Vacationing in Thailand

When we arrived in Thailand, we didn’t really, we were locked on ship for 6 hours !!! (our longest yet) before the ship had been cleared and we could get our passports and go. We didn’t make port in Bangkok but in an industrial town 2 hours south. In these 6 hours we decided to completely alter our travel plans and it was wonderful! I was getting really stressed because Thailand had been the country I was most looking forward to, and at first I thought spending the week in Bangkok would be cool, but everyone we met on our travels was like get out of Bangkok it sucks! So then we got a flight to Ko Samoui to take a ferry to Ko Phenon where there was this half moon festival the first night and then thought we would spend the next night too and 2 nights in Bangkok, buuutt we were getting really worn from so much travel and were regretting our hasty decision to go to the half moon at all, so we had already missed our flight due to the delayed dismissal, we switched everything around and planned a great vacation to stay on Ko Samoui all 4 nights (and see Bangkok the last day)! We booked a hotel and everything (but accidentally messed up the 1st night so went to the half moon anyway – worth it). The coolest thing was it was free to switch our flights around! Deciding to stay on the same island the whole time, and not deal with the city was great, and so great to have it all planned ! ah it was wonderful to have a plan.

We took a bus to Bangkok, which kind of sucked because the airport was between the ship and the city, but we had already booked the bus, but it was cool to see the city this first day, because it was (of course as we had planned to stay out of it) really really cool. So clean! Such great transportation and roads and ! everything! There were a lot of American food places we saw and well ! it was really cool, a lot of traffic, but less hectic than Vietnam and we just got right in a cab and it seemed all very easy and nice – especially as we had been warned left and right about how dangerous Thailand is and how we were all going to die and thrown in a Thai jail because a cop planted drugs on us and all that. which we luckily, did not happen, and in fact we didn’t have a bit of trouble until the very last day, twice in Bangkok cabs were kind of weird, someone right out of the airport tried to put us in a car for double what the fair should have been, I think my dad would have been proud that I was like, I’m not getting in an unmarked vehicle, we’ll just take a regular cab! And also some other guy tried to take us to like… his friends silk shop or something, which might have been cool but. We had limited time. soooo

We got to the airport a little early for our 7:30 flight, so we had some really good food! Haha I think I talk a lot about food but it was just so good! Ah so I was really really happy and loving Thailand because it was perfect (especially since we had been forewarned the opposite). Though it was kind of expensive, not expensive but about the same prices as America, so seemed expensive. I had ice cream and “Pepsi max” which looked like cherry Pepsi but said zero calories on it and tasted really good but I guess the reason it’s worth writing about is that the writing on the can was all in Thai and that was just nice because it’s a really cool looking language. All curly and pretty and again, native English speakers are so lucky because everything is also written in English, if I had to come to Thailand and try and interpret Thai… ! I would stay at home. It has been very interesting that even like German and Spanish and French and Chinese and whoever speakers all have to learn English to travel. Watching 2 people who don’t know English very well is interesting as I’m sure it’s harder than one person who doesn’t know it.

There were a bunch of SASers on our flight (which was really really way too small, which I did not like) I thought I was going to die – really everything this night seemed really scary because it was very up in the air and dark, you know, so the next day I realized everything was much more normal and safe than it had seemed. When we arrived on Ko Saumoui – the 7:30 plane beat the 7 o’clock plane (hehehe) the airport was really small and cute and they were very helpful in getting us to Ko Phenon. We chartered a boat, which would be really expensive but there were about 30 of us so we got on a giant speed boat and it was so cool! for under $10 we got in a giant van… transportation to the ocean and all got in a giant speed boat and traveled like 15 min to the other island, it was really fun and exciting, when we pulled up to Ko Phenon we didn’t dock… we just kind of backed in to a beach – 50ft ish from shore and all had to just JUMP OUT!! !!!! ah, it was really funny and exciting, the beach was really nice but kind of wavy so we got really pretty wet but had to hold our stuff over our heads and stuff, very funny. Then we got in the back of this really sketchy seeming truck (though in the morning it was like their regular taxi there) to our hotel that seemed like it was in the middle of no where (this was so scary because it was dark is what I’m thinking) and we walked down this winding road and got checked into our little cheap bungalow for the night, though it was just this one guy half asleep like how did you get here?? So late??? Because there’s no way on or off the island, and we told him we chartered a boat so he probably figured we were millionaires and we thought he’d steal all our stuff, anyway we quickly got ready and headed off to the festival, which was cool but not what we expected. It was very commercial, the beach we pulled up to had people fire dancing and cool “Thailand’ey” stuff like that, this was just kind of like a big club outdoors in the middle of the woods with a ton of black lights. We painted our bodies with glow in the dark paint and danced around with other travelers – most from Israel, otherwise other places in Europe, at it’s most crowded there were maybe 1,000 people there, so it was big and cool but not out of control and we weren’t in danger of being stolen into a drug ring or something. It was a cool experience and worth going out of our way for.

