Colin’s kitesurfing trip was cancelled due to lack of wind, so he took the long way home and had a tour of the west side of the island. We swam out to the reef near our house and did some snorkling there. The corals are covered with brown goo, but there are an amazing assortment of fish out there – just hundreds of colourful little guys that look like they belong in a fish tank. We also spotted some large crabs that looked more or less like Colin’s lunch yesterday, and I spent ages watching one of the little prawngoby’s prawns excavate their hole.

It was like the Day Of The Jellyfish out there again today. For two or three days there has been a band of densly packed jellyfish near the shore, varying from thumb-sized to fist-sized. I think there are two species: brown spotted ones with stubby short tentacles, and larger blue ones with chubby big tentacles trailing almost invisible long tentacle-strands. Something has been stinging us occasionally out there since day one, but it probably isn’t these little guys. They’ve been bumping into us and winding their tentacles around our legs to no effect so far, although Colin thinks he felt one of the blue ones sting him on the upper lip today. My theory about the stinging we’ve been experiencing is it’s little bits of broken-off tentacles from bigger guys. Whatever it is, it’s too small to see and the stings are mild and wear off in a couple minutes.

I tried to find these guys online but had no luck. Why isn’t there a site devoted to jellyfish identification yet??

Luckily I did manage to identify the shells I stole from a couple prawngoby holes, with our tropical shells book. I think it would be nice to have a beachcomber’s reference that included more of the random stuff that washes up around here. Our beach is peppered with cuttlebones that totally had me mystified until Colin shed some light on them. And all those neat little boyant nuts that shorline trees must produce in the hopes of floating them to some other beach or island.

Colin just left for his first kiteboarding lesson. I know we worked together and did… basically everything together back in Victoria, but somehow we never seemed to spend as much time together as we have been here. Could be because we’ve been basically alone together so far. We’ve met a lot of friendly people, but many of them are just visiting for a short time. Honestly, I kind of like it so far. :) We’ve been asked a few times if we’re on a honeymoon or romantic getaway, and it does kind of feel like that sometimes. :)

I’m uploading a few more pictures from Chaloklum and Haad Mae Haad. Did I mention our bungalo came with cats as well as pet-sized spiders? Friendly, drowsy, skinny little cats who slept on our bed and on the deck when we were out there. Like most of the pets around here, they seemed to enjoy our presence but weren’t terribly excited about being petted.

There are a lot of dogs here, and as most aren’t spayed or neutered, a lot of puppies too. There is a black dog we see on the beach a lot who goes by the name of Gypsy.. I’m going to get some dog cookies and see if I can’t woo her up onto our patio. :)

Just an addendum to Sarah’s last post really.

Details on the crab: It was fantasitic. I ordered it knowing pretty much only that it was crab and that it was prepared with curry.

I got a splendid whole crab cooked in curry sauce with vegies soaking around it in yet more curry sauce. And a side of rice.

It was amazingly good. I cannot tell you what kind of crab it was. It was much pointier than say dungeoness, it had much longer claws but was about the same size. It looked like it maked a living reaching into tiny bedrooms and stealing children.

I ate it with much gusto and mess (no little fork provided). I’m not sure if the thai stares I recieved where due to them being impressed with my west-coast technique or the horror of the carnage. Probably the latter.

A note on the food. Lonely planet apparently did a massive pole that found Thailand has the 4th best percieved food in the world. That seems high from what I’ve been eating, but not unreasonable. I don’t know if it’s the provincial nature of our island or what but I find very little blows my mind with goodness quite like I was expecting. Although if you stick to curries it seems you will get a very good meal every time. My theory that, accounting for variety, Victoria has the best food in the world stands.

The bike: I find it very… nice. I don’t find it entertaining. I must continually remind myself of that. Obviously if I found it entertaining it would become a source of entertainment and we all know how Laurence of Arabia died.

Never-the-less I find it very freeing to know that we can move about the island in a much less fettered fasion. And yes, Aunts and Mothers, I am religiously wearing a helmet. It’s actually an amusing conversation to have with people: “Yeah I wear one. I have a fair number of nurses in my family so I am constantly and vividly being made aware of the helmet’s value.”

A funny story that involves me not wearing my helmet (now that I have assured you all that this never happens): The houses here don’t have house numbers. I don’t know how or why but the idea of street signs and house numbers is a foreign one in this land. You would think something so simple and effective would have been taken up but it hasn’t. I am tempted to mail-order a huge stock of house numbers and just start affixing them to houses.

