In the South!

On Monday Caitlin and I set off on a school trip with some of the teachers from NaKaePitthayakhom. We went to possibly the furthest away place that we could without leaving Thailand - Phuket! After being told that the bus would leave the school at 4.30am, Caitlin and I decisded to deliberately not get much sleep beforehand so that we would get on the bus and instantly fall asleep. Unfortunately, this plan failed because a) the bus didn't leave until about 6am and b) as soon as we were on the bus the teachers decided that Thai Karaoke would be a fantastic idea! As I'm sure I have mentioned, Thai Karaoke has two volume settings - off and max. It was at max. Caitlin and I had brought a DVD of "Mamma Mia: The Movie" in the hope that at some point during the 35 hour bus journey we would be able to watch it. After eventually convincing the driver that if he stopped pressing buttons the DVD would load, we got to watch it. Well, we got to watch about half of it before the school's Director came up and said that they were turning it off because they wanted more karaoke, and they couldn't understand it because it was English! I found it a but annoying that in a 35 hour journey they couldn't deal with 2 hours of an English film, but hey ho!

We eventually arrived at Koh Pang Nga and went straight into the days activities! We visited markets galore of course, and went to the "James Bond Island" which is very beautiful. I decided to sit on a big rock and get my photo taken with the island in the background, and ended up dropping my shoe down the side of the rock... got it back though, managed to rope some kids into climbing down to retrieve it for me :) The rest of the day was filled with visiting a lovely temple and another lovely market, then heading on to Phuket to check into the hotel. After eating, we all went to bed. Well, actually, most people went to bed, but Caitlin managed to find Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix in English on the TV, so we stayed up to watch that. Then we slept.

The next day started at 6am with a wake-up call from the hotel. Since breakfast wasn't untl 7am, we decided to continue sleeping until 6.40am. This resulted in about 4 missed calls from the head of English, Kru Nid (who is strangely punctual for a Thai...) and another hotel wake up call. We were still down to breakfast at about 7am though! After breakfast, it was time to take a boat to Maya Bay, past Koh Phi Phi for snorkeling! The fish were beautiful, but unfortunetly most of the coral had been killed - I suppose that is typical of a tourist snorkelling spot. We then went back to Koh Phi Phi for lunch, and got to wander round the island a bit.

That evening we had a party in the hotel and of course ots of Thai Karaoke, but the disk was realy old so they didn't have many English songs that we knew. We spent most of the evening playing with the kids (once they got used to the fact that we were "farang' and stopped being scared of us :P) wth balloons and generally acting like a 9 year old! Much fun!

The school eft the following morning, but Caitlin and I stayed on Phuket for a couple of days to explore and ended up staying at Patong Beach. It was really nice, and I loved swimming in the sea!

At the moment we are in Krabi, trying to find a way to either Railay Beach or a temple with monkeys... aah, decisions decisions!

I will try to keep updating when I can, but I doubt I'll be able to upload photos because of the time it takes to upload them. More often than not the only internet I can use will be in an internet cafe.