How fab, Deryn decided to take a short trip away from the British cold and come out to see me in Koh Samui. I discovered a new airport at Pattaya called U Tapao that I had never heard of before and took a Bangkok Airways flight direct from Pattaya to Koh Samui. And it was a freebie, paid for with my Bangkok Airways frequent flyer points. Another propellor jobbie, but got so used to them in Burma. And what fun to meet her in my favourite airport in the world, Koh Samui. Deryn agrees it is the best too! And even with independent flight booking (she came in from Bangkok) I arrived on the flight immediately after her. Even more spooky, on the return leg, I was off to Trat and she to Bangkok, so flights were determined by timetables, but I took off on the plane immediately before her.....
But I couldn't subject Deryn to the real backpacker world (one day....) so we booked in to the 5* Mai Samui Resort, not that I took much persuading.... as you know, I like a flaskpack now and again.... A lovely hotel on the Western Coast, isolated but that's ok when you are not on your own. We were real flashpackers and upgraded to pool access rooms and spent quite a lazy time. The food in the hotel was good and reasonably priced (apart from breakfast at almost £15 for the buffet), but the drinks were extortionate, they tried to charge over £4 for a lime soda, but of course secret water making yet another outing helped a little with that one... But next door was a small villa type hotel that was in the process of being built, called GG's.
A very apt name I thought, I made it my own as they served a reasonable and affordable why why. The GG actually stands for Gato and Guitar, we never did discover why. The food was good too, and right on the beach, the tables sheltered with little bamboo structures, really charming It is family run and we took a look inside one of the new villas, really impressive. Currently it's cheap at about £20 a night, with no real infrastructure, but when the pool is built and the other building is finished it will be a force to be reckoned with. And a massage lady who according to Deryn is very skilled, she was taught by her grandmother. The menu was really big and all food came out of a tiny kitchen sheltered by bamboo. The menu was the usual mix of spelling and we were particularly disappointed to find that the banana "friffers" were not available, the answer when we ordered was "so-ee, yeh we ha no banana", I'm sure there's a song in that somewhere... And the explanation that the lime soda's had gone up from 30 to 80 baht in one day was the increased cost of limes in the market.... That's some inflation, think we all need to go into lime futures....
Another place we tried - just the once - was Beryl's Bar, right at the end of the bay on a little cove. The Jamaican knick knacks hanging around should have been a clue, but we missed those at first, too intent on getting the barking dogs away from our ankles. It appeared to be built out of bits of driftwood but in its own way, very attractive. We had planned to eat there, but on closer inspection, decided against it. The owner was rather feral looking and insisted on huge bear hugs as a welcome (so un Thai) and the whites of his eyes were very yellow. We had one drink to which Gill, for hygiene reasons of course, added a large dose of secret water and then left. We decided to walk along the cove beach attached to the bar to get back to ours, but we soon turned back when we realised we were crossing sand that was strewn with broken beer bottles and empty syringes. We also went for lunch at the very swish Four Seasons which was next door to our hotel and Deryn took advantage of a post lunch rest on their rather flash beach furniture...
The Mai Samui hotel luckily didn't go in for evening entertainment, so we were spared the ritual of the "cultural show". So we were very surprised one evening on going down to the beach to get to GG's to find a huge screen and speakers erected on the beach. It was showing a Whitney Houston concert, think it might have been the day of her funeral. Even more bizarre, two days later, the same set up appeared, this time a Michael Jackson concert... Had we stayed longer, we reckoned an Amy Winehouse retrospective may have appeared....
As with lime inflation, transport cost have rocketed here too. You can still flag down the songthaews on the road, but by the time you pay for two fares as these have gone up a lot too, it can be almost as cheap to take a taxi and you don't have to stand up on the back clinging on for dear life as I had to on one occasion as it was full. But, like Phuket, the taxi mafia seem to have taken over here and taxis are generally at London prices. Odd as in Bangkok they are cheap as chips. But we struck lucky one day whilst waiting for a songthaew on the main road. A taxi stopped, driven by a Mr Non who agreed to take us for the same price as the songthaew. He owned his own taxi and was very proud of it and, a rarity in Thailand, he seemed a careful driver. We got chatting and he became our personal transport, but the downside was the exhaustion of the conversation, it really is quite hard to translate Thai English into English English although Deryn, like Ant and David is getting there with my tuition! On a trip to Lamai to see my old haunts (and one big disappointment, my old Churchill Pub where I had great Sunday lunches, cottage pies and baked potatoes is no more, it's now a swishier restaurant...) he insisted on stopping for us to see the big sight of the island, Grandmother and Grandfather rocks. Here is the official blurb:
At the south end of Lamai beach are some rock formations that are standard, if a bit sophomoric, stops on any tour of Samui. The 'Grandfather Rock' and 'Grandmother Rock' have been shaped over millions of years by wind and water to resemble human sex organs. A short narrow alley lined with souvenir stalls leads from the main road to the rocks. You actually end up on Grandmother's belly, where a crevice has been worn into the rock to form granny's legs. The Grandfather Rock, a penis shaped pillar, is about 25 metres to the south.
Despite the silliness that the stones induce, the spot is actually rather beautiful, with turquoise waters in pools among the rocks.
Now in most places in the world a taxi driver insisting on taking women here would seem a bit odd, but here Mr Non was very proud of this almost spiritual place.....
We ventured into BoPhut for dinner one night and enjoyed a good pizza on the beach with drinks in a bar on the sand where you lounge on big cushions with a view of Koh Phangan and its lights twinkling in the distance. They had a big screen set up for a big footie match later in the evening but obviously we didn't hang around for that. Other days we wandered into Chaweng, which I had thought from my last visit was awful, but after being in Pattaya, I can now see some charm in it. There is still some evidence of the bad flooding they had here last March with some places taking the opportunity to re build. And another good result, the flooding has meant they had to repair some of the pavements so it is a much easier walk along the main shopping bit! There is still work going on all along the road and it looks like they may be burying the drains, how nice would that be not to be assailed by sewage smells everywhere you go! And the good fakes that were missing in Bangkok were here in abundance. Not cheap but very good, but of course neither of us would ever be seen with a fake bag... Although Deryn was tempted by the fake Hermes dog collar for Totes, but the prices quoted would have bought you the real thing at home, so he will have to make do with his current wardrobe of other real designer collars....
All too soon it was time to part, Deryn off to more shopping in Bangkok and me back to a visa run to Cambodia. Looking forward to a repeat visit soon......
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