Archive for July, 2007
Offline for 2 weeks ….
The next two weeks we’lll disappear from the face of the Internet planet because we’ll be in a meditation center. Imagine Sally and Peter silent for 2 weeks (no talking at all!) and Sally eating only 2 times a day! Wow! Enjoy the old stories and we’ll post as soon as we’re online in Vientiane, Laos!
Buddha Magic Garden … so where is the Magic?
Posted by peter in Holiday, Pics & Movies, Thailand on July 29th, 2007
Although my back was hurting still from the powerboat wake-boarding we decided to go to the Magic Buddha Gardens of Samui. After we dealt with all the chores (buying tickets at Time to travel [by far the best travel agent we saw]) we set off around 4PM to the gardens which are around the highest point in Samui. We had a Automatic scooter which was good at cruisin’ the roads of Samui, but as we found out, not the slippery muddy mountains. Halfway up the mountain, it started to smell like a dry cooking water kettle and lost all power: result Peter drove up helping the bike, and Sally had to run uphill (“good for bum” I assured her). At 5.45pm we finally arrived at the Magic Garden and we shot the following pics: [Gallery=12]
The last pic is the result of the way down: halfway we had a flat. Perfect timing, it was getting dark and we had no clue where we exactly were. Luckily after half an hours walk with the bike, we reached the main road where an industrious Thai had set up a bike repair store just there… how convenient! I guess he had seen these stupid farangs (Thai for ‘Foreigner’) before, trying to scale the mountain with rented Automatic city bikes!
Wakeboarding
So, after spending a day doing very little of anything, I decided that we should get off our asses and do something constructive. I decided it’d be a great idea for me to have my second wakeboarding lesson, the first one having been in Singapore 5months earlier. It’ll be easy right? After all, I was a natural…
Peter did a fantastic job of getting up on the board and pulling some stylish manoevers… it WAS easy after all!! (he also managed to put his back out for the next 4 days though… something about an old injury and a bad boat driver…. old age as well maybe 
?)
I also managed to stand… once… and wave (hand, not water) … for about 3 seconds…. but spent most of the rest of the time swallowing water and trying to keep my head from disappearing inside the massive life jacket.
We both limped home later like 2 wounded soldiers… bodies and pride in serious need of TLC….
Explorations
Posted by sally in Holiday, Pics & Movies, Thailand, Updates on July 27th, 2007
After our very exciting visit to Tesco, we went to see one of the marvels of the island… the Nam Meong (sp?) waterfall…. 80m high from top to base. It’s in the middle of the island and took us nearly an hr by bike to get there. We managed to escape from the very persistent elephant trekkers at the entrance to the falls and made our own way to the bottom of the trail (which did in fact require that I get off the bike the few times, because the automatic just wasn’t gonna make it!!)
The falls themselves were great to see – not hugely spectacular, but not bad for a small island! We climbed to the pool near the top and swam with a bunch of other tourists. I managed to make friends with a few very unfriendly rocks, since the water was far too cloudy to see through… why do I always do things like that??
The trip home was fairly uneventful, and no…. we didn’t visit Tesco on the way back…..
Sally’s Field research
On our way to the waterfalls at Koh Samui, Sally really needed to check out TESCO. Since Sally is going to work at the European HQ near London, I found this a bit nerdy but why not. But I could not resist I just had to shoot this little movie …
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2909412816816519354And there was wind….
Posted by peter in Holiday, Kite surfing, Pics & Movies, Thailand on July 25th, 2007
Finally there was enough wind to get my kite out of the package and so I did, but now it was the lack of kite skills which prevented me from getting it up immediately. When my skills slowly improved, the wind decided to go on holiday and my kite fell out of the sky. Sal did her best to register my feeble attempts on camera, which means that she had to shoot really quickly to get a pic of me on the board….
Dutch entertainment
Posted by sally in Holiday, Pics & Movies, Thailand on July 24th, 2007
Since there was not enough air to move a palm frond and because the Thai farters were nowhere to be found, we looked for other entertainment… after all, there’s only so much jet lag that one can recover from.
So we decided to explore the island and rented a scooter, for the princely sum of 3euros a day!! With there being too much to see, we decided to make it a cultural excursion and elected to visit a few temples and anatomical structures on the island (more on that later!).
The trip around the island took about 4hrs. We visited 2 of the many Buddhist temples on the islands, all of which are massive and are very ornately designed and painted. One of the temples was home to the 20yr old mummified body of a local monk – his family apparently donated his body after it failed to decay after his death (buddhists believe that enlightened persons bodies’ don’t decay).
Along the way we had to stop off to see the ‘Grandfater and Grandmother rocks’… large genitalia shaped rocks alongside a beach. It was amazing to see just how many others had flocked to see it as well… what is it with humans and sex anyway??!!
We finished off our trip by going to see the Big Buddha, which is situated on a small island off the Big Buddha beach, (where we launched from for the Full Moon Party that we went to in Feb). Not much to see really, other than a big buddha. Duh.
In addition to the pics, we had to add this radio clip below… it comes from one of the vans that traverse the island ALL THE TIME, advertising the Thai boxing that is taking place ‘that night only’.. those of you that have been to Thailand before will probably remember…. (We added some visuals, but the audio is original!!)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4337398949057494489Kite surf (frustrat) ing
Posted by peter in Croatia, Holiday, Kite surfing, South Africa, Thailand on July 23rd, 2007
So I took my kite to South Africa and there was no time in between visiting family and friends to surf. Besides the water around Cape Town was too cold anyway. Then I took the kite to Hvar, Croatia. Nice weather, nice wind but no beach to start! So I took the kite unused back home and now I took it again to Koh Samui, Thailand and my favorite website is Windguru which is supposed to predict wind and waves…. Everyday the site makes sure I jump out of bed at 8 to check the palm-trees outside our cabin…. dead still. Another day to sleep in. Then I check the site again inn the afternoon and it says that there will be wind tomorrow…. and this is how a website keeps me busy and hoping for wind. I’m so desperate for wind that I almost wanna hire some Thai to fart simultaneously to get the wind going.
