Day 94

Thursday 3^rd February 2011

The very last day. We leave today although it will be tomorrow by the time we hit Manchester soil.

Franky had discovered there was an animal park on Koh Samui where you could have your photo taken with a tiger. He was itching to do this and as our flight wasn’t until 6.30pm we had the morning free.

Unfortunately this meant a very early start for the Franks. The alarm went off at 8.15am and we headed down for one last hotel breakfast before being picked up for the animal park.

We were scheduled to watch an animal show but it wasn’t starting until 11.00am so we had time free to check out the residents. First stop was the tiger enclosure. Here was found Tony the Leopard and Pacqiuao the tiger cub. Tony was a bit intimidating, pacing on his perch and staring down the lens of the camera. Pacqiuao on the other hand was a playful little thing aged just 4 months and sooooo cute.

We both had chance to stroke him and pose for photos. His fur was coarser than I expected. And I learnt something useful… I can add tigers to the list of animals that I am allergic to. I admit this probably isn’t something that is going to cause me great inconvenience in life but it’s good to know!

From the cats we headed up to the enclosures where the toucans were being given their breakfast of bananas. I thought this one was trying to fight his way out of his enclosure until we discovered that he just liked having his beak stroked. He’d close his eyes with an air of contentment.

There were a couple of monkeys who were keen to come over to the bars of their cages and check us out and some little red deer that really liked eating the leaves that we found scattered across the path.

Then we spotted a leopard cub. He was just 2 months old in a cage next to Pacqiuao’s sister. He was cute and playful and much friendlier than Tony. We got to pet him and give him a bottle of milk. Although he could hold it perfectly well himself.

The place the Leopard on the head game is very common is parts of Thailand

Just after this shot was taken he amused himself by biting my head!

There was a huge variety of animals you could be pictured with including monkeys, a n otter, a snake and various tropical birds but we’d spotted a baby elephant who was out ready for the show with his mahout (trainer). We grabbed some bananas to feed him and headed over. When we arrived he was dancing to Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ New York – how surreal! We fed him the bananas which he wolfed down in no time. We hosed him down. I was giving him a drink with the hose but not to his liking so he just took it off me and held the hose in this own mouth until he’d had his fill. Then Franky gave him a scrub down.

It was soon time for the show. The three Indian elephants were 2, 4 and 6 years old and performed all kinds of tricks.

Hula hooping on their trunks whilst dancing, standing on front legs, back legs or sitting down.

They could play football and had a penalty shoot out against an American from the audience. Thailand won.

One elephant won a tug of war against 16 tourists!

After this it was onto the monkey show where again 3 monkeys were performing all kinds of tricks with their trainers, eating with spoons, twirling fire batons, climbing for coconuts, playing basketball and much more.

Finally we watched a crocodile show. Four crazy Thai trainers jumped into the enclosure with 6 crocs. It was very different from the ones at Australia Zoo. One minute they were snapping and growling at the humans. The next it was as though they were hypnotised by the trainers using small wooden sticks and the trainers could then put their hands and even their heads in the crocs mouths. One trainer even put his hand through the flap at the back of the croc’s throat into his stomach. First he put a 100 Bhat note in their and then 5 minutes later he took it back out. Very bizarre!

say aaaaaaarrrrrgggggghhhhhhh!!!

We were supposed to watch a bird show and a snake show but time was marching on and we hadn’t packed or checked out of the hotel yet which we had to do before 2.00pm so we got a transfer back.

We packed up the bags one last time and said a fond farewell to the grand suite. I’m not sure we’ll ever stay anywhere quite like that again. We had time for lunch on the veranda at the hotel. typically as we were leaving the sun had finally appeared to prove that Thailand really can be a sunny tropical paradise. We had a last few beers and a dip in the pool before taking a shower and leaving the KC resort in our complementary transfer to Koh Samui airport.

Yet again it was nap time for Franky but fortunately the airport has some comfy sofas.

 In fact it’s a great airport with beautiful gardens and a complementary area with coffee, cold drinks and nibbles for all passengers.



The nap was kind of justified today though – we had an early start and have a busy night of travelling ahead of us. Typically as Franky sleeps I take the opportunity to write the blog. It will be weird not doing it anymore. I’m considering continuing when I get home although I’m not sure we’ll have anything interesting to write about… ‘got up, went to work, had tea, went to bed’!

