island tour from ao nang

From Khao Lak, we returned to Ao Nang for a couple of more days. Anneka went back home at this time. She ended up having to fly home through Malaysia, since the Bangkok airport was still closed. We missed her after she left. We took an island tour that left from Ao Nang one of the days. These are what the water taxis look like and we got completely soaked riding in it. We were luckily in our swimming suits, so it didn't really matter. We first went to Chicken Head Island, maybe you can figure out why it's called that, by looking at the photo below.

We got in the water to snorkel and after about 2 minutes of being in the water, we discovered how many jelly fish were also visiting Chicken Head island. I hate jelly fish. I quickly got out of the water, as did everyone else. It was disappointing that we couldn't snorkel. You can kind of see the jelly fish in this picture, hate them. And there's a shot of one washed up onshore on one of the other islands we went to. There were hundreds of them on the beach. We also went to Poda Island and these shots are from there. It is so beautiful.
Me and Jane looking HOT!
The last beach we stopped at was Phranang Cave, which must mean penis cave because look at the cave...don't ask, I really don't know.The beach here was so nice, no big waves, just water slowly lapping up to the beach, we didn't know that the best beach would be here, so we ended up only having 30 minutes to explore. I would want to spend more time at this place, if I went back, even if the cave itself is creepy. The limestone cliffs were amazing. Jared and Lance were pretty amazed.

Ah, how cute.Annemarie, here's your monkey! I couldn't catch him for you, but I at least took a picture.

When we got back into Ao Nang, the tide was out, so our taxi couldn't take us all the way back up to the shore. We had to get out and walk in shin-high water to the beach. Which, normally wouldn't be bad, but the part of the beach he let us out at was at the river outlet and since rivers aren't exactly clean here, the water was really gross at this spot. It was so disgusting, muddy sand was oozing between my toes and I tried not to think about why the sand was so muddy. I just wish they had real septic systems there. yuck. We washed up as soon as we could after that part.

We didn't stay at the Sunda Resort when we returned to Ao Nang because we were being cheap. We found the Good View hotel, which was right in town and was $20/night. It was clean and convenient and had AC.

khao lak

After our dive trip, we spent a couple of days in Khao Lak. We stayed at the Phukhaolak resort here. They had the nicest grounds and pool. The rooms we stayed in were pretty basic, but they have some really nice bungalows, if you want to spend a little more. Our's were $25/night.I found it interesting that a lot of the places we stayed had an open bathroom concept. No separate shower area, so the whole bathroom would get wet when you showered. It's all tile, so it really wasn't a big deal, but it seems like it would be pretty easy to install a little shower curtain.You'll see these little shrines all over the place, in front of homes, businesses and this is one that was at the hotel. This is where they leave things for buddha. I don't really know any details, though. Can you see the lady in the yellow bikini? This is the beach in Khao Lak, the guy walking next to her is wearing an orange speedo with a matching orange hat, nice.

This little bug (about 2" long) was making a bunch of noise out on our porch. It's very interesting-looking, kind of looks like a grasshopper, but much wider.

I wondered if there were scorpions here since it's such a tropical climate and reminded me a lot of central america. I only saw one and luckily it was dead. But, it still made me scared to walk on the grass at night when I was only wearing flip-flops. So, I would run across the lawn back to our room, to minimize my foot-to-lawn contact time.

After we returned from our dive, we were invited to the Happy Snapper bar. It was fun, all the dive shop people come here when they're not out on the boats. This was a band that was performing (I know, crappy picture). They only played covers and all of them were American songs, but they sounded really good. Natalie and Mark from the dive joined us there, they were fun to hang out with. I had a couple of sprites, I know I'm such a drunk. I love sprites in foreign countries, they taste so much better. And I let Marcel buy me some sort of virgin lemon drink. yum

engrish

There's a web-site that I find particulary hilarious (www.engrish.com). It inspired me to take the following photos. Enjoy! (And yes, they don't make any sense.)

similan islands dive trip

I think my most favorite part of the trip to Thailand was diving in the Similan Islands. We booked a trip with Wicked Diving out of Khao Lak. Jared, Jane, Anneka and I completed our dive certification while on the 3-day live aboard. Lance was already certified, so he was in a separate group. The water was so clear here. We saw a lot of neat fish and eels, rays, turtles, sea cucumbers, coral, slugs...I have a video, if you're ever interested in watching it. It would probably be boring for someone else, though.

I get really bad motion sickness and so I was worried about being on a boat for 3 days. I took medicine, but the 4-hour ride out there was really, really rough. I spent most of the time throwing up over the side of the boat. It hurt. Once we got to the islands, I didn't have any problems. Phew. We dove a total of nine times and by the last day, I was really feeling comfortable with everything. It takes a little getting used to, but I wasn't ever scared, which was one thing I worried about before.

The dive crew was fun, we were on the boat for Thanksgiving and one of them dressed up as a "turkey" by using some medical gloves and cotton balls. I didn't have my camera when he did it, but it was pretty funny. Marcel was our instructor and he must have a lot of patience to deal with people like us all the time. This was their initiation for one of the other instructors to complete his certification.Can you believe how blue the water was out there? It was so beautiful.

This was a sunrise one of the mornings, we did have to get up at 645 each morning because we had really full days.

Part of our group. There were 6 other divers besides us.Lance getting ready for a dive.Me climbing out of the water, that was the toughest part, the equipment was so heavy.We had a small amount of time to explore one of the islands. It had a great beach.Our turtle friend that greeted us when we arrived.

When we returned from the dive trip, we had gotten so used to being on the rocking boat, that it seemed like everything was moving. We couldn't make sudden movements, or we would get dizzy. And then when we went to bed, it felt like the boat was still rocking, it was weird. It went away by the next day, luckily.

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.

a quick note from Thailand

I'm in Thailand! I arrived late Sunday night with Anneka, Lance, Jared and Jane. We've been here 3 days now and are having lots of fun. I'll post more about our adventures when I get back. Some of the highlights, so far:
--elephant ride
--thai massages (only $9/hr!)
--food
--Yo-Yo candy
--chocolate covered cashew nuts

Some of the drawbacks to our trip so far:
--pouring rain yesterday and all clouds so far
--crazy taxi driver from Ao Nang to Khao Lak
--smells of sewage

We're leaving for a 3-day liveaboard dive trip tomorrow morning! It should be fun and I'm hoping for more sun.