L: Phuket!

So after a few days in Bangkok, we traveled on Air Asia to Phuket, which took about an hour. Phuket was pretty amazing and the beaches are dazzling (ha, dazzling is the only word I can come up with right now). The sand is white and the water is warm, so it was great to step into the water without shivering. There were things about Phuket that annoyed me at times. Phuket is very touristy, so every where we walked, all we could hear was, "Miss, Taxi? Miss, massage, Miss, tuk tuk? Miss, drinks?" and so on. I just wanted a little peace sometimes. I'm sure the locals look at all the tourists as one big dollar sign.

On our first day, we went to Karon Beach, which was about a 15 minute taxi ride from our hotel. The beach at Karon is known for its white sand and man, it was white! We spent a couple hours there, then made our way to Kalin Beach for some elephant trekking. Riding on an elephant may be one of the coolest things I have done in my life. It was a little scary at times when we went uphill or downhill and I felt a little sorry for the hardworking elephants, but I guess without tourists, elephants would have no food or care in this very poor country. After elephant trekking and dinner, Terry and I went to see a lady boy show called the Simon Cabaret. The lady boys lipsynced to popular songs of all different languages. You can tell that some were still very masculine, while some looked hella good!

On our second day, we booked a speed boat tour to James Bond Island and Phang Nga Bay. It was my first time on a speedboat and it was worth paying a bit extra because it got us to the islands much faster than long tail boats, ferries or motor boats. At Phang Nga Bay, we did another amazingly cool thing. We went canoeing! Okay, so we had a paddler that did our hard work for us, but we did get to try to paddle. Major Fail! It's much harder than it looks and we were basically not moving or going around in circles. We got to go inside caves and the views were breathtaking. After canoeing, we were able to spend time at another very white sandy beach. I can't remember what we did that night, so i'll just continue to the next day.

On our third day, we went to PhiPhi Island by speedboat again. PhiPhi is very popular and almost everyone who visits Phuket makes a trip to PhiPhi. We got to see the location where "The Beach" was filmed. They kept calling it the place where "The hit movie, The Beach" was made. I don't remember that movie ever being a hit. Another very scary, but fun thing we did was snorkeling. Terry and I both cannot swim, so we were just going to wait on the boat while everyone else went into the water. However, our tour guide insisted that we wear life jackets and go in because there were a lot of fish. The boat was just in the middle of the ocean, so we were SCARED. There was a rope on the side of the boat, so we held on to it most of the time. We did let go eventually and went under a few times and saw a lot of colorful fish. Life jackets do work! I would love to try snorkeling again. This trip was a bit tough for me because I did get seasick and by the time I got back to the hotel, all I wanted to do was sleep. And sleep was what I did, from 7pm to 8am the next day. I had a tiny headache the entire last day at Phuket and the sun and heat made it worse. We spent our last day in Phuket chilling at our hotel pool and getting pedicures and manicures.

I'll only post a few pictures since ther're on fb anyways.

Elephant Trekking near Kalin Beach. We had a beautiful view of the ocean from the top of the hill. The trainer made the elephant go up on the rock so we could take this picture. He just kept shouting words at it and the elephant understood so well. Behind us is a very steep cliff, so one step backwards would bring us all down.