The Final Furlong!!

Hello again peeps,

Well, the final few days of our honeymoon were a little less hectic than the first week or so!!! We flew to Yangon from Heho and Inle Lake and spent a few hours looking around the local markets and catching up on some sleep at the Traders Hotel in Yangon. Our flight to Bangkok was late evening so we got there in plenty of time and made full use of the facilities at Bangkok Airport - after we'd gotten there, that is, because the taxi driver took us to the Don Muang Airport first instead of Suvarnabhumi Airport!!! One of those days, that's for sure...

The food at Suvarnabhumi Airport was extremely good, so we made sure to eat lots of noodles and curries before we left in case the food on the flight from Bangkok to Krabi wasn't very good - just as well we did too, because the in-flight meal was some sort of yukky flabby prawn and noodle type thing!!!

Anyways, having bought some books at the shop in preparation for the time on the beach that we had ahead of us, we caught the flight from Bangkok to Krabi. When we arrived, we picked up our cases and headed outside to find our transfer to the hotel further down towards the coast. I think the poor driver was a little surprised at the weight of our cases, but they didn't seem to affect the suspension on the van too much!!

The hotel complex turned out to be chalets dotted around the main reception and dining area building - very quiet which was good, apart from the loud racket made by various insects and birds!! On the way to the chalet, we had passed a sort of village hall that had lots of cars parked outside and much noise coming from inside - turned out to be an evening of Muay Thai Boxing, with a few of the local celebrity fighters making an appearance. After we'd made ourselves comfy in our chalet, Mike took the video camera down to the village hall and watched a few bouts - when in Rome, and all that!!

The next day, after breakfast, we transferred to the next (and last!) hotel that we stayed in. We had an interesting journey down to the beach on a sort of moped/ice cream van type thing, luckily our suitcases didn't fall off!! Then, once we'd extricated ourselves from the strange scooter type thing, we jumped onto a boat (slightly bigger than the ones at Inle Lake, but not much!) and headed off around the coast to Rai Lay Beach West.

The scenery was absolutely spectacular, towering cliffs and lush green trees above a white beach and very blue sea - I guess we could put up with this for a few days!! The poor boatman and Mike both risked hernias getting our suitcases off the boat and onto the beach, and then we had a bit of a mission wheeling the suitcases through the dry sand further up towards the resort - I guess this place is kinda designed for back-packing Uni students rather than 30-somethings who need a lot of stuff to survive!!

Still, the beach was too good to resist so we ditched our stuff in our li'l chalet, got changed into more suitable clothing and headed off to laze in the sun for a while. It was, unsurprisingly, extremely hot so we went for a nice shady spot at the far end of the beach hoping that we wouldn't be disturbed too much. Well, that hope was short lived!! Every 20 minutes or so, a local person would come up and ask if we wanted a manicure, or a massage, or some cold drinks, or a beach mat... And then the first one would come back and start the whole process again - grrr!! They did seem to get the hint after a while though, fortunately!!

That night, went to the restaurant at the resort and had a very good dinner - the service left something to be desired, but then we weren't in any rush (luckily!) so it was all good. After dinner, we went for a nice romantic walk along the beach and looked at the stars and so forth over the sea (this time without hoardes of children running around all over the place!). There was an electrical storm out over the sea which was pretty spectacular (no thunder at all, I didn't mind that!!), so we stayed and watched that for a little while before heading off to bed.

The next day was equally hot so we headed off to the beach (a walk of about 30 seconds) early and guarded our bit of beach against the other European bods that were trying to muscle in on our turf!! There were lots of little sort of see-through crabs running around the beach, I think some of them were a bit annoyed cuz we'd put our beach mats over the entrances to their homes but we were a lot bigger than them so they made nothing of it!!

We were a little confused by the fact that the staff at reception thought we were checking out on the 9th, but we assured them that it was definitely our last day on the 10th so they apologised for the mix up and upgraded us to a Superior Chalet (very posh!) for our last night - how kind, we thought! So, Mike moved the suitcases and so forth over to the new chalet and we thought no more about it...

So, after much sun-soaking and book reading (I'd bought Mr Nice, the Howard Marks autobiography - probably not the best idea given that drug offences in Thailand can result in the death penalty, but nobody seemed to notice luckily!) we ventured in to the restaurant for some lunch and then lounged around in the chalet with the air-con turned up full blast - this was made doubly sweet when we turned on the TV and saw CNN reports that there were snow drifts and other forms of winter chaos taking hold of the United States, hehe!!!

