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Back to Koh Bida again. The weather was getting pretty rough and it was getting very difficult diving. The problem is getting back on the boat safely when the dive platform is going up and down and people are trying to climb a ladder with their fins off. So we wound up just doing a couple dives and then going back to Phuket.
Covid is still devastating this tourist island. It has been slower such as when I visited last year but it’s still not doing well at all
The boat started moving and I am wide awake now at 5:30 going for coffee upstairs, dictating my first remembrances on a moving boat with the wind coming at me and hoping I’ll be able to correct all mistaken dictations, completely contorted by the noise of the engine and the wind. It feels so good to get up early as I always did when I had customers on board. Being the first one up I’m able to greet people individually in the galley as they come up the stairs.
It is such a good feeling to be up and ready and waiting for a job I don’t have to do. This is really the first time I’ve been a customer on a dive boat. Comfortable but now i realize there is something about having worked on a boat that never leaves you, the need to always be looking out for something or someone or some situation.
The dives were good, they say, but getting back on the boat today was challenging. Everyone is fine though a few close calls.
The wind is getting stronger so the waves will make boarding the boat more problematic. So the captain just told me the plan is to back to closer islands that provide better shelter around Phi Phi islands. This is a difficult time of year to be diving in the Andaman sea since the monsoon winds are already strong. Strong winds equals big waves.
I woke up at six as usual, went upstairs for cups of coffee and then decided to go for a swim. It was still not very light since Maya bay is on the opposite side of the sunrise. I was thinking about going close to the sailboat attend decided since it was quite late and I didn’t see any people up on deck it was probably not a good idea since they might sink I was attempting to orthopod and steal something. You never know.
The first time was at Koh Bida Nok. The waves were not too high so this should be a fairly easy return to the boat.
The wind is getting stronger, should be up to 25 knots later and up to 30 tomorrow with rain.
The second dive is at Koh Bida Nai.
Koh Haa is our first stop to drive around those small islands. I am not diving since I still have this very painful hole in my mouth from the extracted tooth operation. They didn’t do the famous cave dive, just the coral reef areas. I haven’t been on this boat for 22 years, having worked on her for eight years with customers from all over the world.
I noticed I have my old habits of picking up garbage whenever I see it and rearranging things so they look a little bit better and wanting to carry some things or just generally check things out. I think this is now solidly in my DNA so it’s probably impossible to become just a true lazy customer on a drive trip.
The food is very good as always, some rice porridge and some cooked vegetables with small amounts of meat and some spices on the side. I find myself in the habit of drinking a lot of coffee. I normally don’t do this but it used to be a habit since I needed to stay alert watching the customers and checking for safety all the time. So it’s gonna be hard to take a nap during the day. Well, i tried a nap and got in a few winks.
At 5 PM after the last day dive we stopped at a very calm place so I just went for a swim with fins and tried a few skin diving tricks to try and get my breathing partially back to where used to be so I could go down and see some 5 meter corals and sea life.
The Thai customers are very quiet and considerate. I was expecting they might start Karaoke but they didn’t. I think they just preferred some quiet and joyful talk. They’re from the same dive club, brought their own instructor to be divemaster l. I would have chatted more with them but I have my own issues with the painful hole in my, able to eat only on one side very slowly. I didn’t want to bother them with my affliction.
In the evening I just took some extra strength paracetamol and watched a few television episodes I saved on my iPhone, finally going to sleep at 8 PM.
OK, so it’s time to get off the plane in Phuket and prepare for the journey, a live aboard dive trip south of Phuket along the coast islands of the Andaman sea
For hotel in Patong, before you depart, you can book at their hotel Andaman House. their dive shop and swimming pool are there as well.
I should note here that the lower deck is more comfortable than the upper deck cabins since the boat rolling sensation is much less on the lower deck. So the crew sleeps on the upper deck. OK, so now we depart. Talk to you later.
