Thailand is amazing! I told SMS today that I’m so happy that we visited Cambodia but it’s Thailand that I would want to come back to. It is so beautiful here and we have already had the most amazing mini-trips within this trip.
On Friday, we had a long but manageable travel day from Phnom Pehn to Khao Sok, Thailand. First, we had a slightly more exciting time crunch getting to the airport than I would have liked. The cabbie was 20 minutes late and then it took about 40 minutes to travel the 6 miles to the airport. I did not think it would take that long and I was kind of worried. The cabbie found the situation more and more funny as the minutes ticked by: “Sometimes, the other direction? The flyover? Cars don’t move. HAHAHAHAHA!!!!” I did not find this very funny, but distracted myself by telling him how hilarious he was. Sarcasm didn’t translate very well but he did drive like a banshee and we got to the airport an hour before our flight. The Phnom Penh Airport is small and we got through passport control quickly. So, despite the time stress, we still had time to browse the “Dufry Shop,” aka the Duty Free!
We took the plane to Bangkok, ate lunch at the airport between the A&B terminals and took our connector down to Krabi. We waited 20 minutes for our driver to find us since he went to the wrong terminal (domestic connections instead of international- even though our flight was from Bangkok, we went to the international terminal because of our origination airport). During that time, we tried to buy a SIM card but our phones were locked. One of the guys selling the cards was really nice and offered his personal hotspot to SMS. We called the hotel at about the same moment the driver came rushing up with the sign. Hooray!!!
We then spent 2.5 terrifying hours passing many, many cars along the road to the hotel. Our driver was a maniac. We got to Our Jungle House, which I highly, highly recommend. We stayed in the Romance tree house, which was delightful. The nearby river burbled over a small waterfall and the water noise was so soothing. We had a balcony right by the cliffs and it was absolutely awesome. We ate dinner at the restaurant and had some minor bad news given to us by a guy named Chris. SMS and I called Chris the “Cruise Ship Director” since his main job appeared to be chit-chatting with guests and drinking coffee in the morning. Anyway, once we established that no one had called trying to give us an urgent family emergency message, Chris told us that we were not going to be able to go on the 2 day, 1 night trip to Cheow Lan Lake since the National Park-run cabins were suddenly unavailable according to the authorities. Boo! I had looked forward to the trip. But, the fact that the hotel was so lovely made staying there an extra day an easy burden to bear plus we were still going to go on the day trip. SMS and I soon turned in, excited for our cave-exploring lake adventure the next day!