God damn crappy connection! Either you won’t see this at all or it’s going to be posted like ten times.

We watched a Korean horror movie last night – “The Ghost”. Like the name, the screenplay was terribly derivative of “The Ring”, “The Curse”, “The Eye”, etc. But the film was beautiful to watch and some of the directing was pretty cunning. Maybe they’re just trying to perfect the “The Something” movie then they can finally move on to something more original. How can a horror film be scary when you’ve seen it all before?

“The Ghost” – most likely coming soon to North American theatres in a scene-for-scene US remake.

Feels like we’ve been here for months and months already, when in actual fact it’s been more like four and a half weeks. The daily routine of wake up – go swimming – find adventure hasn’t gotten old at all, and we are still happy to eat Thai dishes for every meal possible.

Last week we strolled down along the beach to a little restaurant perched on the edge of the water. We split a whole fish caught that morning and served sweet-and-sour style. It was absolutely delicious and not too sweet at all; the cook had rubbed salt and spices into the fish’s skin and surrounded it with heaps of root vegetables and pinapple. Colin got the head end; he figures because it is where the delicacies are and he is ‘the man’; I think it might be because as ‘the man’ he’s got a stronger stomach for those weird bits and doesn’t mind working harder to extract his meal. Anyway, such a great meal.

On Saturday (not that days of the week mean much here; I had to look at a calendar to be sure) we went up to Chills to go snorkling. Chills is a small, relaxed resort just up north where our wide bay ends. They’re right off the same reef as we are, except you don’t have to swim for half an hour to get out there and the reef is a little more spectacular. This time we spotted eels, giant clams, nudibranchs and probably fifty species of tropical fish. I finally got a sunburn despite having sunscreen on my back.

The guys at Chills are pretty cool so we stuck around all afternoon and evening. The owner and a couple long-term guests are from England, and after a year or two on the island they find themselves eating mostly western food and hanging out with other ex-pats. On this island it certainly isn’t hard, though I’d rather go the other way and absorb more Thai culture and language. We ended the night with homemade banana custard and V for Vendetta out on their deck.

About the language, well, I really haven’t had much luck so far. I’m still feeling pretty down on my ability to memorize new words and sounds. Forgetting the tonal portion, it isn’t that complicated a language, but my mind seems to hold it like a sieve. Of the few dozen words I know and have said hundreds of times, I still mix them up sometimes or draw a blank when I need them. The unfortunate truth is, learning Thai is a whole lot harder than I’d imagined it would be, and getting by with just English a whole lot easier. And I am a lazy, lazy person.

Aww, dogs love Colin so much. :) I fed ‘momma’ some leftover rice and fish this morning and she’s come up to beg scratches from Colin for the last half hour. He’s trying to coax her onto the deck so he can sit and read in the hammock while doing it. She has three puppies that are off somewhere else right now, but she brings them up and down the road new and then. The traffic really freak the poor things out, but probably better they learn early. I’ve been wondering how many of the scarred up dogs around here met with a car at some point. They fight a lot, being dogs, but some of them are missing so much fur it can’t be from fighting alone.

I’ve got another cold – goddamit it~! – but am feeling well enough today to go exploring. Colin wants to ride up north and look for good beaches. I’m still horribly nervous of those big hills and dirt roads but at least I don’t close my eyes as much as before. ^_~

Last… Friday or something, we rode up to a freshwater lake near Sreethanu (pronounced Seetanoo) village. We rented a dinky manpowered bicycle-boat and tooled around the edges looking for wildlife. Some of the pictures are up on Flickr – bright red dragonflies and such. We’ve heard there are huge carp in the lake as well, which was small enough for us to lazily circumvent in about an hour. It’s little trips like that that make the bike totally worthwhile I think.

Oh, there go the puppies!

So I’ve promised to start working on December 1st. Still ironing out some stuff when our up-and-down connection permits it. I really hope it smooths out once the weather in Bangkok improves; if it is the weather that is doing it. We’ve always got our cell backup for when it really conks out, but it’s hard to download large amounts of data over a 5kbps connection. ;) Colin’s laptop of course is still somewhere out there in the void but I won’t start worrying for at least another week.

Is an attractive bay on the north-west side of the island.

