Ko Samui

Saturday, February 6th – 7:00 A.M. (At sea)

What a wonderful room this is. We are not at all crowded and we have plenty of space to just relax. We are up early again even though we did go to a show at 8:30 last night. It featured an Australian singer named Seamus Earley. She was really good and we both enjoyed it. We were in bed by 10:30 but up early again. We are still falling quickly to sleep and sleeping really well.

Bill has already been downstairs and has brought us a light breakfast which we enjoyed on the deck. It’s still warm enough to be out there this early in the morning. Bill surprised me with a special “coffee” card he purchased this morning. There is a Starbucks like station here but the coffee there has to be paid for so we’ve passed on it. He bought a card that purchases 14 coffees so I’ll be starting my days with a Latte from now on. He really spoils me. He rarely spends any money on himself but denies me nothing.

It was very hot and humid yesterday. We rented that motorbike and road partly around the island. It was too hot to spend more than a couple of hours doing that. I’m glad we didn’t take the ship’s tour. They were loaded into buses and spent hours on the island. It was too hot and humid for that. Bill is so experienced on a motorcycle that I felt safe buzzing around with him. We road to the zoo where we saw lots of elephants just roaming around. They had elephant rides which Bill tried to get me to go on but I elected to just feed them. It was a fun couple of hours. After that we came back to the ship. The island was very poor and very crowded. It wasn’t a great stop so two hours or so was just perfect. Today we are at sea and tonight is our first formal night. I only brought one pair of velvet pants and a couple dressy tops for the three formal nights. The pants fit really well when I left home. I’m hoping they still do. We seem to be eating all the time and our selections of food have not always been too healthy. There are lots of wonderful desserts and it’s hard not to indulge ourselves.

As I write this, Bill is at the gym working out. He is very faithful with his exercise. As for me, I’ve gotten so much more exercise since leaving home that both of my calves hurt (from all the stairs I was forced to take in Bangkok) , my knee is swollen and for some reason both of my ankles have been swollen the last two days. I’m wondering if that is from the long plane ride. I’ve never had this problem before. I don’t need to add one more ailment to my list.

I’m so glad that this cruise has every other day at sea. It gives me a chance to rest up between stops. Today we’re at sea. Tomorrow we dock in Singapore. I have no idea what we’ll do there although I do know we are not taking any of the ship’s tours. Bill is comfortable doing things on our own and it always turns out to be the right thing for us. As he always does, he has researched our every stop so he has a good idea of we’ll be doing. I’m just his tour companion. We’re only taking a ship sponsored tour once on this trip and that will be in Viet Nam since the area we are going to see is about an hour and a half from where we will dock.

I had terrible headaches on the plane ride here but I am happy to say that I haven’t had a single headache since getting on the ship. I pray that continues.

I discovered yesterday that the demographics of Thailand are 95% Buddhist, 3% Islam and 2% Christian. We see Buddhist monks all the time. We have elected not to visit the Buddhist temples (although we did see the palace where the king lives and there was a temple there that we saw). For the first time we are on a cruise where there is no religious service on Sundays. The Asian people are extremely courteous. The Westerners could learn something from them. There are many traditions that MUST be observed at all times while visiting here and the ship is very good at keeping us informed of them.