Day 77 of The Big Adventure.
I was woken at 5.30am by Georgia who was making some commotion about the cockerels outside. I was not impressed. Thankfully I managed to get back to sleep until 8.30am. I went to go and have cornflakes next door at the turtle house. It was quite nice to have cornflakes – hadn’t had them for months and they always reminded me of home.

Side note: they had the most bizarre SOLID washing up liquid (well, not liquid clearly).

Went back across to the volunteer house to get ready for this mornings activity: snorkel tour.

We (a Malaysian intern called Joel ((pronounced Jo-el)), the Malaysian family and me) all set off to the jetty with our snorkels in hand and found the boat that would be taking us around. 

We stopped off at various snorkelling spots around the two islands. There were loads of fish and some amazing corals and the water was amazingly clear.

The mum of the Malaysian family (I’m just going to call her Mum because I essentially became part of their family) was feeling very seasick and asked to be dropped off at the nearest beach. So we dropped her and Dad off and they left Jo-el and I to take sole charge of Georgia. Brave.
At the next stop off we saw a few black tip reef sharks swimming around the edge of the coral which was pretty cool, and plenty of Nemo’s. Then we headed back to the beach to collect Mum and Dad before heading back to the village for lunch. We went to a restaurant right by the pier and ordered food.

Mum and Dad would not let Georgia order a sandwhich and insisted she eat a ‘proper’ meal, which it turned out had to be rice according to them. I thought it would probably be inappropriate for me to order a sandwhich at this point (even though I did rather fancy one) and was forced to order Pattaya rice instead (fried rice wrapped in an omelette).

Over lunch I received a lot of abuse for using a fork to eat my rice instead of a spoon. I soon realised I was vastly outnumbered, with only little old me against 4 Malaysians.

Their arguement was that it was a lot more efficient using a spoon because you could get more rice on a spoon than a fork. None of them were in the best of shape and I think it probably would have done them some good to have less rice in each mouthful, however, I decided not to mention this and continued with my fork.

The restaurant we were at also made fresh donuts so we ordered a round and had them for dessert. They were DEEE-LICIOUS.

That afternoons activity was: Turtle Survey, which entailed more snorkelling and taking photos of all the turtles we saw. Mum decided to stay at home to avoid more seasickness and so Dad, Georgia, Ramona, Jo-el and I headed out to do survey. We got a boat across to turtle bay and saw 3 turtles. Either Ramona or Jo-el would dive down and take pictures of either side of the turtles face and one of the top of the head (this is how they identified the different turtles).

Jo-el started trying to teach me to free-dive but I wasn’t very good. I found the pressure quite painful and I wasn’t vey good at equalising.

We had a few practices and then it was time to go back to the village. We went home to shower and then went out for Malay dinner. Before we left, Wid showed us how to properly wear a sarong like the locals.

Then we walked down to the village and went into a locals house who had prepared loads of food for us. It was much the same as when we ate back at the house, with all the food laid out on a wooden mat and then we all sit around it.

However, here there was no cutlery and we had to eat with our hands. Everyone else seemed to know exactly what to do, you held the plate with your left hand and picked up food with your right hand. It was absolutely bizzare; eating rice and vegetable curry with your hands. It certainly took a while to get used to. And then a teapot that stood on a little grate was passed around that we could all wash our hands with.

No soap. So after a greasy curry it didn’t really do much to help.

It had been another long day and after my 5.30am alarm I was ready for an early night.