Friday (12 June 2015)
We woke up this morning feeling a bit rough around the edges after last night’s shenanigans. Probably not a good idea to overindulge too often, but it was well worth it. To get the booze out of the system we decided to do a 45 minute gym workout which was great. Walking back to the apartment, passing a group of English holidaymakers having a drink at the restaurant, the one woman exclaimed “You must be mad !” when she saw the two sweaty bodies trundle past. In all fairness, it was 13H30, hottest time of the day, 31 degrees with 73% humidity. All I could muster was a sheepish “I realize that… now”.

While I was trying to further sort out my banking issue, which by the way did get sorted today, Adri started sweeping and cleaning the apartment, hand washing clothes, only the urgent ones of course, the rest can wait for another spurt of energy that may or may not arise in the foreseeable future.

Drying clothes in the tropics is a bit of a problem as we discovered. Actually, we did know it but chose to forget, because, maybe this time it will be different. It never is. With the high humidity, clothes do not dry quickly, if at all, and can get a musty smell which is not easy to get rid of. This happened to a few pieces of our clothing and we decided we have to try something different. We have two options. There is an onsite washing machine which comes to life when you feed it Baht, or we can have our clothes washed at a laundry shop, which are plentiful on the island. They charge 30 to 50 Baht per kg, depending on what area you are in, and then there is an extra charge for ironing, if that is required, all very reasonable.

While trying to dry the clothes, i.e. moving garments from outside to inside the apartment and vice versa, from shade to sun and vice versa, turning them around periodically and so on, we realised that it was getting late and we still had a few errands to run. We essentially needed some plastic containers for our ground coffee, sugar and coffee creamer, it was becoming a pain to coax these ingredients from its original packaging every time I wanted a coffee. We saw just such a shop about 300 metres from where we live, so we decided to take a late afternoon walk rather than ride there. On the way we stopped off at the Wat Plai Laem, a Buddhist temple, which is about 100 metres from our apartment building. There was a service in progress with some Buddhist monks leading those gathered in chanting and singing, so we could not go into the main temple building, something for another time.

We found the shop, found the containers, found the Baht, paid and hurried back to the apartment for a gin and tonic. Tonight the menu called for yellow curry. Green, yellow and red curry paste, used to make the curry variant you desire, can be purchased pre-packaged from most grocery stores, or you can buy it freshly made at the fresh produce market. We bought the pre-packaged type a few days ago with the current stock level containing one yellow and one red package. The recipe called for two packages, what to do, what to do. After careful consideration and consultation, and neither of us wanting to go down to the grocery store, we decided to butcher the recipe and use the available stock on hand. We ended up with a bastardised yellow-red curry, or red-yellow curry if that is your preference, which turned out to be, not surprisingly at all, very delicious.

Saturday (13 June 2015)
The alarm was set for 06H45… “why, oh why”, I murmured. “To do a parkrun”, came the prompt reply. “But there is no parkrun on Koh Samui”, I countered, this last comment falling on deaf ears. If you are not familiar with the term “parkrun”, please visit www.parkrun.com, but essentially it is a 5 km run, or walk if you prefer, that takes place on a Saturday morning in various locations around the world. We did a couple of these back home, a bit of running, mostly walking, but we quite enjoyed it. As there is no parkrun on Koh Samui we decided we will still go, whenever we feel like it, for a Saturday morning run, or rather walk.

We started off with a brisk walk to the road that runs between Bangrak and Choeng Mon, the we turned left and continued until we reached Choeng Mon, which is about 2.4 km. This single, rather narrow road, sans pavement, was fairly busy so early in the morning, which made us decide to take another route next time. As you enter Choeng Mon, there is a road that turns to the left and passes by the Thongson Bay turnoff, which eventually leads right back to our apartment. This circle route is approximately 5 km and that concluded our first “parkrun” on Koh Samui.

