Leaving Ko Chang ("Elephant Island" - where we saw no elephants. Maybe island is shaped like elephant?) was sad, to say the least. Our beachside bungalow...the deserted sands and bathtub-temperature water...and all the little beachside cafes where you sit on cushions on the sand by lantern light...yeah, we could have used an extra day here. Or a week. Idyllic.
I don't know why, but we (for some reason) decided to fly to Chiang Mai (via Bangkok) from here rather than take a bus to Bangkok for our flight, which would've been dirt cheap and taken maybe 3 hours longer. Anyway, this airport has three regularly scheduled flights per day. One runway, and the terminal (clearly labeled as such) doesn't have an indoors, per se - it's all open air. There is one baggage scanner (no durian fruits allowed, and after your baggage goes through, the employee puts a sticker on it and hands it back to you, so you can go check in! Convenient, if not perhaps TSA-approved. There's one check-in line, one runway...you get the idea. But the airport was beautifully landscaped, had free internet terminals, free juice/water/coffee/pastries...really, far nicer than anywhere else we'd been. Strange dichotomy.
Regardless, we and our baggage made it safely to Chiang Mai (northern city in Thailand, near the border of Burma.) We're still sunburned, and I'm starting to itch/peel. It's so exciting to see clouds of little dead skin flakes "poof" into the air whenever I take off my shirt. Well, OK, not really, and I can't change my clothes without help. Bah!
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