Thai new year is joyous, playful, fun and uninhibited. On Koh Pha-Ngan Songkran is celebrated with copious amounts of water thrown at any and every passerby—whether on foot, by car or (most often) on scooter. Some trucks even travel around loaded with watergun-laden revelers hunting for their next target. Eventually I couldn’t help but get in on the action.
The forecasted tropical storm didn’t materialize.
Still, the water kicked and rolled, welcome cool air blasted my face and colours and clouds roiled in the wake of the wind.
In Georgetown, former colonial capital of Malaysia for a visa run. Conveniently, the Thai consulate decided to close for a few days which gave me some extra time to wander and explore.
Home to the world’s largest wooden Ganesh statue, weighing five tons and carved from a single tree, this artist’s colony is funded by a wealthy patron who sees it as his legacy. The main building is built with thick wooden planks covered top-to-bottom with detailed painted carvings. It’s a beautiful, peaceful, inspiring place.
It’s a bit of a cliche, I know… but despite the hordes of partiers who end up in nearby towns, Bali—specifically Canggu—is a great place to start a long trip. It’s cheap, accessible and there’s a great digital nomad community centred around Dojo Coworking. It’s been a great spot to get into the rhythms of nomadic travel and meet some fellow work-while-wandering friends.
The people are the best part. My first night in Canggu a fellow nomad took a few of us new arrivals around to his favourite hotspots. It was a great kickstart to meet some friends and find some regular haunts. As I’ve seen before in my travels, if on your first night in a new place someone local invites you out, it’s a good sign. Canggu is no exception. A small group of us from that first night ended up forming a core that would travel to nearby adventures on the weekends, grab meals together and generally commiserate.
Surprisingly for me, many of the people trying out the nomad lifestyle are in a similar life stage—30’s, had some success, trying something new. A beautifully large proportion of them are women. So far I’m the only full-time filmmaker but hopefully that’s just a matter of time.
The downside to Canggu is that it’s very, very touristy, and the prices & culture reflect the mostly-foreign population. So while it’s a great place to get my feet wet as a traveler it’s not a leap as far as I’d like. It’s more a tropical party-town Portland than a cultural excursion. So we’ll see where I’ll end up next…
One upside: Canggu is a convenient place to practice my scootering, in particularly my Darth Helmet impressions.
A mobile snapshot from the local coffee haunt.
A few shots from a recent jaunt up the Sunshine Coast. I took the pleasure of taking a single lens, a 100mm f/2.8 macro, to see what I could see.
