peanut sauce, elephants, and pad thai

nate has been living and working on a project for his job in singapore for about six weeks now. it's been kind of awful being across the world and in opposite time zones of each other, but the opportunity was too good to pass up. the saving grace part of the deal was that his company would pay for me to come visit once during this gig. i begged for work off and just got back from spending ten days in southeast asia.

i flew into singapore at 1 am, and we promptly left on a flight to phuket, thailand at 5 am the next morning. did i mention the flight from chicago to hong kong was 15.5 hours? then 3.5 hours to singapore? woof. i have always wanted to go to thailand, and since we only had a weekend, we decided to go for phuket and the koh phi phi islands (even though i am still dying to trek through the jungles of chiang mai and see tigers and stay at an elephant reserve, all while riding a zip line).

we knew phuket would be touristy, but it was such a nice getaway for us -- nate probably needed a vacation more than i did. since i'm not around, he works nonstop. it drizzled most of the time we were there, hence the foggy pictures.

our first walk through patong beach


tasty rice in a pineapple bowl

the second day, we took a boat ride about two hours out to the koh phi phi islands. unfortunately, we didn't even get to capture the best part of this little day trip because we couldn't bring our camera in the water, so allow me to illustrate...
me and nate, in flippers and snorkeling gear + hundreds of other people standing on the back of a boat
some guy yells "okay go!" in thai and people start jumping off as the boat is still running
we look around and follow suite
we swim from the boat through a coral reef to a beach
it's called monkey beach
we look up and see monkeys staring down at us from a huge tree, then jump down and come stand around us
another tourist is drinking coke and rum
he gives the monkey his half full coke bottle and the monkey starts chugging
the guy tries to pry the bottle away from the monkey, who starts squawking and screeching, then finishes off every last drop of coke.
everyone is laughing. this is crazy.
another guy is feeding a monkey straight up rum.
one monkey attacks (playfully) a little girl, pulling down her swimsuit bottoms. she cries and her mom chuckles.
we keep our distance from the monkeys, but they are quite entertaining.
we hear a horn and swim back to the boat.
there is no roll call. if you didn't swim back, the boat doesn't wait. we're not in america anymore.

we stopped at one of the islands for lunch, and had heavenly banana smoothies too.

we drove past other islands where movies like the beach were filmed

i loved the colorful boats all lined up

and i loved being with him (holding our amazing smoothie)

it looked like the set of jurassic park

it was our last day and i was dying to ride an elephant. so we scouted out an elephant trek place, and despite the rain, went anyway. first, we pet and fed a baby elephant. she runs away, so they had to chain her leg.

our guide, tong. it was just us, him, and our elephant lucky in the jungle. i think nate and i both had permanent smiles the whole time minus when i thought for sure we'd fall off this elephant

tong let us drive for awhile

my lens was getting soaked in the rain, but i wanted to capture the beauty of the lush jungle

bonding with lucky

feeding her bananas

and goodbye to rainy phuket.
thailand, you're the best. we'll come back.
more of singapore up next...