Snorkelling for girrrlllss
It’s the Last Last Lanta Blog
I have an announcement to make. I am acquiring a Thai bride. She doesn’t know it yet but she’s coming home with me.
This is the Lady who gave me my first ever Thai massage and I want to take her back to the ‘deen with me. For quite a wee lady she was able to hoist me into the air with her feet. Absolutely incredible.
I have only had one decent massage before at the Kandalama Hotel in Sri lanka. Before that point I never saw the fuss. The Kandalama experience was one of pure luxury with fresh white cotton towels and proper professional massage beds with a hole for your face and a clay basin in your line of vision with a beautiful lotus flower in it, for your viewing pleasure.
But this was even better. Here I am getting the best massage ever in a bamboo bed on a beach. No white towels, no lotus flower, just me, my new best friend and her entire family having their dinner next to us.
John had been for one the day before and put the fear of God into me. “It’s quite sore actually, she kept on telling me to relax but she was crushing my legs with her entire body weight…”
But this is the equivalent of the difference between actual flu and man flu. Actual flu is a horrible, debilitating genuine illness; man flu is a slight cold that induces the male recipient to whine like a baby as if he had actual flu. The massage was just firm- deep tissue massage, I think they call it. So deep-tissue, that the woman’s elbows pressed into my back stick out the other side of my body. But sore it wasn’t. I was so relaxed that I feared I might dribble or snore, or worse, release and involuntary fart into the atmosphere.
I am never going to waste my money on a massage from Oldmeldrum’s “Bees Knees” beauty salon again. An Aberdeen College Beauty Therapy graduate whose idea of a massage is to absent-mindedly rub some lavender oil into your shoulders for ten minutes whilst she plays a new age whale noise tape isn’t going to cut it any more. I want to be elbowed, walked on and hoisted aloft. This woman even massaged my ears for goodness sake!
The other thing of note that has happened in the last couple of days is our boat trip to Koh Phi Phi.
Koh Phi Phi is the former unspoilt paradise, discovered by many a tourist and backpacker and now thoroughly spoiled. But you can’t have it all ways. There are two islands in Phi Phi, Phi Phi Don and Phi Phi Lei. Phi Phi Don is like Benidorm and Phi Pi Lei is like heaven, having been preserved as a National Marine Park. No houses can be built there and you can only visit on a day trip, which is what we did. Phi Phi Lei is also the film set of “The Beach” and as such now attracts more visitors than before, hoping to have a wee personal slice of paradise.
Our first port of call was indeed “The Beach” which is indeed lovely and instantly recognisable as the beach that de Caprio et al gambolled along. But of course now it is lined with twenty boat cruisers like ours. But the good thing is that you can only swim to get there, so that you can’t take a heap of snacks, water bottles and rubbish to leave there to last for all eternity like people seem to do on other beaches, so the sand is pristine. We didn’t go straight to the beach but moored in the deeper sea beside it and snorkelled which was fantastic. There were hundreds of brightly coloured fish, it was like “Finding Nemo” down there! They would all mill around you in shoals, centimetres from your face. Just wonderful.
John had given me an underwater disposable camera but unable to chew gum and walk at the same time, snorkeling and using an unfamiliar camera proved too much for me and I think I have broken it, so may not have photos of me and Louis pretending to be Don and Valerie Taylor (the divers filmmakers in Jaws). Still not everything has to be recorded. Put it like this; I think I will remember this for a long time, so who needs photos?
The thing about snorkeling is that when you see something you forget that you can’t shriek “Look! Look! Louis! An Angel fish!!!” without drowning yourself. I found this hard to get over and frequently snorted water up my nose in my excitement. Definitely going to learn to dive at one point. I can see why it’s so addictive. Memories of that film, “Open Water” aside……
Then we sailed on to “Monkey Beach” named after the fat baboon like beasts that hump in front of you with abandonment for your entertainment. We’ve seen monkey behaviour before to the max in Sri Lanka, where we had to endure a pornographic monkey display on our hotel room balcony. The memory of it still makes me gag, but I can’t go into why- just too revolting. Will get me banned from the blog site.
