Getting Home and More Pics

Well, I won't bore you again with a long detail of my trip home from Thailand, but I figured I'd mention it a bit since something typically Korean happened. I flew back to Busan instead of Seoul, since I'm only an hour away from that airport. Sadly, I had no travel companion anymore from Bangkok into Korea, since Kent's home is closer to Seoul and he flew back into our departing airport.

I really didn't have a firm grasp of how I was getting home from the airport. I knew there were buses that ran from the airport, but I couldn't find a schedule and didn't know exactly where to go or how to get a ticket. Luckily it was a simple process. I just followed the ground transportation signs after I left baggage claim, and found that I just had to wait at a bus stop, which had a schedule and fare information posted. I only had to wait about 15 minutes for the bus, and it was only about $7 (which is still twice as much as it is to get from the Busan bus terminal, but whatever).

I was pretty nervous on the bus, though, since I had no idea where it would stop. Luckily, one of the last people on the bus, and who had to sit next to me for lack of other seats, was a guy who told me all about how he runs a private English academy in Ulsan. So within our conversation (which lasted the whole hour-long bus ride and was a little exhausting), I asked him where the bus stopped. He told me it would stop at the Taehwa Rotary, one of the several major rotaries in town. Not really near my house. So I would have to take a taxi or hope that the one city bus whose route I basically know would stop near there.

However (and here is where the typical Korean part comes in), when the bus stopped and people were getting off, the guy said his wife was there picking him up, and they would give me a ride. Only in a place as safe as Korea would I have accepted that offer. They drove me right to my street and were happy to do it (I think). Neato.

Okay, and here's a link to a bunch of photos that Kent put up online from our trip. Some of them I've posted here, but most you probably haven't seen.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29235655@N04

Thai Pets

We noticed that a fair lot of the businesses around the area in Thailand had pets, and that they seemed to take great care of them. They all had nice coats, weren't too thin or fat, and were pretty friendly. Kind of like the Thai people, heh.




This is one of the dogs that our hotel had running around. There was another one, sort of German Shepherd-looking mutt, but we didn't get a picture of her.



The dog's name is Dog, according to the collar. It could just be the collar asserting which species it should be put on, though. Dog almost always came to hang around our table and sat or lay patiently, waiting for scraps. He never really begged. Maybe a little, but nothing you couldn't disregard. We never fed him scraps, though, because we could tell he always got fed our leftovers in the kitchen and we didn't want to teach him any bad habits.

In the D. Time restaurant, I saw they had a cat and her two kittens, and based on the fact that the employees didn't chase them away, and by their seeming good health, I assumed they were pets of the restaurant. So I was finally able to play with some kitties, which I haven't done since I left the US. The cats in Korea are all feral.

Here is a video of the kittens playing:

Isn't that precious?

Here is a video of the kitties eating their meal of rice. I thought cooked rice was kind of a weird thing to feed them, but I guess it has a similar consistency to canned cat food. Kent says most pet foods are based in rice, anyway. They seemed to enjoy it.

What's Funny?

A couple humorous printings from Thailand:

Dude, it's a bar AND a bar!


Ummm... I think I'll have diet this time.

The 50 Baht Adventure

Well, our trip was coming to a close. I was very sad for that to happen. Saturday was our last day in Phang-Nga, and we spent it like most of our days off, with beach and pool swimming and going to town. Our plan in town was to have lunch; get a Thai massage, since it was only eight bucks; make Kent wander around while I get a mani/pedi; do some final shopping; get a Swedish massage, since it was only fifteen bucks; have supper; go home.


Unfortunately we didn't plan our money very well. I'm not sure how that happened. After lunch, the Thai massages, the manicure and pedicure (which were the worst I've ever had, by the way), and a couple sarongs I had planned on getting, we hardly had any money left. So we had to superbudget our supper by just going back to the same place we went to for lunch, which was the cheapest we'd been to so far (but still decent food), and skip the Swedish massages. Boooo-urns. We did end up having enough money for me to force Kent to buy something besides a Red Bull shirt and some requisite sunglasses and a hat. He ended up finding a set of small wooden bowls that were 600 baht, in a rare shop that actually put prices on things, telling the shopkeeper that all he had was 500, take it or leave it, and finally getting her to agree.


