January 29, 2020
Nothing new here. We don’t have Corona virus. Now that the Chinese have been sent home we may be out of the woods. Just as I say that, the hotel staff escorted a group of Chinese guests to a nearby bungalow. Most of the staff had on masks. That was a first we had seen them wearing masks. Unfortunately Thailand has the highest rate of infections outside China. The Chinese are big business here, at least until recently.
Our hotel pool was out of commission for couple of days. Seems it doesn’t have a good enough filter to remove body oils and sunscreen. The water was getting cloudy and the hotel’s pool guy just kept adding chemical. Finally they had a professional come in and set up a large pump with a big 40 gal sized tank (like an oval pressure vessel). The pump ran for at least 24 hours. After the pump / filter system had done its thing, the guy vacuumed the sediment out of the bottom of the pool, there was lots. Seems his filter had somehow precipitated the sunscreen. Not sure of the process but it seemed to settle the pollutants in the water to the bottom of the pool. The pool now looks great. The talk around the pool is, how long will it take to get cloudy again? One week?
Today we sat on the two lounge chairs on the right, in the shade under the 2 umbrellas. No sunscreen, except on our faces. We survived the morning outside, but could feel that we both got a bit of sun from the short time we were in the pool and in the shade on the pool deck.
About 5:30 we walked to the Festival Market in Saladan, a bit over 1 km. We waited until the sun was low so we didn’t need sunscreen or hats. Besides it starts cooling down slightly about 6 pm. At the Festival Market we found food stalls, most of which we had no idea what the stuff was. They also had clothing stalls, most of which would not fit our sized body. Linda got the loose screw on her glasses tightened as there was actually an optometrist / eye glasses booth. We bought 2 passionfruit smoothies. Each cup has the edible innards of 2 passion fruit, a bit of water, a bunch of ice a 1/4 plus teaspoon of salt and a huge scoop of sugar. We now know the recipe. They were excellent, in fact the best passion fruit smoothies so far. Only 40 baht each, $1.80 CAD.
We walked back to the hotel and ate supper across the street at the Cicada Restaurant. We shared one chicken cashew nut dish with 2 orders of rice. For desert we shared a coconut mango sticky rice. The sticky rice was ok, but the coconut milk mixture was way way too salty. The mango was the best part.
The end of our day finds us sitting in the room where we can hear Elvis playing across the street. It’s the perfect volume to enjoy it. We passed on attending the Elvis supper show as it didn’t start until 8 pm and we were almost ready for bed by then. The heat and humidity really wears you down here. We try to get in 3 or more km of walking a day, Its hard to keep moving when its so hot. Some of our neighbours sit and drink beer by the pool all day. They look like it too!