Yesterday we decided to do some exploring so we packed up a couple of snorkle masks, picked a beach we’ve never been to, and headed off.

Haad Salad is supposed to be less built up than some of the other major beaches (haad rin, haad yao, haad mae had). But you could have fooled me. It was wall-to-wall resorts. Anyway it was still a very nice beach, and because of the season, it was pretty much empty.

The each trickles into rock up both sides of the bay (granite. this whole island is literaly granite and there’s no climbing!??). We decided to strole up past an interesting looking bar all stranded out past the beach and over the rocky shore to where the reef likely started.

Took, what I consider to be some really good pictures on the way. Although I noticed when I got home that they are all in black and white. Ooops. They’re still good but they would have been really good in colour. Well mostly the one with the guy fixing the boat was good but would have been really good. The boat is red except for the clean new wood, and the trees are all green and he’s on this colourful mat and god damn it!

Of well, so we jumped in off the rocks and… oh my god. One of the most beautiful places I have ever been. Reefs are beautiful. But reefs built on undersea rock-gardens are fantastic.

It was alot like a planned and tended garden. There where paths and variety and depth and shadow and all these little fish swimming around everywhere.

It was completely fantastic. And totaly our new favorite place to snorkle. We swam up to the point where the bay ends and there was a wall of 3 or 4 schools of little fish with a few bigger fish among them. And behind them the rock just dropped 10 meters into the ocean.

It was breathtaking.

Lunch kind of sucked. There’s this wierd little proto-town behind the wall of resorts which contains something like 4 restaurants, 3 nick-nack places, and one fruit stand.

Anyway no interesting places to eat lunch. At least we had it on the beach.

Also watched a Korean horror movie we picked up in Chiang Mai. Called ‘The Ghost’ and was very well made if having a fairly cooky-cutter plot.

Lazy day today. Started out sitting in the hammock reading while Sarah wrestled with some software for work.

We said hello to the jellies on our daily swim (I am slowly getting better at the front crawl). Once again there was no wind so I didn’t get to go kitesurfing (for the 20th consecutive day).

Saw a greater coucal out the front window early in the morn’. Which was neat. Read more about lenses. Which I have discovered I can spend a great deal of time doing.

Around mid-day we rode into town to check out a german place that brags about its bread. Also wandered into town to buy some stuff and finally take some snaps of Thongsala.

None of the pictures are great. The sun was very harsh and I didn’t really find any pictures that captured the place. In the interest of giving people some idea of what the biggest town on the island is like I posted the pictures to flickr anyway.

I did miss an amazing picture. While Sarah was in a shop I went wandering between a couple of buildings to photograph some graphiti (picture didn’t work out) and I saw a cat on top of a fence staring intently into a tree. I walked the long way around behind the cat so I could get a picture of him and whatever he was looking at. I expected a myna bird or a pigeon. When I got around i saw it was a hawk! Just sitting in the tree staring back at him. I fumbled with my camera and managed to miss the picture. gah! It would have been fantastic! From this I learned: snap the first one without thinking and make the next one pretty.

Later while I was describing the missed opportunity to Sarah the hawk flew by, glanced off a window, and we had to duck as he careened over our heads and off into the palms. Of course I didn’t get a picture of that either.

So a day of poor photography somewhat mitigated by a side trip on the way home to a nice little bit of forest with big chunks of granite growing out of it. Pictures also posted. I got a bad picture of a butterfly in flight. Which makes me feel slightly better about my reaction time.

Wow we hadn’t even been on a hike yet before yesterday?

It was one of the big reasons we got our bike. Well, and getting around would cost a fortune otherwise.

But Laurence’s comment about living by the Thai border and seeing all kinds of interesting spiders and stuff galvanised us.

Thais are big on the waterfalls and there are a number of well signed falls on the island. We pretty much just picked the closest one (Phaeng Waterfall) and motored off for it. We got to drive up the big road past all the government buildings and the big police station.

That road is the only one with a line down the middle of it on the island (dotted of course) although after the government buildings stop it abrupty goes from two lane crispness to one lane pothole-tarmac. It then fluctuates between potholes and washed-out all the way to chaloklum on the other side of the island.

