Our Travels: March 2006

THAILAND

From February 11 - March 5, 2006 we spent three great weeks traveling around in diverse Thailand. We got the chance to experience everything from North to South, mountains to ocean, relaxing to sight-seeing and shopping, contact with locals and fellow travelers.

Here is a map of Thailand. I circeled our places of stay. From Bangkok we went by train up North to Sukhothai, then by bus via Chiang Mai to Pai. From Pai we returned by bus to Chiang Mai and after our stay there we took a plane to Hat Yai via Bangkok. From there we proceeded by mini-bus and ferry to Ko Lipe and back the same way to Bangkok.

Look at this pretty girl on Khao Sarn road. A very busy street in the backpacker area. Cool place to people watch and shop.

Eating on the street is great in Thailand. Very cheap and very good. Thai food is by far the hottest food I have had. Great pad thai (noodles) for 50 cents. In southeast Asia, life happens on the sidewalks. They are not for walking. That is what the street is for.

Yummy chicken

Behind the scenes.

Donuts?.

Outback Steakhouse. Lots of American chains in Bangkok. We even enjoyed a Blizzard at Dairy Queen.

Bangkok traffic. Notice the cool Hilux 4 door turbo diesel!

Bangkok in the evening....

What a change, Lipe in the evening.

Chillin' out on the beach at night before leaving.

Christina made a little friend before we left the island. There were many stray dogs on Koh Lipe. Enough so that they are a problem. They often slept on our door step and you could hear them howling and fighting. Cute puppies though!

It was sad to leave our bungalow and head back to Bangkok. Bye!

Beautiful sunset!

Awww, cute monkey.

This is the main road through Koh Lipe. Pretty hectic huh? Note the piggie!

Vacations aren't all about play. Here is Christina working hard on the blog.

This beach was really nice. Soft, fine sand.

This is a little shop on one of the beaches. This beach was cool, the sand was soft and fine like flour. The mongo shakes here were thick and made with a lot of mango. Large pineapple fresh cut were just $1. Yum!

Diving: Though we initially didn't have the intention to go diving or even take a diving class, it really appealed to us once we got to the island. Though it is pretty small there are 5 different dive schools to chose from. The classes are pretty inexpensive and people told us that the diving sites were pretty nice, so we decided to give it a try. As it is not that easy for us to just sit still on the beach we thought this would be a nice way to spend time outside and still be active. So we registered for the Padi Open Water Diver Course. We were on the boat for 4 days, had 8 dives and studied a lot. In order to get the certificate you have to read a book of about 250 pages, watch the according DVDs and take 5 multiple choice tests. The chapters were pretty easy but as our goal was to get the course done within 4 days it was quite a challange, getting up early to study and taking the tests in the evening. Diving was fun, though at times the currents were quite rough, making it really difficult to dive (especially for me). Anyway, we accomplished and had a really good time diving and with the people of different nationalities on board.

Nice dive school. In the evenings they often made Pizza, the italian guys working there had built a huge brick oven, or you could just hang out there. Before leaving for diving Nathan and I often came earlier to study some more or take our tests.

unfortunately this was NOT our dive boat.

... but this one. Though it is old and slow it was good to dive from a real boat instead of a small longtail.

in order to get to the dive boat, which stayed in deeper water, we had to take a longtail boat through shallow water to get there. In the front is Petra, one of our dive masters and behind here everybody's scuba gear.