The only way we found to forget about having spent eleven hours in an almost full plane, during the day, with a short legroom and with really bad movies on the screen, was by drinking a couple of those tasteful “helles beer” –hell here means light colour, not the hell- that make Germany so well known.
Adventure of life is never over until death meets us, so this travel adventure will never be over until the lady of the scythe comes to pick us. We don’t need to travel far away from home to learn about life and we will continue experimenting with new trips, from local to international destinations.
Since we arrived in Koh Tao and found “Homer”, the way we have to refer to our beautiful wooden house in the island, I’m experimenting a great feeling of peace and joy through spending long hours in the hammock. It is something I had already learnt from this trip and anothers before. Since our visit in India I have tried, rounding up, around fifty different hammocks and other balancing sits. It has always been recomfortating and nice to let myself flow with the movement from side to side. But it is being this time, in our wooden house in Koh Tao, that I am really getting addicted to it. I have breakfast on the hammock; write, read and smoke on the hammock. I even eat on the hammock and spend the time I’m at home laying on the hammock. When I have left the house and come back, I come back to the hammock. When we go to a bar, I always look for a bar with a hammock. I also sleep on the hammock sometimes.
The day in which we had to renew our Thai visa arrived and we did it fast and easy, although very tiring. After spending long hours discussing which way would it be the best for us to extend our stay in Thailand and whether to cross to Myanmar or to Malaysia, we decided to do it through one of the travel agencies offering the “Visa Run” service in Koh Tao. We paid them money and they arranged everything, such an strange feeling for us.
We started to feel kind of sick of nonstop travelling a couple of weeks ago. It is a pretty confusing feeling because we really love to travel and want to go on with our trip, but at the same time we feel tired of visiting new places everyday and never get to know them well. We have the feeling that we need some holidays from our trip again, something like a stop over to settle and rest for a while. For a couple of weeks, maybe for a month… This is why we decided to look for a house for rent in the island.
We knew from the beginning of our trip that we wanted to do a diving course in the south of Thailand. We had heard that Koh Tao was the cheapest and also one of the best options to spot different fish species in all Southeast Asia. That’s why we decided, without knowing the island yet, that we wanted to have our first ever diving experiencie in Koh Tao. We booked our 4 day course from Bangkok so we didn’t do any research when we arrived. There are plenty of diving schools here and all them offer more or less the same. The company we chose, Planet Scuba, is a small school with less students, which makes groups smaller and the classes more personal.
Four months are over now since our last pit stop in Valencia and we have had the opportunity to visit the north of Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. The trip has been mainly inland and in hill areas and we could hear the call of the sea in our souls. We come from a coastal town and need to feel the sea breeze in the face much often. So, the next move was going to be to get closer to the sea, heading to the south beaches and islands of Thailand.
We entered the country thinking about a past war, rice fields and conical huts. We exit the country now thinking about many other things, much more interesting and appealing. Vietnam has so much to offer, and we have enjoyed it so much that we have promised ourselves to come back again sometime soon.
A couple of days before our vietnamese tourist visa expired we had to face a difficult decission which would affect the philosophy of our trip and consecuently our trip itself. We had two options: whether cross the north of Laos in order to come back to Thailand again by land, or take a plain and make the whole thing easier for one time. The first option was our starting plan. We always had thought of keeping our feet close to the earth, so that we are able to diggest the differences between countries, cultures and landscapes. We have always had enough time to do it this way too. The second option, the one with a plane involved, had been a temptation before since one can travel fast and easy between two points in a matter of hours, not weeks. We did the usual research –internet, travel agencies, other travellers…- and finally decided that we were flying this time.
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