Monkey Islands

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Monkey Business

View from Ko Taleb

View from Ko Taleb Hi, this is Mike updating the blog.

One of the best things about Thailand is that you can buy a beer in the 7/11 for $1. In fact, everything is cheap. Our bungalow on the beach is less than $30. A nice meal in a restaurant is less than $10. A meal at a noodle cart is less than $1 for both of us.

Anyway, since we've been in Bophut, we've been doing stuff during the day and spending the evenings on our bungalow's patio drinking $1 Heinekens (or, in Melinda's case, $1.50 Bacardi coolers) and reading. The women in the massage hut on the beach know Melinda by name already ($5 for a one hour massage). Yesterday we took a boat trip to the Ang Thong National Marine Park and came across a large troupe of monkeys in the jungle. It was awesome - they weren't afraid of us (apparently because they have no predators on this particular island). They seemed to think Melinda's hair might be food. 😊 After spending a lot of time with the monkeys, we climbed up close to the top of the island and took a cool video. We look near death in the video because it was a hot day and a pretty steep climb (thankfully, the Thai Parks Department had ropes tied between trees to mark the path and let you haul yourself up as well).

Having spent my first ten days in Thailand attending a tobacco control conference and hearing about how wonderful and effective Thailand's tobacco control laws supposedly are, it was a bit of a disappointment to find that the laws don't seem to be enforced at all once you get outside Bangkok. The crew of our train (on the government owned railway) didn't lift a finger to stop people from smoking right under the no smoking signs (and the train crew themselves were smoking as well). People smoke anywhere they want, despite the national law banning indoor smoking in public places, and cigarette vendors display their wares openly despite the national law banning cigarette displays at point of sale.

Besides secondhand smoke everywhere, booking our trip back to Bangkok has been the only challenge in the past couple of days. Apparently, all you need to do to become a "travel agent" on Ko Samui is put a sign in your window and have a telephone line (which need not work reliably). You don't seem to need to know anything about travel options or how to book anything. We had to visit five travel agents before we found one who could book our return train trip to Bangkok. The good news is that we're booked on the overnight train on the 13th. We'll spend the 14th in Bangkok, or possibly on a day trip to the Bridge over the River Kwai if we feel up to it after the overnight train, and then we fly out to visit Dominic and Cindy (and their herd of cats) in Nepal on the 15th.

We've finally found an Internet cafe with a card reader, so here is a backlog of photos and videos from the past few days.

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Photos

Us at Saltwater Lagoon
This is on Ko Mae Ko (Ko Mae island) in the national park. This is where they filmed the movie The Beach, which was based on some book Melinda read and was based on this island. (Mom, now you have a picutre of us together, thanks to some Australian guy)

Puppy
Seen at the Internet cafe where we're uploading these photos.