Now that I’m just starting my electives, I figured I’d revive this blog to share my experience. At the end of fourth year, most medical students are required to do electives in which we get the opportunity to explore the area of medicine we are interested in wherever we wanted to go.
I’ve chosen to do my electives in Thailand for the next two months and since I’ll also be doing some backpacking and travelling, I’d be separating my travel experience from my elective experience working day-to-day.
This post is the travel bit of my elective experience.
The first four weeks of my electives will be spent in Mae Tao Clinic in Mae Sot. To get to Mae Sot, I flew from the LCCT to Chiang Mai. It was my first time travelling using Air Asia since it became the so-called ‘world’s best low-cost carriage’. The actual first time was back when I was nine when my family went to Sarawak and its colour was blue instead of red and the pilot was my uncle and my brother and I got to see the pilot cockpit. Anyway, the journey was pleasant enough for the 60GBP I paid for and since I bought the hot seat 1A, I got to be the first one to board the plane to see it entirely empty apart from the cabin crew.
From Chiang Mai International Airport, I took a taxi to Arcade bus station. It cost me 180THB and I bought the ticket to Mae Sot right away which cost me 259THB. As the departure time was at 11:45am and it was only around nine, I went to a cyber café located in the station to contact my family to say that I arrived safe and sound.
I waited anxiously for the bus to come. I was excited to be doing this whole elective thing: I get to travel; I get to meet new people; I get to explore medicine I may never get to see. Those reasons were perfectly adequate to make me look forward for the elective period to come ever since I started my fourth year. However, anxiety got the best of me at that time because I was on my own. I could not understand the language. All the announcements were done in Thai and I was left to wonder what those nasal, raspy and bark-like announcements could possibly mean.
It didn’t help that the bus arrived slightly late. By 11:45am, I must have dragged my luggage across the bus station 10 times to make sure the bus didn’t stop at another platform than the ones mentioned on my tickets. I also remained on the look-out for foreigners that might be fellow medical students who would also be doing their electives at the same clinic. I did saw two Caucasian girls and I was a bit relieved when I saw them both waiting just as anxiously at the same platform I was waiting at.
The bus arrived and the 5-hour journey began. I wanted to stay awake at first as I wanted to see the sceneries from Chiang Mai to Mae Sot but my tiredness and jet lag got the best of me. Mind you, I boarded the plane to Chiang Mai barely 15 hours after I landed in KLIA from Dubai. Nothing eventful really happened apart from when one officer from the border control stopped the bus and came up to check our passports. For whatever reason, the guy seemed to deliberate on my passport a lil’ longer than I’d like as compared to other passengers.
Other than that, the journey was really uneventful. The bus did travel up some mountain areas with winding road not unlike the road heading up Cameron Highland and all I had in my mind was:
“Where on effing earth am I going to?”
I arrived at Mae Sot but station at around 5pm and by that time, all I wanted was to get to my accommodation and get some proper rest. I hired a tuk-tuk to get to my accommodation. The first guy asked for 100THB but I refused because they guy at the information counter in the bust station it should be around 80THB. The tuk-tuk driver did not want to back down with his price but he called another driver who already had a passenger. He happened to be heading to the same direction to my guesthouse and he offered to split the 100THB between the two of us so I only paid 50THB.
| Pretty exciting to be on my first tuk-tuk ride |
I then fell asleep. I woke up. Showered. Skype-d with my family. I wanted to go out to get dinner but I didn’t quite like the idea of going out at night in a new town I have yet to explore during the day all on my on. So I just stayed in munching on Oreo while watching CSI:NY. It seemed to be the only show on an English-speaking channel that I was interested in. There were 90 channels on the TV but most of them were in Thai, or dubbed with Thai. There were several channels in foreign languages like French, Korean, and Japanese but all the subtitles were in Thai as well so there was very few shows on the TV that I could understand.
All in all, it was a very long and tiring day and I’m gonna have to do some getting used to very fast but hey, I was and am excited and I really can’t wait to experience this elective from every aspect that I can.
P.S.: I seem to have lost that Asian habit of taking photos every 5 seconds whenever one visits a new place so I apologise for the few photos I have here. I'll try to take more photos for next posts. =P
