Adventurasia Community

during our stay down south, Shannon and I went to Ann Thong National Parkwhere they partly filmed the aerial shots of The beach. we did somesnorkeling and let\’s just say i should never do that again! The madnessall started out when I had to rent my snorkelling gear from the boat. Itried to fit the goggles on my head when the straps broke off! (maybe myhead is too big?). fortunately, this nice couple from north carolina lentme their goggles which worked fine. however, I aspirated a liter of seawater into my poor lungs! the water was so shallow that I kept on cuttingmyself on the coral. well, i decided nuff of that. I made my way to thesafer side of the beach when halfway there I realized I lost thegoggles. shit! I asked shannon, who couldn’t stop laughing at this point,to use her snorkelling gear to find those goggles. but the water was too sandy to see thru. I then decided to walk and see if I could feel thegoggles with my feet. then, by some strange miracle, I felt a plasticthing on my feet (which could have been anything) and voila those goggleswere found. needless to say I returned then promptly back to the northcarolina couple and didn’t say a word about this unfortunate incident.Karim and Shannon rented motorbikes and I was in for a ride with them , wedid get lost but it was fun. but in thailand, motorbikes are a big killer and is one of the highest causes of death here (coconuts are the 2nd biggest killer)

Karim then left us for vietnam and we left to another island of Koh Pgannon. we stayed at the most fantastic beach after that other house. thebeach is called Thong Tapan Noi which has to be the most beautiful beach I have ever seen in my life! it took a very bumpy and sometimes dangerousride to go down there but it was well worth it. barely any tourists, people just hear about this place by word of mouth. we met this englishcouple. Ian is a tour guide for adverntures.com and has been working allover the world. he invited his girlfriend katherine who happens to be abellydancer (interesting, eh?) to come there. she asked him to take her tothe best place to go to and he took her to this beach! Ian was sort of our tour guide, looking after us girls as we were leaving the peacfulsouth.

We then left the warmth of thailand to the hell of bangkok for the day, enroute to northern thailand. In an interesting and common scam, fivedifferent thai men all told us that it was a buddhist holiday and that thegrand palace would be closed to tourists. they were all trying to get usto take their taxis up to other attractions but we caught on quickly. weeventually went to the grand palace after overcoming many obstacles and itwas a pretty cool building with many many buddhist temples. Bangkok is apretty crazy city and I don’t plan to spend anymore time than I have tothere.

we are now in the north of thailand in the city of cheng-mei which is anancient city. We are staying at the Libra guest house which is an awesomeplace to stay, the people are friendly and helpful with cheap room rates(i’m spending $2 cdn a day)

We went on a wicked jungle trekking just this weekend. It involved alot ofhiking, some elephant riding and rafting. the first night we camped out atthis hill tribe (the Lahoon) whose village is very close to the Myanmar Border. we thought we heard thunder at night but our tour guide said theywere bombs but not to worry, they won’t hit us! River rafting wasquite interesting. The rafts were made of bamboo and we had a guideleading us. All of us girls were on one. The first half was quite peaceful until PA and I switched with the other 2 girls in paddling. A big log cameout and tripped PA and PA was literally holding that log on for dear life until we stopped the raft and the guide ran out to save poor PA! it waspretty crazy but it was alot of fun! we all got quite wet in the riverand in the monsoon rains. needless to say we were pretty dirty by the endof this trip.

I look like a thai! i’m soooo tanned, my mom is not going to likethis. it’s kind of funny because all the westerners want to be tanned but the thai people love my friend Sarah who is so white (which is “cow” in thai)

The thai food here is excellent but right now, I am all thaied out! Lastnight, we all ate non-rice and non-noodle dishes. The fruit is amazing here to with the my fav, lychees and mangos.