Oops.

Khao Sok is pretty quiet and pretty quiet was just what we were... Oh, holy crap, I completely skipped over a very important part of our trip. For some reason I mixed up the order in which we did what we did.

Ok, insert this between Kantiang Bay and The Next Thing I Know...

When we left Kantiang bay we headed not for Khao Sok but for Khao Lak. An important distinction. We spent two weeks in Khao Lak building houses for folks who had lost their homes in the Tsunami of December 2004.

When we first got to Khao Lak we walked around in flip-flops with our enormous, three-months-worth-of-stuff backpacks on our backs for about an hour and a half trying to find a place to stay. K spotted a bunch of bungalows behind a restaurant set back from the main road but we couldn't find the proprietor and so we soldiered on, checking many different places, none of which compared to the ones behind the restaurant. So we went back and hung out until a hilarious lady appeared. She spoke six or seven words of English and I had recently mastered "hello" and "thank you" in Thai so our conversations were largely gestural but she knew what we were looking for (white people with backpacks don't often peddle magazines or salvation in Thailand) and she set us up with a cute, quiet bungalow in the palm tree crowded garden.

We hit the beach.

The beach in Khao Lak was nice but not as idyllic as the beaches on Ko Lanta. No matter, we loved it all the same. We arrived in town on Friday and work didn't begin until Monday so we spent the weekend lazing at the beach and drinking Singha on our porch. It was by all accounts a great weekend.