February 6
We have been busy the last few days. Well, not that busy. We have walked the length of the beach, both directions, most mornings, approximately 3.6 km. The last two nights we have gone into Sala Dan or Saladan, depends on who you ask. One way is 1.8 km. We have resisted the multiple offers for a tuk-tuk and opted for the exercise to walk there and back to our hotel. It IS a round trip of 3.6 km. While we were in Saladan last night we bought two sarongs that were hand made by a local artist. They are larger than our current sarongs which is nice. We paid 450 baht each, about $20. The guy in his little shop makes them right there so you can watch his talent at work. We could have made a custom order but we will be leaving in a few days so just picked from what was on hand. Not even sure what a person would put on for it if we had the option. There is a large room in the back where you can actually make your own design, with the owner’s occasional assistance. We watched a mom and her 5 or 6 year old daughter each making their own design.
The previous night we ate at the Indian restaurant in Saladan, it was very good. We were a bit short on cash because we needed to make an ATM run. The temporary cash shortage kept us from ordering too much food. We hit the ATM we are most familiar with on the way back home because it has a 20,000 baht cash button which is just right, there is a 220 baht service fee added to the total for using the machine. That is about $9.50 CAD which kinda hurts, but you can’t carry many thousands of dollars around for three months. The price of travelling.
We have been watching the Corona Virus fiasco in the news. We are both corona free so far. There are very few, if any, Chinese people here now. We are surrounded by Swedish tourists and a few other Europeans. We saw (more like heard) what we believed to be Canadians at the Indian Restaurant in Saladan when he slipped in an “eh” at the end of a few comments. Back to Corona Virus, hopefully we are over the worst of it in 42 days because that’s how long we have before we head home through Hong Kong. We only have a 2 hour and 45 minute layover there.
February 9th we take a high speed ferry to Koh Lipe and then a long tail boat to Koh Adang for our next 2 week stay at Adang Resort. From there on Feb 23, we take a ferry to Langkawi Malaysia in the morning and later in the afternoon we fly to the city of George Town on Penang Island in Malaysia. We will stay in George Town Feb 23 to Feb 29 when we fly to Kuala Lumpur for one night and then off to the Philippines on March 1.
We will be fairly isolated until we hit Penang. Hopefully by then we will have a better idea what the virus situation is, not just the hyped up news. Our only English TV station here is Aljazeera.
Tomorrow we are planning to look at different places to stay on future trips. We like this place but in the event we are unable to get a room we want to have options that we know are good.
On our walk to Saladan we came across this family of chickens seen below.
Great read! Everything looks good…stay well…enjoy!