A black day for me, another white one for Mal

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There’s been a partial death in the family. Well if not a death, a long term debilitating illness at least.
Whilst we love the simpleness (and cheapness) of our current island residence, it doesn’t necessarily offer all the security features of the concrete bungalows on the resorts. For a start it’s made of wood, so if somebody was minded to get in - they could just huff and puff and blow the thing down. It also lacks a safe. This is a bit of a conundrum - do we go to reception/the bar and ask them if they have a safe, thus alerting everyone to the fact that we have stuff we deem valuable enough to be locked away? Or do we try and hide things in the bungalow. We chose the latter, reasoning that we are only here for 3 days until we move to the dive resort and sought to find hiding places for our valuables. A lockable drawer was ok for wallets, passports etc, the camera was stuffed at the bottom of Mal’s bag and we left the room messy enough to look like it had been turned over already to confuse any would be theif. My laptop was stuffed under the mattress where it stayed safe and sound until about half an hour after we’d gone to bed - when we remembered it was there.
On opening her up this morning I was greeting with a pattern of cracks across the screen, creating a quite pretty floral design of dead pixels.
If I had been at home, this discovery would have probably made me cry, or at least very angry. But its pretty hard to get angry when all you can hear is the ocean and the birds . I reasoned that it still works fine, and its easy enough to move windows around if you need to see what is behind the dead bits. That said, if anyone knows where I can get a replacement screen for the now extinct ibook g4 12”, I’d be most grateful if they’d let me know. Hopefully we’ll find one that can be waiting for us when we arrive in NZ and all will be well again.
We’re having a quiet day today, on what is our first full day in Koh Tao. Mal may be beginning to succumb to the traveller’s affliction so we’ve decided to ditch plans to hire a kayak for the day and just chill on our porch instead.
it’s actually a bit cloudy today, so a little cooler, without the relentless sun - giving us a good opportunity to catch up on some writing and reading, and also to give my shoulders a bit of time to recover from their encounter with the searing sun yesterday. It seems there was a discrepancy between the straps on the vests I was wearing on the ferry ride yesterday, which i overlooked when it came to the sunblock - resulting in some patches angry skin.
So that’s where we’re at today. Me typing this on my poorly ibook with a touch of sunburn and mal lying in the hammock, reading ‘On the Road’ - incredibly and stubbornly still the whitest man in Asia.

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