Feb 16, 5pm

It’s 5pm now and it feels like nothing at all has occurred today. That’s just fine with me. I got up to secure our rooms for one more night. No trouble there. The rest of the day was just relaxing. I had an excellent chicken sandwich on a baguette for breakfast, then went to an Internet café to check email and do a few other online tasks. I installed C1 on the café computer so I could process a few photos into preview images, but I won’t post them until I check that the color and contrast is okay. The monitors in that place were pretty shabby, and the color looked very strange.

I sat on the beach under a palm tree for a while, alternating between reading about Northern Thailand and watching the picturesque parade of topless Swedish girls ruining their pink skin in the pounding sun.

This afternoon I bought a few bamboo skewers of tasty satay pork, some chunks of fresh watermelon, and a drink box of iced green tea. I brought them back to eat on my enormous private verandah–it’s bigger than the room itself, I think–overlooking a tropical garden and goldfish pond complete with waterfall. It’s really quite idyllic.

^{I wonder if there are any responsibilities that come with having a verandah like this? Maybe this is where resort staff and guests will congregate in the event of an emergency? Or perhaps I’ll have to host the inter-resort basketball tournament here?}

I feel like my body is finally acclimatized to the tropics now. I feel the heat, but it’s not nearly as severe. I don’t feel exhausted, even after a prolonged walk in the sun. I know the temperture is hovering around the 37C point. You can add a few degrees to that for the Humidex, but it’s not as torturous as I found it before. It’s kind of a shame that my system has finally caught up with my geographical coordinates, because we’re heading up to Bangkok tomorrow on an overnight sleeper bus, and I’m flying to Chiang Rai in very northernmost part of Thailand the next day.

Feb 17, 9:50am

Thai massage seems to be agreeing with me. I went last night before dinner. The masseuse was much stronger than the first one I had. She twisted and kneaded and bent me into all kinds of shapes. It felt like she was trying to realign the muscles of my legs. It was sometimes painful, but never unpleasantly so. I walked out of there feeling about 20 lbs. lighter. Later on, I looked at my ankles, which felt particularly good. For 14 years I’d put up with fluid and swelling in my right ankle from a baseball injury. After last night’s massage, the swelling was completely gone. My legs feel new again.

Had a BBQ dinner in Chaweng last night at the African Café. It was a decent meal, but nothing spectacular.

This morning I’ll be packing up and getting ready for the long journey to Bangkok. I should arrive in the Khao San road area at 6am tomorrow.