The third day in Thailand started just like every other day in Thailand, with an early morning run. I get up and run every morning before work in Korea, but there was just something so satisfying about getting up to run in Thailand. Maybe it was because I knew the rest of my day would be filled with relaxation and not kids asking me, "teacher, page what?" all day, but whatever the reason, it was wonderful.
After my run and fresh fruit breakfast, we resumed our positions in the sun on our beach chairs, staring at the Gulf of Thailand. After about 4 hours of sun bathing and switching between swimming in the infinity pool and the gulf, we decided to rent some motor scooters and explore the island of Koh Samui. We rented the scooters for 24 hours, and it was pretty cheap, but not all of us wanted to ride on our own. Brandy and I decided to split the cost and ride on one together. This seemed like a great idea at the time, save a bit of money and still have some fun, but neither one of us had ever driven one of these before, and now we were driving with someone else on the bike with us. I'm not sure how we missed the huge "DISASTER" warning written all over this idea, but even if we had seen it we probably would have chosen to ignore it.
Before we hit the open road, we each had a few practice runs. It went pretty well but I did not feel very comfortable driving with someone on the back. Never the less, Brandy fearlessly hopped on the back and off we went. Oh, I almost forgot to mention, in Thailand they drive on the left hand side of the road-made the trip a bit more interesting. We made our way out of the hotel parking lot and on to the Lamai walking street. We maneuvered our way through people and other moving vehicles, just a tad frighting, and made our way to the main road. To get to the main road, you have to go up a somewhat big hill and make a left onto the main road. This sounds easy enough, but when you don't' really know how to drive a motor scooter and when you have someone riding on the back, this is quite difficult. As we were climbing the hill and making our way to the intersection, we had to stop and wait for traffic. As I stopped, or tried to stop, I lost control of the scooter and we fell over. Luckily we weren't going very fast so the bike just fell over, unluckily the exhaust pipe fell right on Brandy's leg! I felt horrible!! She had a huge burn mark on her leg and she was in a bit of pain. She took it like a champ though, and continued on as we made our way to some sights around the island.
It was so great being able to explore the island on our own. We spent the rest of the day traveling around discovering new beaches and quite little coves that we would never see on a scheduled tour. The places we found were very peaceful, such a change from the beach we were staying on. And as we made our way from place to place, the landscape of palm tree mountains made me feel as if I was driving in a movie.
After about 3 hours of riding and exploring, we decided to head back since it was getting dark. We had only made it to the south part of the island and there was so much more to see on the north side. We had only rented the scooters for one day, we we had to have them returned by 1pm the next day, unless we rented them for another day....
When we got up the next day, and after my run, I decided I was not ready to give up my scooter just yet. So Hayley and I rented our scooters for another day so we could explore the north part of the island. After my much needed relaxation on the beach, well maybe "much needed" is taking it a bit far, we headed back out on the bikes (I think it can go without saying that Brandy was finished with the scooters). We wanted to check out Chawang beach. Lamai and Chawang were the two big beaches on Samui. We chose to stay on Lamai because it was more low key than Chawang and we wanted to have some quite and relaxation on our vacation. Even so, we wanted to check it out.
We made a few stops before we actually got to Chawang. We stopped at the Big Buddha Statue, which is exactly what it sounds like, a huge gold statue of Buddha. It was really cool, but it was clear it was just made for tourists and not an actual place people worshiped. After Big Buddha, we head to the beach. It was very pretty and the water was a beautiful shade of blue, but I thought our beach was more beautiful and I was very happy we had chosen to stay on Lamai. After we checked out the beach, we started making our way home. We rode back right along the coast, and I would have to say this was one of my favorite parts of the whole trip. We stopped twice on the way home to see the gorgeous views of the island. We found another cove and stopped to take some pictures. The views made me speechless, which is hard to do! The water was crystal clear and three different shades of green and blue. The mountains were over flowing with palm trees and the sand was so white it looked like someone bleached the beach. The contrast of all the colors reflecting off each other was like nothing I had ever seen.
As I stood there, trying to take it all in, it was hard to realize that this was my life. I was standing in paradise. We took a few more pictures, the pictures couldn't capture the beauty of that place, and we made our way back to the scooters.
After we arrived back to the hotel, we parked our bikes and made our way back down to the beach. We swam a bit more, then headed into our rooms to shower and get ready for dinner.
Even though I had already rode an elephant and fed a baby tiger, and I knew I had more adventures like snorkeling and kayaking in front of me on this vacation, I would say that this day was my favorite part of the trip. The freedom of the scooters is something you can't get on a guided tour and the sights I saw is something I will never forget.
That being said, the next day was another adventure in itself......
No comments:
Post a Comment