Koh Phangan, Thailand

Upon departing the boat we were met with another torrential downpour.We were soaked and tired and really hadn't thought about where we wanted to go. We had four days until we were supposed to arrive at the island so we needed to find accommodations. We basically got tricked to go to this one "resort" by a very kind woman with very deceiving brochures. Once taking a 30 min cab ride we drove down a dirt road to what we would come to refer to as Milton's. This is because the owner looked exactly like the Office Space character. Milton's was a joke.Our room was literally built out of twigs and extremely thin plywood by small children. Our bathroom was a door into some boulders outside where a family of extremely large crabs lived. The floor was a bunch of small branches put together in a raft like manner. When we were standing inside and looking at the "floor" we could see a river running down from the hill into the ocean. At night during high tide our hut was completely on top of the ocean. The bed was literally a box spring (we checked the tag and our suspicious were proven true).The hut also was home to about 9 different species of creatures. This is all fine and dandy on its own, but the topper was the most frightening storm that was occurring during our stay at Milton's. We had been counting the seconds between lightening and thunder and were noticing that they were greatly decreasing. At this point we were all piled on the bed under the one faint light that our hut had. Michelle was facing the window and was able to experience the lightening firsthand. All at once we saw the hugest flash, simultaneously followed by the loudest, most fierce crack of thunder ever. The rock that our hut was wedged between had been struck. Consumed with delirium Liz and Michelle found the whole situation amusing. Robyn, however did not.It was basically her greatest fear come to life. It didn't help that she could literally feel the heat of the lightening on her arm hairs.We knew we must escape Milton's, so in the morning we strapped on our enormous packs and hiked the four miles (in the rain) into civilization. Our next home was on Had Yao beach and it was beyond glorious. On top of once again having walls,doors, and a floor, we each got our own comfy bed, we had hot water, and a tv/dvd player to top it off. We were in heaven. The next two days were basically used to catch us on sleep and momentarily experience the luxuries of home in the form of a movie marathon. We would have loved to stay there longer but we had previously booked accommodations farther north on the island. Our new home, Smile beach Bungalows, was extremely kitschy but nice enough. Our room was done up head to toe in pink satin-it was a pretty classy joint. We attempted the beach a few more times but were always met with evil black clouds and hour long downpours. We hiked a bit more and saw some elephants and waterfalls. Then came the fullmoon party. It was like nothing any of us had ever experienced. We got to the beach at about 9:30 pm after an extremely bumpy hour long taxi ride. The only was to describe it is as a giant rave on the beach. Complete with fire dancers, glow sticks, and extreme body paint. We all had a very fun, but interesting,night and only made it till about 12:30 am...even though our shuttle wasn't supposed to pick us up till about 4 am. As we always say, were turning into grandmas in our old age (no offense mom). This leads us to 48hours of extremely interesting traveling until we finally reached Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. This is a very long story however and may have to be continued at a later date, especially since this Internet is so very ghetto.