Southern Travels

My roommate Dada, a German girl Juliane, and a Japanese boy Hiroshi and I went to the bus station after class on Wednesday and got on a bus around 6pm to go down to Krabi (it's in the south). It took us 12 hours to get there, but we stopped at midnight and they fed us this rice soup stuff that was pretty good. We got to Krabi at 6am and were exhausted (obviously) but we took a songtaw (truck taxi thing) to the main town from the bus station to go and look for the pier to take a ferry to the island we wanted to go to. The songtaw dropped us off in the middle of this random street, it looked like the main road through town, but it was still wicked early in the morning so there was nothing going on. We wandered around and found a market to get breakfast, and finally found someone who could give us directions to the pier. Then it was trying to negotiate the price and find someone to take us in a boat to the beach (it was on a pennensula), but they had some sort of union or something and all the boat guys refused to discount their price. Lame. This happened a lot actually, which was annoying, but that's what we get for going somewhere so touristy I guess. We found a hotel at the beach, once we got there, and then went and got sunburned lying in the sand. It was great fun just relaxing there, and hanging out, but the nightlife was pretty tame. All the bars were "sit around and drink, maybe listen to a mellow band" types rather than danceparty types, which I prefer.
The next day we checked out of our hotel and took a ferry to Koh Phi Phi (an island, also touristy) and got a hotel there for 2 nights. This time the town was a lot more developed, and much bigger, but the beach was kind of annoying in that the water was too shallow for waaaaaay too long so you couldn't go swimming. We hung out there for a while though and watched the crabs and stuff, and did some shopping, and then went back to our hotel for a bit because it started to rain. That night we went out and were disappointed to learn that because it was a Buddhist holiday all the bars were closed. We were fairly tired anyway though, and we had to get up early to go snorkeling the next day, so we went to bed around midnight.
Snorkeling was awesome. We got on this big boat that brought us around to all these different sites and then we got to hop in the water and check out all the cool fish and coral and stuff. There was even one place where they claimed you could see harmless sharks, but we didn't see any. (I'm kind of glad). Anyway, it was great, but then our last stop was this beach that has a colony of monkeys living on it. Apparently the tourists are not very nice to the monkeys (which we saw evidence of after a while - people were teasing them with food and stuff) so when this guy was trying to take a picture a monkey tried to attack him. He ran into the water to get away, but Juliana and I were standing nearby and she had a camera too, so the monkey came running at us! We were sort of shocked, and I certainly didn't expect him to attack me, but he bit me on the leg! Luckily he didn't break the skin, so all I have is a small bruise and a story, but it was pretty scary.
We also found a "full moon party" at a bar on the beach that night, which was pretty cool. There were a ton of foreign people there (I don't think I saw even one family of Thai tourists on Koh Phi Phi), including an Australian wedding party, and they had games to win free drinks, and fire limbo and stuff like that. It was pretty great, and the party was right on the beach and really close to our hotel. I even met a kid from Vermont! He said he's volunteering (teaching English I think) for a year and taking time off from school, but it was totally weird to meet someone from that close to home on a random beach in Thailand.
On Sunday morning we took the ferry to Phuket and Hiroshi left then to take a cab to the airport (he scheduled an earlier flight b/c he had schoolwork to do for Monday). Dada, Juliane and I wandered around the small town for a bit and then took a taxi to Patong beach. It was a little weird to be there with all our stuff, and have to change on the beach because we had no hotel room to use as a base, but we paid $2.50 to have some beach chairs and umbrellas for the day (there was no shade anywhere except if you rented the umbrellas, and we were already pretty sunburned). Then we chilled there for the rest of the afternoon, interrupted every 5 minutes or so by someone walking by and trying to sell fruit, or sarongs, or watches, or collapsible tables... it was crazy. Then we had dinner and took a cab to the airport, and finally got back to our house around 2am. Class Monday morning was a bit difficult. =P It's even harder to get back into the whole "doing homework" thing after having such a beach-bum long weekend.