Morning View from my 400B a night bungalow

Day two and I have almost forgotten my nightmare from yesterday and am loving this place! (despite its price - I realized that even though it's more than I wanted to pay, it's still only $12 a night) It's really pretty here, there's no sandy beach but the snorkeling is amazing! I rented a snorkel for the day ($1) and front crawl snorkeled around the bay. It was awesome! If swimming laps always had this much to look at I'd swim more lol. I can feel myself getting in shape already! I might walk into town tomorrow (apparently it's doable and only takes an hour, slightly skeptical) and buy a snorkel and do this every day!) Oh and I got into a 350B place for the night which has an awesome view, I feel like I'm in a treehouse :) I did some laundry in my sink and am not sitting here enjoying the breeze before dinner. Almost finished my first book, two more to go...any bets on how long they'll last?

Kathmandu to Koh Tao - Part 3

On the catamaran I sat up top with the wind in my hair, listening to music until the storm clouds rolled in and I went down below.

Kathmandu to Koh Tao - Part 2

After waiting in line for a half an hour I made it inside the office, showed them the booking on my phone and got my sticker (red 15) and my boat ticket for the next day and was told to come back in half an hour. I went and got a banana shake and bought some pineapple for the bus ride (I missed fruit!!) and then went and sat and ate my veggies and rice. After being herded down the street a couple blocks, buses started showing up and my red group climbed on our bus. To my disappointment it wasn't a sleeper bus like Vietnam but one with reclining seats. Still, it was much nicer than any of the buses I'd seen in the last month and a half! I put my earplugs in and tried to sleep, fairly unsuccessfully - so uncomfortable.

At 6am we arrived at the Chumpong Ferry dock and I brushed my teeth, washed my face and then ate my rice cakes with peanut butter (yup, all of this was in my carryon from the airport. I also had a pair of shorts I changed into! I was quite impressed with my packing abilities :) I watched sunrise from the dock and then got on the catamaran (first time on a catamaran!) bound for Koh Tao.

Chumpong Ferry dock to Koh Tao:

Sent from my iPhone

Kathmandu to Koh Tao - Part 1

I woke up at 5am Thursday and sat in the lobby of my guesthouse, in the dark, with my headlamp on and used the wifi to pick my shifts and send off emails to my work (to ensure i'd get summer shifts), ate my bananas and peanut butter for breakfast and then walked out to the street at 6:30am and got a taxi to the airport for 350R. My first flight was short, only an hour and a bit, I chatted with my neighbors (a lady from Uruguay and a guy from India) and ate three fruit salads because the flight crew said the catering company didn't give them any gluten free food for me. We were late landing because the pilot couldn't land the first time because it was too windy, so happy I wasn't staying in Delhi - It looked stormy. I ran to my connecting flight (boarding call was 11:15am and my plane landed at 11:20am) and made it 5 minutes before the gates closed, hoping my luggage made it :S The second flight was longer, about four and a half hours and I actually got fed, real food! It had my name on it and was curry, salad,fruit and corn patty thing. Yup, I took a picture of it :)

Did I mention I went book crazy??

This is me deciding which books to buy for my two weeks beaching it. I picked the two on the left and then Superfreakonomics. I almost bought all four but then decided maybe four was a bit excessive?? I can't wait to start my first one on the plane tomorrow :)

