Monsoon's & Travel Plans

Phuket, Thailand - We are still in Phuket having been here just over a week now but are heading to Bali, Indonesia tomorow.

The week in Phuket has really flown by as it doesn't seem like we've done much except do some surfing, hanging around the great pool at our hotel and planning the last 6 weeks of our trip.

Last weekend we had a tropical storm come through where it rained most of Saturday and Sunday, at times quite heavy. So needless to say we were stuck in the room most of those two days so we decided to plan out our last six weeks. It was a pretty crazy storm with palm fronds knocked down everywhere and the power off and on for two days. I got soaked going out to get us dinner one night. When I left it was sprinkling but by time I returned it was a torrential downpour!

Back to our travel plans, our intention had been to go to Sulawesi in Indonesia and do some diving and then follow that up with some more diving around Bali & Lombok also in Indonesia however what we failed to realize was that it is high season in Indonesia right now and in Bali that means best of luck getting a hotel, in the other areas getting a hotel was possible but very expensive. So to make a long story short we have cut our plans in Indonesia from 6 weeks to 2 weeks with about 9 days in Bali using points for our hotel stay and 5 days in the Gili Islands doing some diving.

On July 30th we fly from Bali back to Singapore and then on July 31st we are headed to Sri Lanka for a month before flying back to Singapore on Aug 29th and then home on Sept 1st.

How did we come up with Sri Lanka? We basically looked at a map and tried to find destinations that were within a 2 or 3 hour flight that would be cheap to fly to, wouldn't be in high season like Bali but would still be a good time to visit and would be cheap once we got there.

We came up with 3 possibilities, Sri Lanka, Nepal and the Philippines. Nepal and the Philippines are very rainy right now whereas in Sri Lanka the weather is actually pretty good this time of year. The final marks in Sri Lanka's favor was that we could get a flight on Sri Lankan Air for $350 for the two of us and that the used bookstore next to our hotel had a copy of the Sri Lanka Lonely Planet!

So we've been reading up on Sri Lanka and trying to formulate an itinerary. The only thing we have booked right now is 5 nights in the town of Kandy which is the sight of the biggest festival of the year in Sri Lanka called the Esala Perahera.

The only other thing I need to keep in mind is my Fantasy Football Draft will be on the morning of Aug 28th our last day in Sri Lanka so I will have to make sure we have a hotel with a reliable internet connection...priorities you know!

Surfing in Thailand

Kata Beach, Thailand - Betsy and I took our first (of two) surf lessons today. Tony our surf instructor has been surfing for 20 years which means he started very young because he doesn't look much older than his 20's!

It was a lot of fun but tough work. I managed to stand up on my 3rd wave and ended up riding about half the waves that I tried to get up for. A couple i was kind of kneeling but didn't have any huge wipeouts.

The waves were good for learning about 3-4 feet.

Betsy had a little more trouble getting up on the board as I guess most women do when they first start as they don't have quite as much upper body strength to get up but she did pretty good and enjoyed herself enough to try it again tomorrow.

It was a blast and definitely looking forward to trying it again tomorrow though I think we are both going to be pretty tired!

Simple Life Divers

Phuket, Thailand - Betsy wrote a short thank you/review of our dive school in Koh Tao and they published it on their website. You can check it out here.

Phuket Revisited...

Phuket, THAILAND - We left Koh Tao via ferry headed for Koh Samui that is about a 2 hour ride. Unfortunately, it turned into a longer journey than expected. Once the ferry left the Koh Tao port we headed out for about 15 minutes and then came to stop as we anchored up with two other ferry boats in the middle of the ocean. With no announcement we somehow gathered that we had to get our belongings together and step across to the other boat and the passengers on that boat were to board our original boat. The entire process took almost an hour. When we finally arrived on to Koh Samui we boarded a mini van that was to take several of us to our various hotels. Of course we were the last ones in the van with the driver wanted to head back in the direction of the port but we know our hotel was further on. We convinced him, after he stopped to ask directions twice and was still taking us in the wrong direction, to borrow someone's mobile to ring our hotel for proper directions. That did the trick and we were at our hotel a few minutes after that.

We spent the next 3 days at the Samui Reef View Resort relaxing by the pool and organizing our next stops. The Samui Reef View is located up on a hillside and was very quiete with the pool adding to the chill-out factor. The owner, Angus & his wife made us feel at home.