We woke up pretty early the next day in our little bungalow, the beach was pretty amazing, it wasn’t a long beach, but went out forever really shallow, there were some sandbars way far out where you could stand and have water to like the ankles, later in the day the tide came in and it was a little deeper but it was really cool having like a private beach, it was off season so there was no one there and the view was beautiful. It was a relaxing morning, we got a very cheap breakfast from the hotel and laid around in hammocks for awhile. It sounds like a paradise but it was a very cheap place, which is why we didn’t stay, you know? I hope you dear reader understands, why it was so important we head back to Ko Saumoui. The pool was clean and the water was ocean, but the beach was rocky and there were giant bugs and construction going on, our beds were… it’s wasn’t the lap of luxury. We could have easily spent all our days there but, we decided to spring for nice place we got a good online deal (pay 2 nights for 1nt free-and over the weekend!).

The afternoon we had some transportation issues, there was only 1 ferry at 4 PM so we had to kill some time as we had already headed into town, it was very hot but we did some shopping and looking around and I got some reading done. The Thai currency – the Baht is for some reason really fun to work with, it’s about 33 baht to the dollar, so I just kind of compared everything to 100 Baht being 3$. Some stuff was cheap like a giant bottle of water for 80 cents, but I bought a lot of presents in this country and they were for about the same prices as I would have paid in the U.S. for these items, but everything I got is really cool and actually from Thailand so I hope everyone likes it – speaking of gifts Jack is getting a good sized haul! Maybe it’s because he’s the only boy I love or something or because he’s my only brother but uh, yeah, alllssooo speaking of cheapness, I made a phone call from Vietnam for like 60cents to my mom, do you remember that call mom? It was like off and on 40 min long, and cost 60 cents! From the ship or a hotel it would have been over 60$. Ooookkkayyy well,

We easily got to our hotel via a free tram and it was beautiful! It was like a typical resort where you pull up to it and you’re in a really sketchy area and you think, where is this, this isn’t the right place, and you enter the gate and you’re in this palm tree, swimming pool, gardens paradise place and you realize how lucky you are. We looked really sweaty and gross and instantly realized this was kind of like a romantic get away place. And we didn’t really fit, oh well, we got to sit down on these nice couches in this open area off the lobby where you could look down the length of the… hotel area/compound, haha it was long and rectangle, and you couldn’t see the beach from there but a lot of trees and a long beautiful blue swimming pool with these elephant statues shooting water and they brought us pomegranate juice to clear out the system and it was very good and nice. But instantly got kind of stressful because we had kind of wanted to sneak 4 of us into one 2 person room, but didn’t go about it the right way, we all showed up together so of course the hotel insisted we get 2 rooms. Long story short we got 2 rooms and it was so wonderful to have my own giant white bed and share a room with my only half normal friend Jackie, but I have never been a part of a group that was such a pain in the butt to a hotel, I get so embarrassed and will always just go with the flow and pay whatever they say to pay, and not make a big deal out of things, but so many people are like… hagglers, so we ended up being the only people in the place with a continental breakfast and stuff like that, I suppose it’s good for me to learn to deal with confrontation. Haha

