Koh Samui

I flew into Koh Samui last night with my friends Nissa and Kully, who I met at the airport. They were traveling from Hong Kong, where Kully worked this summer. The flight was on an 80 person prop plane (the first time I've flown a prop in 10 years) and was very uneventful. Bangkok Airways is quite good, I would recommend flying them to anyone who travels in Southeast Asia.

Koh Samui is sort of like the Florida Keys, except the development has not been as stringently controlled and this sometimes shows up in ugly ways, such as run down and abandoned buildings. And in the Keys you don't get all the Thai hookers that seem to be everywhere. As we walked the main strip last night looking for bars to have a drink at there were some that seemed entirely populated by pros.

Also, as far as I can tell we might be the only Americans on the island. There are plenty of foreigners but almost all of them are Europeans, with England, Sweden and Italy seeming to lead the way. This makes a lot of sense if you think about it geographically. You can essentially get what is offered here in the Caribbean and getting there only takes you 3 hours, not an entire day. To fly here from Europe is only about a 10 hour flight, about as long as it would take a European to fly to the Caribbean. Since Koh Samui and Thailand in general are a lot cheaper than the Caribbean, it makes sense to come here

Nissa's cousin owns a hotel here and got us a couple of rooms. They are at the far end of Chaweng beach and are very nice. From my door to the ocean is maybe 50 yards and there is a nice pool as well. We enjoyed both last night after wandering the bars, showing the Thai waitresses how to play quarters (they thought it was hilarious) and getting a feel for this part of the island.

Koh Samui and Chaweng beach in particular have a reputation for being party central. I think we are so near the southern end of the beach that we have avoided the noise that comes from the all night discos farther north. As we were taking the cab down to the hotel from the airport we were very amused that people were on a beach resort island wearing their best club clothes.

Tonight we are going to grab dinner at one of the many seafood restaraunts here. They have large displays of fresh fish, squid and lobster on ice right on the street. You pick what you want, they weigh it and charge you (usually about $5) and cook it on the charcoal grills that are right next to the fish. Not too shabby.

Tomorrow Matt and Jake should arrive from Bangkok and we are going to head to Koh Tao, a smaller less developed island an hour north of Samui by ferry. There is fantastic diving and snorkelling there and we also plan to see if we can charter a fishing trip. You can fish here for barracuda, cobia, shark, spanish mackeral, sailfish, snapper, and grouper among many other types.

I would post some pictures but I managed to delete the contents of the SD card on my pocket cam messing around with the menus today. Among them was some great video of our quarters game last nigth so we're going to have to recreate it tonight.

I still have plenty of Bangkok shots on my FZ-30 though, so it's not that big a tragedy. Still, I plan to start uploading photos soon.

Internet time at the cafes here is charged at 1 baht per minute, or less than $2/hr.

I'm off to buy some mosquito spray to go with my recently purchased sunscreen and Tylenol.

More soon.