KOrea - Hanging in the south with little Kim's big brother South East Asia, Nepal, Korea

hello!. i havent written anything for quite a while because we have been in chailand on an eyeland, and the internet has been prohibitively expensive to use. so a rapidfire update of our travels since penang which i think was the last place i sat down to write anything... we took a boat. the worst boat in Scotland most likely to an island at the top of malaysia called langkawi. the sea had something less than a 1 metre swell. NOTHING by nz standards, but we were on a boat that apparently had a flat bottom. kinda like a landing craft traversing open water at speed. actually im pretty sure lissa wrote about this, but i guess a bit of an overlap can be good. anyway, we had a guesthouse guy with a ponytail, who looked like steven segal. he was the dude. real helpful and cool, and he didnt mind us drinking the duty free beer in his place. so lissa got mauled on the leg by a massive jellyfish, and no one even went near the beach for like a week.she has almost healed right up now though after a couple of weeks of the most savage itch imaginable. next another much nicer boat to Thailand, a bus to krabi, booked a taxi that was actually just some dudes clapped out car to the beach, and booked a longtail boat to hat ton sai, one of the best places ion the world for rock climbing. we weren't really told what to expect so we went down to the beach wearing about 25 kg of pack each, and commenced the wade out to sea. looked kinda like saving private ryan styles thing, but obviously in reverse. the boat was about a mile out. we thought it would come in closer. it didnt. the realisation dawned that we would be wading into the ocean to get to the boat. mad scramble to get passports cameras wallets and such out of the pockets and somehow safely stowed in day packs before the waves swamped us. all was saved except for ross's wallet which fell victim, and we eventually scrambled aboard the longtail. it took us out to a strip of rocky mud that swallowed my new jandals, but was apparently the beach. we sludged ashore and fell into the first bungalow place available. so we spent a few days there climbing swimming and kayaking. our beach was awesome, palm fringed white coral sand with thatch bungalows and a good assortment of wildlife. i got up early most days because it was a good place to sit reading and nearly impossible to sleep past 8. also this is when the monkeys were active, jumping around on the roofs of the bungalows, and hanging out on ross's deck trying to break in and steal his laptop. we also had an encounter with a running lizard, and a pet massive spider who spun a new huge web on our balcony each night, and most likely killed more mosquitoes than us. he didnt try to come inside. unlike the frogs, who seemed most at home trying to look like the wall or hiding under the skirting boards. we kayaked around to the resort beaches a few bays around, took one look at the people and left. this is where the fat rich whiteys go. a can of coke cost almost as much as our bungalow, and none of the people here were fit rock climbers. we did have a cool thai kid jump on our boat and nick a paddle though. he was cool. time to leave, we caught another boat to phi phi which is where the beach was filmed, and is 'one of the most beautiful places in the world' according to someone. it was pretty cool, but hella expensive, but had clear water and lots of fish right up near the beach. our place was a half hour trek through the jungle from the main town, but was about 1000 baht cheaper than the next cheapest option. but it was scummy scummy. still, it had a beach so fuckit right... we went to some thai boxing in town, at a bar that we had heard about from some mad irish dude 2 years ago where they give you free alcohol if you fight none of us fought, although lissa got pretty keen as the drinking progressed. i won my bet on a skinny thai guy who was the dude, and we watched a brawl between an aussie and a brit. the aus dude loved it, he was in his element. we met some kiwis who were on a package tour and couldn't believe that we had to trek through the bush to get home. obviously that walk presented a set of unique problems. and now for tonight we reside in au nang, real close to krabi. we got conned yesterday into accepting some rooms at a resort that were 15 NZD per room had a pool and a free motorbike. 25 mins walk from town. OK... no free motorbike and more like 30mins drive from town. we attempted a walk to the night market and on the way encountered 2 scorpions (one massive squashed, one tiny alive one that got real close to climbing up my foot), some fireflys, about a hundred frogs, 2 massive crawling armored beetle slug things that had a light in their tail, a handful of bats and some strange looking snails. the night market was closed by the time we had completed our paranoid trudge down there. we saw a motorbike crash then trudged back to the resort which mercifully had a restaurant still open. we left this morning packed on a motorbike with a side car with all our luggage and a driver. that honda almost died trying to haul our asses into town, but the driver seemed oblivious, and kept trying to sell us his friends guesthouse. we declined, and treated ourselves to a second breakfast of chicken on a stick. thailands finest innovation.