So we let the hoardes of Swedes taunt the monkeys with bananas whilst we snorkeled some more. Getting onto the beach was an ordeal though. We had to swim quite some way from the boat. Louis is getting to be quite a good swimmer and I was confident he would make it. I would take Eve with her armbands on, on my back. John however, can swim but in his head believes he cannot, which is a problem.
John didn’t learn to swim until he was in his twenties. As a kid his Mum nearly bankrupted herself paying for thousands upon thousands of lessons. But John was the swimming equivalent of that Maureen from “Driving School”, no matter how much tuition he got, he still couldn’t do it. I even tried to teach him, but he had no confidence and just couldn’t manage a length.
However, one night on our first ever holiday together in Corfu, Joe , an Army PT instructor living at our resort discovers that John can’t swim and makes it his mission to teach him. Being a bit of a one, Joe doesn’t wait til the next day to put together a carefully constructed programme of swimming exercises. No; Joe is a British squaddie . John must learn to swim NOW!
John however has tanned a bottle of Metaxa Brandy that we won in a pub quiz, that no-one else could stomach. John is very pissed. He may even have been sick at one point, I can’t remember. Joe dodsn’t care- he orders John into the pool and doesn’t let him out until he can swim like a fish. Job done. We are forever in Joe’s debt. Even though John nearly died.
That’s over fifteen years ago and John can swim pretty well, but he still doesn’t rate his ability. He also panics a bit as I lower Eve into the water. In my mind, Eve goes down the ladder first and floats for a couple of seconds with her arm bands, until I get in and position her on my back, ready for the swim ahead. John jumps in the water, for some reason wanting to get in before Eve, and duly jumps on her, knocking her off the ladder. Eve is crying hysterically.
I now have to swim half a mile with a screeching, terrified three year old who refuses to go onto my back but instead acts as a lead weight at my front, clinging tightly round my windpipe as I try to swim to the shore. There was a point where I really thought, “I have to do this, if I can’t do this, we’re both dead.” But I made it, but only because I let go of her and then took her hand and made her swim alongside me, making my job a hundred times easier…and effectively saving both our lives.
Meanwhile, John is having his own personal nightmare as he thinks too much about not being able to make the distance coupled with the responsibility of having to save Louis, should he start to fail. The distance feels so much longer than it looked from the boat. But after considerable self-doubt, he made it and Louis is a swimming god.
Nevertheless, John is freaked out by the whole thing and pays a guy to canoe him and Eve back almost immediately. He was so grateful for the guy in the canoe that I think he might have paid him half his annual salary. Where’s Joe when you need him?
Other news, there’s a snake loose at the Kaw Kwang Beach Resort! The excitement! We gather round to watch as some of the waiters try to coax the poor bugger out of the palm that it has tried to escape into with broom handles. But never fear, as some Swedish blokes are clearly snake catching experts and shout helpful advice like “You need a net!”, “You’re not doing it right!”, and “No, do it this way!”
Snorkelling for girrrlllss
It’s the Last Last Lanta Blog
I have an announcement to make. I am acquiring a Thai bride. She doesn’t know it yet but she’s coming home with me.
This is the Lady who gave me my first ever Thai massage and I want to take her back to the ‘deen with me. For quite a wee lady she was able to hoist me into the air with her feet. Absolutely incredible.
I have only had one decent massage before at the Kandalama Hotel in Sri lanka. Before that point I never saw the fuss. The Kandalama experience was one of pure luxury with fresh white cotton towels and proper professional massage beds with a hole for your face and a clay basin in your line of vision with a beautiful lotus flower in it, for your viewing pleasure.
But this was even better. Here I am getting the best massage ever in a bamboo bed on a beach. No white towels, no lotus flower, just me, my new best friend and her entire family having their dinner next to us.
