A Grand Adventure - Day 9 - Genie

On this day, the last of our adventure, my friends did not let me sleep in.

We got up early and got breakfast at Oasis again. We had limited time back in town and we wanted to, like my little sister at the cabin "say goodbye to the lake". AKA: see all our favorite places one last time.

After breakfast at Oasis, we walked on the beach for 20 minutes.

Then we were back to the hotel for checkout.

We stored our bags in Noy's store and headed off on the bike one last time.

As we were driving back to Old Town, a GIGANTIC black snake slithered out in front of the moped!

We made it to Old Town in one piece, I got the reusable bamboo straws I had wanted the day before, and we headed out on the public pier to admire the view one last time. We saw some very cool baby squid under the pier and a large jellyfish that looked, according to Amanda, like "a cupcake with tentacles".

One last time, we visited the coffee house we had all fallen in love with. We got wonderful coffees, a dry and sad carrot cake, and a salted caramel and chocolate tart that was sinfully delicious.

We left the cafe and said a final goodbye to the lovely ladies who had come to recognize us over the past week.

The bike ride back was uneventful. I drove as slowly as I could to soak in the view. Arriving back at our hotel, I traded Noy a set of moped keys for my passport and we got on the van back to Krabi.

This van ride was potentially the worst part of the entire trip. It got us where we wanted to go. It was cheap.

It stopped everywhere. My inner ear and I were FIGHTING.

The best part was the man behind me not wanting to share his bench seat with anyone. The driver looked at him and said: "share seat or pay another 300 baht, white man."

I think all three of us did spit takes to this. The driver was not having this mans manspreading.

Three hours and fifteen billion stops (or what felt like it) later, we arrived at the Krabi Airport. We had a lot of free time. We did a stunky pokemon go raid, got through security, got snacks and "glacier" coffees (a blended coffee with a scoop of ice cream on top), and played Phase 10 on the ground waiting for our flight to leave.

On the walk to the plane, we photobombed a picture a dad was taking of his daughters. He was living for it and asked for us to pose together. There is a very cute picture of the three of us with two small Thai girls somewhere on the internet.

The flight was wonderfully uneventful and we landed an hour after takeoff. We snagged a taxi and after a bit of bickering with him, he set the meter and we took off for Min Buri. (Taxi drivers in Bangkok like to fool foreigners into a more expensive taxi drive instead of using the meter. I know it costs between 150-180B to get from the airport to our apartment based on distance, so when we got in and he said 400B, I laughed at him and said "illegal *slapped his meter* use your meter".

Needless to say, he did not get a tip. The metered ride cost 165B.

While this wasn't a spectacular ending to such a great trip, it reminded us that we were about back to reality. We were home, but a piece of my heart stayed in Koh Lanta.

A Grand Adventure - Day 8 - Genie

Guys. This is the part of the trip where I finally start getting some sleep!

They.

Let.

Me.

Sleep.

Until.

11am.

I've got some good friends - or they're terrified of sleep-deprived me.

Both? Both. Both is good.

We were deciding where to go for brunch when Amanda said she knew of a cute place on the nothern side of the island that specialized in brunch. It was a yoga retreat.

Roxi and I were both floored.

How long had she been holding out on this information?

We may never know.

We piled onto the bike and took off.

We got very lost.

The GPS took us many places.

Eventually, we found our way to Oasis.

It lived up to its name in every way. The food was sublime. The people were fantastic. There was all you can drink french press coffee. It was owned by a lovely lesbian couple and was run by a rainbow of Thai people. I felt ... very at home.

I'm amazed I'm not still there.

I got hollandaise sauce.

This isn't a drill.

Along with my eggs benedict (with avocado) I got an espresso/banana/peanut butter smoothie topped with shaved almonds. If I ever get put on death row, I want this to be my final meal. (With Pedal Pusher's french fries)

My notes from this day (thank god for the bullet journal as this actually took place almost a month ago now), state that the place is 14x10^65 / 10.

I don't disagree with me from a month ago. She was right.

Amanda: I had the Buddha Bowl and it was amazing! There was a delicious peanut sauce that went over the colorful display you see to the right.

From Oasis, we walked down to the beach. There was a pokestop and a gym down the beach. Amanda and I needed to turn it blue. (Judge my all you want, I've loved this game since I got my first Pikachu from my Japanese penpal at age 8.) And the halloween event had just started - we ended up doing the spoopy charmander raid there as well.

