We seem to have entered some sort of food-bringing ping-pong-playing paradise. But I'll get there later.

Anh negotiated for us to get a bus, which was interesting. This guy definitely had a Rasta bus – the guy who helped with luggage had a knit cap, the bus was all different colors, the inside had different color lights, it was awesome. He drove us to the first cave of the day, though we took a wrong turn, we got there eventually. We drove through a lot of shrimp farms. Apparently it's cheaper to farm shrimp here and send them to the US than it is to get them from US fisheries. So we climbed up to the cave entrance, which was more difficult than expected, I lent Becky a pair of socks because she couldn't find any, and down the rickety ladder we went. So that was cool, some nice rock formations, some tight spots we had to crawl through, lots of bats (mostly on the ceiling). At one point we did shut off all the lights, which I enjoyed. We climbed out, a little bit treacherous, Liz bumped her head, and then back down to the bus. From there we went to the national park whose name I swear I'll spell eventually, got little boats that we waded out to which took us around the mountain, instead of hiking over the mountain with all our gear. We got there, dropped our baggage off at the front desk while they set up our tents, and ate lunch. Sweet and sour pork, sprite and water for me. Tents set up, we moved our stuff over, and I went and hand-washed laundry. Poorly. Very poorly. First off, I didn't do it in the sinks I was supposed to use, secondly, the woolite was INCREDIBLY sudsy... yeah. Fail. But it was better than nothing, I suppose. Hung my stuff up on the big clothesline we set up (Denny made a bad Bermuda Triangle joke), and got into the ocean. The beach was a lot of ground-up shells, which were... interesting. We also saw a live sea anemone (small), and lots of hermit crabs. Most stayed in their shells but one came out kind of aggressively, it was amusing. Tossed around in the water for a bit, we all almost got taken out by a ripcurrent, and eventually came back in. I kind of considered the ocean my shower. From there it was a hike to another cave, which was at our leisure. Beautiful hike, the planted stuff (pines) on the beach gave way to more a more natural forest, saw a great spider, a few different ants, and most excitingly, monkeys. Macaques, maybe, they were at a distance swinging up the mountain. Climb climb climb, a bit down, it got cooler as we got into the cave, thankfully. Otherwise it was VERY warm, less so on the beach. So we got down into the first part of the cave, this one had a collapsed ceiling so it was open, plants growing in the bottom, beautiful. In the second part there was a pavilion built to memorialize the visit of a king, as well as some ceremonial things and lots of little stone structures, the function of which I'm not sure of. There was also “Crocodile Stone,” which did look a lot like its namesake, especially for no carving, and “poison plants” which were obviously planted by humans. We decided, y'know, just in case you needed them there. Came back out, hiked down somewhat more quickly, and then Matt gave me a “shh” from down below. He was at the same platform where we had seen the monkeys earlier. I came down slowly and saw that there were some in the trees RIGHT next to the platform. So close. It was absolutely amazing, got some good pictures. Some guys came down (I later found out 3 Argentinians and 2 Thai) who were kind of the “ugly Americans” of the area: talking loudly, not looking around much, one of the Thai guys had his cell phone out all the time, in the cave they even climbed up on a large rock to take a picture. So I gave them a finger on the lips, the guy in front caught on and they came down, they saw the monkeys, about 3 got really excited, stayed quiet, were good about it, the other 2 looked bored, but did keep quiet. That was awesome. So we headed down once the monkeys moved on, I ended up with Liz at the bottom when we saw one in a tree right near us. Took some pictures, followed him over, and then a bigger group showed up, climbing and swinging RIGHT over us. The closest I got to them all day, and the pictures show it. Fantastic. Even got to seem them eating a bit, at a range where I could tell what they were doing. Ran into the Argentinians and Thai again, talked to them a little bit more on the way out, and that was that. I napped for 15-20, pretty conked out from the hiking. We had dinner, pineapple pancake (delicious!) and water I filtered with Michelle's pump, at this point I was down to only 50 baht to cover dinner and breakfast the next day. After dinner was class, part of which I spent playing with a ground beetle, Denny “ended” class, then got sidetracked for a period about the epic journey (which was interesting, just funny that he had officially said we were done before that). I showered, sort of – there's a bucket and you pour it over yourself.

Gotta finish later, class.

Friday, January 29th, roughly 12:30-1 PM local time

So, finishing up. I dealt with that semi-shower, went to bed in the tent, used my coat for a pillow and there was some sort of small towel or something that I put under my back (wasn't long enough for my whole body, but oh well). That's what I get for lacking a sleeping bag? It wasn't too bad. Warm, humid, but listening to the ocean while you fall asleep – the real ocean, not a recording, not a white noise machine – is nice. I woke up around 7:20, plugged in my netbook to charge (there was an outlet in the light over by where we had class in the log circle), and sat down to write some notes on the ground beetle. I found another one, even tried drawing it... that went poorly, when a bat landed at my feet. Literally. He seemed injured, didn't fly, just crawled around. I think he was eating ants. There were small red-orange insects on him, parasites I'd guess. I watched him for a while, finally went to get some other people, and he was gone. I thought he'd recovered and flown off, so I went over to breakfast, had fried eggs (better than expected), I thought they were 20 but was only charged 10 and I do feel bad if I ripped them off but I think there was a miscommunication about 1 fried egg versus 1 order of 2 fried eggs. I hope I didn't rip them off. When I came back people said they'd found the bat again. He crawled over the logs, apparently, and was now climbing up a tree. Not long after I got over there he hung upside down, we got some pictures, I finished packing, tried to hand sweep the tent less successfully than hoped, found a small lizard, class again...

Friday, January 29th, roughly 1:55-2 PM local time

Okay, that whole time wasn't class. I got distracted. So we finished up the tents, got back on some boats, went around the mountain quickly, and from there onto two minibuses. I looked outside, watched, interesting enough, slept a fair bit of the way. It was supposed to be like 4 hours, but it ended up being only 2 or so. We got here, fairly nice place. It's all one big room with 20 mattresses spaced along two walls, three bathrooms (Thai style, which means you dump buckets of water to flush and put toilet paper in a waste bin, but! Real showerheads, which is exciting). Lunch was absolutely frakking fantastic, they kept bringing more and more food. Green curry, some sort of meat raddish soup, delicious delicious chicken, watermelon, rice (so much rice, I heard “more rice?” in a Thai accent more times than I can count), and we can even trust the water here. We also have wireless, which none of us expected. Matt had to do some voodoo IP magic to make it work, but we're in. So we had class, took a short break, had some more class, and then I've spent the rest of the afternoon in here, relaxing, chilling. Dinner was fish (as in, a whole fish), some meat we argued the identity of but which was probably chicken, another soupy thing, and of course more rice. Then they brought out watermelon and pineapple, too. I like this place. Now I need to work on my prompt for Biomes and get some sleep, 4:30 wake up for hiking.

Friday, January 29th, roughly 6:35-6:45 PM local time