Finally got back home from Malaysia/Samui. Been away eight days. I hate travelling. I’ve had about three or four sessions where I’ve had access to an Internet connection. The shops in Malaysia and Samui are all cool, spangly ADSL lines. The office in Samui was a 128k ISDN line, which was still reasonable compared to my usual affair. But, only having small windows of time at each, and having to concentrate on as uploading as much paid work as I can and downloading as much stuff for offline work as I can. I’ve tried to let non-important stuff build up until I get back. I’m back now, but I’ll talk about now later, so first here’s what came before now… ;)

Apologies to those looking here for technical blogs and finding this all a bit off-topic!

I left Mee on Saturday morning (Apr 2nd), heading towards Malaysia because my Thai visa had expired, and I have to apply for a new visa in Penang, Malaysia. I rode my CBR400 from my house near Prachuab Kirikhan to Hat Yai near the Malaysia border. I rode at approximately 110-120km/h stopping only for petrol and snackfood, for 7.5hrs, covered about 600kms from 6am to 1.30pm. About 1pm, the bike started overheating, but I managed to limp to the “Kings” hotel and park the bike up.

The next morning I crossed at the immigration checkpoint in Sadao. I had to pay a visa overstay bill of 11 days (2200baht) for late exit, no problem. I stay at the Cathay Hotel in Leith Street in Penang, as I stayed there before and I haven’t heard of or seen anyhing better. At 50ringits a night, it works out slightly more expensive, and slightly less well-equipped (fan-only, no fridge, only terrestrial TV) than Kings in Hat Yai. I spent most of the time in Penang working offline on my laptop in the hotel room, but hooked up once at an ADSL-equipped internet cafe. I plugged in a microphone and a set of earplugs and started using Skype to call Mee at home on our Thai land-line - quality was good and it was less than a euro! Also called my dad, who was on-line back in England, using Skype too, so it was free! Much as I’m not into proprietary products/protocols, there doesn’t seem to be an open standards based solution that does the same thing. It works well enough for me, so until there’s an open alternative, I’ll just have to run a bit of closed source.

Monday morning, I catch a taxi to the Thai Embassy to submit my visa application, on the way back I share a taxi with an English guy, Colin, working in Bangkok as a journalist. The rest of the day free, so working, sleeping, trying to watch Malaysian TV. Whilst watching TV, I noticed that some of the channels have English language programmes occasionally, and how Malaysians speak much better English than Thais. Walking back to the hotel from an evening meal, I noticed that Malaysian ladies of the night say ‘Where are you going, darling?’, whereas the Thai girls usually just say ‘where you go, sexy boy?’! I also discover that the airport and a hotel got bombed in Hat Yai on Sunday. I had left Hat Yai on Saturday, and I didn’t change my plans to stay there again on the way back.

Tuesday afternoon, shared the same taxi again with Colin to collect our passports from the Embassy. I got a one year, multi-entry non-immigrant ‘B’ visa. Colin got a singl-entry. Colin went to the airport, and I went back to Jim’s Place on Cathay St. for a quick bowl of indian curry and rice and jumped on a minibus back to Hat Yai. Got a load of stick from a Malaysian immigration exit-point official cause I couldn’t find the departure slip that was supposed to be kept in my passport. I politely informed him that if they stapled it to the passport, like Thai immigration does, it wouldn’t fall out of the passport. He made me search my bags. I found it and presented it with a smile, so he pushed past all the other foreigners a bit then stormed off to his office to have a cigarette whilst his junior everyone through. While waiting for Thai immigration, I got chatting to a guy in the same minibus, Lacerne, American, about 40ish, living in Phuket who had been in Thailand for ten or so years. He’d never stayed at Kings hotel, so I explained it to him and he decided to try it out. Another couple of English guys, apparently from Koh Samui, overheard and also decided to try it, so we all shared a taxi back to the hotel. I went out for some food and saw Lacerne, and asked if he wanted to hunt for a decent restaurant. All the restaurants are muslim run, so in most places you can’t sit and have a beer with your rice. We settled on a road-side plastic-chair affair, and ordered some beers and some Isaan food (Lab Mu, Namtok Mu, Somtam Boo and sticky rice) both reading from the Thai-only menus. A couple of Thai girls saw us eating this and started talking to is Isaan dialect, asking if our food was nice, to which we both responded, in Isaan. His girlfriend is also from that part of Thailand!

Wednesday morning, set off at 5am, hoping to catch one of the first ferries to Samui. 3km out of Hat Yai, the bike starts overheating. I figured a hole in the radiator or something from the ride down had leaked all the water, or that the water pump wasn’t pushing water round the engine. I couldn’t locate the radiator cap, so I crawled along, stopping frequently until about 7am before I found a mechanic that had opened up shop. He helped get the tank off, so we could fill it up with water. We still couldn’t find where it was leaking from. This was good enough to get me to Samui, so I get there mid-afternoon. I leave my bags at Emma’s and take the company paperwork round to the lawyers and come back with a bill. Pa Deng wasn’t around, but I met Loong Dam and Pa Neum. When I saw Loong Dam six months before, they said he was dying of lung cancer and he only had a few months to live. Now, he’s alive and well and walking around like his old self. Either he made a full recovery, or I misunderstood the condition. I went off for a lovely evening meal with Pete and his wife, whose birthday it was. By the time I got back, Emma and Pa Deng would have been asleep, so I headed into Lamai, and found a cheap (300baht a night) beach bungalow.

