Found Nemo

After my last post, I spent the next few days lazing around on the beach, eating mouthwateringly spicy (ish) dishes, sunbathing in the dazzling sun (the stormy weather finally abated), swimming in the gorgeous azure sea and lying in my hammock. The days were a complete blur. One night Jeff, Marjolijn, Christiaan, Sanjim and I tried to work out the date - it took us about 5 minutes, and none of us had any faith in the conclusion that we'd come to.

In an attempt to stick to my budget (between the burglaries and the scuba diving that hasn't quite gone according to plan so far), I'm not drinking cocktails or wine any more, and am attempting to develop a taste for beer instead (finally). Singha beer seems to be the one that tastes the least like rat's piss, but I can still only manage about a pint in an evening.

My tan is coming on nicely - the sand on my toes now looks ridiculously pale next to my skin and I barely recognise my arms they're so brown. Sadly my legs are absolutely covered in mosquito bites that I can't seem to stop myself from scratching (I even cut my nails short in an attempt to stop myself scratching off my entire epidermis). More about my plans to rid the world of the little bastards once and for all later.

I've not been seeing so much of Sally (the salamander) recently, but Roland puts in regular appearances - to eat my soap, or to Andrex-puppy off with my toilet paper - it wasn't fucking funny at 4am when I woke up desperately needing the toilet, couldn't find the toilet roll for ages, then found it scattered over the shelves with rat bite marks in it. Neither am I amused at the fact that she decided that perhaps my Lonely Planet to SE Asia would be rather tasty too. Thankfully she decided that it wasn't and she only half chewed the front cover.

A few nights ago (Christ only knows how many), I got home to find a cockroach in my bed - no this isn't my infamously bad taste in men striking again - an actual disease ridden, only-thing-to-survive-a-nuclear-holocaust, resilient bastard cockroach scuttling about on my fucking pillow. And it didn't even buy me dinner first. Cheeky bugger. I managed to rearrange the mosquito net so that it was now outside it, then swept the little fucker out of my room as quickly as possible so that it wouldn't run onto my feet. Yeeeeeech.

The next door cabin has been vacated again, so I now have access to their hammock whenever I feel the need to slob in style. I love it here - every morning first thing I put my bikini on and go for a swim to wake myself up, and every evening before I go to bed I lie on my back on the beach looking at the stars - it's clear enough to see the milky way.

My toe is pretty much back to normal, and the coral cuts on my hand have almost gone, but, as I said, the mosquitos are still loving me, despite the DEET, the vitamin B1 tablets, the garlic, and my unwillingness to allow my vegetarianism and environmentalism to cloud my judgement when it comes to the issue of the mosquito's extinction, and the paramount importance of bringing it about as quickly as possible. I mean, really - what purpose do the little bastards serve?

I finished off my PADI course a few days ago - it was wierd not diving with Marjolijn, John, Pamela and Cormac, but Gianpaulo (the instructor) and I had great fun, and I got chatting to one of the guys doing his Dive Master qualification - Majek (sp?). Very cute! Gianpaulo was clearly once a boy racer who's mostly grown up and become a responsible adult, but he still has an inner wild child who pops up when there's something reckless to be done. He was fastidious about making sure that we knew all of the safety checks and emergency procedures, and that we practiced them in a swimming pool until we could do them in our sleep, but then when I did my last dive he took me down to 31m (someone doing their PADI open water isn't strictly speaking supposed to go below 18m). I was expecting that he'd take me below 20m, as he had done with the other group, but I wasn't expecting that. It was unbelievable though - we saw a pair of giant baracudas about 1.5m long, schools of tuna fish, a surgeon fish, a stone fish (a type of scorpion fish that can paralyse you if you touch it), a moray, lots of angel fish, butterfly fish, groupers and harlequin fish - it was indescribably amazing to be flying through the water surrounded by it all.

