Relaxing on Paradise Island!!!

Hi there!!

Well, we're definitely on the last leg of our trip - only one week till we're back in Ireland, which is very exciting!!! We've spent the last 6 days here in Ko Pha Ngan which has been fantastic as we've literally done nothing. I've read lots of books and got plenty of sun, but the most energetic we've been is playing a few games of frisbee down on the beach.............

We stayed in Auckland for another two nights after we last updated, in a lovely hotel that was quite central - luckily for us, it also had parking - parking in NZ's finest cities can be a bit of a hassle. That particular day, while we were updating our blogs, our car park fee was clocking up a massive $32!!!! I don't want to be a bore about exchange rates and the cost of living, but we're currently paying $10 per night between the two of us to stay in our beach hut - a much better deal!!!

We finally got to do a few touristy things in Auckland. We drove up to Mount Eden, yet another volcano right in the middle of the city!!! There are quite a few more around it also, which can be seen quite clearly from the Mount Eden look out point. Fascinating to think that a city can be built on volcanoes - even more surprising as Martin's cousin Robin, told us that they're not exactly dormant and could blow in a few thousand years!!!

We had a meal in a Brazilian style restaurant on the Tuesday night - it's called Wildfire and we think it's the same idea as the one in Sydney - the setting is similar too, although Wildfire in Sydney has a nice view of the Opera House, but the one in Auckland is near the harbour too. It was a nice place and the food was fairly good, but nothing spectacular. The next evening, we had a trip up the Sky tower for a drink on the observation deck. It wasn't in the bar, so the atmosphere was zero, but it was nice to get a view of the city by night. The lift was quite funky (scary) in that it had a glass bottomed floor, so you could see yourself flying up the building. They also had some glass floors in the observation deck, which neither of us liked to stand on for too long!!!

On Wednesday morning, we took a drive out to Kelly Tartlan's Aquarium to see the Emperor and Adelie penguins. The penguin part of the trip was lovely. You basically sit in a carriage type thingy and drive slowly through an antartic ice field which they've constructed. The penguins are very cute and lovely, though between you and me, there's quite a bit of yellow snow about!!! The rest of the aquarium is unfortunately a bit of a rip-off - for a start off, it was really short. There was just one large fish tank and there really wasn't anything that interesting in it (except for a couple of scuba divers lurking about and making it authentic!!). The aquarium is in a nice area though - it's about 5k's out of the city along the harbour. It kind of reminded me of a 'not very built up' Kiribilli.

On the Thursday morning, we packed up our stuff, checked out of our hotel and prepared ourselves to say goodbye to NZ - we had such a lovely time there and are already talking about "when" we go back rather than "if". We dropped our Rav back to the car hire office near the airport, got a courtesy lift from them to the airport and checked in for our flight. I also had one last look-see in lost property for my errant jewelry, but it's not to be found Ah well...............

Once we arrived in Sydney, we picked up a massive people carrier at the airport and made our way into the "cidee". We picked Leah up from work and drove back to her and Paul's to start the horrid task of sorting all our gear into things we can live without back home and things we just can't bear to leave behind. My list of things I couldn't bear to leave behind seemed to be a lot longer than Marty's and when Leah came up with our pre-dinner drinks, Martin was in full flow, trying to persuade me to throw out our ramekins and chopping boards!!! No way, Jose - ramekins aren't easy to find, especially those ones that cost me a small fortune in Woolworths bargain basement.................

Anyway, it actually wasn't that bad in the end and about 1 and 1/2 hours of arguing and slipping things into boxes when I thought he wasn't looking, we had dinner with the two Rules, a nice chat and then went to bed - it had been a tiring day.

The next day however, was a lot worse!!! We thought we didn't have too much in Dave's place, but when we got there and saw it, we were horrified to put it mildly!!! So we started sorting, all the time thinking how this was all going to cost us a small fortune!!! At about 3 o'clock in the afternoon however, Tim from Traveller's Contact Point got in touch and told us about a fantastic deal they had for sending boxes to Europe. We quickly calculated that it would cut our costs in half, so within an hour, we were unloading our boxes out of our car and into the service lift at TCP. Thanks to Lorraine and Catherine for coming downstairs to help us - it was much appreciated!! We had tonnes of forms to fill out before we could get going, but eventually it was all finished and we enjoyed yet another "leaving" gig in Sydney!!! All the usual suspects were there and we had a really nice evening in the Lord Henry Roberts. We stayed in Balmain that night and John and Kylie drove us back to town the next day to collect our car. We picked up Dave and drove up to Potts Point for one last breakfast in Roy's (to be fair, we've had more than one "one last breakfast" in Roy's). Then, it was time to get ourselves off to the airport; we wanted to be in good time!!! Said goodbye to Dave, but we'll be seeing him when we get home (he's there already!!) so it was more Adieu.........