Next, we flew to Phuket to stay at Kata Beach. Our first flight since flying to Hanoi, Vietnam in late March. To date all of our travels have been via bus, boat or train. Stacy and I were in Phuket 5 years ago on our honeymoon. It is low season here so the hotel and restaurants are pretty quiet. The plan for now is to stay here for the next 5 days and maybe take a couple surfing lessons.

Where in the world are the Kuchta's?

Koh Tao, Thailand - Yes we are still in Koh Tao, going on 18 days but are finally getting ready to leave tomorrow to Koh Samui another island about a 90minute boat ride from here.

There hasn't been much in the way of posts lately because we haven't been doing much except chilling on the island and diving and without an underwater camera simply writing about our dive trips is probably not very interesting.

We've hit pretty much every major dive site around here from the depths of Chumphon Pinnacle to the recent dive boat wreck at Japanese Gardens to the schools of fusiliers at Mango Bay we've seen a lot. The weather has been great and the water warm. Our new found love for diving has definitely changed our focus for the last couple of months of our trip.

So far we have done our open water certification, advanced open water certification and a half dozen "fun" dives with our favorite dive operator on the island Simple Life Divers. Thanks to Woz our instructor and Lisa our divemaster on our fun dives for making our diving so enjoyable.

On our last dive for our advanced certification Woz brought along a camera and we took a few pictures that you can see below.

Us under a school of fusiliers

Looking up at the Fusiliers

Nasty looking Triggerfish

As Betsy calls it a "cute" little boxfish

Stacy & Betsy getting ready

for a dive

Certifiably Diving!

Koh Tao, Thailand - Well, it's official Betsy and I are now certified divers! Woohoo! We completed our Open Water course with two dives yesterday, one called White Rock and the other Japanese Gardens. It was great fun and we both really enjoyed it. We got down to a depth of about 20m (60ft) and got to see a lot of interesting things.

The highlights of the dives yesterday were probably a blue spotted stingray and a school of barracuda that we swam through. We also were chased by a titan triggerfish (nasty little buggers!). Apart from that we saw all the usual suspects including sea urchin, "nemo" fish, bannerfish and an assortment of other colored creatures and critters.

The course was a blast, our instructor Woz was awesome and our classmates Rebecca and Clive were good fun. The school we went with Simple Life Divers was excellent and all the staff were great and very accomodating with us having to delay our diving a few days due to Betsy's cold.

We were accompanied on our open water dives yesterday by a videographer (thanks Amber) who filmed our setup and diving and turned it into a 20min DVD. We got to watch it last night at a local watering hole and it was great fun. Look for it in stores everywhere soon!

Since we have enjoyed ourselves so much we have decided to do the advanced open water certification which consists of 5 dives including a deep dive to 30m (100ft), underwater navigation, fish identification, a night dive and a buoyancy control dive.

This new found love for diving has altered our travel plans once again as we are now planning our trip around what dive locations we can hit.

We've been in Koh Tao for a week now and will probably be here another week. We are enjoying the island and not in any real hurry to move on at this point.

Koh Tao Diving

Koh Tao, Thailand - Betsy and I completed our first dive today, actually it was really just our "shallow water" or "confined water" training but it was a real dive nonetheless.

We were supposed to start the course a few days ago but Betsy picked up a cold so we had to delay and as such haven't been doing much the last couple of days but relaxing and letting her recover.

Yesterday we did the "academic" part of the course...yawn. Today we went out on the boat to a dive site called Japanese Garden. Once we were geared up in we went. We swam from the boat to the beach (about 50m) where the water was only about 2m deep. We then "dropped" to the bottom and practiced some basic skills like taking your regulator out of your mouth and putting it back into your mouth remembering to purge it before breathing in! Also filling your mask with water and clearing it underwater.

We also got to scuba around the site for about 20minutes after we had practiced our skills. Even while we were practicing our skills there were many fish swimming right up to us, schools of small brightly colored fish, larger colored fish even a barracuda was seen.

Betsy was a little nervous that she wouldn't be able to equalize her ears due to her cold but she did pretty good. We only went as deep as 7m (22 ft) but still were able to see a lot. All in all we were underwater for about 50minutes.

Tomorrow we have a bit more academics and then we have two dives in the afternoon to 12m (40ft).

