thailand

There was a storm one day that came on in a matter of a few minutes! All of a sudden, people are running around yelling and taking beach carpets and pillows indoors. The sky unzipped and tons of rain came pouring down. We played in it for a while until it actually got a bit chilly. When the rain stopped, it was back to relaxing and searching for sea creatures and treasures!
I don’t know when the photo of jesse and lennon in the back of the pickup truck was taken (or maybe it was on a tuk tuk – a tuk tuk is a little taxi type vehicle that looks like a tiny truck or there are ones where you have a motorcycle with an area for seats on the side.) Every time I try to delete the photo, it pops back up. So here it shall stay.

The kids were going through some pictures and videos that we had uploaded to the iPad. The Thai woman sitting behind them was so excited and wanted to see everything. She was great- laughing and pointing at her favorite ones. When the kids moved on to something else, I think she was kind of bummed.

This was a longer trip than planned, but all worked out well. We were supposed to be on a five hour ferry ride, but they waited for a “large group” of people to arrive for over an hour. Finally, a longtail boat putters up and 3 people hop out. Come on! By this point the bathrooms were already starting to smell and our journey hadn’t even begun. It was all good, though. We spent some time above checking out the sights until it got too wet (good travel day because of all the rain.) Some of us took cat naps, read the guide book, worked on school work, jotted down blog notes or played a bit on the iPad. We have become relatively good at using our time efficiently. In one of the pictures, there is a guy behind Maddux that, I swear, looked just like Geraldo Rivera. That was my third and last attempt at taking a picture of him.
It looks like Maddux was having a photo shoot in some of these pictures. It was super windy up there – he was loving it! Check out the surfer hair below!

Wow! That was some incredible snorkeling. We hired a longtail boat and went to about four or five different places to snorkel. It is a wild world below the water. The fish were swimming right up tour faces. It was like we were in the movie Nemo. The coral is big! We all saw different things- here is a list of what we remember: a little swordfish, a squid, anemones, clownfish, the fish that looks like Gill from nemo, a puffer fish (unpuffed), sea cucumbers, sea urchins, starfish and little white fish that we call starer fish. The starer fish would swim real close to you and just stare at you. One bit Jesse on the toe. Pretty funny. The puffer fish was one of my favorites. He swam through the area like a bodybuilder struts through a gym. All the other fish kind of made way for him.
A scary part of our field trip (that’s what Lennon called it) was when our boat guy dropped us in an area where the current was violent! I jumped off the opposite side of the boat because he was taking awhile to put the ladder down. I was dragged about 50 feet in a second. The guy didn’t speak English but was motioning me to swim around and grab onto a rope attached to the boat. Easier said than done. I had some adrenaline going so I was fine. Em and Maddux were smarter than me and kept holding onto the rope while Jesse and Lennon got dragged quite a ways away and were making their way back. Thank goodness Jesse has been eating all that muscle man curry! In the commotion, some goggles were lost at sea and a flipper had to be rescued by another boat. The current was so strong, it was stripping Lennon of all his gear. We cut that excursion short and hopped back on the boat. Later that afternoon is when Emme got bit by the dog. What a perilous day!

The mosquitoes can’t get enough of Maddux and me. When Emme came into the room, Maddux lifted up the netting and said, “Come on in! It’s a mosquito party!”

All is well, but Emerson had an altercation with a crazy beach dog on koh lipe and got bit. It drew blood and left a bruise. Not good. We talked to the people who own the bungalows on the beach where it happened and they said “That dog is loco! He bites children all the time.” I was like ‘What in the world?!’ The guy said the dog is not sick, no rabies – don’t worry about it. I quickly grabbed a guide book that has a section on rabies that basically says if you get bit by a dog that has rabies and you don’t get treatment, the fatality rate is 100%. If the dog that bit you has rabies and you get the series of shots, your survival rate is 100%. We weren’t quite sure what this dog’s story was and we were on a remote island in Thailand…. So, we immediately decided to head to the island’s “hospital.” We had to walk through town and where the locals live. There was lots of garbage and more stray dogs wandering aimlessly. Man, they were everywhere. We got to the clinic and there was a woman treating a guy with gnarly looking marks on his stomach and arms. He was stung by sea urchins. We tell them that Em was bit by a dog. A man hanging out near the entrance of the building says he’ll be right back and runs over to a group of guys playing soccer on an old cement court. A couple minutes later, a doctor runs over all sweaty from his game and says “what is problem?” We show him the bite and he says she needs rabies shots. Two shots/one in each arm on five different visits, within 28 days. Yikes! The woman filling out an information card tells us when to come back, but we tell her we are traveling the world and will be moving around a lot. Her and the doctor start laughing, but are rubbing Emerson on the head. I take this as a good sign. They say all countries will have the vaccine she needs because stray dogs are an issue in Southeast Asia. The doctor gives her the shots (they are in the arm, not the painful ones they used to give in the stomach back in the day. Thank goodness.) After the shots, he rubs her head again and laughs while yelling “stay away from dogs!” then re-joins the soccer match.
Emerson handled the whole situation amazingly well. She is one tough cookie! I was going to post a picture of her with shaving cream on her face saying she was foaming at the mouth, but no one else thought it was as funny as I did. She chose these photos instead. One is her pointing at the island of lipe working through some anger issues toward that dog. In the other picture, she is pointing at koh lanta. A really nice island with fewer strays wandering the streets. She was much happier! “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger!”