So we finally did it, sort of. Here is our "official" blog for our travels through Thailand and India. We are excited to keep all of you up-to-date about our adventures for the next few months, along with lots of professional pictures (yeah right). Below, we have uploaded a handful of pics that document our trip so far, along with a few brief captions (warning: these are in reverse chronological order because I suck at using this blog-site).
For those of you who are interested, I thought I'd also recount a bit of our travels up till this point. It's been mostly beach bumming and lounging, but we've also managed to go on a few adventures and keep ourselves active!
We arrived into Bangkok on the 21st. The first thing we did when we got in was jump onto the internet and try and locate a video of Obama's inaugeration (for those of you not timezone savvy, he had just addressed the nation about two hours before we landed). We found one, but after 22 some odd hours of traveling, we fell asleep through half of it. Yeah, historical blasphemy, I s'pose.
We spent the next day just running around Bangkok trying to buy our tickets to India, which we got for the 23rd of February, and also find a train down south where the white sand beaches of postcards are. We had some great food that morning; barbequed pork and chicken with spicey soup over rice. Jen and I were both happy to have switched to the carnivorous ways a few weeks earlier.
We took the night train down to Surat Thani and from there we got suckered into a VIP bus to Krabi town. I say suckered because the local scam is to charge 3x the government rates for a bus trip and then drop you off about 3 km outside of town, where your only option is to book boats/hotels/taxis through the agents who got you the bus in the first place (we learned our lesson, obviously). Once we got to Krabi, we hopped onto a boat and puttered over the azure Andaman Sea for 30 km to Koh Phi Phi Don. This is the big brother of Koh Phi Phi Leh where the infamous (or at least its infamous here) "The Beach" was filmed.
Arriving in the port of Phi Phi, we were exhausted (up to almost three days of non-stop travel) and sweaty and suddenly bombarded by the omnipresent touts of the tourist-trade. Fortunately, we had booked a room at a resort on the supposedly calmer side of the island and soon found our way out to Ao Toh Koh by longboat (see pic below).
Toh Koh was splendid. We spent about six days there. The beach was marginal, but the atmosphere was just right; that is, totally serene. There were about eighteen small bungalows littered all up and down the beach. Ours was basically a roof and four walls and a mosquito net (no electricity half the day and windows with several wooden slats for a screen). For three days we simply swam, napped, and ate delicious Thai food at our own leisure. I jammed on my guitar too (see pic again). The birds were great (see pic of Pacific Reef Egret) and the monkeys bountiful.
On the fourth day we went diving with a local company, Viking Divers, recommended to us by a Danish dive master we met on the boat on the way out to Phi Phi. We had arranged a refresher course and an afternoon dive. Our instructer was American, who was being tested in-turn by her dive instructer. That actually insured a thorough review. Anyway -- the diving was awesome! We both had slight nerves beforehand, but about, oh 2 seconds, underwater we were both swimming around with the biggest grins (well, I tried to grin then quickly remembered that sixty feet underwater, grinning is pretty difficult). We saw black-tipped reef sharks, a scorpian fish, numerous trumpet fish, fan coral, hawksbill turtles, sea-slugs and many other goodies of the deep. By mid-afternoon we were ready to sleep underwater. Alas, we had only paid for two dives and soon found ourselves lying lazily along the lapping waves again.
After saying goodbye to Phi Phi, we hopped on a bus (government run this time) and headed south to Trang town, capital of Trang province. A small commercial town, Trang town is known for its night markets. After sightseeing at the local temple, we soon found out why. We showed up around dinner time to the nightly feast and were quickly overwhelmed by choices. Everywhere we looked there were foods we had no names for, but with aromas that allayed any skepticism we might had. Armed with about four dollars we bought six different dishes, each better than the other. Combined with the general hubub of hundreds of Thais (and two other tourists), we felt we had finally stumbled into Thailand.
We left Trang quickly though, leaving our musty, six dollar backpackers resort room (five-star) behind and meandered to the coast via mini-van. We spent a night at Hat Yao Nature Resort as the guests of honor, well, the only guests. Owned and operated by a charming retired-professor of natural medicine, the resort is geared towards nature conservation and organic-hippies like us. It was nice, but we decided to try out the sister resort off-shore on Koh Libong. Much nicer, this resort (where I type this blog-post) is situated in a long sandy cove shared with a fishing community of "sea-gypsies". Very friendly, the community is pretty isolated and subsists off what appears to be fishing and rubber tree plantations. Today we went for a 23 mile (or at least it now feels like it was that long) kayaking excursion to the other side of the island to visit another fishing town; where we roamed the streets for a couple of hours sampling a roadside stand selling a half-dozen delicious Thai deserts.
Now we're just loungin' again, using the world's oldest pain-killer, ice-cold Chang beer, to combat our soar shoulders and sunburnt necks. Yes, this is exactly what we thought Thailand would be like - pure awesomeness. (This was actually posted February 1st).
Sunset off Koh Libong
Jen headin' out to Koh Libong
Wat Tantayaphirom in Trang Town
Lanterns adorned the streets of Trang Town after the Chinese New Year
Koh Phi Phi in all its glory!
