Hotel Thaikamala Village Kathu

<br><br>Arrive LAX 10:10 pm 10/29 Oh my gosh, I can&#8217;t believe I am actually doing this! <br><br>Well everything went smoothly at the airport and I had ample time before my flight so I exchanged my money. 400 US for 12,000 baht, pretty nice exchange rate! And strolled around for a while.<br><br>The flight from LAX to Hong Kong was 15 hours long, fortunately I was able to sleep/rest for about the first 7 hours!. After that I watched The proposal, listened to music ...

... as we had a hot shower for the first time in a couple of weeks!<br><br>Next stop was Phuket, the town itself has nothing to it so we headed to the beaches and stayed on Karon Beach. You can't swim here at this time of the year and I could see why as the waves are huge and the current so strong, I just went in above my knees and could feel the pull! The waves made this place though as the next day we headed along to the ...

Friday right after school I was off to the airport to head down to Phuket. I spent the night at a really cozy townhouse off the main strip. It was really comfortable and I was the only one there, which was good and bad. The following morning I was supposed to get picked up at 6:30 by the scuba company to head out to the live aboard with South Siam Diving- a boat I was staying on and doing diving all day. They had the wrong hotel name for me though ...

... with them for the duration of the tour. The tour began by docking near monkey beach and we were instructed that we should swim to shore (a small boat was provided for non-swimmers). The swim was actually quite far - at least two or three hundred yards (don't quote me on that - I'm terrible at estimating distance). Despite spending the majority of my high school afternoons in a swimming pool, I had never swam in the ocean before. It was a welcome challenge to make it to shore. Once ...

... to the most amazing scenery I think we can safely say we've ever seen. The morning comprised of canoeing, with our own canoeist, who took us through caves where we had to lie down in the canoe in order to negotiate the stallectites hanging down from the rocks. The experience was surreal to say the least, and was somehow made even more amazing when our canoer took us into one particular cave and asked us if we wanted to swim. Both a bit confused on where ...

... of its room, so we had to sit in the lobby to charge all the electronic equipment. Around noon the next day, we walked to the share taxis which run to all of Phuket's beaches from Phuket town (but not between the different beaches unfortunately). The price for the taxis to Patong Beach had increased from the 2005 cost (15 baht) to 25 baht per ride, but this is still a much cheaper option than the tuk-tuk drivers offered. Unfortunately this bus only runs until around 17 ...

... feet below, somewhere in the inky blue sea, just before you hurl yourself off that jagged volcanicesque cliff (twice) to find her, landing with a thunderous CLAP and an empty promise. This is also a land that gifts, in sorry consolation, two right sandals, one red and at least six sizes too small, the other black and fleecy and snapped in half, for your scraped left foot. This is a land that permits your walking around the largest city in the region all day, all ...

... along the way. We get into a smaller boat and are taken into the caves to explore the insides. Some of the caves you have to stay in the boat and look around with flashlights, torches as they are called here, at the bats and stalagmites on the ceilings. Other caves are dry and you can walk around in them exploring them and some of them actually come out on the inside of the island in a little secluded lagoon called a 'hong'. It was something right out of ...

Sunday April 13, Songkran (Thai New Year day), year 2551 (Buddhist) It is the big new year's holiday time here. It's 5 days of vacation all over the country. The main celebration is spraying water on each other. Big, powerful water guns, huge tubs of water with plastic bowls (like in the bathroom to flush the old non-flushing toilets), hoses, spraying anyone who passes by, on foot motorbike open truck etc. Some things I saw: Middle aged ...

... Everton commentating on a snooker match was just bizzare! I also bumped into live coverage of France Vs Ireland last night which was a bonus! Yesterday (Saturday) I had a real palava tring to get a flight ticket back from Phuket to Bangkok to catch my Monday flight back home. I finally managed to sort it after almost giving up and opting for a 12 hour bus ride back up north, and have booked a flight for tonight at 11pm to Bangkok where ...