So when all was said and done, we still had 50 baht to burn, and were determined not to leave town with change too small to bother exchanging at a bank back home. We also had time to burn before our taxi was meeting us, since we had time budgeted for two one-hour massages and only got one.


We decided to go around and tell shopkeepers that we had only 50 baht (which is about $1.65), to see what they would offer us. In Kenya, that could have gotten us something decent, but even though Thailand is cheap, it's not that cheap. We figured we'd get shown the postcard racks, mostly.

Kent told the first guy we tried this on about our money situation as we were walking away, and the dude called after us jokingly holding up what I think was a rubber ducky in his hand. We didn't go for it. The second shopkeep showed us the postcards, as expected. After that we just quietly browsed various stores for a while. Then finally, we were talking to a guy who knew English probably the best of all the people in town that we talked to, and Kent had to tell him about the 50 baht, as I think he was trying to get us to buy a bunch of stuff (of course). He showed us a shelf of little incense packages with two sets of mini-incense sticks, a tiny elephant-shaped holder, and a tiny candle, all inside a wooden open-topped case, to catch the ashes. It wasn't half bad for under two bucks. So we went with that--for me to keep, not him.


Here is the set. Cute, eh?



And for scale purposes, here it is with me, still with remnants of the bad manicure, holding the elephant:

Day 6: Monkey Temple

This is my 100th blog post, everyone. Congratulations to me. To commemorate this occasion, I think you should all go read every one of my previous posts, just to be sure you got them all.

Our last stop on the James Bond Island excursion was a Monkey Temple. This was a temple set into a cave with a bunch of monkeys and vendors running around outside. The vendors were kind of stationary, actually. This was one of the best parts of the whole trip. These monkeys were not the vicious, two-faced monkeys of Monkey Beach, near Phi Phi Island. No, these were cute, cuddly, friendly monkeys, who just wanted to play and eat bananas. And steal my camera bag. I didn't allow it.

Here are some monkey pictures:

This is a rock. There must be a monkey in there somewhere.

Monkey, monkey, monkey:

This is a short video of a monkey jumping around on the branches. Then I lose track of him a little.

Here is a video of monkeys running, playing, eating, and fighting. It really doesn't get much better than this:

The best part about this trip were the little monkeys that thought I was hiding food under my skirt. I was videotaping some other monkeys when we first got there, and I felt this little tug on the back of my kanga. I turned around to find this little monkey. I'll never forget the innocent look he had on his face. That one (I think it was the same one) kept coming back for more, too. Then later, he brought a friend, and they both tugged at, looked under, and opened my skirt, ever so gently, to try and find food. Very cute.

Here is the video I was taking while Kent took the above photo:

After a little while with the monkeys, we decided to check the temple out, not because it was a temple (boring), but because it was a cave. We climbed up into the big upward crevasse, where Kent took some pictures, but I'm not sure if they came out. It was pretty dark. We didn't take any other pictures inside, because it was a temple and that's rude. We did manage to find this little trail to walk on, around the outside of the caves:

We walked for a few minutes, found another tiny cave with some Buddhas in it that looked barely used, then found the end of the trail. It was a big field, which I thought was the field just outside the entrance, but as we walked a few feet into it, I saw that there were monks about, and it was actually the property behind that field where the monks live. We didn't want to disturb them, so we had to walk back through the trail. There were many bugs.

A few more minutes with the monkeys after that, then we headed home for the day. Love those monkeys.

