The Gods smile down on us.

November 16, 2007 by Rick.

Our hotel was fully booked from today and we had to leave. Luckily we found even nicer digs! Story below…

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Upon entering Thailand we went first to Krabbi, only a few hundred KM North of the Border with Malaysia. Krabbi was OK, we were a bit confused as to all the fuss of the travel books. The beach is about a half hour drive from town, but there are an abundance of tours to all sorts of islands and spectacular sights available. After asking around to other travelers, the lure of Krabbie would merely seem to be slightly cheaper accommodation and food prices with the inconvenience of traveling a bit more back and forth to the beach. It had a small market, and lots of GREAT! Inexpensive food so we enjoyed it for a couple of days. Alex got her hair done in a whole bunch of mini braids. This took two and a half people almost three full hours to accomplish! She loves it now, keeping her hair long, but not getting so sweaty and hot in the often muggy weather.

After Krabbi we chartered a large van to take us to Phuket for a week or two. Grandma Vi would be joining us here after a couple days. Claudette found a hotel on the web somehow that had two rooms available. These were pretty basic rooms, with a washroom and a large ceiling fan for about $30/night. These rooms sure smelled musty and possibly mildewy though, so people wouldn’t want to stay there more than a week or so… This place had only 14 of these fan rooms open, but they were constructing another 50 or so units on the same property, (right beside our rooms, from 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM each day!). There were already 15 or so of these newer rooms (post Tsunami) open, but they cost a minimum of $16/night! We were here to save lots of money, not just a tiny bit. These other rooms had beautiful marble throughout, as well as air conditioning and king sized beds. A couple of them also had private hot tubs for only $165/night.

We had originally only booked for two nights in case it was a dump and we wanted to go elsewhere. This beach we were at was amazingly gorgeous, and very deserted generally. I walked a kilometer or two in both directions and there was nothing better for the same or cheaper money. The problem came though when we went to extend our booking and found out that all but one of the cheap rooms were booked for the next two weeks! So, Claudette and I ended up in a room with two single beds and the kids and Grandma Vi got a king sized bed altogether in another old room that was being renovated, (but that they opened up just for us at $60/night cause it was old but had air conditioning). After Grandma Vi arrived we did lots of relaxing, a fair amount of eating, uploading pics of GV relaxing for all her co-workers to see and some Blog posts (including the invention of Pete’s Blog, linkable from the upper left hand corner of this page). Luke made friends one day with a couple year younger boy who was Canadian and living here with his family. They had even just moved here from Oilberta! They didn’t make it back to the beach for a couple of days, and Claudette got a chance to meet the parents briefly. Close to our last scheduled day there, she gave Phil and Joy a call to try and arrange supper together some evening. This worked out wonderfully and we all had a great time catching up. He was a pilot and their kids attended a Thai public school (with an English program) rather that the English International school that is private. Better yet, they lived in a spectacular! House barely a seven minute walk to the beach, with three bedrooms, stunning marble floors and a shared swimming pool among four homes!!! Now the best news; one of these homes was empty and due for new tenants in another month so they arranged through the landlord for us to stay in it for a week, for the same price we got one two person fan room at the current hotel. Needless to say we jumped at it and decided to stay for an extra week.

I took a bunch of pics of the amazing house we stayed in as well as the deck area, BBQ, massage bed (they book to have them done at home once a week) and the pool. There were three other units almost finished being built in the same complex that were for sale. These all had their own private (un-shared) pools though, and are only priced at CAN$245,000. My mind was clicking away, working out how many other families we would want to buy with at 30, 40 & 50 thousand dollars each. The trouble is that most friends or family that we would trust enough to buy in with, are people that we’d want to go at the same time with. I mentioned this to a few friends with keen interest, but Claudette quickly smashed me back into reality, saying that we wouldn’t be able to continue our trip past Christmas, flights are $2,000 each from Edm, and take a little over 24 hours with layovers each way. Thus the idea has slightly waned… (Certainly NOT died…)

Posted in 2007-11, Thailand | 6 Comments »