Thailand - May to December

Early in May Karen decided to return to the UK and asked Mike and I to stay on in her bungalow - to look after the place and keep the unpleasant landlord out. She’d already paid the rent so it was free to us, apart from utility bills, until the lease expired at the end of July. In theory, we were doing her a favour but it was most definitely the other way around. Forever continued to hang at anchor in Chalong Bay and Mike went back and forth, often spending the night aboard. One night there was another tsunami warning and Mike cycled into Chalong (I needed the Honda for work) and then rowed out to boat at midnight – just in case. Happily it came to nothing.

In May I started my second teaching job at Kajonkietpattana, a large private School in the town of Phuket. I taught two small classes of five to seven year olds in a new Special English Class. Once again, lunch was served at the school, a fact that made Mike eternally envious. The children I taught were dinky, usually friendly little darlings.

My fellow English teachers were pleasant and good company, particularly Geoff, our supervisor, who was very good to me.

Geoff, Joy and Lisa

The tuk tuks were too unreliable for work, so we bought a second hand 125cc Honda, in the long term cheaper than renting. I managed to get a 'Phuket kiss' - an ugly burn on the calf from a hot exhaust and soon had the inevitable accident.  Phuket apparently has the highest motorbike accident rate in the world with 150 deaths per year,  but I survived with nasty scrapes to my knees and toes. After that I dressed like all Thais on a bike – jeans, trainers and a jacket, never mind the heat.

Transport in Phuket was something else. There were proper buses and they were cheap but few and far between, whereas there were plenty of tuk tuks, small trucks with open sides for ventilation. The price of these depended on the mood of the driver and how many customers he already had, but mostly they were reasonable. There were no proper stops and they stopped wherever you flagged them down. If the truck was full, some drivers would still take your money and let you hang off the sides or back! An even cheaper, more dangerous and less appealing option to the tuk tuks were motorcycle taxis. Legally, they should only take one passenger, but this law was flouted and you frequently saw two or even three passengers squeezed onto a bike, along with extraordinary assortments of luggage.

In August, we rented a two bedroom house in a large housing complex in the town of Phuket called Villa Three until the end of the year. This was not nearly as nice as Karen’s, but it was considerably closer to my school and meant a shorter (less dangerous) journey to work.

Our patio at Villa 3

Jean Pierre and Nelly arrived and we lunched and dined with them a couple of times before they went off cruising. Our friend Terry Ann visited with us for two weeks, and my sister Lucy for a week.  Unfortunately, I was working on both occasions, but it was lovely to have friends to stay.

Karen returned to Phuket for a holiday with friends and we went out for a weekend cruise. 

  

Warm weather ear muffs!

Once again we gave serious thought to chartering. I met a young American diver and we got particularly fired up at the concept of taking small parties out to the remote islands to dive. The big dive boats tended to go out for the day only arriving at an island late in the morning and leaving early afternoon so the good dive areas were crowded between 11am and 3pm. We could anchor overnight which would mean our customers could dive in the early morning and late afternoon in a beautifully deserted spot. It seemed such a good idea, but, I couldn’t pin the young American down, so we gave it up.

In September, there was the Vegetarian Festival, which celebrates the Chinese community's belief that abstinence from meat and various stimulants during the ninth lunar month of the Chinese calendar will help them obtain good health and peace of mind. There are many, sometimes quite gruesome, ceremonies to invoke the gods. Fire walking, body piercing and other acts of self mortification undertaken by participants acting as mediums of the gods have become more spectacular and daring as each year goes by. Men and women puncture their cheeks with items like knives, skewers and considerably worse. They believe that the gods will protect them from harm, and in fact little blood or scarring appears to result from these mutilations. There are plenty street parades, noisy fireworks, music and dancing and eating of vegetarian foods.

The year was drawing to a close and decisions had to be made. In sailing, there are specific times to safely cross oceans, and the time to leave across the Indian is January. My teaching job was okay but I was finding the extra classes every day exhausting and I’d had enough. My salary was good by Thai standards, hugely and embarrassingly more than that of the Thai teachers (who worked much longer hours than us) but even so we had not saved as much as we would have liked. (Why does one always spend as much as one earns, no matter how much it is?)  However, we did have some savings and could afford to move on.  We had given serious thought to staying in Thailand, and although it was tempting, it wasn't ideal.  No matter how long we might have stayed, we would always have been ‘farangs’ and we would always have felt foreign. We could have stayed for five or ten years, but not permanently, and we were searching for somewhere permanent. So, with some regret, we decided to leave at the end of the year.

Burmese teak is famous and, naturally, cheap in this area. Our teak decks were in poor shape, being 23 years old at the time, so we decided this was a good place to have them replaced. In October, we put Forever into the yard at Ratanachai. Mike spent his days at the yard with the Burmese carpenters whilst I was at school. He also anti fouled the bottom, had a new spray dodger made, had our dinghy fixed (that was waste of money, as it continued to leak water in and air out), had the main sail restitched, replaced the swages on the life lines, bought a new solar shower, a new halyard, a new life ring, fitted a new sea cock for the out flow in the toilet, and a new battery for the starter motor. We were very pleased with our boat.

Dinghy blow job

I resigned and finished school just after Christmas. We sold the motorbike and what little furniture we’d bought or inherited from Karen. We agonised over Kat but were afraid to take her with us. She was no longer a kitten, knew nothing of the sea or life on a boat and was bound to go over the side very quickly. Sadly, we persuaded the new tenants in our house to keep her.

We had kept in touch with JP and Nelly by telephone and made arrangements to meet up with them and Mai Stracc on 31 December at Phi Phi Leh, the island famous for being the location where the movie The Beach was filmed.

Maya Bay

We joined our friends in the beautiful Maya Bay. We gathered on Melancolie for dinner, agreeing to each provide something. We didn’t liaise beforehand and all produced something very rich. I did the starter - a Thai Tom Ka soup with chicken, Nelly did the main - Confit de Canard with potatoes cooked in duck fat and a green salad, and Kikka did the pudding – Tiramisu. It was all absolutely delicious. There were snacks and aperitifs, wine and then champagne at midnight. Tourists on the other side of the island set off fireworks which rose above the rocks and lit up the night sky as we took the dinghies to the beach for a midnight swim. It’s amazing we didn’t sink like stones!


The next day we all sailed on to Phi Phi Don, spent the day there and all had dinner on Mai Stracc that night.

Andrea, Mike, JP, Peggy, Nelly and Kikka

We sailed on with Mai Stracc to Ko Ha (beautiful) and then drifted on our own through the islands back to Langkawi where we met up with Melancolie again. Also, we were very pleased to catch up with two other boats, old friends from the Pacific, Pam and Dick on Aliesha and Jocelyn and Ruedi on Globitou, neither of whom we had seen since Tonga.



After stocking up with water, fuel and food we set off across our last ocean, the Indian, heading for Cochin in India.