after 5 days in Bophut, Ko Samui

It's now Sunday and we have been at Bo Phut Beach aka Fisherman's village on the north side of Ko Samui since Wednesday.

Until today we've done nothing at all except hang out on the beach. The Lodge where we are staying is very nice, we are on the top floor with a perfect view of the beach, and we literally walk out of the rear door and onto the beach. There are a couple of large trees which give all-day shade, so we get our sun loungers early in the morning and park there all day, eating breakfast there, running out to get some lunch when the street foodsellers (fresh fruit, meat on skewers, sweet rice) come along, and taking a break from the heat in the air-conditioned bedroom for a couple of hours in the afternoon, before a late afternoon swim and then out for dinner.

Yesterday an old friend of ours from Munich days, Ian, arrived here for 2 nights. He's travelling with his partner; they came from the island Ko Phangan where we go next. We haven't seen him for 6.5 years except once I met him briefly in Budapest a few years ago, so it's nice to catch up.

Today we went for a snorkelling trip on a longboat to two small islands off the south coast of Ko Samui. We were considering going to the Angthong national marine park but that's a longer trip. The snorkelling was quite good, with coral and a fair selection of fishes including some rays. The nicest part was feeding bread to the fishes out of your hands - they literally surround you in the water. Briana got in for a short time in morning and afternoon, and Fiona surprised us by spending a lot of time in the water and even trying a mask and snorkel for a while - considering she never likes to put her head under the water this was quite an achievement by her.
Most of the time she liked to put her hands around my neck and hold on with her head out of the water while I snorkelled around. She wasn't at all afraid of the deep waters.

We've been thinking of hiring a car for a day trip around the island but today we went along the entire east side of the island and it wasn't very attractive, so we might save our money and just stay on the beach until we move to Ko Phangan on Wednesday. We know the main Chaweng and Lamai beaches on the island only by reputation, which isn't good, so we won't miss much I think.

Going scuba diving from here is too expensive because of distance from the main dive sites so we will postpone that until we reach Ko Phangan where it will be cheaper (and it would be cheaper still if we would change our travel plan and stay some nights in Ko Tao where most of the dive sites are).

We've avoided most of the relatively expensive restaurants by eating each night in on of the very few ordinary Thai restaurants in town. The difference is mains ranging from 50 to 80 Baht (1 to 2 Euros) there, versus mains ranging from 180 to 450 Baht (4 to 10 Euro) at most of the eateries. We wouldn't care if it was just a 2 week holiday but over 3 months expensive eating out would add up. And anyway the Thai food is very tasty! However we can't resist the temptation to hang out after dinner for a while in a nice cocktail bar, usually spending a good bit more than we paid for dinner. Tough life.

We aren't following the news from home much but I note that Ireland won the triple crown and grand slam, Gyurcsany might be on the way out as Hungarian PM, and Man Utd are under pressure.

One other thing - Ko Samui has the nicest airport we've ever seen. This picture doesn't show much but sums it up. First of all, the bus from the plane is open-sided like the sort you find at a theme park. Then the baggage carousel is in an area that has a roof to keep the sun off, but no walls. The toilets have large aquariums. In fact it doesn't look like an airport at all, except for the runway.

(We flew here on a Bangkok Air Boeing 717 which was about 2/3 full, mostly westerners. The resort here is very quiet and we heard that the airlines are reducing flights.)