The next couple of days it rained, putting a real dampener on things. Thailand in the sun is wonderful but in the rain dull as dishwater. We even looked at the weather elsewhere in South-East Asia but it was pretty grim all over, so we decided to grin and bare it. What else can you do on a rainy day but have some retail therapy and ice creams on the way? I opted for a banana split which was just what I wanted, took me back to my youth. Odd how that can happen.
The next morning we still had the private hotel and pool so the guys came around and spent the day with us and the kitty lounging around the pool. In the pool, in the Jacuzzi out the Jacuzzi it was a really laid back day, saving our energy for round two of my birthday celebrations. We decided to go to the Blue Maneo a restaurant just a minutes walk from our hotel, armed with beers from our favourite shop (pretty normal). This place had been recommended through Trip Advisor so it seemed ok enough. Plonked under ceiling fans and wall fans it was nice and cool; we ordered a table full of food a Thai delight but to be quite honest: the street restaurant was much better and again half the price; well you can't have it all. Dinner over we headed back over the footbridge to the beach to have a few more beers. By now it was quiet, most diners having gone and a few people like us just wanting drinks and a chat. Birthday officially over, it was time for bed and guess who was waiting for our return? Ting Tong came up with us, he stayed till about four in the morning waking me up to be let out. We said goodbye to our friends who were heading back to Hong Kong for a flight home to the USA for the rest of the summer. We still had the whole place to ourselves. Luckily, because I think if we now had to share it would spoil things, how greedy can you get… The next couple of days it rained, putting a real dampener on things. Thailand in the sun is wonderful but in the rain dull as dishwater. We even looked at the weather elsewhere in South-East Asia but it was pretty grim all over, so we decided to grin and bare it. What else can you do on a rainy day but have some retail therapy and ice creams on the way? I opted for a banana split which was just what I wanted, took me back to my youth. Odd how that can happen. Funnily enough, we ended our time in Kamala beach with a few lovely sunny days, time for some more wandering around, a huge market for instance. All’s well that ends well. At last sun back out to our private pool. Until the morning we left for Bangkok we enjoyed the private hotel and the pool: it doesn't come much better than that.
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On the first morning all of a sudden a little black kitten appeared. A fine looking chap about twelve weeks old, we guessed. I was hooked: I love cats. I was already planning on heading off to ‘our’ 7 Eleven for some cat food, poor little thing. Luckily enough, well for him anyway, they had bags of cat biscuits: mission accomplished. Happy with my purchase I was back within minutes to find puddy tat happily lying on my towel on the sun bed ‘Make yourself at home’ I said, but I guess he didn't speak English. I tipped some of the biscuits out next to him on the bed and he devoured the lot in seconds,i was glad to see. He stayed with us the rest of the afternoon until we went to our room to get ready to go and have a beer. Went to Danny’s Place where we had some spare ribs. The spare ribs were great and washed down with ice cold beer: what more could you ask for. It was just about getting dark by now, so we popped into our favourite shop, filled a bag with beers and headed back to the hotel for a shower; ready for tonight's entertainment. We just got through the gate and who was there to greet us, you've got it, kitty… Well, kitty deserved a name and instantly Ting Tong came out of my mouth, Ting Tong it was. He followed us up to the room but we wondered if the hotel staff might not like this. Too late; he was in and hunting around for the bag with the cat biscuits which he found rapidly on a table next to the TV.
We got ready to go out and he happily played around, running behind the curtains out on the balcony, Ting Tong wasn't scared of anything. We finished our beers and it was time to go out. Ting Tong just followed us downstairs but there was someone at reception; I thought ‘oops, we've been caught’, but no reaction. I asked who's was the cat and they said it arrived at their hotel some weeks earlier, they thought he’d come from a cat in the hotel next door. They didn’t mind him being there, so that was it: his official home. I would just like to add here that we did look into bringing Ting Tong home with us. I contacted KLM and they gave me details; it was all very reasonable except on checking through the Internet on Thai rules, it meant that he would need injections at least 21 days before travelling. Of course, we wouldn’t be there that long (who would?) So, after a lot of discussion and hard thinking in my head, we decided his life was there, not in the city that is Amsterdam. Rightly or wrongly, we will now never know but I wished him a nice long life when we left. I hope the staff in the hotel look after him. As a parting gift we gave them the largest bag of cat biscuits we could find. I must say the car journey from the airport to Kamala was pretty uneventful. There is not much to see until you climb a hill and catch sight of a long beach on your right. Past Phuket FantaSea, the theme park, which is, in my view, a torture chamber for elephants. FantaSea happened to be around the corner from Kamala Beach, our destination. Passing the usual massage parlours, shops selling flip-flops and t-shirts, both of which I will almost certainly get, before pulling up at our hotel, called the Layalina. In we marched, by now pretty knackered. After the usual information overload on arrival we finally get to see our room. Our room was on the first floor, large enough with a spiral staircase just inside the door, leading to a roof terrace with a day bed and a canopy over; far too hot up there. By the time we left, we hadn't used it. The only odd thing about the room was that the toilet, bath and shower where only partitioned by a Venetian blind from the bedroom itself so privacy, if needed, could be an issue, as it turned out for us it wasn't a problem. We decided to go for a sleep for a few hours. It is recommended that a cycle of three hours is enough, so that's what we did. I only snoozed at best but when it was time to get up I was ready to go and explore. It was just the right time, the sun being over the yardarm already. Off to ‘7 Eleven’. Armed with a bag full of beers, peanuts and crisps we went back to our room. From day one we had our breakfast in the room (the other option was down at the pool), everyday exactly at the same time. The table was set up on the balcony overlooking the pool and beach. A very nice breakfast it was: tea, coffee, fresh fruit, toast, pancakes, scrambled eggs and cereals: a great way to start the day (if you’re not on a diet). We decided to hit the pool. This sounds dramatic; what I actually mean is take two beds to the left hand corner and sit in the shade; low and behold we've got a private pool, in fact we had a private hotel, it turned out we were the only guests at the moment. Coming out of the the lovely cold shop we turned right passing Danny’s Place, which we would come to know well over the next few days. Close to the hotel is a local tsunami monument, to which, it seemed, many tours pulled up. On we plodded coming across a BBQ restaurant - highly recommended by Trip Advisor - only to find it was closed till the autumn. Next we headed over a footbridge onto Kamala beach itself and, luckily, found a good few beach bars and restaurants one of which we earmarked to have dinner in later that evening called Smile. By the time we got to the main road, we realised there really wasn't more this end, so we headed back to the hotel having done our first bit of exploring. Time for a wash and brush up.
After a drink in a small beach bar, we went to Smile, to have dinner with ‘our toes in the Thai sand’. Smile has a BBQ at the front with a display of fresh fish, lobster and large prawns, making it very difficult to make a decision. I eventually chose the prawns barbecued with rice and vegetable. My partner went for chili beef fried rice, all washed down with more freezing beer. In hindsight this was to be the most expensive meal we had in Kamala; though we did go back to Smile, I left the seafood alone. After our yummy dinner we headed off to look for a bar for after dinner beers. Apart from a couple of girlie bars there really wasn’t the kind of thing we were looking for. We quickly learned that just going into any restaurant and asking for a beer was fine. By this time it was well gone midnight and the street was all but empty: time for bed. |
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GaryBorn in Chiswick West London, grew up in Royal Berkshire, currently living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands Archives
March 2016
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