Cheese and red wine

We have now landed in Ao Nang after getting another ferry boat back from Phi Phi island. It is a lovely seaside town set in stunning cliff scenery with lots of pretty shops and good street food (which means we can afford to eat well, so we are both happy). The beach here doesn't quite live up to the island but then we have been pretty spoilt for beaches lately! We are staying in a wee hovel of a room with no window (which freaks me out) but hey, it's cheap and right now cheap is what we need! We're discovering that the tighter our travel budget gets, the more you can find really cheap accommodation if you try hard enough. You may have to be prepared to traipse the streets for a while and compromise on luxuries such as flushing toilets, but it's possible!

We spent our last night on Phi phi sitting on the beach and watching a fire throwing show while listening to reggae music. The thing with these parts of southern Thailand is that they are ridiculously touristy (at least the parts we've stuck to). But, the Thais do do touristy really well, with so many beach front places, beautifully set up and pretty lights everywhere and cheesy holiday music. We've just been enjoying it and going with the flow. I do have my doubts about how eco-friendly the hoards of ferry boats are, not to mention the fishing boats with their huge nets. Still, like I said, for now we're just going with the flow.

Earlier today we walked the length of the beach and ended up following some rickety old nature track up around the cliff (this was some wooden contraption that was built with a healthy disregard for health and safety). At the end of the track we found a wild monkey happily munching away on his lunch. The monkey's lunch was a super-size box of McDonalds fries. We have no idea whether the monkey was given the fries or got them himself, either way, we felt so at one with nature! The truth is that we can eat at all the little shack restaurants we want and gaze out at isolated, clear blue waters, but really you have to go a lot further than we have to escape the capitalist world. In reality, we are approximately 2 minutes away from a 24 hour McDonalds (where they even deliver) and about a street away from Starbucks. I don't know if this is reassuring or tragic, but at least the monkey seemed happy enough.

Tomorrow the plan is to head onwards and upwards to Bangkok. As ever, there seems to be next to no reliable information on times or fares. I have pretty much zero patience with searching the internet for this information. As such, my plan (just for a change) is to just go to the train station and see what we get from there. Brett has maybe marginally more patience and is still researching but I have a hunch we'll just be piling into the train station and hoping for the best.

I have absolutely no right to complain, especially with what we've seen on the news of Japan just now, but I still can't help my craving for red wine and cheese! We have so much good food here and enough coffee to keep the caffeine cravings at bay, but still it's been over a month now since I had any wine or any good cheese! And boy, do I ever miss my cheese and wine! Brett reckons this is a sign of my middle class, yuppy roots, but as this is coming from a grown man who spent a considerable amount of time earlier today chasing a crab around the beach, I won't be losing any sleep over his comments. The fact is that cheese and wine were an integral part of my life well before the uneducated Ozzy and long should they remain so. I won't say any more on the subject but if I could have one luxury item in my life right now, it would not be windows or flushing toilets, no - it would be cheese and red wine!