A sunday shopping adventure

After a day at the kite beach, where I almost(!) got my back-roll to stick, we decided to go shopping for some things and have a look around.
Carlos changed his room in the surf shack for a bungalow close by, so now he’s living with Mr Pong and Miss Nong, near Mr Moo’s scooter rental. Is it only me who see the humor in these names? :-)
Anyhow, Mr Pong and Miss Nong were really nice and invited us to have dinner with them, me as well, eventhough I am not living there. Two full plates of thai soup, some really great stuff with cabbage, meat and other things I don’t really know what it was.

It is not every day I eat at a thai familys place, and certainly not in a house where the livingroom is out in open air with just a roof. I’d like to see this setup back in Sweden in the winter time.. :-)

 

 

After the meal, we ventured off on our scooters to Pranburi and Tesco’s.

Thumbs up!! If I didn’t already have a DVD player at home, I would definitly buy this one. Just take a look at this guy on the cover. Hasn’t he got credibility written all over him? What do you think?

 

I don’t know if the candy is supposed to be so good that you fight over it, nor what drugs the product manager at the candy company had been taking prior to approving this design, but this must be the best candy bag I ever got my hands on. Period.
The candy itself didn’t really sweep me off my feet though. Regular old-timer mints with sweet disgusting choclate inside. But it was worth it, just for the bag.

 
In the end, some coffee and a chance to read the local newspaper. The coffee – great! What is going on in the world - not a clue..

Learning how to Kite Surf - Again.

This friday I started the ATC, assistant teachers course, which is the pre-requisite for the instructors course next week. Jens, the guy running the surf center in Pak Nam Pran, held it and it was really good to have a look at things from a different angle.

The previous class finished their instructors training that very day, and they all looked very happy to be done and over with it. We went out for dinner and a few drinks, nothing more, as this place is quite quiet, our group was bigger than all the guests combined no matter where we went. However, we ordered in huge amounts of thai sea food for all, as we’re just by the sea. It was some really great stuff!!

Happy and relieved faces at the dinner, and some drinks at the bar later on.

 

Pak nam pran is actually not bad at all. There’s plenty of places to eat, people are friendly and relaxed, and there’s virtually no traffic. Apart from a few scooters that is.
For the first time in quite a while I had breakfast with sea view. Really relaxing. You can’t get a much better start of the day.

 

After breakfast we went to the surf center to wait for the wind and prepare for teaching our first students as assistant instructors.

Preparing for the Assistant Teacher Course 

 

Later on we went for dinner in Pranburi, a town about 10 km inland from here, at their local market. It reminded me a bit of the food hawker centers in Singapore, except here all was thai food. With the help of body language and our almost non existant thai skills we managed to order some squid with rice, beef in sauce with cabbage, pork with rice, and two pad thai with two big Chang’s. It all ended up at a very modest price, of course. Man, was that food great!

 
One of the food stands

Carlos and me having a pad thai

Pak nam pran

I arrived this tuesday at Pak nam pran, the location where the ITC course (kite surfing instructor) will be held. I got a room at a quite good place, a little villa that I am sharing with some other kite surfers. Other than surfers, there’s quite a lot of thais down here temporarily because of the floodings in the north.

Previous Sunday, I had a very small, to me pretty ridiculous accident on the reef in Bali, I got a small scratch on my right leg. I disinfected it, but nevertheless I got some kind of infection in the end, which made me go visit the doctor here in Pak nam pran (Thailand). I felt like back in the day when I lived in Spain for a while, I didn’t understand anything they were saying, but the doctor spoke some english and I was able to explain to him what happened. Some paperwork later, and I got medicine (3 kinds of them) + a reciept to come back. All in all, 112 bath, which means approx 3 euros! Incredible. And they were quite fast too, I can’t say the hospitals are faster in Sweden.
Going to the hospital, with a bike I borrowed from a guy at the place I stay, was quite fun. I pre-cached google maps, and just took the shortest route. It took me on small dirt roads, one leading to another, and finally up in to town and the hospital. It was really interesting to see the Thai countryside. Not bad at all. I’ll go back tomorrow, this time with a english-thai dictionary, so maybe I will be making some more sense to the doctor. Sign language can only get you that far..

Thumbs up! Medicine prescribed and ready to go. Now let’s hope it actually works..

