A Day of Frustration

Wednesday 6 September

Only managed a couple of swims today, much too busy with the Thai Shite. The weather is still hot with quite a strong breeze coming off the sea.

After breakfast I decided to get down to creating a picture gallery for the blog, as I have kept promising to do. We have taken about 2000 stills and countless hours of video so far, and yet we’ve only been away for seven weeks. The problem with photos is that they mean something to the people who are there, but to others they are just someone else’s holiday snaps. Several people had asked for Gold Class piccys, so that was a starting point. I tried for a couple of hours in the morning, but could not get the pictures to connect, either directly through the blog or by copying to Word first and pasting.

So I gave up, woke Colin up from his siesta under the pagoda in the shade by the pool, and decided to go for a walk. We wandered up the beach along the water’s edge – Colin overcame his dislike of the sand – towards Juz’s intended hotel. It is a much shorter walk on the beach than by road, but the sands were burning, especially if you deviated away from the sea – you needed your shoes on or your feet would have been singed. We could only peep in at the beach entrance to the hotel, but it was all greenery and looking like a tropical paradise. There were lots of loungers on the beach, and a restaurant offering yet more seafood, which is obviously one of the hotel eateries. Nothing for Juz to worry about.

On our way back we continued to walk, past Smile – we had reverted to the road by this time, as the sands were just too hot – down to Coffee Junction at the T junction in the centre of the village. We stopped here for nachos – with tomato and mango salsa, avocado dip and sour cream – yummy, my sort of food – and beers and teas. It was a very pleasant interlude, sitting under large fans, away from the penetrating heat outside.

Back to the bungalow bacony and yet another try at downloading the piccys to the blog. It was still hard to decide which piccys would be of interest to others, with so many to choose from, so I decided on the Great Wall, because that was the starting point when arranging the trip, and the terraced rice paddies, where we actually were for my birthday, (in fact the piccy I chose shows Colin and me at the top of the mountain – there are others which show the terracing much better), and a couple of the Gold Class carriage, which so many people have asked for. I almost got five on a page with explanations at one stage, but then the writing just went all over the place and I lost one of the photos too. So start again . . . and again . . . and again. It was so frustrating. After yet another couple of hours –this computer work takes so long – I gave up and decided to insert one picture on each entry – a cheat’s way I am sure - but at least there will be a couple of piccys for people to see.

I desperately needed a swim after succeeding with three entries, and by that time it was dark! Later we headed for town and the Happy Elephant bar, which was opening tonight. There were still only a few people around at this time, but we had cocktails (OK – 3rd best so far) and some munchies on battered prawns and peanuts – not sure how you eat rice and noodles as finger food! The bought the bill with the drinks, so we decided to move on to the Beatles Bar for a second cocktail. Unfortunately, this was closed tonight (I suppose they all rotate their night off – F&G last night, Beatles Bar tonight), so went to the cheaper Italian restaurant, just across the road. We had seen several people going in here on other nights so thought we would give it a try. There is a much smarter Italian nearer the F&G. The food was OK. I had mussels as a starter – they were huge, bigger even than the green-lipped New Zealand ones we sometimes get at home (at least as big as oysters) – but the sauce was not as good as the other night. Colin had crab cocktail, which was fine. He then had pasta with prawns and mushrooms – what a surprise (those of you who know Colin appreciate that he would eat pasta every day), with a salad, while I chose deep fried calamari and a rocket and parmesan salad. Colin had another Singapore sling – again OK – while I stuck to a large Singha beer!

As we wandered back through the town, the Happy Elephant Bar was in full swing – although the food wasn’t going down very fast – which is a bit of a surprise as it was free. Once in bed, I heard some distant thunder, though no accompanying flashes of lightning. I woke up later to hear the sound of rushing of water, even louder than the air conditioning – as rain fell in sheets from the sky – I wonder if it was noisy in the tin roof bungalows?. And it was still thundering in the distance. Hope this doesn’t mean there will be no sun tomorrow.