Much ado about nothing
Posted by sally in Holiday, Pics & Movies, Thailand on July 22nd, 2007
We arrived in Thailand about 3 days ago I think and have spent most of the time doing, well… nothing much really… We were both pretty jet lagged when we arrived and needed to sleep A LOT. But we have at least managed to find the time to swim and have a few beach strolls 
.
Apart from nearly getting reversed over by an angry taxi driver (and getting to see Peter’s Zen karate moves in retaliation!!), the past few days have been pretty uneventful. We’ve mostly caught up on sleep now and will be off kite boarding tomorrow… FABULOUS!!
The River Tour
Posted by sally in Holiday, Pics & Movies, Singapore, Updates on July 19th, 2007
We decided to spend our last day in Singapore in a fairly relaxed fashion.. a quiet lunch followed by a leisurely boat cruise along the Singapore River. Was a great way to see the city, but we certainly could have done without the ‘I-forgot-to-take-my-lithium’ recording that they insisted on playing at full blast above the roar of the engine…. ahem…
Off to Ko Samui in Thailand tonight… hooray!!
Lookie-look: the naïve Dutch man
Sal crashed in bed and was not planning to move. The jet-lag had seduced her and taken her away. I just had to answer some email regarding my latest job opportunities and since the Hotel Internet machine was occupied by a overweight Chinese 9-year old who was playing online poker games I thought is was wiser to find a Internet bar outside.
A guy asked me whether he could help me and I said that I needed the Internet. “Ahhh” he said “Lookie look?” “Yes” I said “lookie look”. He was leading the way and before I knew I was standing in a large room full of naked big breasted (fake I assumed) Asian ladies. I said again to the guy “I need Internet you know, lookie look at email!” He said “but this is real thing … much better you know!” So I gave up the quest and walked out in the street suddenly realizing that we slept in the Singapore red light district: all the places around me looked like the one I just visited.
After some precarious querying I finally found a Internet bar where most of the screens were occupied by guys scanning for porn … I guess its’ cheaper. Suddenly the concept I learned at my INSEAD MBA of choke price made more sense.
Blooming marvelous!!
Posted by sally in Holiday, Pics & Movies, Singapore, Updates on July 18th, 2007
What do you do when you are on holiday in a city that you’ve lived in?? The touristy things of course! So we decided to go and visit the Orchard …oops Orchid Gardens, which, for those of you interested in visiting at some point in the future, are situated in the Botanical Gardens and NOT near the zoo as the Singapore maps suggest.
Was all very stunning. Did you know that the Orchid family of flowering plants is the largest in the world, comprising 10 percent of all flowering plants? And that bananas belong to the ginger family? Very informative trip indeed! Thereafter we had Singaporean hotpot for dinner at Dempsey road, where we basically had to boil all our own food, veggies, meatballs, the lot! (Did you know that the bright orange prawns that you eat are actually purple-grey in their uncooked state??) Was kind of fun, but think I’d rather pay someone else to do the cooking!!
Business is business
“Dear KLM Customer Service Manager, I’m writing this from row 14 on board your Boeing 777, which, if you knew your plane layout, IS NOT NEXT TO AN EMERGENCY EXIT! We kindly request that you refund the 2 train trips to Schiphol that we had to take in order to secure our requested seats THAT WE DID NOT GET ALLOCATED. Either that, or surprise us with some creative solution…” Fortunately, the air steward creatively bumped us up to business class, so Peter’s friendly ranting never needed to be sent off!! After our pampered flight and some luxurious sleep, we arrived safely in Singapore. Of course, the 6hr time difference meant that we were suitably jet lagged, so we were wide awake during the evening and spent the time walking along the Singapore River, before we had our first Asian meal at a floating restaurant on the river. It sure is great to be back in Singapore!
The holiday begins…
We woke up bright (and not so early) on Friday, to finish off the packing and to get onto the road to start our big post-INSEAD adventure! Of course, the fact that Thursday had been the grad party and the evening had been late and bubbly meant that packing lacked any real enthusiasm or speed. We eventually got on the road only an hour late bound for the ferry at Boulogne.
Unfortunately the car had other plans. After an hour it started to breakdance intermittently and strange fuel vapours seeped into the vehicle. It then VERY CONVENIENTLY decided to conk out completely when we were only 20km from the port. NICE! Of course, I had a road plan with Citroen, so we called them and Peter calmly explained that ‘le car (carre?) ne function pas’ (thankfully Spanish was his exit language 
!) and Citroen sorted everything out. Very impressive actually… we got to picnic by the side of the highway and explore the service roads of Berck in a tow truck – highly recommended! (We actually have some excellent pics of this great day – unfortunately there’s back in Europe with the other camera. We’ll have to post them in Sept when we get back!)
All goods have since been safely brought across the channel and are now sleeping peacefully in a Wimbledon storage depot.
And so the adventure begins…..
Graduation Day!!
Posted by sally in INSEAD, Pics & Movies on July 5th, 2007
Grad was special and amazing and sad all at the same time.. the beginning of the end and the end of the beginning.
[slideshow=4]
And here’s a little video for laughs…
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8031571383483531398-
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