Thursday, I went to the ATM first, then took some money to the lawyers. They’re going to start the process of moving my company from Suratthani jungwat (county) to Prachuab Kirikhan, and they’ll finish off the 2004 statement of accounts, which should have been done back in March. I’ll need to wait for the company to be moved, and then re-apply for a work permit myself in Prachuab Kirikhan itself. On the way back I stopped and met Pa Deng, who was pleased to see me, gave me a key and invited me to stay. Next, I headed towards the office for a couple of hours, but the bike overheated again, so I pulled into P’Chai’s (another one) and we set about fixing it. By the end of the afternoon, it had a new water pump and was working fine (about 20quid for the water pump, and a 5quid bottle of whisky for P’Chai). I went down to see Dtimmy and William that evening, and had a few beers.

Friday, spent the whole day in the office, gathering as much of their requirements information as possible, and setting about fixing as many problems as possible within the one day I had available there. Much business was discussed. Evening, spent with Paul, chilling out with a few beers at his house, next to Pa Deng’s.

Saturday, well-deserved day off. I’d done what I went to do, and I needed a break before doing the final leg home to Prachuab. Mee wasn’t happy when I said I was staying an extra day, but that didn’t matter much by the time we were floating or sitting in the shallow, warm sea water in Ban Taling Ngam bay with Paul and Stuey. About 5pm, I head into the office feeling more relaxed, and try to sort out a problem that had seemingly came from nowhere. Couldn’t find the problem, or anything that had changed that might have triggered it, and as the next step would involve debugging C-level code, I had to just say I’ll fix it another time. I hate that. That evening, P’Puk me and a couple of her staff out for a meal at an odd remote Thai restaurant with no menus. It was OK. On the way back, I stopped at a bar in Lamai and had a chat with Rick and Stuey, who were going back to work in England for six months. Stuey’s taking his Thai girlfriend, Doi back this time for the first time. Ricky takes Tay every time, and this time they’ll possibly stay there for a few years, so I might not see him for quite a while. Both the girlfriends speak good English.

A little hung over, I leave Pa Dengs on Sunday morning at about 8:30am, and get to Donsak ferry port on the mainland at about 10:30ish. I ride through the middle of the day in the hottest part of the year, doing an average speed of around 100km/h for about 400kms, I arrive home just after 3pm. It was nice to see Mee, as we had spent 8 days apart, and it has become very unusual for us to spend more than a day or two apart. Mee has already told me that the land-line stopped working a day or so after I called her from Malaysia, so I was expecting to have connectivity problems, but nothing I could do about them on a Sunday. I also found that our moped had a flat back tyre and that the pipe that the pond from which we draw water is even lower than before. We need to make a bore hole, but we haven’t got the cash (all of about 30quid!) to do it right now. If we can find some within the next month or two, we will do it. In another month or two, rainy season will come and the pond will correct itself, but it will make cutting a bore hole impossible until next year. I’m not entirely confident the water left in the pond will last until then.

This morning, I checked the telephone cables, everything seems to be in order and I can’t see any reason for it not to work, so I’ve reported it to TOT. The bills are all paid up and there shouldn’t be any reason that we’ve been cut off at the exchange. I’ll just have to keep working offline for now and go down to the local Internet shop for a couple of hours every evening until after Songkram next week, when the telephone engineers go back to work before anyone can come to look at it. Not good timing, as I’ve got lots of problems I need to fix which need decent access (e.g. for SSH), and the local kids down the Internet shop seem to cane what little bandwidth there is playing on-line games. Lets hope a couple of hours an evening is enough to fix the important customer problems.

This week, I’ll also have to spend most of my time away from the computer (shame!) celebrating Songkram with my Thai friends, or they’ll accuse me of being a slave to my work. Let’s hope I can just keep everybody happy. After Songkram, I might have enough time to work out how much I’ve spent on the Malaysian visa run and the trip to Samui, and whether I can keep our heads above water for another month! Way too much to do, way too little time, and way too little money (at the moment!) to do it all with.

Still, the weather’s good. Here, it’s still hot and sunny but with gusty winds. I can hear thunder rumbling across the border in Myanmar and see the storm clouds building over there from the back of the house. Our coastal breeze seems to be holding the storm across the border there, as apparently it’s been rumbling for days but it hasn’t rained over here yet. It’s probably been torrentially raining for a week just 20kms away across the border! The storm looks to me like it’s starting to drift across at some point, and it would be more than welcome to. We could do with a good downpour to cool things down and fill the pond up a bit.