehicles and providing security. So I instantly realized that there was a strong chance that I would go outside to find that the scooter had been stolen. And that would have been the disastrous icing on the cake of this trip.
The thing is that I had actually enjoyed the trip very much. I was glad that I went on it. Despite my many issues with the hotels and other things, I had enjoyed every stage. I’d had a good time in the small riverside village with the bungalow shack. I was really glad I’d gone back to the Nam Lod Cave for a second visit. I was happy that I’d gone up to Ban Jabo for sunrise and had that experience and been able to spend some time in Bang Mapha. I didn’t get much out of my new visits to Pai, but I had a wonderful time in the caves at Chiang Dao. And I had enjoyed riding my scooter through the mountains again, despite the poor views.
But there was the feeling that the trip was kind of unnecessary and I wasn’t getting out of it quite what I had imagined. Had I planned my first trip better, I could have done all these things the first time. This second trip consisted largely of just three new experiences: the riverside village, Ban Jabo, and the Chiang Dao caves. And I could easily have folded those experiences into my first trip if I’d planned a bit better. So this second trip was a bit of an unnecessary expense. And that thought was at the back of my mind a bit for the entire trip. And whether this trip was a success or failure was kind of hanging in the balance. And if I stepped outside of Shangsin House just two days before I had to go to immigration in Mae Sot and found that the scooter had been stolen, it would have been something of a disaster. I’d pretty much have to buy Eddie a new scooter to replace it. And that would have made renting this scooter all this time doubly dumb and expensive. And I would have had some very frustrating days as I tried to deal with reporting the stolen scooter and now having to get back to Mae Sot on my own without my own transportation. It would have been no fun at all. And it would have been because I was so dumb as to leave the key in the ignition in plain view.
To my relief, the scooter was still sitting there. It had not been stolen. But even then, I wasn’t able to relax right away because with the key in the ignition, it’s possible that it would have been in such a position as to drain the battery overnight. But I got lucky again, and even though I had left the key in the ignition, I had turned it far enough to the left so as to shut down the scooter completely. The scooter had not been stolen and the battery was not dead. It started right up. The day could easily have been an utter disaster. But I got lucky, and the day was saved. And in a way, the whole trip was saved.
It’s almost eight in the morning now, and the morning has gone relatively smoothly. The air conditioner still won’t work, but at least the fan mechanism is working. It is loud and annoying, but it is at least blowing a little bit of warm, stale air around the room. And my retching neighbor still appears to be occupying the room next to mine. I heard him moving about, and I saw him leave the room and go to let the dogs out of their cages. He was dressed in his scooter-delivery uniform, so I guess that is still his job. And I did hear him retching, but it was somewhat quiet this time and shorter in duration. Perhaps there is hope for this room.
And it is time to start thinking about going to immigration. This is kind of a red-letter day because it should be my penultimate visit to that office. Assuming the stars align even remotely, I will be returning to Malaysia within the next sixty days. There won’t be a need to extend my visa again. I have all my paperwork ready and signed for my immigration visit. Fingers crossed and my arms wide open to the positive winds of the universe that this immigration trip goes well.
To end my thoughts this morning on something positive, I should mention that the ride yesterday to Mae Sot was wonderful. The whole day was great. I was worried because during the evening when I was in Mae Sariang, the news broke that all of Thailand, including the north, was under a severe weather warning. Some kind of weather system had moved into the Bay of Bengal, and they were predicting torrential rains and floods for Thailand the next day. And that was the day I had to ride 230 kilometers over some wild, hilly countryside to get to Mae Sot. I went to sleep fully intending to complete the ride. But if it was raining heavily when I woke up, I was probably going to stay in Mae Sariang for another day and wait for the storms to end. Luckily, it was not raining when I woke up. I assumed that it would start raining later in the day, so I got on the road as soon as I could and then I just kept riding. And I rode faster than I normally would. I wanted to make sure I was off the road before the rains started. And it worked out perfectly. The skies were heavily overcast, and there was tons of mist and fog in the mountains, but it never actually rained for the entire five-hour journey. I left at 6:45 and I arrived at the Phannu in Mae Sot at 11:45. And that might not seem fast, but on those mountain roads, an average speed of over 50 km/hr is very fast. I had the speedometer pegged above 80 for lots of long stretches, and that was asking a lot of that poor scooter. But it hung in there.
