Oh…
Can we please go back to the lazzzzzzzy days on this tiny island?
Strolling. Beach combing. Swimming. Snorkeling. Swimming. Splashing. Digging. Kayaking. Reading. Dreaming. Looking. Observing. Climbing. Listening. Tasting.
And sleeping on rock hard beds.
Oh, and getting stung by jellyfish. And getting bitten by mosquitoes.
(Darn! Can't win them all, can we?)
Sleeping in tents on a beach on a teensy weensy island in Thailand we so amazingly awesome. Seriously. But, let me just say this – it's most definitely not for everyone.
It was perfect for us though.
Look to the left….dramatic cliffs:
And to the right….beach. Beach. Beach.
And other cliff (right behind the "resort"):
What little crab makes this hole and these perfectly perfect round balls of sand?
Annika and Ava writing…things…in the sand. (Annika is on a Fez kick. The hat. Not the place.)
Ava wanted to give me a "tattoo". Using a piece of burnt wood:
I got a star and a butterfly tattooed on me:
The island's bar…open only after 5pm (or was it 6pm?). The soft drinks and beer were available on an honor system. The "resort" had a log book that you're supposed to keep a running tab and then you pay at the end of your stay. Worked out quite well for us. They had a few different kinds of Fanta that we had to try. Oh! And Chang beer. :-)
The meals were served at a set, predetermined time. Lunch and dinner usually had similar dishes (rice with a curry…spicy, hot curry!).
Different twist on a toaster oven (charcoal fired):
We swam…and played…a lot:
Home, sweet home! (we had two tents…one for Mark and me and one for the two girls.):
Checking out the receding water line and the exposed coral reef. While we did see other guests walking on the exposed reef we did NOT do so. It seems to me that walking on it would certainly accelerate its destruction. No thanks!
The tent next to ours was occupied by a young Norwegian couple with their six month old baby. They were taking time off from work and traveling around for several weeks. How cool is that? Their baby boy was a great little camper too! He hardly made a sound at night. All that fresh air has got to be good for something, right?
We stayed on this island for four nights total…on one of those night a huge group of Malaysians came and stayed. Boy! Were they noisy! They brought fire crackers and fire works with them. Kind of fun, really. Half of them spoke Chinese and the other half spoke Malay. We could actually understand the Chinese speaking Malays (they identified themselves as Malaysian). It was fun watching them. Some of them had monster cameras…like the professional kind. At night a few of them had set up tripods with their cameras and took beautiful photos of the night sky. Sadly, that's not something you can capture with our iPhones. Man….oh, how I wish I'd gotten their contact information to see if I could buy one of their photos. The stars, the low ambient lighting……just made it perfect. I bet this place could use a telescope! (now wouldn't that be something??? Why not offer lessons in astronomy???)
Babbling on now…
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See that cliff over there? There were several rock climbers scaling that wall at different points of our stay. One couple had a young woman from California…boy, was she snotty! I very much wanted to roll my eyes at her look of disdain when we told her we lived in China. There was also a couple from Germany that were HARD CORE rock climbers. It was fun watching them crawl up that wall!
Yep! It really is coral! (we only stepped on the sandy bits to get close enough to examine some of the corals):
Swimming:
What's that in the background???
Hey! It's Mark and Annika! On a sea kayak. They borrowed one of the resort's kayaks and paddled around the entire island…in less than thirty minutes.
Do you see the color of the water????
Hi, Ava!
The communal restrooms:
Cool open air restrooms…low flow toilets. So low flow that it was hard to flush. And…this might be too much TMI but we couldn't flush toilet paper. Yikes. At least they had sprayers that made it more bearable. (Eep!)
Hammocks! Reading and relaxing time!
And a swing! The girls played and played and played on that swing. At one point we even saw a giant crab on the Swing Tree.
Sunset.
Holy cow…isn't that gorgeous? Did we really see this? You sure it wasn't on a postcard???
At high tide these caves are under water. When the tide is out this view looks like a dragon's mouth:
Oh my.
That view!
Happy birthday to our wonderful Ava!
Annika found lots of red coral bits:
Time to leave! We've settled our bill (cash only) and the long tail boat is about to leave. We're heading back to Trang early this morning and flying back to Bangkok.
Good bye!!!!
Getting ready to dock in Trang…. yes, this IS Thailand.
My pretty little 9-year old:
While waiting for our driver to gas up at a gas station, Mark snapped this photo of a bucket collecting sap from a rubber tree:
All checked in and waiting for our flight at the Trang airport. Thank Heavens there is a tiny but perfect-for-us restaurant upstairs…Serving gorgeous and yummy lattes:
There's our flight! We're off to Bangkok!
Well, getting to Bangkok was the easy part. Getting from the domestic airport to the international airport in Bangkok was NOT. There is supposed to a FREE shuttle bus that goes between the airports. Ha! What they didn't tell us BEFORE our trip is that you MUST have a printed itinerary with you stating that you're flying out of the other airport. Huh? I had my itinerary printed…so they would have let me get on but what about the others? NOPE. Those fricking @$$holes would not budge.
So…we took a taxi instead. Which meant standing in a long line BUT mercifully the line moved quickly and the end result was much better and faster (and not that expensive). Screw the dang shuttle bus!
Anyway…we had HOURS and HOURS to kill before our flight but not long enough to check our luggage into a storage facility and head into the town. So we hung out at the airport. I finally got my fresh coconut drink (along with some super yummy Thai food). Mark finally got his massages (two of them!).
Reception Room for Buddhist Monks: