2) Driving on the left side of the road with elephants.

We rode the train in a first class car. This meant we had private rooms with two bunks in each room. I was by myself and quickly fell asleep for a mid-day nap, which turned into a seven hour-long snore fest. The other four guys had two rooms and were joined by a sliding door which allowed them to hang out and converse for most of the trip.

Our train arrived at 1:30 am Surat Thani time. We took a 15-kilometer cab ride to our hotel. Now I say cab, but it was more like a small pick-up truck with a tarp over the back of it. But hey, what else can you expect at 1:30 in the morning in the middle of Thailand.

We all woke up the next morning and enjoyed a healthy breakfast at the hotel. Michael and I then grabbed a taxi to the airport where we picked up our rental car. Okay, up to this point in my life I had always driven on the right hand side of the road. Now it is no longer illegal, it is merely just an option. The novelty of being in the passenger seat with a steering wheel in front of me quickly wore off as I made my way onto the main roads in Surat Thani. I think Michael could sense I was tense because about every five minutes he would say, "You are doing awesome." Driving on the left side wasn't as big of an adjustment as driving with thousands of mopeds weaving in and out of the traffic around me. When we arrived back at the hotel and I had placed the car in park, still sitting in our seats, Michael and I pumped our fists, stomped our feet and screamed as if we had just won the Baja 1000.

The Thai roads we used for travel where very smooth. The driving however was like a roller coaster. "Keeping up with traffic" should be considered an olympic sport. As we drove through southern Thai land our group imagined developing a video game called
"Developing Nation Racing". Each game would have multiple races, using indigineous modes of travel. For Thailand that would be cars, boats, trains, planes, tuk-tuks and mopeds. There would also be local "obsticals" like the ones we faced while driving, such as a truck full of elephants.

As I had projected it took us two hours to drive from Surat Thani to Krabi. What I didn't plan on was the hour and a half it took us to find the Krabi Emerald Garden Resort that would become our home for the next four days. When we pulled into the Ao Nang beach area there were no signs that there had been a Tsunami warning the night before. Shops were open and tourists were bustling around as tourists normally do. After checking into the Emerald Garden I asked the hotel staff to help secure us travel to Phi Phi Island for the next three days. I asked about a traditional Thai long tail boat and they laughed. Mr. Sak, the day manager, informed me that it would take two and half hours to get to Phi Phi by long tail boat. We opted for a speedboat that would take us only forty-five minutes to get to the island. The boys and Neil went swimming while Michael and I checked out down town Ao Nang. We ate dinner at the hotel where I had Pad Thai with Chicken, which I love. While at dinner the restaurant sound system started playing Jack Johnson. I couldn't help thinking how perfect this would have been if my wife and kids had been there to enjoy it with me. After dinner we shared with each other the stories about the previous days earthquake and tsunami warning that we each had heard about. We decided to head to town to call family.

After reassuring our loved ones that we were fine and everything was fine we headed back to the hotel to begin our "The Beach" marathon. The Beach was a movie released in 2000 staring Leonardo DiCaprio that was filmed on Phi Phi Island. Many young travelers come to this area of Thailand to relive portions of this movie. So as a way to promote Phi Phi and the movie, our hotel had a designated a TV channel that would show this movie twenty-four hours a day. I'm not sure how many times I viewed it in it's entirety over those four days, but it seemed like a hundred. If you would like to see where we were, renting this movie is a great way to do that.

More to come!