Ko Chang - paradise island

OK for some Ko Chang can seem busy but when you find a nice quiet beach it is wonderful. For my part I have a hut at a quiet resort on Bailan Bay which is 15 minutes walking to Lonely Beach (which is not so lonely because many many resorts). In Bailan Bay there are only a few resorts, maybe 5 therefore the beach is not crowded and I would say that it's even lonely. Although I didn't do any beach time, other than having my daily massage on the beach at sunset ... yes yes... life is hard. For the last three days I've had a massage on the beach at sunset, life is hard ;-) To be honest the massage are the best I've ever had. It's a Thai massage so they do a western style massage with what I could call assisted stretching and cracking of the bones. Sounds hard but once you get the touch, it's pure magic! Add to that the sunset and the sound of the ocean and I call it paradise. Other than having massages every single day here in Ko Chang, I've gone elephant riding in the jungle and that was a first for me. There I thought I was going to ride in the seat (that looks like a ski lift) but no no, on the way to bathe the elephant I was on that seat and it felt ... well... different, unlike horse riding the elephant is more like if you would take your upperbody from left to right slowly. After the bath (which I didn't go because I saw an elephant take a HUGE dunk in there) we returned to the camp and I sat on the elephant's neck, right behind the ears. That was such an experience, I was alone on the elephant and the trainer was taking pictures. The day after, which was yesterday, I went scuba diving and the first dive was nice but the second dive was great. A lot more fishes and playing with a porcupine fish, so funny! I know we're not supposed to annoy or play with the fish, so I said sorry to the porcupine fish. My punishment for having played with the porcupine fish was having a sunburn ON MY KNEES! Not so nice and a little painful. Bad karma isn't it. My hut is nice except I keep waking up at night because I've got this hunter (don't know what animal it is but it's bigger than a cat) that jumps on the roof of my hut and then I go back to sleep and all of a sudden "squeak squeak" a poor animal get caught by this hunter and eventually dies and I go back to sleep. So I now call it my hunter versus squeaky toy moment. It's very rustic but I like it. It's pure nature. Today I went for a jungle trek, or at least I thought it would be the jungle. Well actually it was the rain forest, the thing is on Fridays it's the long hike up the highest peak of the island (750 metres) so we don't go on the side where there are monkeys. Which I would've loved to see but I still had a tremendous day, a bit exhausting but nice and right in the middle is a waterfall in which I got to bathe. This is dry season here so the waterfall doesn't have much water now, still refreshing enough for our tired bodies and since the temperature was 28 celsius we appreciated it and tried not to think of what was in the pool. I'll miss this place, as I will miss all the other places I've been to. It's the hard part to leave someplace where you've experienced so much in just a few days, everything is so much more intense. Tomorrow is Bangkok where I shortened my stay because I wanted to stay in Ko Chang longer. Unfortunately, after it's back home. Where all the effects of the massages will be crap because of the 20 hours on plane. I must find a place where they give thai massages in Montreal.

About the pictures well, it's long to download them and I'm so busy that I'll download them at my guesthouse in Bangkok... or maybe not. :-)

Cheers to you all!