November 15-20: Ko Tao, Thailand (By Liz)

After an all-day bus ride from Chiang Mai to Bangkok, a night train from Bangkok to Chumpon (which arrived at 4am), a bus from Chumpon train station to the pier, and a nearly barf-inducing ferry (many other people were sick) from the pier out to the island, we were finally in Ko Tao, in the Gulf of Thailand. We had previously made a reservation with Ban’s Dive Resort, so we immediately set out for the hotel. Because we were going to do the open water scuba diving course with them, they gave us a free basic room. The one we got was pretty crummy and smelled like paint fumes, so they switched us to another, better room but asked us not to use the air conditioning…um, yeah right! So that was an awesome deal.

We started our scuba course that evening by meeting our instructors, watching an instructional video, and completing some reading and homework. We were in a class with four Canadians and two Irish girls. Everyone was super nice, which made the experience so much more fun. The next day we did a contained water dive (swimming pool) to get used to breathing and to practice various skills, like taking off your mask and removing the regulator from your mouth. The day after, the real fun began! We had two dives in the morning in the ocean, going down to 10 meters/34 feet! Apparently November is the worst (and the only bad) month to dive in Ko Tao, so the visibility was pretty bad, but the dive was still amazing! It’s such a cool feeling to be suspended in water, and to have fish swimming all around you rather than only below you. We had to do some more skills again, which sucked because the salt water burns your eyes and nose so much more than pool water, and makes your mouth feel awful for the whole rest of the dive. But it was a small price to pay to get used to the feeling of diving! The following day, we did two more dives, this time descending to 18 meters/60 feet.


On the dive boat!

Because we enjoyed it so much, Jeff and I decided to continue on and get our advanced open water certification, which means the diver can dive to 100 feet and can dive without a dive master. We got 5 more dives over two days. The first one we dove to 100 feet to check and see if either of us gets nitrogen narcosis at that depth. It is a condition where the diver acts very silly and feels like they are on drugs, so it is necessary to make sure the diver won’t do anything too stupid. Our instructor told us a story of a previous student who ended up chasing a fish with his extra air because he thought the fish couldn’t breathe. Luckily (or disappointingly? Haha) this didn’t happen to either Jeff or myself. The next dive we had to learn how to use a compass and a dive computer to navigate around the dive site. A bit less fun than the others, but it definitely built up our confidence. Our third dive was the night dive! We went out with flashlights and observed the different kinds of fish that come out at night. We saw lots of barracudas, who use the light from our flashlights to hunt. We also saw an enormous trigger fish sleeping on its side just like a human under some rocks. At one point, we all turned off our flashlights and moved our arms and legs around to irritate the plankton and make them glow. So freaking cool! The colors of the coral were even more vivid without the blue-hue that sunlight through water gives it.

The following day Jeff and I did the two dives all by ourselves! It gave us so much confidence in our skills and really brought the adventurous aspect. One dive was for fish identification, and it was amazing. Our instructor told us to choose one place that seemed to have a good amount of activity, and simply kneel on the ground for 5 minutes and watch what took place. We ended up choosing a great place, as it was a fish “car wash”: about 5 feeder/cleaner fish would clean all the crud off whatever one fish was in a particular spot. Once that fish was clean, it would swim away, and another fish would come in and take its place. We watched this happen with about 15 fish, and we even saw it happening in groups by species. One of the cleaner fish even swam over to Jeff and tried to figure out how to clean him! It was a super cool dive and we both loved it. The next dive was more practice with navigating a dive site, and although we didn’t know exactly where we were, we still remained within the site (our instructor said that many people end up waaayy outside the boundaries) and had a great time.


Back from an amazing dive :)

After finishing up all the paperwork for our certification, we hurriedly packed up our things to catch the early afternoon ferry over to Koh Phangan.



Beautiful sunset from our hotel's beach


A sweet kitty at the hotel waited for us every night at the top of our stairs and always wanted to hang out with us...we eventually gave in and let her cuddle on our bed!