Alarm bells rang as soon as I got into the queue to check in (Mart had gone to give the car back). A member of ground staff asked me if we were flying anywhere from Bangkok - then I knew that the flight was delayed. It turned out that instead of flying at 4:30, we weren't leaving until 7:15. So we amused ourself in the airport for a while (that gets a bit monotonous) spending lots of money on essential stuff etc, until we were allowed to go through security. Once there, we went down to the Qantas lounge as Martin had two invitations in his wallet for the last year or something. It was a good place to have a small glass of champers to celebrate our departure to Thailand!!!

We had a fairly uneventful flight - I think the exersions of the last couple of days meant started to catch up and I slept for most of the flight. We arrived at Bangkok international at about 1 am or so and joined the long taxi queue. As we're quite obviously not Thai, we were hassled by quite a few taxi drivers who didn't want to bring customers into the city in a metred taxi. They tried to charge us about 6 times as much as it usually costs in a metered taxi!!! Luckily, Mart discovered this scam by doing a little bit of reading in the LP!!!. We eventually go into a taxi (we shared it with an English guy who was heading to the Koh San Road and after much wrangling with the driver over what our hotel was called, we got to our little oasis at about 3:15. I stayed in the Asia hotel four and a half years ago, so I knew what to expect and neither of us were disappointed. It was so good to get out of the humid city (even at that hour of the morning!!). We had quick showers and got into bed - sleep was not at all long in coming as you might imagine!!!

Next morning, we got up for our very sumptuous buffet breakfast and decided to go for a swim in the hotel pools. We had a look at the 12th floor one, which has a fantastic backdrop of the city skyscrapers, but settled on the 5th floor which was much quieter and leafier. Once we had a little float and some showers, we went out to battle our way around Bangkok. We decided that we'd check out the Koh San Road and set off on foot. Shortly, we realised that we weren't really making any headway on our map, so we gave it up as a bad (and sweaty) job and hailed a taxi. We unashamedly worked our way around BK in taxis as they're really quite cheap and a lot quicker than walking. Anyway, we took it easy that first day in BK - we had a wander around the Koh San area and amused ourselves with the markets for a while, stopping every so often for refreshments. Sometime in the evening, around 6 o'clock maybe, we decided to go to an Indian Restaurant for dinner - when in Thailand, eat another genre of food................... We got a taxi to a restaurant that we read about in the LP - it was a fair way across town, but not too far from our hotel. Once we got there and eventually found the restaurant, we realised what the name India Hut meant - it was a cog of Pizza Hut!!! It had the little red symbol and everything. We were a bit put off by that, but once we went in and confirmed that there was no "all you can eat" deal, or a salad buffet, we relaxed and had a really nice meal. After that, we decided to go for an after dinner drink to one of the rooftop bars in the city. We had chosen one that the LP made sound quite nice!!!! When we arrived there (The Banyan Tree), we knew that we had made the right choice!!! It was a fantastic place!!! We took a lift up to the 59th floor, got out and started looking for the bar. It turned out that we had to walk up another two flights of stairs to the 61st floor!!! Near the top we felt the lack of air-con on us and then slowly it dawned on us...............it was open air!!!!

This place was incredible. We eventually managed to get a table overlooking the best side of the city (the one with the most action), all the time discussing the fact that they must be breaking lots of health and safety rules by having an open air bar. Like what if a glass fell off it???? Still, we weren't complaining - if the Thais want to take that risk, it's our gain!!! After a while though, we both started to realise that this far off the ground, we were both slightly out of our comfort zone - it was a bit scary, truth be told. It's fine sitting there with a nice thick pane of glass between you and 200 metres of nothingness, but without it............... I asked Mart if he'd abseil it and he nearly choked on his beer. I thought it was funny until he mentioned tight-rope walking, then it was my turn to wince!!! We decided to only stay for one drink and leave while we weren't troubled by these horrific visions..........