Elephant baths and the End of an Era

Our last day in Sauraha, Betty and I woke up bright and early and went for breakfast. We intended to have a ridiculously productive day and head off biking around the area but wanted to stop first to watch the elephants bathe at the riverside. We walked down and sat in the sunshine (a short lived pastime in Chitwan since it rains like every morning, afternoon and evening - sound a little like Vancouver??.) waiting for the elephants to show up. Turns out, you can pay 200 rupees ($2.50) to sit on the elephant's neck for about five minutes while it stands/sits in the river and bathes itself - essentially using its trunk to squirt the both of you, with river water (yum, mouth closed). Super touristy but so cool! (to ride an elephant in the nearby community forest for one hour costs 1300 rupees - and you're sitting in a box , lame) Elephants are so much more interesting up close! They have really rough wrinkly skin and spikey coarse hair on their head. And they're really smart gentle creatures. Ok, I want an elephant. So for five minutes we were bathed by elephants in the morning sun (pretty awesome) and then Betty and I walked back to our cottage to shower again to get the dirt and river water out of our hair. After lunch we hired bikes and pedaled around some nearby Tharou villages (the local people who used to live in the National Park but were relocated outside once it became a park). It was so pretty! Bumpy dirt roads surrounded by rice paddies and mud huts and colorful laundry drying on clothes lines. Or our last activity of the day we checked out the elephant breeding centre (mentioned, I might add, as a "must see" in the Lonely Planet) - for a total of two minutes. It was horrible. The adult elephants are all chained up, feet together and then chained to a pole while the babies roam around. The adults aren't able to get to their babies and the trainers hit them with sticks if they try to move and they cry out. Sickening. So mad we supported this and that it's a tourist attraction and so happy that I went to the Elephant Nature Park in Thailand and learned that training elephants doesn't need to be like this. Bit if a sad end to the day. Right on time (4pm) the clouds rolled in and the thunder, lightening and downpour started so we biked home in the rain to relax before dinner. At dinner time the storm as still going strong so we suited up in our rain gear to walk to "town" 5 minutes away. It was a bit scary walking to the restaurant, the thunder was so loud it felt like the lightening would hit us. We found a restaurant (most places you sit outside on the patio) but it was raining sideways so we were ushered inside while the owner boarded up the doorway and we spent an hour inside writing in our journals by candle light (gotta love the Nepal power outages) while we waited for dinner - dal bhat of course, yum :)

Safari Adventures!

Rounding out our adventure travels, Betty and I signed up for a safari in Chitwan National Park, hoping to see some fierce animals! Originally we were supposed to canoe for an hour and then do a full days walk in the park to see animals, but there was some confusion and we were no longer able to canoe. A little annoyed, all of my anger left when I actually sat in the canoe (we had to take one to cross the river to start our walk) and realized how unstable it actually was. "My iPhone!" Was the only thought that went through my head. Not "oh crap, there are crocodiles in this water that could eat me." But, "if the boat flips I need to be sure to keep my iPhone out of the water." Clearly I have my priorities in order. Once on the other side (relieved to have passed imminent danger) we walked along the river and into the park where our guide (one of two) explained some safety rules: If we saw a rhino and it started to charge us we were to run in a zig zag pattern (because rhinos have poor eyesight) and then climb a tree. For tigers we were supposed to stick in a group and be loud and menacing and try to stare it down. For sloth bears we were supposed to stick in a group and try to scare it but not look it in the eyes (sloth bears hate eyes/faces and will try to scratch your eyes out). Did I mention our guides had sticks for weapons and we were on foot? Right. The day turned out to be really good though, and relatively safe (with only one close encounter). We saw:
- a long snouted crocodile
- a spotted deer
- a massive deer the size of a giraffe
- a mongoose
- an Indian cuckoo and other birds
- red and grey monkeys
- some really cool red leaf cotton bugs
- a gharial (like a crocodile)
- some rare lizard
- a wild bore
- some wild chickens
- government elephants
- and two massive rhinos!

The first time we found a rhino we were trumping through the jungle (waving sticks infront of us to clear the cobwebs) like adventurers. Our guides told us to hush and we stalked it in the bush for awhile and then crouched while it crossed the path in front of us. Rhinos are massive animals! And quite scary in person when you realize how big they are and that there's literally nothing between you and it. I got an awesome video of it walking and peeing (who knew rhinos peed straight back??). Later in the day we found another rhino frolicking in the river. We creeped up to get a good look at it when another couple with two guides clomped up behind us loudly. The sounds angered the rhino because we were to close and so he lifted his head, looked at us and growled. "Run" our guide said. So we ran, all frantically and zig zag for about 200m until we realized it hadn't followed us, just growled. The noisy couple left and we crept back up closer and watched as this massive animal rolled over in the river and kicked its feet in the air, frolicking. This was when I need an SLR! It was incredible. We had lunch by one river, trekked bare foot through another (Chitwan has like three rivers bordering it) and checked out numerous observation towers before heading back to town for dinner. All in all an amazing day :)