Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Phang Nga tour - part 2

Next, we travelled for about 1 ½ hours to a secluded beach for swimming. Isn't it beautiful?


This is the small boat that we used to travel to this island.


The locals charged 100 baht for beach chair rental which of course, I wasn't prepared to pay for just 1 hour. So I sat on Dion's beach towel, chatting to Jan, while Dion and Mick had a swim. We stopped there for an hour.

You can see the beach umbrellas on the right of this picture


While we were waiting for the small boat to arrive to take us back to the big boat, all of us had a weird/ interesting discussion about what a miracle a long-lasting marriage is, and how so many people don't even bother to get married these days but just have kids. Apparently the average length of a marriage in the US is a mere 26 months. Very sad.


We were all very quiet (tired out from the day in the sun) on the way back to hotel where we set off from. Amazingly, those floating blue things were now on the sand because it was low tide.

The guy showed us the pictures he'd taken of us in the morning when we set off - very nice one of us, but we didn't buy it at 150 baht, and I was tired of bartering for the day.

We went to the loos, and then back to the hotel. Sad thing is we didn't get to say good-bye to the Australians but we did with Mick and Jan since we traveled back with them.

Overall, a very nice day - especially chatting to people who could speak English!

Funny thing happened on the boat - Jan started chatting to the Australians and she said, "oh by the way, we're from England". Now Jan speaks in a very English accent so it really is obvious. But Anthony says in a real deadpan way, "yes, we gathered"

Jan & Mick were from Windsor, England. She'd worked for British Airways for 39 years and just retired at the end of September. She was at home for 2 weeks before getting bored, so she got a part-time job working in a dept store two days a week. Mick retired 7 years previously and now works from 3 - 6pm 4 days a week as a bartender.

The other Australian couple, Lee-Ann and Anthony, was from Melbourne. She's an ex-chef turned office worker and Anthony is an interior designer. She stays in Richmond and he in St Kilda. The cool thing is we've been there - we had a whole story to tell her of how we got lost in Richmond.

It rained heavily once we were back for about 3 hours (most it ever rained while we were there). We tried waiting for it to stop but eventually at 7.30 we set out with our umbrellas. And you know what? The rain was lovely - warm and tropical and actually quite pleasant.

We ended up at the Kata Café (opposite Natalie's) where we had spaghetti marinara (D) and carbonara (me). We didn't enjoy it very much, not so much for the food (although the portion was really small - fine for me but not for D) but for the attitude.

Free salad with some bread but you have to pay for the butter. You pay for ice, etc. so it's almost like are you charging me for the glass and cutlery too?! In the end you're too scared to ask for a wedge of lemon or a serviette in case she says 10 baht, which was the answer for any extras.

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