Koh Samui, Thailand

Hello all, we've fionally had some time to update the blog. For those of you hearing about the unrest in Thailand right now, do not fear we're perfectly safe. We made it out of Bangkok a day before the protests escalated, and are now in Chiang Mai.


Its been about three weeks since we last left off. At the time we were headed up to Thailand, Koh Samui to be exact. We got to the airport extremely early in Singapore since it was so hot and we had already been venturing around the city for hours. After about five hours at the airport we boarded our plane to Thailand. We just can't get over how much they feed you on the planes here. Even if your flight is only an hour long, like ours was, you get a full on meal every time. Iguess we are just all used to cheap American airlines that rarely give us peanuts. We landed in Koh Samui at around 10pm and had to go through immigration for what seemed like hours. We were literally the last three people at the airport, and saw them gate things off and turn off the lights as we were leaving. We had read in Lonely Planet that Lamai beach was the place to be so we hailed a cab and headednorth. The island was absolutely beautiful. We were staying directly on some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. Sounds too good to be true...and it sorta was. The thing is that we were in an island paradise, during Thailand's dry season, and we experienced some of the gnarliest storms ever. It poured for the whole 14 days that we spent in the islands. Lightening and thunderstorms-the whole deal. We realized that we weren't going to be able to truly enjoy the beaches during the tumultuous storms so we figured we might as well explore the islands. We decided to take a cab to this supposedly gorgeous waterfall one of the days. We hiked for a few hours until we reached the top of this mountain where we were able to see all the surrounding island for miles. The waterfall was straight out of a movie and we made sure to get a major photo sesh in. The icy cool water felt so nice and refreshing compared to the boiling ocean water. A few days later we decided to sign up for a group boat ride/treck thing out to a marine sanctuary. We all piled on a huge boat where we were given bananas,croissants, and coffee. We all hoarded the "free" food and stuffed ourselves like usual. The boat ride took about 2 hours to get out to the islands. We then donned life jackets and zinc and piled into kayaks. The three of us decided to share one, and Liz sat in the middle like she was the other girls' child. About ten minutes into kayaking we noticed that the huge black clouds in the distance were now located directly above our heads. About 2 minutes later the sky opened up and we all got drenched-from the rain and the waves that had suddenly developed and were now smashing over us. We continued like this for about 20 more minutes until our guide lead us into some caves. We were able to stay dry for a few moments before being bashed into the rocks by the now fierce ocean. Having all lost our minds weeks ago we found the situation hilarious, especially now that it was thundering directly above us. The rest of the adventure consisted of hiking to this salt water lagoon that was extremely gorgeous. We were most likely the coolest people in those parts since we decided to keep our life jackets on while hiking. After another rain soaked day we decided it was time to get off the island and see somewhere new. We then booked boat tickets to Koh Phangan to begin the next leg of our journey.