thailand!

Ok, so I am officially lame at posting to my blog. I have stories to tell from my trip to Thailand, I hope I can remember them all. I actually kept a little journal, so I could remember everything while we were there. I am hoping to post a lot of information about specific places we stayed and such, so if anyone wants to go to Thailand and happens to want recommendations on where to stay, it will all be here and if that part's boring, you can just look at the pictures. Here goes!

I went to Thailand with my brothers Lance and Jared, Jared's wife, Jane and Anneka. We arrived the Sunday night before Thanksgiving after flying for many hours and connecting through Seoul. Lance and I traveled together and watched 5 movies on the way there. We were on Korean Air. It was my first time flying this airline and it was so nice, all of the flight attendants were so perfect and they even cleaned the bathrooms en-route. They had matching outfits and matching hair styles. My favorite movie from this flight was Promotion. It was really funny, you should check it out. The best part about Korean Air was their selection of movies, we chose from 100s of different movies. Very nice, since we were stuck on that plane for 11 hours.

One thing I noticed while we were in the Seoul airport was that a lot of the Korean couples traveling together wore matching shirts, here's an example of one couple. There were so many of them with matching shirts, I really didn't understand.

We arrived in Bangkok a few days before the riots that happened there (and no, the riots didn't really affect us in our stay there, just kept us in Krabi one additional day). We stayed at a hotel near the airport the first night, it was the Garden View Resort ($25/night) and we had a free shuttle transfer to the hotel. The room was simple and clean, we only needed a place to sleep for a few hours because the next morning, we flew down to the Andaman coast, to Krabi. We took Air Asia and had pre-booked our flights on-line without any problems. The earlier you book these domestic flights, the cheaper you can get your tickets. I think we ended up paying $120 for a round-trip ticket, but I had seen them as low as $80.

Once we arrived into Krabi, we decided to take a shuttle bus to Ao Nang, but we should have just taken a taxi. We had to wait for 40 minutes for the bus to fill up with passengers from the next flight. It did take us all the way to our hotel, though and it was only $14 for all 5 of us. Driving from the Krabi airport to Ao Nang reminded me a lot of Costa Rica, it is very green there and a lot of the buildings along the highway looked like central american buildings. We decided to stay in Ao Nang for the beach and the easy access to Railay--for rock climbing (but we actually never ended up doing any climbing). There's three separate beaches in Ao Nang and the one that is furthest out of town was the nicest, but the water was pretty shallow in this area.

It rained some the first few days we were there, which made us a little worried, since it was supposed to be their dry season. We only were drenched a couple of times, luckily, throughout the 2 1/2 weeks we were there.
We stayed at the Sunda Resort ($40/night) in Ao Nang. It was really nice, off by itself and a little away from the center of town. Here's our room and our bathroom. It was the nicest place we stayed, I think it was the elephant towels that made it worth it.

They had free tuk-tuk rides into town, so we could walk down the street and look at shop after shop filled of the same stuff. That was one thing that was weird about all the places we went, there were so many people trying to sell the same stuff. I don't know how any of them make any money. Jared and Lance were approached by so many tailor shops wanting to make them "Armani" suits. It became funny after a while because Jared would try to be nice to all of them and say no thanks, but talking to them only made them want to pull you into their shop more! We just learned to ignore them. That was probably the only annoying thing about Thailand.

We went on an elephant ride here and it was so fun! I thought they might be a little smelly, but we didn't smell anything. Anneka and I rode together on Na. Our guide looked like he was 15, but he did a good job and we didn't get thrown off the elephant. Our ride was about $9 each and lasted maybe 45 minutes. It was so muddy, look at how big the footprint holes are. There were a couple of hills that we went up and down that were scary and I kept hoping Na wouldn't slip. He held his ground. I had to take a photo of the poop, sorry, just had to share it.

The trip also included a stop at a catfish farm that had alligators and these alien-looking catfish. We fed them these little pellets and they went crazy, it was actually kind of scary. A picture of our group in front of the "waterfall", which really was just a fast flowing stream. We met a nice Australian couple, Natalie and Anthony.