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Traffic started before sunup, mostly two-stroke motorbikes, then the occasional lorry and dog barking. Had to get up at 7:30 with a dodgy tummy. The Toilets don't have seats or paper but they were western stile ones. I just squatted and did what I had to. There is a small hand held shower by the bole. It has a trigger that you squeeze to get a stream of water. You use it to wash your self. I think that this is a much cleaner thing to do then use toilet paper and in this heat you soon dry off.

At breakfast I Got talking to a lady from England called Rose. She worked for the Post Office and they let people have a year sabbatical every five years. She had gone around India for about four months then had come over to Thailand to meet up with her boyfriend and his brother who were here on holiday over the Christmas period. They had ended up renting a flat in Patayer for 5000B (£80) a month.

She told me that her boyfriend's brother was a typical sex tourist and had a different Lady every night. Once they had gone back to England she decided to travel around and see the rest of Thailand. Breakfast was toast and jam with a cup of tea or coffee 60B. No milk, just creamer powder, basic be filling.

After breakfast Rose needed to go to the loo and I went for a walk before the 12:00 checkout. I went to a Wat that was also a school. I went in one set of doors and walked around the quadrangle that surrounded it. In the quadrangle there were loads of statues of Buddha or monks, I couldn't tell. At one point I came across some tables and chairs with a blackboard in front of them. Imagine learning your alphabet with stone monks starring at you. When I got back to the door I came in it had been locked. I asked a man repairing one of the statues how to get out but he spoke no English so gave up and walked over to the Wat. Some young school kids came over to me, all smiles and said the only English they knew "Hello Mister. What your name?" and wanted to shake my hand. They were just so friendly. Took a picture of a couple of them. They were very interested in the camera and I allowed them to look through it.


Kids at the school

I found another exit out of the quadrangle that took me into the school proper. Lots of smiling kids came up to me wanting to shake my hand. A teacher then came up to me and I thought "oh I`m going to be ordered off the school ground" like you would in England, were we have very little tolerance of strange men walking around our school grounds. You would automatically be thought of as a pervert or worse. But this man wanted to shake my hand and asked "where you from?" he seemed to be quite glad I was there talking to the kids. He had not much English but was able to tell me how to get out of the school grounds. On my way out I met another couple of teachers who also wanted to shake my had and asked "where you from?" I was getting the impression that this was a standard phrase that they used when speaking to a foreigner. Finally got out of the grounds with a lovely happy feeling inside, not all the world first impressions of a stranger is some to be feared or thought badly of. It was such a nice change from the west.

Saw a hill with some palaces on it and walked towards it. As the sun got higher in the sky the heat increased. I Stopped at a small shop and got a Cornetto for 18B. As I Walked along a road that was by the side of the hill I came across a tribe of monkeys. They looked at me and some showed me their teeth, as I got closer. I took a wide birth of them, as they didn't look overly friendly. Found a small locked Wat with what I took as graves around it. There were some steps that went up the hill with the palaces on it. I decided to walk up them but they ended after about 20 meters at a small shrine with pictures of people on it. I think it was a family shrine. On it there was one old black and white picture of a man in a military uniform.


The @%^&% Monkeys

Walked back past the monkeys. The young ones are very quite with expressive faces, especially their eyes, almost human. I can see why we share 98% of our DNA. Continued to walk around the base of the hill until I came across the path up to the palace called Khao Wang, this was the way up to the palaces I had seen from a distance. It cost 40B to enter.

I had a lot of steps to climb up to get to the top of the steep hill. Old ladies were selling food to feed the monkeys with. Stopped at a stall ran by a young girl who sold home made wooden key fobs and other assorted crap. Nothing caught my fancy.

Continued up the hill. It was hard work climbing in the heat. At the top the palace was worth the exercise. It was a staging post for the king when he journeyed south out of Bangkok. Had to take my shoes off to go around the palace, it had some antiques and some notices in Thai. No use to me. I found that there was a cable car on the other side of the hill that I could have taken, if I had waked the other way around the base.


