Jay and I decided to take a side trip to Thailand from Feb 26-Mar 4. We didn't book anything other than a plane ticket. We booked this trip on Feb 24th, two days before we took off for Thailand.
I decided to keep things really simple and pack my bathing suit, towel, toothbrush, camera, sandals and one change of clothes. It was quite liberating having such a light load.
We decided that we didn't want to waste any time in Bankok and wanted to spend our entire trip on an island. Here's the timeline as to not bore you with the minor travel details.
15:00 arrived at Bankok airport
16:30 took cab to downtown Bankok with a really nice Norweigan couple
17:30 arrived at Hua Lamphong Station, Downtown Bankok
18:00 had dinner at restaurant nearby
19:00 met back at train station to board overnight bus to Chumpon
00:00 stopped for food
03:00 arrived at a 'nap office' in Chumphon to get a few more hours of sleep
06:30 woke up to have some breakfast and took transfer bus over to pier
07:15 off to Koh Tao
10:00 arrived in Koh Tao
I was definately glad to finally arrive....in paradise. It took us a few hours to find a place to stay and for me to find a scuba school I was happy with. I was able to start my academics at 2:30 that afternoon.
The resort where we stayed was called
'Simple Life Villa' and my dive school was affiliated and called
'Simple Life Divers'. The name speaks volumes. It was located on the west side of Koh Tao on Sairhee Beach.
For the next four nights and five days we were definately living the 'simple life'.
Jay spent his day basking in the sun, swimming, and walking around the island, while I was in class and diving to get my open water scuba certification. We met up at night with other people we met on the island for delicious Thai food, drinks, and parties.
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I was able to go diving at three different dive sites during my course. Sairhee Reef, Chumphon and Twins. Open water students don't usually get to go to Chumphon for one of their 18 meter dives but since I was the only student in my class they decided to make an exceptioin. Chumphon is used for the advanced deep dive to 30 meters so I was really lucky. Chumphon ended up being my favorite dive site. There were tons of coral, fish and other underwater creatures. We saw nemos, baracudas, sea urchants. There was even one fish that followed us around like an underwater dog after we pet it. Super cool. Scuba diving was definately one of the most interesting things I have ever done.
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We met many interesting people during our stay in Ko Tao. I found that most of the foreigners on the island were from England, including all of the diving instructors at the Simple Life.
My instructor's name was Andy. He was fun. He made me flood my goggles laughing by holding a sea cucumber up to his crotch as if it were a certain body part. He was telling me that if you squeeze the sea cucumber, a white sticky substance squirts out the end. Thank god he didn't try this out on me. His friends however have squirt him with cucumbers many times. The stuff gets all over your wetsuit and is aparently really hard to clean off.
Ha ha. He dove down deep and got jizzed on! Sucka!!!
I met some local djs that lived on the islands as well. They were also from England. It's not hard to pick up a djing job on Koh Tao since every bar welcomes guest djs. I'll definately be bringing some records with me next time I hit the islands. Because the music on the island was highly influenced by the U.K., it was definately our cup of tea. We had a blast at Lotus Bar, Pure, AC and In Touch.
We also met a guy named Luke on the overnight bus to Chumphon. He was an interesting guy. We chatted for a long time and even got in trouble at the 'nap office' for being too loud. Oops. He was also headed to Koh Tao to meet up with a travel buddy of his, Sully. We bumped into the two of them at a bar called AC one night and ended up hanging out with them a couple more times during the trip. Jay had met someone on our last night in Ko Tao so I let him have our room and I bunked up with Luke.
I felt like I had some sign on my back saying 'It's my last night here and want to have sex before I go!' judging by how the guys at the Simple Life were acting. However, I thought Luke was different but man was I wrong. I never knew English boys could be so persistant. Let's just say that it was an interesting sleepover. Partially my fault I guess.
"Hi, my name's Wendy. I'm living in my own little world where guys and gals can just be friends, there's no need for awkward shut-downs, and people know the meaning of 'No, I don't want to sleep with you!'"
Anyways...
We also met a couple guys from Israel. One of them being Danny. He had been to Koh Tao many times before for extended periods of time. He knew everyone on the island. He taught me how to tell people off in Hebrew. He also made an effort to '7 Ball' me when we played pool at the Simple Life. That's when I'd show him up and tell him off in his own language. I know, I'm a horrible person.
'7 Ball' - when a player wins a game with all 7 of his/her opponent's balls remaining on the table. At the Simple Life, house rules stated that if you are 7-balled you must walk around the pool table butt naked.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When the day came to leave, Jay and I were super depressed. Our glory days were over. No more sun, no more sand, no more scuba. 7 days is hardly enough in Thailand. We kept thinking of all the possible ways we could stay and make it work. None of them actually worked, mostly for financial reasons. So sadly, we had to go.
This time we decided to take the high-speed Catamaran back to Chumphon, and an overnight sleeper train back to Bankok.
Our train was delayed by 2 hours but luckily we bumped into 4 German boys that Jay had met on the island. We sat at the train station drinking some beers and had a blast with these boys. They were fun. It turns out they were in the same car as us and had the bunk beds right next to us on the train.
When the train finally arrived, we took our little party right onto the train and continued having a hoot with a couple of attendants on the train. We gave them some beers and the male attendant ended up lending us a memory card. One of the German boys put the memory card into his phone and we were all shocked yet quite entertained when we saw what was on the card.
The card was full of porn . Masturbation, hetero, lesbian porn...there was even one clip of a girl doing a horse! That was really disturbing. This memory card definately kept us entertained for the first hour of our train ride. It was hilarious having the 6 of us huddled around a little cell phone watching porn. The youngest German boy (I think he was about 20) even had to go hide in a corner for a while to...ummm...get rid of a little problem he was having...hahahaha...
So nevertheless, we had an interesting journey back to Bankok.
We had a couple hours before we had to hit the airport to catch our flight back to Hong Kong, so we decided to check out the
Chatuchak Weekend Market. We didn't have much time there so we only got to check out a fraction of it. It was HUGE! It's one of the world's largest weekend markets and has over 5,000 booths selling goods from every part of Thailand.
Then took a cab to the airport, checked in, got a traditional thai massage while I was waiting to board, and went back to Hong Kong.
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I've officially added to my list of goals. I need to get back to Thailand and do the whole Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam tour. I need to do this before I drown into the depths of debt hell. In other words, before I start school. So June/Julyish it is. School starts August 14th.
I hope I hope I hope....
