Koh Chang, Thailand

After reaching the Thai border by taxi, we passed on foot and Ken displayed his best travel intuition skills as a local attempted to scam us out of $40.  Luckily Ken found us a minibus to the city of Trat instead of an overpriced ride with a tour company.  We arrived at the seaside town as the rain started to fall.  Jumping into the back of a pickup truck, the driver raced down the broken highway to the boat landing.  We had zero minutes to spare as we nearly missed the last ferry to the island of Koh Chang - on the eastern Gulf side.  The boat was filled with screaming boy scouts hitting each other with empty water bottles - seriously, twelve year old boys are another species (and yet the same everywhere in the world).  Arriving in the dark, we hopped another taxi and found our way through the rolling hills to the Paradise Palms Guesthouse on the western shore.  (The taxi was over capacity, so Ken stood hanging out the back on the tailgate).  The bungalows were quite nice, although, gasp! no Internet.  

We spent the next few days exploring the island by scooter - including a broken kickstand spring incident.  As a short term remedy, we used our camera string to hold up the kickstand so it wouldn’t shoot sparks as it drug on the blacktop.  To save a little money, on the latter days we only rented one scooter so we shared the ride (think Dumb and Dumber style).  Then we got a flat tire, but luckily we were only 200 meters from town (walking in the 100 degree heat) where a repair shop sold us a new tire for $3.

The island was one of our favorites as it had plenty of restaurants/stores/amenities but wasn’t overly crowded with partying kids.  For Super Bowl Sunday... err, Super Bowl Monday due to the time difference... we woke up at 6:30am and watched the game live at an Irish bar while eating eggs and bacon and hanging with the other Americans on the island.  We didn’t see any of the TV ads though, as the broadcast was commercial free, except for a few ads for Malaysian football.  

We love this place.  Somehow this country just sucks us in like quick sand... it’s impossible to leave!