Snakes and sweetcorn

Hi it’s Jen! We're now on Koh Samui, which is the largest island on the Gulf Coast of Thailand. It's just paradise in this little village we're staying in, it's a proper town where real Thai people live, and they've got really good restaurants serving real Thai food to Thai people - and us! They don't really have choice, they tend to have one or two dishes they sell, and you either have it or you go somewhere else, but it's really delicious, and it's super cheap. The village's called Mae Nam, and it's on the north coast with lovely 4km long beach with lots of coconut palms, and brilliant beach for swimming, in case you plan to come to Koh Samui at some point.

A couple of days ago we were exploring the island on our little hire scooter (it's turquoise, which goes very prettily with Dan's helmet, which is purple) and stopped to have lunch at this little restaurant perched on top of a cliff overlooking some white beaches, turquoise water, well you get the point, and anyway, so there we were sitting quite happily, Dan was sitting just under where the roof of this little shelter ended. We were eating some noodles, and the next thing I know is that Dan's screaming, has spat out his food, and flicked up this snake that had landed on his lap! The 75cm long green beast had obviously been on the roof trying to catch some birds or maybe just warming up in the sun, had lost its balance, and landed on poor Dan's lap! He was obviously just horrified and real scared, and after he'd stood up so the snake rolled onto the floor, it slithered off the side of the restaurant, and down the cliff. I just saw the snake's body rise over the table when Dan was struggling to get up. Isn't that horrible!!!

After the incident with the snake, Dan was very jumpy and twitchy the whole rest of the day, it wasn't till the next day that he seemed normal again, but we still didn't mention anything to do with snakes in case it made him go all weird again.

Another thing we wanted to tell you about is water buffaloes. As I said earlier, we're staying in a real village where people go about their real business, and there's this man near where we live who keeps water buffaloes, and he takes them one by one to have little walks on the beach at sunset, and he takes them into the sea to have nice little baths too. How brave he must be to be walking these enormous animals amongst people and make them be nice and not kill us if they've had a bad day. (Sorry the photo's not in focus.)

They also do bull fighting with the water buffaloes, but contrary to what they do in Spain, they actually make two buffaloes fight each other. Although I still am not sure I'd like to go and see this, it seems a lot more fair than a man with a spear stabbing an animal.

Oh and I've found my new favourite yoghurt - sweetcorn and kidney bean! They sell it here as a normal yoghurt, and it's sweet, and although I must admit that having vegetables and beans in your yoghurt is a bit odd, I quite liked it. Dan couldn't stand the smell so he would not try it although I especially picked a lovely selection of both corn and kidney beans for him.

I was also wanting to say that the rest of Koh Samui island seems to be full of tourists, and feels like you're in Mallorca, or Benidorm, or some other place we imagine not to represent a specific country, but just a resort full of red skinned sweaty tourists (we of course are something entirely different ;) ).

Hope to hear from you all again soon!
Jenni & Dan