New Trip, New Blog!

For our next travels we have a new blog! You can find it easily by following this link: http://gemandtimnz.blogspot.com/.

This time you will also be able to sign up for emails so that you will get them sent right to you when we find the time to write one... You can do that from here, or the site. 

We loved our time travelling in Asia and Bangkok in particular and so leave for New Zealand at the end of September before passing through Thailand again. Hopefully we will be adding more photos and stories to the blog soon!

Leaving On A Jet Plane

That’s it, we are off! A sad day, we are going to miss Bangkok, I think we both feel at home here and I look forward to being back next year! This may not be the end, it is a consideration to come back next year if the right job comes up. I have really enjoyed my time out here, I think It has been good for the both of us, we needed to get away from England and luckily we are only back for a few months as I feel neither of us is ready to move back there permanently. We have a couple of days to hang out in Mumbai, a chance to check out India and see if we like it, before arriving back in London ready to meet up with Carys! Hopefully this blog will fulfil it’s original remit and serve as a permanent reminder of our time out here and the fun that we have had.

Now, on to the next adventure!

The Final Countdown

Tim and I have a couple of weeks left in Bangkok before going to Mumbai and back to the UK. We have managed to get our Indian visas, they were double the cost of what was stated on the internet. That was rather annoying; this little jaunt has turned into a money pit. Anyway, now that has been sorted we are spending our time seeing the last few things that we would like to see and to buy a few souvenirs at the night market.

We nipped to the might market last night and managed to pick up most of the things on our ‘to buy’ list. It took a good 4 hours but it’s done now! Today we are going to visit a forensic museum, a little gory but should be fun, we saw another example of a Thai house this week, it used to be owned by a former Thai PM until his death. The house is less well known than Jim Thompson, but this house doesn’t have a silk brand behind it using it to promote their products! It was nice to see that the Thompson house wasn’t just a one off.

I think that we will go back to the palace one more time, we also have a couple of parks to visit and a lingam shrine. We have also discovered an all you can eat sandwich and ice cream buffet at a hotel on Sukhumvit, we were considering going to a buffet before we left and the mention of ice-cream clinched it for us!

We are off to a Thai friends birthday party on Friday which will by good fun, Tim was invited today while he was in work helping Mr Yim install some software on the school computers. We have a couple of other people to see before we go, Jackie and Christian Bishop, they are moving to Beijing and have invited us to stay or at least meet up with them in China when we are there, it will be nice to have friends out there! Also a guy called Douglas, I have only met him once but Tim knows him from school IT circles.

We have had a practice run at packing, things still need to be re-arranged and we will end up sending a box home unfortunately but the flat is bear now. We have boxed up all other the things that we are giving away to Carys and Cookie and will drop them round at their flats next week. We especially need to re-pack due to the huge amounts of things we bought at the night market!

Chilling In Chiang Mai

Almost as soon as we arrived back from Krabi we were on a plane again on our way to Chiang Mai to visit Keith and Sara Wilson. They house sit for a few weeks each summer at a friends house. Their friends bought a traditional Thai home and renovated it, adding a modern extension and pool. Keith picked us up at the airport and drove us to the house where we were introduced to the family dogs, all four of them, and the two male buffalo! They lived at the bottom of the garden. The family bought them to eat the grass!

The property also has a massive lake with a little gazebo that sat out over it. It was Sara’s birthday they day before we arrived, Sarah Cook was staying also and our visit overlapped hers by a day so we all celebrated Sara’s birthday together by driving to Chiang Mai as the house was in the sticks, about a 20 minute drive, and taking tea at a nice Thai restaurant and furniture shop, one that Tim and I took Katie and George to on Sara’s recommendation.

After tea we nipped to a supermarket as it was decided that a BBQ would be a good way of ending Sara’s birthday celebrations. After shopping we all headed back and got in the pool, I was a little trepid, I hate getting wet, but one of the dogs, I nicked named stinky, she did smell, took a strong liking to me so I got in the pool eventually as I was covered in slobber and dog hair! Gross! The dogs didn’t get in the pool so I was safe.

Tim and Keith took charge of the BBQ and did a good job, we all picked a dish to prepare, I chose chicken and vegetable kebabs, Tim made beef burgers, Cookie grilled marshmallows for dessert and Sara made her amazing potato salad. All in all the BBQ went down well and we were all really stuffed! Everyone (except me) popped into the pool for a late night swim before bed, we were all knackered, I blame the country air!

Cook left the next morning, she is in Indonesia for a while before flying to the UK for a holiday, we will meet up with her backpacking in Australia next year.

We didn’t get up to much just the four of us, it was really nice just relaxing and hanging out. Tim and Keith managed to stay up most of the next night drinking beer and discussing music and making up quizzes while Sara and I barely managed to stay awake past 11! We went for a bike ride one of the days, a good four hours on the bike left me rather saddle sore, I am still bruised a week later!! We stopped off at a lake which had these little boat house things with dinning tables and chair on, we ordered some light snacks and drinks and were then paused out onto the lake while we ate. It was cool, there were these massive fish that we threw rice to.

When we rode back to the house Tim and Keith unpacked the guitar hero game and we all ‘rocked out’ for an evening, I discovered a new talent of mine, and managed to stay up quite late. Tim and Keith managed to rock all night and completed their ‘career’ and crept up to bed at 5am!

