Oops, Thailand is Closed Today.

Reid here... As some of you may know, Thailand is having a bit of a problem lately.  Pro and Anti government protesters have been staging demonstrations in central Bangkok and a bit of Chiang Mai for a while now.  The situation has deteriorated in the last few weeks.  There have been police crackdowns and grenade violence that have resulted in many injuries and some deaths.   Nonetheless, the conventional wisdom had been that the problem was isolated to Bangkok and it was fine to travel in the rest of the country.  

This seemed reasonable to me until the last few days.  At the end of April, the US state department said that US citizens should avoid all non-essential travel to Thailand.  The Brits said the same thing, and even Australia said it could be dangerous if you get caught in a demonstration and you should re-think your travel there.    

The next leg of our RTW plane ticket takes us to Phuket, Thailand, where we were planning to spend a few weeks eating delicious thai food and learning to scuba dive (and probably getting a sunburn).  After that, we were going to move north to Chiang Mai to start our trek along the Mekong through Laos, Cambodia and then work up through Vietnam to Hanoi.  

Now we are in a pickle.  Thankfully, we're in a very picturesque (and relatively cheap) spot in China (Yangshuo) to take a few days to strategize.  We've come up with three or four options for our onward journey and we're puzzling through the logistics now.  One unfortunate side effect is that all of the options look a bit more expensive than Plan A.  But, as the sign on my mom's fridge says, the key to life is how well you deal with Plan B. 

Plan A.  Decide that the US/British/Australian embassies are just whining, that we are nimble enough to avoid large groups of people in red shirts, and that we should be pretty safe on the tourist beaches in a country filled with very peaceful buddhists.  As one line of thinking goes, all of the troublemakers from either side have gone to Bangkok anyways.  Ahh, beautiful Phuket.  Why does the beach here look so empty?  Umm, could someone please take me to Cambodia?

Plan B. China is rather a lovely country and we didn't really budget enough time here in the first place.  Take another week or two to visit Yunnan province, especially the trek through the beautiful Tiger Leaping Gorge.  Then we can take a bus from Kunming (China) to Luang Prabang (northern Laos) and start our planned trip through Laos, and Cambodia.  Take an extra week or two on an island in southern Cambodia to get our scuba ceritificatons (same water as Thailand, same PADI course, but cheaper).  Then we can work our way up through Vietnam, catch a cheap flight from Hanoi back to Hong Kong, and resume our RTW trip (skipping the Phuket and Bangkok legs).  The downside is that we don't get to the beach for quite some time (and, says Dyanne, no Thai food either!)  

Plan C.  We go back to Hong Kong and revise our itinerary to skip Thailand and go directly to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). From there we can go to a few islands or nearby beaches for our scuba certification, then work our way up through Vietnam to Hanoi, then over to northern Laos and do our planned Mekong itinerary back to Saigon.  The problem is that our visas for Vietnam don't start until June 1, so we would have to get new visas issued (and pay the fee again) in Hong Kong.  

Plan D.  We take a train/bus combination from Yangshuo to Nanning, a Chinese city near the Vietnam border with a consulate.  We get new visas and then head to Hanoi and do our planned trip through SE asia in reverse, stopping in Cambodia/Southern VN for scuba.  The difficulty here would be getting from northern Laos back to Hong Kong to resume our RTW trip. 

So these are the plans we're currently considering, give or take a few esoteric logistical differences.  Oh, did I mention that almost all of the regional flights route through Bangkok, particularly on Star Alliance?  Oops :)

In the meantime, Yangshuo is beautiful.  We are enjoying our little double room with a huge balcony on a quiet alley off of the main drag.  We've gone for some fantastic (though tiring) bike rides in the countryside.  We might be volunteering with a local program to teach english in one of the rural primary schools for a few days or a week (they want the kids to get used to speaking english with foreigners).  Also, the local beer "LiQuan" is quite drinkable and costs about 50 cents per liter. So, we are rather content to hang here until we figure out where to go next.  If you have any comments please be sure to e-mail us, since we cannot get to our blog to read the comments.