November 3-14: Chiang Mai, Thailand (By Liz)

We originally planned to use Chiang Mai as a base for everything we wanted to do in northern Thailand, but soon after arriving to the city, we found out that Chiang Mai had much more to offer than some of those other surrounding areas. We decided to play it by ear rather than book trekking trips and buses to the mountain towns all at once. This obviously irritated our guesthouse, SK House 2, because every time we passed through reception, some was eagerly waiting to push all sorts of tours on us. They were even angry at us for buying Muy Thai boxing tickets from someone else! We went to the boxing match our first night and had a great time. It was way more affordable than in Bangkok, and they even had “lady fights” with two women boxers! We sat next to a British couple, John and Christiana, and they invited us to go motor biking with them on a two day trip out in the surrounding countryside. It sounded like a great time, so the next morning, Jeff and I checked out of our pressure-selling guesthouse and into John and Christiana’s (the White House—amazing place), rented scooters, and set off with a vague map not drawn to scale.


Muay Thai boxers

The whole trip was somewhat of a bust, in that everything we had planned to do (visiting waterfalls, hot springs, elephant camps) we never ending up doing. But it was super fun nonetheless! John and Christiana popped a tire, so that was interesting getting it fixed, and we got super lost using the crummy map. We drove around all afternoon, desperately looking for somewhere to sleep, and FINALLY found someplace just after it got dark! Some Australian guys were staying there for the night during their 2-week dirt biking trip. They (and their lady “guests” from the village) hogged up all the rooms, so the four of us shared a room with three single beds. And one of the beds felt like it was stuffed tightly with sawdust. So, not the most comfortable room ever, but very welcome nonetheless. We made it back safely the following day, and explored Chiang Mai’s Sunday night market that evening.


Beginning our moto adventure!

The next day, John and Christiana joined us in a cooking class we had signed up for. We had a recommendation for Thai Farms, which is an organic cooking school out in a country setting. They took us around to a local market first, showing us the different types of rice, curries, and condiments used in Thai cooking. Then they drove us out to their farm and showed us, in their garden, the unique fruits, vegetables, and chilies that Thai people use everyday. After a lovely day of cooking six dishes, we chowed down on all the delicious food. Jeff made an awesome coconut curry soup and super delicious chicken with cashews! At the end of the day, they gave us a cookbook with all of the recipes we made, plus a section that listed alternate ingredients in case we couldn’t find certain ones at home. We had such a good time and recommend it to anyone!


Insects and other grubs, ready to eat, at the local market


One of the meat aisles at the local market


At our cooking class out in the garden


All of our lovely creations!

Jeff and I were feeling guilty for not booking treks like we had planned, so we created our own and felt very optimistic about it. Doi Inthanon National Park has the highest peak in all of Thailand, along with many waterfalls, hiking trails, and hill tribes. Going off their limited website, we found out that they had cabin accommodation there, and that we could drive up the peak ourselves. It sounded lovely, so we drove the one hour there on our scooter. We arrived with some sore bums, saw two waterfalls near the entrance of the park, and headed out to park headquarters to book a place to sleep. There were two incompetent people running the desk, but we were able to figure out that all of their cabins were insanely expensive. There was one that was a bit cheaper though, so we decided to look at it first. It was awful. The walls did not extend all the way to the ceiling, it was grubby, and had no fan. That would have been fine with us if it were cheap, but it was more than twice as much as we were paying in the city. We decided to camp instead, and rented (from the two morons running the desk) a tent, sleeping bags, and pillows (although it was still outrageously expensive). We of course somehow got very lost on the way to the campsite, but managed to come across a good restaurant for dinner later. When we did find the campsite, it was very pretty and peaceful. The ground was very hard though, so we rented a blanket from the campsite to use as a mattress. We should have rented about 7 more! The one blanket made hardly any difference, and it was soooo freezing we barely slept. We were miserable the next morning. To top it all off, our scooter was too weak to make it up the steep incline to the summit of the mountain, so we just had to turn around and go back to Chiang Mai. It was all very sad, considering how excited we were for the trip!