But I really had a great time, I ate some really great fancy food at the hotel, I got my first egg white omelet since this trip has begun and that was wonderful. We did a lot of swimming, relaxing and watching hotel free movies. The second day, taking advantage of our free amenities we went kayaking all around the bay we were in. I tried really hard to get a windsurfing lesson because I wanted to learn so I can use my birthday present !! and I really wanted to be able to tell my dad I got a lesson but neither day was there enough wind! So I was kind of disappointed about that but, oh well, maybe I’ll get it in another country. We went into town for lunch and got subway, haha which was really good, it’s surprising how hard it is to find a regular old sandwich in these places! It was funny because I’d been saying I could pick up and move to these countries I’ve been to but managing the subway was this British man with… haha well he had a glass eye or something, but I was just thinking, what the heck is this guy doing in Thailand managing a Subway? Did no one like him back home or something? And at subway an older man from San Francisco now living alone on the island for the past 12 years also sought us out for conversation and I decided unless my business calls me to another country, like a job in foreign affairs… I’m thinking lives lived in such different cultures must be quite odd and more than a little lonely.

It rained a little that afternoon but it was still really relaxing, I got my first ever massage, not a regular old massage, but a traditional Thai massage! Haha I wore these Thai pajamas and it was very natural and all about pressure points and stretching and the room just smelled so good and it was really cool, I liked it a lot. I was very sorry when it ended but they served some tea after and that was also nice. Also I took more showers at this hotel than I probably have the whole trip! Haha I showered a lot.

That night I kind of wanted to just stay in and relax some more but (I forgot to mention we met up at the hotel with 2 more of our girl friends, so it was me, Jackie, Lauren and Christina, and we met up with Danielle and Kassidy – both from CA) everyone else wanted to go out, and we kind of botched it because we headed out to theses really cool places but too early, so we went to a Reggae club, with a band singing covers, we went to this giant out door club that had a really cool atmosphere, we were practically the only ones there, but it was cool. we split into 3 and 3 here and actually did some middle of the night shopping, which was fun and then ran into these too girls from London we had shared a cab with a few days ago, it was fun to chat with them but headed home early so we could… prepare for…

Ridding ELEPHANTS! We got up early… had our free breakfast… and got picked up for our 2 hour Safari excursion which included an elephant show, a monkey show, riding elephants and then ridding ATVs. It was pretty commercial but also pretty authentic. The back of their shirts said “we save elephant” which was funny and I bought one, but also these elephants were not treated very well. Some SASers rode actually on the back of elephants but we rode on the back on strapped on seats and it seemed like these seats were probably left on the elephants all the time, and they were chained in, not allowed to roam. Also they really didn’t look very good, kind of sick and sad : ( but it was cool the two in the show, a baby and a little older one where pretty healthy, except the baby seemed like he had a mental problem, rocking back and forth for like 15 minutes before the show. It was really cute though, they did hand stands and played basketball and even played the harmonica! Ahh it was really really cute, I took a lot of video. The monkey show was pretty strange too, this monkey that looked like a human spun some coconuts around, and some crazy Europeans in our group were I think drunk, though it was 9am, and they were very strange but added some interest to the shows as well.

The actual elephant ride was pretty cool, the girl I rode with gasped really loudly the first time the elephant guide… well they had these giant sticks, one end round, one end pointy- the first time he thumped the elephant on the top of the head to get him to go one way and then she said “oh my god did you see that!?” so our elephant guide didn’t like us much, which was kind of sad. We trekked up this mountain but he didn’t take us to look over the edge, and we turned around early, our elephant was the slowest going up so it was ok, I smacked my head on a tree branch at this point but I have had a surprisingly (or not so surprising maybe?) large number of head injuries on these trips overall! Haha in Vietnam in our van we went over a big bump and I went so high that I really bruised my head on a knob coming out of the roof of the van.