Today was a beach day, it is weekend after all, so we set off for Choeng Mon, this time not on foot but by bike. We settled in at the Crystal Restaurant for breakfast, me with a normal English breakfast of two eggs, bacon, sausage, toast… great, and Adri with a glass noodle salad. Strange choice for breakfast, I agree, but that was the order, and apparently, it was also great. But then again, I would not know, I did not try it, and you’ll soon find out why. The glass noodle salad is served with a fish sauce, the smell of which is pretty repugnant. Wrong choice of word here actually, “horribly” rather than “pretty” would be more accurate. Fish sauce is an amber-coloured liquid extracted from the fermentation of fish with sea salt in wood barrels. It is used as a condiment in various cuisines and is a staple ingredient in many cultures in Southeast Asia. Liquid extracted from the fermentation of fish with sea salt ? I rest my case.

Once breakfast was consumed, we inhabited two beach chairs in front of the Crystal Restaurant and spent a couple of hours in the sun, swimming and reading, and then swimming and reading… you get the idea. Once we completed another cycle of… swimming and reading… we packed up and headed home for a relaxing late afternoon/evening at home watching a movie, then some rugby and then we crashed out quite early as tomorrow will be another taxing day.

Sunday (14 June 2015)
Today was another beach day, still weekend you know, so we had a quick breakfast of oats and set off for Lamai beach on the south eastern part of the island. Everything is pretty much exactly how we left it 18 months ago I am happy to report, and still as beautiful as we remember it. At the spot where we parked, there were quite nice apartments/bungalows which are right across the road from the beach, which looked pretty amazing. We checked out the prices but unfortunately these were rooms only, no kitchen, no use to us. The guy at reception was very understanding and pointed us to Lamai Luxury Villas, about one km from there. We made a mental note to go there later on. Spent a few hours on the beach, under a palm tree no less, and continued our ritual of swimming and reading…

I prefer reading e-books but find it a bit of a drag to sit on the beach with the Ipad, getting all sweaty, sandy and oily from the suntan lotion that invariably finds its way onto the screen. So, a paperback I would have to find. There are a number of old paperbacks at the apartment’s reception area, there for everyone’s benefit. The selection is not that great as most of the titles are either in German or Russian, a few French and Dutch books are also thrown in for good measure. I found a book called Whiteout by Ken Follett, thus far not very good I am afraid, but it keeps me busy between to swimming sessions.

It was getting really hot so we decided to go for an ice cream at the local McDonalds. Can you believe it, they ran out of ice-cream ! We wanted to walk around Lamai town for a while but it was simply too hot and we were drained, so we decided to move on. Went visited Lamai Luxury Villas, they were not so much luxury but pretty nice for the price, but we will give it a miss. We had to stock up on some energy so we went to our favourite Tesco supermarket (there are three on the island, Lamai, Chaweng and Nathon) where we had coffee at our favourite coffee house, the Black Canyon. I had an Americano, Adri the Cappuccino, really great coffee (we noticed that there is now also a Black Canyon at the Tesco in Chaweng which we will surely try out shortly).

Having stocked up on some energy we decided to slip in a bit of shopping at Tesco, Adri particularly wanted palm sugar. Palm sugar is made from boiled palm sap and is the most commonly used sugar for addition to stir fries and other dishes. We asked around… and around… but nobody could figure out what we were after due to the language barrier thing, so we were taken to the sugar isle and back there again time after time. Then I remembered the translator app, called surprisingly enough, Translator, which I downloaded onto my Iphone some time ago, specifically for this purpose. I fired it up, typed in “palm sugar”, pressed translate, and “น้ำตาลปึก” displayed on the screen. I walked up to the nearest attendant and pushed the phone in front of her. She read, smiled, and proceeded to the palm sugar, kept in the fruit and vegetable section. We also needed green curry paste and feeling emboldened by this success, I typed that into the app, went to the same attendant and followed the same ritual. She proceeded to the same counter and pointed to the palm sugar. I then realized she probably looked at the previous translation, must have thought I was a moron at first, but smiled sweetly when I pointed to the new entry, this farang was not really such a moron.

After adding a few items to the trolley we decided that we were not really in the mood for shopping after all, getting out hands on ice-cream was now top priority. We left without buying anything and headed to Chaweng’s Burger King who serves up a mean soft serve sundae ice-cream in a cup. You can choose between a chocolate, strawberry, caramel or pineapple sauce, delicious, and a steal at 25 Baht.

