ANDAMAN COAST

20TH - 25TH OCTOBER

We hadn’t got any accommodation booked in Phuket and we weren’t planning to stay there for long, as it’s package holiday central, but we needed to go there to get a boat out to the quiet and untouristy island of Ko Yao Noi, a Noah recommendation! We picked somewhere near to the airport and in the least touristy part of Phuket and decided to stay a couple of nights as my cold had developed into a real nasty thing so I was feeling pretty rough. We headed for Hat Nai Thon (not the easiest of languages this Thai!) and ended up at a beach resort place! Not that cheap, but we did get a room upgrade because we complained that our room had no curtains! We were given a huge aircon sea facing room - quite a bargain in the end! The view was definitely better than the weather though, it was particularly cloudy and very humid. We went for a walk along the beach and you could imagine how beautiful the sea would look on a clear day, it was more of an emerald green colour than the usual
blue we’d come to expect. It was quite obvious that there was a lot of building work being carried out, you could see large cranes on the next cove and there was a reasonable amount of work going on where we were and it was quite strange feeling to think of what devastation must have been caused by the tsunami. At one point I stood in the edge of the sea trying to imagine what on earth the big wave must have looked like, the sea looked so calm and welcoming yet the results of the big wave were still so clearly evident, it was a very sobering moment.

The rest of the day was spent blowing my nose and chilling, Rob managed to read a whole book that day! 380 pages!!! The conversation out of him for the day was quite something - not!!! We also found out that the end part of the zoom lens had broken, we were trying to work out what had happened to it as the plastic seal at the end was spilt and