Day 7 – 235km. Day 8 – the rest of the way
In the morning after having a coffee and chat with Tik who i used to work for in the scuba diving business back in the 90s, we went to the locker, storage facility, emptied out all the contents, took what we wanted and thought we could carry back with us on our motorcycles and gave the rest to people in need.
Then we went to look for a coffee, took a short walk on the beach and found everything closed except a Starbucks coffee shop. After sticker shock on seeing the 180 baht price for a small coffee and not being able to find a reasonably priced coffee on the main roads we went off a cul-de-sac i knew from long ago and found a place for a snack and an Inexpensive coffee.
We were contemplating sending the motorcycles back through the post office and then I thought maybe it was just better to drive to Surattani and either approach the post office to send our motorcycles back or to check what the train situation was. With all the expensive food and drink in Patong and not very happy it was pretty much a ghost town we decided to pack up, hop on our motorcycles and spend the day driving to Surattani.
When we got to Surattani we first stopped at the train station. They told us there was a train leaving in an hour and they could accommodate our motorcycles as well. The price was about 855 each for ourselves, the sleeper car, and then another 855 for the motorcycles, all the way to Bangkok. That was an easy decision to make. So we bought the passenger tickets, took the motorcycles to the baggage manager, paid the fare, got some food to eat on the train and hopped on.
The sleepers were very comfortable even though the car we were in suffered a power outage so we had to move to the next car. When we arrived we were a little surprised to see our motorcycles being pulled over to a baggage area. We were warned that the motorcycles might actually have to go on the next train after us. I gave a tip to the baggage fellow not knowing if his request for one would be more of a mandatory request or a request request. You never know what kind of barriers can be set up if you don’t pay certain requests.
We wheeled the motorcycles out of the baggage area and a pickup truck driver called us over and agreed to take us most of the way with the motorcycles on board with us for 3500 baht (30 Baht=US$1). When we reached Chantaburi we got off, rode the rest of the way to the ferry, got on the ferry and then back to Koh Chang.
I will summarize a conclusion in the next blog.
Day 6 – 300 km
The only goals were to get to Patong Beach in Phuket and try to figure out what to do with the stuff in a friend’s locker, the sole purpose for driving 1,400 km to Phuket. I had the key for the locker but without access to the locker area I would have to work with management to get in.
The drive was tough but beautiful. With all the road construction, hazards for motorcycles were prevalent. Caution was the key today.
But we made it to Patong Beach and the storage facility just before closing. All we needed to do was find who was minding the store. After a few calls i found who was supposed to be at the closed facility and we had access to see how much stuff was stored. It wasn’t much so the next day we could sort through everything.
For dinner we stopped to see Kenya, a good friend, at his new restaurant, Honeymoon, and got a description of what are the recent Political and Social goings on in Thailand. The food is great and the service is excellent, as it was with his previous restaurant, Sea Hag.
A very simple thing washed up in large numbers on the beach, something called a cuttlefish bone. it isn’t really a bone it’s cartilage on one side plus some other softer substance on the other. But it IS the internal skeleton of the cuttlefish. When the cuttlefish dies this is all that’s left and it is light so it floats to the surface and washes up on the beach.
A Cornell college friend, Francis Wu, told me when he was a kid his mother used these to scrub the dishes. One side of the “bone“ is smooth, hard cartilage. The other side is a softer and abrasive substance. When he told me what his mother used them for I tried peeling off the outer edges of the cartilage and using the softer side to scrub some dishes. It’s not only does an excellent job of scrubbing the dishes it also is a biodegradable substance that can be washed off, taken back to the beach and let to wait for thousands of years to become a new substance.
Don’t you dare kill a cuttlefish to get this bone or I will come after you. Joking aside, if you happen to be walking on the beach and see these in quantity, pick one up and try it out. It’s better than buying plastic and having it wind up in the ocean to kill animals and to degrade into microparticles we subsequently eat.
