For Peter's birthday on the 16th we decided to head to Koh Lanta, yet another beautiful Thai island. We caught a quick ferry ride (about 2 hours) to the island and on the boat, met a guy promoting his family's hotel--The Blue Andaman Resort. The rooms looked decent, location sounded good, he was willing to offer us a discounted "birthday price" and it was a free taxi ride to check it out, no strings attached. Most importantly, the guy was nice so we decided we ...

Phuket, pronounced Pu-ket for all you gutter-brains out there, is a town in southern Thailand. Phuket itself didn't have much to offer, other than a refuge during the tsunami evacuation. Other than that, our time was spent in the beach area of Patong. We spent April 13th-16th here enjoying the beach and catching up with friends. We didn't do much in Patong other than "catch up on life days" (laundry, errands, future travel planning, trying to fix my darn back/...

It's true. And I got away with it. Let me explain. See there's this little holday called Songkran and it's the New Year celebration in Thailand and surrounding countries. It's celebrated April 13-15th (ish). Each city has a day that the festival is celebrated and some have multiple days (Bandkok has 3, Chang Mai 5!) As with most holidays, although it started out with religious significance, it has now progressed into a massive fun-fest. In Thailand's case, ...

Spent my birthday on "The Beach!" If you haven't seen the movie, you should. If that's not enough endorsement, know that it has Leonardo DiCaprio in it, in a bathing suit, a lot. That should be motivation enough. It's a movie about a secret beach island in Thailand. We went to said beach....on my birthday! It's a place called Maya Bay Beach, and it's where they filmed the movie. It's a national park and is not so secret anymore. At least not during the day...

So turns out 6 and 3 are the "same same" here...my bus didn't actually arrive to the Phuket bus station until almost 7pm. (see last blog entry for full story) by this point, however, I had bigger problems than running a few hours late. See, as we were heading into town, the girl on front of me got a call from her friends warning her that she should not go to the beach because there was a tsunami warning! Apparently an 8.6 earthquake had hit Indonesia a few hours...