Jungle Fever (and other ailments)

I know I know, I've been quiet on the blog from Thailand so far - sweet reflief I hear you shouting! There are good reasons for this lack of blogging - I've been on a beach with Sam. Although it turned out not to be quite the trip to paradise we hoped for...

Sam arrived in Bangkok feeling dreadful. She'd been feeling sick just before she left and on the flight things took a turn for the worse with wicked headaches and fever. Not the vision of loveliness I had anticipated, she looked knackered and sick!

To cut a long & painful (for Sam) story short, she had a fever brought on by an upper respiratory infection, temperatures up to 100F and had to spend 36 hours in hospital (it felt more like 36 days to her) under observation as the doc was wondering if she might have a brain infection. Her brain was fine, so we headed to Krabi just a few days late.

The beach and the resort were lovely. Railay Beach is quite a short strip of land on a peninsula south of Krabi, surrounded by vertical cliff faces and mountains, lush green palms & bushes, and golden sand. This sounds like paradise, but our tale of woe was just beginning. I don't want to go on about it all too much cos you might think it ruined our time together, but we still managed to have fun despite...

- quite a bit of rain that kept us in our room for hours on end. (Not exactly a punishment for a couple getting reacquainted!)
- both being idiots and getting severe sun burn on the 3rd day (1st day the sun came out). We got burnt so badly that I couldn't touch my back and Sam her front for days. I've never been burnt so badly. It's now over 4 days later and I'm still sore and the top 5 layers of skin on my back are starting to leave me. We were fooled by overcast conditions - a lesson to be sure!
- obviously the regulation travellers diarrhea, which for me has really out-stayed its welcome now.
- and to top it off it looked this morning like Sam might have picked up an eye infection overnight.

We are not usually sickly people!

All in all we both felt physically quite miserable for much of our week together!! But we managed to make the most of it and had a fun time. We ate well (local snapper was delicious), walked to some local caves with impressive limestone formations, laughed at other tourists we didn't like the look of, and ate plenty of ice cream. Once again it was dreadful to say goodbye.

I'm now spending a night in Surat Thani before getting the morning ferry to Koh Tao for some of Thailand's best diving. Yeee-haa!!

Railay Beach, Krabi