Dan and Don's Excellent Adventure: The Good, the Better, and the Ugly

Right now, I am afraid to leave this room.

It's not for fear of crime, life here is peaceful and you're more likely to be greeted with a warm smile than a hot hand. It's not for fear of rain, the weather since we've arrived has been beautiful and not nearly as sweltering as Koh Phagnan's close-to-the equator location suggests.

But something is waiting for me outside that threatens my existance more than any of the "caution" tips in Frommer's prepared me for.

It's a motorbike.

See how happy I look in this picture? Well, look closer. It's because I'm not actually on the bike. About four minutes later I nearly launched myself through the wall of our hotel's restaurant (which has excellent Lad Na by the way, but must - not - blog - about - food...) Now, Mom, Amy, stop punching the computer screen - we're returning the bikes tomorrow morning and hopefully I won't have to pay too much for the war wounds I put on the thing when I crashed it directly in front of the rental place. Maybe I can claim the ignorance of being "farang" (foreigner) which seems to get you out of a good deal of things here, kind of like Zack Morris calling a time-out and leaving the room.

So that's the ugly. Now on to the beautiful - everything else.

This is the view from our balcony. We're in Koh Phagnan, a little island off Thailand's south-eastern coast. We capped off Friday with a moderately wild final night in Bangkok, which involved, unfortunately, a horrifying ping pong show which instantly sent us into Fight Club mode (first rule of ping pong show, is that we'll never, ever again talk about the ping pong show.) After a near "we got screwed" experience that involved handing $1000 baht over to a random woman on our ferry over from Sura Thani who promised to score us a "very nice room right next to the beach," we somehow scored a very nice room right next to the beach. It's actually an incredible, tiny little bungalow in a community of no more than 30, looking over the view that you see here. We spent the first hour after we got here just staring into the horizon, then grabbed dinner and drinks on the beach with a British/Austrian couple who were on holiday from volunteering with tsunami relief.

At some point, we're supposed to leave this place and head down to the "party" side of the island, but the thought of trading peace and tranquility for beer and tequila has been an epic struggle which we haven't yet resolved. For now, though, things seem to make sense, and the slow pace of life in Thailand has taken its course on our minds and bodies (I swear my beard is growing slower here - four days without shaving in the States and I'd already be tripping over the thing).