We had a bad sleep last night. Wouldn’t you know it, we had 2 phone calls. One at 9:30 pm from our VISA credit card fraud department to notify us that our card has been used in Thailand. Yes, we got that straightened out fast. It was our hotel booking for the next 1 week, $345 CAD for 7 nights. The second call at 3:49 am was from a business Linda deals with, they were just checking their client file and wanted to update things. We didn’t tell her she woke us up in Thailand. Our VOIP phone line is amazing, it sends our calls anywhere in the world.
Breakfast was our usual smorgasbord of fruit, mangos, pineapple and passion fruit today. We enjoyed a Skype call with Linda’s Mom, June. Technology is great for keeping in touch and the ability to do face-to-face calls is great. We chatted with other family last night too. Later we walked up the road about 15 minutes to a coffee shop for an early lunch. We have a video of our adventure below.
Our afternoon was pretty low key, between Gary’s toe he sprained bothering him a bit and little sleep last night we hung out at our villa, surfed the web a bit, read some books and basically relaxed.
Our outing for supper using the Grab app turned out to be a gong show. We had typed in the name of the restaurant we wanted to go to. The driver took us to the address the app indicated and was supposed to be right but there was no restaurant there! Go figure! It didn’t help that the driver spoke no English and we can’t read Thai. After a lot of head scratching and searching google and apple maps we made a plan to get back to the fruit market that we felt was near the restaurant we were looking for. Turns out the restaurant goes by several name variations – Lynn’s Mexican and Mexican Plus! We’d originally put in Lynn’s Mexican and ended up on a taxi ride to no where we wanted to be and had we typed in Mexican Plus we’d have got to the place we needed to be! Things could be worse, we only spent $3 on our ride and hour or so wandering the streets of Rawai Beach. If nothing else, we saw some more of the area and did confirm a few landmarks
Our Mexican supper was pretty tasty. A short hike had us back to the Family Market where we picked up a huge bottle of water and then back to the fruit market. We stocked up on more mangos, bananas, passion fruit, avocado, pineapple and a watermelon for $13 CAD. The fruit here is amazing! We managed to get another Grab back to our villa. Originally we had debated about renting a car. Everyone always says rent a scooter but neither one of us feel that this is the time in our life to start riding a scooter particularly in an unfamiliar area and driving on the wrong side of the road to boot! After a few days here, we’ve decided renting a car isn’t high on our list and with the inexpensive Grab rides we could manage just fine. Even with tonight’s fiasco with the address we are still money ahead not to mention the stress of driving here. Our ride from Rawai Beach back to where we wanted to be was quite an adventure down some narrow side streets. One near miss wiping out a scooter on a blind curve and we were glad to be spectators. There is a huge part of Rawai that has narrow streets and tons of little restaurants. There are Tsunami Hazard Zone signs along the whole area. This is the exact area where a tsunami washed ashore December 26, 2004.