One of the waterfalls at Doi Inthanon National Park

One of the most awesome things we did in Chiang Mai was visit the Tiger Kingdom. It was a touristic place through and through, complete with a gift shop and restaurant. But guess what we got to do?? Pet tigers!! It was so cool! You could choose between babies, small ones up to 2 years, medium ones up to 5 years, and big ones. We chose medium because they were less expensive than the babies and big ones, and they had no line (the babies had a huge line—understandably!). While we were waiting, the big ones ended up having a small line so we were upgraded to them! They were so massive. Their paws could like, knock you unconscious! None of them were tranquilized or anything…apparently they are just so used to humans they don’t care. Although you do have to avoid their heads and paws, and we were fine with that, haha. The large ones had a pool they could jump around in, and the keepers had a palm frond on the end of a long stick, just like a cat toy! Too funny. After our 15 minutes in the tiger cage, we walked around the rest of the grounds looking at all the other cats. The babies were so cute!!! So fuzzy and sweet. We snuck a picture of one!


Baby tiger!! :)


Massive tiger paw compared to Jeff's hand!!



Chiang Mai was a great city to kick back in and enjoy the local culture. It’s very modern, yet still very Thai, but not like a standard big city like Bangkok. Although we didn’t do too much, we loved our time there.

October 29-November 3: Luang Prabang, Laos (By Jeff)

It was a brutal 6 hour ride sitting crammed in the back row of a minivan for the duration of the trip, but we eventually made it to Luang Prabang. Since we did not yet have a guesthouse booked, we talked to one of the many guys who harass you upon stepping out of the van to stay at their guesthouses. We stopped at his place to find it suited to our needs based on the fact that he was telling the truth about where his guesthouse was on the map…this unfortunately was not the case. The next morning we learned this when we tried to go for breakfast and got horribly lost because the street we thought we were on was not the one we were actually on. About an hour of stumbling around in the heat later we settled for some German place that turned out to be delicious, but immediately headed back and checked out. We were not too happy about the owner lying about his location just to get us to stay there so we decided to head into the heart of the city where we had originally hoped to be.

Being that it was the time of the World Series and the Giants were finally in it, we had to find a place with Wifi so I could stream the game on the computer at an upsettingly early hour of the day. It took some time but we found a place right near the river and a couple blocks from the main street in the city. We set out to explore the city and check out our options of things to do for the next several days following. The main tourist street has been completely Westernized with restaurants serving pizza and burgers, wine bars scattered around, and seemingly every other store was a tourist travel company. We had talked to a couple British people in Vang Vieng who recommended a specific tour guide from a company called Phone Travel saying he was a great guy and a ton of a fun so we did our best to seek him out. We stopped at Phone Travel and asked about this Lao man named “Tom Perry” and he did in fact exist and so we booked a tour to go with him in a couple days. The rest of the day we hung out exploring the neighborhood until it came time to see the huge night market. This market was unlike any that we had seen before because it sprung up from nothing and covered the main road with canopies for blocks as vendors lined all their similar crap out for sale next to each other. After having to walk with my back hunched so I didn’t smack my head into every canopy along the way, we made it to the end where they had the food market portion which we were eager to find. Many of these places have a huge spread of various noodles, tofu, and rice laid out so you can help yourself to as much as you please for 20,000 KIP per plate (about $2.50). This was a mistake on the lady’s part to allow us to fit as much as possible because I can be quite gluttonous in these situations which she quickly learned. Liz was much more civilized about her serving, but it was all pretty decent food for the price so we were happy.

