Home soil!

After 20 hours of flying we arrived back in the good ole´ USA! We were very excited to see the first familiar faces we had seen in 7 months, when Kristin´s parents met us at the hotel. First things first, we got a couple of hot dogs from a street vender, and grabbed some food at the hotel. It was great to talk about our trip with someone, and we exchanged the multitude of stuff that they brought us, and that we brought back. The next day after waking up about 4 a.m. we could not go back to sleep, since it was about 4 p.m. to us in Thailand time, we went out to get some food and walk around the city. Ben also got measurements taken for a tux for a wedding when we get back. Glad to say the measurements were a little different than they were for our wedding in May, 4 inches off the waiste is a nice change! NYC was very cold, compared to what we were used to in Asia. Later that night we went out for some great huge steaks, something we could never find on the trip! Finally we had to pack all the stuff that the Shulers had brought from home, including all the camping and fly fishing gear. Before we went to the airport we went for one last meal at Carnagie Deli, which were the biggest sandwiches we have ever seen. We could only eat about half of them, and the leftovers actually made it all the way to Argentina! We had a great time in the city, and a special thanks to Uncle Dick for hooking us up with the great hotel rooms - the best we have had in A WHILE!!!

Back to the Islands!

After a hectic day and a half of travel, going from minibus > Plane > Taxi > Overnight Train > Bus > Boat....we got to the island of Koh Tao in the gulf of Thailand. This was a very small island that was only about 21 kilometers around. The island is known for its diving, and that is the reason that we came down. We found a nice dive shop that offered us 4 free nights accomodation if we signed up for their Advanced open water course. We took them up on the offer, and signed up for the 5 dive course to get our advanced diver certificate, since we had just gotten our basic certificate in Vietnam. Our hotel was on a beautiful beach, even if the room was roasting hot with no A/c. It had to be close to 98 degrees during the day. Our first two dives were the navigation and buoyancy dives, which are the more technical dives of the advanced course. They were easy enough, and we saw some great fish and corals. The water clarity was much, much clearer than in Vietnam. The next two dives were our deep dive which we went to 30 meters, and our fish identification dive. The deep dive turned out to be a bust, because our instructor got lost and we went off course and didn´t get to the coral that was supposed to have a bunch of sharks and fish. He was very upset, and ended up feeling so bad that they let us have two more dives the next day, so we could do another deep dive and actually see something. That night we went on our night dive. This is a completely different experience than a day dive, and was by far one of the best of the 7 dives we did. The colors on the coral at night are much more livid than in the day, and all the corals come out. Some of the people on our dive had a barracuda hunting over their shoulder, using their flashlight to hunt by. The barracuda snatched a fish from right under their light as they shined it on a fish. The next day we went back to do another deep dive, and it turned out that this was our favorite dive by far. There were big bull sharks that would swim withing 5-10 ft. of us, and were very curious. We also saw huge schools of barracuda, and some giant grouper that were about 5 ft. and around 300lbs.

After the dives we spent the next two days just laying around the beach, and getting a tan(massive burn)! The last night we went out to the bars, and ended up meeting up with a big group of people from the dive shop who were celebrating one of the instructors birthdays. After the bar they told us to follow them to a suprise for the birthday boy. They had reserved some room at the Thai lady boy Cabaret! Although skeptical at first, this ended up being absolutely hillarious. Some of them were pretty convincing....some were not! We had a group of about 25, and at the end they pulled up some of the guys, luckily not me, and made them dress up and dance with the lady boys to YMCA! It was a great time!

Anyway, that was the last stop in South East Asia, and next we headed back to Bangkok, via Boat, Train, Bus. We had one day in Bangkok, and we went back to the weekend market, and went to a Muay Thai fight the last night.
That puts an end to Asia, and the next morning we headed to the airport for our Bangkok > Hong Kong > NYC flights.

Relaxing in Pai

Pai is a pretty small town in the mountains. It has one main highway that runs through it and a couple roads that branch off from the highway to make up the town. We found a cute place to stay that had bungalows right on the river (ours had a waterwheel in front) and a huge deck for hanging out. We were able to relax and hang out on our first day there before booking our ticket to get another 15 days on our Visa. That turned out to be a hell of a day. We thought that because Pai was closer to the Burma border it would take less time than going from Chaing Mai - WRONG! We had to wake up at 4 am to drive 3 hours to Chaing Mai, pick up other people that needed to go to Burma, head north again for another 3 hours to get to the border, leave Thailand, pay for a Burmese visa, leave Burma, re-enter Thailand for another 15 day visa, drive 3 hours back to Chaing Mai and then another 3 hours to Pai. We didn´t get back until 8 pm.; had dinner and crashed. We had a relaxing day after that of sleeping in, just eating, drinking on the deck and reading our books all day. It was lovely! At night our place has a campfire that people hangout at which was nice for us just to walk out of our room to a bar next to a fire.

