Hello from Chiang Mai.
We arrived here late on the 14th after another whole day of traveling. Our journey off the island of Koh Phangan was much less eventful than our journey to get there. This time we were prepared for the stinks and the touts and the hustle and bustle so it didn't hit us quite as hard.
The most surreal bit of the trip between Koh Phangan and Chiang Mai had to be the "mini-bus" that took us from the SuratThani bus depot to the airport. The driver was a young Thai dude with spikey hair who looked too cool for school. He loaded our bags in the van, started it up, and immediately began blasting deafening techno dance music. The whole inside of the van was vibrating with bass for the entire twenty minutes to the airport. We got there and he let us out as if there was nothing unusual at all about his rolling dance club. Very odd. We giggled the whole way.
Reflecting back on Koh Phangan for a moment: we could have stood to spend much more time there (maybe months). We really aren't beach people in general, but there was something special about this place. We fell into the flow of doing nothing quite easily. Of course with the speedy pace of this trip, we still spent about half our time figuring out the details of how to make the trek up to Chiang Mai.
Some highlights of the island: We rented another motorscooter and used it to tool around and get from place to place, but mostly we just hung out at our bungalow (or as we called it, our "bunghole") on the beach. We found a resaurant on the beach where they set up tables and chairs right on the sand and served the most scrumptious food. We would sit there and watch the sun set with the waves lapping right by our feet.
We also each got our first full body Thai massage on the beach. It's like yoga massage where you leave your clothes on and they bend you and stretch you and push on all the right spots. The place where we got our massages was a hut on the beach. There are little open huts set up everywhere for mid-day napping and on the beach they are set up every 50 feet and used to give farangs (foreigners) massages while on their island holiday. We took advantage and it was amazing. Picture yourself in a shady open hut on a hot day with a cool breeze blowing, you can hear the water gently rolling up the beach only 5 feet away and birds singing in the coconut trees above you, all while being bent and twisted by a skilled Thai massage therapist. Divine.
Semi-regretfully, we moved on.
Now we're up here in northern Thailand. Its a whole new flavor. Our next post will talk more about what we've been doing up here.