And here's another monkey video for the road:

Day 6: James Bond Island and Sea Canoeing

Thursday was a major off day for us. We didn't even leave the hotel, except to walk on the beach. The most exciting thing that happened was that we walked along the beach in the other direction, found another river inlet, and I almost drowned in it while trying to cross. It looked shallower and calmer than it really was. Also, Kent got attacked by biting ants while that was happening. Oh, boy.

On Friday we had our final excursion to James Bond Island in Phang Nga Bay, about a half hour away. The night before found out that the Belgians had booked a trip for Friday to the bay, as well, through a travel agent in town (we booked through the hotel) and we figured we'd see them at some point during the day. They ended up being our travel companions on the boat all day, haha. The lady, I think she said her name was Micha? asked, Are we the only tourists in Thailand? For everywhere except Phuket, it sort of seemed that way. We found out the twins' names were Tille (pronounced "Tilla"), the shy one, and Rhode ("Rhoda"), the outgoing one. Their dad's name was something like Yoss or Yost (or Joss or Jost). Oh, these foreign names. They had some trouble with my name, too, though. Luckily, the little girls had their names written on their shirts.

We took a boat through the bay for a while and saw a lot of jutting rock islands, mangrove forests, and this floating Muslim village:



Our first stop was James Bond Island, named so because it was used as a location in the 1974 film "The Man With the Golden Gun." The local name for it is Ko Tapu Island. I don't have a lot of pictures from there. I must have taken most of them with my film camera. Here we are on a rock leaving the island. We were only there for a half hour, but we explored some shallow caves with stalactites and stuff. I have a bunch of 4x6 photos of them, but nothing to put up here. Sorry.


After leaving James Bond Island, we boated around some more, saw more rock islands and rock formations, and ended up at an island dock in the bay, where we would go sea canoeing. We were given plastic bags for our cameras and put into a little inflatable canoe with a rowing guide. He brought us into caves to show us stalactites and other rock formations like these:





Here's another boat, by the way:


The biggest cave we were in:


More rocks. I'll be honest with you: with all these rocky pictures, I'm not sure if they're taken from the boat or the sea canoe or during what part of the day, but enjoy.





I took a lot of these photos because the rocks looked like something (usually an elephant, according to the guide), but I'm not recognizing anything from the pictures.



We also went through a mangrove forest:



The guide took us into these caves so tiny that we had to lie down on our backs to get in, and I almost lost some forehead and nose a couple times. The first time he did it, I didn't even believe we were really going in at first. I thought we were just going towards that two-foot opening (or whatever) because he had to get around a tree trunk or something, or he was just psyching us out. But no, he told us to lie down and we went right through. It was nuts. This is a photo from inside one of the caves, just barely big enough for us to get through:


More rocks:



This is the cool part. These are videos of us going into the big and little caves:

After canoeing and having a soda on the dock we went to lunch in a big floating restaurant and then our guide took us through some shopping alleys. This woman and a tranny each threw a monkey on me and Kent and told us to take pictures, which we did. Then they tried to charge us 50 baht (about a buck fifty) a picture for pictures we took with our own cameras. We would have paid them something if they had just asked for a donation, but they were so pushy and scammy and overpriced about it that we didn't pay them.

That wasn't the end of our day, but the Monkey Temple is a post of its own. I'll do that one in the next day or two. I took about a million photos.

Day 4: Bamboo Rafting and Animals

After our elephant trek and having some pineapple in the shade and feeding the elephant and buying an overpriced photo of us on the elephant, our driver took us to a river, where we went bamboo rafting. It was pretty cool, but wet. The raft sunk down a couple inches into the water, and we would occasionally go over some minirapids, which got us wetter. Glad I was wearing fisherman's pants.

Here's our river guide, guiding:


Here's Kent on the raft, behind me:


The river:


A hut overlooking the river:


Sometimes it got quite shallow, and there were nice rocks:



After bamboo rafting for maybe like 30-45 minutes, we were taken to a really nice looking outdoor restaurant with tables out on docks, overlooking the water to have curry lunch. I really feel like I took some pictures here. Kent, this would be your cue to send those to me, or any you took yourself. Plus any of my video of the rafting, because I really feel like I took some on the card, and I don't have it on my computer.

