Snorkel trip to Cham Island

While in Hoi An, we decided to hire a speed boat to take us snorkeling off of Cham Island.  Well, the water was freezing cold, so we jumped back on board of the boat and headed for the island, where we soaked in the sun and island breeze for most of the day.  It brought us right back to our Thai island life, where isn't too shabby.

Speed boat to snorkel at Cham Island from Craig Palumbo on Vimeo.

Morakot Cave inside of Koh Muk

During our 4 island snorkeling trip off of Koh Lanta in Thailand, we swam 80 yards into the heart of the island where a mesmerizing beach lives.  Tania gives a great description of it below.


Morakot cave inside of Koh Muk from Craig Palumbo on Vimeo.

Days 56-59 Sunday – Thursday January 3-7, 2010 Koh Lanta, Thailand

Highlights

-       - Massaman Curry!!!!!!  Man the king has good taste!

-       - Snorkeling was fun, but discovering Morakot cave inside the heart of an island was icing on the cake!

-       - If you’re looking for crazy backpacker fun, head somewhere else (i.e. Phuket, Koh Phi Phi, Koh Pha Ngan).  This place has luckily evaded that doom.

The Nothing Else To Do While Tania Gets Another Massage Version

Let’s start by saying that Koh Lanta was our favorite of the Thai islands, but as you can tell from the video of our overnight ferry from Koh Tao, getting there was the antithesis of our love for Lanta.  Along with the ferry, we had to battle our way through a taxi ride from the ferry terminal in Surat Thani, a bus from Surat Thani to Krabi, then a packed mini-bus drive to Lanta.  Yet all of that chaos was forgotten when we arrived onto Lanta.

Eight years ago when I was traveling through Europe, I randomly met a Brit named Emma in a sandwich shop, and we spent a day touring Valencia, Spain, before she left town.  Somehow through the magic of email, blogging, and Facebook, we’ve stayed in touch through the years.  When we learned that she was now living on Lanta teaching scuba diving, Tania and I decided to skip over the touristy Phuket and Koh Phi Phi and spend our time on the west coast on Lanta.  And boy are we glad we did. 

Emma was kind enough to find a hotel for us to stay at, the NT Lanta Resort, which had just opened a few months prior, meaning our bungalow was brand new with all of the amenities a weary traveler could desire; AC, hot water, satellite TV, fridge, and most importantly, new and clean furnishings.

Emma also introduced us to the best restaurants in Long Beach, the nicest stretch of beaches that hadn’t already been trampled by tourists.  We fell in love with the king’s favorite dish, Massaman curry.  It’s a peanuty curry served with potatoes and onions, and basically the greatest thing your pallet can swim in.  We also ate delicious seafood and rice dishes over meals with her friends Claire (don’t call her a life coach), Magnus (www.tapper.com), and the rest of her scuba friends.  We even got to partake in trivia night with all of the expats at Bar Racuda (get the play on words?).  We got third place, out of about 10 teams, basically because Tania doesn’t know as much about Lord of the Rings as she thought she did.  She let all of her D&D friends down on that one.

Aside from eating the delicious food, Tania obviously got a beach-side oil massage (I think she is in the midst of setting the world record for most massages in a month’s time), we scootered around the island, down to Old town, walked along the picturesque beach, and boated around to 4 islands for an incredible day of snorkeling.  Our new gear came in handy to see stunning coral swarming with schools of brightly colored fish.  Getting to wade in the water as the fish swim around you as if you’re part of their clan has quickly become one of our favorite things to do, which we’ll greatly miss once we head up north to Chiang Mai.

The highlight of the snorkeling trip was when we visited Morakot cave inside of Koh Muk, which requires a 10 minute swim through a pitch black tunnel that eventually leads to a hidden beach in the heart of the island.  Once inside the cave on and standing on the beach, you can spend an hour notching your head back and gazing the perimeter of the walls that stand around you, reaching hundreds of feet above with a lining of lush shrubbery and plant life.  Stunning, absolutely stunning.

We were sad to leave Koh Lanta because after the resort feel of Kohs Samui, Pha Ngan, and Tao, we really started to get into the groove of quieter island life that Lanta provided over the others.  Yet, we had a flight to catch out of Phuket, so we hopped a high class ferry through Koh Phi Phi so we could stay the night in Phuket before our early morning flight on Friday.  

 

Days 45-49 Wednesday – Sunday December 23-27, 2009 Koh Pha Ngan

Highlights

-       - When on vacation, remember that it’s not all site seeing, and remember to unwind.

-       - If you’re going to partake in a fast, you need to follow a strict diet before starting the fast.  Therefore, don’t do a fast.

-       - There’s nothing wrong with getting a Thai massage every day when they’re that cheap.

