The endings

This is a long post.  I warn you.  At first I thought I should cut it down, but... this is the closest thing I have to a journal and I wanted to document some of this stuff.  Plus, I love these stories!  And if it's more info than you want... you don't have to read it.  :)  *She says, as she laughs gaily, knowing her biggest fans would never DREAM of leaving one of her posts unread.*

As you may have surmised from my last post, I am indeed back in Utah.  THAT, however, is not really what I want to post about.  :)  Basically I just want to fill you in on my last two weeks in Thailand.

Okay... do you people like monkeys?  Because guess what?  I heart them.  There is a city in Thailand called Lop Buri, and it is FULL of monkeys!  The monkeys and the people all just sort of live with together.  In this picture you can see how there are monkeys climbing all around, and the people just sort of leave them alone.

There is one main park where monkeys like to hang out.  In this park there are ruins of an old temple, and the monkeys run, and jump, and climb ALL OVER them.  They are so funny and so smart, though.  The also sit and wait by the road for the traffic to back up.  When the traffic stops, they jump into the backs of all the pickup trucks and steal whatever is in them.  It's great to watch.  They also cross the road and climb all over the buildings and things.  Really, the people just ignore them!  It's amazing.

We bought little bags of sunflower seeds to give to the monkeys.  Sometimes they scare me, though!  They KNOW you have food, and basically think it's their right to have it... so... they do what they need to do to get it!  They'll jump all over you, and try to pry your fingers open with their little hands.  They ARE wild animals, though, so they'll bite, too, which really isn't as cute.  :)  It's not so bad when they don't break skin... but who  knows what diseases they have, so all in all... probably just best not to get bit.  :)

Our last trip in Thailand was to the south.  We went to Krabi and Phuket.  Krabi is a coastal city, and Phuket is a little island just off the west coast.  Krabi was our first stop.  It was SO beautiful.  It's amazing that places like it even EXIST!  Unfortunately, I still haven't gotten the pictures off of Whitney's camera, so you'll have to put up with just mine.  I might post more pics when I get them.  The first day we got there, we just drove around to see the scenery, and found a hotel, and just sort of relaxed.  The next day was not NEARLY as relaxing.  Dad, Amber, and Brian decided they wanted to go Scuba Diving.  The rest of us aren't certified to dive, so we passed on that.  :)  Mom decided that she wanted a relaxing/shopping/foot massage kind of a day, and Whitney and I wanted to go kayaking.  So... we all did just that.

Kayaking was SO amazing!  It was a TON of work, though.  (I guess technically they weren't real kayaks.  More like... a cross between a kayak and a canoe.  Moving on.)  Our kayaking group consisted of one Australian kid named  Ross... or Russ... couldn't ever quite figure it out, one German couple named Sven and Yvonne (Of course they were named Sven and Yvonne.  Just... of course.  LOVE it.), our guide, David, and us.  To start off, we all got into our kayaks and headed down river.  It was so nice.  Whit and I were wanting to get some serious rowing in, but our guide kept telling us to slow down and let the river do most of the work.  We tried.  It was hard.  We took some winding little river paths around, and saw AMAZING scenery.  One of the coolest things was that we got to go through caves.  Ooooooooo.  :)  We paddled up to these little caves and the entrances were so short!  I was a little scared, cause I'm claustrophobic and I was worried I would freak out, but it ended up being okay.

We paddled into the opening of the first cave, and it immediately got pretty dark.  You could barely see the outlines of the path.  It was so cool.  It was filled with all of these stalactites and stalagmites, and we had to negotiate the kayak around the bigger and longer ones.

It all looked sort of like a movie set, just because I've never seen caves like that in real life.  They were so beautiful!  After we got out of the other side of the cave, we ended up in a gorgeous little lagoon.  We were completely surrounded by walls of green jungle-life.

I can't even tell you how pretty it was.  We stayed there for a little while, then headed out, back through the cave.  After a little while, we got to another cave.  It was dark when we got inside, but after only a few more seconds, it was PITCH black.  And lucky for Whit and me, we were the last kayak, so we lost the guides flashlight pretty darn quickly.  We couldn't see a thing!!

 We kind of freaked out for a minute because we couldn't figure out where we were going.  The paths were so skinny that we couldn't really even get our paddles into the water without hitting the walls and stalactites/stalagmites, and we couldn't see anything, so we couldn't figure out how to move, or even were to go.  It was freaky.  We figured out that I could take a picture, and it would give us a second of light.  Finally we made our way out.  After that we saw another cave, and another couple of lagoons.  Everything was amazing.  We also went through this little maze of trees.  I don't know what kind they were, but these plants completely surrounded us and all we had was a little pathway through them.  They were like tunnels we went through because the plants were like walls on the side and they covered us above like a ceiling.  There were a few winding paths, and they were super hard to get through, and at one point we kind of lost our group.

We finally got to another cave that we got out of our kayaks to explore.  It was awesome.  The entire floor was made up of fossils and seashells because years and years and years before, the water had been super high.  Our guide then pointed out to us several hieroglyphics that had been painted THREE-THOUSAND YEARS AGO!  Freak.

