Very.Merry.Christmas
Three hours drive from Bangkok lies the town of Hua Hin, where we had chosen to stay for twelve days over the Christmas period. As we wanted somewhere nice to stay for Christmas we went way out of our poor travellers budget and treated ourselves to a swanky ‘condo’ with private pool and beach. And to make the most of it we spent nearly all of our time relaxing in the beautifully landscaped pool and beach area. We were joined For the first seven days by Rene with whom we had spent some time with recently (see Mae Sot) and has become a good friend. So whilst the boys where playing ball in the pool I got on with some quality reading and sunbathing. For the last five days of our stay in Hoi SIn we had a visit from back home as Chris’ mum came to stay with us for Christmas. She came bearing a suitcase full of sweets, chocolates and alcohol which was obviously very well received (thank you Bernie!)
Hua Hin is not a place in which we would have spent a long amount of time had we not had company. There is little to do apart from laze by the pool, go to the weekend market or drink in the over priced bars. With that said, it was nice to just enjoy the luxury of an apartment for a couple of weeks and not have to consider where our next location would be or how we would get there.
As I said we spent a lot of time by the pool, making full use of this luxury which I doubt we will get again whilst travelling. The nights were spent either having a movie night via our huge screen TV, at the weekend market observing the millions of little trinkets being sold or at the market village complex listening to live music (either the bee gees or Christmas hits) and eating a selection of street foods. Whilst we had access to a kitchen in the flat we decided that most nights we would prepare our own foods so this entailed a trip to the local Tesco (yep they have them here too!) Chris was particularly happy to find Chipotle sauce and I was delighted to find a variety of cheeses- it’s the little things. With our mutual love of Mexican food our first nights meals was fajitas although tortillas weren’t one of the things we managed to find so our chicken was wrapped up in rice wraps which taste a bit like noodles. Slightly strange combination but good none the less.
With Christmas approaching I took it upon myself to fashion a Christmas tree out of a cardboard box and some cheap wrapping paper I found in the supermarket. This made things seem a bit more festive! When Bernie arrived the mountain of Christmas presents she had brought further added to the Christmas. It was also so lovely to receive cards from my family back home that had been passed to Bernie before she visited, they made the apartment look even more festive! In true Christmas spirit we headed to the pool and caught some sun before Skyping home. A nearby hotel was our base for Christmas dinner which more than delivered, we had a full buffet of everything you could ask for of a Christmas lunch. My first Christmas away from home was a happy one. We, or rather Chris must apologise for the lack of photos. We only have images taken on my phone as Chris managed to damage and corrupt the SD card with all the photos on.
We hope that all our loyal blog readers had a very happy Christmas and would like to wish you a happy new year 2015! We have finally been able access our emails again after the second time of being locked out. Chris would like to say hello to everyone at IBI in handforth, he hopes everyone is having a lovely Christmas.
Now we are off back to Bangkok to see in the new year in the big city before moving onto Cambodia.
Sawasdee!
