After about thirty minutes through the forest, we arrived at a waterfall! Our guide told us that the waterfall was good for swimming if we fancied a dip!
And then we headed back into the national park to visit an elephant conservation center! It sorta seems counter-intuitive, but the way they raise money for their cause is by selling elephant treks, where you get to go for like an hour ride on an elephant through the jungle. Here's us way up high in this tower watching the elephant that we're going to ride cross the river...
Around 1pm we ate a delicious lunch. Here's Mer with two of the other tourists (If I remember correctly, they were from Germany) enjoying some post-lunch fruit.
Check out the totally jungley mountains in the background. Can you believe that this place actually exists in the world? Even though I was there, every time I see these pictures I'm like "What? That place can't be real!"
Our bus literally dropped us off on the side of some road on the outskirts of Khao Sok National Park, and from there someone from the hostel we'd booked online came and picked us up! Here's Mer excited about the fact that we were on the final 10 minute leg of our almost twelve-hour journey!
Anyway, due to this misunderstanding, we had to try to sleep sitting up on a really bouncy train. Here's Meredith (who was already feeling totally sick) decked out with a sleep mask, ear plugs and our one inflatable neck pillow.
Later that evening, we went back into Bangkok and grabbed some dinner (Meredith is sad because she was starting to feel really ill). And then after we finished eating, we said farewell to Jeremy and headed to...
...and we ended up buying and eating some sliced durian!
If you don't know, the durian is Thailand's most famous fruit. It's really, really weird and smelly. The best description of it that I've ever read was written by British explorer Alfred Russel Wallace all the way back in the late 1800s:
This pulp is the edible part, and its consistence and flavour are indescribable. A rich custard highly flavoured with almonds gives the best general idea of it, but there are occasional wafts of flavour that call to mind cream-cheese, onion-sauce, sherry-wine, and other incongruous dishes.
At 2am, the bars closed and we wandered around Nana Plaza talking to people and watching the madness of drunk tourists scrambling to secure "company" for the night. Here's Meredith and Jeremy posing with a kid who was selling flowers that wouldn't leave Jeremy alone because he thought it was so funny that Jeremy spoke some Thai. Hahaha. (Bonus points to the little kid for flipping the bird).
Meredith was totally blown away by all the Thai ladyboys walking around and all sorts of questions about them that Jeremy couldn't answer - so Jeremy being Jeremy, he proceeded to ask every single ladyboy that passed Meredith's questions. Some of which included "Do you still have a penis?" and "When men hire you, do they want you to act like a man or a woman?"
Most ladyboys are not shy AT ALL so when Jeremy started asking questions like this, it led to AWESOMENESS. My favorite part of the night was when Jeremy was asking a ladyboy a bunch of questions and working up to the "Do you still have a penis" part, the ladyboy was like "All your questions are making me excited. Here, I want you to feel my excitement" and proceeded to put Jeremy's hand right on the erection that was starting to form inside her miniskirt! Hahahaha.
The best part was, Jeremy wasn't even phased by it. He just laughed and then was like "So, if I wanted to party with you, how much would it cost and what would we do?" The lady put Jeremy's hand back on her penis and was like "1,500 Baht. You fuck me..." (then she leaned in and lowered her voice to a man's timbre and finished) "...then I FUCK YOU!" Hahahah. Oh, man. It was epic.
The night was really funny. The girls also LOVED Meredith's big blue eyes and kept telling her that they didn't usually "go with" other ladies but that if she was interested in one of them "that was ok." Hahaha. We ended up getting really drunk and hanging out with the girls and answering a lot of questions about life in New York City.
After dinner, I had to go to an international calling center and call the founder of Yodle to talk about a potential job opportunity. (I ended up turning down the job a couple of days later, but six months later after the company had grown a bit, I ended up taking it and started there in April of 2008 as their Director of Product Management. Woot!).
Anyway, while I was away on this call, Jeremy took Meredith out for a couple of buckets (he doesn't drink) and when I met back up with them they'd decided that they were taking me to...
Jeremy's a vegetarian too and when he told us that he'd never been to May Kaidee's restaurant, we decided to go back there for dinner (even though we'd just eaten lunch there like 5 hours ago!). Hahaha.
