Better than Aluminum

Aaron and I spent last weekend on Koh Samui, an island in the Gulf of Thailand, celebrating our ten year (!) anniversary. We haven’t spent much time at the beach since arriving in SE Asia, and Koh Samui, which we’ve heard people call paradise, seemed like a good place to change that. We’ve also heard it called Pooh Samui, as the island is apparently renowned for “cleansing” spa diets and treatments. That sort of thing was not on our To Do list, however.

So, while in paradise, what did we do?

Well, we could have spent lots of time relaxing at our hotel…



Or getting massages in this little waterfront hut (to the right in the picture below)…



Or eating delicious pad thai…



Or we could’ve gone elephant trekking or swimming at one of the island’s waterfalls…





Or gone for a hike…



On our second day there, we settled on this last idea – a morning walk in the lush rainforest. When we spoke to the hotel staff about our planned hike and asked where on the island it might be best to start off, they told us, “No, no, no. Hot and far. Better to get motorbike.”

If you’ve read some of my prior postings, you know that Aaron has developed a motorbike obsession in recent months, so the staff at the hotel had said just what Aaron wanted to hear. In fact, he had started lobbying on the motorbike issue long before we arrived in Thailand. But I had read on-line that Koh Samui has the most motorbike fatalities in the kingdom. Having (sort of) conquered my fears and ridden a motorbike once while we were in Vietnam, I had no real need to get back on one. So we chose a new, closer destination we could easily walk to from the hotel and set out.

The road had no sidewalk to walk on, and was busy with cars and motorbikes… and, as seems to be usual in this part of the world, many of the motorbike passengers were very small children, most of whom did not bother to hold on… and women in skirts casually riding side-saddle at top speed… and no one was wearing a helmet…

So, you know what happened. The walk was aborted and we got a bike. Here we go again.



We gassed it up at a very nice roadside station (a table with some gas-filled whiskey bottles and a friendly attendant).





Now that we had the bike, Aaron kindly pointed out, we could get to all the island’s sights quite easily. We decided to head for a “secret garden” of Buddhist statues and other sculptures that a fruit farmer had built up in the hills. The main roads on the island were paved, but a lot of the roads into the interior of the island were nice smooth dirt.



Others were dirt, but not smooth in the slightest, and some of the roads were very steep and ridiculously narrow.

But don’t worry moms and dads, I insisted we wear helmets.

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One road was almost entirely washed out - all that was left for us to ride on was a path about a foot and a half wide, with deep ditches on either side. At one point, as we slowly climbed the narrow trail up the mountain, I told Aaron that I thought it wasn’t such a good idea, and that we should probably turn around. Yep, definitely turn around.

But he assured me that it was just like mountain-biking, which he has spent countless hours doing. Perhaps having caught a bit of Olympic spirit, he said something along the lines of, “I’ve trained my whole life for this moment,” and forged ahead.

We soon reached a freshly paved portion of the road… but it turned out the road was a little too fresh. It was, in fact, in the process of being built. My muscles, tired from clinging to the bike for hours, got a break while we waited for the workers to give us the go-ahead to pass.

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Eventually, we reached the secret garden.

Turns out the garden is not so much of a secret. As we pulled up to it, so did an elderly Thai woman and her family. They had traveled up in an SUV. She shook her head and laughed kindly at us, our helmets, our bike.

In addition to the garden, we saw a bunch of other beautiful and interesting things we probably wouldn’t have seen without the bike, including this postcard sunset we caught as we rode back to the hotel that evening.

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I was wrong about getting the motorbike. Aaron was right. So that’s once in ten years.