I never did post anything about my travels at the beginning of this year - for some reason I didn't feel any motivation to do so...
Let me briefly summarize (links to pictures are below the recap at the bottom of this post):
Our first beach bungalow; Koh Lipe, ThailandEric Carter, my friend and roommate from A&M, came to visit me in Korea right before New Years. We spent a couple of days looking around Korea, partied it up on New Years Eve, and took off for Singapore on January 1st.
We spent a couple of days in Singapore (plenty of time for such a small place, in my opinion) and headed up to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia.
KL was OK. When we asked taxi drivers what was the one thing we shouldn't miss while we were there, they always said, "the women". Interesting that they thought we were there for the hookers...
But we were really in the mood for beach/scuba/sun, so after a couple of days in the Malaysian capital we took off to an island off the Northwest coast of Malaysia called Langkawi.
Langkawi was a wonderful little island, though the water quality wasn't that great so we didn't do any scuba diving. We did hang out on the beach a bit and spent our evenings at Babylon Mat Lounge where we listened to reggae and relaxed. We also rented motorbikes (my first experience on them) to tour the island. My personal favorite was a place called 7 Wells, which was a series of pools at the top of a mountain that you could swim in. The pools were all connected by a flowing stream, and after the last well the stream ran over a cliff into a waterfall.
After another couple of days there, we decided it was time to hit up Thailand and took a speedboat to Koh Lipe, where they had an immigration "office" (a hut on the beach) and we could get our passports stamped. Koh Lipe had beautiful snorkeling and all the amenities that one could need while playing tourist: Except an ATM. Go figure… So we budgeted, and got charged a 7 percent fee for using our cards, and enjoyed the hell out of our little beachside bungalow that we rented for about $8 a night. We also went scuba diving for the first time on the trip, and rest assured it was so much better than Korean diving that it doesn't even compare.
From there we took another boat to Koh Muk, an island that we chose to go to because it had the Emerald Cave, which we had heard about from other travelers. Emerald Cave is a tunnel in the rocks of the island that can only be reached during low tide. You swim 50-75 meters in darkness (your guide brings a torch light) and it opens into a ‘cave’ that looks like a hollowed out volcano. The sky is open, and there are trees and a beach inside… you’d have NO idea it was there by passing by in a boat, and possibly even if you were flying over you wouldn’t see it because the trees inside would blend in with the trees outside.
Other than the cave, there wasn’t much to see on the island. So we took a boat to Koh Lanta. Lanta, to this point, was probably the most “touristy” place we had been… but was one of the most laid back places as well. For that reason alone it was one of my favorite islands. We again rented motorbikes to tour the island. We went on an elephant trek (don’t judge) and went on a tour of Tiger Cave (pics in the links below, or course).
After a few days there, it was time to head to Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, so Eric could catch his flight back home. So far I had been traveling for about 2 weeks.
So here I am, traveling all alone after Eric leaves. Except not at all… Pat, one of the teachers in Yangsan (where I taught in Korea) was traveling in Thailand at the same time and we met up the very day that Eric left. We spent the night in Bangkok, and the next day took a flight to Koh Samui to do some diving.
Koh Samui is one of the most obnoxious tourist islands I’ve been on. It’s really not that bad, but there are SO many tourists and SO many advertisements. Everyone is trying to sell you something, and McDonald’s is usually only 5 minutes away – which is a shame because Thai food is seriously some of the best food that you can eat on this planet.
But the diving near Samui was pretty good. Pat and I hung out for about a week, checking out the island and diving. There wasn’t much in Samui to talk about, and since most of what we did was diving, the pictures can explain what we saw well enough (:
After a week with Pat, he had to leave to go back to Korea. So here I am again by myself. But only for a couple of days, because Kelly was traveling in Thailand by that point as well and she came to meet me in Koh Samui. I picked her up at the airport on a motorbike, and the 2 of us, with all her luggage, safely (surprisingly) rode back to our room off Chaweng Beach. The next day we took a boat to Koh Tao (an island really close by) where all we did, literally, was go diving with Big Blue.
The first day we went on a couple of fun dives, and the second day we started our Advanced Open Water scuba course. (Basically that means we are certified to go deeper and dive at night, it’s just a step up from the regular scuba certification). Big Blue runs an AMAZING organization – it’s so organized and friendly. Their staff is cool and is super helpful and knowledgeable, and the diving is great. Being there made me seriously consider coming back to Big Blue to get my Dive Master certification just so I could hang out with cool people and dive in cool places!! I even left my new iPod in our room when we checked out and they were kind enough to mail it all the way back to the US for me! If you ever go to Koh Tao and want to dive, the only place you should consider is Big Blue....
So after about 10 of diving Kelly and I headed back home to Korea to finish out our last 2 weeks of the fall semester (yes, it was February by this time… yes Korea’s school system is weird). And in the end I went from having about 10 dives before I started my vacation, to having about 40 dives after.
It was a fantastic vacation, but overall, it was just that… a vacation. Which is why I didn’t really care about updating this thing. It was just a really fun time (: Check out the pictures, and be on the look-out for another update soon!
Pictures, separated by places:
Singapore
Malaysia
Thailand
Thailand - Diving
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