Day 86-91 - Chillin' Relaxin' Nothin'

What I like most about our Resort on Koh Chang Island? The huge breakfast buffet that is available until 10:30 (loooong sleeping). No kidding, the breakfast is awesome: freshly made pancakes with banana or pineapple, freshly made eggs, changing fresh tropical juices, cornflakes and Swiss style musli, a salad bar, custom-made spicy soups for the Chinese visitors (and my father), freshly baked coconut pudding, Chinese doughnuts, other pastries, bread, pineapple jam, and brunch things like fried rice, fried noodles, etc., ..... And an extra island for the most awesome exotic fruits: watermelon, banana, cantaloupe melon, papaya, lemon and white dragon fruit!

Enough about breakfast. About lunch I cannot say much, because we skipped lunch and instead had an early dinner at 5 or 6 PM. The beach swing was genius, especially when it was high-tide, your feet almost swung in the sea water. We had beautiful sunsets every day except when it was storm time around 6 PM. The thunders and lightnings can be quite scary in Thailand, even scary for me.

The day we mostly spent at the pool (used towels were exchanged the same evening into fresh towels that had a small present on top: a braided fishie made from a palm leave and containing a candy :-) ). The pool was super necessary in that burning heat (which I appreciate, because in Switzerland it is already damn cold). The sea was unfortunately quite dangerous because of jelly fish, and it wasn't too refreshingly cool anyway. At the beach you could observe a lot of funny little sand-colored crabs forming billions of tiny sand balls all over! I learned that they are checking the sand on any nutritious bites by forming these balls. If the balls get too big, the crab just pushes it behind itself and all these uncountable balls are created.

The beach is home to lots of different animals, anyway. On our way back from a dinner to the resort along the beach in the dark, if we hadn't used our iPhones as torch we would have walked into gray-green frogs, tiny froggies, blue big wasp-like things, big toads, small and big hermit crabs and all the bigger crabs at the beach that only show up at night. One evening I had to get some water from our parent's room at night, because I was damn thirsty, what means I had to walk about 50 meters through our Resort "village". These 50 meters nearly gave me a heart-attack: because it was around midnight, everyone had already returned to their villas and wildlife had taken over the resort. I left our room and closed the door when I realized something was standing in the gate to our parent's room pool area: a dog of middle height! I was so shocked that I couldn't move, I was really terrified, especially when the dog ran towards me the next moment. Of course it ran to escape, and not to bite me. What a relief. And what a even bigger shock seeing two even bigger dogs creeping around the pool area in my direction (who but hadn't noticed me yet). I ran to the parent's door and knocked the hell out of the door. I almost cried of terror. I'm not dog-panicking but the situation and everything fit to terrify the hell outta me. Gosh.

We had a lot of fun with my snorkeling equipment and even tested my GoPro and selfie stick on water resistance. On TripAdvisor we read that the snorkeling trip organized by our resort was quite boring for experienced snorkelers, and the elephants in the elephant camp seem very miserable, carrying a lot of people every week. So we did not engage in these activities. On the other side we got the very good recommendation on TripAdvisor for a Thai-Spanish restaurant located at the main road around the island. We made use of the free shuttle bus that drove us these 1,4 kilometers to the main road, and walked back home. And always these wonderful sunsets...

The shells at the beach are super cute and you can even find sand dollars. And you look not only at the beach but at the water, too, then you can even find wooden boards, too.

As a welcome present at the resort, we received two discount massage coupons, which my sister and I redeemed together. It was awesome! We first got our feet washed, then undressed and redressed a pair of pink pajamas, went upstairs and felt relaxed with the sound of the waves at the beach. How awesome was that! Even though the woman often used elbow and foot, it didn't hurt. But: my daily dose of stretching was already done.

The next time we went to the Thai-Spanish restaurant, I ordered a coconut soup. For my opinion it was more chili than coconut, and in the end i fished about 6 whole red chili peppers out of my soup...

Our neighbors in the resort were funny figures. One couple hardly ever spoke a word and looked like they weren't enjoying their stay too much. Another family was also from Switzerland, from whose 25 y/o son my sister and/or I "received" a letter at our door with name and mobile number. Another family was German, brought their 30 y/o son with them, and were the kind of people I wouldn't interact with voluntarily. What to do? Order some coconut shakes and go snorkeling in the pool.

One evening we ordered pizza (an exception, usually we ate Thai fare) at a beach restaurant with our feet in the sand - how wonderful. After one of our sunset meals I spontaneously decided to have a massage at one of the rundown KP huts (several "tree houses" on stilts at the beach) next door. The two women already were about to take away the sign of offers and had to uncover all the piled mattresses and pillows again for me, because it had rained before. After one hour of pure relaxation we even were surprised with a small banana, a cookie and some tea.

Later we tried our mooncake that we bought in the 7-eleven in Koh Chang. Because we didn't get a mooncake at the moonfest in Singapore, we HAD to try it here, and it even was much cheaper than in Singapore. As we can't read Thai package texts, we didn't realize that we bought a durian flavored mooncake (which was guessable because we took it from the durian shelf). Big surprise when we cut it into pieces and it smelled like old cheese from far. Holding the nose directly at the cake it smelled like fuel. Yum, that's what I ever wanted to eat: old cheese and fuel. As we immediately suspected the Mooncake to be durian flavored, we asked the waiter from our resort restaurant to translate the package and validate our suspicion. With closed nose it was edible...

One day, due to an unexpected thunderstorm at sunset we did not dare to walk to an outside restaurant and returned (after we managed half the way) back to our resort. In the resort restaurant I got the most innovative plate ever: a pineapple boat filled with cashew nut yellow curry and fried rice. We taught the waiter how to say "good evening" in Swiss-German (guätä obig), and we learned from him how to say it in Thai: [suadi ka] or something :-) After the dinner we discovered the most beautiful bug on earth: from the front it was black, from the top it was green glittering, and from the back it was brown glittering! Because we rescued it from the sandy beach where it could hardly walk, it held onto my finger like a new-born's hand, SO CUTE.

 

I probably was a little too enthusiastic about the massage quality in the zero-star neighboring KP huts "resort". I tried it a second time and got a different masseur who wasn't too skilled in back neck shoulder massage affairs. Instead, she decided (in the middle of the massage) to give me a Thai massage. That means that in the end I was thrown half over the massage bed, and my back hurt even more than it did before (because I'm not too flexible, too).

The last evening we spent at the beach restaurant again, with an awesome sunset that I recorded in time lapse.