What A Wash Out!!!!

Wednesday 13 September

Today started warm and sunny for my morning swim, with only a few while fluffy clouds passing overhead. Breakfasts here are a bit hit and miss. Some mornings you may order food and it comes along as asked, other mornings it doesn’t arrive at all, and even on a few occasions you get more than you asked for – as was the case with Colin this morning. He ordered one fried egg, bacon and tomatoes. First of all he was served just two fried eggs so returned it for the rest of his order. Sometime later – they are not very fast here either and in the meantime, several other orders had gone awry – his plate returned with the full order, plus sausage and sautéed potatoes. So he gave up and ate the lot – he was well set up for the day.

Boiled eggs are another anathema here – when we arrived most people were asking for four minute eggs – but when they came, the white was still sloppy – ok for some people like Colin, but yuk for me. I have had boiled eggs a couple of times now, once unsuccessfully - after seeing Colin’s, I had requested mine were reboiled for a few extra minutes – after which the whites were still runny – and once with more success – I asked for five minute eggs and when they arrived I ate some fruit, cooked my toast and buttered and marmited it, before cutting into the shell to reveal an almost perfect boiled egg! Today I heard a man ask for a seven minute egg! There are obviously more people like me on Koh Samui who like their eggs “cooked”.

I spent most of the morning on the computer – I know the connections are slow but the operator is also getting slower, as the brain cells don’t seem to work at the speed they used to. Dave arrived with today’s Bangkok Times – there are some quite interesting articles, such as the one about “The Man in Seat 61”, which is the website I used to find out about our train journeys. He is a civil servant in London, who updates his website whilst traveling into the city by train every day. He is currently waiting to research the new Beijing to Lhasa, Tibet, railway, that only opened on 1 July.

Tibet is one of the four Autonomous Regions of China (the others being Hong Kong, Beijing and Taiwan) and while we were in Beijing, Lei, our guide, told us that this train journey had already become very popular. It has taken Chinese engineers five years to complete. The train leaves daily at 08.00 from Lhasa and takes 48 hours to complete the trip (a similar time to ours from Berlin to St Petersburg). Part of the journey is through a tunnel of 1,686 metres under Kunlun mountain, which is the longest tunnel though frozen land. According to the article the numbers of tourists had already increased by 50% due to the opening of this train line. The journey is 4,064 kms long, but a lot of it is at high altitude (up to 5,000 metres above seal level) and they have oxygen on hand to assist with breathing! – I hope there’s plenty of oxygen in South America where we will be traveling at similar heights! Its definitely a journey I would like to undertake one day – we are now considering how we can incorporate it with a visit to India.

After all this cultural activity we went for a swim and sun bathe round the pool. But about 16.00 the clouds began to gather and the breeze strengthened, so we returned to the bungalow, just before the heavens opened for yet another deluge of stair rod droplets of rain, which lasted for about half an hour. (Apparently Juz was caught away from their villa and received a drenching.) Although the paths were flooded at the time, they cleared and dried very quickly around our bungalow, but when walking to Juz’s hotel later – around 18.00 - there were still many large puddles, and the main road itself was flooded from our turn off to the Bandara (about 200 metres) – we had to try and avoid puddles on the footpath, whilst watching the continual stream of cars and motor bikes, as the water sprayed out from the wheels over the curbs.

After a drink in the bar at the hotel, we hailed a tut-tut to take us for an evening in Chaweng for 100 bahts each. These are trucks with seats along two sides, open-ended at the back and with a roof. Some have polythene covers on the sides, but not ours. We had seen some dark clouds descending whilst we walked to the hotel, and in the tut tut, after picking up some more passengers along the way (they hold about 10 people at a squash), I noticed the clouds were getting closer, it would be a race to see who reached Chaweng first. We lost. The rain just emptied from the sky and splashed in from the front (where there was only a narrow gap) and the sides (completely open) and Colin and I were soaked within seconds – we were first in the vehicle and so sitting nearest the front. When we reached Chaweng the rain was still dropping out of the sky and no one really wanted to leave the safety (if not the dryness) of the tut-tut as the driver slowly wended his way along the waterlogged road. He eventually pulled up somewhere near the middle of the long main street, and we piled out, wading through the flood, straight to the shelter of the doorway of a bar – just getting out of the vehicle was like standing under a power shower.

