I flew home on August 12th for the first time in over 13 months. San Francisco was my first stop, mostly because it was the cheapest place to fly into, but also because I could hang out with my friend Kat before flying out to Minneapolis to see the fam. We spent the day in San Francisco, doing touristy sight-seeing stuff like going to the pier and watching the sea lions (and forgetting that if we were late getting back to the car we'd be paying a $50 fine). Later that night I flew to Minneapolis to meet my mom and step dad and drive down to Iowa. I think I spent about 40 hours awake before I really got to sleep, and I slept all day once we got down to Iowa.
In Iowa, I spent one night having dinner with my dad’s side of the family, who all came to my aunt Lorna’s place to see me. It was really nice to see most everyone there. I also got to meet my cousin’s 5-month-old baby Maya. She was really happy and cute. It was a bit strange and very sad though to visit with my dad’s side of the family but not see Grandma Elsie. It always felt like I would have my grandparents forever because up until recently I had all four and I’m already in my 20s. That’s been one of the hardests things about traveling for long periods of time. I couldn’t be there to say goodbye to Grandma.After seeing the Dessel side, I spent time with my mother's family and celebrated my grandparent's 60th wedding anniversary. They dragged my sleepy, jet-lagged butt to church for the occasion (yeah, you heard me, church) where they had reserved ten rows of pews for our family. With my grandparent's twelve children, their children, and their children, we filled them all and spilled over onto the other side! I found it hilarious when the priest was blessing my grandparent's 60 years of marriage and also blessed their ABUNDANCE of offspring.
Iowa was a bit shocking after living in Korea for so long. I enjoyed it, don’t get me wrong. It amazed me how many people thought that traveling in other countries is so scary and dangerous, as if nobody else does it and comes out alive, or as if people don’t LIVE in other countries. Many people also think that South Korea is a third-world country. Another strange thing was eating whole meals of food that was not in the least bit spicy! Only a few years ago I didn’t eat a single spicy thing, now it feels weird not to!After visiting my family, I went back to Phoenix. This town, though I hated it for the first few years, is more like home to me than anywhere else now. It was incredible to see my friends again. I haven't felt like I belonged somewhere in quite a while. I went back to staying with Ruvi and his family, where I lived for three months before going to Korea. But now I can be more helpful, since their family of three expanded into four. They took Aasha home from Sri Lanka in August, just in time for me to come and babysit! She grew not only chubbier since I met her in Sri Lanka, but she also is happier and more talkative now. She even grew fatter after Ruvi and I went to Burning Man at the end of August (blog here).
After the burn I took a long weekend in Seattle to visit my brother Justin. We hiked in the Snoqualmie mountains and also walked around Seattle a lot, drinking very yummy beer, eating amazing food (so easy to find vegetarian food there!) and visiting beautiful city parks. We also walked down to the Ballard locks, which are mainly cool because of the salmon ladder, but it was the wrong season. The salmon ladder is a series of pools that flow into one another and go up to the level of the lake, and the salmon jump upstream to get through the locks. It's usually pretty cool when there's more than one lonely fish in there.
I'm loving being home. I'm working at the metal shop again with my awesome old boss Chris. It's just the two of us which is nice. It keeps me very busy and allows me to save more for my upcoming travels. It's difficult to live in Phoenix without a car. Luckily Ruvi brings me grocery shopping when we need to go, and some friends have been sweet enough to come pick me up to go out. I have been steadily growing happier and happier since I've left Korea and come home. I LOVE all the food! Shereen is an awesome cook and I've been going to my old favorite restaurants. Oh how I missed feta, artichokes, pizza that doesn't have sugar in the sauce...I could probably write an entire blog post about food! I've even been taking pictures of it. Am I a dork? Wrong question...am I proud of my dork status? Aye!
We were a little nervous landing in Koh Phangan, as I had tried to book one night in a hotel there for the night of the Full Moon Party, but all the rooms online required at least three or four days of stay. Apparently this party lasts for a few days before the actual night of the full moon, which is the night of the big party. We had to go back to Bangkok the next day, so we couldn’t stay. Luckily, when the ship docked, there were guys out there ready for travelers like us and we were offered a great little bungalow on the beach for cheap. It was very cute and the restaurant/lobby had a beautiful view. It was a nice place to come and go from, and we were both glad to have found a place instead of having to bring all our junk to the party and watching over it like we were afraid we might have to.
Our room even came equipped with our very own bathroom toad. The bathroom wasn’t very clean, so I sprayed the whole thing down with the shower nozzle. Great idea, but I didn’t realize that an ant colony resided in the wall near the sink. After the spray-down, the ants swarmed out and up the wall to safety. There were thousands! And our lovely toad, which we named Fernando (and then could not get that song out of our heads), apparently wasn’t hungry enough to eat them. Dang. I’m getting better about my ant phobia and I don’t freak out too much when I see them (as long as they aren’t on me), but I do still get plenty of dreams that ants are crawling all over my bed even after leaving Thailand.
