2005-01-03 - 8:27 p.m.

Happy New Year’s!! We just got back from Thailand, and no, we did not go anywhere near where the tsunami hit. We were 600 miles away, in the Gulf of Thailand. We arrived in Bangkok really late at night, after the most pleasant plane ride ever. The flight attendants were so nice. Everything was nice. It smelled nice, the food was nice. Even the bathroom was nice. It was covered with real flowers. Mike’s friend, Ryan, who lives there and was our host, told us about lots of cool things to do and see in Bangkok, and then we said, gee that sounds cool, too bad it’s 11:00 pm and everything is closed. He took us to a really cool bar on the water. This temple is right across from the bar.

The next morning we had to catch an 8:00 bus to get to the boat, which would take us to the island. It was a 3 hour ride, and quite uneventful. I slept, Mike air-drummed to his new best friend, his I-Pod. We made it to the pier and got our tickets for the boat. Here’s the pier.

I have got to be the world’s biggest scaredy cat. My first fear to conquer was simply getting on the boat. I dance, I have good balance- it couldn’t be that hard to leap across the tiny gap between the dock and the boat.
I immediately had visions of me being the only human in the history of that particular boat dock to misstep and break my leg and hit my head and fall into the water. So I began mentally preparing myself to do a grande jete from ballet class, and have no chance of being injured. I am so dramatic-I hardly had to hop to get across. Next irrational fear-sinking. The boat kind of meandered along at quite unsettling angles in the water. It didn’t seem natural to me that the front of the boat was so much higher than the back. I decided it would most certainly sink, so I put a life preserver on, and made a mental note in my head to let Mike hang onto me when we sank, since he refused to wear one. My brain always functions like this. I have to have a worst-case scenario plan of action. We all have coping mechanisms-some people smoke, I plan emergency evacuations. Here we are on the boat
-that’s me laughing to keep from crying. I started taking pictures to take my mind off the boat—Thailand is so pretty.

There’s Mike, Ryan, and . Ryan’s girlfriend, Am. After about 45 minutes, we made it to the island, Koh Samet.

I thought getting off the boat would be easy, considering my flawless performaance getting on, until we docked. There was another boat in the way of ours I suppose, so we shimmied up right beside it and played “jump, leap, hop, and hope you don’t fall in” from our boat (on the left) through the other boat, and then to the dock.

It was exciting and terrifying all at once. We had our luggage to wrestle with too, as an added challenge. I went to Thailand. You expect stories of exotic and exciting things. I go into great detail about boats. Sorry-here’s exciting for you- I read on the internet that pirates used to live there, and that locals used to believe that there is treasure buried somewhere!!!! Ooohhh aaaahhh!!!!! We met up with a gang of Ryan’s friends- all really nice people from all over the world. They informed us that every bungalow on the island was taken. They invited us to sleep in theirs, and for about 5 hours that is what we planned to do. We went swimming,

ate at a nice restaurant on the beach,
then decided that we wanted our own places to sleep. So Mike, Ryan, Am, and I walked up and down the island, looking for somewhere to sleep. Everywhere was full, and we were just about to resign ourselves to sleeping with bugs on the ground, when we found a place that had tents on the beach. We got the very last two sleeping quarters on the island. It was so exciting to me! We were right on the water.

I’ll finish the story tomorrow, complete with tales of a load of wildcats on a tropical island, drunk as skunks, celebrating New Year’s. ( I am well aware that I just mixed metaphors or whatever it’s called-but now you understand just how drunk these people were--me not included, I am an angel)
Xoxo, Julie

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