Monday, November 15, 2004 (Koh Lanta)
Nothing to see here; move along. Not much else
to do here other than eat, walk or get bored. Reflecting on our Thailand budget
to date. We have crabs! Looking forward to more diving after tomorrow. Will this
be our last chance to see a whale shark?
Day 252 (62). We did pretty much nothing today.
Getting up late for the second day in a row is probably not going to help us
much with regards to our body rhythms for the coming days on the live-aboard,
where we will probably have to get up very early each morning for the first dive
of each day. You could argue that it is ideal here on a relaxing, sunny, beach
paradise with absolutely no pressures of any kind whatsoever. Both of us,
however, usually get quite bored and restless after just a few hours of not
having anything to do and end up constantly asking each other what to do next.
It’s quite bizarre really. After a few days of non-stop activities such as
diving or sightseeing, our bodies really do need a few days of rest but neither
of us is happy to sit still for any length of time with nothing to do. You
can’t win either way.
For the
most part we either ate, walked along the beach, sat in our room or at one of
the Internet terminals, today, slowly whiling away the hours of this our last
full day on the island paradise of Koh Lanta. As expected, our funds lasted
pretty much to the end. I paid 2,900B (€55,77) for our cabin for six
nights. A few extra trips to the Internet café meant that I had to dip ever
so slightly into the money I have stashed away to pay for our live-aboard. This
means we will have to withdraw a small amount of cash from an ATM when we get to
Khao Lak tomorrow. I’ll probably end up withdrawing the maximum again to
minimise the effect of any withdrawal fees there might be (there shouldn’t
be any at all).
So far, our budget
for Thailand is not doing too badly at all. After the first few days in Bangkok,
I was getting quite worried that we were spending close to and perhaps even
beyond our self-assigned €60 per day budget. It’s always difficult
to get the sums exactly right in the first week or so that we enter a new
country but after a while, things start to even out and become a little clearer.
Currently, based on the money that we have withdrawn from the ATM here in
Thailand, we will have averaged around €88 per day by the end of our
three-day live-aboard (there will be no opportunity to spend whilst on-board and
we’ve essentially already paid for it). However, that also includes the
cost of all the diving with done here, including the live-aboard, for which we
have a completely separate budget. Remove the cost of the diving and this daily
average goes down to just €39 per day - €21 per day less than we
have budgeted for. As things currently stand, then, we have spent €441
less than we had planned for these first three weeks here in Thailand.
Additionally, we’ve not yet tapped into our €350 per country luxury
budget either so we are very well ahead of the
game.
There are lots of small sand
crabs scurrying along the beach here and the sand is full of narrow holes that
they bury themselves into. By gentle digging around the hole, we managed to find
some quite large crabs today up and down the beach. They can move extremely fast
and it doesn’t take them long to reach the water and bury themselves out
of sight again.
As much out of
boredom than out of hunger, we had an early dinner and spent some time packing,
ready for tomorrow morning’s seven o’clock truck ride into town. Our
two-hour ferry crossing to Krabi departs at eight and we have another two-hour
or so bus ride to look forward to after that. We should be in Khao Lak by around
one in the afternoon. I exchanged a few e-mails this afternoon with the
live-aboard boat operator, Green Dragon, about the facilities on the boat, our
food likes and dislikes and various other things. One thing that is a bit
irritating is that there are no electrical outlets in any of the ten cabins on
board, although the brochure does specify that there is electricity on board
somewhere. Without electricity, the laptop and camera batteries cannot be
re-charged; without the batteries, the photography eventually grinds to a halt;
without the photography, what’s the point of diving to begin with? I think
I said something pretty much identical to that when we were in Cape Town, South
Africa regarding the safaris when my laptop charger stopped working. We found
then that the safaris were only as good as our ability to photograph everything.
It’s become the same way now with the
diving.
We’ve now packed
everything away, save for the laptop and charging batteries, and we’re
pretty much ready to leave tomorrow morning. I wonder if we will ever find that
elusive whale shark before we leave Thailand. This live-aboard my be our last
chance to do so … or perhaps not.
Posted: Mon - November 15, 2004 at 09:05 PM