When times are tough and when travel becomes a little bit more complicated very often the stories turn to difficulties, sadness and complications. But maybe I can just get around some of that and try to give you a little picture of what it’s like to commit yourself to traveling during a virus outbreak.
I left Singapore on March 17 to fly to Phuket to go diving with my godson, Dennis, the second generation of Bubbles, and to visit a few friends on the island. But what started out as a somewhat normal yet vacant vacation spot turned into what everyone realized was becoming a fairly dangerous situation. Too many people not taking care to keep distance or protect themselves from the virus. So after a week there I left for Suratthani to get away from the tourists in Phuket who were not observing most of the safety measures to keep from getting the COVID-19. The streets were also fairly crowded and Patong Beach is always a very noisy place to be.
Getting a 5 1/2 hour bus to Suratthani was not quite as difficult as I had expected since there were quite a few mini buses employed instead of the normal large buses to take large number of tourists here and there. But I got lucky and I got a big bus so there was a lot of space between passengers and it was very relaxing.
But upon arriving at a very nice hotel, costing only $18 a night, everyone found the government orders were increasingly shutting down the city. Now restaurants can only provide take-out meals, regulations even coffee shops need to obey. But there are plenty of little carts selling deep fried chicken, barbecued pork, sticky rice, mashed up fruit drinks and all sorts of other kinds of food so life was going on just fine if you are satisfied with fairly minimal survival necessities being plentiful.
Everyone is wearing masks and in order to enter many shops, especially department stores, you have to have a mask, get some alcohol and wash sanitizer and have your temperature taken with the laser gun. On returning to the hotel one time my temperature read above normal and above the recommended maximum so they asked me to sit down for a few minutes. After about two minutes my temperature went down to an acceptable maximum. It was the heat and the walking outside and the black hat that raised it above the allowed maximum.
After the first three days of just walking around, going by the docks and watching the people fishing and feeding the pigeons, and then going on to see the Thai temples and Chinese temples and open marketplaces, my tourist journeys were completed and it was time to spend the rest of my two weeks getting some work done, reading a lot of newspapers and information about the virus, protecting myself and getting some of the 7 to 8000 images of family photos and heirlooms organized, a job which will take several more months.
So today I decided that since the hotel called me yesterday and told me that beginning today all the hotels had to close, it was time for me to go to immigration to try to extend my stay here another month as well as look for other accommodations. I have two more paid days at the hotel so they let me stay for those two days. Immigration was pretty easy since I was only one of two foreigners there. Immigration officers on the islands around seem to be extremely crowded since that is where the tourists are. Suratthani City is the jumping off point for those islands and so there really aren’t many foreigners here. On top of that the immigration office is way out in the countryside which discourages people from using that office to get anything done. Good for me.
So now that I have another month okayed by immigration I need to find a place to stay. There aren’t many options since all the hotels will be closed tomorrow so I’m trying to be a little creative. But the staff here at the hotel has been very helpful and has given me some ideas. If I can get to one of the islands Airbnb accommodations are available which seem to get around the regulations that shut down the hotels. I read in the Bangkok post today that a fellow from France was walking around Phuket without a mask and so was arrested. I am not only wearing a mask when I go out but when I buy anything and bring it back to the room I wash my hands and then I wash whatever I bring back in. Since I can’t see the virus I don’t know how much good this is doing but I know it’s a good practice to at least be doing my best to keep healthy.
The cleanliness in this hotel is exceptional. Every day they go into every unoccupied room and clean it as though it were occupied. They don’t take all the sheets and towels out but they do a fairly good once over. And of course they thoroughly clean and fix up all the occupied rooms. Today since they are closing they have taken a lot of the mattresses off the beds and have obviously put them somewhere, not sure where they went.
Well I think that’s enough for today.
PS I want to explain why Dennis is my Godson. I was at the Phuket hospital when he was being born. When I saw the 4kg (8.8lb) newborn I said, “God, son, you are big.” That’s the rest of the story.