The next day started off pretty much the same way as the previous. Very relaxing morning followed by a taxi ride to the area around the Grand Palace, where we were starting the day's sightseeing. Bangkok's con men/women were out in earnest and if one person offered us a tuk tuk ride to see Big Buddha, 20 people did. We managed to out fox them all, well, we walked away shaking our heads saying "No thank you", which is a form of out-foxing. We walked around the Grand Palace, which is a really huge and spectacular place - you can't help appreciating the work that went into building it. We saw the Emerald Buddha there and then moved onto Wat Po to see the enormous reclining buddha. It was getting into early evening then, so we got on a boat and took a trip down the Chao Phraya river. We went right to the last disembarking point which joins up with the Skytrain - we had complementary skytrain tickets from our hotel so we decided to use them to get home. Before the train ride, we stopped into the Shangri-La hotel for a drink and to get out of the heat for a while. The hotel was lovely - there's one in Sydney too, which had the best views of the harbour!!!

Back at the hotel, we went for a swim. I was feeling really wrecked at this stage despite drinking lots of water during the day. The heat always catches up at me in the end, so after my shower, I had a lie down and we indulged in room service. I have to say, I was asleep before it arrived, but I ate a salad, while poor old Mart tucked into one of the worst looking pizzas I have ever seen!! Once dinner was over, I thought I'd have a another little snooze and then we could head out for our last night in Bangkok, but the next time I woke was at 5:30 am!!! Clearly, I hadn't quite gotten the hang of jet-lag....................

We got up at a more civilised time than 5:30 and went for our breakfast. When we got back, we went for one last swim in both pools and then started packing. We had sent some laundry to the hotel laundry room (not too much, just enough to tide us over) and the bill was extortionate. I'm pretty sure that it's the single most expensive thing we've bought in Thailand to date. It definitely cost a lot more than one night in the hotel (thanks STA Travel). Marty just shook his head sadly when the bill arrived and mooched around the room, muttering things like "I feckin' told her...."

Packing was done very swiflty, and before we knew where we were, we were safely ensconsed in a cab, bound for the domestic terminal of the airport!! Once there, we checked in, paid quite a lot in excess baggage for The Red Bag aka Ethel (though not quite as much as the laundry), and boarded our flight to Ko Samui. It was all very quick and painless (though the only veggie food they had on the plane was a pot noodle, so not totally painless) and before we knew where we were, we were at Big Buddha, waiting for our 45 minute boat ride to Haad Rin. Once we got there, we jumped in a taxi with about six other people, bags on the roof and headed for Baan Tai, which is where Martin's sister, Shevaun runs PAC, a vetinary clinic she set up to try to sort the stray dog problem here on Ko Pha Ngan. We dumped our bags in our lovely air-conned hut first and following her directions, we found her, the people she works with and as many dogs as there are humans!!! We spent our first night eating take-away on her balcony surrounded by about 6 very energetic dogs. They're quite humanised and like to think that they can drink out of cups and eat off plates!!! Two of them, Boogley (is missing half a paw) and Ploy (abandoned by his owners when they left the island), followed us back to our hut that night and kept watch outside our door!!!

The next day, we borrowed a motorbike for Shevaun and me and Martin took Shevaun's green bike and we explored the island. Driving on the island is quite dangerous - a lot of the roads are just dirt tracks, but Marty was more than up for it. Only thing is, he didn't see a whole lot of the island, such was his concentration. We eventually decided that the following day, we'd head up to Coral Bay, which is where we're staying at the moment. It's a bit of a favourite of Shevaun's - she's stayed there loads of times!! It's really quite and relaxing. Our only complaint is that there's no air con and it's so warm and humid here that we're finding that we're lost without it. We have a fan in our room, but the generator goes off at midnight until six the next evening, so we're without fresh, cool air for the whole night. Shevaun had a couple of days off, but she went back to Baan Tai this morning. We're going to follow suit and go back to our original place tomorrow morning until Thursday. Then for the last three nights of our holiday, we think we'll treat ourselves to one of the more upmarket resorts with a pool maybe - just to celebrate the end of 4 1/2 months of being on the road.

Oh, we went to the full moon party on Saturday night. I thought it was pretty much the same as last time - it doesn't seem to have changed. There were a couple of naval boats in the harbour because there were rumours of a bomb, but nothing came of it thankfully. It was nice to sit on the beach and watch the sun come up!! We got back to our hut at about 8 yesterday morning and slept for a couple of hours. It was an early night for me last night though!!!

That's all the news I think - like I said, we're trying to do as little as possible - the most energetic thing we do is apply cream to mozzie bites!!!

Will finish off the blog next week, when we finish our trip!!!!

Hope everyone is well - see most of you very soon!!!
Lots of love,
Sue XX