long time, lots to say.

10May09

so, i am obviously terrible at keeping this up-to-date, sometimes i think i’ll write things and then i end up thinking ‘no-one will want to read about our train being delayed for 5 hours or me losing 3 games of scrabble in a row and getting in a mood’ so i just end up not blogging.

we’ve left our little home in chiang mai, i missed it instantly, it’s good having somewhere to come back to and also somewhere that means you don’t have to carry everything round with you. mainly i miss:

a) food – i had an excellent collection of fine eateries established through my comical thai and goofy smile, think people just love to feed me really…and i love to oblige.

b) chiang mai bouldering wall – i spent lots of time here whilst jen was busy studying, i was toiling away at the climbing wall for a few hours a day. it was a tough job, it’s not all fun and games you know. i learnt lots of stuff of various people from all over who just stop by to do a few routes while i struggle on the easy ones.

c) having a swimming pool – this is just obvious really, everyone loves a swimming pool when it’s touching 40 degrees out.

d) the little fino – i miss having our young stallion to ride about on, despite it’s numerous flat tyres and cold, morning engine, scooters are simply the best way of getting around thailand.

e) master kuma’s yoga experience – every night on thai tv, master kuma does an hour of yoga. no tv, no yoga! i was getting quite good too after less than a week and i was also learning a bit of thai too, such as ‘breath in’ and ‘breath out’. i think if you put something similar on in the uk between 5 and 6 pm, a surprising amount of people would do it.

not to worry though, i’m away seeing the world now. right now we’re on koh samui, just using someones wifi connection in our nice bungalows minutes from the beach. before this we were on koh tao, i won some brownie points by finding a really special beach called ao tanote, very quiet with coral reef starting 1 metre from the shoreline. i sensed sceptacism from jen and my mum when we started climbing a rutty, dusty track but i knew it would be worth it.

i got to use my christmas present off jen finally – a snorkel – and i got sunburnt for the first time on the backs of my legs because i wanted to snorkel the whole time we were there. it’s worth the pain though, i saw a black tip reef shark, loads of other types of colourful fish and coral and a few puffer fish. i tried to get them to puff up but i was too scared to get close enough to make them.

just took my mum out to a thai bbq, don’t think she enjoyed it as much as me. i’m buying one of the grills before we come back so maybe if there is still some summer left in england we’ll get to use it. i love these bbq’s. here’s an earlier excursion to one in cambodia, believe it or not i am not doing that french ‘magnifique’ type, finger kiss gesture there but chewing on some fine, fine meat of some description.

so that’s pretty much up to date. there was a little trip to the river kwai and stuff in between where we stroked some tigers and saw the bridge and stuff. tomorrow we’ll be doing more snorkelling.

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Tags: ao tanote, bbq, bouldering, climbing, fino, food chiang mai, ko samui, koh tao, master kuma, snorkelling, south east asia, thai, thailand, wall, yoga