Day One in Phang-Nga

Our first day in Thailand we mostly just chilled out and recovered from travelling. We were a bit confused about what time it actually was once we had gotten up to the room the night before, since there was no clock in the room, and my cell phone didn't automatically compensate for the time zone change. I thought we were two hours behind, but these numbers that appeared to be the time on the room phone said different, and I stupidly believed it. Consequently we woke up an hour earlier than intended on Sunday.

After a massive American breakfast, we trekked (for like two minutes) down to the beach. It was wicked windy, and the surf was pretty rough. It was so windy, my kanga flew at 90 degrees when I held it up, as seen below:



Here's some video of the waves. We went in the water some, but it wasn't the greatest that day.
After that it got more tranquil and also clearer, since the sand in the water calmed down.



There were many crabs:


The hotel's website advertised a private beach called Kukkak beach. I think Kukkak is the name of the long stretch of beach we were on, but our little piece of it was certainly private. Because there wasn't another hotel for quite a ways down the beach, the area right by our hotel was empty pretty much the whole time we were there. We saw a fair number of tourists down in front of other hotels when we took walks, though.

This is the (empty) beach to the left:


This is the (empty) beach to the right:


After the beach and doing some swimming in the pool and washing up and all that, we went into town. The hotel just calls a taxi, which is a pickup truck with a cover and two benches in the back, to come, and we have to choose when we want to come back, so the driver can meet us in town. We tried one time to just get our own taxi back, but it ended up costing twice as much. That was surprising.

Here's the Khaolak Strip. It's kind of hard to see anything. Sorry. Suck it up.


It was lunch time for us when we got into town, but not for everyone. The first restaurant we tried to go into was closed. It was 4:00 or so. We ended up in this little restaurant and bar called D. Time. We think the D. stands for Drunk. Ha. The food was good. They served us our rice in the shape of a bear. I think the lady who I assumed was the owner was a transvestite. Thailand allegedly has a lot of those. I think we saw three or four during our stay there. It was pretty funny.

Here's some Thai food:


And a rice bear:


And a rice bear whose head exploded into Thai curry. Yum.


After lunch, a bit of shopping. I bought a sarong, a skirt, and a dress and Kent got a Red Bull t-shirt (in Thai, of course). We got all that for 1000 baht, which is about 30 dollars. The stores strategically place calculators around so you can use that to bargain without anyone getting confused on how to say the numbers. The shopkeepers spoke good English pretty consistently, but I guess the calculator just makes things easy, and allows them and customers to do math on multiple item purchases. I'm not the biggest fan of bargaining, so I was lucky to have someone who is.

After a light pizza supper, we went home to go to bed fairly early, as we had our first excursion the next morning and had to get up at 6am.