It's Still Raining!

It's amazing how quickly you stop enjoying the cooling rain and get sick of it. It's SO annoying, Thailand is meant to be at its hottest and driest this time of year and instead we've had 4 days of overcast crapness and bucketing rain.

We haven't let that stop us from enjoying ourselves, even though it's annoying. Yesterday we hired a scooter (though here anything with two wheels is called a Motorbike) and fanged it around Koh Pangan. We decided against hiring them on Koh Samui because of how dangerous the roads were there, but here is a totally different story. There's much less traffic and drivers are much more considerate, slowing down and moving over to let people go past. Pretty much the complete opposite of Koh Samui.

Yesterday mission seemed easy enough: Aquire a kettle. We've decided that to help cut costs a little bit we can make our own coffee (mostly for me) and also eat dinner out of a noodle cup sometimes. Off we zoomed on our little scooter, me clutching to the back while Sarah drove. We zoomed in, out and around massive puddles that all the rain has left on the road and eventually made it into (I think) Thong Sala, a little township where the ferries from Koh Samui arrive. Eventually we found a kettle though it was a bit big, so we skipped on that. We also had a good look around and finally plucked up the courage to eat some street vendor food.

Once we'd gotten sick of Thong Sala we drove over to Hat Rin. This is the place where every full moon there's a massive party, so we thought we'd go and see what was so great about Hat Rin. The poor scooter couldn't handle some of the really long steep hills with two people on it, so a few times I had to get off and jog up the hill to the top, then climb back on. Lots of other people were having to do the same thing.
We found a place that had a decent kettle, so we bought that for the grand sum of 270 Baht, that's about $11 NZD.
What a disspointment Hat Rin was, it's just tourist central. The place itself is messy and horrible, rubbish everywhere. It's also full of people who are obviously just there for the party, which I think is a shame as they're not seeing any of the real island.

We left pretty quickly after that and kept driving, stopping a few times at little roadside stands to get petrol. They're nothing bigger than the size of an outdoor toilet with a barrel of petrol and a hose, but because there's so many scooters here there's hundreds of these little petrol stations too.

On the way back we stopped at a tiny barber shop on the side of the road to get me a haircut. The room was quite small and the equipment looked really old and a little scary. But I had nothing to fear, the razor he used to clip my hair was sharper than half of the places I've been to in Auckland!
We also stopped in at the local supermarket and got some instant 3-in-1 packets of coffee and a few other things. The coffee packets have coffee, milk and sugar, just perfect for travellers. Once we hit the road again it started to rain on us and rain hard, by the time we got back to Ibiza Bungalows we were drenched through.

I unwrapped out kettle only to find the cord didn't fit into the base of the kettle at all. I suppose that's what you get for a $11 kettle, but after some work with a screwdriver and some good ol' brute force we managed to get the plug in there. Horray! To celebrate we had some cup-o-noodles thai style, which turned out to be dynamite hot. Really blow-your-head off spicy, though very tasty.

All last night it rained, we got up this morning and headed back into Thong Sala which is where I'm currently typing this. It is still raining today, the power in our hut went off just as we were leaving too, though the power's on here in so hopefully it'll be back on.

I really hope the weather fines up soon enough, it's getting quite depressing not being able to lie on the beach or enjoy the sunshine!

Tim