Adventures on Sentosa II- the Sequel!

Here was the weather forecast for beautiful Singapore today:

12:00am-7:30am: Drowsy with scattered dreams. In other words, sleeping time.

7:30am-12:00pm: Positively cool and breezy! We only started sweating about twenty minutes in. Singapore is only about one degree above the equator, remember.

12:00pm-12:40pm approx: Rainy.

12:40pm-1:40pm: Cool from rain.

1:40pm-5:00pm: Extremely, ridiculously hot, with life-sapping humidity.

Anyway, today we revisited the island of Sentosa, an attraction-filled island that popped up in the first vacation documentation on this blog. In case you weren't here back then, one of the activities that we tried was a segway™ tour. The tour wasn't available until hours ahead, but we managed to secure ourselves a spot on the fun ride track. The segway™ controls are as follows: lean forward to move forward, lean back to stop, and lean the handlebars to steer. There are only two wheels, but it's an easy ride thanks to gyroscopes.

It's not all fun and games, though. We saw a kid who didn't know what turn he was supposed to make, got confused, and subsequently smacked into a thick tree. ... Okay, that was me. Let's just say that I got distracted.

Afterwards, we wandered around Sentosa for a while, and after not finding anything that spoke to us, went and saw a show at a place called "animal encounters". It was a show where birds performed various tricks. We didn't even know that there was a show when we arrived, but decided to make the most of it. Thank you for reading about our most recent outing! Tomorrow we will be heading home.  Up next: Ecuador and the Galapagos!

Bonus photo!

This was taken on the plane ride to Singapore.
Someone put up their foot right next to me!

Beach to City

Hello all.  Guest writer Lisa here today.  Aidan didn't have much to write about so I am filling in with my summary of Thailand.  We spent a few hours at the beach today and then flew to Singapore.  We had to get back to a major United serviced city in order to fly home and decided to visit Singapore instead of going back through Bangkok.

Last day relaxing by the pool

So for my summary of Thailand...
First off, Bangkok.  I knew it was a big, busy city but I wasn't prepared for how big and busy.  The chaos and grime was hard on my OCD type personality.  I don't have any good pictures to demonstrate the odd differences everywhere.  For instance, we traveled by river shuttle boat and saw shopping centers next to shacks (no exaggeration, barely four walls with cut outs for windows).  The streets are narrow and traffic is crazy.  But the sky train runs efficiently and is very clean.  And strangely, though there appears to be a lot of poverty (based on the number of dilapidated buildings), we didn't spot any homeless people or people begging for money like you see in other big cities. One of my favorite places wasn't any place we set out to see.  When heading towards the hotel shuttle boat station we came across this.

This was called a Thai Spirit House.  They are placed in the corner of properties.  This was a very large one with a beautiful tree but smaller businesses will have smaller ones too.

Chiang Mai was a more spread out city and not quite as chaotic.  But it was still far from organized.  Nobody seems to follow any traffic laws such as stopping at red lights or staying in their lane.  The sidewalks, if they exist, are narrow and overrun with street vendors.  One really cool thing about the city is that it has an old town area with parts of an old wall remain and the old moat has been turned into ponds and fountains.  We took a tuk tuk back to our hotel one evening and it was a highlight of our trip.  They no longer use pedal powered rickshaw like vehicles.  Instead they have moped powered tuktuks.  They are open on the sides and have neon lights and blasting music, the antithesis of the old fashioned type.

View from our TukTuk

The beach resort was beautiful.  There were a lot of European travelers there since there are direct flights to Phuket from some European cities.  We were surprised at the number of creatures we saw every day.  Just on a ten minute walk on the beach this morning we counted eight hermit crabs and 34 sand crabs.  There are many lizards also and prehistoric sized bugs (often dead, likely due to a serious pesticide program).

So we are in Singapore now.  Back to efficient taxi queues and not having to worry about being ripped off.  Aidan will blog about our one short day in Singapore tomorrow.

It's a rough life

It's a rough life here in Khao Lak. To prove it, here are some pictures.

I decided to go boogie boarding today. Once you get used to it, it gets pretty easy, as seen below.

 To add once more to the wildlife sightings, here is a giant snail and a sand-colored crab. This particular crab has evolved an incredible camouflage. Can you find it in the picture?

Pictured below is me relaxing with a smoothie at the bar located in the pool.

We encountered a beautiful inlet today, too. An inlet is where ocean water runs into the land past the usual shoreline. On the right, you can see a miniature cliff made entirely of sand.

Bonus!

Sorry, I don't have any bonus photos for you, but I do have a bonus wildlife sighting. While we were relaxing in the pool, we noticed another lizard scampering along the far edge... But this one was about two feet long! A hotel attendant was attempting to shoo it off with an uprooted umbrella stick from one of the pool chairs, which the lizard didn't seem to mind too much.