"Wat" we've been up to...

Hello from Nakhon Si Thammarat! I'm currently in the back of a gaming internet cafe in Southern Thailand. School just got out so the place is packed with kids playing Starcraft, Fifa, and some other kind of fantasy fighting games I don't recognize. There's a pungent smell coming in from food cooking on the street and from the adolescent boys around me. It's the perfect locale to update you on our recent adventures.

Maia and I just got in this morning and checked into the monolithic and notably empty Thai Hotel on Nakhon's main drag. The hotel's a concrete ghost town with a weird flea market on the 3rd floor (we discovered when the elevator stopped and opened up there), but it's very comfortable primarily because it's the first place we've had with air conditioning in the last 5 days and Thailand is freaking humid. The town itself is much livelier, and as an added bonus, we seem to be pretty much the only westerners around. People like to shout "hello!" to us and when we say "hi" back they laugh. As Maia put it, since we're here to ogle them, their culture and country, it seems only right to just allow and enjoy the reciprocal ogling. Ogle on, Thailand.

Wat Phramahathat Woramaha Wihan. Asking for directions was a mouthful. But worth it.

We spent the steamy afternoon checking out the town's big attraction...surprise, surprise...a wat! What's a wat? Glad you asked! A wat's a temple and they're strewn all over the place here. However, Nakhon's wat WAS particularly nice. Lots of gold buddha statues hanging out in different positions (standing, reclining, fat), incense burning everywhere, a staircase to nowhere, a big gong bell you can ring. I don't know anything about Buddhism.

Maia kayaking in Angthong Marine Park. We won the race around a small island against some Germans and Australians. We also saw a HUGE jellyfish en route.

In the last few days since the last post and before we arrived here in Nakhon, Maia and I were enjoying the island life on Ko Tao and Ko Phangan in Thailand's southern gulf. Both islands lay along main arteries of the Backpacker Path (a.k.a. Gringo Trail), but both were really beautiful and we managed to find some quiet spots in which to avoid the drunk Australians. We did a one day snorkeling tour around Ko Tao, which was incredible, rented mopeds on Ko Phangan to explore the island on our own, and also did a speedboat day trip off of Ko Phangan to see Angthong Marine Park, where they filmed The Beach (y'know...the one with Leo DiCaprio running around looking for Nirvana or drugs or something...I didn't actually ever see it). Maia got a traditional Thai massage and I sampled some different tropical cocktails. We had breakfast by the beach every morning. We're both much tanner. Yes, I'm trying to make you jealous.

From here on out, however, we're expecting to leave the relative ease of traveling in Thailand behind and get into the nitty gritty of Malaysia. On the horizon are some good birding locations that may require some adruous jungle trekking, colonial towns, shadow puppet shows, and an increasingly impenetrable language barrier.

Okay. The internet speed here has been great (thanks, gamers!), but I think we're going to go seek out some dinner at the night market. Adios!

Breakfast by the beach: coffee, fresh-squeezed juice, eggs, and toast. Ahhhh!