The night of the wedding, I think we went to sleep around 2 am. There was a little bit of drama. Cell phones and wallets were no where to be found. We had to evoke some help to search for said items. Once those items were returned, we went to bed and woke up to a 5 am alarm call. Yup. I heard we barely missed some of you guys in the lobby. I heart you guys.
Bojangles in Sarah's hand (Ben was feeling a little vommy), we make our way to RDU airport. Halfway there, we had to pull over so Ben could dry heave on the side of I-40. No worries, we made our flight. Let me paint this picture. Ben is green, I still have somewhat of a "wedding-do" and am decked out in workout pants and a long-sleeved t-shirt. We look awesome. We take a 2.5 hour flight to Chicago and begin the chaos.
The original plan was to activate Ben's cell phone for the duration of our trip to Thailand. His phone was dead to the world and after several failed attempts of trying to charge it at the airport, we discover it is done. Upon closer inspection, the phone reeks of beer. I called to see if I could activate my phone, but the guy I spoke with was a total retard. Hence, we had no means of communication on our way to a foreign country.
We opted for Korean Air to take us on our merry journey. Ben had taken a few trips to Asia for work in the past and said, and I quote, "Korean Air is the tits." Korean Air would take us on a 13 hour flight from Chicago, to Seoul, Korea. We'd have a 2 hour layover in Seoul, then board another 6 hour flight to Phuket, Thailand. Korean Air was nice, we had our own personal TVs where we could choose to watch several different new blockbusters, TV sitcoms, documentaries, view our in flight status, or play games such as tetris or pacman. It was a long flight.
We arrived in Phuket at 11 pm Phuket time. After going through customs, we step outside the airport to be accosted by no less than 50 taxi drivers trying to
screw us take us to our hotel. After getting harassed for what seemed like 15 minutes (it was probably 5) some guy felt sorry for us and phoned our hotel to pick us up. Another picture to be painted. We have now been awake for 24 hours, traveling for 20 of those hours. We had enough sense to get some Baht out of the ATM in the airport, but have no means of calling anyone, some things are written in English, and some people can speak English. Thank Buddha/Allah for the guy that called our hotel.
Our shuttle arrives and we take a quick, 5 minute drive to our place to sleep for the night. It's not a bad hotel. This is where we get introduced to a bidet for the first time.
We're up early the next morning so we can make an 8 am ferry. This ferry takes us from Phuket to Phi Phi Island. On Phi Phi, we board a different ferry to Koh Lanta. This takes around 3 hours. The views from the ferry are absolutely breathtaking. We arrive to Koh Lanta and take a tuk-tuk to our final destination. A tuk-tuk is basically a motorcycle/scooter that has a covered seat attached to the side of it. It's very easy for one to flip over. Here we are, on this tuk-tuk, zipping past other tuk-tuks, motorbikes, trucks, people, and cows. Oh, and they drive on the left side of the road. Welcome to Thailand.
We stayed at a place called Long Beach Chalet. It was a really nice place. The chalets were basically a studio room up on stilts with a thatched roof. The bathrooms were located across the stairs. They were open air, but they had fresh hot water, so no complaints. We had a/c and a pool to lounge at when we got tired of the beach. Long Beach Chalet also had its own restaurant called Three Mums. Everything these ladies whipped up was absolutely delicious. Actually, all of the food we consumed while there was so freaking awesome. I do have to admit, I did get a little tired of nothing but Thai food and ate a cheeseburger once, followed by a slice of pizza the next day.
The first couple of days in Koh Lanta, we just lounged around. We were exhausted and jet lagged. It was a 12 hour time difference between Koh Lanta and Texas. So at 2 pm, we were pretty sleepy. That Tuesday night, we ended up sleeping close to 13 hours and managed to get somewhat back on track. During the lounging, we came across our first "ladyboy." He was the bartender at the beach bar. Speaking of beach bars....you have to be a very brave soul to use the bathroom at one of these bars. Just go use the water, or go back to your room. Another thing we had to get use to was all of the stray dogs on the island. I became pretty fond of this one dog that would always greet us along the path to the beach and "show us the way." She did piss us off one evening by trying to bury a bone while we were watching the sunset.
We tried booking a snorkeling or diving trip through Long Beach. After 3 days of them telling us they weren't running that day, they told us they were closed for the season. During this time, we rented a motorbike so we could explore the island. Neither one of us had ever driven one of these things, so Ben learns in about 5 minutes by taking it up and down a dirt road beside the chalets. Then we hop on and off we go. It's a pretty terrifying experience being on the back of one of these things. Not to mention an inexperienced driver on roads that have completely different traffic patterns and laws than the US. There were lots of times during this trip we both turned to each other and said, "We gonna die!"
On our first excursion, we hung out in Ban Saladan, played with some monkeys at Lanta Monkey School, stopped for tea at a place with a beautiful view point, and ran screaming from a place we were hoping to go kayaking. The monkeys were cute, but one of them was a butthole. He kept jumping onto our heads and trying to steal my sunglasses. Also, my friend Judi yelled at me afterwards because we could've contracted some pretty nasty illnesses from those monkeys. Thanks, Thailand. The drive from the view point back to Long Beach was pretty long, so we stopped at a kayaking place, hoping to kayak through some Mangroves. We drive up to the place and a guy stops us before we're even at the "booth." He wants to know what we're doing. We tell him we were hoping to go kayaking, but I was starting to get a really funny feeling from the whole situation. Dark clouds were rolling up and I didn't really care to be out on the water during a thunderstorm. When I tell Ben, "Hey, let's just go." The guy starts trying to convince us to stay and kayak. "It's the best time to go, it's low tide," he says. Since we are still stopped in the middle of the road and there are no boats to be seen, I affirm that I do not want to kayak at this very moment, but tell the guy we'll be back. We need to turn the motorbike around and head in the other direction, but as we're trying to turn around, another guy stops us asking what we're doing. We tell him we're just trying to turn around and leave, so he watches us do so. We never did see any kayaks, nor did we return to that place.
We rode an elephant and got to feed her pineapples. We took a hike through the rain forest to a bat cave and waterfall. Both the guide and I busted our butts...Ben managed to stay upright. We tried taking the motorbike to the national park one day, but it got to be way too terrifying for me. We went from sea level to a 19% grade on a bike that had crappy brakes. Nope. Then, 3 days before we leave, we found a diving shop while out to dinner. Guess what? They had been taking people out scuba diving and snorkeling every single day we had been there. Of course, we booked a scuba trip the next day.
I still get pretty nervous about scuba diving. This was our first dive outside of the open water dives in class. I'm still learning to control my breathing and buoyancy. I manage to keep my shit together to enjoy diving at two different locations. We saw all kinds of coral, fans, fish, lobsters, star fish, and pointy urchin things. It was a really neat experience.
I'm sure I'm leaving all kinds of things out, but this is getting way too long. I thoroughly enjoyed our first trip as husband and wife. Maybe one of these days we'll get to go back.
