I haven't posted in a while, because I haven't had a whole lot of time to sit down in front of a computer. This traveling thing has kept me pretty busy, but now I'm about halfway through my six weeks of fun touristing (which means I'm three weeks away from flying home! wow!) and I thought I'd mention where I've been and where I'm headed.
My sister flew out here the day after my job ended. We went on a whirlwind tour of Bangkok and Kanchanaburi, spent waaay too many hours in vans and buses to see Angkor Wat (which was simply incredible, but my camera died in awe of it, so I have no pictures to post) and then headed north to Chaing Mai and Pai. We went rafting down the river Pai, took a fancy Thai cooking class, and I failed at riding a bike up the highest mountain in that part of the country. All in all, I had a magnificent time (Thanks for coming to visit, Kate!).
Then a week ago, I took a long bus ride south to Koh Tao island where I started an introduction to scuba course (to get my basic certification) and ended up loving it so much I stayed on to get the advanced degree! Scuba diving was truly one of the most magical things I have ever experienced, it opened up a whole new watery world that was better than even "Planet Earth" made it look. I saw stingrays! I saw barracudas! I saw triggerfish and moray eels! I saw my fingers and my fins lit up in bioluminescent water!
It was so beautiful, I never would have stopped if I didn't have this darn plane ticket to Vietnam in two days.
My plans for Vietnam aren't entirely concrete, but I fly into Hanoi, and I'm hoping to spend a couple days there drinking good coffee and eating french baguettes, before traveling to Halong Bay and Cat Ba island. Then who knows? Maybe up to Sapa, to see the terraced rice paddies near the Chinese border?
The crazy thing is, I leave Thailand in two days, a country I've been living in for more than six months.... and I don't know when I'll be back again. There are just a couple more weeks of travel ahead of me, but in a way, I feel like leaving Thailand will be the beginning of heading back home.
