I’m leaving the island in a couple of days for a holiday (that makes me laugh so much).

My 90 day visa stamp is up on the 26th of January and I need to leave the country and re-enter so I can get another 90 days. So on the 20th I fly to Bangkok and from there head north up to Chiang Rai. I’ll probably go trekking for a few days to visit the hill tribes and play the tourist before crossing the Laos border at Chiang Khong. Once I get across the river into Laos I climb aboard a riverboat and spend two days drifting down the Mekong river to Luang Prabang. I’ll spend a few days dossing around, AKA smoking ganja and trying to retain my willpower when it comes to the cheap and readily available opium in Laos. Putting me smack bang in the middle of the golden triangle is much like leaving a child alone in a sweet shop. I will then head down through the bottom bit of Laos via Vang Vieng and finally ending up in Vientiane. I then hop across to border back into Thailand and head southwards back to Bangkok (possibly visiting Khorat, the capital of Isan on the way) and meet up with Loek and Winchy on the 3rd of February.

My laptop and most of my stuff is staying on Koh Phangan so I will have no easy way to update my blog, it’s just going to have to wait until I get back, which should be sometime towards the end of February. Amazing, I’m taking a month long holiday when I already live in paradise. Sometimes life is so sweet.

I usually have at least one picture in all of my entries, so just to keep things balanced, the one above is of the gecko that lives behind my fridge and only comes out when it thinks I’m not here. I call it the ice maiden, because it’s fridge hid, get it? *chuckle*. It’s a big bastard, about 8 inches long, I chased it around the walls of the bathroom once so I could have a shower without having to keep and eye on it. The sneaky thing ran behind the toilet cistern and only it’s tail was hanging down. I grabbed the tail to pull it out and it screeched at me so loud I jumped and fell into the bathtub (which was empty) and hit my head on the shower taps. I leave it alone now and don’t bother it!

I was lucky enough to be invited to the wedding of John & Wan, good friends I have met here, they have been running a small bar/restaurant on the island for 6 years and finally got married a couple of days ago! Here they are in their wedding gear.

Their party was excellent, they both did a really good job of decorating and setting up the garden with help from their neighbours. The food was superb and the company was cool. I did have to chuckle when I asked John how it felt to wear a suit? He just replied ‘Very weird!’, he hasn’t left Thailand for around 6 years now and almost all of that has been spent living on paradise island.

Everything was pretty traditional for the first part of the evening, but once the more normal people had left we all adjourned to the chill out area John had built, complete with bonfire, floor mats and cushions as can be seen here.

I don’t remember driving home afterwards, I do remember having a whale of a time, thanks to John & Wan for inviting me, good people, the kind you don’t find too often these days.

Firstly happy new year to you all, I hope you had a good new years eve! Mine was pretty good although news of the multiple bombings in Bangkok and Chaing Mai put a bit of a dampener on it.

I woke up yesterday lunchtime with what I though was a hangover, but it didn’t go away it just got worse, by early evening my right ear was aching a lot, very painful and I felt generally washed out. I went to bed early but woke up a couple of hours later with the whole right side of my face hurting, a quick look in the mirror confirmed that the entire right side of my face had swollen up like a football. I smoked a spliff and managed to get back to sleep for a couple of hours then woke up again with the pain, had another spliff and managed to get back to sleep again, rinse and repeat every 2 hours all night, not fun.

So I had decided to go and buy some antibiotics today, obviously some kind of infection but I was loathe to use antibiotics as they would definitely leave my stomach in a bad way and I would more than likely not be able to handle the Thai food for a while in that case.

I went for my usual juice and coffee at John & Wan’s place and great amusement was had by all looking at my football face. Wan’s friend suggested that her mother who is an old Chinese woman could heal it with old Thai medicine. I figured hey, why not give it a try, if it works it saves me using antibiotics.

They took me next door and I meet this very old woman, who takes a look at my face and disappears inside the house. She comes out with a bowl that contains something very blue, I have no idea what it is. She then smears this blue stuff all over the right side of my face and makes some little markings in it with a piece of bamboo. This is what it looks like!

As you can see it’s quite dramatic looking! I had to drive all around town on my scooter and visit the supermarket looking like this! I have to leave it on until tomorrow and she tells me the swelling should have gone by then.