The amazing thing is that they let us in that cave, and let us see the hieroglyphics, and let us touch the stalactites/stalagmites and everything.  In America you'd be taken to the entrance of the cave and then shown pictures of what was inside.  After we got back in the kayaks, we headed back to the starting point.  Problem?  UPSTREAM.  Whit and I paddled for all we were worth.  I'm not kidding.  We didn't stop paddling once, but we were barely moving!  The other two kayaks were steadily pulling away from us, and eventually- we couldn't see them at all.  After a LONG time of rowing as hard as we could, we finally realized we had no idea if they had stayed on the main river or if they had taken another path.  We didn't see them for forever.  We thought we might be in a wee bit of trouble, but our only option was to keep on going.  Finally we rounded a corner and saw the place to dock the kayaks in the far, far distance.  When I say that our arms were giving out... I mean- OUR ARMS WERE GIVING OUT.  It hurt sooooo bad!!  The other two kayaks got back probably more than TWENTY MINUTES before we did.  We were dying.  And they just sat and watched us coming.  Slowly.  Coming.  Slowly.  When we finally pulled up they, of course, made fun of us a bit, and then said that it wasn't a good idea to have a kayak without a man in it.  Yeah... well, cool.  Anyway, it was still a blast and I freakin' loved it.

The next day we went on a little... snorkeling expedition.  It was so beautiful!  We got on a speed boat and headed out into the open sea.  Yo Ho.  Our first stop was "The Beach."

 Evidently there is a movie called "The Beach."  Don't know much about it, except for the fact that it was filmed in one of the most beautiful places ever.  Oh, and Leonardo DiCaprio was in it.  Those are the facts.  We went to a couple of amazing snorkeling spots after that.

I seriously love snorkeling.  There were tons of bright, tropical fish swimming all over the place!  At lunch they brought Brian a special plate of spaghetti noodles without nut oil (he has a fatal allergy to nuts, FYI), but they brought him TONS!  We felt bad wasting them, so we stuck handfuls of extra spaghetti noodles into my bag.  :)  On our next stop, however, we made an A.M.A.Z.I.N.G. discovery.  SPAGHETTI NOODLES ARE THE BEST SNORKELING FOOD, EVER!  We put the noodles in the pockets of our swimming shorts, and fed them to the fish.  We would hold out a noodle, and DOZENS of fish would come fight for it.  It was a blast.  Sometimes the fish couldn't figure out which was food, though- the noodle or your hand.  Brian got bit pretty hard.  Ha.  :)

So basically, this speed boat took us around to different beaches and snorkeling spots and such.  It was such a fun day!  Really tiring, though.  That sun can definitely wear you out!  I need to get myself an ocean.

After all the fun in Krabi, we headed to Phuket.  My parents had a senior missionary conference down there.  On Sunday we went to Phuket's cute little branch.  Well... actually they don't have a branch.  They have a "group".  They meet in a hotel.  There are like 5 members.  It's awesome.  The rest of the time we just sort of hung out and swam at the beach and played with the monkeys at the beach and such.  One day we decided to go to this snorkeling beach we had heard about.  There didn't seem to be any good snorkeling, but when we looked to the left (where the beach looked like it ended) there were tons of huge rocks, and we thought if we could climb over them- we might find good snorkeling.  Oh. My. Word.  It took FOREVER to climb around these giant boulders... and they just kept going!!  It was way hot, and we basically just baked out in the sun while we climbed.  Finally we got to a tiny beach that was like... 15 feet long or so.  It was way cute, but again- not any good snorkeling spots.  There was this cute little Thai girl there (she was like 10) who became immediately attached to Whitney.  Her name was Bio.  They hung out for a while (she didn't speak any English) but they had tons of fun anyway and she tried to teach Whit Thai words.  She was cute.  Whit (through charades) told Bio we were going to go snorkeling, so she ran and found her mom and asked if she could come with us.  Oh.  Okay.  So, she gestured for us to follow her, and showed us a tiny pathway that connected the beach we were on to the beach we had come from.  That's right.  It was like a 20 foot path that basically just cut off the corner with all the rocks- yeah, the ones that took us 45 minutes to hike around!  It was funny.  Bio showed us where to snorkel, but it turned out that she was afraid of deep water, which is super odd for Thai kids!  We swam out a little ways, and then Bio got nervous, so she climbed onto Whitney's back.  The problem with that?  She made Whitney sink, so Whit couldn't use her snorkel cause she was too deep!  Whit found a rock to stand on, but we really couldn't communicate the problem to Bio.  She just sort of stood there smiling, and we had no idea how to get her back to shore without drowning Whit.  Hmmm.  It took a while, but we finally managed to drag/swim/putter our way back to the shore.  :)

One night we were eating dinner at a cute little sort-of-outdoor restaurant when this CRAZY storm hit.  That is one thing I'm really going to miss about Thailand.  The rain storms are so... just incredible.  And I love the rain- so dang much.  It was an unbelievable rainstorm and the thunder/lightening were unbelievable!  It was seriously deafening and just kept going and going and going.  We ran out into the road and just jumped around in the rain.  We were soaked, but it was so warm and beautiful!  That lasted until lightening flashed ridiculously close.  :)  We went back into the restaurant and waited there for a little while, but finally decided just to go for it, and we headed back to the hotel- yes, walking.  Even though the rain was still really heavy, the lightening seemed to have moved on, so we decided that probably meant we needed to go swimming in the ocean in the rain in the dark!  By now it was pretty late, so it was way dark.  We ran out into the ocean, and the water- was SO WARM!  Like, it was way warmer than the air.  It was so dang fun.  I thought Whit was going to pass out though, she was so nervous that we were going to be killed by lightening.  :)  It was great.  I really loved Phuket.

A few nights before we flew home, we had dinner with a member of the Royal Family.  Crazy, eh?  I think she is the previous King's granddaughter.  Anyway, she and her son came over for dinner.  It was interesting to watch her.  Everything, down to the way she carried herself just seemed very regal.  Her son is mentally handicapped, and one of his favorite things to do is to sing.  After dinner, we all gathered around the piano and sang a few songs.  It was pretty cool.

I guess that about wraps up Thailand.  Well... there is no way to really explain the experiences I had over there, but it wraps up some of the fun stories, anyway.  It is such an amazing country.  Anyway... time to be American again, I guess.  :)