Anyway going down this mountain on the elephant, I don’t know if he had a name, so I’ll call him Elly, but going down the mountain on Elly was really very scary. I thought I was going to slip right off the seat, but all was well and I tried to pet Elly a little bit but could only reach his butt or a little bit of his neck, which was surprisingly really hard and course, though I guess that’s exactly what it looks like, I just figured he would be soft and wrinkly, but, I figured wrong! So, even though I didn’t like the idea of supporting the industry I tipped our driver so he wouldn’t wish evil thoughts upon us for the rest of the day and after that we rode the 4 wheelers, which I was actually pretty scared of (in my old age I’ve lost my nerves a bit I think) so I was lapped by 2 people, we rode around this track 4 times, it was a cool track in the jungle, but like I said, I really didn’t go too fast. Better because some people just don’t pay attention to what they’re doing. Anyway… I probably have malaria now!

We spent the rest of the day by the pool and beach, had some good Thai food, I tried to get my windsurfing lesson again, but no luck. I spent about 30min using the free internet at the hotel, as I’m out of minutes here on the ship and have to buy some more just to post this! We had a nice/fancyish dinner on the beach from our hotel restaurant. I got a Thai Beef salad (interestingly not as good as the one I had in Chicago… haha) and a Shirley Temple, with “chili chocolate cheese cake” for desert, it rained while we were there but they put out verandas and we sat around for about 3 hours eating and talking and listening to this Vietnamese pair from the Philippians sing American love songs to us while we were eating in Thailand. None of us had any money on us so we didn’t tip and they seemed kind of upset. I worried a bit about being rude off and on during this trip but I suppose I’ll make up in generosity when I am old and rich and traveling the world again with my famous rich husband some day.

We stayed in, lounging around, and watched gone with the wind! But fell asleep before the end as it’s so long. It was great to just go to bed because I wanted to really appreciate my last night in a giant wonderful white comfy bed, and I did. : )

The next morning we woke up a little too late – as we messed up the alarm and had to get on a 10am flight, but I managed to weight myself for the first time, it was in kg but I can convert well enough to know it’s time to get my act together! Haha, we made our flight to Bangkok no problem and had a good day there. Going to the Jim… last name starts with an H, Museum, he was this American guy who was in the CIA in Thailand then moved back to Thailand when he was done and collected all sorts of art pieces and made really extraordinary silk stuff and other art. He mysteriously was murdered or died while on vacation when he was 61 and now his house is a really cool museum and designer silk shop. I didn’t really want to go there initially because I’d never heard of it, but was really glad to have gone!

Next we went to the Grand Palace, which I had dressed all day for, long pants, closed toed shoes, appropriate shirt, and had been pretty upset because though they told us this was what you had to wear about 7 times, 2 of our 4 were wearing short dresses and flip flops, and one had not even brought closed toe shoes to Thailand. So I went in by myself and I had to run around quickly and didn’t get to see everything but I really really loved it! It was more what I would imagine a palace to be then those in China, like in China it was all hand painted and you could really appreciate the work in that, but here it was all tiles! Billions and trillions of really colorful tiles arranged in patterns, and some were sparkly and some mat and there was a lot of gold, gold everywhere and ah it was just really beautiful! I took a bunch of pictures. Also there were really fabulous paintings done too, but they were like under a tile awning so they weren’t faded or anything. It was really a cool palace.

The king doesn’t live there though, he lives somewhere else in Bangkok, I assume some where more modern, but everyone really respects the king, you have to be really careful with the way you handle the money because everything has the kings face on it and you aren’t supposed to bend it or get it dirty and stuff (though the night we met up with the London girls from the taxi they demonstrated the wonders of Australian money – cannot be ripped, we tried very hard, is water proof, we dunked it in water and then still ineffectively tried to rip it, and though they thought it was also fire proof, we learned that was not the case as when put to fire the edge began to melt – so we stopped then – haha a fun fact.) but yeah no one speaks out about the king at all and there are pictures of him everywhere.

