Long Day of Travel, Now in Ao Nang

There's really not much to say about yesterday, except that we left our hotel in Koh Tao at about 9:30am and didn't get to our hotel in Ao Nang until 7:30pm.  It was a loooong day of travel.  Here's how it went:

We took a taxi from hotel to the pier.  Got on the boat and headed for an upper deck this time, because we heard that helps with sea sickness.  What also helps with sea sickness are good old fashion pills. We have a lot of those now.

On this boat we discovered a "VIP" section, where you could sit for an extra 100 bat. That's about $3.30 so we figured what the heck.  It was a nice air-conditioned cabin on the middle deck of the boat and it had super comfy chairs that leaned back.  We actually slept most of the way to Chumpong!  That's a huge difference from our previous nightmare ride.

From Chumpong pier we were herded onto a large bus.  Then we were dropped off at a restaurant for lunch in Chumpong city.  From there, we got in a 12 seater van with all of our luggage strapped to the top.  The driver was somewhat of a dare devil, and the ac apparently worked too well in the front, where I wasn't, and not well enough in the back, where I was, sweating away.  It was tough to find a compromise, because I felt bad for the folks in the front with icicles forming in their hair, but I'm a delicate flower, and was wilting gosh darn it.

Anyway, 4 hours later, we reached Krabi, where we dropped off a few of our passengers and reloaded the luggage into the van.  Now I got to sit in the front of the van and enjoy the cooling AC.  Much much better.  Another half hour or so later we were in Ao Nang, tired but safe.  Let's just say we slept long and well last night.  Phew!

Open Water Scuba Certified on Koh Tao

It's official, Dax and Liz are now open water scuba certified, with 4 dives under their belts.  Woo hoo!  And we have the cards to prove it.

This has been a challenging last three days.   I last wrote about getting sea sickness and still not having fully recovered the next day.  Thankfully I was all better by Wednesday, when we did our first dives.  We started off in shallow water just off the beach of the Scuba Junction office.  Then we got on a boat (sea sickness pills ingested) and went out to a spot about 3 meters deep.  Both of these shallow dives were meant to help us learn skills like inflating and deflating our buoyancy compensators (BC for short), removing and retrieving our mouth pieces (called second-stage regulators), and clearing our goggles once they'd filled up with water.  Another skill that was a bit tricky for me to learn was how to equalize my sinus pressure as I descend to deeper waters.  I sorta got the hang of it by swallowing and bending my neck back and forth, but my ears still feel funny and they haven't properly popped yet now that I'm back on dry land.  It's cool though, it just takes practice.

The visibility wasn't great but we did see a bunch of neat coral and colorful fish.  We saw trigger fish, file fish, sea cucumbers, cardinal fish, damsel fish, brain coral, and tons of other stuff that's too numerous to mention here.  By the time we did our fourth dive, I was a lot better at checking out the scenery as opposed to just keeping an eye on my instructor's fins so I wouldn't get lost.

Dax is just thrilled to finally have an open water certification.  Elias has been diving for a while now and has some advanced certifications, so it will be fun to go out diving with him once we reach Koh Lanta, an island south west of here on the Andaman Sea.  We leave for Ao Nang this morning so I'm going to stop writing and finish packing!

Sea Sick!

Yowzers.  Yesterday, Dax and I had the roughest day on a boat either of us had ever had in our lives.  It's about an hour's boat ride from Koh Samui to Koh Tao on a "speed catamaran," and on choppy seas, it's one of the hardest hours you'll ever experience.  Everyone around us was pale as a ghost and puking into black plastic bags that the were passed out by the crew.  I think I vomited 4 or 5 times and Dax maybe 3.  I tried to keep my gaze straight ahead and to focus on the horizon, but instead all I could see were 15 foot swells and lot's of white caps.  I think we were so happy to be on land by the time we got in that we were fairly energetic for our scuba orientation that afternoon.  We had a nice thai dinner at our hotel for super cheap, watched a James Bond movie: The Man with the Golden Gun on HBO (they've been showing a bunch of Bond movies and we've been enjoying watching them throughout our trip), and passed right out.  When I woke up this morning though, my stomach felt a bit tied up in knots, and I ended up puking again after less than an hour into our first real day of scuba training.  We were supposed to go out on the water this afternoon, but the instructor switched some stuff around so that all we did today was course work and watch videos.

During lunch I napped on a couch and Dax went and got me some white rice, which helped a bunch, so that was good.  He's not at 100% but at least he's got energy and didn't loose any of his meals today. There's one other student in our course named Lucas, from the Czech Republic.  I apologized and thanked him for being so cool about not going out on the water today.

