“No, I didn’t see the elephants in Thailand”: A Story of Love and Loss

View from the room mentioned in Creatures of the Night

Listen, friends. Despite the tiny filtered (impressive) photos, you see on my Instagram of baby monkeys, beach views, jungle huts, and mango smoothies, it really isn’t all that (all the time). Travel can have a lot of low lows to accompany those adrenaline filled highs. You don’t hear about them because who wants to see a picture of me throwing up on a winding bus ride, or near tears over the tarantula sized spider we found outside of our door.

If you do want to hear about them (me complaining), you’ve come to the right post.

FOOD POISONING:

Honestly, I had this one coming. Our first two and a half weeks in Thailand I was thrilled (albeit baffled) that neither Taylor or myself had any problems adjusting to the street food or small restaurants that line the tiny streets here. Until one fateful day.

“I feel nauseous” “Like….how nauseous?” “We need to get back to the hut NOW”

*Hops into tiny tuk tuk and sits through a 20-minute bug in face filled ride*

Gets to hostel and begins throwing up everywhere and other things that I don’t even want to try and relive. Throughout the night my fever, pass outs, and a variety of other unfortunate events continued (Again. I think I may have blocked a lot of this from memory).

Being in a foreign country while ill SUCKS (trying to keep this PG). We didn’t have working Wi-Fi and the owner of the “resort” (read: Tiny hut that sometimes had functional air conditioning) did not understand what was happening. He came to terms when he saw me laying on the floor with a washcloth over my forehead after yet another near pass out. When the Wi-Fi managed to come back in my parents were saying I would need to go to the hospital for an IV if the dehydration/fever/passing out continued. Taylor somehow managed to remain calm as I laid dying (I honestly thought I was) on the floor between our bedroom and our bathroom. Luckily, I was able to start antibiotics and slowly started the uphill track to recovery. I’m writing about this 3 days later and all I was able to eat today was white rice (surprisingly difficult to find), Gatorade, and dry cereal. Unfortunately, we had to cancel our volunteer trip to see the elephants due to the fact that I can’t be outside for more than a few hours without feeling dizzy/dehydrated again.

HEAT/ HUMIDITY:

Is anyone here familiar with “heat rash”? Because we sure weren’t. One morning Taylor and I both woke up with our legs looking like they had been bit by a million ants and were insanely uncomfortable and itchy..this is the glory called “heat rash”. Apparently being from a cold Midwestern state where 6 months of the year is winter, we weren’t attuned to this 90+% humidity in 100-degree weather. During a foot massage the masseuse asked us what the terrible things on our legs were and we did our best to charade out the hot sun and our pale Midwestern legs. To quote Taylor “We have never sweat more, and we have never smelled worse”. Boys? Where yah at? We have agreed we will go up at least 4 points on the 10-point rating scale after returning to our home country.

BUGS/GECKOS/CREATURES OF THE NIGHT:

Oh my LAWDY. I consider myself average on the afraid of bug scale. I once let a spider stay in the corner of my room just for the fact that I couldn’t find anyone to kill it and it really didn’t seem to be heading anywhere. As you can tell, I’m pretty in tune with nature. When our air bnb said “some bugs are to be expected” Taylor and I thought we could handle it. We were WRONG. Our air bnb looked GORGEOUS in the day light. A decent sized bed, and an incredible mountain view. That was until night fell. We turned on our light to find a swarm of moths fluttering and simultaneously dying all around and on our bed. No big deal, just moths. Then on our bed we found a 2-inch-long beetle meandering along on top of our covers. Again, we reassured ourselves. Then we heard a chirping sound coming from the corner. We pulled back our curtain to find multiple crickets, and yes, a large and FAST gecko. Like I said we are humane, nature loving folk and so we decided to leave the gecko (lets be real, how do you even catch it), sweep out the dead moths, and release the beetle back outside. During our quest to release the beetle we stumbled upon the biggest most terrifying GINOURMOUS spider I have ever seen in my 23 years of existence. This is when the breakdown occurred. Looking back, I think we were overstimulated. Too many bugs, too many noises, too small of time frame. We left the hut the next day and told our host we had accidentally booked an earlier bus out of the city. Currently, we welcome geckos into our hut as a way to kill all the other annoying bugs.

ACTUAL PHOTO OF SPIDER WE SAW
(blurry because of breakdown)

DANGEROUS DRIVING:

The drivers here are HORRIBLE. I’m not exaggerating this. According to WHO (World Health Organization) Thailand is ranked SECOND in the WORLD in terms of traffic fatalities. Although I admit I am not an expert on any sort of traffic related terms I have seen a few issues myself. The first being that I have seen MULTIPLE people driving down the wrong side of the road (yes, I’m aware they drive on the left side here, but apparently these drivers were not). Our tuk tuk driver at the time shook his head and honked and that was it. I’m not sure what the rules in the US are in regards to renting out motorbikes, but I do know that I wanted to rent a car once and it was nearly impossible unless I was 25. Here you hand over a copy of your passport and you’re the proud renter of a motorbike for the day. You do not even need to have a driver’s license in your own country to be able to be on the streets here driving a motorbike amongst the locals. Although we briefly considered renting a motorbike as one of our fellow hostel go-ers told us to “get out of the box and try something new”, we ultimately hired a taxi and decided that 20 stitches to the head wouldn’t be the something new we were aiming for.

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the time travel is as amazing and breath taking as my well-crafted Instagram portrays it to be. Just remember there’s a background that’s been cropped out. It’s all part of the experience!