8.04.2009

Thailand: Part 3, the Island

My ankle is doing better people....I actually rode the bike at the gym today which was good. Then, I had a slight heart attack today watching the ND game. Hopefully the Bengals will seal the deal with the Browns tomorrow!

I went to London last week for work, and then Aggie and I met up in NY over the weekend. We hung out with some of our great friends that we have met while living in Europe (some live there, some were visiting). Needless to say, it was a wonderful weekend!


So, now back to Thailand....

As we wrote in our last post, we woke up in Chiang Mai on Saturday morning, had breakfast and then headed to the airport. We were flying from Chiang Mai to Bangkok to Koh Samui. Everything went well and we arrived in Koh Samui with no problems. We were amazed as we went to the one small conveyor belt for our luggage, which was under a complete outdoor, open-air hut! That was the totality of this airport. The beach/party mood was starting to kick in!!

We met our driver and off we went. We drove about 20-30 minutes through the island - our resort was on the opposite side. The ride was pretty amazing in the sense of how poor the people were. Shacks (homes) were all over and trash and debris was everywhere.

What was nuts is that basically the side of the road where the sea was, there were resorts and beautiful restaurants and homes that had decks and ports out to the water. Literally, across the street from these wonderful places were shacks/homes. The road was the clear divide between rich and poor. It was crazy.

We checked in and took a tour of our resort. All I can say is, AWESOME! That is the best way to describe it. In our room, we had our own private pool (which was huge, considering it was just for our room) and patio area. Our room was beautiful and the whole resort was stunning. That evening we had dinner at the hotel and feasted on some amazing food, of course sitting beach side!

On Sunday it rained on and off most of the day, but we read, watched movies, walked down the strip, etc. It was actually so nice not to be go-go-go! The "strip" was basically where a bunch of restaurants, massage shops, stores, hotels, etc were.


Monday we soaked up the sun. Probably a bit too much! We both had SPF 45 on and got burnt! Oh, well. It was so nice to sit and hang out with each other and just chill. For dinner that night we enjoyed some Thai food and walked around. We were actually quite amazed with the amount of prostitution that was going on...it was very common to see a white dude with a Thai girl on his arm, walking around, dining together, etc. It was disturbing at first but then we just got used to it which was probably bad too!

Anyway, Monday came and went and Tuesday and Wednesday were pretty much the same...we ended up hanging out at our room most of the time, in our pool, watching movies, ordering room service, enjoying what basically was paradise. It was awesome! We ended up leaving late Wednesday afternoon (5-ish) for the airport.

We were flying from Koh Samui to Bangkok and at 12:30am we were flying back from Bangkok to Zurich, Switzerland. The flight off the island was a bit rough as there was a bad wind storm that came in but we were okay. The flight from Bangkok to Zurich was smooth for the most part so that was a big relief.

We had 4-5 days in Zurich before we were taking off to Santorini, Greece to extend our holidays a little bit. During that time, we went hiking with a group of friends in Flims. Check back on a few blogs to read about that weekend.

We hope you enjoyed Thailand as much as we did!! Next up will be Santorini....