Day 33, according to Lauren. 

This day technically started with some 3am vomiting but I was soon feeling better after a couple of hours of puke-free sleep. Whatever it was seemed to pass pretty quickly so I was counting my blessings, knowing what it could have been like after Sarah’s experience at the beginning of our trip. We got ourselves dressed and went downstairs for some breakfast. Sarah ordered boiled eggs and I asked for mine scrambled. And of course some tea for me and orange juice for Sarah. 5 minutes later some fried eggs on toast arrived…umm no…we explained again how we wanted ours cooked so the lady returned to the kitchen. Soon enough our corrected eggs appeared and we tucked in. We did some quick additions and realised how easily our money was disappearing. On that note we decided that from now on we’d make an effort to do meals ourselves as we now had a fridge to keep things fresh. Remembering that ‘seven day supermarket’ was over the road, we were hopeful that we could get some cereal and milk at least. After breakfast we headed over and had a look at what was on offer. It was mostly strange expensive products that were nothing like what we were looking for. Even the water was overpriced. It may have been open seven days but it certainly wasn’t a supermarket. We figured we’d ask later about where a better one was but for now the sun was shining and there was some serious beaching to be done. We grabbed some water from the petrol station, got our beach bags from the room and went down to ask about the free beach shuttle we had seen advertised. “It’s too late, now you pay”. Turns out the free shuttle runs at 9am from the hotel and pickup at 4pm from the beach every day. It was a little too far to walk (and pavements are non-existent) so we paid for one of the staff to take us in his tuk tuk.

  
A very bumpy 15 minutes later and we were there. The beach was lacking somewhat; the sea was almost up as high as where the sun loungers were laid out and it looked a bit dirty. Still, we were here now and all we really needed were a couple of loungers and some sun, so we set up camp and let the tanning commence. Soon enough we were disturbed by a street seller and her daughter offering manicure/pedicure, hair threading and selling bracelets. They tried to convince us to have a treatment but remembering the poor quality of our last pedicure experience in Krabi we declined. The lady then tried to sell the idea of threading to us (leg hair removal by tightly manoeuvring thread across the leg), promising it wouldn’t hurt. We said our no thankyous but she persisted to give Sarah a free demo. Sarah feigned a few “ouch” sounds so that we’d have an excuse not to have it done. “Ahh no pain no gain, I think you scared”, the little girl spurted out. “No money no honey”. We chuckled at her surprising collection of English phrases and told them we’d maybe buy something later to get rid of them. After a couple of hours it started to get a little cloudy but we still needed refreshing so ordered a mango smoothie for me and a strawberry milkshake for Sarah. We took advantage of the free wifi to get some hostel booking done for our upcoming tour of Vietnam with the English Roses (Parker and Freya) in a couple of weeks.

  
4pm soon came round and we were told that a sister of one of the hotel staff would take us back in her car. Air con and suspension, what a dream. Her English seemed to be pretty good so we took this opportunity to ask her where a local supermarket was. She told us there was one a 5 minute walk away from our hotel and said she’d happily drop us there if we wanted. Perfect, a lift to the supermarket too. We arrived and said our thankyous (in our newly acquired Khmer) and went inside, hoping that it was a real supermarket this time. Sure enough it was just what we were looking for and was well stocked with cereal, bread, milk etc. Realising we had nothing to eat our cereal out of, we headed for the homeware section (this was more than your ordinary supermarket) and spied a melamine bowl for a dollar. We decided this was a wise investment and got a spoon and a knife along with it too. We found some bread, some cheese, and yay! Some marmite! We were super excited at the thought of cheese and marmite sandwiches for dinner (a classic delicassy that we had enjoyed countless times at uni together). We stocked up on cereal and milk and other yumminess and congratulated ourselves for becoming self sufficient as far as food was concerned (it was really starting to annoy me having to pay for meals out all the time). I was starting to feel a little faint so we completed our purchases and wandered home for a rest. We had seen downstairs that alongside their book collection they also had some DVDs. We had a DVD player in our room so asked if we could choose one to take up for a cosy night in. They kindly agreed and so we chose ‘The Bucket List’, an emotional comedy about two men with cancer completing their dying wishes. With our cheese and marmite deliciousness (Sarah’s in a bowl, mine on a makeshift cereal box plate) we settled in and enjoyed our movie night.