A Not So Relaxing Day

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What a day. We woke up this morning and after breakfast, headed straight to rent another scooter for the day. Scooters really are the lifeblood of this island. Everyone and everything seems to travel on one.

We took off for Namuang Safari Park, where we were determined to ride an elephant. Here on Samui they call it Elephant Trekking. Luckily for us, this place appears to be a major tourist attraction, so there were several road signs in English pointing the way. We chug our little scooter up the side of a mountain and find a little, open hut selling the elephant tours. We sign up, but there are many people in front of us so we ended up having to wait about an hour until our turn. In the meantime, there is a waterfall approximately 60' tall just down the road so we decided to check it out. There are 2 famous waterfalls on the island and this is the smaller one. It was beautiful, and just what you would expect in the middle of a jungle. We also met our first American there, a young girl from Washington DC. We were so excited to hear an American speaking English so we had to say hi. We chatted for a minute, and went our separate ways. To show how small the island is we ran into her in the afternoon as well.

After the hour of waiting was up, we were ready to jump on our elephant. We walked out onto this wooden deck where the elephants were waiting and climbed into our seats. Our elephant was named Yambo (I have no idea how you really spell it, but that is how it sounded). The keeper told us that he was 25 years old so he was a very young elephant. The people who run the eleohant trekking tours had given us a bag of bananas for the elephant. Apparently, bananas are like crack for Yambo. He kept stopping, throwing his snout back to us, and wanting another banana. Who knew? Anyway, we trekked around for about an hour with a Thai man who took about 100 pictures of us with our camera. I think he just wanted to keep us happy with pictures so he would get a tip, but it was very nice of him. Kayde got to ride Yambo for a while straddled on the bag of his neck, which she said was a sweaty experience so I chose to sit back in the saddle and just enjoy the ride.

We left the elephant park and made our way to what they call "Waterfall 2", which is a much larger waterfall up the road. We found out that it really is possible for a road to be uphill both ways even though we just always thought that was a story. The road was steep, long, and dusty, but we finally made it to the top (with several long pit stops along the way). We could have paid for a truck to take us to the entrance of the waterfall, but then we wouldn't have our story about the hike. We did some exploring and climbing before we finally decided to head down. The views from the top of the waterfall were amazing. We were basically in the middle of the island so you could see the ocean in the distance. I think Kayde enjoyed the hike down the mountain much more than getting there. Even with all of the hard climbing, it was a great experience.

We left the Safari Park and headed to the Hin Ta and Hin Yai (grandfather and grandmother) rocks on Lamai beach we spoke of yesterday. We finally found some signs that pointed to it, parked the scooter, and started yet another hike. After about 5 minutes, we finally popped out at a rock formation. Low and behold, both of the rocks were right in front of us. I would describe how they looked, but we have kids reading this blog. We will tell the legend of the rocks when we get home. At this point we were both tired of walking, climbing, hiking or whatever else you can call moving with your legs. With the heat and the humidity we were both exhausted so we headed back to the room. You may not believe this, but the only places on the island with A/C is our room and the couple of 7/11 convenient stores. I never looked forward to walking into a 7/11 so much in my life.

We finished up the day eating at the street vendors we went to last night. Once again, awesome food for practically nothing. I think we will be eating there every night from here on out.

Tomorrow is the Ang Thong National Marine Park for our kayaking and snorkeling tour. We can't wait!

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