Goodbye, Ko Lanta!

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With just one more day left, it's time to wrap up my blogs on Ko Lanta. I've already written a blog about the first ten days at Somewhere Else Bungalows, and another blog about our three weeks "flashpacking" at Good Days Resort at the other end of the beach during Christmas.



Our final few weeks were spent back at the northern end of the beach, this time staying at Best House. It's located right behind Somewhere Else Bungalows so we could still go there every morning to eat our breakfast on a platform overlooking the beach. It was nice to be back. While it was handy to have a pool at Good Days Resort, it was nicer to be back at the best part of the beach. Location, location, location! My parents also moved into a room at the same guesthouse, making it easier to coordinate ourselves.



One thing that we struggled with was naps. Jake had been taking good 2+ hour long naps but suddenly in the New Year, he started to resist. He'd say "Skip nap" and "What's Kyla doing?" In the end we decided it was easier to just drop his naps, go to bed earlier, and see how it went. It all went ok until we moved back to the "cool" end of the beach, where there were more fun toys restaurants, grandparents, and fire shows, all making it more tempting to stay out "late." After a while the tiredness built up in Jake and he was pretty much a cranky mess most of the time. There was nothing else to do but to reinstate naps. It's kind of a pain to waste all afternoon inside the room, but at least we could get in a few more fire shows (that was my incentive to get him to nap!)



Speaking of Jake, he has at this point practically potty trained himself, thanks in part to those little magic beans called M&Ms. He now tells me when he needs to go most of the time, but we still put him in diapers (which are like pull ups here anyway) whenever we go out, just in case! I guess we should just take the plunge and try ditching the diapers. Maybe after the upcoming travel days?..



Along the same lines, Kyla had refused to use a "big toilet" for almost a year before our trip, preferring to use a potty only. She'd had a bad experience in Nordstrom's with automatic flushing toilets and had never recovered. It was such a pain and we really wanted to break her of this phobia on the trip. Africa wasn't the place to do it as we needed a potty for in the car anyway, so Asia was our goal. We told her that they didn't have potties in Asia, and we couldn't fit ours on the plane, so she'd have no choice. The M&Ms strategy also helped! Now I look back and laugh. There are no automatic flushing toilets here to worry about, but she uses toilets that are pretty grotty without flinching, including traditional Asian style squat toilets!



But I digress, now back to Ko Lanta. We spent our time making sand castles, eating and drinking right on the sand (no annoying main road to deal with anymore), swimming, and not much else!



We did rent a "truck tuk" with driver one day for a trip around the island to see some different beaches, and another day we went to a children's festival in the park. Later that day, Kyla and Jake got to paint a batik of Picachu (a Pokémon) for free in honor of children's day. It was a cute project but there's no way Pokémon is going to grace my walls at home ever. I thought it would be fun to design a nicer batik and have it as a souvenir from our trip. I copied an image of rainbow fish, handed it in, and a couple of days later the sketching and waxing was done and it was ready to be painted. The kids had fun painting it, and when they were done, it was taken away to be washed, set, and dried. It was then returned to us the next day. All this for just 50 baht! (Less than $2)



A couple of days ago we bid farewell to grandma and grandpa as they left to start their journey back home. We had just a few days left ourselves before heading out to our next adventure: The Philippines. I hope it's a good as Ko Lanta was!



*** Please scroll down for more photos ***

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