Thailand Adventures: Scoot Scoot

Have you ever rode a scooter in monsoon-like rain?  Well, if you ever do you should do it with a man twice your size in front of you.  Aside from your shoulders, you will stay pretty dry.  The same can't be said for him, but if he's anything like Ben, Tim and Jason he will be a good sport.



The day we decided to ride scooters on the Ko Lanta Island was the same day it decided to rain the morning.   But guess what?  You can't hold us down.  We kept to plan.

I was terrified, but I put on my big girl pants. {And reminded Ben to "beeee verrry carefulll" every, and I mean every, chance I got}

We had a plan to ride scooters to caves, to hike the caves and swim in waterfalls.  And I will tell you that rain or shine that was going to happen.

So we suited up and the sun came out.  We rented the scooters and the rain started again.  Oh well, let's do this!

First, we had to stop for gas.  This is for real.
Gas is "pumped" out of barrel into 1 liter glass bottles.  You purchase a liter at a time and they dump the glass bottle into your vehicle. In our case, the scooter.  The gas was about 30 baht a liter.  That's one US dollar.  Ben and I rode around the island for a day and a half on one dollar of gas.  Glorious.

Deneal and Tim didn't have as much luck as the rest of us.  Their scoot scoot didn't move very quickly and it DID NOT move uphill with them on board.  That was unfortunate because it seems as though someone came to this island and put a road in with no worry about the grade of the road.  Most of the hills we encountered we 19% grade.  And there were A LOT of hills.  Tim and Deneal got quite the workout.

We stopped for some lunch at this gorgeous little restaurant on the sea.  It was delightful and since it had just rained the temperature was PERFECT.   The food was delicious, as were all of our meals, but more on that later.

We drove through the stormy weather to a side of the island where the sun was shining.  We found the cave and when we asked for information the sweet man wanted to charge us to first cross his property to the cave, then pay to go to the cave, then pay to leave the cave and cross his property again.  He was sweet, but no thank you.  We will find another place to explore.  On our way back we passed some rubber trees.  DID YOU KNOW RUBBER COMES FROM TREES?  I missed that day of 3rd grade because it totally does!  Thailand is FULL of rubber tree farms.  You see, what they do is insert a spigot into a tree and a bucket below the spigot and the rubber drips right into the bucket!  Fascinating.  

Anyway, we ended up driving back through the exact same storm cloud to another sunny side of the island.  Here we found more elephants, a hike, waterfalls to swim in and caves! It was like a gold mine. Execept for the fact that there was a huge snake skin in the middle of the river we were sloshing through.  HUGE.  Did you know there are many cobra snakes in Thailand. If I am honest, I don't even want to know what was crawling in the jungles around us.  

We ended our scoot scoot day on a beach we found.  We got there just in time for the guys to take a swim in the ocean and to see the sun set over our fun day!

I was secretly so happy we made it through our days with scooters without injury.  Motorcycles in general make me super nervous.  Combine that with a land of roads without rules and I about go off the edge! Literally. :)