Dear All,

It’s been far too long and I’m sorry for that, but I won’t dwell on that and will just get started.

Tim and I are currently in Thailand, having worked our way north from Indonesia and Malaysia with many stops along the way. If you would like to see our entire route from start to most recent location, just check out the map at the top of our blog. No Foreign Land is what Tim now uses to track our path. Over the years, Tim has made a note everywhere we have stopped along the way and there will be more blogs of those times to come.

We haven’t had long here, but these are some first impression of Chalong, where we cleared into Thailand.  

Clearing in here involves visiting many offices and it was quite a quick process. We were warned that when you get to the last office, where you request the amount of time you wish to stay (a 60 day visa being the maximum allowed), if you get the lady official she will not want to give you the 60 day visa.

Guess what? We got a smiling lady official.

When asked ‘How long do you intend to stay?’, and Tim said, ‘60 days’ and her smile vanished. She didn’t say anything, but Tim waited silently and held his ground. Eventually still scowling, she gave us both 60 day visas. To be fair there is a crackdown on individuals trying to abuse the visa system to stay longer than they are welcome. See the last ‘White Lotus’ of a glimpse of the problems.

After clearing in we headed out to the shops.

Just outside the marina we passed this marvellous tree.

We often see them, all wrapped in ribbons of cloth, and I looked it up.  How Auspicious Trees Can Revitalize Thai Cities - great article, full of information on the past, present and future hopes.

A different view of old and new; a bird’s nest of wires of telecoms wires and shiny electricity  wires and pylons. 

This is the roundabout on the main road nearest Chalong Marina. The roof on the left covers a small police station. This roundabout has a traffic police, whistles shrilling, starting, stopping, berating and fining drivers as well as helping pedestrians like us cross the chaotic and unrelenting traffic. 

Each time we’ve passed the roundabout, there have been a number of cars and especially motor bikes stopped by the police to check they have the correct permits.

They also have long stretches of road without roundabouts or traffic lights. The solution for drivers wishing cross traffic to turn right is to use U-turn breaks in the road, but the traffic is continuous. There are no traffic lights or traffic police and if there was a lane for merging into traffic it was not apparent. It’s pretty hairy, I can tell you.

This is not a country we intend to do any in driving.

…

Yesterday we are anchored in a bay on the southern tip of the Thai peninsula. This is our second time here as we had a reunion of sorts with friends from our time in Fiji and Vanuatu.

The guests of honour - Thant Zin and his wife and daughter who were visiting from Myanmar. They now live in a more secure part of the country as their village is no longer safe from the on going fighting. 

Colin from Burmese Breeze and Bill and Zoe from Into The Blue made up the party.  Bill and Zoe were  anchored in the bay with us. Thant Zin had scoped out the best restaurant for our group, staffed on the whole by young Myanmar men. It is better for them to work in Thailand right now and avoid the military draft and it was wonderful for Thant Zin and his wife to chat to the waiters and help with our ordering.

It took a while for baby girl to warm up to me, but after that we gone on wonderfully. 

Thant Zin’s daughter drew every eye and she was petted and cooed over by a great many ladies of all ages.

We had a lovely few days together.

…

Moving from place to place and country to country as we do, we are often caught out by unexpected changes. For me the greatest yet most satisfying challenge is provisioning, finding the food and supplies we need.

Food shopping in Indonesia is done on the whole in open air markets. It takes some getting used to but it is a wonderful way to shop going from stall to stall and trying to ‘share the love/money’ with as many people as possible.

Malaysia is much more European in its shopping style. There are road style stalls of fruit and vegetables but we very quickly got into the habit of using supermarkets where we could get everything in one place.

Thailand goes one step further than Malaysia with its small high-end supermarkets and Makro style bulk shopping. We haven’t been here long and I hope as we get away from the cities we can find smaller shops and stalls.

One major shocker for us concerns milk. Tim buys fresh milk when ever we can; when we can’t we have a supply of powdered skim milk. In Indonesia, we’d been using our stock of milk from Australia. We could buy powdered skim milk in Malaysia everywhere except the island of Langkawi. This is the island where we cleared out of Malaysia for Thailand. We could buy full fat milk, but that isn’t to our taste any more so we didn’t. We were sure to find it in Thailand, but we haven’t yet.  

We can buy UHT milk and oat milk in cartons but that’s heavy and takes up space. We will keep looking. In Malaysia we buy thinking we can’t get in the shops - like tinned tomatoes (though you can buy those in Thailand) - on sites like Lazada a Malaysian type of Amazon. You need a local phone number and a place to have the goods delivered and we have neither.

We haven’t been here long and there are many more towns and cities, like Phuket, in our near future so fingers crossed. 

…

We’ve updated our travel plans and the next part is an excerpt from an email explaining them…

Since we left Pangkor Marina we’ve been trying to get into the swing of things but we don’t feel ready to start the long passage to the Mediterranean.  The boat looks great and has all its mechanical things bits and pieces serviced, our oven and fridge have become a little erratic with the oven going out unexpectedly mid muffins and the fridge door handle not always giving the expected ‘clunk’.  Tim can tune most of these things but we need to be sure they will stay tuned.

Having had everything off the boat for the work, it doesn’t feel organised below deck yet. We got rid of somethings and added others and need more time to feel comfortable. 

It would also be good to have a more frugal year, we have decided to stay another year in the South East Asia. 

I know the weather and the flooding you’ve been hearing about must be very worrisome but none of the weather has affected us. Unlike the poor locals, we move with the seasons.

We have lots of friends going to the Med this year, but some of our first sailing friends from the Caribbean are making the passage next year and it would be really nice to do this with them.

This will also give us a chance to see places we missed on our first time in Indonesia and more time to catch-up on the blog.

We hope that all is well with you and yours. 

Lots of love from Nancy and Tim.