That is the reason why the blog has seen so few updates in the last three weeks. Not the cows: the beach. While we were declaring to everyone we were super ultra busy in our travel, we were actually shamelessly whiling the days away, basking in the golden sun, sipping fruity lassis or playing frisbee (admittedly at a terrible level). Well I guess that still made us a bit busy.
Oh God, I want to be back in Goa already. Why did we leave, again?
Here are some pictures we had not got the occasion to publish — either because they did not fit into any post, or simply because they were too random. Sillily random, to be precise.
Almost as quickly as we went through it. Following our beautiful, inspiring journey through Myanmar, we only spent a grand total of ten days in Malaysia — where to head to, given so little time? After Kuala Lumpur, the thriving megalopolis which was no more than an arrival point for us, we quickly made our way to Pulau Perenthian Kecil (small Perenthian island) before exploring Penang and its bright, exploding mishmash of cultural heritages.
“Do you have fresh coconut?” I ask the waiter from the restaurant in Haad Yao, the beach where we just arrived.
“Yes,” he answers and points upwards to the coconut tree above our heads. He counts “One, two, three, four, five, six…” fresh coconuts and laughs. Then he fetches a long stick and starts hitting the coconuts; Salome and Fernando have to get up lest they be struck by the falling green hard ball. A few minutes later, the waiter serves us the delicious coconut water and as we suck happily on our straws, feeling the sun on our skin, watching over the white sand with the deep blue ocean beyond and hearing the waves, all four of us agree: we just arrived in paradise.
We met up with Salome and Fernando, two old friends of Ladina’s, in Bangkok, the capital of the kingdom of Thailand. And after an evening of plotting and scheming, we all decided to head straight to the heavenly tropical islands of the South. So we made a run to the train station, dodged the touts trying to enlist us in an travel agency package, bought tickets in a sleeper train to Chumphon, came back under heavy rain in the evening, discovered inside the carriage that our tickets had been issued for two days hence, ran to the controllers, argued at the counter, changed our tickets for seats in a later train, sat down in the station hall to play Yatzy, and finally, boarded our train bound south.
