Welcome to warm weather! I love Thailand! Finally I am no longer shivering from the cold Beijing winter (although it is a little chilly in some of the air-conditioned rooms). After a early early morning, I arrived at the new Bangkok Airport to meet my mum and Matt. The new airport is nice enough, although the walk from the where you get off the plane through to where you pick up your luggage is a little long… Never mind, met up with my fellow travelers and we caught up over Thai curry, before catching our flight to Krabi. Krabi was just a pit stop where we stayed the night before heading over to the ultimate destination – Lanta Island.
At the last minute, mum and I managed to find a beautiful resort area on the bottom end of Lanta, and it is there that we stayed for a couple of blissful days. On our first full day, Matt and I spent the day snorkeling at Koh Raa – beautiful. Of course, it wasn’t without drama – we caught a long boat to the diving boat, and after boarding the diving boat we found out that the engine was playing up. Never fear – the diving group had another big boat, which they quickly pulled up beside us. A little too quickly, as it turned out, because, as the boat was coming in along-side us, they hit the boat, causing all the oxygen tanks behind me to spill out onto the deck, knocking us over. Thankfully I’m a quick mover – I copped the brunt of it, but only managed to get a tank on my little toe. The snorkeling itself was awesome – we saw a heap of different beautiful fish, as well as a sea snake and a tortoise. We also spotted (and got ‘bitten’ by) a huge number of small jellyfish (‘mosquitoes’), which kept us scurrying out of their way.
The beach that we caught the boat from to go snorkeling
Whilst on Koh Lanta, we decided to hire motorbikes to scoot around. Our first attempt wasn’t so successful – they only had one spare bike, so we decided it’d be fine, we could ride with two people… Turns out we were wrong. First time on a bike, first time trying to balance on a bike – not particularly easy with two people. Fortunately, Matt chose the better option – he crashed the bike instead of taking us head first down a 50meter cliff into the sea… The next day we were able to hire a bike each (even mum!) and we headed off into the sunset on our bikes…
Matt & I on my bike
All of a sudden, it was time to leave. Unfortunately, our bikes had to be returned before we caught the bus to the airport – the bus was to pick us up at 6am, so it was with weary eyes (we went out to a funky outdoor club the night before) that we dragged ourselves out of bed at 4.30am… And proceeded to ride our bikes at a very slow speed into town (for we had just realised that we were dangerously close to running out of petrol – oops). As soon as we could see we were going to make it, we sped the last km and made it in time – phew!
And now I’m ready (I think) for the craziness of Bangkok – bring it on!
xoxo bobs