I'm chilling in the room for a while while Dax and Elias go out for a walk and drop off our laundry.  It feels good to relax and take it easy.

For the next and every subsequent boat ride we go on, we will have motion sickness pills at the ready, believe you me.

To the parental units and other loved ones that might have tendencies toward worry, don't worry, we are okay, young, and healthy and are totally getting through this.  Thank goodness it wasn't from eating a bad piece of fish or something.  Knocking on wood... we've been very lucky health-wise until now.  Well, not if you count mosquito bites... they love our sweet sweet foreign blood... oh, and a few bruises here and there, but those are to be expected I'm sure.  Okay that's it.  The good news is that we're on Koh Tao, our 2nd island in Thailand and our 5th destination of the trip, so half way in to our epic journey, things are going quite well.

Swat Dee Kah!

Lady Boys

I saw my first thai lady boy in person tonight.  Well, I saw three of them, one after another.  We're in Chaweng now, which is a larger city on Ko Samui.  We came here for the weekend to experience the night life a bit, and to see a different part of the Island.  Here is what you might picture when you think of going out to bars and dancing all night in Thailand.  The Bandara and the Bo Phut fishing village were sleepy hideaway havens compared to Chaweng.  Our suite is on the second floor and the window overlooks the main drag.  I can look out the window and see a posh outdoor dining patio with white interior and lush green foliage flanking the exterior.

The lady boys were passing out fliers on the street for a cabaret show called Starz Cabaret.  They were dressed in strapless dresses, high heals, tons of makeup, the works.  I knew right away what I was looking at because no one wears that much makeup on this island.  Other than that though, they are pretty convincing as ladies.

Funny references to lady boys so far on this trip:

• Dax's alternating purple and silver toe nails have now been commented on by the massage therapists at all three places we've been to, and 2 of them joked that he was a lady boy.  
• When we went to see an elephant show, the announcer asked the audience if we knew how many kinds of elephants there are.  We knew the answer was two: African and Asian/Indian, but she said, no, there's three: male, female, and lady boy.  Wow, haha.  It's definitely a thing here.  

On a completely unrelated note, we went on a speed boat trip through the Ank Thong national marine reserve today.  It's an archipelago of 42 islands off the cost of Ko Samui and Ko Phangan.  The islands are mostly made of jutting limestone and few have beaches.  We went snorkeling just off of the northern-most island.  Then we made our way south to another island where we pulled up to the shore, enjoyed coconuts, then climbed some extremely steep stairs to get to a view point and then down to a lagoon and back up again.  The stairs were basically metal ladders with a slight incline.  Something like this would never fly in the states.  

Next stop was lunch on one of the larger islands in the marine reserve.  I believe it's the only one where people are allowed to live, because there was a small fishing village, a restaurant, and a bar.  We had delicious thai food, of course, and then walked around the island a bit.  We saw a monkey chained to a post in what was possibly someone's front yard.  We also saw a litter of feral puppies that had not been trained not to bite, so we got out of that situation pretty fast.  Rabies anyone? 

After leaving the fishing village, we docked on a nearby island's beach and got in sea kayaks for a short treck around a different island.  Dax and I were adventurers today!

You've read this far, so you get a reward.  The reward is a tip on where you can find excellent mexican food on Ko Samui... are you ready for this?  We were!  It's called Gringos and it's in Chaweng.  It's down an ally off the main drag, so look for signs to Kabuki Tattoo and the Thai Massage School.  It'll be on you're right, you can't miss it.  Nor will you want to.  How about some super veggie nachos, a burrito, and some fish tacos?  Si por favor!!! 

Life is good. :)

Yesterday in Ko Sumui

I'm a day behind in my blogging because we've been filling our days full with fun activities.  So here's what we did yesterday.

We opted for a full day tour of the island so we could get oriented and see some of the sites.  The sites were actually pretty silly, but we still had a great time.  One place we went was called "Grandfather and Grandmother Rock."  The story behind the place is that there were two lovers lost at sea during a storm, and they made a wish that even if they died, they would somehow live on forever.  The rocks look like mail genitals and female genitals respectively.  Pretty silly stuff.

Another fun stop was at a waterfall with a swimming hole.  This one was my favorite because I got to jump in for a cool, refreshing swim.  It was freakin hot yesterday and I was feeling a little worn out from the heat, but the swim made everything all better.  I love a good dip in the river.

