T&A

After the visa run, we stayed the night in Ranong, Thailand, and took a bus to Khao Sok National park the following day. We stayed in a small bungalo place which was run by a extremely nice and very generous thai man named Gai. The bungalos were called Evergreen House, and we would recommend it to anyone headed to the park. The same day, we booked a tour to visit a man made lake admist massive limestone cliff faces. Unfortunately, Melanie was sick and could not participate.

The night before the tour, Gai also took us to his village temple which was based inside a small cave. At this temple, there were hundreds of monkeys. We threw them some bananas and had the chance to take some good photos.

The next morning we took the lake tour in Khao Sok park. We first had about a 2 hour long tail boat ride while staring in awe at the massive cliffs and trying to find monkeys. Our guide also explained to us that the lake was about 160 square kilometers in size and was created to act as a reservoir for a hydro-electric dam. When created, the lake flooded some villages, but the government built them new housing. We soon arrived to our home for the night: a floating bungalo village. This place was fun to stay in. After dropping our bags off in our bungalo room, we were escourted by boat and a short hike to a cave.

This large cave was once used by students during a communist era who were escaping persecution from the thai government. The cave was littered with bats, spiders, and creepy crawly things. We also had to swim in several places, but it was exciting.

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It’s been a while since the last update because we’ve either been in really touristy places with expensive internet, or in places where the internet doesn’t exist. Currently, we’re in Chumpon en route to a deserted beach that a fellow traveler told us about. We’ll split up the past into two entries.

Last time we left off, we were headed to Phuket. The morning ferry from Ko Phi Phi was certainly interesting. There was absolutely no room on the boat, but they kept piling people onto it. We had to sit on our bags, cross-legged on the deck of the boat with people crammed in all around us. It looked like a floating refugee camp. Everyone was sweating, hungry, and thirsty. Just when you thought that we couldn’t fit more people on the boat, we actually stopped in the middle of the ocean to meet another boat which promptly packed our boat full of more people. It was crazy. At one point a serviceman came on deck and told those who were standing to sit if we wanted to make it to phuket; the boat was rocking too much in the swells.

Somehow we made it, and left the boat to find a taxi monopoly from the pier to phuket town. It was 50 baht each to travel around 1-2 km. To put things in perspective, we just paid 100 baht to travel 3 hours on a local bus. There was no alternative this time, and we had to fork over the cash. We decided to stay in Phuket Town rather than the beach side resorts/bungalos upon the advice of a french women living in Phuket. We soon found out that chinese new year was approaching, and we had to wait for Brad and Dianna. It made sense to stay in Phuket for four or five days.

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We arrived on the island early in the morning and took a taxi to a beach bungalo hut guesthouse which we read about in our Lonely Planet guidebook. Unfortunately, the place was completely full, and it took us about an hour wondering along the beach to find a cheap enough place to stay. Ko Lanta is a long island that is rapidly being taken over by resort development. It was affected by the tsunami, but to a lesser extent than Ko Phi Phi.

It didn’t take us long to find a scuba shop, it was right next door to our bungalos, and we signed up the first day to start our open water certification. This meant that for the next 4 days, we were waking up early in the morning to learn about scuba diving; in class and in the water. The entire program was completely safe, and we practiced everything from taking the mask off, to taking the entire scuba gear off our backs. After about five dives, we had enough experience to control our bouyancy simply by filling our lungs with more or less air. At this point, we could drift over coral reefs with the small currents and move up and down through the water simply by altering our breathing. We were hooked.

After four days, we obtained our open water certification, and loved it so much that we decided to complete our advanced open water cert. The advanced program lets a diver to swim to deeper depths, and observe wrecks, caves, etc. These dives were a bit more fun since there was more time spent in the water. At one point, we descended to about 30 metres. At this depth, the nitrogen levels in your blood stream can cause you to act silly or as if you are drunk. As an example, our instructor asked us to perform a simple task underwater at that depth while timed. Adam had to spell the word “vancouver” backwards by writing on a slate. It took him 26 seconds, and he couldn’t figure out the order of the letters “o” and “u.” He also forgot the letter “c.” When he finally figured out that the “c” was missing, he wrote it in, but backwards or like a mirror image. That was pretty funny. On the surface it took him 6 seconds with no mistakes. A big difference.

On the advanced dives we were also given a camera to take pictures. On one particular dive, we were able to see two leopard sharks, a HUGE manta ray, a cuttle fish, and ghost pipe fish. It was an extremely lucky dive. Unfortunately, the batteries in the stupid camera died.

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