So I’m sitting back at my desk at school where I’m supposed to be getting lesson plans ready, preparing worksheets and getting ready for a new school year, but all I can do is think about the past two months and what an amazing time I’ve had. I’ve had some of the best times of my life these past two months and I feel so lucky to have been able to experience all that I did! But now comes the hard part of trying to remember it all and trying to share the journey with everyone! So I guess the best place to start is at the beginning…
So after kianna and alysha got to Thailand, they headed down to koh phi phi for a few days. I had to stay at school for a few more days so I could help out with the kindergarten graduation, so we made plans to meet up that Sunday in kohl anta (another island down south). Graduation was lots of fun and the kids looked adorable dressed in their caps and gowns and the English play went fabulously, so all in all it was a great success and I’m really happy I stuck around. Saturday night I grabbed a bus down to krabi, and from there I got a minivan to take me to koh lanta! I didn’t know much about kohl anta before arriving, but I wanted to go to a new island and check out a new island so we figured we at least go for a couple nights just to check it out and if we didn’t like it we’d just head somewhere else. Well our couple night stay turned into 4 nights there we loved it so much. Koh lanta is probably my favorite island in Thailand….i absolutely loved it there! Less touristy and crowded than koh phi phi, but still beautiful blue water and lots to do! We spent our days lounging on the beach, hiking to waterfalls, eating lots of yummy food and drinking fruit shakes and renting motorbikes that we rode around the entire island. Driving motorbikes was probably one of the highlights of the entire trip! I remember driving the bike, looking around me at the clear blue sky, the beautiful ocean on one side of me and green meadows on the other side and I just smiled….life is good. Monkeys run all over the island too, so sometimes we’d have to come to an abrupt stop in the middle of the road to let monkeys cross the road and get out of the way. Early one morning we took our motorbikes out to the bottom tip of the island and went to this neat little lighthouse where we had an amazing view…. i just can’t get over how beautiful this island was! Loved it.
After a few days we decided we needed to move on to somewhere new and headed up the coast to a town called khuraburi where we spent the night before catching a speedboat out to the koh surin. The surin islands are 5 little islands that make up the mu koh surin national park. There’s no hotels on the island, only a few little bungalows and tents. On our last day in koh lanta we met up with another girl, Julia, who is from three rivers and was a roommate of another friend of mine from UCSB. The 4 of us decided to rent a big tent for the week and rough it out camping on the beach. koh surin was a beautiful place and its been kept nice because Thailand hasn’t let it become taken over by hotels, restaurants, bars, etc. There is a big mess hall on each side of the island so this is where we ate all of our meals. While the food was really good, it got frustrating because they were usually out of a lot of stuff….such as chicken….or noodles…or fruit. So we ate a lot of friend rice and lots of papaya salad...it was delicious, but got a little old after 5 days! Oh well, mai pen rai. We spent our days snorkeling in the crystal clear water, chasing after nemos, swimming with baby sharks, laying out on the deserted beach, reading through out supply of books, playing sudoku. In the evenings it would usually pour rain for an hour or so, so we would sit in the mess hall and play cards, read and relax. Basically, we just sat around and did nothing on this island. It was great. After 5 nights though we needed to switch things up so we headed back to the mainland and hopped on a bus to another national park, khao sak.
Khao sak national park is home to the oldest evergreen rainforest in the world, it has huge limestone mountains that shoot staring up in the air, caves, wild animals, and it looks like something straight out of Jurassic park. When we got off the bus we were bombarded by these thai guys who were trying to convince us to stay at their guesthouse. Super overwhelming, so we kinda just chose the one that offered us the cheapest deal. Little did we know that the price was so cheap because we were going to be sharing it with other roommates….a lovely bat, a large lizard, some friendly bugs, and so many more. Needless to say we only spent one night there before moving on to somewhere that was a bit more expensive, but we had the room to ourselves. After changing rooms we headed to the park entrance and headed up a trail that went to a series of waterfalls. We started fairly early in the morning, but it got HOT fast. We continued hiking for a good 2-3 hours before suddenly I hear alysha screaming! We hadn’t really been paying attention to our surroundings, but when alysha looked down at her shoe she saw a leech trying to latch on to her! We froke out and all of us started checking our socks and shoes to see if any of those little blood suckers were on us! We tried to continue on the hike, but the ground was getting wetter, there were more leeches and we just kept getting attacked! Finally we had enough of getting attacked so we hurried back down the mountain and called it a day with hiking. We were drenched in sweat by the time we were done because we had hustled down so quickly, so we went and washed up before heading out for a late lunch. We were just about to eat at a little pizza place on the main road when I looked up and saw my friend Chelsea, another teacher in Thailand, walking down the road with her friend Katie! We spent the rest of the afternoon/evening catching up with them and hanging out on our porch watching the rain pour down around us.
