Home Again, Home Again Jiggety-Jig, February 18

Today, February 18, we left Bangkok and said Good-Bye to South East Asia. We took the 7:00 AM flight from Bangkok to Narita Airport in Tokyo. From Narita we flew to Washington, DC, Dulles Airport. After an hour delay we flew to Burlington International. We arrived home at 8:00 PM on February 18th. We left on the 18th, traveled about 36 hours and arrived home on the 18th. How cool is that!

Sculpture inside Suvarnabhumi International Airport. We flew on a big double decker airplane from Bangkok toTokyo. 

The plane from Toyko to Washington.

We arrived home in St. George to find that we still had a lot of snow and spring was NOT just around the corner. 

We had a great trip. It was fun, exciting and a great learning experience. We met lots of different people and  traveled to countries we had always talked about visiting. 

The end to another great adventure.

Special thanks to Ben, Hiroko, and Jessica  for helping make this trip possible. They kept a watch on the house, dealt with all the mail, kept us informed of what was happening at home and Ben shoveled a walkway through the snow to the house door. Also, thanks to Farley for plowing our driveway several times.  Ben and Hiroko didn't have to dig our car out of the snow so they could leave it at the airport for us to come home in. 

Thank you all for following our blog of the trip.

We only have one question left. Where do we go next time???

 

Bangkok February 17

This is our last day of our trip. We spent the morning repacking our luggage for the flight home, trying to update this blog, and just relaxing.

Around 2:00 we headed back into Bangkok to Terminal 21 where we were meeting a friend, Chantana, and her family for dinner.

We arrived at Terminal 21, a huge shopping mall, to find the protests in full swing. It was Monday so the protests were happening around the city.

There was a large stage set up across one of the intersections. Speeches were given from the stage.

This empty street would be filled with tents later that evening.

There were tents set up on the walk ways over the road.

Vendors for food and protest souvenirs were set up all around the area.

There were large screens set up because the area was so large.

After work Chantana and her family came to meet us at Terminal 21 for supper. Chantana was a graduate student at St. Michaels College. She took graduate courses from both Charlie and me when we taught summer classes there. She also worked in Jane's classroom as part of her graduate program. She was in many of Jessica's graduate classes and they became good friends. 

Chantana and her husband are both teachers in a private school in Bangkok and their 7 year old daughter attends the school that Chantana teaches in.

We had a great time visiting and catching up on what everyone has been doing since graduating from college.  We promised to get together again someday.

It was dark when we left the restaurant and more protesters had come and set up their tents. There were hundreds and hundreds of these small tents set up in the streets. It was strange because you didn't see as many people in relationship to the number of tents. We wondered if some of the people just set the tents up and went home to sleep.

Vendors selling their wares.

More tents.

Things seemed to be pretty quiet with the protesters. There was someone giving a speech, people walking around and not much else happening. Although, during our trip we had been receiving US Government updates on the protests and knew that some of the protests had turned violent. We were careful walking around but weren't afraid.

We rode the train back to Lat Krabang Station and took a taxi back to our hotel. We were beginning to feel train/subway travel savvy. This was the end of a great trip for us. We tried to get to bed early as we needed to get up at 4:00 AM to catch the hotel shuttle ride to the airport.

The Great Residence Hotel. We choose this hotel to stay in because it was close to the airport (about 10 minutes away) and had free shuttle service to the airport. If we had stayed in the city it would have taken over an hour to get to the airport and might have taken longer to get there because of the protests.

Bangkok, February 16

We decided to go into Bangkok for the day and because we didn't know how to use the train system we decided to hire a taxi to take us into the city. It took about half and hour to get into the outskirts of the city. The traffic was good, according to the driver, because it was Sunday.

Victory Monument. "No one seems to know what Victory Monument commemorates, but all roads and practically all forms of public transportation in Bangkok, maybe even all of Thailand, lead here." wiki-travel^[1]

After a drive around the monument our driver took us to the Chatuchak Weekend Market. The driver let us off and told us that all we had to do was take the train back to the place we were staying.  If we couldn't figure it out he would come back in the afternoon and get us. All we had to do was call him. Of course, we didn't have a way to call as we didn't have a phone. He told us just to give his number to someone with a phone and they would call him.

Chatuchak market is huge and we walked around only part of it. 

"The 35-acre (68-rai) area of Chatuchak is home to more than 8,000 market stalls. On a typical weekend, more than 200,000 visitors come here to sift through the goods on offer. Veteran shoppers would agree that just about everything is on sale here, although not all at the best bargain rates. But if you have one weekend in Bangkok, squeeze in a day trip to Chatuchak Weekend Market and you will not be disappointed."

Fruit and vegetable selection.

These are good luck charms made from flowers, garlic and other items that people hang on their vehicle mirrors, on their stands or places where they want good luck.

This wok was huge!! The restaurant was cooking a seafood dish in it. It looked delicious.

After about two hours walking around the market we decided to call it a day and it was time to figure out how to use the train system. We wanted to travel to Terminal 21 and then back to the hotel where we were staying.

Train map guide. The train system is well organized and color coded. We knew we could make it to the places we needed to go. 