 

I got myself a scooter of my own that evening. I haggled the price down to 1600 bath for 2 weeks, a really good price. Things are incredibly cheap here compared to Bali where there were tourists practically everywhere I went and all locals tried to hustle you.

The pro of having your scooter is that it is easy to get around and see things you wouldn’t see and do things you wouldn’t do otherwise. Like visiting the local town market for a late night snack. I bought some dumplings and some chicken sticks in various seasoning. Really excellent food!

 
The market with all its food stalls

 

Today, Thursday, I set out to kite surf for the first time. Quite good wind, a little too weak during the last 30 minutes to be able to do any tricks or so, but the beach is just excellent! Right on it there’s a restaurant with thai food and snacks, so you just take a seat with the other surfers under one of the roofs, and order in what seems good. It is cheap, and really nice to sit there resting in between the sessions, taking a coffee, beer or whatever and have a chat with the others while watching the ones who surf and do tricks.

As the ATM’s down here just won’t accept my credit card, I took a trip in to town to get some more money. While I was there I picked up some iodine (disinfectant) at a farmacy, where they had absolutely no idea about what I wanted. Zero english comprehension led me to draw the periodic chart on a piece of paper, then circling the “I”, then they got it :-)
I passed the little harbour on the way back, where they were all busy drying squid on these kind of racks, quite cool!

 
Squid drying in the sun

 

On the way home I stopped to snap a picture of the sunset. Magical.. With all the sounds from the tropical insects and animals, it was just.. Priceless.
However, I had to make a move quite quick, as the mosquitoes got baring of me. I think I managed to get about 10 bites just on that quick stop for 10 seconds. Incredible…

The beach hotel

No, it isn’t as good as it sounds. When I arrived in Phuket, I stayed at the same hotel as they used when making the movie “the beach”, hence the heading.
It played a part in the beginning of the film when Leo arrives in Bangkok and meet the french couple and the guy with the map. It could still play that part. It was just as shady now as it looked in the movie ten years ago, but dirt cheap. The dinner I had in the evening costed me more than the room!
This morning was the first time ever I showered without taking off my flip-flop’s. I guess you can imagine why.

 
Nice huh! The bed sheets were clean though, and no bugs or critters. :-)

 

 
Phuket didn’t make any special impression on me, so I decided on taking the earliest bus possible out of there. As I still get a little bit too comfy for going totally low-cost I took the VIP bus with air condition and with a toilet on board! I sinceriely don’t know how you are supposed to manage a 10 hour ride without going to the bathroom even once! Next stop Pran Buri and the kite beach!

Some funny looking hills on the way.

A sunday at Belangan beach

We spent the day at Belangan, my last day of surfing in Bali before leaving for Thailand. Pretty small swell, but you could still get a few. After a tip from Madik, our local indonesian surf guide, I learned to keep on paddeling just that extra 2 seconds when almost on the wave, and all of a sudden it was so much easier to catch them. I caught a little (in my opinion) bigger one, messed up, and got my first, though very shallow, reef cut which we disinfected with lime. After one week on the board, the pains in the lowermost ribs have disappeared, so it was really a great feeling to be out there.

 

The balinese can fit almost anything on a motorbike, A whole family, or as in this case, a store.

 

The warungs sit directly on the beach. Excellent to be able to sit down and have something cold to drink, or to grab a snack. I found out a room in one of those cost just 100.000 rupies (about 10 euros) for a week. Cheap!

WTF! Another photo shoot for a japanese wedding! In bikini. No clue why, but Bali must be really popular for this, as we saw 2 or 3 of them during the week. Not to mention all the other wedding photo shoots.
You see the girl to be married on the left, and the rest of the people are helping out, with things like holding an umbrella for the sun, or just standing around.

 

 

After all this we had a barbecue at the camp in the evening. Seems like ages I had something else than rice or noodles, so that was great.

Some strange bugs have been gathering around the lights out in the lounge areas, hundreds, thousands of them. Then, all of a sudden they lose their wings one by one, fall to the ground and start crawling around instead. It has happend several days in a row now, and in the mornings when we get up and walk out to the lounge, the floor is all full of bug wings. Weird.

Private charter to Ubud

This friday, I took off for some sight seeing around Ubud, a city a little bit further in land. A bit after 7, I got picked up by Toya, my driver, who took me to all the sights. The monkey forest, the temple in Ubud, the rice teracess, another temple and for a quick peek at Sanur.

