Bangkok and Khao Lak

After an Airplane ride from hell of ten hours in the smallest airplane chairs I have ever seen I arrived at Bangkok Airport. My neighbour in the plane was a nice Austrian who helped me filling in the immigration form for my visa there. The Thai people are keen to see you leave so everything is wel if you have a ticket to leave the country. My first stamp in my passport! I was a bit proud of that, dopey huh. The weirdest thing was that before immigration we had to walk past a camera in a neat row slowly and look into the camera. When we past the camera I took a sneak peek on the screen and noticed it was a heat seeking camera. They were looking for people with a fever to quarentain them, they are spastically scared for the swine flu here. Everyone is walking around with mouthcaps and eyeballing all foreighners suspiciously. I took my ginourmous bag and my diving bag from the belt en stuffed my diving gear back into the bag. After I took some money from the ATM. Thai money is like monopoly money. It looks weird and is ridiculously big. You could wipe you *** twice with a 1000 bath bill. I took a cab in from op the departures terimal. My cousing John told me it was cheaper, and it is!! 300 bath I paid the guy that is approximately 6 euro's for 45 minutes of driving. We couldn't find the hotel at first so we had to stop and ask some people, which made the trip even longer. The hotel, called Villa ChaCha, was a very neat and beatiful hotel, full with buddah statues and there was a beautiful pool. I dumped my bags and went on the streets to find something to eat. I ate the best cocos soup with chicken ever in my life at a little stand on the street. I bet it would've tasted even better had I not cought a terrible cold. Imagine, sneezing, snotting and coughing in a humid city of 45 degrees centigrade... I thought I was melting away.

After my lunch I decided to hide in my air conditioned room. I turned in at three and came out at seven to take a dip in the pool filled with french people. After I tried a nice Thai dish, Flied Glass Noodles... Very Nice! And a Papaya juice, the best juice I have ever tasted. The Thai sure know what is good. A few moments later a Monsoon rain started to fall out of the sky. It was possible to swim in the streets, so my plans to go to the MBK mall litteraly fell in the water. Soon I had some companions at my table, since the rest of the tables floated in the rain. I met a guy and a girl from Austria (again). Roberto a guy who has been traveling for over 25 years with an incredible life story gave me some good ideas of places to visit that are not in the lonely planet. So Hopefully I will meet him in december when I'll be back in Thailand to make a few dives near the similan islands.

The next morning I was up at 5:30 to catch my plane in Phuket where I was picked up by the Sister of my dive instructor to go to Kao Lak. A town that was gruesomely damaged by the tsunami in 2004. The signs are still clear though the village looks very good taken care of and is almost completely rebuilt now. The town is surrounded by a jungle and close to a great national park, that I hope to visit for some hiking in the following days here. I rented a scooter and got on the road with Wilma (the sister) and we went to the most wonderfull beach. Like on postcards. A real bounty beach where we ate squid fritter, green prawn curry, stirfried morningglory (no idea what vegetable it was) and sweet banana in cocos milk as desert in a cute bamboo furnished restaurant. The weird thing is that the sun goes down here at 7 PM. So we had to drive back in the dark, which was a bit tricky since there are no lights whatsoever on the road, it was hard to recognise the way back. Home again we went for a Thai massage. One and a half hour of bliss for less then 5 euro's. I allmost feel like I'm robbing them. Now, totally sitasfied, I'm sitting on my bed contemplating what to do tomorrow... I'm sure it will be great...