Happy Thai New Year - grab your water guns!!

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Today is the Thai New Year (also known as Songkran), and to celebrate this the Thai people have one big ENORMOUS water fight. Andy and I had read up about this as we knew it fell when we were going to be in Thailand, but nothing could have prepapred us for the huge party going on all day today.

The Thai people and the Westerners all have water guns, and bukets and super soakers etc and soak you every time you walk past so we havent been dry since we woke up, and then they also put some talc white stuff on your face whcih burns a little, ... not exactly sure about that, but they areall covered in it!

To give you an idea of the extent of the partying .. The Thai police went past us today on a moped in full uniform and squirted us clear in the face!! Brilliant!

Yeterday was a pretty great day, we decide to do an organised tourist tour, a boat trip around Koh Tao which stopped at serveral points for snorkelling .. It turned out to be one of the best days so far! The first port of call was a spot scarily named 'Shark Bay' where we were told only sharks lived as they had eaten all the fishies ... brilliant. We felt better when they explained that the sharks were about 3 metres long and we scared of anything bigger than them and they would almost certainly leave us along (almost?!?!) Anyway, we bravely entered the water and after 20 minutes of swimming around with our heads in the water we had seen the entire cast of Finding Nemo, but no sharks ... until i noticed a large shape at the bottom of the sea and low and behold ... there he was!! Mr Shark! .. and I'll be honest, I thought he was gonna look like an overgrown fish but no .. he was clearly a shark .. fin and all. It was so incredible to see I forgot to be worried and just enjoyed this amazing creature. Turns out no one else saw one of the trip so I was pretty lucky!!

The day concluded with two hours on a beautiful little island just off Koh Tao which is joined to another island by a small stretch of sand and its just beautiful. We were feeling keen for a nice view and headed up to the View Point of the one of the islands .. well worth it for the view, not so much for our poor backs which we burnt to a crisp on the walk! Ouch!

This wasn't great timing as last night we were boarding the dreaded night boat ... dum dum duuuuum!! We were moving on to the next island and figuired doing it overnight would save us a nights accomodation ..(were getting better at this budgeting lark 😉. I commented serveral times before the journey that the night boat sounds like were gonna be all thrown below deck .. in the style of the old slavery ships from Africa, and as soon as we boarded Andy commented that I wasn't far off! There were two levels, and each level was like an enourmous bed .... for 70 people! we all had to lie like sardines getting cosy with people we had never met, whilst a few poxy fans tried to keep the heat off us. The boat then proceeded to take seveal hours to do a journey which probably should have taken about 4 ... but regardless we got there and it was certainly an adventure, especially with such sunburnt backs .. eek! And totally worth it as I mentioned the Thai New Year so we've been chilling in the sea with some Chaing for most of the day .... bliss

Unti Next Time ... becky@andy

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