We stayed in a very nice place called Chaweng Resort on Chaweng Beach. It was beautifully located right on the beach and we had a really nice room. The day we arrived in Ko Samui the weather was absolutely beautiful, but unfortunately it rained hard the next four days. So we took it easy, eating good thai food, walking around town, and getting massages. One day we both got the traditional thai massage which lasted 2 hours and was awesome.
Thai massage is great, but is nothing like sweedish massage that you are used to. It consists of a lot of streching and cracking joints, which is good for me since my flexibility is terrible and because of all the surgeries I have had due to basketball. The other reason it is great is that it is typically only 5 bucks and hour.
Funny thing happened one day when Vince and I were having breakfast, a couple guys walked into the restaurant we were at, and I was like, "Hey, I know those guys!" Turns out it was Paul and Richard from DC who I met in Cinqua Terra, Italy a couple of months prior. It was really funny to bump into them again. They were doing an extended trip too, but with a different itinerary, so it was great to meet up again and compare notes on where we had been.
Ko Samui was really great in the sense that it was realaxing and beautiful as well as being relatively cheap. It is a perfect place to sip a drink on the beach all day and then watch the sun go down.
After 6 days in Ko Samui, we headed out to Kao Sok national park which was only a couple hundred miles away on the map. We figured it would take us a couple of hours to get there, but after a ferry ride and a bus ride and then transferring to another bus, the trip had taken all day.
Kao Sok park was literally in the middle of nowhere in south-east Thailand. We stayed in a little hut there, and were set to go on a safari the next day. Unfortunately that night I got very sick, and I had horrilble cramping and fever and sweating. I thought it was malaria and that I was in trouble since I was miles away from a hospital. After a night of great pain we headed back to Bangkok and I was able to make it back to an emergency room there that night. After a negative malaria test, the doctor decided that it was just severe dehydration. I guess that's what going out 12 consecutive nights as well as having a few good bouts of food poisoning will do to you...
The dehydration really took it out of me for the last few days in Thailand. I was just fortunate at the timing when it did happen, since I would be realaxing at home with Mom's home cooking in Hawaii very soon.