3rd December - Koh Samet, 12°N 101°E

The bus to Koh Samet is a pain, the bus driver is unable to maintain a constant speed and uses the digital (variable frequency / pulse width modulated) method of throttle control where the bus is constantly accelerating or engine braking around the desired speed. A bit like the number 4 bus to Derby, initial progress is impressive but, as the destination is approached, you leave the fast road and do the remainder of the journey on back streets.

As we approach Ban Phe, the port where the ferry leaves for Koh Samet, the rain starts. It stops in time for the ferry crossing but the seas are choppy and the skies are a uniform grey - where are the crystal-clear calm waters and the sun? It's supposed to be the dry season on Thailand's least rainy island!

The hotel we have booked online is 'convenient for the ferry terminal' - perhaps a little too convenient. It is surrounded by large trees and could be very nice if it was not sandwiched between two giant red and white mobile phone pylons ('excellent mobile reception') up a grimy alley that is constantly wet for some reason we'd rather not think about. The signs on the way to the hotel advertise rooms for 300 Baht a night - we had paid 1000! It's not looking good. The rooms are dark but otherwise ok but it is a half hour walk to the beach along the busy and charmless main road. No problem - we've changed the dates of a booking before without any trouble. This time however we find that the booking cannot be changed or cancelled. Karen had suggested only booking a couple of nights but Phil had lost his nerve because of the limited number of places that had rooms available and had booked 14 nights in this unsuitable establishment. We discuss our options and decide that we'll stick it out for a week and spend the time looking for somewhere better to stay.

We hire two motorbikes the next day to go exploring. Motorbike hire is very cheap here (£2 for an hour, petrol and map included) and we get two bikes for 24 hours for £10. The bikes are automatic scooters, designed for zipping around cities. They have had fat knobbly tyres fitted but they are still city bikes, completely unsuited to the dirt tracks on the island. Nevertheless we give it a go. The road is concrete for the first 20m then it's a dirt track that gets progressively dirtier the further south down the island you go. We make it most of the way down until we get to a sign saying the next hill is particularly difficult (after a number of unsigned, particularly difficult hills) and we decide to call it a day.

We go into the resort that we've stopped near and decide that this would do nicely as an alternative place to stay. We check and they have rooms for the dates we want at virtually the same price we were paying before but with the beach about a 4 second walk away rather than 30 minutes. We head for the north of the island to make the most of our time with the bikes and get them back before dark (riding here during the daylight when you can see the potholes, rocks and gullies is hard enough). The next day we find a reasonably quiet place on the beach and enjoy the sand, surf and street-food. The weather is still unsettled but each day is better than the one before and we are starting to get the calm seas and crystal clear water we were expecting.

Karen decides her shorts are too long and cuts some material off the legs. We then set out to find someone who can hem them and come across a Swiss hippy woman with a sewing machine who takes in sick and stray cats. She points out that the bum on Karen’s shorts has almost worn out and so there’s no point in hemming them. Before we think of a suitable response she asks if we still have the material that was cut off - we do and she repairs the bum as well. When we pick them up she tells us that she doesn’t charge for her work (a proper hippy) and so we donate some money to pay for cat medicines.

We spend the rest of the week making the long journey to and from the beach. About the half way point there is a puddle at the side of the road that never drains away and has a smell and a look all of its own. We took a photo but it doesn’t really convey the green-grey colours, surface film and unspoken peril associated with the puddle. Every other part of the street has bikes parked on it but not here. We made the most of our time at the ‘happening’ end of the island (before we move south to the quieter / more of what we had in mind part of Kho Samet) by eating on the beach two nights in a row, this included some of the friendliest Thai people we have met here (most are much less smiley here than we have come to expect - must be all the Russian tourists), some of the nicest food, small boys twirling fire, fireworks and Chinese lanterns. We drew the line at laughing gas (“If you’ve never tried it you’ll never know”) and the boxing ring set up in the laughing gas bar even despite the tempting Xmas tree beside it (maybe if we’d tried the gas). We will get the Toyota pick up taxi to the south east (Ao Wai) on Wednesday.

