Seagrass and Paradise

Last week, I went together with the people from IUCN (who have their office in the same street as Andaman Discoveries and who we work closely together with) to do some seagrass-monitoring.

That was very interesting... we spent hours on looking in a square, deciding how many % of which seagrasstype there was. Good, there could have been more going on in those squares BUT the surrounding was just stunning!

Last weekend, I went to Railay Beach with Andrew as it was his last weekend and he wanted to see more of Thailands beauty and I HAD TO join..

No need to say a lot, I guess, the pictures say it all - what an amazing spot. Even the liaison with some nasty jellyfish could not spoil this experience.

Meetings and Beaches

Last week, we had a team-meeting-day with all the staff from Andaman Discoveries. This was great as hold in a beautiful natural surrounding close to Kuraburi.




On the weekend, we went to Khao Lak, which is only 1 1/2 h south of here. We had the beautiful beach and Resort just for us as now in the rainy season, there are hardly any tourists.. Well, it didn't rain the whole weekend! :)
















Yesterday, Laura and her visiting friends were cooking french dinner for us, which was amazing...! Yes, thai food is one of the best ones on earth, I agree on that and I love it. BUT, french is hard to beat and a change in between is just a treat.

Homestay and Jungle

Last week, I had the chance to go to Ban Talae Nok, a close by village with who Andaman Discoveries does Homestays. I was staying over night with a very friendly family and again felt sorry that my Thai is not yet good enough for any type of proper conversation.. But we still were able to communicate - no language was needed to see how much I enjoyed the food and their hospitality. Also, P'Tui, AD's director was never far away for any translations, staying with Janice and Andrew, the volunteers who spent the whole week there.

We were quite busy making postcards from handmade recycling paper, planting palmtrees and mangroves and we even painted a sign for the women's soap goup. But there are also other activities to do like fishing, weaving nepa palm rooves, learning how to cook thai food or making natural soap - depending on your interest! At an intercultural evening with the local kids, they had a great laugh listening to my repeated thai words before I learnt them to sing "Tirol isch lei oans" (a famous patriotic song from Tyrol, Austria, where I am from) which also was quite funny! :)

Also we had the chance to jump into the ocean at the beach nearby which was wonderfull after getting all dirty in the muddy jungle where we got the mangroves and palm plants from.

What a great experience to get to know life in a small authentic village while helping the locals!

For the weekend, we went to the close by National Park Khao Sok in the jungle where we did rivertubing and relaxed in a beautiful resort surrounded by rainforest and its animals!

Sooo nice...