We got back from a trip to Koh Samui yesterday, and I'd love to say that we had the time of our lives but alas....

We left Bangkok last Friday to get away from the APEC conference - more on this later - and flew to Koh Samui which is a small island in the Gulf of Thailand. The flight lasted about 80 minutes and as we touched down the sun was shining. Koh Samui airport has International and Domestic terminals which are in fact grass huts, which makes it quite the cutest little airport you've ever seen. We went to our bungalow which was nice but a bit basic. What we did have though was our own little beach, complete with some rocks and rock pools. Swimsuits were donned and we were soon enjoying the sun and sea.

That evening we went for a meal in Chaweng, which is the main town on the island as it also has the longest beach. Chaweng caters very much for the back-packer and is full of bikini shops, cheap clothes shops, dive shops, currency exchanges, moped hire, cheap bars and restaurants, including the obligatory Irish bar.

It then started to rain and it never stopped!

On Saturday we decided that the high cost of the four of us getting about made hiring a jeep viable, and so by midday I was happily behind the wheel (for the first time in over two months) of a Suzuki jeep. We headed into the middle of Samui to do some jungle exploring, and were soon near the top of a 600 metre hill on a bit of dirt track. The track was getting a little bit hairy, it was raining heavily, the jeep was in 4WD and was skidding and bumping all over the place, and the kids started arguing about something or other extremely trivial - talk about a lack of sense of occasion!

The rest of our days were spent sitting in our damp bungalow playing Connect 4 and drawing, driving out to get food, and very occasionally popping down to the beach to collect shells in the rain.

Still we managed to spend five days without a TV and not kill each other which is a first!

Posted on 24 October 2003.

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