The Dawn of Happiness

 From Ko Phagnan, David and I made our way north to Sukothai spending one night in Bangkok.  Sukothai means "rising of happiness," and it was the capital of Thailand a long time ago.  Now, Sukothai is a big historical site with really impressive ruins.  David and I took a day to rent bicycles and ride around the Sukothai ruins.  The next day, we went to another set of ruins in Si Sanchanalai (about 50km north of Sukothai).

 There are tons of Buddha statues in these ruins, but most of them are pretty burnt and weathered.  This is probably the most in-tact Buddha that we saw.  Unfortunately, the signs at Sukothai don't really explain much of the history of the area.  However, David and I came up with a theory that everything was burnt down at some point or another, because most of the ruins look pretty black.  However, that might also just be how this kind of rock weathers... no idea.

 This is a really big Buddha and a really little me.

 David and I played hide-and-go-seek here.  He ended up having to come look for me, even though I was supposed to be the seeker.  There are a lot of ruins to hide in...

 This is a pretty cool place, right?  Being the lazy person I am, I spent a lot of time just lying around by the ruins and thinking about life.  It's a great place to waste some time.

 This is David looking Buddha-like.

 This is David with our bicycles.  They give pink ones to the girls and ugly ones to the guys.  My bike also had a really nice bell that I used as much as possible (even though there was no one around to ring a bell at...).

 I knooow you might think that all the Buddhas look the same, but I think they're all really great.  Keep in mind that I'm only posting a very small fraction of the Buddha photos I took...

 This is me and David standing in front of the main Sukothai ruin site.

 This is where the photos start from Si Sanchanalai.  Si Sanchanalai is an hour bus ride north of Sukothai and it is much quieter than Sukothai (if that's even possible...).  There were basically no other people in the whole park while we were there.  Si Sanchanalai also had much more impressive ruins than Sukothai.  This was probably one of my favorite places that I've visited so far.

 I like to call this guy the Blank Buddha. 

 From what I understand from the signs (written in pretty bad English), this is a cheti in the khmer style.  I'd like to have one of these at my house when I grow up.

 We climbed up into an old stupa ruin that gave us pretty good views of the ruins nearby.  This is me sitting at the top of the stupa thing.

 This is David at the entrance to a little room on top of the stupa.

 This is what it looked like inside.

 Guess what... More Buddhas!  These are newer ones that were inside a temple.

 This was my favorite ruin out of all of them.  This one has a lotus style cheti thing, and it was located off in the forest before you got to the main site.  It sort of reminded me of a fairytale.

 This is the main stupa of the Si Sanchanalai site.

 This is me chillin with the buddhas.  I think I fit in quite well.

This is the last Buddha we saw.  He's located at the top of the Si Sanchanalai hill, and you have to go up 144 steps to see him.  Every step was definitely worth it.















These pictures were all from yesterday and the day before.  Today, I left David and took a bus farther north to Chiang Mai.  The bus took 6 hours, and I'm pretty exhausted, so I haven't seen much in Chiang Mai yet.  However, from what I have seen, it looks like a pretty amazing city.  I haven't been in a big city for a long time (besides the day in Bangkok), so I'm pretty excited to hang out around here for a while.

The Full Moon

The full moon is an exciting time to be on Ko Phangan.  For the full moon, the whole island becomes a huge beach party where everyone wears fluorescent colors. 

This is the beach a couple days before the full moon party.  This is low season for tourism in Thailand, so I haven't seen this many people gathered at one place in a really long time.

This is just another beautiful sunset picture.  Even when the island is filling up with crazy people looking for a good party, it's nice to remember that I'm still in one of the most beautiful places in the world.

This is Jonna (the lovely Swedish girl I had been traveling with) a couple nights before the party.  Jonna was supposed to leave on a bus for Bangkok this night, but she slipped on the stairs, broke her wrist, and dislocated her shoulder.  We spent a couple days in the hospital at another island called Ko Samui getting it taken care of.  It's a really good thing that Jonna is always in good spirits.  If this had happened to me, I probably would have been quite upset.  Jonna, on the other hand, was hardly phased. 

The thing that made this hospital stay really hilarious was a very German nurse named Gabi.  Gabi would come into the room (very purposefully) every now and then, and she would make a huge deal out of every little thing she said.  Like, "I have some papers!  You must sign these papers now.  It's so important for the insurance.  You really have to sign right here."  I think I would have gone crazy if I were the one who had to talk to her.

So, the crisis was taken care of, Jonna made it back to Sweden, and this is where the party pictures start.  This picture is some examples of the things people paint on themselves at the full moon party.  Thai people set up these booths where they will paint pretty things onto you.

