Time Out for a Storm

I wanted to just pause from the Thailand stuff for a moment to mention this storm that hit last night. It was just a thunderstorm, but it was perhaps the worst one I've ever witnesses in person. It lasted for hours and hours. I stood out in it for a bit and it only took about five minutes for me to be soaked through. The lightning was so bright that it lit up my room even through closed blinds. I took some video of it for you. It can hardly convey the actual experience, but you can let your imagination help out.

I wouldn't have thought that the storm could do any real damage, unless lightning hit something, but one of my students said a college student drowned last night because she was swept away by one of the rivers the rain formed. I'm a little skeptical of that story, and I wasn't able to find anything about it in a cursory google search, so maybe he got some false information. Or he's a LIAR.

In any case, today the day started off with a bright sun and almost no puddles. You'd never know.

Day 3: Beachy Stuff and Thai Massage

Tuesday was an off day for us as far as excursions go. After breakfast we went down to the beach and took a walk down toward some other hotels. Along the way, we found an inlet where the water formed a river that ran into some big pools. It was pretty neat.










Next to the inlet was an abandoned resort that looked like it had been ravaged by storm.






There were a couple bathtubs hanging about. They didn't look like they were part of guest rooms, though, since this area seemed more like an addendum to the hotel, like an outdoor restaurant, and not the hotel itself. Not sure what the deal is there.


All the little huts still had tables and chairs in tact. We crossed over the low barbed wire to look around, then heard music, and I realized there was a squatter sleeping in one of the huts, so we figured we'd better get going.





After walking a bit more, we passed a few hotels and a restaurant and came upon some rocks on the beack. Good Kodak moment there.








This whole trip I carried around my hybrid video camera AND my Minolta 35mm camera. What a nerd. Plus Kent had his own digital camera.



After the beach and swimming in the pool, plus lunch at the hotel, we went to town to get Thai massages. We had seen several in town, and they were a quarter the price that the hotel spa was charging (but even the prices at the hotel were good compared to a massage back home). Thai massage in town was 250 baht, or about eight bucks, for an hour. Such a deal. We chose the one that clearly had more than one person available, so we wouldn't have to wait for each other, and whose staff had uniforms.


We were given Thai pants (aka fisherman's pants, which are huge and use a tie-belt) and big t-shirts to put on. You get manhandled a lot in Thai massage, so you have to wear loose clothes. We lay down on these thick mats upon a platform, and curtains were brought down to enclose our mats together for privacy (not that there's anything private going on).


Thai massage involves stretching the muscles and pushing on them, as opposed to the Swedish technique, which is more like kneading. It's also called Thai yoga massage, because the way you get moved and stretched is yogically based, or at least similar to yoga poses. The masseuse started at my feet, using a routine followed by Kent's masseuse, as well, and bent my ankles and knees in various ways, pushed my leg muscles, cracked my toes, and pressed pressure points in my feet. There is no oil involved in this type of massage, but they do use tiger balm in some areas.


Moving up the body, the masseuse continued all of the above, which involved more than just working from the side of the mat, as we're all used to at a massage. Here, the masseuse actually gets into your space, sitting between your legs and cradling each one while she works; straddles you as she moves your whole torso from side to side, sits on you as she pushes your shoulders away to crack your spine, and so one. She also did this thing this where she had me on my stomach, jammed her feet into the crooks of my knees, bent them in so she could rest her body on my shins, and walked her hands all over my back. I'm not even sure how this works, physically. It boggles the mind.


After getting tossed around for an hour, we got dressed and they gave us some tea. Then we did some more shopping, and bought some of the pants we had worn during the massage. I had wanted to get some. They're wicked cool. Then we ate at an Indian restaurant called Mr. Indian Food. Haha. It was good.

Day 2: Phi Phi Island

Monday was our first excursion of the week. We chose to go to Phi Phi Island first. It's pronounced "pee-pee," hahaha. It's good we got that one out of the way, because it was the longest and most exhausting. We were supposed to be picked up at 6:40am, but the driver was late, having been picking up people from other hotels. We left at 7:00. The hotel was good enough to provide us with box breakfasts, since breakfast at the restaurant didn't start until 8. We each got a ham and cheese sandwich, a banana, a green orange, an apple, a can of pineapple juice, and a can of coffee. Not bad.