10:47 a.m.
I’m all done with my trip to immigration. There were no issues at all with my application for the extension of stay. I was done in just minutes. And now I just have to return to immigration on April 7th to get the official stamp.
11:18 a.m.
I have more trivia to add to my story. I want to write about it just because I found the situation vaguely interesting when I spoke to the woman that runs this hotel. It’s interesting because of the difference between expectations and reality. And there is the question of where this difference comes from. And my own emotional reactions are interesting because I think they are generally way out of balance.
First of all, she barely reacted at all when I mentioned that the air conditioner doesn’t work and didn’t work yesterday and didn’t work all last night. In my mind, I’m thinking that if a hotel guest informs hotel staff of a problem like this, the first thing you’d get is an apology. “Oh, I’m so sorry about that! It’s so hot right now. I’m sorry the air conditioner isn’t working. We’ll fix it right away or get you into a new room.” Something like that. Anything remotely like that.
And then I might expect some kind of recompense. I might expect them to give me a discount on the room rate to make up for the inconvenience. Something. Anything. Any reaction at all. But there really was none. She did say that she will call someone to come check on the air conditioner and try to fix it. And that’s good. But it’s also annoying, because now I’ve got a whole day of waiting around for repairmen to look forward to. I had to deal with a lot of that at the Green Guest House. The repairman could just show up at any time, and I’ll be sitting around on pins and needles waiting for a loud knock on the door. Or I might wait around all day today but he won’t show up until tomorrow or the next day. These things usually go on for a long time with lots of trouble and changes.
And I find I have to really keep my emotional reaction in check. I realized long ago that I store up annoyance. In terms of my feelings, this air conditioner problem is not just the air conditioner problem at the Phannu. I have a large pent-up store of annoyance and frustration and stress from all the hotel problems I had on this latest trip. And, in fact, I have pent up frustration and annoyance going back for the last twenty-seven years of hotels in Asia. I end up lumping it all into one experience and all the people into one person. And then I react with much greater anger and annoyance than is actually justified. And that’s because I’m blaming her for not just this problem but all the problems I’ve ever faced. I’ve realized that this can happen, so I’m careful to really moderate my response to situations.
It’s not a great way to live, though, because you never have a justifiable outlet for your emotions. There is never a proper time to be annoyed and angry. And you just swallow it all and keep it all down.
The other interesting thing I learned concerns the other single room, which is beside mine but on the left. I was told when I showed up that this other room was not available. My only option was my current room, my old one with the retching neighbor on the right. And this woman at the hotel said something about how it might be available the next day, which is today. And I brought this up as an alternative when I was speaking to her. I mentioned to her that this air conditioner problem is one of the main reasons I’m interested in switching to a new room. I wanted to know if perhaps the other room had a better or newer air conditioner. The thing is that I’m worried that a repairman will come and fiddle around with my air conditioner and just manage to get it to work. But it will be a bandaid remedy. It will now work, but barely, and it will just putter along. It will make a lot of noise, consume a lot of electricity, and sort of cool down the room, but not by any great amount. And I wondered if just switching to a new room would be a much better alternative for me.
And then this woman surprised me: She said the other room wasn’t available because of covid. Apparently, the last person who stayed in that room (or someone who is in there now) came down with covid, and there must be some kind of professional cleaning and room isolation and quarantine before it can legally be occupied again. Personally, I’m not bothered in the slightest. However, I can imagine lots of people being quite upset that they weren’t told upon checking in that their room is right beside a covid hotspot. It just sort of feels like with the world’s hyper concern over covid that it might even be a legal requirement to inform other guests in your hotel when an infectious viral disease pops up on the premises.
With the retching neighbor, the broken air conditioner, and now covid, if I had an alternative, I’d probably move. But I don’t know of any alternatives in Mae Sot except for the Green Guest House. And I don’t want to deal with that place again. So the easiest option is to just stay here.