5th May, less technically.
It’s quite hard to take any photographs around here that don’t look like they’re destined for a brochure. I spent part of the morning down the beach, where the golden sands stretched away in either direction as far as the eye could see with barely a soul on them. Ahead the turquoise ocean was clear beneath the cloudless sky as far as the tropical jungle island in the distance. I went home – I’m not much of a sun-bunny – to find the pool entirely deserted (at around 12:30) gently rippling in a light breeze, blowing white flowers down from the tree that was shading me and across the empty pool.
And why is the pool and beach empty? How can we get a table at almost any restaurant we rock up to in the evening? What madness is this? Well, every couple of days the blistering heat and oppressive humidity is broken up by a long, heavy, warm rainstorm which leaves the world clear and damp. So this is the low season, and nobody’s here. I don’t understand the tourism industry.
My brothers have both hired motorbikes to whizz around the island on – I’ve stuck to the 50-baht-to-anywhere taxi service. The lack of petrol stations confused me a bit, but then I realised that outside most of the random shops dotted around the island have a stand or table of old vodka and whiskey bottles, refilled with gasoline for the motorbikes. Most of them have a plank or shade to keep the bottles out of the sun. There are a few black patches on the ground where that lesson was recently hard-learnt.
Whenever we get new towels, we get a kind of towel origami:
I don’t think I understand the tourism industry either. You’d think that having the heat and humidity broken up every so often would be perfect.
Cute towel origami is cute.
I appreciate that this may be the “low” season, but I think you’re just being very English about wondering why there’s nobody in the pool at 1230 😀 It’s pretty much the worst time of day to be out in the sun in any place that has a decent amount of sunshine and heat 🙂