We departed Koh Samui on schedule at 6.30pm and arrived in Bangkok for 8.00pm where we had to get our bags and recheck them in for the flight to Heathrow. We tired the ‘honeymoon card’ one last time but to no avail. The Thai lady at check in was lovely and told us that although the flight wasn’t full there were no leg room seats or upgrades available at the moment but that she would put a request on our booking and we could ask again at the gate. We’ve heard that before so it means 13 hours of cattle class for us!

We cleared immigration without any trouble and as we had a few hours to kill thought we’d see if we could buy our way into an airport lounge with our remaining Thai Bhat. It took some effort to find the lounges as the airport is massive but we eventually found them not to far from our departure gate.

The British Airways staff were not for letting anyone in who wasn’t a Business Class or first Class customer. Apparently they are trying to maintain the exclusivity of the lounges. However, we were informed that the CIP lounge would allow passengers to pay to get in. We trundled down there and parted with the last of our money – we were in! The CIP lounge also turned out to be the Air Korea lounge so the variety of food on offer was interesting – pork balls?! There were some little sandwiches and good selection of drinks. To be honest we didn’t really need feeding as we’d been given a snack on the flight from Koh Samui and were expecting to be fed as soon as we got on the BA flight. More than anything we wanted a comfy seat, a drink and the use of the internet.

We had sufficient internet to get yesterday’s blog posted….. and then it crashed. Typical bloody Thai internet dealing the final blow. It amazes me that South East Asia is where all our technology comes from and when you get here it doesn’t bloody well work!

We boarded the plane and was dismayed at being right, we weren’t in premium economy, we did manage to get bulk head seats but there didn’t seem to any extra leg room and the seats were tiny, so thin its criminal!!

The flight was long and fairly uneventful; I stuck to the plan of having tea and then getting some shut eye whilst Franky decided that the plan didn’t seem like much fun so instead chose to drink whiskey with the older guy sat next to him. 6 doubles later I could hear him telling a lady that the 10 month old baby opposite was actually to blame for the red wine spillage as the baby had toddled over and requested to read the article in the magazine regarding Harvey Kietel, apparently toddlers love him. I thought oh great that’s him drunk and turned round and fell back to sleep, I left Franky and his new friend to it.

We landed at Heathrow and after a fairly short layover and a Starbucks we boarded the jet back to Manchester.



The rain was lightly spitting as we landed just how we imagined it, the clouds were grey and full, the temperature was cold and windy and for the first time in 94 days the taxi driver didn’t help us with our baggage. It’s good to be back.

We slid the key in the lock of our lovely little home and eagerly pushed down the handle. The door swung open and we ran inside jumping around like little school kids, it’s funny how much you appreciate your house when you haven’t seen it for three months.

Ten minutes after this we’d phoned Sky, had all the HD channels switched back on and were sat on the couch with a coffee watching Sky Sports News.

I guess some things never change!

Day 93

Wednesday 2^nd February 2011

This time next week I’ll be getting up for work – Ow! That’s reality biting and it’s not pleasant.

This is our last full day of honeymoon, so as a special treat I didn’t even set the alarm. Consequently we didn’t wake up until 11.00am. When I threw back the curtains I saw that although we’d missed breakfast we hadn’t missed much else. It had clearly been raining for much of the morning.

The weather was still lousy. We had been planning to spend our last full day at the beach but there seemed to be little point.

Instead we have mostly been lazing around in the hotel room. We didn’t even get dressed – I just put on my hotel bathrobe and spent the day lazing away on the day bed on the balcony. We got peckish and so ordered room service.

I’ve been getting the blog up to date before we come home and Franky has been watching Dexter on DVD since he’s missed the last series at home. On the whole it was been a lovely afternoon.

By 3.30pm the sun still hadn’t put in an appearance so we concluded that the beach was a no go and got back into the hot tub instead to finish off the bottle of wine from last night. And then Franky went back to bed for a nap – honestly that boy can sleep for England. I have no idea how!

As part of the package when we booked the accommodation we were given a seafood dinner for two in the hotel restaurant to celebrate Chinese New Year which is today. Neither of us are much into seafood but thought we’d give it a try – it wasn’t going to cost us anything so why not!

We got down to the restaurant at 7.00pm and there was just one other couple in there who were also having the seafood platter. It was quite romantic in the candlelit restaurant overlooking the island. Although it was very windy so we couldn’t sit out.

The seafood platter was OK. We had crab and lobster, some fish fillet, king prawns and mussels. We had fun trying to get the meat out of the crab claws with our cutlery in the mood lighting. At least no one else could tell we didn’t have a clue what we were doing!

