Island Transfer--Day 6

We woke up early Friday morning and packed our bags. We said goodbye to our beautiful Mai Pen Rai beach and caught the morning 4x4 bone-jarring taxi to the Thongsala Pier. We caught a ferry boat from Koh Phangan back to Koh Samui. The waves had gone way down, but it was dumping rain. I had already booked and paid for an elephant trek on Koh Samui, so I was really worried it would get rained out. However, it stopped raining just long enough for us to take an elephant ride through the jungle and up to a giant waterfall. The little kids loved it. Chloe was irritated because there were knats that kept following the elephants and flying in her ears. You can see a very cranky look on her face in most of the photos!

Brian's elephant had the hots for my elephant, but the my elephant hated the elephant that Oakley, Gwyn and Diamond were riding, so you can see in the photos that they were always quite a bit a way from us. That was kind of disappointing because it would have made a pretty sweet photo to have the whole family on top of all three elephants in a family photo. Oh, well, maybe next time!

Florence sitting on top of the elephant was a big deal. She did not want to take a turn on the elephant's head because she was terrified. I asked her what she believed would happen to her if she got on the elephant's head (using my therapy techniques). She said she was afraid she would get hurt. I asked her if any of the rest of us had gotten hurt when we did it? No--so finally, I coerced her into riding the elephant and it ended up being a lot of fun for her and she was really proud of herself. It is very common for children who had insecure attachments to a caregiver in the infant and toddler years to fear new things. They do not trust that they will be taken care of if something were to happen so they are constantly trying to protect themselves. Diamond is also a little bit like this, but feels much more securely attached to me and Brian. We're still working on it with Florence. It may be a long road.

After riding the elephants we all hiked up to the waterfall to wade. Oakley was the only one who wore his swim suit so he did a little bit of cliff jumping into the swimming hole. Speaking of fear--he's not afraid of much.

We finished off the evening with dinner and swimming and another solid night's sleep thanks to sheer exhaustion. I realized that our idea of vacation is a little more on the adventure side than the relaxation side.