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Published: March 16th 2008
Oh one thing that I forgot to mention is that my travel insurance didn't cover the food poisoning, both my work international insurance and the extra Blue Cross insurance that I paid $300 for declined the medical expenses! Luckily Thailand is so cheap that even medical care is cheap and the whole thing cost me $120 including prescriptions. Blue Cross will be hearing from me when I get back!
Anyways, so I decided to stay 6 days in Ko Tao...it was just too beautiful to leave. Most of my days were filled with being a beach bum (though I'm still not really tanned!) and chilling on the beach bars at night. Whats cool is that a lot of the restaurants also play movies on the beach (even ripped/downloaded new movies), stores everywhere selling the same old thing (which is why there is a t-shirt you can find everywhere in Thailand that says "Same Same, maybe different"), and the local 7 Eleven. There's also about 10 different bars on the beach but the one that everyone eventually heads to is Lotus Bar, complete with the guys that spin quarter staffs on fire and globes of fire attached to chains all night.
The past couple of nights I met a slew of different people, 3 girls from the UK, a group of 8 Americans who just ended their organized tour of 2 months going through Cambodia, Vietnam and Lao, but the most fun and interesting was these 2 Italians I met who were a breath of fresh air from all the British punks running around everywhere (Indy I wasn't impressed with your kind). Anyways, Lucia was 26, soon to be 27 in a couple of weeks and she's an international buyer for Bally's (high end fashion line...for those that don't know, including me before I met her) looking after the entire European market. She used to be a buyer for Armani, Dolce Gabbana, went to all the swanky party's and fashion shows, not a bad life! Giuseppe, Lucia's colleague, also works for Bally's in the finance dept and got nicknamed "the princess" by Lucia (I helped with the translation) since he had to only stay in the highest end rooms and kept complaining about a little cut on his foot.
Anyways long story short they were a blast to hang out with. Lucia and I took the boat taxi over
to Ko Nangyuan for the day, which is 3 tiny islands connect by a small but absolutely beautiful beach. I actually ran into Remmy (my one and only Canadian that I met in Bangkok) who was staying on the 1 and only resort on Ko Nangyuan paying only $20 a night as apposed to $80 since he knew the owner of the island.
This morning I decided to go for a "real" Thai massage, not the foo-foo ones where they play soft music but ones that contort you into the different positions to fix my knee, and back and other injuries I got when I awoke on the floor from passing out from the food poisoning. So I asked around and I found the "master" on the island. This little Thai man was about half my height and probably 50 lbs less, how can he give a real Thai massage? Well let's just say that was the most painful thing I've ever experienced...it was a mix of chiropractic, and very very deep tissue pressure points using his elbows, feet, heals, etc to work out all the stiffness but after 1.5 hours of bones cracking, grunting (I scared away the
children paying beside us), I was a new man (headache gone and felt loose and limber). So much so, that I was actually able to take my first Mauy Thai lesson. Pok was my instructor and this guy (about the size of the Thai "master"), loved taunting me, since he could tell that I took martial arts before. I surprised him a couple of times but I have no doubt this little feather-weight could have kicked my butt...plus I was completely out of breath, soaked in sweat after an hour and he was still taunting me without a drop of sweat and running around me in circles. Man I need to be back into shape!
Tomorrow I'm checking out of this little paradise and heading to Ko Samui to meet up with Graeme at the airport there for the next 8 days!
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Jen
non-member comment
Wow!
The pics look amazing, Dave! Keep the stories coming...look forward to reading the next batch! Stay safe. J