Around the town there are a bunch of waterfalls and a hot springs you can check out. We rented a moto to go see the waterfalls and hot springs. The hot springs had a place that got to 80ºC and little kids were boiling eggs in it - not sure hot sanitary that is, but funny to see. We hung around the hot springs for a while, but it was just too hot outside to really enjoy it. So we left to see a waterfall that had big boulders in the middle of the stream you could walk out onto. It looked like a great place to just spend a day so we parked it until it is was close to sunset. Most of the rest of our days consisted of our first relaxing day: eating at different restaurants, listening to bands, drinking on the deck or next to the camp fire, and reading books. The people at our place were friendly and we met some pretty cool other travelers - some were not so cool though. One woman was bashing America and Ben asked her if she had ever been there. When she said no, he basically told her that she had no room to judge. We heard a lot of those type of comments where people would generalize America in really stupid ways and have no real basis for their argument. Another guy tried to tell me that all American companies had each employee complete a blood test for drug screening. I tried to explain that was not normal because most companies would not want to pay that much for drug screenings. He was not buying it but I didn´t feel like arguing. We could see why a company might single him out for additional drug screenings by the way he looked. A lot of the other folks around the campfire were super nice and we got along with most of them, hanging out until the early hours of the morning.

We stayed in Pai for 6 days and loved every minute (aside from the visa run episode). We would have stayed longer but we decided we wanted to spend some time on the beach before we headed to NYC. It is supposed to be freezing in NYC, so we have to live up this heat while we can!

Back to Thailand!

Well, after quite a few hours of travelling we made it to Chaing Mai which is situated in Northern Thailand. We stayed at a place called Baan Nud-Kan that 2 Israeli girls told us about; the owner, Tao, was really nice and helpful plus the rooms were super clean. Chaing Mai has tons of cooking class options, so naturally we took 2. One was through a place called Baan Thai Cooking Class that was really cool. We had a good group and they walked you through cooking each individual dish, then you ate it before moving onto the next one. It took about 7 hours to go to the market and cook 6 different dishes plus they had a fridge full of beer - we had a great time! Dinner was not happening after we left there. The other we took was through Chaing Mai Cooking Class and we didn´t like it as much. They had it set up so you watched them cook the dish in a classroom setting then you went and cooked it on your own. It turned out to be hectic when you were trying to cook it on your own with them yelling "throw that in now" or "stir, stir, stir!". But they did teach us vegetable carving at the beginning - Ben can do amazing tomato roses or a tomato lotus. The great thing about both classes was you got a small cook book with a bunch of different recipes in it.

We also booked a 2 day hike through the jungle that included an elephant ride and rafting down the river. As we were going to our starting point, one guy that was in our tuk tuk continued to ask the guide why he was with all the people trying to do rafting and elephant riding when he signed up to do just trekking for 6 hours each day. The guide told him that we just started in the same place but he would go off and hike before us. When we arrived we did our elephant riding first. It was kind of cool, but sort of sad to see these massive animals chained to trees and just walking in a big circle around their "camp". Our elephant was the tallest and did not like dogs. While we were riding her, she started charging at a dog and trumpeting - it freaked me out, I

thought we were going to fall off her! They also had a baby elephant that was named James Bond that was too cute.

From our ride we walked about an hour towards the village we were going to stay at before a woman in our group decided it was too hard and hot so she wanted to turn back. We had to wait on the trail for about 45 minutes while our guide walked her back to the road and had someone come pick her up to bring her to the village. Why she thought the hike would be easy - and in jeans - is beyond me. Anyway, we hiked for about 4 hours stopping at a bat cave on the way. There were no bats there, just a cave. We stayed the night in a camp style bungalow with mattresses on the ground for us. The guy that signed up to hike got into it with the guide because he walked the same path we did and it only took him 2 1-2 hours. Not what he signed up for and apparently this was his second attempt at just trekking because the first time he got lumped into a big group doing all the other activities too. Our guide, Tuck, said he was going to kick his ass, but nothing came of it. Tuck made the guy sign a waiver basically stating he would not be refunded his money. The next day we hiked for about an hour before we hit a waterfall that we could swim at. The water was freezing but felt kinda good after hiking in the heat. Ben jumped off a cliff into a little lagoon along with Tuck and some other guide - there is a video on Flikr. The "rafting" part of our trip was just like bumper boats. We got into these 4 person inflatable rafts and just ran into a bunch of rocks to have them push us down stream; regardless of our guide saying "paddle, paddle". Not the most exciting rapids we have seen.

We made it back to Chaing Mai to see the Flower Parade that they have every year. Each float was covered in these wild orchids and other beautiful tropical flowers. Along the side of the road they had flower stalls with huge bouquets and the min roads were shut down. It was cool to watch, but way too hot to stand out there for a long period of time. Apparently the parade is a big deal each year which you can tell from all the preparation that goes into some of the floats. They had dancers out and about along with trucks following their float blaring music.

Our visas are just about expired so we have to make a run to the Burma border, cross over into Burma and come back to get another 15 days in Thailand. So we are heading to Pia which is further north and supposed to be a cool.