We would get on the ol' speedboat at Phuket, so it was almost two hours in the van with some other foreigners. I slept a lot. Early, you know. Once at Phuket, we were stickered with a boat number, as there were quite a few other tourists from various destinations going out. Once out, we saw tons of other boats on the same excursion. I was surprised to see as many tourists as we did, with how few we had seen so far. But evidently Phuket fills up more than the outskirts.

It was kind of a whirlwind tour. We rode in the boat, Carpe Diem, for 45 minutes, drinking water from sealed plastic cups with straws and listened to our guide, Pom, give us the itinerary. He later had to change the itinerary, though. Doesn't matter. I didn't remember any of it anyway.



I don't remember the order of everything, but we visited the larger and smaller Phi Phi island, a monkey beach, and a lagoon, which we couldn't enter because the tide was too low. We went snorkeling for about a half hour at one point (Don't step on the coral. Don't break my heart, Pom kept saying). I've been snorkeling a couple times before, but I always have trouble reconciling breathing underwater. I got used to it after about 15 minutes, though, and started to do a little better. I still can't really go underwater with the snorkel, though. I tried, and couldn't even get down a few feet hardly before I flipped out a bit. Ever since I got contact lenses 14 years ago, I haven't really gone under water for fear of losing them, so I've lost the ability to deal with it, and I've lost the lung capacity. Too bad. Just surface snorkeling for me.

We spent ten minutes at the monkey beach, and spent twenty minutes, I think, at the smaller Phi Phi Island, Phi Phi Ley, which was a filming site for Leonardo DiCaprio's "The Beach."

Here it is:



Here's a monkey at monkey beach. I took a million photos, but I dumped them all from my disk onto Kent's laptop and haven't gotten any but these from him.


We were told adamantly to stay two or three meters away from the monkeys, as they're aggressive and moody. This guy very stupidly let one of the monkeys climb up onto him. A few seconds after this photo was taken, a bunch of other monkeys came around him, and something happened to upset the one on his back, which then attacked the guy, and he had to throw it off him and run away. Right after that a Korean chick got scratched on the leg, as she was heading back toward the boat.

Speaking of that Korean chick, she and her boyfriend were on our boat. I first saw her at the dock in Phuket. I was looking down at the ground and saw a set of high heels. I thought, only a Korean would wear high heels on a boat and beach trip. Sure enough. I saw the couple on the boat, with a man I thought was one of the crew at first. I figured he could just speak Korean, since there are many Korean tourists in Thailand, probably. After seeing him cater to their every whim for a bit, I realized he was with them, but clearly not on the same level. Then when I saw him taking all these glamour shots of them all over the place on every island we went to, I figured he must be a hired photographer. I was so embarrassed. Koreans are ridiculous.

Anyway, back to MY story. As I was taking video of some monkeys getting chased away from this guy's canoe and playing with his oar (not a euphemism), one of the monkeys decided to walk very fast toward me. I had to back up quickly to avoid him. It was a funny and nervous moment, because those monkeys'll getcha.

Here's a link to the video I was taking:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2HZ9JRPTkY8

Kent also happened to be taking video of the same thing on his camera, so he caught the whole thing from another viewpoint. As you can see, the monkey wasn't really coming at me very fast.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=qyUC80xnTJg

We saw quite a few staggering rock islands like these while speeding around:


Just look at that water.


At some point we stopped at an island for lunch, where there was a buffet. It was pretty good. We walked around to look at the shops a bit, but didn't buy anything. I figured a location that was only frequented by tourists on the middle of an excursion was probably going to charge the most money ever for their stuff. Our guide had to leave the island to take a couple people to the hospital during lunch, so we left without him. A little while later we met back up with him on another boat, and he made jokes about someone stealing his boat. Har, har.

Here's the other Phi Phi Island, where we stayed for two hours. We brought snorkels, but didn't end up using them. The water was wicked warm. We walked around the tip of the rocks, there, and ended up finding a little cave in the rocks. It was cool. We couldn't take a picture because getting a camera over there would have been risky, the water being so deep.


The beach was filled with umbrellas and chairs, as you can see, but you had to pay to use them, so screw that. Pom said the vendors that were lined up along the beacher further up were all residents of other islands who set up camp each morning, and leave with all their stuff once all the tourists are gone. Come 4:30 the island is deserted.



After our time was up, it was only a 15 minute ride back to Phuket, and a tiring trip back to Phang-Nga. We got back to the hotel at 6:30, and 11 1/2 hour day. I slept like a log that night.

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.