On Sunday we do our final two dives at a place called Chumphon Pinnacle which is famous for its Whale Sharks (large plankton eating sharks that grow up to 12m (40ft) long).

The dive operator we are doing our course with is called Simple Life. So far they have been excellent. I actually got my dive certification 10 years ago in Seattle and didn't really enjoy the course or the instructors. I only went for a real dive once after that and then soon moved to Denver and never dived again.

Simple Life has made this a much better diving experience. They were very flexible with Betsy's cold and our instructor "Woz" has been great. We've also got a small group of just 4 so it makes the instruction that much more personal.

We are looking forward to doing some serious diving in the last couple of months of our trip as we journey down through Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Oceans Away!

Chumphon, Thailand - We just arrived in Chumphon which is down on the east coast in southern Thailand and the gateway to the eastern islands of Ko Tao, Ko Pha Ngan and Ko Samui. This is the first glimpse of the ocean we've had in 2 months since we left Nha Trang in Vietnam.

We had what should have been a 6 hour train ride and turned out to be a 9 hour trip. We were late leaving Bangkok and also hit a cow on the way though that didn't seem to slow us down much. It sounded like we hit a speedbump and then there was gravel flying and cows running all over the place...not sure what the result was for the cow but Betsy said there was a streak of "Cow Digested Grass" down the side of the train.

You have to love Thai Railways, we've taken 3 trips and while the trains are comfortable enough, 2 of the 3 have been a couple of hours late. We were commenting about all the traveling we've done up to this point and had zero delays until we started using Thai Railways!

Anyhow we are staying about 20 minutes from Chumphon next to where the catamaran will take us to Ko Tao Island tomorrow where we will do our diving certification...hopefully!

I say hopefully because Betsy thinks she might be coming down with a cold. That isn't the end of the world but would delay us diving a few days.

I feel like we've gotten into a bit of a rut traveling since we arrived in Thailand. Thailand is very modern compared to the other countries we've been to and as such it has been a lot of shopping, going to the mall, different restaurants and not a lot of touring.

Hopefully being on the islands will rejuvenate us a bit.

The Big Mango

Bangkok, Thailand - We arrived by train in Bangkok this afternoon from Phitsanulok. We had taken a train to Phitsanulok from Chiang Mai a couple of days ago with the intention of seeing the historical ruins at Sukhothai about an hour away from Phitsanulok but both of us are going through a bit of temple fatigue so we bagged that plan. That coupled with the fact that I have had "Thailand Tummy" the last 4 days it wasn't hard to skip Sukhothai.

It is great to be in Bangkok aka The Big Mango, we found a nice little boutique hotel that just opened a month ago so we've gotten a great "Grand Opening" rate. We will be here about 5 days. The plan is to get our Indonesian visas here and also go see a movie. We haven't seen a movie in ages and Bangkok has lots of first run movies in english.

From here we may go to Kanchanburi which was made famous in the movie "Bridge on the River Kwai" and is the site of the "Death Railway" built by Allied prisoners in WW2 but it seems like a bit of a slog and we are both feeling pretty lazy these days so we'll see...

The other more likely option is to head down to the Thai islands for a few weeks. We are thinking that we might do our diving certification while we are here. Betsy has never dived and I actually got certified about 10 years ago but then only dived a couple of times after that.

It seems a shame to come to some of the best diving areas in the world and not take advantage of it. So if we do that we will head to Ko Tao an island in the Gulf of Thailand that grants more diving certifications each year than anywhere in the world except Cairns, Australia.

Our Thai visas are good until July 26th so we have plenty of time left to explore the country.

Flying Through the Jungle

Chiang Mai, Thailand - We've been in Chiang Mai now for almost a week and it has been great.  The food has been great, the weather, our hotel, the shopping, everything.  We were only planning on being here 3 days but have been extending our stay a day every couple of days. On Friday though we will catch the train and head down south towards Phitsanulok & Sukhothai.

Yesterday we did something that neither have us have tried before...zip lining.  We went zip lining & abseiling (rappelling) in the jungles north of Chiang Mai with a company called Flight of the Gibbon.

It was great fun, we did 11 zip lines with the longest being 150m (450ft) at a height of 150m above the ground and 3 rappels, the longest being 45m (135ft).

Betsy was a little nervous at the start as she has a fear of heights but by the end of the day she was ready to jump off the platforms to get a running start.  She was a trooper and we both had a great time.

