I have uploaded the last of the Kata Beach photos here, and added some new GPS maps here for those that are interested 🙂

It is time for us to finish up the southern part of our travels.  After 5 weeks in southern Thailand we are leaving the beach and heading north to Chiang Mai and the interior of Thailand.  Our days in the south worked out much better than we could have expected, with rain (during the monsoon season no less) only impacting us for really 2 days out of the 35 or so that we have been here.

We changed our proposed plan a bit to and ended up going to Khao Lak and Kata at the end instead of going up the gulf coast and stopping in Bang Saphan and Hua Hin – I guess we will have to visit those spots the next time we are here 🙂  The change worked out for the best though as the weather was fantastic particularly in Kata and we had some great down time just enjoying the days we had left.

For our last day in Kata I finished up with a bit of spa time – I got the ladies to scrape the barnacles off the bottoms of my feet (and for me they did not have to use a Dremel tool for that), and then had them finish up with a foot and oil massage.  We rounded out the day with a trip to the Red Chair restaurant – this is a spot that was recommended by my parents as one of the places they frequented when they were here.  It is way off the beaten path, so unless you knew about it you would never find it, but it must be popular with the locals – we had some of the best Thai food we have had so far there, and it cost about 500 Baht (about $15) to feed the whole family – and we ate a lot there!

We left the hotel at 8pm for our journey to Chiang Mai.  We are flying the midnight flight to Bangkok, and then ‘sleeping’ in the Bangkok airport until 6am for our morning flight to Chiang Mai.  I am not sure how well this will all work out, but but I expect some tired, cranky people to appear at the end 😉

For our last stop in the south we decided to go back to Phuket and spend some time at Kata Beach. Kata is the next beach farther down the coast from Karon where we stayed last time, and has a very nice beach. The town is a little bigger and more ‘active’ than Karon, but not the zoo that is Patong, so a nice balance between the two.

We have spent a few days here just hanging about the hotel and the pool, going down to the beach and walking along the sand, and getting in some much needed shopping.  One of the nice things about Kata is that the shopping is close enough that the ladies can go out and get their fix in, and I can stay back and get a bit of work done, and some time relaxing by the pool 🙂

We don’t have any grand adventures planned here, just relaxing and enjoying the last of our Phuket time before heading north to Chiang Mai.  I shall try and upload some photos in the next day or so.

Our time in Khao Lak is almost done, and the last few days have been very laid back. We have spent the last few days here just hanging about the resort. We did go on a small hike up into the hills behind our hotel to see a waterfall and a few sights around here. We also wandered by an animal safari that is closed for the low season, but the animals and everything were still there and we got to see a bunch of elephants and some monkeys fairly close up.

We have also spent some time in the pool and down at the beach, and then the weather shifted and it has been raining for the last day or so.  It is still nice and warm out, and we are able to sit on the balcony and do some reading or a bit of work and listen to the rain and the surf, so not all that bad.  We have been here for 30 days now, and I figure if we have only had a couple of real rainy days then we are doing real well for the ‘monsoon’ season.

We are moving back down to Phuket tomorrow to spend a few days at Kata Beach, where there is a little more to do if the weather is off and a lot more shopping and stuff for the buyers in the group 🙂

Way back in the day, before Mrs. Columbus and I were married, she owned a futon.  I believed at the time that this was the most uncomfortable ‘bed’ man had ever invented, and was likely created by a father who gave them to his daughters so that gentlemen callers would be un-inclined to stay over.

I have however discovered that the futon is actually a much more comfortable variant of the asian bed.  The majority of the beds we have slept on here are of the similar futon style of a dense ‘mattress’ on top of a more western style bed frame or riser.  The net result looks similar to a western bed and is about the same height off the floor, but the similarities end there.

The asian bed I think has not evolved since Medieval times when they were more commonly used as torture items.  The bed itself is very firm, rating on a softness scale of somewhere between sleeping directly on a concrete slab and sleeping on a concrete slab covered by a towel.

Clearly the Asian people have adapted to this and find them rather comfortable, as they are a step up from the many people we see having a nap on the floor in the back of a shop or on the bamboo floor of the small salas (like a small gazebo) we sometimes see on the roadsides.  I however have not been able to adapt myself to this form of comfort, and look forward to my comfy bed back home.

Some of the places we have stayed have reasonably soft beds, but others not so much.  After spending a night in one of these beds you often feel like an elephant has been dancing on your back while you sleep.  Perhaps that is why the housekeeping ladies left us these creations to show us the firmness rating of the bed…

In this case the rating is 2 elephants – meaning that in the course of the night 2 elephants will gleefully do the cha-cha on my back.  We have had beds that were I believe rated as high as 5 elephants, but after about 3 it all seems the same to me.