Things will a be a little different until we fly to India towards the end of August when the journal will start again properly. In the meantime we will be on holiday on Koh Tao and you have all heard plenty about the island already. So there may well not be an entry for every day, but rather some more general updates. Keep checking though!

Day 264 - 286  Friday  30th June 2006 to Saturday 22 July 2006 - Colin's Account

A few weeks into our holiday from our holiday and we are enjoying not having to lug around our rucksacks with us constantly. In fact we have stowed them at the back of a cupboard so we don't have to see them at all.

Bangkok was its usual hot and polluted self and my daughters arrived safely on the 3rd July. Having a member of the flight crew bring them through immigration was great as they skipped the huge queues that build up there. Their baggage was also tagged priority and was first on to the conveyor belt, so we missed the free for all at the taxi rank and were soon back on Khoa San road in Central Bangkok.

Trying to get an Indian visa has been a real mission. We finally tracked the embassy down to a small street (or Soi in Thai) somewhere in the Sukumvit area only to find they had shut the doors for the day. Luckily I managed to persuade one of the security guards to go in and get us the necessary forms to fill out.

Back we traipsed the next day, forms duly completed, to find the waiting room full of people. Our ticket number was 94 and the counter was only showing 35. Two hours later and it was up to 76, when they decided to close for 2 hours for lunch. Apparently they don't normally do this and of course no one thought to tell the people with high numbers that they wouldn't be seen that morning. After we and others had told one of the embassy staff what we thought of them, we left to wander around.

When Sam went back later she and the other westerners noticed that it was only Thai's going up to the counter. The penny finally dropped when they realised that the numbering system had been abandoned, but that this had only been explained in Thai. Finally at 4pm she handed over our forms and was told to come back in 5 days to collect the visa's. As we had already rung the embassy to make sure we could collect the visa's on our return from Koh Tao in mid-August, this didn't go down too well. Especially as the man at the counter insisted that 5 days was when we had to collect them. His parting words were 'well just come back when you can be bothered then'. I guess we'll find out in a few weeks if they are still there waiting for us.

Our apartment on Koh Tao is roomy with a sea view and aircon. A cleaner comes in every two days together with fresh towels and bed linen. The apartments are new, but lacking in kitchen equipment, in other words there isn't any and the new 'Thai' word every time I ask for something is 'no have'. The price of electricity is extortionate at 17baht per unit and the owner assures me that this is because the supply is private, not government. This might be true as I know of other places where this is the case, but last time we only paid 2baht per unit. This will cost us at least £200 per month and so I negotiated a discount on the rent. Ever since everything is 'no have'. From coat hangers to knives and forks, they don't have anything. Fortunately we have been able to borrow all we need from Sam's brother.

Deyna has completed her PADI Rescue diver course and is now more highly qualified than both Sam and I. I think Danika got a bit fed up with having CPR practiced on her and having to pretend to drown in the sea so she could be 'rescued'!

I have decided not to do my Rescue and then Dive master courses, but to add some bolt on technical skills to my qualification. In particular I intend to do deep diving and Nitrox. Nitrox is a different air mixture to the normal compressed air you usually breathe underwater and allows you to dive deeper and for longer without decompression problems. This is useful, because there are several WW2 wrecks in the area and some are at 50m+ depth.

Sam has taken up Thai boxing to keep fit (Muay Thai), but only the training aspect of it as she has no intention of getting in the ring and we went to see a Thai boxing match the other evening to show support for Sam's gym. It is deeply ingrained in Thai culture and before each bout there is a display/dance by one of the combatants. No doubt heavily frowned upon by our western sensibilities they think nothing of matches with kids as young as five years old. Of course, they are too little to do any real damage to each other and everyone loudly cheered them on, especially the compare who was the father of one of them.

Danika has also got the diving bug and has done her 'Bubble Maker'. She is too young to take her Open Water qualification as you have to be at least ten years old, but she is allowed to go down to 2 metres. She wore all the same equipment as us (in miniature) and spent 45 minutes at the bottom of the swimming pool doing acrobatics and playing underwater Frisbee. She loved it and took to breathing underwater very quickly.

Sam's brother Luke has started a restaurant called Aroi (Delicious in English) with two friends, Dave & Wendy. They have been open three weeks and it's going well. One of the attractions is the four large crocodiles in a huge concrete tank. Although not actually part of the restaurant the land is owned by the same Thai who they rent from and is only a dozen metres behind the kitchens. No one seems to know how they got there or how old they are, but there are no Crocs on Koh Tao naturally. In fact they may even be Alligators. Diners have often heard about them and so Luke has to regularly take quick tours with a torch in between courses.