The Full Moon Party was nuts of course. There were drunk people everywhere and many people were body-painted in brightly colored black light reactive paints. We missed the memo on that one. We got in and busied ourselves with drinking a bucket cocktail. I mean they sell you a little bucket with ice, a can of coke, a can of Red Bull, and a flask-sized bottle of booze. That was a bit hard to get down at first! Right when we got onto the beach we were greeted by some friendly, drunk Frenchmen who seemed to think we could speak French. One of them kissed us both on the cheeks and his friend guided him away. The night was full of very silly encounters like that. All the bars on the beach were opened up and full of people dancing to crappy, loud house music. And each bar was competing with the next to be the loudest. Not the best sounding dance party I’ve been to. One bar had this tall, crazy slide on the side. You had to climb up a rope ladder to a platform and make sure the bottom was totally clear before you went down (or you would hurt yourself or others, which one girl we saw did). Oh and on the way down, you had to keep your hands to yourself because you went through a flaming hoop at the bottom! We even ran into an Austrian traveler we’d met on Koh Tao. Thailand really is a small place when you stick to the touristy areas. We saw many of the same people in different tourist locations during our trip.
We took a taxi truck home that night. They are pickups with seats lining the bed of the truck and they fit probably ten people total inside. It’s nice to get one that’s covered, especially since it was raining most of that night. I’m sure those drivers bank on party nights. In fact the entire island probably thrives off of it. We got home and slept only a few hours until we had to get up, check out, and get on a boat back to the mainland. Chelsea had a jammed toe from a badly placed rock in the ground, both of us had cuts on our feet from shells on the beach, and I was still nursing scraped feet from my volleyball game. We were tired, hungover, and in generally rough shape heading home! But we had a fabulous time in Thailand and are already talking about the next place in the world we want to meet up and travel around in. I’m thinking somewhere in South America. Onward ho!
When we finally got to the islands, it was overcast and rainy for about four days straight. This would have bothered me more if we weren’t going straight to the dive center to get our SSI open water scuba certifications right away. The four-day training program involved reading from the manual and completing study guides, watching a training DVD, taking an exam, and practicing safety skills in the water. We were diving by the second day, which was really cool, but also very scary. We had to practice things like taking our regulators out of our mouths and putting them back in (that’s the air hose you breath from), learning hand signals (since underwater, no one can hear you scream, hah), and filling our masks up with water and clearing it out underwater. That last one I had particular trouble with and didn’t actually complete until the last dive on the fourth day, whoops. We also had to learn how to share air and do emergency ascents. We made it out alive and with super cool dive certification cards in our wallets! Only regret - it was rainy and very wet and we didn’t take our cameras on the boats or get underwater photos. Also, because of the rain storms, the visibility underwater was only a few meters, so we didn’t see much. I did see a very large sea cucumber though. Thing must’ve been about two feet long and very fat! Our instructor also pointed out an eel hiding near the bottom. I’m very excited to see other reefs in the world now that I’m allowed!
The second day of diving was my 24th birthday, but we were just exhausted and had to dive again the next day, so I postponed celebrating for a couple days. The day we got our certifications we celebrated by going out and having fun at some of the bars that were right on the beach. It was such a cool location - you could sit at a bar and have waves lapping your feet at high tide. One had a cool bench swing we liked to sit on, and another was out on the sea so you had to walk down a narrow dock to get there. Koh Tao was gorgeous. Earlier that day though I played a little too much beach volleyball and skinned up the tops of my feet on the rough sand and bruised the hell out of my arms. My feet are still healing from that! It was a great belated birthday that day.
We spent the next couple days sun bathing, since the sun finally decided to come out a little bit, and got ourselves a bit tan. Chelsea was getting worried about spending two weeks in Thailand and coming home without a tan, but we got that under control. We got a little silly at one beach and found this shell of a crab and built it a memorial in the sand. We also rented a scooter, but soon found that the island was so small there wasn’t much road to travel! We just took it to a beach. Chelsea drove a scooter for the first time and both of us drove on the left side of the road which was interesting.
One of our last evenings there we met yet another person interested in Chelsea’s camera. It seems that photographers have quite the community of common interest - everyone wants to talk about their cameras and photos. This guy worked at a nearby bar and was very excited to show us his work. At first it seemed a bit strange, but when he handed us his ipod to show the photos, we couldn’t stop going through them. They were amazing! He did a lot of cool shots with a fish eye lens and some cool double-exposure shots too (I really don’t know what I’m talking about, but they were badass). So Chelsea and I went on a photo-taking rampage that night and just had fun taking pictures of things.
After almost a week on little Koh Tao, we took a ferry over to Koh Phangan for the Full Moon Party that the island is famous for. Koh Tao was a nice little island to visit. It felt small and friendly, kind of like Pai. Like everywhere else I’ve been in Thailand, it was full of stray dogs and cats. I think the little island had about as many strays as human inhabitants. Luckily, there have been neutering programs recently. Also like many of the other Thai towns I’ve been in, there were a lot of ants! We even had scorpions in our bathroom. Fortunately, with bugs comes cool lizards to see on the walls and who make interesting noises in early morning hours.
