Adventures By Design

In which we relocate our HQ, touch base with Obama, and Ric doesn’t end up in a ditch.

We woke up early this morning, about 7:00 so we could pack our bags, check out of the hotel, and still have enough time for breakfast. We ate our mediocre meal (deep-fried French toast with no syrup), fantasizing about how amazing it would be to own a small beach-side resort. Throughout our journeys, Gin often comments on how she would do things if she had such a place. Traveling to so many different places helps you appreciate the things that make traveling easier and more pleasant. For example, last night while we were on our way to buy water (again), Gin suggested that if a hotel provided a water cooler that filtered the water, guests could (re)fill their own bottles. Folks could get their water needs cheaply and conveniently, and fewer plastic bottles would be discarded into landfills. For those without bottles, the hotel could sell Nalgene bottles with its logo and contact info on it (assuming, of course, that Nalgene bottles turn out not to be carcinogenic). What do you think?

We checked out of the hotel without incident. Gin walked ahead carrying her bags, while Ric followed with the scooter down the hotel’s uneven dirt road. Our plan was to hire a tuk-tuk to drive our bags to the new hotel; we didn’t feel comfortable carrying two big heavy backpacks down the highway. It took Gin little time to find a tuk-tuk, and soon we were on our way.

We got lost trying to find our way back to our new hotel. Last night when we discovered it, it was getting dark, and we approached it on foot from the beach, so we weren’t entirely sure where to turn off the main road. Gin got the woman driving the tuk-tuk to turn down the street she thought it was, but when they arrived at a swanky resort’s circular driveway, she realized they were in the wrong place. So back to the main road we went and a couple hundred meters down was the right road. Unfortunately, Ric lost sight of Gin and the tuk-tuk when he got stuck behind a pick-up truck, and he drove right past the road to our hotel while still looking ahead for Gin and trying to catch-up. While he went off a kilometer or three past the right road, Gin sat in front of the hotel waiting for him to catch up. At first she thought he was just driving slowly, then that he had got stuck behind a really slow truck or something, then she thought he might have driven past the road… After 10 minutes her thoughts were turning a little darker, and with images of a broken and bleeding Ric in her mind she was getting more and more nervous. Just as she was standing up to stash the bags and go search for Ric in Koh Lanta’s ditches, there he was driving up the road, looking sheepish in his goofy blue helmet. Phew!

Our new hotel costs us the same as our old one, but it comes with some additional perks. Both places have air conditioning, but the new place has hot water, a TV (on which we watched Sen. Obama give a rousing speech today), two chairs and a coffee table, a make-up table, soap, and much friendlier staff. It is also on a nicer beach that is bigger, and much less rocky. Plus, there are at least three dogs in the area that have made friends with us, and now chaperone us around the place.

After watching Obama’s speech, we went for lunch on the beach where we watched some cute, young Swedish girls suntanning in their bikinis, while their mother (not so cute or young) suntanned without her bikini. We were annoyed that of all the people to break the Thai taboo against nude sunbathing, it had to be a rather, um, well-fed and sunburned old lady. The Swedes, old and young, were not the only ones enjoying the beach this afternoon. All through our lunch we watched two of our aforementioned canine chaperones dig holes in the sand under the dining tables and flop down into them, only to jump up a few minutes later in search of a cooler place to dig and sleep. We wondered why they didn’t just go for a swim in the ocean which was only a few meters away.

After lunch we headed into town to go shopping, book a snorkeling trip for tomorrow, and look for our friend Pink. On his way to buy a sarong/towel/beach blanket, Ric saw some big cloth hammocks. Although the material was slightly coarser than most sarongs, and it was more than double the size, he figured it could serve multiple purposes. We bought that, a sarong for Gin (that she didn’t really need, but it was awfully pretty), and a new bikini (for Gin, not Ric).

Once we finished shopping we went to find our friend Pink at the dive shop. She had just gotten back from a day on the boat, and after she went and showered we headed out for dinner together. During dinner Pink taught us how to make lime sodas (limes, sugar, a little salt, and soda water), and promised to teach us how to cook other Thai food if we’re interested.

After we ate we caught a taxi back to our hotel (the taxi was expensive, even with a Thai person bargaining for us!) and now, after we see if Obama is still on TV, we have to go to bed so that we can be well-rested for our snorkeling trip tomorrow!