It came with tempura vegetables, salad and rice which would have all been delicious if it wasn’t a little cold. You see the thing with this resort is your expectations are really high because you’ve paid a lot of dough out and its supposed to be 5*, so when things aren’t perfect you get a bit upset. For instance, they didn’t replenish the mini bar, not the end of the world I know, but when you’ve enjoyed something out of it one night (which is chargeable at 5* resort prices) you’d expect to be able to enjoy it again the next. One night a bloke came to turn down the sheets and light an anti mosquito candle which was lovely, but where was he for the other two nights? One night a fella came to the room and delivered our pool towels and a fruit bowl, the next day we went to ask for pool towels and were told that there was too many guests for everyone to have a towel and the place was half empty! And on and on the story goes but to get back to the point the food was cold because the lovely women in the restaurant (and they were lovely) decided that we needed an additional table to put all the different foods they brought out on, by the time they’d finished messing about, the food was cold. We didn’t complain as it was complimentary but it certainly answered the question as to why the restaurant was dead every night.

After dinner we planned on doing a pub crawl through Chaweng for our last night. There had been a storm brewing all day but it had just kept spitting and then giving up. When we eventually left the confines of the room the heavens opened properly and as we made our way down the hill in the hotel’s golf buggy it began to pour with rain. Perfect weather for a pub crawl!

We jumped in a Song Thaew and headed to the other end of town where we started in Tropical Murphys with a pint of Chang a piece.

From there we moved on to an Aussie bar very inventively named Bondi bar and also stepped up our game, moving onto cocktails. They had a standard issue mediocre Thai live band on.

From there we were headed to legends when we heard music pumping out of a bar up a side street which was full of holiday makers. It was billed as a cabaret bar – it was certainly entertaining. The bulk of the ‘touts’ / ‘waitresses’ were lady boys. Some of them you had to look twice at as they were quite convincing. Others were so desperately butch it was hilarious. It seemed the majority of the cabaret dancers were also male. Some had had ‘the op’ other just liked playing dress up. There were a few female dancers in there too to add confusion. We spent an hour making our way through a jug of vodka red bull and playing ‘boy or girl?’

 

When it was time to leave we were accosted by one of the ‘waitresses’ who asked if we would like a photo. It seemed rude to refuse so we agreed. I was first as the ‘lady’. I was more than shocked when ‘she’ hoiked down ‘her’ clingy dress to reveal her boobs and then grabbed my hand and thrust it on top. Franky wasn’t getting away with it either. The camera was passed to me and then it was his turn!

Finally ‘she’ demanded a tip for the photo. Franky dug in his wallet and pulled out 100 Bhat. ‘She’ wanted that placing in ‘her’ knickers which ‘she’ pulled down leaving under no illusion that ‘she’d’ gone for the full top and tails option with ‘her’ surgeon!!! I had honestly thought there were no more ‘experiences’ to be had as the honeymoon was so near the end – how wrong could I be!

A little dazed by what had just occurred we hurried to the safety of legends bar for some of their super strong cocktails in the hope that we could obliterate some of the memories.

A few drinks later at 2.00am we headed back to our little haven of luxury for one final night.

Day 92

Tuesday 1^st February 2011

We woke up at 9.30am in the comfiest bed, it might even be more comfortable than our bed at home but don’t tell it we said so! I’d set the alarm because I didn’t want to miss out on the breakfast in a 5 star hotel. I wasn’t disappointed. There was a variety of things to eat on the self service bars – fruit, cereal, yoghurt, toast, jam, croissants, bacon, tomatoes, sausage, pancakes, cheese, ham, bread, fried red snapper and rice (I kid you not – they were catering for all cultures here!). there was an egg chef to make you fresh eggs however you wanted them. There was even a juice chef with a variety of fruit and vegetables. You could pick the combination and he would make fresh juice and bring it to your table. I could get used to this!!!

After breakfast we made our way down to the pool. It was an infinity pool looking out over the ocean.

The sun finally decided to make an appearance and we headed down to the beach. There was a shuttle bus service operated from reception.! They took us down to the other end of the resort to their sister hotel located on the beach. The sun loungers were actually double beds with independent head ends so you could have it set to your own personal preference and were really comfy. Gone are the days of trying to get comfy on a hard plastic sun lounger.

We had lunch at a beach restaurant. I had a fantastic massaman curry with huge chunks of beef.

