Lumut

When we arrived at the bus station early on Wednesday we watched all the smart coaches coming and going and for ours to arrive. When it did we wanted to cry, it was the crappiest bus we had ever seen, then to add insult to injury the driver said it would take 81/2 hours, not the 5 we were expecting. So this is travelling on a budget! Still we settled down to read and listen to music and the time went reasonably quickly, there weren’t many on the bus and by the time we were approaching the last two stops there were four of us, that’s when we realised something was wrong with the bus as every car that passed was flashing and pointing at it. We were already late and had text KT the owner who was picking us up. Anyway, the driver got off and armed with a newspaper and string tried to try and tie up the rear bumper that had fallen off, he managed it after about 20 minutes and on we went reaching Lumut with no further incidents and met by KT Tan and his wife Beyong.

We were then taken to Tesco to do some food shopping and then for a very nice Chinese meal, paid for by our hosts, then on to the apartment. Very pleasantly surprised, spacious and clean with a large living area and a balcony as well as the largish bedroom and bathroom – better than we had thought and all for £10 a night! The next day we had a long walk up to the 5 star hotel and then down to the beach, white sand, palm trees, blue sea and deserted. In two hours we saw 2 fishermen, one very large iguana and a baby monkey. We also tried out the swimming pool. All good so far. On Friday we decided to try out the shuttle bus to Tesco (the resort is a good 30 minutes from the nearest town but we had been told there was a daily shuttle either to Tesco or the town). First of all we were told no shuttle as the bus was in for a service , then if we could go at 9 and back at 2.30 they’d fit us in, the bus turned up at 9.15 and the driver said he wouldn’t be able to pick us up until 6! Made worse by the fact that Brian was throwing up and obviously not feeling well but we sat around, I did the shopping the we had a phone call about 2 saying we could be picked up in 15 minutes – to cut a long story short, an hour and a quarter later the bus arrived, the driver apparently ‘forgot’ to pick us up. Hopefully this aspect will improve and the shuttle will be more reliable.

On Saturday KT and Beyong arrived to take us to a turtle rehabilitation centre, the largest Chinese temple outside of China itself and for a meal in a ‘hawkers’ restaurant. This is where lots of different stalls sell a huge variety of food, you pick a table and go round ordering, we tried lots of bits and pieces, some better than others. On the way back we bought a load of fruit, some that we don’t even know the name of, to add to the passion fruit and bananas we were given from the Tan’s garden.

We are thinking of changing our itinerary if we like it here, the whole idea is to save money for Aus, and this is certainly cheap and spacious so we might base ourselves here and just spend the obligatory weekend in Thailand every 3 months – we’ll see.

We’ve settled into a bit of a routine, walking, scrabble, reading with excursions into Lumut or Tesco when necessary. We did go to Immigration to check what sort of visa we would need for Thailand and were happy to be told we don’t need one, just a stamp at the border. We had to get a taxi there and had asked him to wait but although we were only a couple of minutes he had disappeared. We had arranged to be picked up at Tesco and had no idea where we were in relation to there so walked to the main road to get a taxi. After about 5 minutes we came across 3 taxis but when we asked them to take us to Tesco they just muttered and basically told us to walk and gestured the direction. We had no choice but to do as they said and 25 minutes later, hot and in Brian’s case, very sweaty we arrived. I had to buy Brian a fresh T-shirt but we couldn’t get over the taxi drivers basically refusing a job – he could have driven round for 20 minutes and charged us what he liked – serves them right!

Golf course - 15th

Golf course - 15th

Pool

Chinese temple

Golf course - 18th