Here is a video I took while zip lining:

Here is a video of Betsy's first zip line, the look of sheer terror was gone by the 3rd zip line:

Welcome to Thailand!

Chiang Mai, Thailand - After two 10 hour  days on a boat running rapids up the Mekong River followed by a 6 hour minibus ride from the border we've finally arrived in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

We were here on our honeymoon 5.5 years ago so it is nice to be back in a city we really enjoyed and have some familiarity with.

We left Luang Prabang on Wednesday morning and spent 1o hours on our boat the Luang Say cruising upstream to  Pak Beng where we overnighted.  The cruise was quite nice as we were on a boat that held 40 and there  was only 7 of us so plenty of room to spread out and enjoy the scenery. We made a couple of stops along the way to see some caves and visit a couple of villages. 

One of the villages is famous for its Lao Lao which is the local moonshine aka rice whiskey.  After being told the fine points of how the whiskey is distilled we were invited to sample some of the firewater.

It wasn''t too bad though probably would have tasted better if it wasn't 100F+ outside and the bottles hadn't been sitting in the sun all day.

The scenery along the river was spectacular, very mountainous with many rocky outcrops in the river exposed by how low the river was at this time of year.  The boat even had to run the rapids upsteam quite a few times.  For such a large boat it apparently only drew about a meter of water so didn't need much water to avoid running aground.

We spent a night in Pak Beng actually about a mile upstream of PakBeng at the Luang Say Lodge which was quite nice with great vistas of the mountains and the Mekong River from our windows.

Unfortunately it was quite warm and since there were no screen on the windows we had to keep them closed to keep the bugs out (we did have a mosquito net over the bed as well).

Neither of us slept great as it was so warm though the lodge was very comfortable and the dinner was excellent.

After breakfast it was back on the boat by 7am for another 10 hour  trip.  We stopped at one more village (I feel like I've seen enough villages for awhile) and arrived at Houay Xai on the Lao side of the border around 5pm.  We took a tuk-tuk to the Lao border and got our exit stamps then hopped in a small boat that took us across the Mekong to the Thai side.  After having our temperature taken to make sure we didn't have swine flu (we didn't!) and a couple of forms and stamps later we were officially allowed into Thailand.

We had decided to spend the night  at the border and head to Chiang Mai the  next day as it was 6 more hours to get to Chiang Mai.  We threw our backpacks on and headed down the main road paralleling the Mekong to find a hotel.

After a few hundred meters we were sweating like crazy as it was quite warm and very humid out (Surprise!).  We stopped at the first hotel that said they had AC, I looked at a room and while it wasn't anything special it was reasonably clean, cheap and had AC.

After cooling down for a few minutes we headed out to organize our transport to Chiang Mai the next day and booked a mini-bus.

The next day we had an uneventful minibus ride from Chiang Kong to Chiang Mai followed by a short walk to our hotel and we had arrived.

Twenty hours on a boat, 2 nights and a 6 hour minibus ride was all it had taken!  I think we'll stay in Chiang Mai a few days to recuperate.  The weather is much nicer here, the food is great and we have a few things we need to get done with me needing a hair cut and Betsy needing a spa treatment being the top 2 on the list!

Where to Next??

Luang Prabang, Laos - As I mentioned in the last post we are almost at the mid point of our trip and are trying to figure out where to go next.

We had both really wanted to go to Myanmar but with the onset of the wet season and blistering temperatures their at the moment coupled with intermittent electricity we are not sure how comfortable it would be traveling.  No AC or even a fan in 100F(40C) weather is pretty tough to do for long and with the wet season approaching some of the areas we really wanted to go would be inaccessible.

So Myanmar is out for this trip. 

What we have decided to do is spend June in Thailand and July and August in Indonesia.  We will cross into Thailand next week after taking a 2 day boat up the Mekong River to the Lao-Thai border.

From there we will work our way south through Thailand all the way to the Thai Islands down into Malaysia probably to Kuala Lumpur. 

From there we will fly to Indonesia for two months.  At this point we are thinking of spending 1 month on the island of Sulawesi and another month in Nusa Tenggara which are the group of islands east of Bali including Lombok & Flores.

Finally we'll end up in Bali for a week before flying back to Singapore and heading home.

All of the above are subject to change!