The main reason though for going to Chaweng was to make another purchase. My plakkas (flip flops) have seen plenty better days and they needed to be replaced… fast, you know. When we were in Koh Samui the first time, some three years back, I bought a pair of plakkas at a shop in Fisherman’s village. They were a spiffy pair of Diesels, no doubt knock-offs, but comfortable as hell. By the time we visited Koh Samui the second time, they had finally gave up being my foot soldiers and they needed replacement.

I went back to the same shop, served by the same sales lady, and got the exact same model of Diesels for exactly the same price as before.  There was a slight dispute between myself and the lady regarding the size. She offered me a pair and I intimated that I needed a bigger size. She would not relent and said she was sure that was the right size for me. The only way I could prove her wrong was to show her the size on my dilapidated plakkas I had on. She smiled a knowing smile and relented, so I ended up with the exact same size as well.

These Diesels seem to be built to last only 18 months, then the plastic material on the inside of the plakka comes loose from where it is attached to the sole, leaving the plastic material sticking out of the front of the plakka as one walks, looking like the tongue of a panting dog. Also, where the sole and this miscreant inner sole are attached, there is a little indented rift which can seemingly store a ton of sea sand, and is near impossible to dump. So, alas, I needed to make a change to a model where the sole and inner sole are made of one solid piece of whatever, so no more lugging tons of beach sand with me. Come to think of it, no wonder the tongue was sticking out…

While changing models, I also needed to move from a slide in type flip flop to a thong type flip flop, they’re cooler you understand. Not cooler as in kewl, but cooler. I tried on so many different kinds at so many different shops during the last few days, I felt like Goldilocks and the three bears. One’s too soft, one’s too hard, and eventually I found the one that was just right for me. And guess what, the ones that were just right was a pair of Diesels ! Different model, but the exact specs I had in mind, and heavenly to wear. After the purchase I unceremoniously dumped the old ones right there at the shop and took the new ones for a test walk on Chaweng beach. They passed with colours flying.

This whole plakka purchase made me think of a Jimmy Buffett (beach bum extraordinaire) song called Margaritaville (snippet from the lyrics… I blew out my flip flop, stepped on a pop top, cut my heel, had to cruise on back home, but there’s booze in the blender, and soon it will render, that frozen concoction that helps me hang on). Maybe now it was time for that frozen concoction…

We walked past the Onion Restaurant where the happy hour menu was on display outside. Here they have a happy hour food menu, no happy hour drinks menu though, so quite a unique concept. We decided that Adri should have the night off from cooking so we stepped in for an early supper of stir fry chicken with cashew nuts and Adri opting for the Massala Chicken curry, forced down with some Chang beer. The food was good, the service was good, all in all a very pleasant experience.

Afterwards we went shopping at the Tops Supermarket located in the Central Festival Shopping Centre in Chaweng, just up the road from the onion Restaurant. Our first thoughts when we entered the supermarket were that it reminds one of the Woolworths food stores back home, so it felt very familiar. Although there won’t be any cooking today, we required ingredients for Monday’s supper and also water, mozzie repellent and a lighter to light the mozzie repellent spirals that we had, and so on.

Had a quiet evening at home, with gin and tonic in hand we watched a movie, and then drifted off.

Monday (15 June 2015)
We slept in today, only got up at around 09H30. Today was cooler at 29 degrees Celsius with a fresh breeze blowing for most of the day. After gym we showered, had breakfast, and then settled down, Adri with her TEFL course and I with some blog writing. We had just settled in when it started raining softly in the early afternoon and later on it started pouring down, a real tropical shower. How refreshing that was.

Once it stopped raining we went for a walk, going down all the little roads that branch out from the main road, very interesting to see how everyone lives. Once we completed our walk, we returned to the apartment had a gin and tonic and then Adri started preparing supper.