One night the group of bungalows I stayed in got together and had a party to celebrate the owner - Kate's - birthday. When we arrived, the staff hung necklaces of orchids round our necks and gave us all fruit punch. We ate like pigs, then danced. Later on there were fireworks, but unfortunately someone's aim wasn't that great, and one of the fireworks landed on the peninsula that juts into the sea and started a forest fire. One guy announced that he was going to put it out, ran off, got a towel, dipped it in the sea, and apparently started whacking the 5 or 6 large bushes and trees that were ablaze by this point with it. Can anyone guess this guy's nationality? Anyway, as my cabin was the closest to the blaze, I had to pack up my stuff in case the fire started spreading towards my bungalow - thankfully it didn't, and the fire burnt itself out after about an hour, but we were all shitting bricks for a while. Captain America eventually reappeared looking sheepish, while his girlfriend nagged him about common sense, a grip on reality, and possible methods of acquiring both.

On the day before I was due to leave Bottle beach I decided to walk the 6km over the hills to Cheloklam so that I could book my boat and train ticket back to Bangkok, and so that I could put my toe through the paces to see whether I'd be able to carry my rucksacks the following day. I asked a couple of guys on the beach for directions and they told me where to go, and confirmed that yes, I'd definitely need walking boots definitely. They both looked at me doubtfully (and later confessed that they hadn't thought that I'd be able to do it). I think that it was one of the toughest walks of my life. The first hour was unrelentingly uphill at a dizzying gradient, clambering over boulders and tree roots, but I was rewarded with a fabulous panorama at the end. Oddly enough it was actually the next 30 minutes of the walk, going downhill at an equally steep (but negative) gradient that was the killer because of the pressure on my healing toe. I tried to limit this by sidestepping down the hill, but I ended up slipping onto my arse a couple of times because of this. Eventually the gradients became more shallow as I approahed Chaloklam and reached a dirt road. A nice taxi driver took pity on me and gave me a lift for the last km on his way back from dropping someone else off. He point blank refused to take any money from me - I must have looked a right old state.

When I got to Chaloklam I had just enough time to sort the tickets and buy a large bottle of rum, to be drunk on the beach later.

The evening went really well - everyone was in high spirits. The only downer came when Jeff started going on and on about how no men want to date fat women and started pointing at women of size 10 and above saying "imagine what she's going to look like in 20 years time if she's starting to let herself go already". I had an awful lot that I wanted to say to that (not the least of which was pointing out that, if she were with him in 20 years time, his wrinkles would be a bigger problem), but the git kept cutting me off to say more derogatory things about women half his age with curves. This leads me to:

CAT'S FIRST RULE OF MEN

If a man is over 40 and still single, there's usually a reason.

Anyway, the next day I packed and left bottle beach with Marjoline and Christiaan. I had a great two and a half weeks, but I need to go somewhere new, somewhere that involves more exploring and adventure, rather than lying on my back and going brown.

Marjoline and Christiaan decided to spend the night on Hat Yao so that they could see the sunset. I decided that I just wanted the minimum hassle option of staying in Thong Sala, where the ferry went from, plus I could see Leonie and the others from the dive shop. I found a nice little bungalow with attached bathroom and a sit-down toilet (you really do feel like you're on a throne - they are the height of luxury after a couple of weeks of squatting), dumped my stuff and went off to the dive shop. I ended up at a lovely chilled out little place owned by Leonie's boyfriend, Toon, with Majek, Leonie and Toon. Toon's friends got their guitars out and spent the evening crooning Thai songs while we chatted and drank. When I got to the stage where I could barely keep my eyes open, Majek gave me a lift back to my bungalow on the back of his motorbike - purely to make sure that I got home safely of course...

The next day and night I made the long journey back to Bangkok. I met Christiaan and Marjolijn on the boat and we caught up on our antics of the previous evening. It was probably the hottest day so far, and the sea and sky blended together in a heat haze so that you could barely tell where one ended and the other began. We divided our time between sitting in the sun on deck, and hiding from it in the air-conditioned bit below deck.