Dave and Wendy had to go on a visa run a few days ago and as the Thai chef can't cook the European dishes on the menu I was called in to help. So I finally got to realise a dream of being a professional chef for a couple of days, it was brilliant! Sam was at the 'front of house', getting people to come in off the street and ensuring the smooth running of the restaurant.

Day 287 - 319  Sunday 23rd July to Thursday 24th August 2006 - Colin's Account

Well, I'm still here on Koh Tao and another year older. A bit of a milestone birthday this time, but more of that later.

Deyna and Danika have gone home back to Ireland and Sam is in Canada for her Mum's birthday, so I have been on my own for a while now. I've found that even tropical islands can get lonely sometimes.

The service at our apartment continued to slowly deteriorate as the island filled up with people after the full the full moon party on Koh Pang Yang (the next island along). We found that when cleaning they took our bedcovers away except for the bottom sheet as they didn't have enough to go around. Then the cleaning stopped altogether, then the laundry service stopped and then the water ran out. It seems they have too many people. Funny that, you'd think they'd know how many rooms they have and plan accordingly.

The government is beginning to make it presence felt on the island a little more and they have even patched up the roads a little including 'death corner', where Koh Tao 'tattoo's' i.e. cuts and abrasions or worse are common from all the accidents.

We went over to Koh Samui to meet Sam's friend Gina which takes an hour and a half on the high speed ferry. There is a great Brazilian restaurant there called Zico, complete with Brazilian dancers in their feathers and plumes and not much else! The food is excellent and a bit like a Carvery. The have a huge BBQ roasting all manner of meats and fish and they then come round to your table holding a large spit or skewer and carve off slices of whatever you fancy. They keep coming as long as your disk (about the size of a beer mat) is green side up. When you want a break or can eat no more you just flip it over to the red side.

Samui itself is much busier than Koh Tao and a bit of a concrete jungle, we don't like it really. I did take the girls on a canopy adventure, while there, which is a set of six long steel cables strung between trees high above the forest. It's like being on a rope slide, except you wear a full harness and whiz between platforms at high speed. On the less steep gradients you can do acrobatics so I hung upside down and prayed my sunglasses wouldn't fall off. Danika did admirably well bearing in mind she is only just nine and the drops were 40 metres in places.

The weather has been quite stormy and the trip back was pretty awful. Apart from the long wait due to delays, the journey took 3 hours and a lot of people were sick, including Gina's friend Andy who spent nearly the whole journey hanging over the side. Sam, Deyna, & Gina took seasickness tablets and were zonked out. Danika is too young to take them and made a valiant and successful effort not to be sick, I mostly played games on my Palm and kept an eye on them except for a freak wave which soaked me at one point. 

I completed my Nitrox and Deep diver courses for which I borrowed a full body exposure wetsuit and dive computer. Nitrox does not let you dive deeper than on normal air, in fact you can't go quite as deep because of Oxygen poisoning, but you can stay down at depth for longer. The deep diving was fun as just two of us sat on the sandy bottom at Chumphon Pinnacle 40.4 metres below the surface of the gulf of Thailand. I saw my first sharks - black tip reef sharks and we batted an egg yolk backwards and forwards and looked at the red crisp packet we had brought down which had turned black and shrunk to a much smaller size. 

You can't stay down very long at those depths and we were within less than a minute of hitting our decompression limit, so it was time to leave. On one dive Deyna and I saw a school of Pilot Wales. There were about ten of them swimming alongside the boat and leaping into the air. We followed them for about half an hour until another Buddha view boat packed with Japanese students arrived. They looked more like they were thinking about lunch rather than 'oohing and aahing' at the wonderful sight, so we waited until they went off again.

Sam has been busy at the Muay Thai stadium and both her and Danika have been going training on a regular basis. Gina also went along a few times while Andy did his Open Water diving course and roared about the island tracks on his rented trial bike.

One night we all dressed up in silly outfits and decided to go to Luke's restaurant, while the jacket potato's were cooking on the BBQ. We had to make do with what we had, but have a look at the photo's when I send them up. I think we beat the crocodiles as the main attraction that evening. Sam certainly did with her futuristic look!

Danika's 9th birthday was enjoyed by all and we had dinner at Aroi with some friends and a little Dutch girl called Lisa that Danika met on the beach. Her Dad enjoys a bit of free diving and can go down to 20 metres, I quite fancy doing that and have been down to 11 metres so far. It gives the divers quite a start when they look round and see someone with just a mask on swimming along beside them. They do have courses here so I might take one.

We have delayed our trip to India, because of Sam's trip to Canada and so we now plan to fly out on the 10th September, if we ever get the damn Indian Visa's.