We wandered the beach and found more shells and rocks to take with us (we're now decorating our apartment with them. It's very cute.). The beach was also crawling with life. Every time we moved, tiny crabs would run under our feet! Don't worry, these little guys were way faster than us - we never even got close to stepping on one!

We ended up walking past a place that advertised massages (ok, we walked past about 45 of them... but we found the CORRECT one according to "Middle Path Pyff").

For the next hour, I got to look out over the beach and into the sea as a woman beat the everloving crap out of my body. It was worth every penny. And by that, I mean it was worth the whole, including tip, 17$ USD.

This was my view during the massage. 

Roxi's lovely massage man was the 4th joke husband of the trip.

Amanda: I got specifically got a back and neck massage...my back has never felt so throughly beaten and relaxed. Mine was done by the husband of the owner. He did not hold back and I appreciated it immensely. At one point, he even stood on my upper thighs and my back.

Amanda and I kept looking back and forth at each other.

My straight-dar was going wild.

We wandered out of the massage parlor and onto the beach where we were greeted by a pair of Swedish children. While their mothers drank mimosas up the beach, they had wandered down to practice their English.

It was about on par with the Nong Khai M1's skills. (Read: not good.) However, I don't speak any Swedish... so kuddos for even trying!

We drove back to our rooms, got changed, and headed back to Old Town.

We then got all the Xmas gifts we still needed! I won't mention everything or the surprises may be ruined. But we also got me the CORRECT romper.

It's a month later and I still wear it almost all the time.

We bought so much from the little store that the excitable woman running it told us all to pick out a little makeup bag for free!

Roxi was thrilled about this because she hadn't even bought anything! She was well rewarded for her patience.

We then wandered to a restaurant that had very photogenic swings at the end of a pier. We were one of two tables in a place that easily fit a couple hundred people during high season. We got drinks, stuffed squid with fried garlic, and took some great pictures!

After dinner, we were going up the mountain back to the left side of the island.

We were driving behind a truck. About 1/3 of the way up, it started smoking. At about 1/2 way up, it was barely moving. It was already dark and it was hard to see, but I could tell the truck was not going to make it up the hill. Normally there's an easy solution to this: drive on the other side of the hill. But no, there was oncoming traffic.

We were behind a truck that was slowly starting to roll back down a mountain. There was no shoulder. There was oncoming traffic.

Somehow, I managed to swerve to the right of the failing truck in front of us, duck in front of oncoming traffic, and get back into the correct lane. It was bumpy and brutal.

As I was frantically getting us back into the left lane, I shouted: "SCALE OF ONE TO ONE HUNDRED: HOW ARE WE?"

Roxi incorrectly answered: "I'm fine."

Amanda yelled from the back: "FIVE. FIVE."

Immediately, I whipped around. Was she falling off? Did she clip her leg on one of the vehicles I zipped through? What was wrong?

I made Roxi ask her again (it's hard to yell two people back on a moped).

All of a sudden, I heard a sharp crack of laughter and then another shout from Amanda: "SORRY! I THOUGHT YOU SAID SCALE OF ONE TO TEN!"

Crisis averted. We were all a bit shaken, but alive and well.

We were all in desperate need of a drink.

We drove to The Irish Embassy (it's a pub, I didn't change nationalities) for their Monday night trivia game.

We ended up scoring miserably low. It was all 1960-70s trivia... we desperately needed the other members of our Lanesboro trivia team because I only got the questions about pop culture and Pokemon correct...

As poorly as we did with trivia, we did amazing at drinking! We got mojitos, mai tais, a horrible Moscow mule, and then we discovered what they did correctly: daiquiris! We got a slew of them: mango, strawberry, lime...

In all honesty, we did very well at the knowledge part of the trivia game. We got a 36/40. But there was another 40 questions about music... the most recent songs featured were from Taylor Swift's first album. And there was nothing Broadway.

There ended up being a funny Spanish language question about conjugation and I ended up sending a quick Facebook message to my high school Spanish teacher thanking her for smashing -ar verb conjugation into my head and the two of us ended up having a very funny chat on and off for the next day.

By the time we made it back to our hotel, the other two were pleasantly buzzed and we were all full of good pub food. While our trivia exploits were unsuccessful, the rest of the night was an absolute blast!