But I had another job to do. There is a DVD player in the apartment which I noticed had a USB port where I could plug in my external hard drive, which contains my CDs and DVDs, currently connected to the laptop. I tried to get this connected but needed access to the TV’s menu to set this all up and get it working. Invoking the TV’s menu options was easy, understanding it was impossible as it was set up in Thai. I had to somehow get the menu to revert to English, but how, nothing on the screen made any sense.

I Googled on how to change the language setting for menus, found plenty of help, i.e. instructions in English with examples in English. I found nothing on how to change the language from one that you don’t understand, to one that you do ! Anyway, I played around for about an hour, going into all the menus and sub menus that I didn’t understand, and eventually, somehow, got it changed to English. After this, setting up the system to play music from the hard drive through the TV, via the DVD player was a cinch.

Had a great supper, listened to some music, watched a movie, dare I say, etcetera.

Tuesday (16 June 2015)
Got up a bit earlier today, went to the gym, breakfasted and then got down to some work.

At about 17H00, we rode down to the Big C supermarket as Adri needed new running/exercise socks, the old ones were thrown out after a big hole made its home in the left sock. After looking around the various shops we decided on a pair of Fila socks at the sports shop in the Big C shopping centre. It seems like we may be taking this exercise thing far too seriously. Further to the issue with Adri’s hole, or rather her sock’s hole, I had a blowout on my running/exercise shoes. Although they are still in very good nick, a strip of rubber on the sole of the left shoe came loose, so we had to get some super glue to rectify the errant little rubber.

In addition to the super glue, we also slipped a couple of other things into the basket such as a watermelon, bananas, oh, and palm sugar which ended up not buying at Tesco. I had to pull the same move as at Tesco with the Translator software on my Iphone. The Translator worked its charm on the attendant who took us to the palm sugar, little problem though, the package read coconut sugar, not palm sugar. When this was pointed out to the attendant he responded with “palm sugar, coconut sugar, same same’. The phrase “same same” is often used by Thais to explain that two articles, or things, or situations, are very similar. When thing are similar, but not very similar, they may use the phrase “same, same, but different”. Anyway, we accepted that palm sugar and coconut sugar are same same and purchased such.

Adri was not 100% convinced so when we got home we Googled the two sugars and came up with the following description:

“Palm sugar is made from the sap of sugar palm trees (also called date palm) while coconut sugar comes from the buds of coconut tree flowers. Both are collected as sap, the sap is boiled in enormous vats to create either a rock-like chunks of sugar or a sugar paste (sold in jars or tins)”.

Hmm, maybe the attendant should have responded with “Same same, but different”.

Wednesday (17 June 2015)
Woke up at around 09H00, had coffee, then went to the gym and had a quick breakfast of oats and fresh bananas. Adri got stuck into her TEFL course and I got stuck into some blog writing. For lack of a better term we will call this “work” from now on ! There was a refreshing downpour of rain which started at approximately 14h00 and petered out at 16H30. We of course stopped work for a read and an afternoon nap whilst it was raining. After work, at around 17H30, we took a stroll around the hood. There was still a lot of water on the roads following the earlier downpour, but people here are so considerate, cars come to a near standstill when they pass to make sure they don’t splash you. Getting quite used to this considerateness, very refreshing I might add, just like the earlier rains.

There were still some leftovers from the previous night’s supper, so we decided to have that for dinner tonight, but it was not quite enough for a full-on meal. We rode down to the main road and bought a couple of pieces of chicken from a roadside vendor, and five minutes later we were back at the apartment, ready for supper. We gloated on how quick and easy it was to get things done around here, life is so simple. We wanted to watch a movie but decided to rather watch an episode of Burn Notice, a series we really enjoyed back home but only started watching from season 4 at the time. All the seasons are available on Netflix, so we started with season one, the pilot episode, and we will now work our way through all the other episode and seasons in due course.

Thursday (18 June 2015)
We decided to take Thursday off from the gym, and hence we slept in until about 09H00, made coffee, sat out on the patio reading the day’s news and started planning for the weekend. Friday evening we’ll be going to the buffet at the Greek restaurant called Fi, which we patronised a number of times on our previous visit, excellent food, truly recommended. Furthermore, the rest of the weekend may be spent at our more local beaches such as Thongson Bay and Bophut, but we’ll see where we end up. After this serious and taxing discussion it was time for a breakfast of omelette made with plenty of eggs and coconut milk, cheese, toast, and all this accompanied by a freshly made side salad sprinkled, quite heavily I might add, with chillies, which finally dragged me out of my slumber.

