Current mood:	good
Current music:	Tracy Chapman

Back to the beach baby
So now I'm in Ko Tao, a small island off Thailand's southeastern coast that's reknown for diving. I stayed in Bangkok for almost 5 days during which: I saw the National Museum, took a river taxi to Chinatown, saw some poor traveler dude get a bottle smashed on his head by some Thai dude at 2am right across the street from where i was sitting on the curb, and randomly ran into the British guy who was on my camel safari back in India 1 month ago. What are the odds?
Thailand is very clean. I see minimal garbage, none in Bangkok, barely any in the countryside. It's probably because they want to keep it all shiny and pretty for the 1 million tourists that are here at any given time. They really do have the tourist thing downpat here.
On all the cigarette packs, there's pictures of people's blackened lungs and rotting teeth and such. Yeah it's gross, and yeah I still smoke. Do people think I'm Thai and try to speak to me in Thai? Yes, about half the time.
There's way too much hair weaving and fake dreadlocking going on around here. People need to figure out that they don't look good.
I know I said that all southeast asian buses are crap, but Thailand tourist buses are niiice. They're doubledecker, cushy, AC, blanket, legroom, reclining, movie, the works. A bus I would actually not mind being in for a long time. So I was kinda miffed when they took us Ko Tao people off the bus at 2:15am in the middle of my first good bus sleep. We all got dumped off in Chumphon, (the bus continued on to drop people off for Phuket and Ko Sumai), and the boat that takes us to Ko Toa wasn't leaving until 7am. So we all got to sleep on the floor of the boating office for the next 4 hours, on tarps. It was a valiant effort on everyone's part to sleep. Even when the phone started ringing at 3am and 3:15 and 3:20. Then we were all shoved on a shuttle at 6:15 and taken to the boat. One 3 hour boatride later, I'm here in Ko Tao. It's beautiful of course. Very hilly and tropical. I'm learning how to dive here at my hotel. Tomorrow morning we watch some cheesy diving video.
I can't believe I'm past the halfway point of my trip.