And that was pretty much the pattern for the next day too, although on the last day we did actually venture to another restaurant further along the beach for dinner. We really did have some excellent food while we were there (as we have all the way along, to be honest), but we had to keep asking for chopsticks to eat with and the waiters kept warning me to be careful every time I ordered something even slightly spicy - was it that obvious that we weren't local?!

On the last night, there was another even more impressive electrical storm over the bay (again no thunder, thankfully!) which we were able to watch from the veranda of the restaurant while eating dinner. We also discovered coconut shakes (not some sort of nervous disorder, but kind of a milkshake without the need for milk!) which were gorgeous, so it's as well that we were given a smoothie maker for a present back home!

We got up relatively early the next morning, our last morning in the tropics, and packed all stuff up ready to catch the boat back to Krabi. We had a few hours to spare so we relaxed on the veranda outside the restaurant of our hotel, watching the world go by and taking some photos. There were some very cute li'l kittens sleeping in the shade with their mum, so we took some pictures of them too - I think Boost could have eaten them all for breakfast!!

Then we had the very picturesque journey across the bay on the boat, then a drive through the countryside to the airport at Krabi - I think this airport has the best view of any that we've been to over the last few weeks, I'll download the photo later so y'all can see what I mean. Anyway, we raided the Dairy Queen shop for some Mocha smoothies and then waited for our flight back to Bangkok. The food on the flight was slightly more palatable it has to be said, but there wasn't very much of it - just as well really because then we had an excuse to eat more yummy food when we got to the airport!!

So that was that really, or so we thought...

We rocked up to the baggage check in and handed over our tickets and passports to the nice lady behind the counter. She read the tickets then drew our attention to the fact that the time of the flight we should have caught was 0045hrs on the 10th April - we had turned up at the airport to catch a flight at 0045hrs on (what was to us) the 10th of April but in actual fact was the 11th of April... Oops - what a mistaka to maka!!

The confused hotel staff made more sense to us then - we should have booked out of the hotel when they said, they were absoultely right!! Oh well, looks like we got a free nights accommodation from the nice people...

We threw ourselves at the mercy of the staff at the airport who promised that they would try and get us on a flight back that night - the Qantas flight that we thought we should have been on was already overbooked, so we spent a very nervous 30 minutes waiting to see if the British Airways flight would have any spare places... As luck would have it, they did so we weren't stranded in Thailand after all - hurrah!! Mike was never in any doubt that we would get home, but I had visions of being sold into white slavery and getting sent to Haiti or something - you never know in these strange foreign places...

Having sorted out our flight predicament, we then only had a short while to buy the few bits that we wanted to get for people and then get to the gate. Shopping obviously took the priority, so we then had to sprint from one end of the airport to the other in order to get the flight - when we got to the gate, Mike commented that it would be quite (but not hugely) amusing if we it turned out to be the wrong place. Lucky us to get the only Thai stewardess with a sense of humour - she looked at our boarding passes, then told us with a completely straight face that we were at the wrong gate... She then cracked up at the way our faces dropped, and we twigged that she was winding us up - what a cow!!

The flight home seemed to take an absolute age, not helped by the fact most of the cabin crew were very camp and having mid-life crises - nuff said!! We were quite glad to be home actually, we took 9 flights over the last 2 weeks and we can safely say that this was the worst one out of the lot - boo sucks to British Airways!!!

Our trusty taxi home was waiting outside the airport and we made it back to Somerset in no time at all - we did grovel abjectly to the nice chap, because it turns out that he'd made the trip up to Heathrow the morning before to pick us up and we, quite clearly, hadn't been there!!! Again, oops!!!

So that's the story of our first couple of weeks of marriage. It's all been pretty cool so far, the wedding presents arrived on the 12th which was also very groovy - everyone has been very generous, and we now have a whole hill of thank you letters to write. Still, we ain't complaining - that's a very small price to pay for such a special wedding day and honeymoon!!

Keep an eye on this blog though, we'll be downloading photo's to go with the appropriate entries just to make y'all very jealous of our travels. If anyone wants to add anything to the blog in the same way that Mum and Ali have, let us know your email address and we'll give you access to the blog - we have the technology!!

I have no doubt that we'll catch up with everyone soon, but in the meantime take it easy!!

Lots of love,

Mike and Nicky xxxxx