Ko Tao

Legends involving great diving and snorkeling around the island of Ko Tao surfaced during our research and we got hooked on the idea of going. Plus we have numerous friends who suggested this island to us as a "must see" on our trip....so we went! The only sad part was that the cost of getting there was so high, we had to say no to diving in order to meet our budget. BUT - snorkeling is free and, gosh darn it, so is walking. So we did a fair amount of both, in addition to lazing on our bungalow's deck and watching sunsets. Highlights of the snorkeling days included a beautiful black and white nudibranch (one of my favorite invertebrates in the world) and getting surrounded by a huge school of juvenile fish - perhaps barracuda? Walking was also fun - I'll quote Jay so you can get an idea of what it is like to walk around islands in Thailand... "the amount of sweat that I've shed during this trip is probably equal to the amount of sweat I've shed in my entire life before the trip." Ahhh yes - we tend to look like we went to the sauna instead of the beach by the time we get back from any walk. But we have fun anyway!

Now we are in Bangkok and we are actually enjoying this insane city! We went to the Myanmar Embassy today to try and get our tourists visas for our planned visit in August. They changed the rules, of course, and now you can only apply for a visa one month before your visit. Ugh. We wanted to buy our flights now, but we refuse to buy them until we know we have the visas (they tend to turn people down for random reasons). So, we will just have to hope we can still afford the flight one month before our planned trip! After leaving that embassy we thought we could still accomplish something, so we headed off to the US Embassy to have more pages added to my passport. After a long and hot walk we arrived, excited to chat with some Americans, only to find out they stop dealing with passports after 2pm. Shafted! What ever happened to 9-5 workdays? I guess in Thailand they figured they would be more like the Thais! In either case, we got nothing done - but we enjoyed our water taxi views of the city and think we got a better feel of this place. Want to know the best part about Bangkok so far? There is a cart outside our hotel selling sweet sticky rice with mango and coconut milk for 20 baht (that's 63 cents folks) and I am in heaven.
Go Obama!!!