Happy Halloween

My local mall, Emporium, could NEVER be accused of making a half hearted effort. The outside picture is my favourite.

Do you think anyone would notice if I took up living in that big one for a day or two?

What I wanted to say ...

For the last three days I have sat down to blog. Sometimes I couldn’t write anything and sometimes I’ve started to write but it’s come out all wrong.

I wanted to tell you about how son left his phone in the resort and the hotel rang me (via the ticket lady) on the ferry to tell me that they’d send a man in a long-tailed boat to the ferry to give us the phone (this would cost 650 Baht, £10!). Son and I took turns waiting for the boat to come, and then while it was my watch, 9am rolled round and the ferry set off. Oh well, I thought, another phone lost by son. I went inside to join the children, then I thought to myself, hang on a sec: this is Thailand … I wonder … I went back outside.

We sailed away from Ton Sai Bay and over the horizon came a long-tailed boat. The ferry, full of passengers eager to get to Phuket, Krabi and other destinations, stopped in the middle of the sea. The man handed over Son’s phone to ticket lady, who took the money from me and gave it to him. And then the ferry set off again. Surely, only in Thailand?

I wanted to tell you about reading Human Traces by Sebastian Faulkes for Book Club, which is a novel about two ‘mad doctors’ wanting to find cures for mental illnesses and how it made me wonder if I'd lived in a different time, I might’ve been sent to an asylum for ‘melancholia’ as they called it. Almost certainly I would.

I want to tell you about being asked to do some volunteer charity work in communities in Southern Thailand in exchange for writing some articles about the company and their responsible tourism projects.

I want to tell you what I’m doing at Christmas because I’m just so excited, but it’s not confirmed yet, and I don’t want to tempt fate.

I’ve wanted to say lots of things, but I don’t seem able to get my words out. So I’m sorry if this is a bit disjointed and odd, but at least it isn’t a blank page anymore.

Life's essentials

I so want to blog about our journey home (Son and Thailand surpassed themselves) but I'm just too tired. We've spent all day at another international school watching daughter and her team mates compete against 10 other schools, and we have to be there again tomorrow morning at 6.30am...

So, after this post, I will leave you instead with this picture of the inside of my fridge:

The Fun is going back to Bangkok

Today is our last day. Tomorrow at the crack of dawn we start a whole day of long tailed boat/ferry/car/airplane/taxi to get home to Bangkok and back to normal life.

I do most of the weekly parenting on my own because Husband’s job keeps him busy through many time zones. Without going into too much detail life can be stressful in the midst of school life: homework, extra-curricular activities, school paperwork blah blah blah. It doesn’t sound much written down like that, but I find it challenging. Both children are so different and need such diverse approaches that single parenting can feel like fire fighting.

But, we’ve had such a fun time here these last few days that I really feel as though I’ve had a proper break. Of course I’ve still been ‘Mum’, but most importantly, without all the pressures of homework and bedtimes, I’ve had fun with the children. It turns out that Son is very funny. I kind of knew this, but was always too … knackered Mum-ish to enjoy him and his humour. Somehow it got lost in all the difficulties of daily life. He’s come out with some corking jokes while we’ve been away. We’ve talked and watched rubbish movies in the evening, kayaked during the day on the shallow sea of our bay, and swum in the pool. Daughter and I played ‘swim under the legs’ and I’ve arrived gulping bubbles of laughter to the surface because my gigantic bottom gets caught on her and pushes her off balance.

It’s quite possible though that I’ve spent too much time with a 13 and 11 year old since I seem to have developed the sense of humour of a early teen. But really, I’m most alarmed, having been trapped in our room by the rain, to have enjoyed ‘High School Musical.’ Yikes.

God's Punishment and the Mossie Men

The Buddhists believe in Karma – that your actions will bring about inevitable results, good or bad - and the Greek Gods punished manifestation of hubris - overweening pride - so really it was only a matter of time before my smug holiday blogging caused me to be castigated: bitten on the backside by some higher power.

In my case, retribution wasn’t a single mandible to the rear end by any higher power, but about fifty thousand mosquitoes feasting on just about every part of my sweet flesh.

I am alive with tingling, prickling and plain old hurting skin. I have so many bites that I can no longer be serene about it. As I type my lower legs are humming; radiating energy of their own existence. The bites, though certainly deployed by a number of individual mossies, are somehow linked to each other. When one on my leg itches, and I scratch, it alerts the forty eight on my left arm to the existence of my nails, and they in turn begin to hum, tingle and sing for attention of my fingernails – which, since I am on holiday, are rather nice and long. They are doing significant damage to my skin.

I think they bit me in the first resort – our room was zinging with the little buggers, no matter what extermination programme we undertook.

At this second resort, at about 6pm on the first day we received a telephone call in our room saying ‘We spray Mosquito. Don’t leave your room.’ I didn’t like to ask if there was only one mosquito was it really necessary to spray the whole resort? Instead I asked ‘how long do we stay inside?’ ‘15 minutes’ is the answer, but we really had a ringside seat.

Transfer by sea

We had an exciting transfer yesterday. Lots of our transport has been interesting.

When we arrived at Phuket we were picked up and delivered to the speed boat provided by the hotel. But there was no pier at the beach of the hotel, so unless we paddled in to the dry land I couldn't work out how we'd get to the sand. (This was entirely possible, but NOT carrying my 19kg suitcase on my head! What happened was a strange floaty thing - not a boat exactly but I wasn't sure why it wasn't at the time - met us off the speed boat for the last 50 yards of the sea. All our luggage was transferred to this transport thing and we moved the last few yards to the beach, but we weren't floating, we were driving. This green floaty thing drove up and out of the water and onto the sand, and that was when I realised it wasn't really a boat, but a kind of water tractor thing.

Yesterday's transport was a long tailed boat. The green floaty tractor thing took us and our luggage to meet the boat, and we were all transferred to our new mode of transport. This first picture is from the tractor thing and the second before we got moving. I wish I could have taken a picture for you while we were moving but I was gripping on for dear life.

At our new hotel there was no tractor thing to come and meet us, so we did have to paddle the last few metres, but nice Thai man carried out luggage, thanks heavens.

Monday

This morning Husband caught the early boat back to Phuket, to catch a flight back to Bangkok. He has to fly to Hong Kong for a three day meeting, which is a bit sad because tomorrow is a bank holiday in Thailand, but clearly no-one told Hong Kong.

This resort has been lovely, but they don’t have room for us for the rest of the week, so Kids and I going, by long tailed boat, to the next bay to another resort.

One of the lovely things we’ve found about Thailand (compared to the UK) is the cheapness and abundance of flowers. (For Daughter’s birthday the year before last, I bought 50 pink roses for just over £1. The roses don’t last more than a few days, but who cares at that price?) Because it is relatively cheap to employ people, hotels think nothing of having lots of time consuming tasks undertaken, such as beautiful flower decorations everywhere. Husband and I were joking that when the trees aren’t flowering, someone climbs up a step ladder to staple flowers on for decoration!

Here are some pictures of some of the displays we’ve seen around the resort ...
















... plus one we took in our bungalow. (Let me make the point now, that NO photoshopping has taken place in any of the pictures!)