Journal Excerpts, Oct 12-16

Monday, Oct 12

9:45pm: Ok, so, I knew I would run into a lot of couples backpacking, but DAMN there are a lot of couples backpacking!  How I Met Your Mother was totally not the right show for me to pick up for watching on long bus rides.  I gotta start meeting people and making friends, i.e., meeting people who actually WANT to meet other people, or I'm going to go out of my mind.

Thursday, Oct 15

8:00pm: I'm currently in my room in Hat Rei Leh.  I arrived yesterday morning after a couple days in Krabi Town (Hat Rei Leh is one of the beaches in Krabi, but you need to get there by long-tail boat).  Walking around, it seems that pretty much every guest house/resort is doing some sort of expansion project.  I guess they must be trying to add some new rooms before the high season starts.

I have very little concept of days of the week right now.  I suspect that as I get further into this trip, I will have less and less idea what day it is.  Though I suppose it's also possible that as I get used to the lack of structure, I'll get better at tracking the day and date.  My internal clock has also been all sorts of crazy since I arrived.  I've woken up between 2-5am every night since I've arrived and no amount of naps or lack naps or timing of naps has seemed to make much of a difference.  Today, I woke at 2am, watched a couple hours of How I Met Your Mother, went back to sleep for a couple hours, showered, walked around the island a bit looking for interesting food options, had an egg/onion/tomato Thai pancake, went to the beach for a bit, had a beer and read a bit from Best American Non-required Reading, watched some beach soccer between two of the resort teams in a local tournament, went back to my room and had another beer and a package of TimTams while finishing off the 4th season of How I Met Your Mother, took a nap, did some laundry, went out and had crocodile for dinner, and now am back in my room typing this journal entry.  Wait... crocodile?!  Yep.  Kinda chewy, but not entirely unlike chicken, I guess.

Friday, Oct 16

11:40pm: Today I left Rei Leh and traveled to Ko Pha-Ngan, meeting up with 3 cute Polish girls on the way: Anya, Victoria, and Claudia.  We were on the same bus from Rei Leh, then ended up spending the rest of day-long trip talking.  They're all friendly, from Krakow, work in corporate finance, and speak English very well.  They will also be in Ko Pha-Ngan for a few days before returning to Bangkok, so we will probably hang out more over the next few days.  It's great to finally make some backpacking friends!

Lesson learned today: never pay for a taxi in advance, especially to anyone other than the driver.  Paid the tout on the bus 350b for the 4 of us, but then the taxi driver who picked us up from the port didn't recognize the name he put at the bottom, and we ended up paying an extra 100b and may have to pay more if he comes back tomorrow and isn't able to sort it out.