July 29, Day 1

Anyhow, on to the main event. I promise that will be the only gross picture. Saturday morning came around and I had slept for about 3 hours, woke up and walked to where the airport bus station was supposed to be, turns out it wasn’t there. I then grabbed a taxi to where I knew there was a bus coming, but like an idiot, I sat for a solid 15 minutes on the wrong side of the road at that bus stop. Luckily the bus was supposed to come every 30 minutes, so I was still 5 minutes early when I finally woke up and walked across the street and found the stop I was looking for. Turns out the bus wasn’t too regular after all, and I waited another 40 minutes there until I finally got picked up. From that point on it was just boring old airport routine that everyone has been through 100 times, and after I met up with Ben and Mike, we eventually got on our 5 hour flight from Seoul to Bangkok. The flight was pretty uneventful, and we arrived in Bangkok, stood in some more lines for a while, got in another plane, this time a little smaller, and took off again. All of us were seated right in the back, literally right next to the engines, so although the view looked really good for everyone else, we basically just caught up on a little more sleep. About an hour and a half later, we arrived in Koh Samui, an island on the southeastern end of Thailand.

Mike has a friend Sofia that lives in Cambodia that he was trying to convince to meet up with us, and she had said that she wanted to, but he hadn’t heard from her in a while, so he had basically given up on the whole idea. But as we arrived at the terminal, her and her girlfriend Won were sitting there waiting for us, it was a really cool surprise. We relaxed at the airport and had a beer and got to know each other for a bit while we waited for a shuttle to our next destination, Koh Penang. After testing out which beers in Thailand not to drink, we got on the shuttle. This was particularly fun as we got our first taste of Thai public transit, which was a little Toyota with the tailgate open so they could fit two more little seats on the box. Of course, those were the seats we decided to sit in. Then we took a really nice ferry ride, as the sun set, and got a really beautiful view, it was so nice to see the horizon unhindered by buildings and smog. As we got off the boat, we realized it was getting really dark and we still had all our stuff to lug around, so we quickly found a resort and just threw money at the kind old lady who ran the place (which we affectionately referred to as ‘Momma’) and threw our bags in the rooms. So throughout the day, I walked, took a taxi, took a bus, took a plane, took another bus, took another plane, took another taxi, and took a ferry to get from point A to point B.

Needless to say, we were all pretty beat, but that didn’t stop Mike and I from trying a little swimming in the pitch black. It was here that I realized just how painful open sores can be in salt water. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy, it stung like a banshee. So the swim didn’t last too long and I half limped half speed-walked to the hotel for the most refreshing fresh-water foot washings that anyone has ever had in the history of the world… ever. But now that the ‘saline solution’ had effectively disinfected my foot, I was ready to go again. The girls went to bed, and we found a cool bar close to our place called the ‘warm-up bar’ owned by this guy named Leo. Leo was a real charismatic, happy-go-lucky, and pretty dirty Thai guy who we hung out with for a good chunk of that night. From there we walked around and found ourselves at the beach where they host the full-moon party where there was a lot of cool fire dancing to watch and we sipped on a little more beer and eventually wandered to the hotel and went to bed.