We ended up going to a place near Khao San called Mai Kaidee's and it was some of the best vegetarian food I've ever eaten in my life. Holy, cramoly. I've since found out that she's pretty famous and runs a vegetarian cooking school and even has a recipe book! Right after we'd sat down to eat, it started pouring rain! We took our time eating and tried to wait out the rain.
When you're traveling, it's really easy to lose track of hte date. We got out of the movie a little after 1am and Meredith informed me that since it was after midnight...
After dinner, we headed back over to the theater (where Meredith posed with the creepy life-sized Voldemort promotional display advertising the upcoming Harry Potter movie) and bought tickets to see...
After dinner we went back the hotel to read and nap. We woke up a little after 8pm to discover that it had started raining. We donned the (sandwich-bag) ponchos we brought along (stylish!) and decided to head downtown and see what movies were playing.
When we'd first checked in, they didn't have any rooms available that had windows! So the first thing we did when we woke up on Tuesday was head down to the front desk and get our room switched. Here's Meredith relaxing in the sunshine of our new room!
...and immediately went to bed! We'd hardly gotten any sleep the night before and figured a nice long nap might help get our bodies adjusted to local time.
Here's us with Faisal's friend Vadim saying goodbye just before getting into our taxi to the airport! Thanks a million for having us, Faisal! We had THE BEST time!
Later that night, I woke Meredith (and Rocco!) up from their team nap and we packed up all of our stuff so that we'd be ready to head to the airport and catch our flight to Thailand! After we were finished packing, we headed out for dinner!
And then I set my camera all the way across the tent and used the timer to take this awesome Hustler Magazine inspired photo that I call "The West's Corruption of the East."
...and we saw the Simpsons Movie! Here's Faisal and Mer with the rest of the fam, minus Bart who must've been stolen! Hahaha. (By the way, they had the same exact display in NYC and someone broke Homer's arm off. Nice to see that Simpsons-vandalism is so universal).
"Reading and relaxing" very quickly turned into "lapsing into a food coma" and we both woke up five hours later! Hahaha. Here's Meredith and Rocco waking up from their nap together!
The lunch time crew! From the right: Philip, Biba, Faisal, Mer and Philip's friend. The food was great, but if you look in the background, you'll notice something more interesting than the food...
After I was finished gawking at the mall's lobby (just like some gobsmacked huckleberry in Times Square for the first time), it was time to get our lunch on in a restaurant named Sezam (pronounced SHAZZAM!) Which is a giant "we have everything you can think of" type restaurant...
We slept in on Friday. Here's Biba, Faisal and Meredith relaxing in Biba and Phil's amazing all-glass living room and trying to work up the motivation to do something.
The ride back to Bernadette and Phil's was a soggy, gritty, sandy affair, but at least we didn't get caught! We stayed up super late playing a trivia video game called "Buzz."
After lazing around and digesting for a while, we finally got motivated to get up and get going. On the way out, someone was nice enough to take a pic of all of us together.
Madinat Jumeirah is ridiculous even by Dubai's standards. It's a resort that takes up an entire kilometer of the coast and the entire thing is connected by man-made waterways. Here's the "water taxi" that showed up to take us from the lobby to the restaurant.
After toweling off and getting changed back into dry clothes, Meredith called her friend Faisal and he confirmed that he'd be driving from Abu Dhabi to Dubai to come visit later in the evening! Here's Bernadette on the phone explaining how to get to her apartment in Dubai because, get this, there isn't a standard address system in Dubai. Stop for a minute and let that sink in. Seriously, how crazy is that. All mail is delivered to PO Boxes. If you need something delivered to an actual address, all of the boxes and shipped labels there have a huge blank rectangle on them so that you can draw a map of where you are.
After gorging ourselves, we still weren't tired (our internal clocks were all effed up!) Bernadette busted out the DVDs of the show How I Met Your Mother (which we'd never seen) and we stayed up late and watched a bunch of episodes. A little after 4am, this mouse passed out on the couch so I woke her (grumpy ass) up and we headed off to bed.
...Meredith returned with her passport! (Look how happy she is!). And that's how our month-long vacation almost got completely derailed twice before it even began! (The first time being when I mixed up the dates and showed up to the airport A DAY LATE!).
While I never imagined that I'd find myself in Dubai, I certainly never imagined that I'd find myself at a water park in Dubai! Thanks for taking us, Beebs!
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