But anyway, because there are no house numbers the only way the guy who’s going to instal our statalite dish (mabey monday?) could know where we lived was to give one of us a ride out here and wait for us to point at a house. Craziness. It was very interesting being on the back of a thai-driven motor-scooter though. Very interesting.

I also got a new favorite shirt today. The art scene on the island is surprisingly vibrant! And not in a victoria colonial ‘aren’t my water-colours of the empress so pretty’ kind of way but in an energetic non-representational art kind of way.

So we’re walking down one of the more interesting un-named streets of Thongsala and there’s this artist selling t-shirt with his stuff on them. Quite a variety. Many bhudist themed works. I got this fantastic zen-inspired looking painting of a dragon contemplating the moon, or the sun. With a bunch of charaters down the side I can’t read. I picked it because I really liked the painting and it was the only non-black shirt he was selling. Tempting to start just buying art and hanging it about the house. Very tempting.

In other Sarah-broached news I have an appointment to meet up with some kite-boarding guys tomorrow. I’m sure I have instilled in them a sense of my keeness by constantly badgering them. Hopefully the wind will be servicable.

The fridge: Has less pineapple in it (pineapple is very good fresh it turns out) and has aquired some leftovers from yesterday’s lunch as well as some more fried fish things from the girl two doors down (actually now Sarah is eating the delicious smelling leftovers). There is also more bottled drinking water.

Today, we both agree, has been a day of many successes. Tired of just laying about and going swimming, we decided to head into town today and get things done. We started with an el-cheapo cell phone ($40 moto incl sim card). Wait, no, we started with our first bike trip into Thongsala, which was pretty uneventful but marked the beginning of Sarah’s acceptance of the motorbike way of life. We discovered gas costs about the same here as in Vic, but obviously the bikes use much less of it.

We plowed ahead and signed up for our satellite internet connection which should be setup in a few days. Colin connected with a local kite surfing instructor and is lined up to have his first lesson tomorrow. We bought more clothes, found a bakery that made multigrain and rye breads (most places have only these wonderbread-esque white loaves), had a nice lunch (Colin had an entire curried crab for $7 while I had a more typical $2.50 prawn & mushroom stirfry), picked up our clothes from the local laundry, found the (closed) post office, and bought a clock featuring the regent from a “10 baht super sale” that had set up in an empty lot and was blaring a Thai rendition of some pop song I couldn’t quite name.

See: such successes! We got some books along the way too. Colin is reading “Nightmare in Laos”, and I, having actually finished the shlock southern detective novel we got free with our last round of book-buying, will be starting in to a Terry Pratchet.

We also bought a book on local shells allowing us to identify the purple sea snail we saw floating in the water earlier. It turns out it spends its entire adult life floating on the surface of the water like that, hoping to bump into something it can latch onto and eat. It makes the raft of bubbles to keep it afloat and just goes wherever the wind and tide take it. Some other shells and floating nuts I’ve found on our beach (including moon snails!):

Colin just got back from his first short trip on our new motorbike. It is red, and yes we have red helmets to match, although I think mine is several sizes too big. :/ For those of you who know anything about bikes, it’s a Honda.. something.. 100cc. I’m going to let Colin ride it around for awhile before I get on the back – it still scares me!

Already looks like maybe a cell phone would have been a better idea than this GPRS thing.. I tried to sign up for an online account so we can add money to our sim card, and it sent my password to me by SMS! But I’m sure I’ll figure this out eventually. :)

Colin is playing a ninja game (Tenchu) on the DS right now. I’m trying not to play the sims or sid meyer’s railroads and instead am sucking up our possibly finite internet time looking up the species of plants and animals I’ve seen around here.

I think the key to living here is to simplify our lives more… because doing even things like going out, taking trips, shopping or buying services is much more difficult here than it was in Canada. It isn’t just the language barrier, it’s the less organized way things are done here, more easy-come-easy-go. People do what they feel like doing, when they feel like doing it.

So, like, they have post boxes at the post office, but maybe none are available today, check back next week. And you could try addressing a package to your home, but there’s a moderate chance it won’t ever arrive because houses aren’t numbered so the post guy might not be able to find it. So the trick is to find an address, like a resort, that is well known to the post people, with a trustworthy resort owner who can notify you when the package arrives.

Or, just don’t try to send mail! Simplification is the key to success I think. If only I wanted it to be that way! ;)