This picture is my beautiful artwork on the back of a German girl named Melanie.  I took pictures of all the people I painted so that I can make a portfolio and apply to art school.  I think I have some real talent and could make a career out of painting people if the science thing doesn't work out.

These are my new friends at the hostel painting things on eachother in preparation for the full moon party.

This is my leg.  Nice, yea?  Just another picture for my art school portfolio...

This guy is now a good friend of mine.  His name is David, and he's from Germany.  We've been traveling together since the full moon party, and we're now in the northern part of Thailand in a town called Sukothai.  He's a big science/engineering nerd working for the German government and he reads a lot of technical magazines, so we never run out of wonderfully nerdy things to talk about.  This also means that I get to practice my German before I fly to Austria in less than a month.  Perfect!

This is one of the bar tenders.  The full moon party is a popular place to drink alcohol out of buckets.  I find it really funny to see a whole beach of people carrying around little buckets.  It reminds me of a playground full of 5-year-olds.

These are the girls that I hung out with during the full moon party.  From left to right it's me, Melanie, Kira, Lindsey, and Mita.  As you can see from the background, there were A LOT of people at this party.

Look, bubbles!  One of the things I found really fun about the full moon party is that there were a lot of things going on.  There were bubbles to dance in, people spinning fire, jump ropes that were on fire, and other similarly silly things to do.

This is me and Oun after we came out of the bubbles.  All my beautiful artwork was washed off by the bubbles.  I guess that's the bittersweet end to my art career...

This is David (the German guy who I'm traveling with now) the day after the full moon party.  On this day, we rented motorcycles and drove to a waterfall.  To our delight, they also had swings and an abandoned bar area at the waterfall.

You can barely see it, but in this picture David is playing one of the popular Thai stick games.  For these games, you have to move one or two of the sticks to get some kind of desired result.  It's sort of like a riddle.  For example, the game he's doing here has sticks that read "1 + 2 = 3".  The goal is to move only one stick to get 139.  Try it and tell me how long it takes you.  Then I'll give you another game.

This is David at one of the smaller beaches on Ko Phangan.  It was a nice place to relax after all the chaos of the full moon party.  In his hand, he's holding one of the best coconut shakes that exists on this planet.  Since it's so ridiculously hot here, Thailand is a popular place for fruit shakes.  So far, my favorites are coconut and blueberry.

This is me at the same place.  I could definitely get used to this kind of life.

Under the Sea...

I just finished my advanced diving course in Ko Tao.  Part of the course was learning to use an underwater camera, so here are a few of the pictures we took underwater.  Unfortunately, the dive site where we got to use the camera was the worst place for taking pictures out of all of the places we went to.  The water was pretty cloudy, and my favorite fish (the parrot fish) wasn't there.  It was still a fun time, though. 

This is a spotted grouper.  They're the ugliest fish out of all of them, but this is the only picture that came out well.

This is me underwater!  Unfortunately, the computer I'm on doesn't let me rotate the pictures for some reason, but you can just pretend that I was floating sideways.

This is right after we went down through a big tunnel in the coral and came out a hole in the bottom of the reef.  I found it really cool that there is a a foot-thick layer of little fish that just hang out next to the coral.

This is me and Milley in the cloudy water.  I'm on the left.

This is Emily coming out the bottom of the coral tunnel.

These are some of the schools of fish hanging around the reef.  That's a lot of fish, right?  They're everywhere.  It's really fun to swim into them - they all move away and leave you a nice hole to swim through.

This is our group right after we got out of the water and back onto our boat.  From left to right it's me, Milley, Lucas, Jake, and Emily.

 So, after the dive course, I left Ko Tao and went to another island called Ko Phagnan.  This is Jonna from Sweden - I met her in Ko Tao while I was diving, and she came with me to Ko Phagnan a few days ago.  In this picture, she's sitting on our beautiful pink motorbike that we rented to drive around the island.

This is Jonna reading a book at the top of a waterfall that we found.  It was a really nice and relaxing day.  We started the day with all these ambitious plans to drive around the whole island, but in the end we just stayed at this waterfall.  I don't regret it at all.

So, I thought I should post a picture of myself when I'm not in scuba diving gear.  This is me in Ko Phagnan with Bob Marley.  I think that everyone should have 7-foot Bob Marley statues outside their house.


Now I'll be in Ko Phagnan for the next few days, and then I'll start heading north toward Chiang Mai.  There's a big thing happening in Ko Phagnan on the 18th called the Full Moon Party.  It's a party on the beach where everyone wears fluorescent clothes and glowing paint and people put on fire shows and such.  It sounds pretty silly, but I'm excited to see what it's all about.