My birthday, although unwanted, was a great day. Sam had checked us into a beautiful resort at the end of the island for a couple of days and I had lots of little presents to open. All the staff in the resort restaurant came over and sang happy birthday to me, which was quite embarrassing, as did Sam's mum down the telephone which is a regular event and always welcome.

Luke decided to buy me a gladiators outfit and some walkie talkies, worlds apart technologically it didn't stop me wearing the full regalia at Choppers bar and grill, where only our friendship with the owner Jeff, saved us from a telling off by the staff.

We've had a bit of trouble with one of our tenants who seems to complain endlessly and has managed to damage the swimming pool liner, but he's a doctor in a mental institution and someone once said you have to be one to know one.

On the way to take the girls to Bangkok, we saw a diver who had decompression sickness, he was connected up to a drip and breathing pure oxygen. At the pier on Samui he was met by the SSS Recompression Chamber Network people and whipped away in an ambulance. It wasn't too serious though as the bad ones are helicoptered out along with the bad motorbike casualties.

For now the weather is calm again and extremely hot, the sea is flat and the views are beautiful. Sam is back in only 3 days now and I can't wait.

Day 310 - 342  Tuesday 15th August to Saturday 16th September - Sam's Account

Phew, phew and triple phew! The last few weeks have been totally full on. Mum's birthday in Canada, Luke's birthday the day I arrived back, a leaving party for us on Koh Tao, my birthday, another leaving party and parties for the sake of parties all thrown in with regular Muay Thai sessions. We have recently arrived in Bangkok and endured more of the Indian visa saga as well as "Executive" check ups for both Colin and me at Bumrungrad; Bangkok's International Hospital.

Canada was wonderful, although very tiring. This was mainly due to the actual travelling time to and from Toronto accompanied with the 11 hour time difference. My journey took me by boat from Koh Tao to Koh Samui, by plane from Koh Samui to Bangkok and then to the International terminal where I checked in for my flights to Taipei, Vancouver and finally Toronto. The flight connections on the way there were really quite good and due to the excitement of seeing my mum and dad and Bruce and Martha (my godparents) I adjusted pretty well on the outbound journey. I would be lying of course if I pretended that my fatigue on the return had nothing to do with the activities whilst in Canada. I think we may have drunk Bruce and Martha's cellar dry at their home in Georgetown as well as a few other establishments in Toronto.

Mum's birthday was a perfect mixture of luxurious pampering, fabulous food, fine wine and great company. We hooked up with family friends, Lee and David, whom we had not seen since our previous family trip 13 years ago! No one had changed as far as I can remember although I am now a fair bit taller of course, but we all picked up where we had left off all that time ago. Martha had also booked us girls into a full day luxury spa to be pampered. My toe nail varnish is still perfectly intact 4 weeks later, quality.

Just a few weeks prior to our arrival Bruce and Martha were unfortunately in a terrible car crash. They were very lucky to survive. Poor Bruce will not be walking for some time and Martha is still confined to a wheel walker. Spirits were definitely on the up as I left and mum and dad were to be with them for a further week, which was good.

Due to Bruce and Martha's immobility, mum, dad and me ended up on a brief trip to downtown Toronto on our own, where we hooked up with dad's old Toronto-Scottish rugby pals. Cor, what an evening! I also managed to actually get dad to do some sight seeing - shock horror - and we visited the CN Tower, a must do whilst in the city. We stayed in one of the plushest Toronto hotels which was of course pure ecstasy, especially after our last 11 months of accommodation. I slept like a baby.

The food was all too good and mum, dad and me had a full blown Canadian brekkie every morning at a road side cafe called "Judy's". Coffee on tap, the best bacon ever, eggs, toast, pancakes, maple syrup, blueberry muffins ... thank god I have been doing my Muay Thai recently.

My trip was all too short and soon with a heavy heart I said my goodbyes to mum, dad, Bruce, Martha and Cleo (their gorgeous Rotty) and at 4am on the 26th August I was whisked off to Toronto airport. My baggage was checked in all the way to Bangkok this time even though I flew with Harmony (a small Canadian company) for the domestic flight to Vancouver (5 hours flying time just to cross Canada) and then had 3 hours to kill until my onward flight to Taipei with China Airlines. The flight to Taipei was 11 hours and I managed to be seated at one of the emergency exits for more leg room. In Taipei I had a further 7 hours to kill before my onward flight to Bangkok, so without any Taiwanese dollars I paid the 24USD to stay in one of the luxury lounges with my credit card. I was given a towel and toiletries to shower (you can't take any toothpaste or gels on board now), food and an armchair to sleep in for a few hours. My flight to Bangkok was only 3.5 hours and thankfully on arrival immigration was fast as it was 1am on 27th August AND more importantly my rucksack had actually followed me. Relieved, I hauled my rucksack over to the domestic airport where I was to wait for a further 5 hours for my flight to Samui. The flight from Bangkok to Samui is only 1 hour and by 9am I was safely on the Sea Tran for the 1.5 hour boat trip over to Koh Tao.