One of the nice things about driving in thailand is that you can go whatever speed you want. I just felt my mum cringe. But I mean it the other way. The nice road probably sees the highest speeds on the island. Locals probably get up to 60 kph. But we can bumble along happily at 30 and noone thinks twice. This is in contrast to attempting to drive a scooter at 30 in victoria (which I have done) in which case you destroy traffic and everyone, quite rightly, hates you.

Anyway the hiking was very good. The park was odd. There were 4 or 5 park buildings right at the entrance. They had a kept lawn, a flag pole, and a very large wood-carved sign welcoming you to the park. It was a more comprehensive complex than I have ever seen in Canada.

The trails, on the other hand, where completely ungroomed and the maps posted along the route contradicted eachother.

It’s like the park service is happy to do a bang up job of things; unless it actually has to go into the park.

But of course I prefer the completely un-groomed trails. A trail that wanders down the side of a granite slope because it’s too lazy to cut through the woods, even if that slope is going to be a river a few days a year, is my idea of perfect. Roots and rocks and a thin, steep, path wander up to two signed falls and a lookout point.

We walked past the first falls without noticing them. Despite the fact that this is the wet season there really wasn’t enouh water to make them go.

The lookout point was cool. It was a good view over our side of the island. It was impressive how thoroughly the lowlands have been planted with coconut palms. There are just little islnads of hilly land in the sea of palms. We could see pretty easily the backside of Thongsala, the bay where our house is, and where the roads connecting the two must be. Very interesting.

From here we walked the ‘nature trail’ along to the second waterfall.

Here is where things started to get interesting. The hike up had been dominated by a very young forest of thin deciduous trees. It was too similar to a young poplar forest to hold any fascination. We did meet one little lizard of which I got three very bad pictures of (too bad to post). But the ‘nature trail’ was full of great stuff!

Thai flora are way more into parasitic relationships than our plants. There are all kinds of vines winding up the trees and plants clinging to eachother for sustinence. It’s really neat. We saw, I still can’t believe it, jug plants! Real life, growing wild, jug plants! So cool! I never thought I’d get to see a carnivorous plant in the wild but they’re actually pretty common up in the mountains. We actually saw some jug plants in the royal flower exhibition and their wild bretheren put them to shame. Lots of ants. Ants here make long mud nests that string up trees. It’s very odd. And every once in a while you grab a tree only to bust-up a busy nest and have ants crawling all over your hand.

Half way through, the nature trail branches off. There are supposed to be three seperate routes to the waterfall, each one inside and shorter than the last. We didn’t know the outside-most one existed because on signs it was represented by a line going off the map. Thusly we chose the middle route and ended up, lost, on the outer route.

Which was all fine and good really. It was more of a serious treck through the jungle. If we had known it was going to lead back to the falls it would have been a perfect path but we didn’t. After we’d gone so far as to ascertain that it wasn’t the path we thought we where on we turned back.

But while we where on it the path was for serious cool. It felt alot like a classic jungle (labeled a rain forest on one of the maps) and here we where trecking through it! The canopy closed in and it got much darker. There where vines hanging everywhere and in places the foliage was thick with unfamiliar plants. Two fantastically neat spiders.

The first one we actually met outside the rainforest, before the path got serious. I will simply post the picture here. I do not know what kind of spider is. It is the strangest, and creepiest, spider I have ever seen. I took tons of pictures and only about three worked out.

The second spider was a charmer. He was a huge jumping spider! Well huge for me. I’m used to our cute little 15mm wolf-spiders (which they also have here). This guy was more like 15cm from foot to foot. He was pretty terrified of me, I chased him around with the camera for a while. He was so much fun to watch run down a leaf and leap to the next one. He must have jumped another 15 cm into the air each time. Very cool spider.

Anyway we backtracked out of the rainforest. We ended up at the second waterfall (as unimpresive as the first) and wandered back to the bike.

It was ultimately an exhausting day of hiking with many very steep paths of very dubious quality. In the end though it just made the morning-caught baracuda in curry and fried with ginger taste that much better.

Side note about our dinner at Lipstick Cabanna: The fish had been caught by the cook’s dad that morning and the curry was made of coconut and spices all fresh from the garden. Such good food.