First stop was Terminal 21. This is a huge mall and it is one of the sites where the protests in Bangkok are taking place.  The roads were still blocked and they had groups playing music was on the stage.

The streets outside the mall are closed to traffic. There are lots of vendors and food stalls set up along the streets. There were also a lot of tents.

"Terminal 21 is a one floor one theme shopping mall. The concept is market streets of the world. It is decorated based on well-known streets in cities such as Rome, Paris, Tokyo,London, Istanbul. This mall has the longest escalators in Thailand, up to 36 metres." wikitravel. There are nine floors in the mall. You can buy just about everything. Clothing, food, restaurants, jewelry, etc. Just like our malls but only bigger!!

You could spend a great deal of time just riding the escalators.

We didn't do any shopping, we just looked around and decided it was time to figure out how to get back to our hotel via the train system.

We took the subway from Terminal 21 to Makkasan Station where we took the Sky Train to the train station near where we were staying. You can take the Sky Train from the city to Suvarnabhumi International Airport. A lot of travelers use the train to get to and from the city to the airport. 

We made it back to the Lat Krabang Station (our get off point) and hired a taxi to take us to our hotel.

The end to another adventurous day.

Leaving Koh Pu Island for Bangkok, February 15

Today we head for Bangkok where we will get our flight home.

We arranged for a tuk-tuk driver to take us into town to the pier where we caught a long tail boat to the mainland. 

Our tuk-tuk driver and his son. We had to get out and walk up a hill as the driver couldn't make it up the hill with all the weight in the tuk-tuk.

We were taken to the pier in the town on the other side of the island. Here we got a ride on a long tail boat.

The long tail boat we got a ride on.

Besides people the boat carried four motor cycles, a cooler that needed to get fixed and some other cargo.

When we arrived on the mainland we joined a group of people getting into a song thaeu (pick up truck) to take us into Krabi Town.  When we left the pier for Krabi Town there were 12 people stuffed into the back of the truck. The trucks have a cover over the top of the back with a bench on each side of the truck body. Along the way the driver picked up 5 more people. We were all stuffed into the back of that truck. We had the driver drop us off at the airport.

We flew to Bangkok and decided to get a hotel near the airport, as we have to catch a 7:00 flight for home and need to be at the airport at 5:00. Our hotel has shuttle service.

We walked around the area we were staying and found this street vendor whose food looked good.  

We had a mushroom/rice dish.  After supper we went back to the hotel and planned on how we were going to use the train/subway system to get into the city.

Koh Pu Island, February 14

This island is a peaceful, laid back place. There isn't much here, except some other restaurants with their guest cabins. At night you only see the stars and some lights from the cabins or restaurants. We think that this would be a great place for a group of people to visit and hang out for  a week or more. A great place to end a tour.

One reason that this island is not on the tourist hot spot list is the beach. The beach is not the white, sand beach of the other islands and when the tide goes out there are rocks. But this might just be a postive thing!!

The beach when the tide goes out.

Some more pictures from the island, in no particular order.

Someone is building a road behind the cabins we are staying in. The road will lead to the other businesses down the beach. This is so motor scooters and tuk-tuks and the occassional truck won't have to drive down the beach. They often have a hard time making it through the sand.

Another Sand Art picture by Charlie.

We have been eating Som Tam (son tum) at the various beach restaurants. This one had run out of papaya and used cucumber. It was still pretty good.

We used the orange kayaka for an ocean tour. We spent about an hour or so paddling along the coast line.

Monkeys- The monkeys were all over the island. We had to keep our windows shut and locked when ever we went out. If we didn't the monkeys would come inside the cabins and steal whatever they could.

The monkeys were not very friendly creatures. In fact, they were very aggressive.

For Valentine's Day we decided to do a little bar hoppping. There weren't many tourists, as most had moved on. Also, no one was celebrating Valentine's Day except us. It isn't a special day in this part of the world. One of the bars we visited. We were the only ones there.

The bar tender took our photo.

Since it was Valentine's Day we decided on trying some of the local specialties.

Long Island ice tea and pina calada.

Our last dinner on the island. A coconut soup, masaman, and a chicken dish.

February 14, full moon rising over the island.

The sunset from one of the bars down the beach.

Koh Pu Island, Friday February 14

Happy Valentines's Day Everyone,

It is a full moon tonight and it is beautiful here on the beach. Tonight is our last night here on the island. We have arranged for a tuk-tuk driver to pick us up around 7:00 AM and take us to the pier so we can catch a long tail boat to the mainland. There, we will get a Song Tow (truck with seats in the back) to take us to Krabi airport. We are flying to Bangkok where we are ending the trip. On Tuesday we catch a flight back home!!

Some pictures of where we are now.

Candle holders made from plastic bottles.

Grilled fish!

The porch railing of our cabin.

The toilet paper holder in our bathroom.

Sand crab designs.

Our bed. We have to keep the shutters closed every time we leave the cabin because the monkeys come into the cabins looking for food. At night we keep the windows open and the mosquito net down and haven't had any issues with the monkeys.

Menu from one of restaurants.

Coconut curry dish.

Sun setting into the Andaman Sea.