phang-nga

this post is one day late due to some technical difficulties coupled with the two of us being literally in the middle of nowhere. yesterday was... ridiculous - in every good way imaginable. we spent seven hours yesterday seeing some of the most amazing sights you can imagine. we started the day visiting the monkey cave/temple. yes folks, this is exactly as it sounds. there were a series of three caves; each progressively higher into the limestone mountain filled with monks and areas to worship buddha. guarding this thai treasure were about 50 monkeys. cute? yes, though we were informed that feeding them was bad as they had rabbies. we spent the first five minutes of the tour running from said monkeys. our next destination was a four hour trek into phang-nga national park and ocean waterways. we boarded long wooden boats and were guided through the ocean tributaries with a backdrop of mangrove forrests and islands for as far as the eyes can see. suffice to say, there is no way we can explain how beautiful this was and will have to wait to show each of you the pictures. we visited james bond island which is a three-sided beach with a long pier about thirty minutes from the coast. thinking we couldn't be more overwhelmed, we were next taken to the sea-gypsy village twenty minutes up the ocean tributary. coy and i are sitting here shaking our heads trying to figure out how to describe it. this was a city of about 1000 people (settled 200 years ago by indonesian fisherman) on stilts in the middle of the ocean. it was like walking through a national geographic cover story as we peered into these people's lives: people sleeping on floors, people making food, people with unknown monkey species, poverty to the extreme etc. we watched the sunset over the water while returning to our bus. a half hour later coy turned to me and said, "don't just bring your elephant on the highway!" as our bus passed a man leading his elephant the wrong way down the highway. we returned home, covered ourselves with insect repelland and slept on top of the covers (fitfully) before our new adventure tomorrow: ko phi phi don and ko phi phi lay islands.