View of one of the Wats

Collected my shoes and waked over to another Wat. The view over the town was good, there was a lot of haze that stopped you from seeing for miles but most of the town was visible. You could make out the Wat/school I had been in and the big red and white mobile phone tower. Something no Thai town was without, I learnt.

As I started back down the hill I came across more monkeys but some of these had hideous injuries. One had its nose bitten off and some of the others had bad gashes in there sides. Most of the big old males had their ears missing except for one enormous male who had no scars at all. He must have been either the Alpha male or a wimp.

Stopped at a stall selling pineapples pieces in plastic bags, with the wooden picks to stab and eat them with. This was a big mistake. The monkeys saw I had food and started to gang up around me. Showing their teeth. One male jumped at me and I put up my hand to defend myself from him. The bastard bit my finger! I lashed out and almost kicked another they ran off. I looked at my finger the bit wasn't bad and bled freely but Hepatitis B and monkey AIDS did cross my mind. The bastards were regrouping so I hurried down the hill being followed by an ever increasing gang of monkeys flashing their teeth at me.

When I passed the old lady at the base of the hill she asked if I wanted to buy her monkey food for 10B. I told her to "fuck off" under my breath. Ate the last of my pineapple in piece but as I walked past a bus stop another bunch of monkeys tried to grab my bag with my camera in it, to the delight of some teenagers in side. They, the monkeys must have thought there was food in my bag or could smell the pineapple. Once I was safely back in the town I TXTed Kath & Nicky about the monkey bite.

Picked up my rucksack from the GH and headed off to the railway station. The train was almost on time. Lots of people selling food went up to the windows and started conducting their business. Got on the train in a third class coach and walked up to my pre-booked seat in second class. Glad I had booked a second-class seat as third class is like a cattle truck. The bench seats had more animals in cages on them then humans.

My carriage has no a/c but the seats recline and you have roof fans that blow the air around. The windows are drop type, like the old Ozzy trains had back in the 70s when I lived in Brisbane. The journey is a spectacle of the unexpected. People come through the train selling all kinds of food. A woman mops the floor. As the countryside goes by I see the tower blocks of costal developments. More steep sided hills punctuated an otherwise flat landscape. Jungles of Yucker plants with pink flowers. All the houses, well more like shacks with corrugated tin roofs, had TV masts that got taller and bigger as we travel down the coast. The mobiles signal is always strong never dropping below 3 on the meter. It's dark by 18:30, palm trees silhouetted against a dark sky. Saw occasional red flashing lights on the top of mobile phone towers and the orange glow of fires burning in the otherwise dark night. Go past a fun faire with coloured neon strip lights hanging from trees.

Got off at Chumpon with no problem, the station had the Roman scrip name as well as the Thai. It was gone 22:00 but there was a man who was waiting for the train to picked me up and took me in the ubiquitous pickup to the jetty to get the night boat. One thing I can say about the Thai and that is they are very organised in their own kind of way. I am the only person the driver picks up and we speed down almost deserted roads out of town to the Night boats jetty.

When I see the boat, that was going to take me over to Koh Toa, I start to have second thoughts. It hasn't been out for a couple of days and so there are about 20+ of us on this rather small fishing boat. There is nowhere to sleep except on deck. The weather is hot and sticky like there is a storm brewing.

I learn that there are big waves out in the gulf of Thailand and we might have to come back if they get too big. I go to find the toilet down in the hold and see it is full of bags of cement. That must be weighing us down for a start.

More people turn up, some hang up hammocks, as there is no space on the deck. Start to talk to a pissed bloke from Austria called Peter and his friend that I didn't catch his name. I have bad feelings about this trip, start looking for the life jackets and find there is about 10 for over 40 people including the crew. I will be very glad when I`m on the island!
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