The next morning we got up early because we had signed up for a jungle trek, kayaking, cave trekking adventure! The 6 of us drove in the back of a truck for about an hour before we reached the Cheow Larn Lake. On our way to the park our driver stopped to pick up some food and water for us, when he went to start the car it wouldn’t turn start! We ended up having to get out of the truck and pushed the truck while he tried to start it. I’m sure all the thais got a laugh watching us push this little pickup down the street. When we reached the lake we boarded a longtail boat and began our cruise around the lake; the lake was beautiful and there were gorgeous limestone mountains jetting right out of the water all around us! After about an hour we stopped at a little floating restaurant and immediately jumped in the lake to cool off. We were able to rent some kayaks and paddled around the area a bit. We could see monkeys in the trees, huge clusters of butterflies flew around us, and just gorgeous scenery. Lunch was delicious and we stuffed ourselves with sweet and sour chicken, stir fried veggies, and fresh fruit. After lunch it was time for our jungle/cave trekking! We had no idea what to expect and we weren’t really prepared for anything to athletic since we all were in flimsy flip flops. Lek, our guide, made us little straps for our flip flops so that they would be connected to our feet so that helped a bit, but they still weren’t very secure. The trek through the jungle was beautiful, it really looked like the set of Jurassic park…I was just waiting for a dinosaur to pop out at us! The only difficult part of the jungle trekking was that the ground was wet from rain the previous day so our flip flops kept getting stuck in the mud. After about 45 minutes we reached the beginning of the cave; Lek told us that we would be spending about 45 minutes in the cave and we honestly had no idea what to expect. They had told us that the cave had water in it and that at some parts the water might come up to our knees, but nothing to worry about. Yeah right. We didn’t really think about how the cave would be dark inside, so the only lights we had were our guides’, so one light in the front and one in the back, and the light that came from our phones. As we got deeper and deeper into the cave it became pitch black and we literally couldn’t see a thing. Lek flashed his light up to the ceiling and we all screamed in terror when we saw hundreds of bats hanging from the ceiling! Then Lek shined his light on a rock that was nearby and we all screamed again when we saw an ENORMOUS spider! Literally the thing was as big as my hand; now we were terrified of everything around us! It was hard to walk through the cave since we couldn’t see too well, we didn’t want to touch any of the rocks around us since we didn’t know what kind of creatures might be on them, the unevenness of the rocks, and our flip flops so we all were falling, but fortunately no one got hurt. At one point in the cave we came to this portion of the cave where the water was above our heads and we literally had to swim through the cave while holding onto a piece of rope….so sketchy and scary, but we made it through ok! We finally saw the exit of the cave and were so happy to see light…but as soon as we stepped out of the cave we realized that it was POURING and we still had to walk for an hour to get back to our boat! It was actually pretty fun being in the rain and we had a good time trekking back out of the jungle. There were a few leeches that attacked us, but nothing horrible. The hardest part was that the path turned to mud so we kept getting stuck and losing our sandals and falling into the mud; we looked pretty ridiculous. After all of us made it on the boat, we ventured back to the restaurant to wait out the rain a bit. It finally stopped but since we were soaked it was a chilly ride back; however, it was really pretty with the fog resting over the mountains and the clouds surrounding the trees and mountains. It made for a different view on our way back. It was quite the St. Patrick’s Day spent in the jungle. Lek told us to stop by their shop after dinner; he braided each of us a ring made out of bamboo. We were all pretty exhausted from our long day of trekking so we headed to bed early.
We woke up early as usual and headed to Koh Phangan for the infamous Full Moon party. It was a long day of travelling; we took a van from Khao Sok to Surat Thani; a bus from Surat Thani to Donsok where we caught a car ferry to Koh Phangan. The weather was not so good today, making it rough seas and a not so fun 3 hour ferry ride. There were numerous kids who were getting sea sick and it was not fun to be around… we were reallllllly happy when we finally reached the pier and got off on koh phangan! We made it to our bungalows on bann thai beach and met up with all the other girls. There was a huge group of us and we took up pretty much the entire bungalows! Altogether there was about 16 of us….most were other OEG girls that I teach with, and a lot of us had friends that were visiting and were with us so it was great to see/meet everyone and catch up! The next night, the 19th, was the night of the full moon party! We all dressed in clothes we wouldn’t mind getting paint on and headed out to Haad Rin for the madness. We lucked out and we were actually participating in the super full moon party since the moon was slightly bigger or fuller that night than it usually is. There were tons of people everywhere; I think there was about 20-30,000 people on the beach. It reminded me a lot of Halloween at UCSB or floatopia. It was a really fun night filled with dancing, translucent body paint, fire shows, a fire slide, and watching the sunrise over the beach. At about 8am we decided to call it a night and headed out for some breakfast before going back to our bungalows to pass out for the rest of the afternoon. After sleeping away most of the day we all met up and talked about our evenings and chilled out. After dinner we had a slide show of the full moon pictures everyone had taken the night before. Allie busted out Gianda, her panda bear loud speakers that she has connected to her ipod and we all laughed at the crazy and silly pictures everyone had taken. It was a great way to end out weekend together since a lot of us wouldn’t be seeing one another for a while since we were all about to start on our own travels. It was sad to say bye to the girls since it would be the last time that I would see two of them, Chelsea and Olivia, since their 5 months of teaching were over. It was a great way to end out time together and I’m so glad we were all able to meet up and spend that weekend together.
The next morning we woke up and hopped on the ferry to an overnight bus to take us back to Bangkok. We had a day to kill in Bangkok before our flight left for Vietnam so we spent the day shopping in siam, seeing the worst movie ever (red riding hood) and shoving our faces before heading to the airport to sleep before our 6am flight. Our night in the airport was probably one of my most miserable nights ever! The airport was freezing, the benches were hard and we got no sleep! We were so thankful when we could finally check-in and get on our plane to Hanoi, Vietnam!
love you all! 
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