John had been for one the day before and put the fear of God into me. “It’s quite sore actually, she kept on telling me to relax but she was crushing my legs with her entire body weight…”
But this is the equivalent of the difference between actual flu and man flu. Actual flu is a horrible, debilitating genuine illness; man flu is a slight cold that induces the male recipient to whine like a baby as if he had actual flu. The massage was just firm- deep tissue massage, I think they call it. So deep-tissue, that the woman’s elbows pressed into my back stick out the other side of my body. But sore it wasn’t. I was so relaxed that I feared I might dribble or snore, or worse, release and involuntary fart into the atmosphere.
I am never going to waste my money on a massage from Oldmeldrum’s “Bees Knees” beauty salon again. An Aberdeen College Beauty Therapy graduate whose idea of a massage is to absent-mindedly rub some lavender oil into your shoulders for ten minutes whilst she plays a new age whale noise tape isn’t going to cut it any more. I want to be elbowed, walked on and hoisted aloft. This woman even massaged my ears for goodness sake!
The other thing of note that has happened in the last couple of days is our boat trip to Koh Phi Phi.
Koh Phi Phi is the former unspoilt paradise, discovered by many a tourist and backpacker and now thoroughly spoiled. But you can’t have it all ways. There are two islands in Phi Phi, Phi Phi Don and Phi Phi Lei. Phi Phi Don is like Benidorm and Phi Pi Lei is like heaven, having been preserved as a National Marine Park. No houses can be built there and you can only visit on a day trip, which is what we did. Phi Phi Lei is also the film set of “The Beach” and as such now attracts more visitors than before, hoping to have a wee personal slice of paradise.
Our first port of call was indeed “The Beach” which is indeed lovely and instantly recognisable as the beach that de Caprio et al gambolled along. But of course now it is lined with twenty boat cruisers like ours. But the good thing is that you can only swim to get there, so that you can’t take a heap of snacks, water bottles and rubbish to leave there to last for all eternity like people seem to do on other beaches, so the sand is pristine. We didn’t go straight to the beach but moored in the deeper sea beside it and snorkelled which was fantastic. There were hundreds of brightly coloured fish, it was like “Finding Nemo” down there! They would all mill around you in shoals, centimetres from your face. Just wonderful.
John had given me an underwater disposable camera but unable to chew gum and walk at the same time, snorkeling and using an unfamiliar camera proved too much for me and I think I have broken it, so may not have photos of me and Louis pretending to be Don and Valerie Taylor (the divers filmmakers in Jaws). Still not everything has to be recorded. Put it like this; I think I will remember this for a long time, so who needs photos?
The thing about snorkeling is that when you see something you forget that you can’t shriek “Look! Look! Louis! An Angel fish!!!” without drowning yourself. I found this hard to get over and frequently snorted water up my nose in my excitement. Definitely going to learn to dive at one point. I can see why it’s so addictive. Memories of that film, “Open Water” aside……
Then we sailed on to “Monkey Beach” named after the fat baboon like beasts that hump in front of you with abandonment for your entertainment. We’ve seen monkey behaviour before to the max in Sri Lanka, where we had to endure a pornographic monkey display on our hotel room balcony. The memory of it still makes me gag, but I can’t go into why- just too revolting. Will get me banned from the blog site.
So we let the hoardes of Swedes taunt the monkeys with bananas whilst we snorkeled some more. Getting onto the beach was an ordeal though. We had to swim quite some way from the boat. Louis is getting to be quite a good swimmer and I was confident he would make it. I would take Eve with her armbands on, on my back. John however, can swim but in his head believes he cannot, which is a problem.
John didn’t learn to swim until he was in his twenties. As a kid his Mum nearly bankrupted herself paying for thousands upon thousands of lessons. But John was the swimming equivalent of that Maureen from “Driving School”, no matter how much tuition he got, he still couldn’t do it. I even tried to teach him, but he had no confidence and just couldn’t manage a length.
However, one night on our first ever holiday together in Corfu, Joe , an Army PT instructor living at our resort discovers that John can’t swim and makes it his mission to teach him. Being a bit of a one, Joe doesn’t wait til the next day to put together a carefully constructed programme of swimming exercises. No; Joe is a British squaddie . John must learn to swim NOW!
