March 26
My host family owns a van rental company so at about 2pm all
of us Lop Buri kids and a few others leave for Bangkok. We meet the others in
Bangkok and by 6pm we are on our awesome VIP double decker bus and offff! The
first hours are excited, loud, chattering and rambunctious! Slowly people begin
to quiet down, tire out and drift off to sleep.
March 27
At about 8am I open my eyes, I try and try to focus them but I can't. All I see is a strange blue, moving mass before my eyes. Within about a minute the bus lights are turned on and our funny Thai tour guide tells us that we have arrived! Oh... I put two and two together... blue wavy mass = the ocean. We check in to our hotel which is barely a five minute walk from the beach and take showers, half an hour later we are back on the bus, breakfasted and wearing our swimsuits under our clothes. We spend the day taking a small boat just big enough for our group of exchange students around the islands of Krabi, stopping for an hour here and an hour there. Swimming, swimming, swimming! That evening we walk around at the night market street and Alex and I go to a shop and get our hair done into a million tiny braids. We plan to keep them for the entire trip. After two hours we are only about 10 minutes late for dinner, that night we take a walk on the beach and finally roll into bed only to wake up in the morning to another day in paradise.
March 28
We take the bus to a hot spring, but it's not like the hot springs I've been to before, water coming out of the ground and creating a pool of warm water, no this is a hot waterfall! The many levels of the waterfall can fit one, two or even six or seven people in them and if you get to hot you can always slip on down and land in the cold river water below. We splash and play for almost an hour, even though supposedly one should only stay for 20 minutes... no more and no less. Later that day we go to The Emerald Pool. To get to the pool you must take about a fifteen minute walk through the beautiful jungle. It was very pretty and of course we all went swimming again! That evening we drove to Pang Nga and stayed at a hotel with a beautiful view of the river. We went swimming in the pool, dove around, took crazy photos, I once again stubbed my old fractured big toe and everyone got some betadine and bandaids for all the cuts from the rocks on the beaches.
March 29th
We took a boat from the pier infront of our hotel and visited James Bond Island. I've never seen the movie that was filmed there so that is on the list of to do's now! While there, a few friends and I explored some caves and disturbed a few bats. Later that day we took the boat to a tiny village of about 200 households on a tiny island. Most people living there were Muslim and they were in the process of building a mosque. There we ate lunch and walked around. We saw the floating soccer field... the rules are that whoever kicks the ball off has to jump in a go get it! Then we donated a bunch of mosquito nets, a water filtration system and some snacks and candy to the local school. A few of us played soccer with some small Thai children... I sort of sunburned the bottom of my feet from this but it was totally worth it. I spoke to a group of girls and learned that many of them did not know how to swim... that surprised me. Also while talking to a woman there we learned that her pet gibbon's name was Turi! The lady let our friend Turi hold the gibbon and we took lots of pictures, even though usually the photos are 50 baht the woman didn't make us pay. Turi was pretty overjoyed. How often do you go to a tiny island with 200 households and find a gibbon with the same name as you? Once in a lifetime for sure. That night we checked into a really beautiful hotel, we played in the pool and then went to dinner. Dinner is a whole other story... now we can get foreign food, sort of, but nothing good and nothing thats not ridiculously expensive so when we walked in to see that the food was an International All You Can Eat Buffet you can probably imagine what happened next. After eating ourselves into what we like to call a "chicken hangover" (the chicken was really, really, really delicious), we rested for a bit before going out to the walking street market to buy some new bracelets and look around.
March 30
In the morning we headed to Phi Phi Island. On the two hour boat ride we met some nice people, especially one couple from Brazil who were travelling all over the world. We ate lunch at Phi Phi Island and then went snorkeling. It was absolutely beautiful. Our chaperone started feeding the fish and there were so many of them and so close together that they were swimming into us! That night we all got a bit dressed up and went to Phuket FantaSea which is an amazing show of Thai dance, magic, other dance, elephants and all sorts of animals! My favorite was the group of about fourteen or so trapeze artists swinging and twirling in the air above us while everything was dark except for their neon outfits. My friend Lea and I walked to The Hard Rock Cafe Phuket later but everything was way to expensive so we couldn't even get a pin for our blazer. Later we walked around at the street market again and we jumped into the ocean after midnight to celebrate Sophie's 17th birthday!
March 31
We swam at the pool, gave birthday gifts to Sophie, went shopping a bit more and finally started the long bus ride back home. On the bus we watched The Sound Of Music and Turi, Daniel and I all sang along. The chaperone had prepared a cake, so we all sang and Sophie blew out her candles on the top of a double decker bus somewhere between Phuket and Bangkok.
It was an absolutely amazing week and I couldn't have asked for any more wonderful people to spend it with than the awesome Spacepeople (inbound students of District 3350), few outbounds who went and our awesome Rotex-- Coco and Ohm! Thanks for everything, especially the goodnight hugs! :)
Also, here is the link to the album of my photos from the trip-- Krabi, Phuket, Phi Phi and more!
and here is the link to my youtube- Kearney on Youtube!
Kearn
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