HUA HIN: On Friday I left for Hua Hin with some of my friends. As our feet literally stepped out of the cab at the Bus Station, workers asked where we were headed, and we were thrown onto a bus headed to Hua Hin in about 5 seconds. Without going to the ticket counter or anything, we were on a bus supposedly going to Hua Hin (about 3 hours away). We were a bit skeptical of the whole thing because it was just us four Americans and 3 other Thai people. But we were assured that it was going there. We bought tickets on the bus, and later found out that it was the 3rd class non-express bus--the worst bus you could possibly ride. It stopped every 5 minutes to pick up and drop off passengers. We fell for the little scam because we thought we would miss the bus because we read that it left every two hours and we didn't want to wait another 2 hours to leave. Anyway, instead of getting a ticket for the non-stop first class bus that costs about an extra 50 cents, we got stuck on third class and it ended up taking just under 4 hours. It was absolute hell. But you I guess you learn something new about Thailand every day.
HORSES: After checking into my room, which was nothing like my previuos room at the island Ko Samet, I headed to the beach. I rode, for the first time in my life, a horse. It was pretty cool to ride it on the beach, but my butt was paying for it for the next day and a half. Once I got used to the horse, which was really easy to control, I was flying up and down the beach--they can run pretty fast; I also almsot ran over some kid, but that's a whole other story.
MONKEY MOUNTAIN: At the end of the beach was a mountain called Monkey Mountain named after its infestation of wild, roaming monkeys. I went here the second day, and this was by far the highlight of my weekend. After being on the mountain for about 30 minutes I only saw 1 monkey, but when I got to a certain point (the hut where you can feed them) about 100 monkeys raced down the side of the mountain, jumping onto the hut, climbing down trees, and going nuts, I was surrounded by all of them--at one point I counted 41 monkeys. (It reminded me of the movie CONGO when they gorillas emerged from the many caves and began attacking the "unwanted visitors") I was able to buy a bucket of bananas--well, I actually bought about 4--and feed them to the monkeys. It was awesome. I was able to simply hand the banana out and the monkey would retrieve it with his hand. They had absolutely no fear of humans whatsoever. I was literally stading amongst 100 monkeys feeding them. Some would even jump up onto my hip and chill out as I held the bucket up and wait for the perfect time to sneak their hand in to grab a banana. Others would tug at my shorts with their hand in an attempt to get my attention. One tourist made the mistake of bringing a plastic bag of popcorn with him. It was immediately snatched from him and the monkey who grabbed it was chased by a million other monkeys. When I was leaving I saw the monkey and a few others just chillin up on the roof of a hut eating the torn bag of popcorn one by one with a bunch of it spilled all around them. I heard about this place and knew I would be able to see monkeys, but I was amazed to learn how close you could get to them and how much I was able to interact with all of them. When we began to walk away the monkeys soon departed up the mountain and disappear into the rocks and bushes.
