The excitement is always high when embarking on a fabulous vaction. Brian and I had been planning this for over five months. I had worked out almost every single detail, reserved and paid for most everything. So when the day came to leave, we were all running on extra adrenaline--which ended up being a good thing considering how exhausting just getting there was going to be.
First, we drove four hours in a tiny van stuffed full of lots of luggage and nine people. Fortunately, seat belts aren't mandatory in Korea because we were laying across luggage and sitting on laps. We then took a two hour flight to Beijing where we had to go through a rigorous process of just transferring flights (never had to do that any other international airport). We had a five hour layover in Beijing.
Brian made the kids do pushups and core exercises to pass some of the time. We were hoping they would sleep on the flight. We took a five hour flight from 8 pm to 1 am. Upon arriving in Bangkok we had another five hour layover from 1 am to 6 am. We were exhausted. We were hoping to find somewhere quiet with padded chairs to sprawl out, but instead there were only cold metal chairs. We tried to sleep on those with our beach towels as blankets, but it made for a pretty miserable night.
Early in the morning, we caught a local flight from Bangkok to Koh Samui. We felt a little more awake when we walked off the plane to 80 degree perfect weather and the smell of tropical flowers. We jumped in a taxi that took us straight from the airport to the pier and with one minute to spare we jumped on the ferry boat to Koh Phangan. As it turned out the area had been experiencing monsoon waves and the ferry boat ride was like a roller coaster ride that just would not end. Florence, Sophia and I were sick and curled in balls. I had to do deep yoga breathing to keep from either crying or throwing up, or both. Fortunately, it was only a half an hour to the smaller island.
At that point we had been traveling for over 24 hours straight and we were a little worse for the wear. I was amazed at how awesome my kids were doing considering what we had just put them through. I had picked a bungalow resort, Mai Pen Rai, on the other side of the island because it was very secluded from other "party" beaches and because it was really inexpensive. That meant that we had another 45 minutes of brain-jarring, bone-bruising travel in the back of a 4x4 truck through the jungle on washed out dirt roads to get to our final destination. But when we arrived it was ALL worth it. (The first picture is a panoramic view of the beach.)
On one side of the beach there were bungalows built up on the rocks. To get there, you had to climb across a rock ledge and through a hole in the rocks. The bungalows were incredible, but the waves were so high because of the monsoon winds that we thought it would be dangerous for the kids to be going back and forth across the rocks all the time. Instead, we were on the other side of the beach across the little river. There was a floating wood bridge that we could cross, but when the tide came in, we had to wade part of the way to our bungalows.
The bungalows had no hot water and there was only electricity in the evenings. They were so much like Swiss Family Robinson that I felt we were living in a movie set. The cold showers were a little bit uncomfortable at times, but the setting was incredible and it had it's own special charm.
You can see our two beach/jungle bungalows right above Brian's head.
This was the rock walkway to the other bungalows. It was really nice to not be over there because I could see the kids playing on the beach from our jungle bungalows.
In the river there was a creature that was something between an iguana and an alligator. The people there didn't know exactly what it was, but it was stinking huge and ugly!
Exhausted, happy and enjoying paradise, we crashed into bed that night and slept for a long time!
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