Lots of trees but not so many monkeys

Before anything, I do have to admit...I finally caved, and bought into the most recently ugly, ugly trend...but man, are they comfortable. Tracy finally broke me down. I'm so sorry, mom:

Today we got to explore the Chanthaburi region of Thailand- Iain and Jen's hometown. We had another lazy start to the day, finally heading to the beach area in the afternoon, where we got to see the Asian side of the Pacific Ocean for the first time:

Where we ate at one of the huts on the beach:

We then visited an aquarium and a mangrove plantation, which was more amazing than I thought it would be- it was started to rejuvinate the land and pull resources from the local shrimp farms:

Then we bought some bushels of bananas to see our first wild monkeys, but the preservation area wasn't open...so sad, so we'll have to try to see monkeys at some other point on our trip. So we drove back to Iain and Jen's place, where we've spend the last 4 hours or so planning our trip to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. We've gotten a lot of good information from Iain, other travelers, and websites, in order to see what our transport would be location to location, and estimated time travel, which through Laos and Cambodia will likely involve largely pickup trucks that also like to stop for men with chickens, and the below picture kind of sums up what we've been up to tonight: