The Plan is Set – Will it Be Back to Thailand?
Thailand was amazing but does it deserve another trip or should we just mark that country as ‘done’ on our Bucket List for future trips? We keep going back & forth. Will we make another trip to the Land of Smiles? We just are not sure at this moment but, bottom line, we loved Thailand & it holds a very special place in our hearts.
We had a great time in Phuket but I think when & if we go back to Thailand it will be probably to the Chiang Mai region. The Elephant Nature Park is located there. It is dedicated to elephant rescue & rehabilitation & I am all over that!! Being able to volunteer for a small price sounds good to me & I am really feeling a need to get my hands on an elephant. Ha. There are quite a few Elephant tours, sanctuaries, etc where you can feed & bathe elephants so we shall see! I haven’t told The Big Guy about this particular day plan but I think he will be all in. LOL.
Back to business at hand, so for my first notebook dated 2017, our “To Do” list was short. Make a list of countries we were interested in visiting. I’ll be posting about those countries & why we feel the need to visit them on the ‘Where Will We Land Next’ page. I’ll admit our first list was pretty short keeping Thailand still at top of list.
At some point, I did some online to research & found others who had moved and their experiences. I found American expats living in Thailand and signed on to their YouTube channels. This also allowed us to widen our views as to multiple towns we might want to visit or eventually live in. Following blogs, YouTube channels, etc are awesome ways to gain insight from that person’s personal experiences & how they handled any hiccups.
Bottom line though, if you really want to get to the down and dirty on entering a foreign country [to you] check out the Embassy requirements online.
When we had visited Thailand in 2008 it was purely for a break for The Big Guy and vacation for us to reconnect after not seeing each other for about six months. Long hot days for sure. Temps were probably close to 90-95 everyday with a little rain here & there but we had plenty of hours in the day to do our walkabouts. We were able to go motor scooting across one island & caught rides on longtail boats with villagers, etc.
One of the hi-lights was our visit to the Phuket Pearl store! We were on an awesome tour and learned all about pearls. Of course, we shopped and were able to hand pick pearls for the girls back home. Later on we were able to see a pearl farm at one of the village boat stops. Below is photo from The Phuket Pearl Farm.
Wonderful sights to see – the island where part of the James Bond movie was filmed. It really was amazing how islands just seem to pop up out of the water. We saw beautiful water falls seeming to shoot out of the side of forested mountains, rubber tree plantations… We couldn’t see enough! We still want to see more!
We will discuss our ‘how did we get to this point’ again but…
While we were sightseeing all these beautiful spots traveling Thailand we also saw how the people were still reeling from the devastation left by the Dec. 6, 2004 tsunami. Thailand was just one of the countries to be hit. Beaches, hotels, homes close to water and the loss of life. Thailand alone # 4800+ deaths, 8500 +/- injured, 4500 Dec. 26, 2007 – in a matter of just over an hour.