7/3/2011 - 7/4/2011
Chiang Mai to Bangkok to Koh Chang
Today started with sleeping in until about 10am. I still wasn't feeing the best, but the sleep helped quite a bit. We had decided to leave Chaing Mai in the evening and head to Koh Chang for a few days. Koh Chang is an isand in the Gulf of Thailand near the Cambodian border. Anyway, so we got up and got some breakfast on the street, as usual. Coffee and fruit. :) Then we packed our bags up and checked out of the hostel; however, they let us leave our bags in their storager room for a little while so we didn't have to lug them around all day.
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| The front of the hostel. This was the "common area" and the reception |
We then grabbed a quick snack from a street vendor before our friend (the one who picked us up from the airport) picked us up to go to church with him and his family. They have a church service at their house every week and invite students from a local Bible college as well as other members. Since Bridget and I were in Chiang Mai, they invited us and we were excited to go. The service was mostly in Thai, although one of the students translated the sermon for us so we could follow along. :) And the singing was all in Thai. And the interesting thing about Thai is that it is a symbolic language not a phonetic language. So, they had 2 Thai hymnals; one with the symbolic Thai script and the other with the phonetic pronunciation of the script. So, they all sung from the symbolic hymnal and we sung with the phonetic hymnal. Pretty cool. The phonetic one was still hard to read with double accents and subscripts and all, but we could do our best to follow along. :)
After the church service, we all stayed for lunch. We laid down a long row of newspaper on the floor and placed the food on it. Then we (about 20-25 of us) all sat on the floor around the food and ate. We had sticky rice, chicken, and papaya salad. The sticky rice was AMAZING. It was so sticky you used your fingers to eat it. You just kind of grabbed a wad and pulled it from the large pile in the bowl. It was so cool! The chicken was great too. The papaya salad was kind of spicy, so Bridget didn't try much of it. I had a small pile, but not as much as everyone else. But there was so much food that Bridget and I were totally stuffed by the time we were done. I am waiting for my friend to send me a picture that was taken during lunch, but I don't have it yet.
Anyway, after lunch we just kind of hung out the rest of the afternoon and early evening. The Bible students were eager to practice their English, so Bridget and I were independently surrounded with students wanting to talk. So we talked about all kinds of things and really enjoyed learning about them, their families, their studies at the Bible college, and sharing about ourselves. Right before we went to the train station, my friend got us some mango sticky rice for dessert. We had heard about this before and wanted to try before we left Chiang Mai. The dessert is mango pieces mixed with sticky rice and drizzled with a sweet coconut sauce. Needless to say, it was pretty good. Definitely on the sweet side, but really good. We both were still stuffed from lunch, but we still ate a whole serving. :) We saved the other for the train ride. :)
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| Mango sticky rice! |
Anyway, after putting down the mango sticky rice, our friend took us to the train station and dropped us off. We were about half an hour early for our train, which ended up being half an hour late, so we had a good hour of standing in the train station. :)
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| Don't worry, if the train is going too fast, the elephant will stop it! |
Once the train arrived, we got our seats and began the 14-hr journey to Bangkok.
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| Our seats for the next 14 hours... |
The trip was relatively uneventful and we both slept quite a bit. I remember coming in and out of sleep a few times and then waking up a few hours from Bangkok. Once we made it to the Bangkok area, we sat just outside of the main train station for a good 45 minutes for no apparent reason. We may have been waiting for a space in the station, but nobody said anything. Oh well. Once we got off of the train, we had to take the subway to the bus station to catch a bus to the ferry to Koh Chang. So, after a 20-min subway ride, we made it to the bus station and got bus tickets. 5 hours later, we were dropped off on the side of the road outside of a small building. The lady inside was selling ferry tickets, so we got out ferry tickets from her. Since we hadn't booked a room, she booked the cheapest room she knew of for us. She said we could try it for a night and go somewhere else if we wanted. So, we took the chance of getting scalped for one night in exchange for knowing where we were staying and avoiding the pain of having to find something once we got there (it was mid-afternoon by now).
After getting all of that set up, we took a taxi to the jetty and boarded the ferry. Koh Chang isn't very far from the mainland, so the ferry was only about 25 minutes.
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| Bridget on the lookout! |
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| The "Welcome to Koh Chang" sign. We made it! |
Once we got off, we got a taxi to take us to our place. It was a very nice bungalow less than 100 yards from the water. And it was clean and had a TV and air condition. Everything except wifi. Their wifi satellite dish had gotten struck by lightening recently, so it wasn't working. Kind of a bummer for the whole blogging thing, but oh well. Anyway, we grabbed some dinner at a place not too far from the bungalow. We got a hawaiian pizza because it was cheaper than individual dishes. The pizza was ok, but the pineapple tasted a little old. But it was still good for weary travelers like ourselves. :) After dinner, it was lights out after a long 24 hours of travel. :)
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