John however has tanned a bottle of Metaxa Brandy that we won in a pub quiz, that no-one else could stomach. John is very pissed. He may even have been sick at one point, I can’t remember. Joe dodsn’t care- he orders John into the pool and doesn’t let him out until he can swim like a fish. Job done. We are forever in Joe’s debt. Even though John nearly died.
That’s over fifteen years ago and John can swim pretty well, but he still doesn’t rate his ability. He also panics a bit as I lower Eve into the water. In my mind, Eve goes down the ladder first and floats for a couple of seconds with her arm bands, until I get in and position her on my back, ready for the swim ahead. John jumps in the water, for some reason wanting to get in before Eve, and duly jumps on her, knocking her off the ladder. Eve is crying hysterically.
I now have to swim half a mile with a screeching, terrified three year old who refuses to go onto my back but instead acts as a lead weight at my front, clinging tightly round my windpipe as I try to swim to the shore. There was a point where I really thought, “I have to do this, if I can’t do this, we’re both dead.” But I made it, but only because I let go of her and then took her hand and made her swim alongside me, making my job a hundred times easier…and effectively saving both our lives.
Meanwhile, John is having his own personal nightmare as he thinks too much about not being able to make the distance coupled with the responsibility of having to save Louis, should he start to fail. The distance feels so much longer than it looked from the boat. But after considerable self-doubt, he made it and Louis is a swimming god.
Nevertheless, John is freaked out by the whole thing and pays a guy to canoe him and Eve back almost immediately. He was so grateful for the guy in the canoe that I think he might have paid him half his annual salary. Where’s Joe when you need him?
Other news, there’s a snake loose at the Kaw Kwang Beach Resort! The excitement! We gather round to watch as some of the waiters try to coax the poor bugger out of the palm that it has tried to escape into with broom handles. But never fear, as some Swedish blokes are clearly snake catching experts and shout helpful advice like “You need a net!”, “You’re not doing it right!”, and “No, do it this way!”
Attack of the Basking Swedes
We had a day off today- what I mean by that is we put the tuc-tuc back and hung around the bungalow and pool. After touring the island yesterday I realize that we’ve actually chosen the nicest place on the island to stay.
Certainly the beach is superclean, the sea is clear and it’s relatively quiet. I can’t believe how lovely that picture of the beach looked in yesterday’s blog. The beach really was dirty. There were plastic bottles everywhere, as well as some broken glass ones. Not really what you’d expect. It depresses me that people can’t pick up their rubbish and stick it in a bin.
Mind you, we were responsible for a teeny bit of littering yesterday. Eve was TOLD to hold on tight to her crisps whilst sitting in the tuc-tuc (Eve always likes to have a snack handy). She’s hosing into a family pack of crisps and at full tuc tuc speed (a terrifying 20 mph) she lets go of the bag, which (still mostly full) hits the motorcyclist in the chest behind us. Poor guy, what a fright he got. Being Thai, of course, he doesn’t think to go completely radge and start fisticuffs with anyone…he slows down to check he can’t help us by retrieving whatever it was that hit him in the chest at full velocity. John hasn’t quite mastered the emergency stop and can do nothing but wave apologetically. Eve starts howling; after all she is now snackless and bereft….
We christen our tuc tuc Matilda, as it goes well with the Flying Martinis. And she does us proud getting us all the way from North tip to South of the Island.
I tell you, being in Thailand makes Western women feel massive. All the Thai ladies and sub size zero, no clothes in Thai shops will fit even a size ten western woman, and to add insult to injury, sometimes I have to get out of the tuc-tuc as my weight is stopping it from moving over a bump or as yesterday, from stopping the whole thing sinking into sand. I get pretty good at nipping out, pushing the thing up a hill and then hopping back on as John accelerates.
The photo of John and the kids in the tuc tuc was taken on one of these occasions. Feeling the thing sinking into the sand, I hop out, but embarrassed by the admission that my 9 stones is too much for Matilda to take, I pretend to the people behind us that I was getting off anyway, to take photos….
