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Hi friends. We’re back home in Korea now, but I’m still posting my writings from our trip to Thailand. There will be a few more segments in the next couple of days. We will have pictures on our photos page very shortly. Enjoy.

In this segment, we are finally leaving Bangkok to head to our island destination of Kho Pha Ngan.

“Sawadeekaa,” a girl greeted us and asked to see our receipt. She handed us two tickets and stuck a red sticker on each of our shirts, below our left shoulders. She worked through the crowd until each traveller had the obligatory red sticker. We passed our bags to be packed under the bus then filed to the top level to be seated in twos.

The driver passed around a clip board as the bus began moving. We filled in our passport info and saw that we were indeed a diverse group– Germans, French, Swedes, Finns, Dutch, Indians, Danish, South Africans, and just us the Americans. Everyone chatted in their language with their seat mates, and I felt jealous that I couldn’t understand anyone, but they could understand me. I need to learn another language. I’m grateful to have grown up speaking English– it’s a difficult language to learn, and I can use it almost anywhere. Still, being a native English speaker, I’m lazy to learn another language. Which one should I learn? I really want to be bilingual. I’ve had the most exposure to Spanish– I could pick that up well. I think I shall.

So the bus bumped into the night: lights too low to read, bathroom too scary to use, bilingual pairs too intimidating to talk to, leg room too cramped to sleep comfortably, earphones in the bag under the bus, so no music to listen to. Hours later, near midnight, we stopped at an open-air convenience store with tables to a 45 minute break. Adam downed a beer to help him sleep, and I dreamed of some NyQuil. We chatted with a Dutch couple who had been touring Southeast Asia for 8 months ad would be headed home in three weeks. She was a caseworker at a prison for the mentally ill and schizophrenic, and he was a prison guard. “And what do you do?” they asked. Umm, I teach english at a theme park, and my husband is an artist and student. Cool.

Back on the bus, we bumped down the Thai highway until we finally reached the port town just before dawn. We unloaded again to wait two hours until we could ride one more bus to the ferry. Each of us zombies sat at tables staring into space, nodding off. At 7:00 a.m., I had 30 more minutes before we would head to the ferry. I got up to walk around.

Across the street was a large gold temple radiating in the dawn sun. I took off my shoes and walked the circumference. The wet pavement on my bare feet, the fresh morning breeze, and the quiet were refreshing, and I finally woke up. A cat approached me, and I scratched his ears for a few minutes as he contorted his body in delight. I walked on, and my new friend the cat followed me back to my shoes and to the gate.

It was time to go. We were corralled into a bus that promptly broke down five minutes from the ferry port. We waited on the road side just moments and then in fast-forward, we boarded a new bus. Finally, we reached the nearby ferry pier. We showed our tickets at the hut and received a pink sticker that we stuck on our chests just beneath our red bus stickers.

The sun beat down from a bright blue sky, but we were immediately cooled by the breeze off the water. We filed from the rickety pier across the plank onto our two-storey ferry. First dropping our backpacks within the holding gate on the rear deck, we followed the flow of people into the lower seating area. As we were seated, we watched the pier drifting away from the window. Our molded plastic chairs were no way to enjoy our passage to the island. The sun and wind called us forth.

Drawn by the beautiful morning in the water, we climbed back up the narrow staircase to the front deck. A handful of other travelers had claimed their patch of sunny real estate on the deck. We found our spot, leaning against the slanted outer wall of the cabin. Adam took off his shirt and wadded it up as a pillow. I hiked my skirt above my knees, tucked it under my thighs to keep from flying away in the wind, and draped my legs over the side of the boat. I leaned against the wall beside Adam, and lulled by the humming boat and the steady warm wind, we fell asleep.

“Where was your sunscreen?” you may ask. In our backpacks on the rear deck, of course.

We woke up a couple of hours later as the ferry approached the first stop, Kho Samui, the island just south of ours. Feeling a little parched and hungry, we migrated back to the plastic chairs below deck. We chugged down water, at a ham sandwich from the concession stand, and made faces at a beautiful French toddler with blonde ringlets.

Soon we were coming to port at Kho Pha Ngan. I smiled at Adam and noticed that his face was a little pink. “You got a little sun.” He said that I looked rosy too, and we happily climbed up to retrieve our bags. Swinging my backpack onto my shoulder, it felt a little tender. Ouch. My shoulders were pink too. As the ferry pulled up to the pier, the taxi drivers began their typical frenzy, calling dibs on the travelers before we were even on the island. “Hey! You’re with me!”…

-Jessica