I wanted to say about Vietnam I had forgot to mention, we walked by a bar that had been at a main intersection that the police officers were at, and the music was off, and that is because of censorship! They are not allowed to play certain kinds of music, and this particular bar played a lot of popular American music, so they were pretending that they didn’t because the police where there! Which is interesting and also that I saw a lot of older Vietnamese people that were actually disfigured and that had burns on them and stuff. Like a lot a lot, and I thought that was sad and interesting.

So anyway after the grand palace we headed to the mall (central mall – I swear it was I think bigger than the Mall of America, haha it was HUGE) where our bus would pick us up and we had some time to kill and some Baht to spend so we wandered around and I bought some traditional Thai crafty stuff and we got some dinner – I finally had some pad Thai from a coffee shop! Haha it was cheap and good. Then we got back on the old bus and headed back to the ship, it was fun on the bus because everyone had all their stories to tell and stuff and I had a nice long conversation with a boy from the Midwest, which was something my friends said I must have been wanting because we talked forever, and it was he was friendly from MN went to Madison so we had a lot to talk about and I miss having Midwest to talk about with all the East coasters. Haha uhhh. Sad but this is all true. At the dock I spent my remaining Baht on diet cokes to drink on the travel to India and a magnet, someone gave me a 8 min phone card for free so I called and got to talk to my mommy whom I love very much, haha… yeah Thailand was great. I really really loved it.

And so far it’s the country probably most feasible to come back to, it was similar in standards to the U.S. and it was such a wonderful vacation spot. I loved it! And the day after Thailand (yesterday) we had free! And it was glorious! Our first day of no travel and no classes yet. It was so nice to not have to start planning a new port while processing the last one and dealing with homework (though now mine is really building up as I took a do nothing day yesterday) and not having to write this journal while going to preport for the next place, ah, glorious! I slept till 1:30pm then sun tanned and fell asleep up there on the 7th deck until 4:30, went to my water pong match at 5:30, though the other team was a no show, so I think we win by default, got dinner, watched some friends episodes and went back to bed by… uh like 10!!! Haha hahah ahaha. But we actually had to advance our clocks last night! (usually we retard) but I think we’re traveling east to get around and back on our way towards India, which is now 2.5 hour time difference from where I am now, which I don’t understand but means I will be retarding 2.5 times in the next 3 days and will explain when I can make sense of it myself, maybe they don’t do daylight savings or have no leap year or… who knows, I bet I will. SO, what that means is I didn’t really go to bed until 11pm new time.

I of course then woke up at 4:30am today so I got up to go to weight lifting class at 6:15 but the instructor was again not there and it was dark out! But I did some reading for a class and the elliptical and bike and stuff so it was worth getting up for, I also feel energized and happy which is good! Haha it has been a good day all around because I’m almost done with this thing and on my way to class this morning there was an announcement (which there often are) “for exercise purpose only, this is a drill, man over board on the starboard side” and we immediately very sharply turned and you could see the angle and stuff. I got to class and after 5 min my crazy professor ran in and told us we had to go up to the top deck and watch because he’s never seen anything like this before.

So we got up there and by the time we had the ship had already turned completely around, we could se the wake lines (which I processed yesterday can be seen from the back of the ship to the horizon – about 8 miles away but I don’t know for what duration of time) so we could see we were exactly retracing our path and could see the relatively small curve, we really turned quickly and efficiently it was impressive. And all watched as we slowly approached a little tiny orange dot, which ended up being a big floating orange thing, then lowered a life boat, picked up the “person” and brought it back on the boat. This whole process – though costing thousands of dollars of fuel and all that, was really fast probably just around 15 min to get to the “person” and I realized that I was infinitely safer on this ship with any danger that might occur here than I am crossing the street in North Oaks (let alone Vietnam!) and so really no one should be afraid of traveling by sea. Ooookkkayyy well! I’m off to India! I’ll try and post some pictures before then but it’s been slow and in Vietnam and Thailand I haven’t been able to take as many! Also Sawadee means hello, isn’t that funny? We eat there all the time and who would have though it mean hello. Okay talk to you later!