When we finished with lunch, we went to a "turtle farm." I was hoping it would be like the one I went to in Kenya, where enormous turtles were walking around a large sanctuary on an island, but this wasn't even close. The turtles were all in tanks, and the biggest ones were only about a foot or a foot and a half long. The ones in Kenya were the size of me.

Here's one of the big guys:



The employee who was walking around with us took one of the bigger turtles out of the tank so we could touch it.



Here are some of the little guys. I liked this one because of the way the middle one rests his flipper atop his back and just floats around.



Some more of the little guys.



The turtle farm was a little boring. We were only there for twenty minutes. Then for some reason we got a bonus trip to a temple (boring), but it had some animals in a yard on the grounds that we got to see.

Here's one of the temple buildings:



Here's me next to one of these island pagoda thingies:



Here's a crocodile. Sucks to be him. Notice my arm shadow, with camera.


A deer:


Pile o' tortoises:


Oddly enough, porcupines:


This scraggly cat was wandering around, screaming about something:


A baboon:


And a bear. He was really hot.


After the temple, back to the hotel for a nice early end to the day. I think we got back at like 2:30, which left enough time for a full day of beach and pool swimming. This was much better than the grueling, yet exciting, Phi Phi Island. When we got back to the pool, the Belgian family, who were the only other guests in the hotel except for the Frat Boys, asked to see our pictures of the elephant trek. One of their twin daughters was much less adventurous than the other, and her parents figured if she could see what went on first, it would be less scary. Kent showed them some pictures while we waited for our food to be served at the restaurant, and he said it worked. So they scheduled their own elephent trek for sometime after we left, which was now feeling very soon. Booo-urns.

Day 4: Elephant Trekking

On Wednesday we went elephant trekking at a place in town. This was a much more laid back excursion than the last one. We were actually the only people on this one, which makes sense since it was so local. We got dropped off at the park, where there were some elephants munching under some trees in front.

Our guide explained that we would ride a trail to a waterfall, take a swim if we wanted, then ride back. He asked us if we wanted to ride the easy way or the exciting way, and naturally we chose the latter. I thought by "way" he meant "method," i.e. bareback, but no, he was referring to a choice of trails. We still rode the elephant while sitting on a metal-framed bench with vinyl upholstery. Whatever.

Elephant:


Elephants:


Same elephants? Or different? You decide.


We didn't drive the elephant ourselves, of course. We had a driver. He sat atop the elephant's neck, and stuck his feet in these little nooks at the back of the jaw.



Trail:


The ride was pretty slow, but it got a little nervewracking when we went downhill, because we just had a rope across the front of the bench holding us in, and we (or I, anyway) would slide down almost off it when the elephant's ass was higher than his head. I had to hold on tight.

After ten or fifteen minutes we reached a platform, where we dismounted (we had to mount on a platform, too). Then we walked for a few minutes on a trail that led to a really bouncy bridge and down to a waterfall.



We swam in the waterfall for maybe twenty minutes. It was cool. You could go behind those rocks on the right and get a wicked back massage, but for fear of losing my contacts, I didn't want to go in. Booo-urns.


Pretty much the only pictures of us together that we got the whole trip was when a guide took the picture for us, which wasn't often, since there were usually so many more people on the excursion.


After we got back from the waterfall, we were offered the chance to feed our elephant a tub of bananas for 20 baht (about 65 cents). Here are a couple videos of me doing that:

That wasn't the end of our day, but it's getting late, so it will be the end of this entry. I'll finish the rest of the day later.

Tomorrow is Independence Day here, so I get a three day weekend. I'm going backpacking again with Kent this weekend, so I'll report on how that goes, as well. We're going to Gyeryongsan National Park, up in the middle northwest of the country. It has a chicken head ridge.