When we got back to the mainland and were waiting for the bus to take us to the train station Marjolijn recognised a guy that she'd met 6 months before at the start of their travels in Bolivia and went to chat to him. It really is a small world. I found myself hoping that I'd run into some of my Bottle beach chums in 6 months time.

The bus to the train station was absolutely rammed, and I found myself sitting (in the loosest possible sense of the word - I had half of an arse cheek on the seat) next to a five year old German girl, Lilly, and her mum. Lilly's parents were taking her and her brother backpacking for the first time - she even had her own little rucksack that had all her clothes and toys in. On previous holidays they'd been to France and Spain, and in future years they were planning to go to Nepal and Burma. Lilly was absolutely loving it - they'd been rafting and tubing, they'd seen snakes and huge spiders - and she really didn't seem to want to go home for school. I can't say I blamed her.

When we got to the train station we had some pretty revolting fried rice that had clearly been sitting around for just a bit too long. This prompted a discussion of which of the dodgy on-the-go meals that we'd had that day was most likely to have us sprinting to the toilet on the train that night (thankfully none of them).

Marjolijn and Christiaan got an earlier train than me, so I sat there on the platform with my beer (!!!!) for an hour while two guys, one of whom had his daughter in tow, chatted to me about my travels. The guy and his daughter waited very patiently while the other guy tried to convince me that all English girls have a Thai boyfriend while they're here, regardless of their (in my case fictitious) boyfriends back in London. He eventually worked out that I wasn't interested.

I've been in Bangkok for the last 2 days, sorting out flights and visas for the next few months, trying to work out how to get my photos onto computers that don't have the correct software installed, sorting out insurance stuff (still), and sightseeing. The Grand Palace and Wat Pho are amazing - there're so many ornate things crammed together into such a small space, you don't know quite where to begin looking, let alone where to point your camera.

I'm enjoying Bangkok much more this time - probably because I'm not staying on the Khao San road this time. I've been there a couple of times to sort out camera issues, but other than that, I'm staying well away. The guest house is run by this old dear with thick glasses that magnify her eyes to fill half of her face. She speaks very good English, has been to London before to see the sights (Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London etc), is really enthusiastic about people from other countries and charges 80baht a night for a single room. That's about a pound and is bloody cheap for Bangkok. Admittedly the room is about the size of a shoebox, and the bed stops the door from opening more than a few inches. When I checked in I had to dismantle and unpack half of my rucksack and take it in piece by piece. It has electricity 24 hours (so far), the ecosystem in my room is not quite as thriving as the one in my bungalow on Bottle beach, and the shared bathroom is tiled, so I'm not complaining. The area I'm staying in at the moment has few guest houses, so fewer tourists than Thais. Last night going to a restaurant to meet Marjolijne and Christiaan, I walked past this crumbling old fort, and in front of it a crowd of Thai teenagers were breakdancing on the pavement. I stopped to watch them for a few minutes - they were really good. When I eventually managed to tear myself away and get to the restaurant, I had possibly one of the nicest meals of my life - the food was amazing. Thai food is normally gorgeous, but this was something else - the flavours complimented and contrasted with each other in subtle, complex ways that just made your taste buds want to sing. Seriously - the three of us were practically making sex noises as we ate - it was almost indecent. And it was only 8 quid between the three of us for two courses and drinks. If anyone reading this ever goes to Bangkok, look up Hemlock (it's between the river and the Khao San road). It's almost worth coming to Bangkok just for a meal there it's that good.

Anyway, the current plan is to go to the floating markets in the next couple of days, then into Cambodia for a few days as my Thai visa is about to run out (has it been that long already?), and I get a new one for free when I come back into Thailand. I'll just have to go to see the temples at Angkor then. Life is just filled with these trials.....