pirates, a cauldron, and finally sleep

apologies that our post is late, but yesterday was a real trainwreck. in retrospect, we should have read into our (non) wake-up call to start the day. as the sunset on our island paradise, it was alas time to head for bangkok. we decided to forgo our already bough train tickets from southern thailand to bangkok and opted instead to fly. $30 down the drain, but a better option as we would have had to try some pretty extreme overland travel. we were suppose to recieve a wake-up call at 6am yesterday to give us enough time to get prepped before boarding our wooden longboat. that didn't happen. instead we woke at 6:45 (our boat departed at 7:10 from the other side of the island) and basically flew around our little bungalow; packing everything and getting out the door in four minutes flat. we did manage to have enough time to see that our hotel reservation in bangkok hadn't gone through. 0-2 for those of you counting; we were once again homeless. we loaded onto our wooden longboat which took us to our large boat headed to phuket. the boat was broken and only drove the equivalent of two miles an hour. then, in some bizarre twist, we went about a mile offshore and stopped. two other boats of equal size appeared from nowhere and sandwiched us in (literally boats knocking against boats), like pirate ships bent on plundering our booty (for the record, our booty at this point is no more than a few granola bars and some video footage... my atm card doesn't even work). passengers were jumping from one boat to another and then they left. now we were overloaded (and quite confused). the next eight hours looked something like this: three hour boat ride of near sea sickness, a crazed scene at the dock trying to board a bus for the airport, a blown tire going 70mph which had us standing on the side of the road next to a giant black cauldron (note: thai taxi drivers change tires faster than a nascar team), trying to purchase a thai airways ticket, a coy/chris demonstration of how to eat insane amounts of food at burger king, a flight, another taxi into bangkok, and a trip to khao san road (maybe the craziest of all previous incidents of the day as it's like having vegas crammed into three hundred yards + merchants (mom: here are your cheap trinket salesman) + debauchary + lights. now it's present time and we are headed to the temple of the emerald buddha. go team.