It's been a busy time: and this post begins busily with lots of links to little blog entries about it - most with photos now. Use the back button to return to this entry if you click a link.
After our Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai trips, Diane left us to head off into Laos (jealous, us?) to buy even more lovely things for the shop, and we flew back to Bangkok to meet Jo, my mum, who arrived the day before my birthday. It was great to see her, and holidaying with her gave us a chance to tour around more of Bangkok, including the Grand Palace, and to go and be tourists on the beautiful, if somewhat boring, Ko Tao. Here we snorkelled (again, for three of us) - this time losing our breakfasts rather than skipping them - and it was very, very beautiful. But no underwater camera, so no pictures ...
Meanwhile, lots of people have been helping H and me, via email, with our application to job-share being Visionaries for a Just and Peaceful World for five years from this summer - which would be pretty great timing. Thanks to all who commented - small sub-edits, queries about key concepts, and general encouragement and enthusiasm were all invaluable - the application is now sent off (glad to see the back of it!) and our fingers are crossed. Particular thanks to mum, who took the girls off our hands so that we could work on it, as well as couriering our signatures home, printing and posting the final thing and commenting usefully too.
We saw mum off from Ko Samui - crowded, big, expensive. Bo Phut was pretty though, and is near the only disc golf course in SE Asia - I was gutted not to have time or money to play ...
While the journey to Samui was nauseating, the ferry to Surat Thani on the mainland was much smoother, so we changed our plan to stay over in Surat and looked for a bus leaving to Phuket - but we'd missed the last one. There was a bus to Krabi going in ten minutes, though, if we were interested ...? So here, perhaps, we became true travellers, jumping on the first bus to wherever was available, changing plans at the drop of a hat, pausing only to pee and buy pineapples.
"Krabi: lively town, lovely people," says the slogan, and the second is true, but Tsunami Fear has emptied the place of tourists this year - which means it's quite and hugely cheap. We've come to the Andaman coast to claim my reward to myself for wrestling with the job application - a four-day open water PADI scuba diving course. This turns out to have been a dumb move - the courses are still lots cheaper on Ko Tao, tsunami or no tsunami.
I liked Krabi - it's not really a tourist town (though it has its tourist streets), more of a supply town for a large rural population. We saw children on their way out of school being catered for by eight or ten food stalls, selling sweet pancakes with sausages in them, tiny portions of chicken and chips, squash drinks and so on. But Ao Nang, half an hour's drive away, got a higher rating from the non-dive students (now just Heather and Mo, as Rosa is going for it too), who after all have to hang about in it much more, so we're here. Our huge air-conditioned rooms with hot shower, TV and fridge cost less than our cold water, fan rooms in Ko Tao - last night we even rented a DVD player to check out some of the many available pirate DVDs.
If you're looking for a spring holiday, the Andaman coast is definitely open for business. Most tourist places were clean (and free of bodies) within a week of the big wave, many within a day or two - only Ko Phi Phi and Khao Lak are still a bit of a mess, and there are posters asking for volunteers on Phi Phi, so we may check that out. There are low season numbers of tourists, with high season weather and facilities, and a mixture of high season and real bargain prices - I would guess that there are still cheap packages here to be bought from the UK, too. It's very first world stylee just here in Ao Nang - smooth clean new pavements and roads, MacDonalds, no rubbish, lots of Italian food, no shack dwellings, no loose animals, no beggars - but there are lots of other options up and down the coast.
We started our dive course yesterday: three hours of video to watch, going over the three chapters in the book we've already read, and then quizzes and chatting about all the same stuff. Today should be less boring - only two hours of video this morning, and then five hour-long pool sessions this afternoon, putting it all into practice. We'll let you know how it goes ...
- Mark
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