Not long after my last entry we had a staff development day at school. I shan’t bore you with the details of this. Suffice to say there were several lowlights and two highlights: a free proper coffee and a free foot massage. So it wasn’t all bad. And the fact that it was the last day of school before our half-term break also made it slightly more bearable. So, that night I was off to the airport to fly down to Ko Samui.
The first inconvenience of the trip was that my flight was delayed by an hour and a half, meaning I didn’t actually arrive on the island until nearly midnight. (In hindsight, this could be seen as an omen for the whole week.) However, I did arrive OK and found the hotel that my mate Owen had previously arranged for us (he had fortuitously managed to get on an earlier flight). The next morning we got on the ferry to Ko Pha Ngan, which is about 20 km north of Samui. We found some very nice beachfront bungalows for the few days we planned to stay there. The rest of the day was as expected: relaxing on the beach, reading, unwinding, eating, getting a massage, having a few quiet drinks in the evening - surely the start of a well-deserved break on a lush tropical island. But it’s funny how things can change. The next morning we woke up to very heavy rain. And basically, the rain barely stopped for the next 5 days. I had all these grand plans for my time down there: do some diving (the rain was so heavy the dive boats weren’t going out most days and the visibility would have been dreadful), do some trekking around the island (heavy rain puts a dampener on such things), do some photography (again, rain and cameras don’t tend to get along too well) and relax on the beach (a challenge to relax while enduring water torture). So, our plans were forced to change somewhat. What we actually did instead was: sleep, read, walk around the few shops nearby, eat, drink, watch TV in the pubs and restaurants (when there wasn’t a blackout due to the heavy rain), get a massage pretty much every day, and that’s about it. One good thing was that the rain held off for the night of the rugby world cup final, so we were able to watch that. Owen is Scottish and possibly enjoyed the anguish of the many English supporters around us even more than I did. That finished about 3:30 local time, after which we headed down to the all-night beach party until dawn, at which point the rain started up again. So it was a fairly uneventful time on Ko Pha Ngan. Our original plan was to go to another island called Ko Tao as well, but we decided given the weather to go back to Ko Samui, where there were at least a few more shops and restaurants in which to avoid the rain. We met up with another guy from school Lee on Samui and the three of us pretty much did the same things there that Owen and I did on Ko Pha Ngan. I only stayed for a few more days before flying back to Bangkok, but at least my last day down there the rain eased up, so I could enjoy some time on the beach. All in all, the trip was a bit disappointing, only because of the weather, but at least I got to relax a lot. Needless to say it hadn’t rained at all in Bangkok during that week.
The day after I arrived back (Friday), a friend of mine phoned me and asked if I wanted to go down to Rayong (south-east of Bangkok) with him and few of his mates. So that afternoon we headed off to his mate’s apartment overlooking the beach, about 3 hours out of Bangkok. Very nice spot. The next morning we went to see a local Buddhist festival, which was really interesting. It involved a very colourful parade walking along the main street of this small village, followed by all the monks from the local area walking along collecting donations of food and supplies from the local community. The local people were lined up along the side of the road behind make-shift tables and as each monk walked past, they put something in his bowl (usually something small like a spoonful of raw rice). I don’t know how many monks there were – we didn’t stay long enough to see them all (potentially over a hundred I would reckon), but the line of local people lined up along the street stretched on for several kilometres. Some of the monks were very young – hard to say exactly but about 10 years old I’d say. It was a huge event given the small size of the village and I was one of only a few foreigners there, which was also really nice. I got some great photos. Here are a few but the better ones are on my flickr page (see link to the right).
That afternoon we all went for a walk up to a local river, which ran down the side of a mountain and had several waterfalls along the way. It was a fantastic walk and at one point there was a section where people could feed some fish. It was amazing how these fish were so desperate for food they would actually come out of the water to get it. After a few seconds of course they had to frantically get back into the water. These fish were literally risking their own lives in order to get a bit of green bean. I was going to try to attach a short video of this spectacle, but unfortunately Windows crappy Movie Maker is useless and I don't have another video editing program at the moment. Sorry.
The next day (the last day of my break) we just took it easy in the morning, then drove back to Bangkok after lunch. I was very pleased that I got at least a couple of days of doing something interesting without getting rained upon. Last week back at work was a busy one and this week has been a bit up and down so far in terms of workload. Last weekend I spent in Bangkok just hanging out with friends and catching up on stuff. So life is pretty much back to normal here in BKK. Cheers.
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