10th December - Koh Samet

We leave our previous hotel with no regrets and no refund. The owner says we can come back some other time and have some free nights - thanks but no thanks.

It is the King’s birthday on the day we leave and the place we get breakfast has live coverage of the celebrations. The King is well loved in Thailand but he’s an old man now and he didn’t seem to be particularly enjoying proceedings.

We get one of the islands green Toyota pick-up taxis which seat about 10 people in the open on the back and are one of the few vehicles which will cope with the island's roads. We are staying in a seafront bungalow about 10m from the sea. Our resort is the only one in the bay and the contrast between here and the busy beach we had been using at the north of the island is dramatic.

After we had arrived at our bungalow and were just about to settle down on the veranda and watch the sea, Karen called from inside to say she had found a scorpion on one of the towels. I heard what she said but it obviously made no sense so I asked her to repeat it - same message with the additional information this time that it's only a small scorpion - about 2 inches long. Karen has made the emergency noise (sharp intake of breath with a kind of 'ffff' noise) so many times for non-emergencies that it has lost virtually all of it's impact. Now there is a situation which most people would categorize as an emergency and she is unnervingly calm. She is right, there is a small scorpion on the towel and we take it off with a glass and a postcard and then deposit it far enough away so it would be unlikely to find its way back.

Samet Ville Resort is the Thai island beach experience as it should be. An empty tree fringed beach with fine white sand and a calm, crystal-clear sea that's full of fish. We buy a snorkel and use it every day. On the first few days the sea also had quite a few small, completely transparent jellyfish in it as well. They are so transparent that it is easier to see the lense effect their bodies have on the shadow on the sea bed rather than the jellyfish themselves. They don’t seem to sting but we’d rather not have things brushing against our legs, thank you very much.

TripAdvisor had a low opinion of this resort but, after visiting it in person, we decided to give it a go. I don't know if the resort management had read TripAdvisor as well but everything that other people had complained about (slow service, unfriendly staff) wasn't an issue at all. In fact we formed a special bond with one member of staff, Somsri, and the cook's naughty young daughter, Lisa (not her real name but as close as our falang ears could get).

It has been Constitution Day, a bank holiday weekend, during our stay here. After being quiet during the week, the resort became suddenly packed as a lot of Thai holiday makers arrived for the weekend. Other than Thais the largest group of holiday makers is Russians, possibly because the Baht is worth exactly the same as the Ruble at the moment making all of those mental currency conversions so much simpler.

There isn’t that much to say about our time here. There’s not that much to do but that’s absolutely fine. The extra things you could do at the busy beach at the north of the island are mostly the sort of things we wouldn’t necessarily want to do anyway.

We start thinking about how we get to Goa. We had it in our minds that Christmas isn't such a big deal in India. Apparently it is. When we tried to book a train from Mumbai to Goa for the 14th of December we thought at first we had been successful but then, when we looked closer, we found that our tickets were waitlisted. Waitlisting means your chosen class and quota on your chosen train has already sold out. Checking the Indian railways website, this isn’t just true of our train but also every other train on the route every day until Boxing Day. You can find out your position in the queue for your waitlisted ticket on the website as well. We were 25th and 26th in the queue for a class and quota that only has 6 berths on the train. This means that 2 people with confirmed tickets and all of the 24 waitlisted tickets in front of ours in the queue would all have to cancel before we could get on the train. Though not impossible this is so unlikely that we cancel the train tickets and book flights instead. It’s a shame because we’d prefer not to fly if possible.

We have a nice surprise on the morning we leave when Somsri seeks us out and gives Karen a necklace and Phil a baseball cap. What a lovely woman. We promise to keep in touch.

Next stop Bangkok again then India!