Today is Monday. I had to check, because I’ve completely lost track of time on this little slice of island paradise. And my internal clock won’t work overseas. We arrived Saturday in the early afternoon to this darling little Robinson Crusoe island. Merely an hour by plane from BKK, an hour by car from the Trat airport then an additional hour south of Trat by ferry, which was slightly nauseating, but I didn’t vomit, so that was nice, don’t forget your gravol.

The island is beyond lovely, mostly crime and drug free. On arrival we checked in to our prearranged hotel – Horizon, on the water, small 20 bungalow resort. Delivers everything they claim, lovely (albeit foreign) owners, beautiful views, very accommodating. No complaints. Neighbours to Never Land. There’s some sort of sick Peter Pan obsession on island. Pan, Tinkerbell, Hook are scattered around as suspicious & (very) overpriced beachfront options. Devoid of anything Thai. You may as well be in Hawaii. Save yourself the 20 hours worth of flights from America.

So far Tinkerbell is harbouring the best beach. In my opinion. But I haven’t seen them all. The water temp is slightly cooler, due to the wide bay. Which sounds crazy, but the water is so ridiculously warm at the beach by the hotel that it leaves something to be desired. And Tink has the clearest water. Nothing on the bottom, nothing floating, no garbage/seaweed. No jellies. A few aquarium style fish. Pretty perf. Perf color, relatively low amount of other farangs on the beach, and locals – as it is a public beach. I rate you 9.5/10.

Enough about the beach. We eat too, that’s really why we’re here. I have fruit for breakfast at the hotel, mister likes his coffee, in this case it’s Nescafé, which he claims to strongly dislike but still drinks 3 cups. Lunch has been grilled chicken/pork from a teen girl with a grill on the main road. Dinner the night before last night (Saturday) was deplorable, like Thai hamburger helper. We won’t go be going back there. Last night was lovely, Panang curry. So good we stay in their bungalow now so we won’t have to drive to dinner. I should mention the driving.

I almost died Saturday. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

The roads here are #1 better than the Lund highway and #2 like a massive (narrow) driveway that spans the western side of the island. The majority of vehicles are scooters – local and tourist, a handful of Thai taxis and resort shuttles – songathew style trucks, and even less work trucks – that are busy fixing/ improving the roads where there have been rockslides. So yes, the close call with death happened on the way back from the beach out south, that I will refer to lovingly as garbage beach, as there is no resort on that beach cleaning it. I guess this was Saturday. We had explored around a bit and the path back to the road was quite sandy so I walked a bit of the way. But eventually got back on the scooter and we were slowly toodling along when something I assumed to be a meteorite blasted past us, about 3 feet to the left of our shoulders and bounced back up ten feet before rolling away. A bloody coconut. Scared the life out of me. A million times scarier than the prop plane to Trat. It had us both fazed and checking every coconut tree we had to walk under for potential brain busters.

Okay, that’s all for now. Staying the next few nights at Relax House. The owner is going to find me some monkeys, a working one and hopefully some wild ones at dusk tonight. So wish me luck on not getting rabies.

Pre publishing update. The neighbour brought over their monkey. It flung coconuts from the tree. It was amazing. And terrifying. And efficient. And a typical pissed monkey. Thor wanted to pet it. So he pet it. And it bit his pinky finger off. Just kidding. But I’m sure it wanted to.

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