thewills'wanderings

Well, we’re off to Malaysia tomorrow on the overnight train. The Thailand trains are great, so it should be bearable. We leave at 2.45pm and arrive at 7.55am the next day. We’re not going to stay in Malaysia, probably just have breakfast get our passport stamped and head back into Thailand. Then we’ll head to Krabi, where Tim and I climbed pre-children. It’s right on the beach, so we’ll spend a week or so there and slowly make our way back to Bangkok before leaving for London. I can’t believe we’ve come this far. We’re excited about the next stage, but I’m definitely sad to be leaving Thailand.

This was the line we heard often spoken to us by the little kids trying to sell us bracelets on the beaches of Cambodia. I guess I never really even thought Cambodia had beaches, but it does and they are really nice, white sandy beaches.
We only had a couple of days at the beaches of Sihanoukville, but we really enjoyed our time there. It’s very laid back with lots of restaurants/bars on the beach, so you can sit at a table on the sand and watch the sun go down while the kids swim. It doesn’t get much better than that!

While we were there we had some great times with the local kids who try to sell bracelets to tourists like us. Their sales pitch was really funny. They had a whole array of one-liners, our favourite being, “come on lady/man/girl open up your heart, open up your wallet!” Even the tiny little 7 year olds try it. They could all speak a bit of English and our girls were a bit of a magnet. Some of the boys would come up and say,”Hey, my friend would like to love your baby!”(‘baby’ seems to mean, daughter/child). Our girls would giggle in embarrassment, as you can imagine. Most tourists get really sick of them hassling them to buy bracelets, but we had a laugh with them and they ended up all sitting with us at the restaurant on the beach and playing with Charlotte in the sand. The only downside was that a big scary police officer came up behind them and gave one of the girls a big whack on the head with a stick. We were horrified and the kids all scattered and we didn’t see them for a while. Apparently, they annoy the tourists so he was sorting them out. We felt terrible that we’d got them in trouble but they seem used to it and run and hide for a while until the coast is clear and then come back. The second night we were there they came back and sat with us again and our girls would tell them when they saw the policeman coming, “Go, go, he’s coming, run!” They started running off with them which was quite funny. Fun, fun times!!!

After 3 nights in Sihanoukville, we went by bus along the coast to the Thai border where we realised we’d made our first major stuff up in our planning. Not bad, I guess, after all this travelling! From December last year, you can only get a 15 day visa at land borders when you enter Thailand. We were expecting 30 days which we need to get us to Sept 8th when we fly to London from Bangkok. Even paying for an extension (about $80 each) wasn’t going to work, because you only get a 7 day extension, so we had to look at other ways. The best option is going to Malaysia as you don’t need a visa to enter. We were always heading south anyway for a couple of weeks, now we’re just going a bit further south!! All part of the adventure!

So, we made it back into Thailand and it almost felt like we were home!! After spending a month in Chiang-Mai at the beginning of our South-East Asia travels we’d got quite used to Thailand and it really is quite an easy place to travel in, especially after all the places we’ve been. Right away, we were struck by how clean and civilised it looked. We had a bonus week timeshare booked at Pattaya, not far from Bangkok which was so nice to arrive at after a long bus ride. Just to have 2 bedrooms and a table and 2 elements felt like such luxury. Eating out for so long has got exhausting, we all just wanted toast! Pattaya can only be described as serious sleazville with absolutely everything you can imagine on sale. Tim was always getting offers! We managed to avoid the dodgy streets and chilled out at the timeshare pool, did schoolwork and went out to the nearby island which was really nice.
After 7 days of luxury in the timeshare it was back to reality and we hit the road again!!