Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Return to Thailand

 

After being gone from the Kingdom for nearly three months, we flew from Kuala Lumpur to Phuket.  For the last week, we have been exploring the islands of the Andaman Sea.  We have spent time on Phuket (Patong), Koh Phi Phi, Koh Lanta, Railay and I think our next stop is Krabi.

All the pic’s came from our friend Nick.

IMG_0722

    Southern Thailand is much different than what we were seeing around central and northern Thailand.  It is more Muslim down here, similar to Malaysia, so there are not many temples, but the occasional Mosque which still wakes everyone up super early in the morning.  All the islands we have been on have kind of party/skeezy.  It seems less like Thailand here and more like any other tropical island resort towns in the world.

   Our friend Toby from Hamburg told me “Mack, there are not many wild places left in the world”.  We were talking about how a lot of the time people go looking for adventure in their travel, only to find some sort of domesticated ‘pet’ version of adventure.  For instance you might hike up to a cave with all of your caving gear, only to find a cement pathway and big floodlights filling the whole thing.  Oh, and don’t forget to pay your 40THB cover charge!  Anyways, these islands kind of remind me of that – although I would have to change his quote a little.  Maybe something like this:

“Mack, there are not many wild places left in the world, only girls gone wild places left.”

    I am really glad we got to spend a lot of time in and around true Thai culture at the beginning of our trip because right now the only Thai people I even meet are the ones offering me buckets of alcohol.  Mostly this is to blame on the locations we have been at lately, but also might be due to the fact that since arriving in Phuket we have been traveling with a large group – our friends from back home met us here.  I think that as six or seven people walking around you are less approachable by local people.  We find it slightly odd also to travel with a group, as we are not used to waiting for anybody this whole time thus far – the communal decision making IMG_0801is slightly difficult.  ALTHOUGH, we are still having lots of fun – it is just more like a vacation now instead of like the backpacking and traveling we were doing for the last few months.  Our friends leave us today and head to Chiang Mai while Chelsea and I figure out how to get over to Koh Tao to get our PADI scuba certification.  I am especially excited for this since we chartered a snorkeling trip from Phi Phi Island and went and saw all sorts of great things!  My favorite parts were finding groups of clown fish in sea anemones and swimming through a gigantic school of fish that extended as far as you could see!  I was scared they were going to touch me and I did  not want to feel masses of fish all over me, but obviously fish know how to swim in a school and not a single fish ever touched me, but they were all within centimeters.

    Koh Lanta was my favorite tropical island we visited – it was quiet and filled withIMG_0832 some villages.  We climbed to a waterfall there (which was quite small I must say) and rode our piglets (I have been calling our scooters piglets, in reference to how people call a real motorcycle a HOG) out to the tip of the island and checked out the lighthouse and the view.  I saw the most beautiful sunset there, it was truly stunning.  We also hung out with three more fantastic people we met there, Kelvin and Stephanie who are kiwi’s (New Zealand) and Stefano from Italy.

    This last week has been hard to update the website and add pictures to facebook because we have been on these tropical islands and many places do not have WIFI.  Our camera has been dead so we have no really recent pictures, I will try to steal some from AJ and/or Nick and Tony because the views out here really are awesome!

    Oh and to top it all off, I really wanted to take a rock climbing course here in Railay, one of the climbing capitals of the world, but today I think I ruined all of that when I dropped an oak bedframe on my toe.  It ripped off the nail, and I think it broke the end of my toe and has been bleeding for quite some time.  I am happy it did not totally smash it or cut it off, but that combined with my sprained/maybe broken left pinky toe is going to make it really hard to get into climbing shoes.  Maybe Chelsea will do it, but I would be really sad and jealous… Sad smile

    Oh, and after four months of being here a girl finally called me tan for the first time in my life! Woohoo

Mack

IMG_0859

No comments:

Post a Comment