Stop 5: Copin' on Koh Phangan -- Koh Phangan, Thailand

We woke up in Koh Samui bright and early on the morning of September 1^st—23 years to the day that Wooman Vilkin popped Cami out of her caslopus (shoutout to Chelsea!). Even though it was a travel day, we still smiled, enjoyed the ferry ride and planned to celebrate at our next stop, Koh Phangan (pronounced Ko Pawn-yawn). We arrived just as the sun reached its highest point, right smack in the heat of the day, and without any idea of where we might be staying. We parked Jen with the bags and Cam set off in search of a place to lie our heads that night. Once she finally settled on a location, she decided to scope out the easiest route back and, as a result of broken Thaiglish, found herself nowhere near any beach, road, person or sign of civilization. A Thai gentleman eventually picked her sorry ass up and returned her to her long lost friend.

One of the wonderful aspects of this small island is that all of the guest houses line a serene white sand beach, dotted by volleyball courts, sand-side bars and hammocks strung between palm trees. Combine this lovely trait with the fact that we thought it would be a good idea to travel with traditional rolling suitcases and you have yourself a catastrophic situation involving two girls dragging parcels as heavy as dead bodies across 500 meters of open beach.

Our bungalow was, how you say, of minimalist décor. The one thing it was not lacking in, however, was friendship — with cockroaches, mosquitos and grasshoppers (found, respectively, in Jen’s toiletry bag, on the walls, and in Cam’s b-crack). After this depressing and traumatic experience we decided to walk into town and book a tour to the Ang Thong Marine National Park for the following day. The boat ticket was for September 1^st, so we returned to the agency to change the mistake to September 2^nd, where we were informed that the day was, in fact, August 31^st, and not, as we had thought, September 1^st. It was not, as we had thought, Cam’s birthday. How embarrassing that we didn’t know what day it was… right nicky? teeheehee

Ariel's perch

We fell asleep and woke up to the ocean, as well as to entire 50 foot palm trees about 30 feet away falling over and causing massive earthquakes at the hands of machetes and other interesting Thai techniques for reconstructing nature. The following day, a long, green and thin snake wished us good morning as we walked to the boat dock. The National Park, composed of dozens of small islands, each with their own allure, was any beach lover’s playground. We rock climbed in flip flops to a lookout of over 10 islands, swam with hundreds of white butterflies, kayaked under rock cliffs and into caves while listening to The Little Mermaid soundtrack (obviously) and hiked to an entirely enclosed green lagoon. It was breathtakingly beautiful and one of the most peaceful and picturesque stops on our trip. We found it hard to stop smiling.

Feeling a bit rambunctious, Jen decided to re-pierce her nose and we both died long strands of our hair pink and purple. Now all we had to do was buy backpacks to replace our suitcases and our morph into hippy backpackerism would be complete.