All too soon it was time to leave the beach and head back to the hotel in the shuttle bus. We grabbed a quick shower to de-sand before heading to the hotel’s spa for a massage. This was included in our booking for free and should have cost £76 for the two of us! We had a full hour aromatherapy massage each – bliss!

After that we headed to the hotel bar to watch the sunset where they were doing complimentary red wine for guests – yay!

Franky was worn out from his day of luxury and pampering and so he went for a sleep while I enjoyed the facilities back in our room.

For dinner we had decided to go to a restaurant that came highly recommended called ‘The Shack’ at Fisherman’s Village, Bophut. This turned out to be abot 25 minutes drive away in a taxi but the girls at reception were more than happy to sort one out for us – you really don’t have to left a finger in this place!

The place is owned by an Aussie bloke called Larry and is famous for it’s steaks. After starters of ribs (Franky) and volcanically hot buffalo wings (me – wlthough I couldn’t finish them – they made my nose and eyes run they were so hot!) we had steak (me) and surf and turf (Franky). This was all washed down with a good Chilean red.

After dinner we had intended to have a potter around the village and check out a few bars as it looked pretty cute but it seemed that by midnight it was pretty much closed so we flagged down a Sang Thaew (truck with two benches in the back) and headed back to the resort. It must be well known for honeymooners as when we told the driver where we were staying the immediately asked if we were on honeymoon.

We’d picked up another bottle of red wine and jumped back in the hot tub to end another lovely day.

Day 91

Monday 31^st January 2011

The alarm went off and we had to pack AGAIN! However, anything was better than staying here another night. Franky headed off to reception to ask for our money back for the remaining three nights. Not wanting to offend by telling them what we thought of their island we had simply agreed to tell them that we needed to go home unexpectedly. Due to the language barrier he got no sympathy but the lady readily agreed to give us a refund – result!

We had to collect our laundry and so couldn’t leave until the 2.30pm boat. We had a couple of tuna sandwiches for brunch and sat it out in reception. The hotel transferred us back to the pier where I was delighted to climb aboard the vessel of death from the previous day and set sail.

Fortunately the weather was a little better today and the sea a little less rough. I even saw the sun on a couple of occasions as it peeked out from behind a cloud – everything was looking up!

When we got back to Big Buddha pier we dived in the nearest internet café to sort out a hotel. Franky’s perusal of laterooms came good again and we got a great deal on a 5 star resort at the on a hill overlooking the end of Chaweng. This was maybe only 20 minutes walk from where we had been staying two nights ago. What’s more if we stretched ourselves a bit we could afford the grand suite – with a hot tub on the balcony – now this was starting to sound like a fitting end to the honeymoon.

We jumped in the nearest taxi and asked them to take us straight there. On arrival we were delighted to find welcoming reception staff who ushered us to the bar area with stunning views over the island as our room was prepared. They explained that this may take a short time as the suite was quite large (108 square metres) and we’d only booked it 30 minutes before we arrived!!!!

When we were shown to the room it was certainly worth the wait. On the 4^th floor of the hotel the views from the enormous balcony were spectacular.

The balcony itself was bigger than many of the rooms we have stayed in thus far. It has two large day beds for sunbathing, table and chairs and the hot tub jacuzzi for two – perfect.

Inside we have a huge bed and a flat screen TV in the bedroom and another flat screen with DVD player and surround sound system in the lounge which is kitted out with a couch and a couple of armchairs. We have a mini bar fridge and a coffee machine. The bathroom has his and hers sinks and his and hers showers. There are even two loos in the room – one in the bathroom and a ‘guest loo’ just off the lounge. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life!

After running around switching everything on and off and giggling like school children we thought it was time to get ourselves sorted and head out. This involved more surprises. The hotel is built at the top of a very steep hill but this is no problem for us. As we reach reception we are greeted by a member of staff in a golf buggy who is waiting to take us down to the main road that runs through the resort. We are whisked down the hill and meander along the road into Chaweng centre, much happier to be surrounded by bustling bars and restaurants that the dirty depressing venues in Had Rin.

We choose to eat at a busy restaurant called Samui Seafood. The food is fabulous. Franky is adventurous and has lobster cocktail to start followed by shark steaks. The service is too laid back to be called service at all but we have a lovely evening there. After dessert and some brutally strong liqueur coffees we decide to head back to KC resort and try out the hot tub.

We pop into a shop along the way back and pick up a bottle of red wine before we are taken back up the hill and delivered to the lifts by the golf buggy. With the hot tub full of bubbles we sit back overlooking this tropical paradise and realise finally that this is what it feels like to be on honeymoon!