 

While I waited for him to turn up, I had a beng-beng, the base of a nutrishous and healthy meal.

After 2 hours drive, we stopped for a real breakfast at a warung. This was probably the meal that upset my belly. Yeah, I thought more than once before digging in to this, but what the heck, you got to try it. And I was really hungry. Toya had something similar, and I picked up the bill which stopped 30.000 rupies (a little less than 3 euros). It was really great though, some things I never tasted before.
Very ofthen here, you get your meal served in a basket like this, with some paper on it instead of a plate.

This is what the kitchen looked like. As you may notice, The chef got a bit embarresed :-)

 
And the display window and the entrance, with all the things on sale.

 

After the breakfast at the warung, we left for the Monkey forest.

A common activity for the monkeys when not trying to steal things from the visitors - pick bugs out of the fur for each other.

There were some people who had as jobs to feed the monkeys to keep them happy. Here they are eating away on some nuts. I bought some bananas to give to them, and one cheeky kid monkey climbed up my leg and tried to stick his little hands in my pockets. :-)

Another monkey hanging around in a tree.

 Hey man! Go put some clothes on!
The kid in the family was kind of amazed that daddys ding dong was out in the free. After a while he grew tired of his curious kid and showed him his teeth which made him lose interest.

 

The jungle itself was pretty cool too. Damp, sweathy and a lot of noise from all the animals. 

The rice teracess just outside Ubud. Really nice place.

 

To enhance the experience you could have babi guling (roasted suckling pig) while enjoying the view.

 

These are pictures of the other temple we passed on the way home from Ubud. Quite a cool place, except for the guy that tried to do the “sarong trick” on me, putting a sarong around your waist while getting your wallet. I gave him a grim look, and he undestood that I understood and backed off.
Toya couldn’t enter the temple as a member of his family recently passed away. Something to do with bad luck I think.

On the way home, we went to sanur beach and saw a gigantic hotel, built in the 60ies with money from Japan as a compensation for what they did during ww2. The beach and its establishments looked very old as well, and seemed to have had its peak some years ago. There were only indonesian people there almost.
After all that I slept for 3 hours when I came home, a compensation for all the bed time I lost during these last days. The heat really makes you tired as well.

Yet some more from Bali

We have hung out at the padang padang beach now for a couple of days and had some pretty good surfing. I am getting a lot better at it now, and caught plenty of waves on my big floaty foam board.

And here it is. The ultimate proof! :-)

Humans aren’t the only ones enjoying the beach, there’s also a great deal of monkeys. I haven’t seen them surf yet though, it seems like they are mainly monkeying around i.e. stealing food from people at the beach and copulating. Tough life, being a monkey. And yes, they are found in the car parking too, even though I haven´t seen any single one of them drive. Yet.

 

 

There’s more animals to be found in padang padang. Thursday, a dead cow payed a visit to the surf break. It was floating around right there among all the surfers in the line up. Pretty disgusting. The story didn’t tell if it died from surfing, and no, I didn’t paddle up to it to get a picture. I think you understand why.

 

 

Some people from the surf camp getting ready to go out.

It has been smaller and smaller swell these days, but it kind of suits me. It is not so difficult to paddle in to it, and less chance of hitting the bottom of the reef if you mess up. Another positive side effect is that the crowd in the line up is smaller.

 

The beach itself is not bad at all. It is located between two cliffs that shoot out in the water. To get to it, you have to use a narrow set of steps that goes down in a crack between two cliffs.

In between the sessions you can get something to eat or drink at the local warung. A Bintang costs about 20.000 rupies (approx 2 euros), which is not bad after some hours of surfing.

I had a chat with an Italian guy who has been working in Bali for a couple of years now. During that time 4 different groups of indonesians came up and asked if they could have their picture taken with us! Incredible! If you know me (which I think you do if you are reading this blog), I just had to counter it, and asked for a photo with them and us. That didn’t go too well, they all shyed away and in the end just one of them dared to be in it. I wonder what they told they friends about us though, I can’t think of anyone famous that looks like me.

The gas stations (for the scooters) here in Bali are like a carbon copy of the ones I have seen in the Dominican Republic. Kind of cool, don’t you think?

 

Kuta, the main city on Bali. Of course, with all the big surf brands represented with their own shops. I just had to get something :-)

There’s a lot of buddhist statues of gods around. Quite cool. And very nice nature. Just check out the colors of that insect crawling on the flower!!