The next day started with my waking up to watch the Giants game, but not just that. While sitting in the lobby of the hotel trying to get a decent signal, a couple Lao women waved at me from the front trying to get me to buy some rice that they were carrying. After telling them I was not interested they began pointing down the road so I followed them out and saw a huge group of monks walking in a line down the street. These Buddhist monks dress in orange and each morning at sunrise (which was the time it was this morning) they walk the streets accepting food donations from the local people (generally small handfuls of rice from each of the people on the street). It was a great experience to see this unique tradition and for once being an observer where the local people were not concerned about my presence. Later that day, we decided to go on a bit of an adventure. As one will quickly find out in Luang Prabang, there are a couple beautiful waterfalls in the surrounding areas that every Tuk Tuk driver will try to take you to see. We had heard that they are a stunning sight so we ventured out to Kuang Si waterfall in a shared van with a group of other people. Once inside the national park they have an Asian black bear exhibit which was a nice bonus before reaching the waterfalls. We were quite awestruck when we saw the beautiful jungle scenery and turquoise water. When we looked further up the river we could see countless cascading waterfalls that flowed into large pools where people were able to swim in most of them. We made the trek to the top of the waterfall where we got an amazing view from the top side of the highest waterfall looking out into the jungle. We were starving at this point and headed just outside the park entrance to grab some food before going swimming and found a restaurant where our driver was hanging out. After we made some BBQ chicken sandwiches, we had the unfortunate pleasure of seeing our driver sharing beers with his friends. We would not have thought much of it until we saw that several bottles had accumulated between the few of them and that we were going to be driving home in a couple hours…we hoped that we was going to take it easy after we left. Back at the waterfall, we saw there was a big swimming area with a rope swing and an area where you can jump off the top off a waterfall into the pool below. By the time I worked up the courage to jump in it was no longer very hot and the water was very cold, but it had to be done. Liz opted to sit and watch while trying to take a couple pictures of me making a fool of myself. The water was quite refreshing to say the least, but the swing and the jump off the falls made it well worth it. All the scenery around us was something out of a movie with the perfect color water and beautiful natural jungle surrounding us. It was a shame when we finally had to leave. Shortly after we headed back to our driver to see him polishing off his last beer before heading off to take us home…we all made sure to buckle up because we had no idea just how many beers he had, but we were lucky enough to make it home in one piece. That night we went to dinner with a couple people that we met from our waterfall adventure and realized that it was Halloween so went out for a drink afterwards. There was no real celebration going on for the day, but we stopped at a bar advertising a Halloween party only to find that we were the only 4 people in the bar. It was a crazy party with all of us there, but we headed home at 11:30 after last call because there is a curfew in Luang Prabang at midnight every night.


Kuang Si waterfall

The next day we took a bit of a lazy day. I was pretty tired since I woke up very early to watch the Giants win so we got a late start. We went to a bakery called Jo Ma that was said to have delicious bagels and we were not disappointed. The rest of the day we spent casually walking around and tried to get various things done like planning, booking tickets, the blog and other things we had been putting off for some time. We strolled through the market again that night and found a place selling delicious soup and went on to sample a few various desert items on the walk back...most of which didn’t have that big chocolate taste that we so often crave. We headed back early to rest up because the next day we were going on our kayaking and elephant riding tour with the infamous Tom Perry.