While we were staying in the house the buffalo escaped from their paddock, they usually managed to escape into the lake to wallow but occasionally while the were in the garden we would all grab a stick and try to herd them back, we were usually in swimwear while doing this so looked a little absurd, we attempted this a couple of times but at the last minute generally one of the dogs scuppered events.

While Tim was up playing guitar hero apparently the buffalo loitered by the pool and one watched them play their game through a patio window. He was obviously a fan of 80’s rock. Tim and Keith eventually managed to get them back in their paddock and re-fix the fence so they couldn’t get out so easily again!

On our last day we managed to hang out by the pool again and play some more guitar hero, I was proper rubbish in the day time mind! The spirit of rock was no longer with me. To pass a couple more hours Keith & Tim took it upon themselves to take the little plastic boat onto the pool for some "fun and games". This seemed to involve them using in-jokes about an extremely geeky video about how to fly a jumbo jet they had both seen and attempting various ways to cross the pool or sink the boat. I had as much fun as they seemed to taking pictures and videoing their antics!

Our flight home was delayed until midnight so we had plenty of time in the day. Keith and Sara packed up some Pimms and we drove out to a temple on a hill which was newly built, it had all of the animals of the Chinese calendars sculpted outside covered in shiny mirrored tiles, it was really pretty. After that we drove down to a lake with a dam and sat on the dam ledge to drink our Pimms and watch the sun set. It was rather beautiful.

We went back to the house to grab our bag and say goodbye to the dogs, then we all drove to Chiang Mai to have dinner on the river before being dropped off at the airport. We will see Sara and Keith when we are in Bangkok next year so it’s not all sad thankfully but it does make you wonder if we are making a mistake leaving so soon.

There are more photos and videos in our Flickr Set.

Railay Beach

The Monday after Tim’s last day at school we flew to Krabi, courtesy of the £4.50 voucher flights from Air Asia! We were lucky, the flight was on time and when we arrived at Krabi there was a well organised bus service that took us to the Ao Nang pier. We planned to get a boat from the pier to Railay beach, only accessible by sea. 5 of us managed to get a boat, the boatmen only accepted 8 otherwise we would have to pay for the missing passengers so we had to pay for the missing 3 so we could get to the beach.

We were really pleased with the beach; it is beautiful, the Lonely Planet wasn’t wrong in stating that it is the best beach in Thailand. It was exactly what we wanted from a Thai beach.

We didn’t have any accommodation booked, the beach is split in 2 the West side with the beautiful beach and the east side which overlooks mangroves. Obviously the cheaper accommodation was on the east side, a 10 minute walk away from the beach. So off we trudged, we had a bungalow in mind but on our way discovered a set of different bungalows with a pool for only 300 baht a night, BARGAIN!

Straight away we packed our beach bag and made our way to the beach, it was overcast, great travelling weather, but not so good for the tanning. As it was low season the beach was practically empty which was fantastic for us. The sand had loads of swirl patterns in the sand, made by hundreds of little crabs, they all ran around as you walked along the beach.

We gave up with sunbathing on the beach after that day as I think we managed to bring back half of it with us that afternoon, the bungalow was full of it from then on. So we used the bungalow pool instead, it had a good set of sun loungers and was hardly used. We managed to fry ourselves and both achieved rather good tans by the end of the week (it is slowly leaving us now mind you, all thanks to the lack of sun at home in Bangkok!).

We were on a budget so sought out nice cheap Thai places to eat, on the West side the restaurants were rather expensive, cheap by UK standards and I am sure that is why the tourists pay the money, they think that they are getting a bargain, however on the east side we found a nice Thai restaurant that we could eat at for 120 baht a night. You couldn’t get a portion of fried rice on the west side for that!

As usual we took loads and loads of photos, hopefully we managed to capture a little of the real beauty of the beach, but also we managed to get some photos of…monkeys! On our walk between the West and East we came across this huge group of Makak monkeys, baby ones and rather large adult ones, they sat only half a metre away from me while I took photos, it was truly amazing to be so close to such an animal and for it to be in the wild. We saw them a few times over the week, swinging in the trees, sitting on walls or eating leaves for their dinner. For me they really made the week, but for Tim I think it was the beach.

On our last day we nipped to the beach for one last sunbathing jaunt but the weather was against us, we had had blazing hot sunshine for all of our stay but on our last day the heavens opened up. We managed to avoid any down our thankfully, every time we needed to be outside it miraculously stopped! As getting a boat was dependent upon getting the right number of people together we started looking around with all of our stuff after we checked out of the bungalow. We tried the first place we knew, they quoted 700 baht! So we walked off sharpish but another boatman spotted us and said he would take us to Krabi for 150 Baht each, brilliant! It was a lot earlier than we were hoping to get one but we and two others hopped on that boat sharpish!

So we arrived in Krabi town with 6 hours until our flight. Krabi town is very underwhelming. A typical Thai town, all concrete, huge ad signs and tuk tuk drivers! We hung out at the ice cream parlour and avoided yet another downpour and then mooched around the town, eventually finding a brand new shiny white Buddhist temple on a hill top where we sat and looked over the town for an hour before hunting for a reasonably priced taxi to take us to the airport.

We arrived very early to the airport but the plane was almost on time and we made it home in the early evening, enough time to put all the washing on and to sweep up all of the sand brought back with us!

All our photos from the week can be found in our Flickr Set.