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| From Koh Chang Island |
On the day after Christmas we got up early to try and catch some more family members before they went to bed on Christmas night back home. I had also agreed to go with Eric to rent a motobike and tool around the island all day. The island's interior is a national park and has several waterfalls that you can visit and swim around. However, despite his excitement about the bike rental, Eric was complaining of bug bites all over his feet. He's right, his entire foot is covered in little red bites and now I get to listen to him complain about how much they itch and how they kept him up last night. I look down and realize I've got them all over my legs but I hadn't even noticed them before he said something (although to be fair I had fewer bites and they were spread out). Plus, they're all flat, not raised like bug bites should be so we really aren't sure exactly what they caused them. I tell him that maybe the water will help and sometimes you just have to ignore them. With that put aside for the moment and with our swimsuits on and some new sunscreen (not waterproof) we struck out.
While I was still talking to family at an Internet cafe, Eric left for the rental place and arrived to pick me up. We left for the first waterfall with me clinging as tightly as I could. As we rolled up, we had to pay a little girl (maybe 3 or 4) 10 baht to park our motobike, and then we had to pay to get in to see the waterfalls! All trip people had been talking about the water falls but we had no idea we had to pay to see them (we should have figured, its Thailand afterall). And you have to pay to see each one individually, 200 baht each person, each waterfall. So after huffing about it we paid and then the guy tells us that this ticket will get us into one other waterfall on the other side of the island. Yeah, that helps a lot. At any rate, we hiked along up to the falls and found lots of people swimming and hanging out in the sun. We jumped in and tried to catch our breaths against the cold but it was fun. We were also the only ones who reapplied sunscreen after we dried off (I'm so my mother's daughter). So we hiked back with Eric still trying to convince me to got to the next one. The problem was getting there on the motobike. We were staying on the west side of the island and the other waterfall was on the northeast side. The road around the north end of the island was very hilly and curvy and I was not all that excited about speeding around with just a helmet on (full body padding did not come included with the rental). However, with the promise to turn around if I got too scared we took off in search for lunch and the next waterfall.
We saw a sign for a Mexican restaurant and stopped (I don't think anyone really understands how much we miss Mexican food) but it was closed so we went next door and had some really bad cashew chicken stir fry. Down the road we flew, braking almost to the point of stopping a couple of times as we tried to navigate our way down the zig zag path.
We made it successfully on the other side of the island which isn't nearly as built up as the western side. It was a nice little motobike drive actually and we made it to the 2nd waterfall successfully. It was a 4 tiered waterfall and we enjoyed climbing the rocks and getting underneath it. We took some great pictures of it. As we were leaving an entire school of Thai kids came and completely overran the place as they were jumping off the rocks we dared not to. Kids are fearless.
We rested in the afternoon and decided to actually find some decent seafood that night. We drove in the dark up and down the hills on the south of the island and couldn't really find a place we liked, so we settled for this rather large English Pirate Pub. Interestingly enough, this restaurant was actually owned by a Russian and the entire place was soon full of Russians. Go figure. A 2 man band played American and Russian songs and we enjoyed the fire twillers as we ate a great seabass (head and tail included) and grilled vegetables.
Great day and great evening overall as we left our little Russian experience with a story to tell.
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