The "Nothing good on late night Thai TV" version

It’s easy to know you’ve let go of all previous obligations when your primary objective to achieve before sun down is to truly understand the difference in color between the deep blue ocean water beyond the break and the light aqua-blue water closer to the subtly absorbing sand.  It’s not until these moments that you realize that months and months of stressful preparation have come to fruition not only for your cultural growth, but for your physical and spiritual health.  No longer do we ignore the beauty in front of us instead of losing our minds to what might be away from where we are.  No longer do our chests tighten uncontrollably simply because a miniscule worry passes across the back of our brains.  This is why we came to this land; to enjoy the stunning world around us, and to absorb the relaxed state of our new husband/wife.

That last paragraph might be overly abstract and/or nonsensical, but I can’t ignore the fact that that’s where my (Craig’s) head was at during one lazy afternoon on Malibu Beach.  That’s on Koh Pah Ngan in southern Thailand islands, not in Los Angeles.

After going so hard through Japan and China, we had no idea how incredibly tired we were from so much traveling and sight seeing, and how in need we were for downtime, that when we got to the first truly lazy beach destination, we sank into that sand and had little interest in doing anything else.

Christmas eve and Christmas day were full of the following…wake up, Skype with our family during their Christmas festivities, eat our inclusive breakfast at the beach restaurant, stay at said beach restaurant through dinner, taking a quick swim and drink a banana shake while at said restaurant, learning first-hand that crabs dart both vertically and laterally (whatever this link means), then heading back to our bungalow to watch a (very legal) DVD and passing out before the evening news starts; assuming there is an evening news, and that it starts around 10pm, which we can not confirm either way since there's no TV in our bamboo bungalow.

We did walk around Choloklum, ride a scooter (extremely carefully) to Koh Ma (an island that you can walk to because a connective sandbar is walkable during low tide), and visit friends at Haad Rin and Haad Yao for dinner and drinks, but mainly, we completely decompressed around Malibu Beach.

There’s something to be said about hurriedly site seeing when you’ve got a short amount of time to take-in a country/region, but when you’ve got 5 months, and you’ve just gotten done quitting your jobs, selling everything you own, moving out of a city, throwing a week-long wedding, and venturing off on a 5 month honeymoon through a completely unknown land, you also need to enjoy a considerable amount of down-time to enjoy your surroundings, enjoy the culture, and to enjoy the person you’ve just committed yourself to for the rest of your life.  Which we did, and did it well.

If you can’t tell, we slightly liked Koh Pha Ngan.

Days 44-45 Saturday – Wednesday December 19-23, 2009 Koh Samui, Thailand

Exit busy city life...

…Enter island living.

Even though we had arrived into Thailand a few days earlier, we didn’t really enter the Thailand we had been waiting for until we got off the mainland, and headed down to the islands.  Bangkok was busy and crowded and, well, big cityish.  We came to this country looking for much more of a retreat so we can recover from the past 6 weeks on the road through China and Japan, and we didn’t get that reprieve until we headed to Koh Samui.

While planning Thailand, Tania broke out the islands into three sectors:

1.     Koh Samui – for cleansing and body pampering after pushing ourselves so much through Japan and China

2.     Koh Pha Ngan, for relaxing on the beach and socializing amongst the Full Moon Party crowd

3.     Koh Tao – for complete seclusion and a quiet new years celebration

Knowing how the next few weeks would unfold, we made the most of our time on Koh Samui at Spa Samui, the original healthy island retreat.  We had planned on partaking in a 3 day fast (yes, that means no eating or drinking alcohol) and getting massages all over our bodies until there wasn’t a drop of tension left in our muscles.

We succeeded in doing half of that.

Apparently, the fast required the participants to ingest a specific diet of foods during the week leading up to arrival at the spa.  Well, we didn’t find that our until the day before arriving, so the fast was off the table.  I was really bummed about that.  Instead, we enjoyed fruit shakes and longevity drinks for breakfast, yoga, meditation, 2-hour long Thai massages and 1 hour oil massages, naps at the beach and pool, and quiet meals at the spa’s restaurant.  I was afraid that a restaurant at such a healthy resort would consist of vegan and vegetarian dishes, which it did, but it also had a healthy selection of options for carnivores like me.  So in addition to healing our bodies and minds, we catered to our stomachs in an equal capacity.

We also enjoyed the island by scootering around to neighboring towns.  We exchanged books at a cute little book shop (traded Dan Brown and Lonely Planet for some David Sedaris and HG Wells), bought some matching tee shirts (now we have two matching sets to show off to the vomiting world) and warm weather shorts/skirts), and passed through Cha Weng, the extremely touristy area of Koh Samui, which we quickly exited so we could return to our peaceful haven at Spa Samui.

 

Our few days on Koh Samui were a perfect outro to city hopping and an even more perfect intro to Thai island hopping, even though we didn’t get to treat ourselves to a good ol’ fashion fast.  (insert sarcastic crying sound)