De Weaver and Nieuw'nhuuzn on the road to enlightenment

After travelling through Asia, Siddhartha became enlightened and changed his name into Buddha. One of his conclusions was that life is suffering. I now understand why someone traveling through Asia comes to such a conclusion.

When writing this I’ve just caught my breath again. At 05.00 AM we woke up in our room at the Queen Hotel in Surat Thani, wondering what that extreme noise was. It sounded like a bunch of Hells Angels were testing their bikes next to our crappy bed. I couldn’t quite figure out what was happening so I looked out of the window. When gazing through the window I couldn’t believe my eyes: smoke was coming out of the ground floor of our hostel! To save some of our readers from a panic attack – dear moms and dads, we’re fine, don’t worry! -: it turned out to be something that is not uncommon here.

But let’s continue the story. When I opened the door I saw that the hallway was filled with smoke. We slightly panicked, mildly put, grabbed our backpacks and ran out of the building. The next thing we knew was that we found ourselves half dressed on the sidewalk, still panicking. But, when we saw an old lady sitting quietly behind the reception desk in a curtain of smoke we were even more confused than before. I asked, still a bit terrified , ‘is there a fire???!!’ She looked at us as if WE were the crazy one’s. She didn’t speak English and was unable to give us a verbal answer. In fact, she was unable (or unwilling) to give an answer at all. She more or less ignored us.

After a few minutes we figured out ourselves that the smoke was coming from some kind of engine in the hostel itself!! Before we had the courage to return to our room a cockroach the size of my hand bumped into Marije’s barefoot. (yes, she continues to be the queen of drama, not to be confused with a dramaqueen ;-)) The cockroach kind of helped us to decide to go back upstairs. It remains a mystery what really happened, but, as you can image we couldn’t sleep after this twilight zone experience. So we have slept for almost 4 hours and we have to prepare for a train ride to Bangkok of more than 10 hours. We are really looking forward to this, as you can imagine ;)

Now you can see that we can relate to Buddha’s conclusion that traveling in Asia is suffering ;) Well, I hope that we come out of this journey alive and VERY enlightened! Marije is already shopping for an orange dress.