Beach Bummery = Bad Bloggery

What a fun title, says I!  Since our arrival in Koh Samui we have been super busy doing absolutely nothing.  It turns out after our experiences in northern Thailand and the wilds of Laos, we were really burned out, so we came here for some vacation-from-vacationing.  Our month long Cambodia-northern Thailand-Laos leg left us feeling like these poor Swiss kids after elephant riding.

Pooped!  When you can fall that fast asleep in the back of a bouncing Thai songethaw, you are TIRED.

Koh Samui has been an excellent panacea for our weary selves.  We started off with an hour long minibus trip from the airport that took us to the remote west coast on the island.  The good news is that it had beautiful sunsets over the ocean, free kayak rentals at the hotel, and a decent beach.

View from the restaurant

Awwwww

I took that picture!  It's true!

 Our hotel was pretty good, including two pools that we loved, but was far too out of the way for us.  A nice beach on a remote part of a Thai island sounds nice and romantic, but the reality is that it's impossible to see anything on the island, no shops or restaurants except the expensive (and terrible) hotel food unless you walk for a long ways, and even then will be serenaded by roaming chickens while eating.  Oh, and the possibility exists that someone is going to randomly tie their water buffalo to a palm tree across the street and leave it to terrify white people who happen to be passing by.  Yes that happened.

"Good afternoon, folks!" Not our actual buffalo, but like they say, a buffalo's a buffalo.

Fortunately we'd only booked that hotel for three days so after those few days we jumped to a hotel on the east coast, and the experience has been much better.  We are in the nicest hotel room we've seen in Thailand, complete with bathtub and shower curtain (that's a big deal!  Really!), balcony, and a lovely pool with a view of the beach.

View from our balcony.  You can see the ocean, promise!

We loooooooove this pool!

It has been the perfect beach retreat, and is quickly making it's way up the list of places we want to come back to.  The stresses and worries of travel have fallen from our psyches like so many coconuts from their trees. Not a good comparison, so if you want I'm sure you can come up with some better beach-based metaphor, I never claimed this post would win the Nobel prize for awesome writing.  Or is it the Pulitzer?  Whatever.  I'm waaaaaaayyy tooooooo relaxed to worry about such things.  You would be too as this is the most relaxed place on the planet! 

Brannan loves life!

Looking down the bay - seriously folks, come to Thailand already!

View from our lunch spot, "The Black Pearl"

We have fallen into a fantastically relaxing routine that we may just follow until the end of time:

9:00-ish: Wake up

10:00: Swim in the beautiful green water

11:00: Happily sun ourselves like so many warm lizards  (bad metaphor #2 - meh, whatevs)

11:30: Swim in the cool pool with beautiful view of the ocean

12:30: Happily sun ourselves by the pool like lazy hippies.  There's a good one!  Waaaait a second, that's not a metaphor...

Sometime later: roam the beach in search of delicious beach/Thai food, usually always with fruity drinks.

3:00-ish: Head back to the coolness of our hotel room to rest our weary, burned skins (and blog!)

Evening: Wander the streets in search of more delightful food, such as

Grilled Shrimps!  And no I am not pretending that they are my prawny puppets in a maritime melodrama of my own creation, that would be crazy, people.  "Evening, Beasley." says shrimp #1, with a hint of chill in his voice..."You watch how you talk to our good master, sir" interjects shrimp #2..."It's OK, Godfried, he has some things on his tiny shrimp brain and I would like to hear them" replies Good King Brannan...to be continued? 

Later Evening: hit up the 7-11 for prepackaged ice cream cones, head back to the room to rest up and do it again tomorrow!

Random side note: for some reason we are literally surrounded by Russians!  We have no idea why, we've never run across a single Russian anywhere else here in SE Asia, but this island is totally lousy with Russians, they are everywhere so much that there are restaurants in Russian, hotels in Russian, a total mystery. 

Sadly for blogging purposes, such a life of pleasure and ease leaves us without exciting/humorous anecdotes or adventures, just a lot of R&R which isn't that exciting to write or read about, as you know since (for some reason) you have read this post up until now.  Nonetheless we love it here and will be here for another few days or years.  We have hypothetical plans to leave this island to go to Koh Tao, which is the diving epicenter of Thailand and has some of the best diving in the world, so more fun is ahead!

Anyways, thanks for following our so-called adventures, it's nice to have an audience, as my nascent prawn-drama (Prama?) can attest!