You might be surprised that I have time to blog whilst on my hols but I tend to do it at around midday, when it is just too hot to go out. We all have a break around now. The kids go and watch a DVD and John starts cocktail hour. However, in this resort the pool is still pretty crowded. Well not the pool, but the loungers anyway. No it’s not the Germans as Stan Boardman would have it, but this place is 90% occupied by Swedes.
I don’t get why a race of blondies can be impervious to UV rays. I have never seen people basking in the full glare of the midday sun like this lot. They are all dark brown and seem to be lying there from well before we surface in the morning til about 3pm. I am, today, delighted that I have managed to procure one remaining sun lounger as they are always occupied by blond tanned Swedes. I can’t believe it. I’m not even on it now- I’ve germanically put my towel down like a dog marking her territory and will leave it there the whole day. I’m nothing if diplomatic.
I can only stand sitting in the sun for ten mins at a time, I have along way to go til I can reach Swedish National Basking Standards. I want to know the skin cancer rates in Sweden- someone find out for me now! It’s not fair.
By the way, the Misssymartin Misssives has a guest blog from none other than Jack Martin later on. I believe he’s going to tell you all about his night out at the Thai Boxing Championships last night. Not to be missed!
Helen is a place on Earth
It’s Wednesday and we’re in Koh Lanta, which is a small island just south of Phuket. It’s just lovely. I think we’re all relieved to be here. It took us two hours from Krabi airport in which time we had to go in two ferries and at one point we thought we wouldn’t get on the last one. Our driver seemed quite concerned at the length of the queue at the pier and we’re beginning to realise that even the slightest sign of minding anything from a Thai person is the equivalent of a Scottish person throwing a wobbly. And given that travelwise we’d had a really crappy day what with Nob Air, we were expecting the worst.
Our poor driver had actually been waiting for us at Krabi Airport since 9.30 that morning. We eventually landed at six in the evening. Any other taxi driver in the whole world would have been mightily pissed off but our chap was more interested in being nice to the kids and of course, wondering what sex Louis is.
So when he looked mildly perturbed at the ferry queue we started to worry. He was on the phone umpteen times and we figured he’s maybe calling the hotel, making a contingency plan, or trying to make a deal with someone to get us across should the worst come to the worst. John decides to pitch in, in a particularly Western way- by throwing money at the situation,
“Could I offer the ferry guy some cash to get us on first?” Our driver looks confused.
“Will we get on the ferry?” I ask, since it is clear that John’s attempts at bribery and corruption are not being understood.
“Yes, no problem!” the taxi driver says before answering his phone again.
A minute passes and a few more calls are made and received. It turns out he’s been on the phone to his mates- there’s Thai Boxing championships on tonight and he’s missing them. Hence the mild annoyance at the wait at the ferry and phone calls.
We relax and enjoy the ferry trip, even though it’s dark and we can’t see what the island looks like. The kids are excited and Eve is being funny. She starts talking about our dead cat, Molly and her childminder’s dead dog (Dinky RIP). “Why did they die?”, “Are they playing together at Helen’s?”
Helen’s? It take us all a second or two to realise that she means heaven. Much laughter and a new car game is born. Song titles with Helen. Here are the best ones:
“Helen Knows I’m Miserable Now” The Smiths
“Knocking on Helen’s Door” Dylan
“Stairway to Helen” LedZep
And for you eighties music fans, “Feels like Helen” Fiction Factory. Anymore suggestions appreciated…
The fact that John’s mum is called Helen makes this even funnier, and I know she reads this blog, so hello Helen! You are now immortalised in popular song!
So we arrive in Kaw Kwang Bungalows in Koh Lanta and there’s a great thunder and lightning storm. (Eve calls it “Thunder and Flashning”). Our bungalow is right on the beach and all though we can’t see much at night, it looks like we’ve landed lucky. We’re so happy to be here that kissing the ground seems reasonable.
Hair update: I now look like Bryan May.