We rode to Chaweng beach via Choeng Mon and parked at our normal spot, just off the main Chaweng beach road close to where the McDonalds and Burger King are. We made ourselves comfortable on the beach under a huge tree, went for a lazy swim and dumped our bodies onto our beach towels, taking in the scene, snoozing and reading. An hour or two later we took a northerly stroll along the beach past all the restaurants and beach resorts and I realised for the first time, because it was low tide, that the reef/rocks are exposed above the waterline a short way off from the beach at the northern end of Chaweng beach. I made a mental note to rather go south than north on Chewing beach as I believe it will be better for swimming, no matter the time of day.

There are a number of vendors that walk along the beach selling their wares. Some sell bangles, some bathing costumes, some ice-cream, some freshly prepared dishes prepared right there on the beach. Most of these vendors stick to one beach, but there is this one guy that can be seen on different beaches on different days, probably due to the fact that he does not have any competition. He has the cutest little monkey that he walks around with and hands to people to hold and have ones picture taken with the monkey, for a fee of course (I was going to say that this guy has a monkey on his back, but that would have given the wrong impression).

Anyway, there is this other guy as well, ostensibly selling nylon hammocks. When we were out of earshot of other people, we heard him mutter something. At first I could not hear, and did not really care to, as I was not in the market for a hammock. He raised his voice slightly and I heard “marijuana, marijuana.. smoking, smoking…”. Heck, I don’t even smoke cigarettes and he wants me to do marijuana smoking smoking… I must admit, this was the first and only time I have ever had an approach like this on Koh Samui. Not sure, but Koh Phangan’s full moon party may be another story, we’ll see, more about another time.

We walked through a rather fancy resort to get to the Chaweng beach road from where we headed back to the where the bike was parked. The sidewalks are pretty uneven in that part of the town and at one point I nearly tripped over a cement obstacle. One of the restaurant attendants cautioned with a cocky “oh do be careful sir”, I shot back with a “too late”. Walked past another restaurant and the manager asked whether we wanted a table and I replied with a very polite “no” to which he responded “maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe next year ?”. The reason for this retort was because everyone, just to get rid of them pestering you, will reply with a “maybe tomorrow”. I responded with a “maybe never”, and that seemed take the wind out his sails for a while.

We went back to Burger King for an ice-cream sundae, Adri preferred a cup of coffee. Mention was made of a cocktail so we rode further down the Chaweng beach road to the Bamboo Bar, yes, the same bar we visited with Patrick a week earlier. As we parked across the road, Lisa the owner, recognised us and waved us over, sat us down by the bar and put snackies out for us, roasted peanuts and chip-like pretzels. I ordered a kamikaze (Vodka, Blue Curaçao, triple sec and lemonade). Adri had a Thai Rum cocktail (SangSom, a Thai rum, with soda and honey with mint leaves). Lisa is quite a character, very friendly, very outgoing, and very good with getting customers into her bar.

An Australian couple walked past and she coerced them in and asked where they were going, why are they not having a cocktail at her bar ? “To watch the Aussie rules game at the Aussie pub up the road”, the man replied. Lisa picked up the remote of the bar’s TV and started scrolling through the channels, hoping to find the Aussie rules game. When she realised she did not have the appropriate channel she smiled at them charmingly and said “OK, now you can go… but you must remember to please come back after the game”.

Lisa was born on the mainland, has now been on the island for 17 years and started the Bamboo Bar three years ago with her husband who is Italian and from Milan. She is proud to say that after many years her husband now speaks fluent Thai. We found, during our conversation with Lisa that she stays just three roads down from where we stay, small world, well, small island, I guess.

We got home at around 17H00, tired, took a snooze, woke up at around 19H00 for tea and started working, for a short while, then supper was served, and sleep followed soon thereafter.

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