The start to the day was perfect because the Giants won the World Series, and Tom Perry was right on time to pick us up. Feeling in good spirits, we were off to begin the day heading an hour North before we would get in the kayaks to head down the river. Liz and I were the only 2 people on the tour which was a shame because we’ve noticed it can have a big impact on quality control. The kayaking offered some beautiful scenery and a nice glance at local people’s lives through seeing traditional fishing villages located along the river. Tom explained to us various things about the fish traps that were set and stopped by a local fisherman to show us his catches from that day. It was not long into the trip when Tom mentioned his financial status and what his monthly salary was along with how he never gets to see his family because he has to work to support them and capped it off with, “Some people take me to dinner after the tour and they pay for me too”. From that point we were a bit confused about what to think of Tom and felt a bit uncomfortable about the whole situation. Regardless, we paddled on and were headed for the elephant camp. We made it there around lunch time and decided to have our elephant ride before sitting down to eat. Tom seemed happy and was offering to take pictures and we forgot all about the awkward comments made earlier. The elephant ride was nothing like we had imagined because it felt like the elephant was struggling the whole time to drag our butts up the steep and narrow jungle path before him. We pressed on feeling bad the entire time that it was struggling to lug us and because our 10 year old guide would whip or hit him on the head to get him moving. The best part of the ride was when he stopped to let the big fella eat. Watching the power in his trunk was just amazing as he tore down trees and branches effortlessly. By the time he was done eating he had torn a massive hole in the jungle trying to seek out the best tasting leaves and the whole time we were having a good laugh. Once at camp we stopped for lunch where I had fried rice and Liz had a chicken sandwich which was premade before the tour began. Halfway through her sandwich Liz noticed that there were ants inside her bread that were dead, but the situation was handled by Tom sticking his dirty hands in the sandwich to yank that section of the bread off the sandwich and explain that the bread must have been old…truly stellar service. The best part of the day was yet to come where we got to bathe the elephants while riding on their bare backs. We were very excited because several people had told us that it was a really amazing experience with the massive creatures. We hopped on and rode the steep incline down to the river where they casually strolled in and began having a blast. We could really sense the joy that our elephant had just being in the water and playing around and with the other elephants. It was all fun until the guide yelled for the elephant to get down and he dunked his entire head in the water, holding it under for people who fell off to get back on. We did our best not to fall in after we saw the giant poop our elephant had let go only a few moments before in the water, but it was no use and we toppled in. Standing there in the river eye to eye with the elephant was great because we felt so comfortable knowing that he did not want to hurt us, but rather he lowered his head again into the water, holding his breath, and waited for us to climb back on. We hung out there for some time as our elephant just filled his trunk and sprayed water in all directions, or threw branches that got in his way. It was a bit sad when our guide called the elephant out of the water because we could tell he did not want to leave and pretended not to listen for a bit before giving in. Overall it was an amazing experience and we were thrilled we made the choice to do it.


Extreme kayaking!


Beautiful scenery while kayaking




Liz had a little trouble getting on the elephant...

On the way home we stopped at the traditional Whisky Village where many of the local people distill their own rice whisky. Within seconds of arriving Tom was already filling up shots of whisky for us to sample and continued to do so until we pleaded with him to stop. We strolled through the village while stopping at a few various stores to see how the distilling process worked and noticed that some places had stuffed a bear (yes, a small black bear) or snakes into a jar with the whisky to serve as a form of medicine for local people. While it looked very interesting we decided not to sample those select few whiskies. During our walk back to the car Tom began telling us about the restaurant that he wanted to take us to where they serve goat meat and cheap beer and we figured it might be a real local experience. Things began to get weird when we got back to Luang Prabang and he then told us that he was not coming with us and gotten very shy and quiet. We were very unsure what was going on and why he changed his mind so abruptly, but we did not want to pry at him so we just took off. Aside from the several awkward moments the tour was pretty good, especially getting to bathe the elephants.


Bear in a bottle of whisky in the "Whisky Village"

Our final night in Laos we climbed to a hilltop temple just before sunset to see the amazing spectacle. At the bottom of the hill, people were selling various flowers, incense, and other things for offerings, among them tiny little birds! The bird lady told us to release it at the top of the hill and make a wish. We felt bad for the birds so we bought one, and let it out at the top, hoping it wouldn't be dumb and get caught again. After the beautiful sunset, we had some classy street food once again and wrapped it up with some wine at a local wine bar. Everything in the day turned out very well and we were disappointed to be leaving Laos, but excited for the upcoming chapter of the trip.


About to release our little wishbird from the hilltop temple!


Sunset from the hilltop temple