10 Sep

10 Sep Two photos in today's update. On the right is the sunset from a couple of days ago and at the bottom of the page the view from Long Beach, also taken a couple of days ago.

Had a fun 24 hours recently which started when an oil line broke on our pick-up and it ground to a halt on the unfinished road down to Wai Chek beach (which is now washed out so you cant drive to the beach anymore unless you're on a motorbike). Got a tow back OK, only to find that one of our guests was having a weird adverse effect to some prescription drugs. The general consensus amongst the amateur physicians that were on hand was that she looked like something out of Dawn of the Dead. So she had to be rushed of to hospital and spent the night there. Fortunately the car will be fixed soon for only a couple of thousand baht and the guest has made a quick recovery.

Jim & his yacht, "Remington" are currently down in Malaysia, off Tioman Island, and want to know if anyone fancies a trip up to the Perhentians and then back down to Tioman and past Singapore to Phuket, where he's due a re-fit - apparently the dodger and genoa are on the way out. (I don't have a clue what that means either.) For info see www.sail-remington.com

We've still got one room left for 14-20 January, other than that our place is already fully booked from mid-November to mid-February. So it looks like this coming high season will be busier on KC than last year. I'm getting a lot of emails from families looking for rooms/bungalows as many hotels say they limit the number of kids in a room to one - which isn't much good if you have 2 kids. If anyone has any recommendations for places, let me know and I'll pass them on when I answer emails

More boat stuff . . . A Danish icebreaker . . .(see if you can guess the name) . . . the 'Hans Christian Andersen', is Koh Chang bound, having set sail from Denmark in late August. There will be 15 members of staff on board catering to the needs of up to 40 guests who are looking for an experience rather than luxury travel, according to the report on Scandasia.com

Some folks working for a internet company based in Bangkok thought it would be a good idea if their new Koh Chang site had some content worth reading. So they simply cut & paste half of this site plus dozens of my posts from the Tripadvisor discussion board and claimed they'd written it. The stuff they ripped off has now been removed and I got a "I don't know how it could have happened' type of apology from someone pretending to be the boss. So, if you're looking for a hotel booking site please avoid kohchangonline.com. They also claim 7 years experience of living on Koh Chang which is nonsense and their parent site is on a blacklist of sites listed as being unauthorised agents for a major hotel in Bangkok. If you just want to book a hotel, there are lots of other sites to choose from.