life's A BEACH.....

Hello from sunny Thailand! We are Ko Samui which is a great place. Clear blue skies every day, warm water etc. Have had a massage on the beach, gone elephant trekking (I can't work out if the elephant liked it but the trainer assured me he did) and yesterday we visited the marine park which is about 50 islands made of limestone. They look exactly like all the pictures you see and have these gorgeous beaches with the clearest, lightest blue water you have ever seen.

Tomorrow we head to another smaller island, Ko Tao so that Dazza can go diving - its meant to be great there. Anyway must go, I have lots of sunbaking to do, and also I must start thinking about lunch - the food here is unreal, dirt cheap (no I haven't got sick yet) and Andy, I have been having lots of pad Thai - yum!

Only thing about Ko Samui is that there seem to be an abundance of old Caucasian men hanging out with young, Thai women. Now the cynical might say something else, but I'm sure they are are all loving families on their honeymoon - yeah right!

A WEIGHTY ISSUE....

Well we are in the new, very snazzy Bangkok Airport at the moment waiting for a connecting flight to Samui. Everything (so far) has been going well except we were shocked and horrified to get our hand luggage weighed!! Now any flyer knows that you stuff your hand luggage with all the heavy stuff so you don't go overweight right? Well, we had to re-arrange, check in extra bags so we would make the weight limit. Which for Thai Airlines (very good airline, lots of leg room) is 7 kg for hand luggage and 30 kg for check in. So with all Dazza's snowboarding gear meant that we came in at 62 kg and two 7 kg carry on bags. Which is fine except that Luftansa, which is taking us to Paris only allows 20 kg check in each (40kg in total). So somehow, in the next 12 days we have to eliminate 22 kg of weight. And excess baggage is $50 a kilo so that's not really an option. Any ideas???

ONE WEEK TO GO.....

Well we have one week to go until we leave, but strangely enough I'm more worried about how our farewell party is going to go rather than the fact very very soon we will no longer have an Australian address.

Anyway I have had my first bad experience with the extremely unhelpful french bureaucratic system. I have been waiting for my contract to arrive for months - this is just a formality as I am being paid by an independent funding body. But still I like to feel organisms - however I only got this tiny simple piece of paper that would have taken about 5 minutes to organism last week. Now I knew that something like this would happen - I had been warned. Now all I thought I would have to do is sign the thing and send it back - et voila! But no, of course how could I be so dumb? I am told I need a tetanus vaccination (gee lucky me I got one of those last week when I smashed my head a got stitches - see silver lining guys!), a polio vaccination (don't these idiots know that polio is virtually eradicated from the earth's face??) and details on my hepatitis injections (sadly for me I'm a non-responder to this vaccination so really that doesn't matter). In addition to this plethora of needles I also need health insurance. And for those of you with knowledge about these 2 fascinating subjects 1) French health care system 2) the state of my kidneys will know this is no small feat. Anyway that's enough griping, I've got no doubt this will become a regular feature of this blog.....