03.05.08 | Permalink | Comments (5)
Greg and I had 10 hours to kill in Taipei on our flight. To kill the time, we decided to go visit the current tallest building in the world, the Taipei 101.
Finding an incredibly tall building turned out to be too much for our cabbie. Greg and I became curious as we got farther and farther away from the Taipei 101. Turns out that our cabbie loves his GPS system a little too much. We were well beyond the entire (massive) city before he realized that he was in the middle of the woods and began to apologize to us. He got off on the next ramp and then preceded to get right back on the same exact road because his GPS told him to.
By the time we got back into town, he had already doubled our trip’s necessary distance. He then felt that the advice he got from his GPS had served him better than we did and decided to drive into town in the opposite direction of the most obvious landmark in the world.
To end this story, we got there. Eventually. I’ve heard of people going overboard with their blind trust in a GPS device, but jeepers, this was enough to make me really really mad.
UPDATE: I’m telling you, people trust these GPS gizmo’s too much, even in Seattle.
03.01.08 | Permalink | Comments (4)
Greg and I had a mantra before we embarked on our trip to Thailand: “Make as few plans as we could get away with.” We didn’t want to be tied down to an agenda when reading about Thailand was only going to give us a small window into the best way to travel here. We’ve lucked out so far, but were becoming quite concerned this morning that our luck had run out.
Pretty much as soon as we got to southern Thailand, it became completely overcast and spouting spurts of HEAVY rainfall. We just got into Phuket and it was raining just as much as our mood was souring. We were spoiled earlier with the courtesy and cheap prices of northern Thailand. In the south, the sun and scenery brings too many tourists and too much money. And now we didn’t even have the sun.
So we scrambled to figure out how to salvage our remaining days. We couldn’t get out of Phuket, so we decided to attempt to follow a very loose rumor about a “mom and pop” bed and breakfast joint that I heard about for $8 a night. “Down a dirt road about 2 kilometers from the Marriott” is all I had to go on.
But the cabbie spoke as much English as we spoke Thai and explaining “bed and breakfast” wasn’t working. He dropped us off at what looked like a pre-1989 East Berlin re-creation from the outside. At that moment, what turned out to be the hotel manager walked by and noticed our predicament. He offered to help us and allowed us to stay at what turned out to be a very secluded 5-star hotel for a fraction of the price. We now have our own private pool at our room and several kilometers of our own beach (!).
We were thinking of heading back to Bangkok early, but now we might be a little more flexible with our non-existent agenda.
