roganjosh

Some of my occasional readers have been asking me if I’m taking plenty of pictures, presumably because they don’t believe I’ve actually gone travelling anywhere and I’ve simply spent the last couple of weeks at home watching daytime TV. Well, I have been taking a few pictures and I’ve even drawn a few things while I’ve been travelling around, but I’ve yet to find a computer on my travels that would make uploading all the pictures onto the internet an easy task, and they’re not very interesting pictures anyway. That said, here’s a stupid photo of me taken after I went to the Tate-do class in Tokyo. Luckily the sweat isn’t showing up too much.

So I spent a couple of days relaxing on Koh Phangnan and growing myself some new shoulders. I don’t have too many exciting adventures to tell you about though, not because I didn’t have any but just because if I had them I can’t remember them. Alcohol in the beach bars is served in small buckets, that you might use to make sandcastles with if they weren’t filled to the brim with vodka and coke, or more dangerously - whisky, red bull and coke. So yeah, I had a good time, there are some gaps…

I never made it outside of Haad Rin once I was on the island, although bombing around the island on scooters did look like it might be fun. Haad Rin itself was very laid back, and a bit of a lawless frontier town. All the bars showed pirated films when they weren’t showing the football, so I’ve seen MI3 and X-men3* and a host of other bad films.

*my review: A big budget version of top-trumps.

Mostly recovered I hopped over to Samui with my scottish mate Stuart, where we jumped on a quick elephant ride and then went to watch some Muay Thai kick boxing. The boxing was brutal, but after about three hours you get a bit desensitised to it - until the last fight of the night where one guy is completely knocked out by a lightning kick to the head! Probably the most violent fight was between two kids, maybe 15 years old, tops. One of them sweeps the legs away from the other, and then gets in a quick kick to the head while he’s falling! All the westerners are looking at each other trying to work out if we’re meant to applaud the victory or call an ambulance.

We stayed on Chaweng beach in Samui, which is an absolute hole. The beach is kind of okay in a families on jet-skis kind of way, but the main road just stinks of sewers and is full of pushy tailors and hostess bars. I couldn’t get out of Samui fast enough! Stuart headed back to koh Phangnan with the idea of spending a couple of weeks lazing on the beach before starting to head home, but I went to Koh Samui airport and hopped on the next flight to bangkok. Two firsts for me with this flight, first time I’ve ever bought a ticket at an airport, and the first time I’ve ever boarded a plane wearing flip-flops!

Met up with Jenny, one of the girls from the hostel in Singapore, last night who has headed off to cambodia today, and I spent today mostly hungover and wandering around Bangkok zoo - where I got to see what happens when a turtle accidentally wanders too close to an elephant. splat!

So that’s that - next couple of days in bangkok I think. My brother Rob turns up tomorrow and then next week we’re heading down to Phuket to spend a couple of days learning to sail. I’ll let you know if I see any pirates…

This entry was posted on Monday, June 26th, 2006 at 4:14 am and is filed under travelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.