We are loving doing nothing other than getting up from our big comfy clean bed, having coffee on the veranda, venturing to the restaurant for a hearty breakfast and then flopping by the stunning pool, hidden up in the hills above Kata. It's a killer calf burning walk up the driveway!
At the bottom of the driveway about a ten minute walk away are lots of cheap eateries and a fruit market where today we bought custard apple, oranges, passion fruits, mango and rambutan for £4. We also bought a huge bag of cashews for £3 which at home would cost at least double. They will go pretty well with cold Singha's on the veranda!
Slightly bored of beer and still not able to drink wine ( no decent stuff here and even the crap costs £10 a bottle), I bought a bottle of local dark rum. With some coke and home made ice cubes using bottled water frozen in our little box freezer inside a carrier bag and then smashed into bits, it's going down well at 7pm, keeping my drink cool even if the Mercury is still rather high causing sweat to trickle down my back, as the cicadas hum their tunes.
Shortly we will head down the drive to find some yummy Thai food and tell them to cook it Thai style and not dumb it down as though they are catering to a European palate! Even then we sometimes have to add our own chilli! Thai food is certainly not what it was when I last visited in 2006! Neither are the prices.... everything is so much more expensive and we are spending more here every day than we have anywhere in the last twenty weeks! Even Beijing & we thought that was expensive!
Last night we decided to walk into Kata, twenty minutes downhill to see if we could find any cute bars or amazing sea front restaurants, strung with fairy lights and playing nice background music. O.M.G!!! What a shock we got. It was like Benidorm but full of Russians. Every menu and sign outside a god awful bar or restaurant was in Russian. Every second shop was a massage parlour and there was crazy golf, a huge Incredible Hulk and King Kong, stalls selling I ❤️ Phuket vests, shops offering hair braiding....in short, it is our worst nightmare for a holiday destination. Pasty men were walking around with their tops off, women wore tiny shorts....gone are the days when one is mindful they are in a predominantly Buddhist country and to cover up when not on the beach.
Today we thought we would brave it again to look at the beach, me remembering fondly spending hours on Khao Lak beach, the only person there on a pristine white stretch of sand, no hotels, stalls or anything other than waves crashing on the shore and a beach fringed by swaying palm trees-tropical Thai paradise.
What we found were lots of people, topless women, women in thongs, overweight men with guts out, people spawned out asleep with ten bottles of Chang around them, a bar with a wave machine, loud music, speed boats pulling rubber dinghies around and a strong smell of sewage. Not quite the paradise I remembered from a beach only a few hours north of here.
That's it. We returned up to the hill to hide ourselves away here in our own little paradise for the next three days, doing nothing but relaxing by the pool and eating the mountain of fruit and cashews we've purchase and drinking beer and rum on our verandah.
We can't decide whether to never set foot in Thailand again or to return after Myanmar to smaller islands where perhaps, paradise without hoards of tourists and the tat that goes with it, still exists.

The next evening we ventured out for dinner, Tony asking what time the rains come. Convinced it would be 10.30pm again as it had been the last couple of nights, we set out under the lightening, sure we'd be back before the rain did start. Well I definitely error'ed on that one. We got to a little restaurant at just after 8.30pm & the heavens opened. Staff started moving the tables closer to the centre and pulling the plastic sides down, although this did little and the ferocious rain just soaked everything. It wasn't great food either so all in all, it wasn't our best meal out! Thankfully though the rain finally stopped so we could head home. We arrived at the bottom of the drive to find the ground completely hidden under water. Tony being the true gentlemen carried me across, him wading through the water not knowing how deep it would get. True romance.

After the third night we changed room as we extended our stay, deciding that we didn't want to stay somewhere else closer to the beach and the restaurants. We unfortunately got moved to a room which was overlooking the moped park, the driveway on the right and a bungalow undergoing renovation on the left with workmen using drills and tile cutters from 9am until 7.15pm. Thankfully though when we asked for another room the next day, they moved us to one of the best bungalows they have-the pool side suites. Lovely four poster bed, huge bathroom, and a verandah where we could once again enjoy our drinks in an evening, this time with the added bonus of the pools water fountains trickling away in the background.

It came to picking up the rucksack 5 days later & we really couldn't be bothered moving on. Perhaps we will venture back to Thailand en route to Indonesia, this time to somewhere much quieter.