The staff in the bar asked us in and provided us with cotton napkins to use to towel ourselves down, as the water ran down into our shoes and on to the floor. The bar was an Italian restaurant too, with a pizza oven and chef in one front corner, and offering pasta and entrees on the menu. We had some cocktails (Blue Hawaiis were very popular) while the rain fell like a curtain and bounced off the road and pavements. People were wandering by the window, huddled under umbrellas, and even some sensible ones were wearing ponchos (we had both back at the bungalow – but did we think to bring them with us?).

As there was no let up in the deluge, we decided to eat here – we were beginning to dry out and felt quite hungry – and although we felt cold and shivery in the air conditioning (the ladies was much warmer, although the floors were wet as the rain poured in the open windows) we would only get another drenching if we stepped outside. There were lots of laughs and jokes about our dripping state – bad hair days, drying the washing before wearing it, etc.

The menu had a good range of food – Colin and Dave both chose broccoli soup with cream for starters as it would be warm (it turned out to have tiny slivers of mussel in it which gave a very distinct flavour). Juz chose an aubergine and mozzarella dish while I had tiger prawns with quails eggs and asparagus and a yogurt hollandaise sauce – all very yummy. For main courses, three of us chose pasta – penne in tomato sauce with tuna, olives and cherry tomatoes, (Colin), fettucine with pancetta, pecorino cheese (and crunchy broad beans that were absent) and sauce (Juz), and ravioli with rock lobster (three rounds) and creamed leek sauce (me). But Dave chose grilled duck breast with sautéed potatoes and shallots. Well – it must have been a duck on a diet – the portion was miniscule, with about half a dozen cubes of potato and a teaspoon of very thinly sliced shallots - which he found lurking under the duck - as accompaniments! It reminded me of a visit to Foxes restaurant at Chislehurst a long time ago when “nouvelle cuisine” was all the rage and we had about three peas and six pieces of potato to a portion of vegetables. There were more jokes, this time about the poor duckie, or was it duckling?, shame the waiter didn’t tell Dave he was ordering two starters or perhaps Dave really wanted to try “Room Service” again, etc., but the food was delicious and washed down well with a couple of bottles of merlot.

The restaurant was called “Rice”. The décor in the restaurant was very minimalistic (it matched some of the portions), with white walls and dark furniture, the seats inset with pale creamy coloured cane. All the staff wore black trousers and Tshirts with the “Rice” logo, but I couldn’t find any obvious reason for the name, as apart from a risotto dish with pumpkin, there was no rice anywhere. But the restaurant had filled up during the evening – even though the rain hadn’t slackened – and the atmosphere was similar to that of bars of this ilk in London. The price wasn’t Thai style – costing us about 90GBP in total, but at least a third of that was on the drinks. And we had had a good laugh.

By the time we left, soon after 21.00, the rain was beginning to ease. We hailed a tut-tut almost immediately, so were not too wet for our return journey. The main problem was that the driver didn’t seem to understand where we wanted him to take us. This was supported by the fact that he stopped the vehicle in a dark back street and ran round and asked Juz to say on his mobile phone where we were wanting him to take us. The man on the other end understood immediately, and obviously imparted the necessary information to the driver, who then set off confidently through the country lanes to arrive at Bophut and Smile, before taking Juz and Dave on to the Bandara (we later heard he dropped them at the end of our road, as he still wasn’t sure where he was going).

The evening hadn’t turned out quite as we anticipated – we had taken a short shopping list for when we moseyed around the shops, and we were looking for Captain Kirk’s restaurant, which we didn’t see any sign of at all. We will just have to return another night – when the weather forecast is a little better. Colin switched on the television to see the weather when we got home! (better late than never) – and apparently we are on the edge of a typhoon which is currently crossing Bangkok and surrounding regions, so it may well stay a little damp for a couple of days.