Thailand

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After trying out breakfast at the resort, we decided to get a taxi into town. This time it only cost 100 baht - we’d been well and truly stitched up the previous day, but at least we were pleased we hadn’t paid the 500b that the tuk tuk driver had asked for originally.

The main town was manic - there were people, scooters and tuk tuks everywhere, lots of shops and stalls and everywhere we looked people tried to persuade us into their shop to buy things. We became hardened to it quite quickly and started bartering over prices of the cheap clothes and flip flops, although I always had to stop myself from bargaining too much as the value of 50b (£1) meant much more to them than it did to me. We couldn’t pick anything up without being asked how much we’d pay for it. A couple of hours in we were exhausted and needed to get out again. Before leaving we decided to go into a few opticians to check out the prices of prescription sunglasses as I’d been missing mine since losing them in Western Australia. I managed to barter over some and ordered them for collection the following day - they weren't any cheaper than at home but at least I'd have some sunglasses for the days I didn't want to wear my contacts.

We hailed a tuk tuk down and headed back, pleased with our bags full of new things. This time we were offered the journey for 60 baht!

I was pleased to spend some time in our air conditioned room chilling out to recover from the experience.

After walking up and down the beach looking at menus we decided to go back to the same restaurant as last night for dinner. We had a pretty view looking along beach at the crescent of lights from the resorts. The other resorts on this beach were all very low key traveller style places, not package holiday tourist resorts which was a refreshing change.

There were a few stray dogs wandering around the beach - a couple of which were the cutest ever curlie poodle type things with the biggest brownest eyes. I could happily have taken them home with me.

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