Leaving Koh Tao, Heading To Chiang Mai

We've got time to burn today, we checked out of our bungalow at 10am and aren't leaving on the night boat to Surit Thani until 9pm. That means we have a lot of walking around with our backpacks, we don't really want to keep them back at the bungalows because they'd be out in the open and we have no way to look after them. Once we get off at Surit Thani we're flying back to Bangkok, then to Chiang Mai.

We managed to burn up a couple of hours this morning, streching out breakfast at the bunglows out until 12:30, just sitting on the comfortable mats and reading our books. There's a lot of place here that'll take your old book and trade it (plus a fee, of course) for a new one, so we're taking advantage of that.

The night boat should be interesting, according to most people it's not very comfortable and therefore quite hard to sleep on. I can sleep on most things though, so I don't think it'll be too much of a problem. I wasn't even that bothered by the early morning 4am Roostering that would go on outside our bungalow. The Roosters were defective anyway, they'd keep their cock-a-doodle-dooing going until 10pm at night.

It's been a nice couple of days, not too much rain expect for at night when it doesn't really matter that much. When it does rain though it usually comes in as a major storm. Sarah was out swimming the other night and I was just sitting on the beach, it was quite a nice night. Within 15 minutes though all the little stalls that were setup on the beach for dinner were being dragged inside as a huge wind blew and rain pelted down. Sarah didn't even notice until I pointed it out to her, it was still that nice swimming in the wonderfully warm water. All the trees started to drop their fruits, the Coconut trees you have to watch out for the most as you don't want one of them bashing on your head unannouced. Or even annouced for that matter.

We've taken it really easy for the last few days, not really doing much at all except walking into town, doing a bit of shopping and eating, trying to avoid the dodgy food. While walking around yesterday we discovered the Thai version of a foodcourt. Open air, dogs lying under the table, more flies than you've ever seen. We ordered a couple of juices from one of the vendors, we got them, tried them and decided not to drink them. They were full of ice which it quite hard to trust, especially from smaller vendors and they tasted like they'd had a bunch of salt (or something similar) added to them. So we smiled, walked off and tipped them. Better that than being super ill for our 8 hour boat ride.

I'm nearly over this stupid flu I managed to pickup, it's really easy to get medicines here because pretty much anything you could need you can walk into the chemist and pickup off the shelf. This includes cold and flu tablets (which is normal) and antibotics (which you can't get back home without a prescription)

Chiang Mai is going to be really cool, I'm looking forward to it already. We're going to do two days at an Elephant rescue park, there's a lady who takes in the injured or abandoned Elephants and looks after them. The money we pay to stay/help there goes towards feeding them (They eat 125kg of food a day) and keeping them healthy, which is much better than just getting an Elephant ride, paying someone who is probably not looking after their Elephant all that well.

For the rest of today I think we'll go and eat an extended lunch, strech that out as long as possible, swap a few books then get some dinner. Many places here show movies around dinner time and we just walked past one that's showing something at 6pm, giving us plenty of time to get to the pier at 8pm. We've just burned up an hour of time here in the Internet Cafe.

Oh yea, just to tell everyone again how great Skype is. If you were to go into one of the thousand places here and make a call, it'd cost you 30Baht (about NZ $1.10) a minute. Skype costs you NZ $0.02 a minute, plus the cost of being in the Internet cafe (currently ~2Baht/minute). I think the call quality is probably better too, it's been great. I've spoken to Mum, Dad and my Nan Milburn. Sarah's currently talking to her parents using it as well.

Well that's about it, not really anything too exciting huh? But it's been good to just relax, take it easy and keep adjusting to the heat. Even when it rains it's a solid 28 degrees in our bunglow, you have to sleep with the fan on. I don't even sleep in my sleeping sack (a very thin sleeping bag, make out of silk), I just lie on the bed. I don't have to worry about mosquitos though, as Sarah will tell you I came prepared for the little bastards!

Till next time,

Tim