Author: Sarah Northway

To confirm, we are alive and have arrived on Koh Phangan. Our house is beautiful and right on the beach as advertised. It’s also right on the main road which is cool; we can pretty much step outside and hail a cab and we can wave to people riding by from our living room. It seems to be right beside beach access as well – there are women who come through every morning to fish and stay out in the water fishing all day.

I’m glad we have air conditioning, at least for the first few weeks. I’m sure we’ll get used to the heat soon, and since it’s been overcast and a little breezy it’s actually pretty pleasant.

Okay, so NOBODY walks anywhere here. Even here in the biggest town, Thongsala, people ride their motorbikes to go down two shops or across the street. But being the adventurers we are, we walked from our place at Ao Hin Kong into town this morning. It took about an hour and we stopped for breakfast. A lot of the houses along the main road also have some kind of business. We were looking for a coffee place called Starbugs that is apparently just down the street from us this morning but must have missed it; most businseses look like somebody’s house but have a small sign in Thai.

We’ll have pictures for you soon. Since we didn’t really start out intending to walk all the way to Thongsala I didn’t bring them along. I am starting to go a leeetle nuts without the Internet – oh and it didn’t occur to either of us that the plugs here wouldn’t have a ground, so I haven’t been able to use my laptop much. I tried plugging it in to our clunky big adapter which doesn’t have a ground either, and was getting little electric shocks when using the touch pad. So – first stop in town today is an electronics store.

Spider count for Erin: one so far. A tiny wolf spider Colin found in the fridge; even smaller than the ones back in BC. We’ve also seen tons of pretty birds and little lizards and some neato fishes. We’ve gotten a lot of use of the binoculars we brought. Spying on neighbors too! ^__^

More updates and pictures to come – hope we can get our own connection set up soon!

– Sarah

It had completely slipped my mind that some people reading this probably don’t have the whys and wherefores of the whole trip to Thailand thing. So here it is.

At some point we decided we had to leave the country. For alot of reasons really. I’d rather not grow up and die all on the same little island for one. We both pretty keen on getting to know another place and way of life. We don’t want to travel so much as live somewhere else. We’re less interested in seeing sights than becoming part of them.

So we decided about 8 or 9 months ago. That we where going to find a place in the world we thought looked interesting. Note that we came to that decision 8 months ago but we’re leaving now. This was because of work. We both felt pretty indispensible at work so we figured we’d give them 6 months to replace us. This decision was alot harder to make than it mat sound. Originally the plan was just to take the whole summer off.

Alright I just got a call saying my laptop ISN’T going to make it tonight and now I’m just all with the hoping I can pick it up tomorrow at the airport. I’m going to bed.

To be continued…