We also saw one of the youngest big buddha's I'd ever seen. It was built in the 70's out of cement and then painted gold a few years later.  It was very beautiful, but somehow lacked the spirituality that the 1000+ year old buddhas we've seen had. We were happy to sit and drink coconuts instead of climb the steps to the buddha in the crazy heat.

Let's see, what else... we got to ride on top of an elephant!  That was pretty awesome. Our elephant driver made us jewelry out of palm fronds and we were very impressed.  We also saw an elephant show and got to hold a monkey on our laps.  That was all pretty cool.

After a long day of touring we ate a fantastic thai lunch of coconut chicken soup.  Tom Ka Gai I believe it's called.  You've probably had it at thai restaurants in the states.  It was the best Tom Ka soup I've ever had - another dream come true.

A long nap ensued, after which we met up with Elias and walked down the beach from our hotel for another tasty thai meal.  After the meal, got to launch a sky lantern on the beach.  The man who sold it to us had a sharpie that I used to write "Dax, Liz, Elias, party time!" on the lantern before we sent it off into the sky.  It was really beautiful.  Such a fun custom.

As you can imagine, we were out like a light after such a long, amazing day.

Today is our last day at the Bandara, so we're spending it enjoying the hotel, swimming, working on The MML, and getting massages.  Tomorrow, weather permitting, we're going on an aquatic tour of the Ankthong National Park, which will include snorkeling, kayaking, and hiking.  Hope for good weather!!

:)

Ah, Ko Samui

Ah yeah, we love Thailand.

This will be a quick update as it's past my bedtime and Dax has acquired SNL for us to watch before bed.

Yesterday was our first real day on the island.  We woke up and had a fabulous buffet breakfast which, we discovered to our delight, was included in the cost of the room.  Then we took a walk outside our hotel and found a nice open air restaurant and sipped watermelon juice while we poked at our thai language guide and tour brochures.  We booked a tour for the next day, then walked down to a flower shop and had a nice flower arrangement made up for our room.  On our way back we stopped for some hour-long thai massages at 10 bucks a piece. One of the massage ladies saw Dax's alternating purple and silver toe nail polish and asked him if he was a lady boy! Wow, lol.

After the massages, we went back to the watermelon juice spot for some lunch.  It was a moment I'd been waiting for my entire life.  Those who know me may recall that I eat pad thai pretty much every time I go to a thai restaurant, and that it's one of my all time favorite foods.  Well my friends, I had my first pad thai in thailand.  I was very pleased that a) they had it on the menue and it wasn't just some dish that thai expats had made up to please westerners, b) that it was a little but not too spicy, and c) that it was freakin de-li-cious.  Holy wow, my dreams had come true.

So let's see... after lunch we came back to the hotel and got our swim suits on.  Next stop... warm ocean water!  Our hotel is right on the beach, but there's a lovely garden pathway between here and there, so I took a few pictures on the way.

Splashed around for a bit, took some pictures, back out of the water, rinsed off, and called Elias.  Had dinner in the Bo Phut fishing village, came home, and crashed out.  What a fantastic day!

Stay tuned for photos and more stories about what we did today (all that was only yesterday's adventures!)

We're in Thailand!

Yayy!!!

We are in Thailand.  Shanghai was fun, but I must say I'm excited to be back online.  I missed my blog!

Point by point, here are some brief updates:

• Shanghai was cool. We did a bunch of shopping, a bunch of walking around, and a bunch of contemplating China as a growing world influence. 
• A major Shanghai highlight was going to see a Chinese circus performance.  It wasn't all glitzy like Cirque Du Soleil, (although they had one similar but it was sold out), it was a straight up, ridiculously mind-blowing display of the outer limits of human abilities.  I think we need some sub-bullet points here:
• Highlight number one: two girls, both spinning 4-5 plates in either hand, standing head to head, one on top of the other.  Woah. 
• Highlight number two: Not one, not two, not three, not four, but FIVE motor bike riders in a large steel sphere going upwards of 40 miles an hour round and round, criss-crossing past each other with just inches between bikes.  I'm really glad I didn't witness 5 tragic deaths and a massive diesel explosion!
• Did I mention we're in Thailand?  It's 11:45pm and we're just getting settled into our hotel after a long day of travel.  Here's a link to the resort's web site if you want to check it out: www.bandarasamui.com.  Thai hospitality is incredible and the room is just gorgeous.  I'm really looking forward to checking out the flower markets as this place has some beautiful and inspiring arrangements.  

Okay, somehow I feel like there's so much more to say, but seeing as how we just got here, I'm going to put the computer aside for now.   Love to all my friends and family, and hi Gramma Jean! :)

p.s.  There's lot's more pictures up on our Picassa Asia Album