A Grand Adventure - Day 7 - Genie

On this miraculous day, Amanda and Roxi let me sleep in all the way to 10am - I will argue this isn't sleeping in. However, when it's a school day, we have to be out of the apartment before 6:30am... so I see the argument here.

It was still before 2pm.

Either way, we were off to find a doctor to look at Amanda's injured foot.

Upon finding that visiting a doctor would be a few thousand baht, I asked Amanda if she'd rather a doctor cut her toenail off and charge her that money or if she'd like to spend it on booze and have me do it for her.

I'm proud of Amanda's life choices.

We went back to the apartment, grabbed the nail kit, and headed off to old town. (The nurse at the clinic was nice enough to re-wrap her toe... so we were set for a while!)

We couldn't help ourselves. Somehow we magically reappeared at the Cafe and Art Gallery that we had loved from days previous. As we ate breakfast, the tide came in and the water swelled below us. Fish came up and took the small pieces of bread I was dropping into the water.

A taxi service across the street from the cafe set up our hotel pickup for Tuesday pickup and then we went shopping! Amanda found a beautiful scarf made from Thai silk and Roxi got a hand-carved wooden magnet. I was looking for a romper, but I couldn't find the CORRECT one.

It started to rain as we left Old Town. We drove up the right side of the island (most of the infrastructure is on the left side, so we got to see a lot of the forest). When we reached the peak, we started to come back down the left side. At this point, it was down-pouring. It's very difficult to 3G1M in the pouring rain, so I found a turn-off for a beach and we headed in.

It was Laem Kho Kwang beach. It was ... not the most beautiful beach on Koh Lanta. Being on the northern most side, it was clearly a tourist-infested place during high season. It would have been a perfectly lovely beach in Florida. But we weren't in Florida, were we...

The highlight of LKK beach was the jellyfish. Not the sea lice, but the actual jellies! There was a small one that was swimming near us and I used the water to swirl it around and toward the surface! After playing with the little guy for ten or so minutes, we needed to get out of the water. Those sea lice hurt!

We drove south, removed Amanda's toenail, changed at our rooms, and headed off to Maria's favorite beach: Ao Nui Beach.

It was decently hard to find.

You have to park your bike on the side of a mountain, secure EVERYTHING onto your bike, and walk down a steep trail until you get to the bottom.

Anyone ever take the bunny trail in Lanesboro from the top of church hill to the park? Yea. That. It wasn't anything too wild, but imagine that Sylvan Park was actually the most beautiful beach you've ever seen.

We spent a couple hours there. There were tidal pools and monkeys. There were minimal sea lice. On top of this, I got hit by a huge wave of Tapie. We've joked about this tapeworm for 6 months now and it always seems to come at the most inconvenient times. (Speaking of which, I've been symptom free for the last 36 hours as I'm writing this post... which is a new high score for a while!)

So Amanda and Roxi played volleyball on the beach while I curled up in the sand and actively didn't scream.

As the sun began to set, we took off for a better vantage point to watch. We stopped at an outdoor restaurant, The Sunset Restaurant (aptly named), applied ample bug spray, ordered drinks, and settled in as the sun slipped below the horizon. Neither the food nor drinks were memorable, but the view was absolutely spectacular.

Honestly. They put raw crinkle cut fries in my massaman curry. It's supposed to have potatoes, but that was a new lazy low. The actually curry sauce was good though.

We got back to our hotel, but all of us were still feeling something else: banana pancakes.

Remembering a stand down the road, we took off walking. It was about 1.5km away from our hotel. Along the way we checked out other street food vendors and shops, but we didn't officially stop until we got to the pancakes.

These pancakes were green! They were made from pandan (banana leaves) which gave them a beautiful light green coloring. Honestly, Roxi's was the best. It was cashew, banana, and nutella. She did not walk the middle path and it paid off. Amanda's was also delicious. She skipped the nuts and got a banana nutella. I got a coconut banana and it would have been delicious if it had any sweetness to it, but it ended up just being bland. The two bites I stole from my friends were the best part.

We walked back and tried to talk to Amanda's mom. Unfortunately, the internet connection on one of the two sides wasn't working well so we ended up not being able to have a conversation.

Not two minutes after hanging up with Mary, we were both asleep.