Living on the edge

Its way too early to be up - but like Amy yesterday, I can't sleep. Now it is just after 5am, and here I am - awake. We have to be up and ready to go early, and whenever I have to get up early, I can't sleep because I am afraid I won't wake up on time. Today will be an adventure for us.

As we've already mentioned, we are here during the Thai New Year - Songkran. This makes booking hotel rooms and travel nearly impossible, especially on the 11th - 13th. We had to be creative with our travel plans, and after consulting a couple of people (thank you Cee, Jett, and travel agent lady), we came up with something a little scary, risky, and exciting.

We booked a flight last night (it leaves in 3 hours) to Trat, which is a town on the Gulf of Thailand. From Trat, we will travel by taxi, ferry, and songthaew to an island called Ko Chang. When we get there, we hope to be able to find a room, and will walk up and down the beaches looking for one. Booking anything over the phone is nearly impossible, and, well, we just don't have time or knowledge to do it any other way. We talked to a travel agent yesterday who told us she'd try to find us a room for Thursday, but since then we've changed our plans. Originally, we had planned to go to the island on Thursday. But our new, nice aquaintances Cee and Jett told us that Wednesday is probably the last working day for Thais and that we'd have better chances (still slim) of finding a room if we left earlier. So, last night we booked a ticket and are planning to just wing it. We can always sleep on the beach, say Cee and Jett - and if we do, the local stray dogs will sleep with us and protect us. Jett has done this before, so we believe it.


--as you can see, they were ready to accomodate us!

We chose Ko Chang because it has everything we both wanted - beautiful, clear water to snorkel and swim in for Amy, and elephants, monkeys, kayaking, and bicycles for me. Cee tells us that there's a woman who owns an orchid farm who will even let me hold her monkey. Jett says the place may not be so easy for us to find, but I feel pretty determined!

We plan on coming back To Bangkok on Saturday night. We hope to find a place to stay - it seems that most people leave Bangkok for the holiday, so I am not completely worried about that. We have reserved another room (204 - the haute couture room) at the Reflections Hotel for Sunday, our last night in Thailand.

This reminds me of another potential problem. We have applied for our Vietnamese Visa - which means that we are without our passports right now. We have been told that a copy of our passport will work as ID, and we are hoping it is true when we try to fly and/or book rooms!

Oh - and we had a fun day yesterday - we travelled by boat up and down the river, and went to the Museums of Forensic Science, Parasitology, and Thai Medical History at Siriraj Hospital. That was really quite interesting - we were most interested in the Forensic Science part - there were displays of things nobody should see like decapitated heads, blown-off arms, and mummified rapists. We loved it! We weren't allowed to take pictures, although we seriously considered it (there were too many people around!)

We also went to China Town. We ate dim sum at a tiny little hidden restaurant that was divine. China Town, especially where we went is not very touristy so Amy and I felt a bit odd.

All in all it was a good day. Saw the biggest reclining Buddha at Wat Pho. Which started off a brief snowball of Abbot & Costello jokes.

It is unfortunate that we have this stress of having to find a place to stay. We take the blame, a bit, for not planning everything ahead of time, but our travel agent should have told us how difficult it would be for us to find lodging too! We will make the best of it, and keep you all informed. I have to go wake Amy up now - its going to take us longer to get to the airport than we thought... Love to all of you! Write some comments! We are missing all of you like the dickens. COMMUNICATE WITH US!!!!