Koh Samet--Dec. 24

**Disclaimer: I still forget to check the settings on my camera before I start taking pictures, so some of these pictures were the very wrong setting. Sorry about that. I wish I could remember those sorts of things.

Koh Samet is beautiful! It was a lot more primitive than I expected. There are shops and resorts and restaurants, but there is only one dirt road on the whole island. And the only cars are these taxi trucks and then motorcycles. People walk around barefoot all day. Everything's right on the beach. The water is gorgeous. During low tide you can walk out forever.

We rode in the back of a truck with a bunch of people to get to where we were staying. They dropped us off literally right on the beach and then we had to find which one was our resort. We looked really silly trying to wheel our big suitcase through the sand. Finally Jason ran ahead to check in and some bus boys came back with a big cart to get our luggage.

While we were waiting with the luggage, we discovered some sand bubble crabs. It was so much fun to see them because we had just watched a Blue Planet video about them. They are these really tiny crabs that come out during low tide and the filter through the sand, eating the tiny organisms in the sand and spitting out the rest, forming these tiny balls of sand. They were everywhere on the beach. We had so much fun watching them. A man even caught a bunch and gave them to my kids to hold. You can't see the crabs in the pictures because they blend in with the sand, but you can see all the tiny little balls that they made.

We really loved the resort we stayed in. We had a bungalow just up the rocks from the beach. So we were on a cliff overlooking the ocean, but it was only a 2 minute walk to the beach.

We played on the beach for a while, until it started getting dark. Then we went and changed. Our resort had a big Christmas Eve buffet dinner with lots of different Thai and Western food dishes. The restaurant is right on the rocks on the beach, so you are eating in the moonlight, right next to the water. It is breathtaking.

Afterwards, we just walked along the beach, enjoying the evening. There were some fireworks and some fire dancers for Christmas Eve. They also had these paper balloon things that you could buy and light a candle in them. They fill with air and begin to float in the sky. So, it's a glowing ball floating in the air. They are very pretty. We did one and the kids loved it.