Just a girl and her dogs: More Thailand -- this time, the bottom 6

The worst:

6) Not speaking the language. I hate to say it, but after 2 and a half weeks of it, I was happy to come home and be able to communicate freely. Especially since our last communication fiasco before leaving the country involved us fighting with a cab driver in Bangkok who came to the address our hotel was supposed to be at but was somehow convinced we were at the wrong place, so he drove us around town for another half hour while the meter kept climbing. Dude, why won't the language phrase books teach you how to say "it was the first damn place you stopped at! Where the hell are we going now?"

5) Good lord -- can there be any more temples, how many can we visit in one trip?

4) Freaking out near the top of the viewpoint in Railay, not wanting to make the steepish looking climb down from there to the lagoon, then seeing these little kids walk past you, practically skipping down the cliff. And THEN, conquering my fear long enough to head down anyway, only to discover that the next leg was a sheer vertical drop down. Needless to say, only Gregg got to actually check out the lagoon.

Not sure if this picture really shows how crazy scary this climb up to the Railay viewpoint was. And lucky me, I was in a skirt and flip flops!!

3) A long trip from Ko Samui to Railay. The travel agent assured us we would be in Krabi by 1 pm, well before the last ferry left Krabi for the island of Railay. I guess he wasn't that far off, if you think 1pm and 6:30 pm are at all close. The trip involved a mini bus from our bungalow in Ko Samui to the ferry port, a ferry from there to the mainland, a van from the port to a connecting travel agency (where the sole purpose seemed to be to get us to buy lunch), a tuk tuk to the bus station, an hour and half wait on the bus (just sitting there, long after it was supposed to have taken off), then a painful bus ride to Krabi that involved at least one stop every 5 minutes, putting us at Krabi at 6:30 pm. Believe me, if there had been a flight between the 2 places, we would have taken it. What made it worse was that the last ferry to Railay leaves at 6 and the bus station is no where close to the ferry port anyway. But of course we had hotel reservations in Railay, that we had already paid for online. So we let ourselves get worked over for the travel charges and just made our way to Railay anyway. The only silver lining was that we got a pick up from the hotel to get to the island and for some reason they never actually charged us though they quoted something outrageous initially. So ha, take that!

2) Wrecking the rental car in Chiang Mai -- Gregg had been complaining about my driving all day, and I was in a pissy mood and SO mad at him, and only driving at all to show him that I could. Well it turns out his fear of me having no depth perception on my left side proved to be founded, damn him. Almost as soon as we left the hotel that evening, a old man decided to stop in front of me on the street (I think to get some oranges), right there in the lane. I waited for a gap in traffic to slide over to the next lane, swung out when I had a quick second and didn't swing out far enough on the left. Rear ended the car in front of me with my left side as I was accelerating into traffic. That made for an awesome evening. Never again will I attempt to drive in traffic in a country that drives on the opposite side of the street. To make matters worse, although we got the insurance and only ended up paying the deductible (about $140 -- not bad for wrecking BOTH cars), we could have gotten even mor coverage and walked away just paying like $12. Damn.

Me driving