Colin was a sight for sore eyes on my arrival at the pier in Tao and he whisked me off to a posh hotel for a couple of nights to re-charge the batteries. That night was Luke's birthday celebrations, and not to be defeated by exhaustion and jet lag we swung into action and had a very fun and rather drunken evening.

I got back into Muay Thai as soon as I could, but then collapsed for a few days entirely spent. Luke organised a leaving party for Colin and me and in between we made the most of the precious time we still all had left together.

My birthday was really great fun. I had planned for something very chilled out and was over the moon when Colin had booked us into the island's top spa for the entire day. On return to our bungalow we prepared for dinner and spent the evening with Luke, Jolien and Scobby our Koh Tao mates. Tanner, Luke's partner in crime, also joined us as he is the owner of my favourite restaurant on Tao; Morava's. We ended up having a very late night with lots of outrageous fun. A great way to celebrate your 31st Birthday.

On the 13th September we left Tao. Very hard indeed to leave Luke. We took the boat over to Chumphon and then the overnight train up to Bangkok. We were in our hotel by 7am the following morning. As soon as possible we headed off for the Indian Embassy in Sukumvit to obtain our visa's. What a nightmare yet again. Firstly we waited for hours to then be told that they would not issue our visa's because we had applied too long ago and their admin system had since changed. Having tried the humble softly, softly approach we eventually managed to speak to the guy in charge and were told to come back at 4pm. Things were looking more hopeful. On our return, having spent further hours killing time, we ended up having to wait another 2 hours until anything was done. At least in the meantime we had some entertainment; a woman who had been there all day like everyone else had been very noisy and making a huge fuss. We couldn't understand what it was all about but eventually a team of doctors appeared to take her back to the loony bin. It passed some time watching her spasmodic outbursts and the embassy officials and doctors trying to calm her down.

Then, at last, with a very ungracious slap on the counter and a grunt our passports were handed back to us with the required hand written visa's. Halleluiah!! We had honestly got to the stage where we thought we were going to have to cancel our trip to India. I'm sure this is just a taste of things to come so we should try and prepare ourselves for this hugely inefficient bureaucracy.

We eventually got back to the hotel around 8pm having struggled through the horrendous Bangkok traffic and made bookings for our medical check ups the following day at the renowned and excellent Bumrungrad International hospital.

This morning our alarm went off at 6am and by 7am we had squeezed our way though the early morning Bangkok traffic once more and were checking in for our comprehensive medical check ups. Colin was so excited!!! The hospital is truly exceptional. It actually feels like a 5 star hotel. Oddly it has a range of restaurants to choose from, one of which is MacDonald's.

Our first check up was blood pressure, height, weight and visual acuity followed by a blood test (for pretty much everything you can think of) and then an electrocardiogram, ultrasound on all your innards, chest X-ray, the usual girls treat for me, and then both of us supplied our required samples, lovely. The doctor was very thorough in his questioning and overall physical examination, his bed side manner was also truly amazing. "Your husband tells me your brother lives on Koh Tao" he said to me in his impeccable English with only a very slight Thai twang. Then, "Have a wonderful time in India". They see hundreds of patients in the International section alone every day and I have to say that Bumrungrad not only puts the NHS to total shame but also the French health system. The friendly, professional efficiency with which all our tests were carried out was quite breathtaking. The Thai's are all perfectly bilingual, immaculately smart, and proud to work there, it was virtually a pleasure to be there. Well perhaps that's pushing it, but they definitely couldn't have done any more to have made the experience as pleasant as possible with a free breakfast thrown in and the results given back to us by 12.30 the same day in a second consultation with your appointed doctor. Copies will also be forwarded to us by e-mail for ease whilst we are travelling. Wow!

Feeling rather tired still, especially from today's ordeal. With all our jobs done we have nothing to do tomorrow so a lie in will be the order of the day, catch up on our e-mails, phone calls, web-site etc... then a movie and a fairly early night before our flight to Chennai (Madras) on the 17th. I can now at last take the time to get excited about our trip to India. Our next blog entry will be under the India section of the web-site home page.

P.S. We were both given the all clear. Colin could do a bit more aerobic exercise to increase his 'good' cholesterol  and I should try and cut down a little on 'bad' cholesterol, although they are both in the normal range. Other than that we are apparently the picture of health. Amazing after the constant parties of late. No need to slow down yet then, hooray!

The Thailand Journal is now finished and moves to the India journal