Well there is love, and then again, there is love.

I quit saying anything about our travels, and abandoned any thoughts of staying on in Thailand when a dear friend's battle with lung cancer took a turn. He has been fighting the beast for three years and is beating it back, but infection has caused some serious problems with administrating chemo, and created some severe pain. So the love of travel becomes pretty much trivialized when balanced against the love of people, and I am happy to be here and maybe be of some small help. I hope to add a bit about the rest of our trip, which was indeed wonderful as time permits.

I guess you might have seen pictures of Guilin China, or Halong Bay in Vietnam. They both have these unworldly tall skinny vertical hills that come out of nowhere and rise up from flat fields, or right out of the water. They are made of lmestone karst, and are strangely weathered. The Chinese have wonderful landscape paintings of them.

Well, Khao Sok has taller, more dramatic karst than any I saw in Halong Bay, or have seen pictures of in Guilin. The cliffs tower up for 900 and even 1100 feet right out of the water. Since this is a rainforest environment, trees and ferns grow out of cracks in the rock so there may be trees with a trunk of 16" or more growing out of cracks half way up the cliff.

To top things off there are monkeys, giant hornbill birds, and a rich fish life.

Barb and I enjoyed a lazy day today, skipping the morning trip to a big market. The markets are really very much fun. Everything is sold in little booths maybe 10 feet square, like at a craft show. Things are more or less sorted by types, but not perfectly. Great produce sections, with every greenery a tropical climate can produce, which is mindboggling. Butcher sections which have all parts of the animal, all fresh and cut to order. Spices piled up in heaps of every color and type. Cloths are varied, mostly western, but aslo sarongs, and beautiful bolts of cloth. Metalworking sections, car and motorbike parts, hardware, electrical, just everything heaped in piles. But we have seen several, and since we need little at the market, I just cant see going to another.

OK, Ko Surin

This is a group of island 20 odd miles off the coast. The largest two are maybe a mile or so long and half that wide. Then a number of smaller islands from 1/4 mile long down to less than 50 yards.

All of granite, steep right from the waterline and all surrounded by wondrous beaches or more likely coral reefs. There is a small national park headquarters and some small cabins and tents in the one small level area. Some common shelters for serving meals and that's it.

Oh a dock with longtail boats for going out to the reefs. longtails are long narrow dory shaped boats with a motor on the rear. The motor can be anything from a small one cylinder up to a medium sized car motor. The motor is mouned high in the rear of the boat, and the drive shaft of the motor goes straight off the end of the boat with a propeller at the end. hence long tail

Well we are Nakhon Si Thammarat in the south of Thailand. This is an ancient Thai city, the source of Buddhism, or rather the route that Buddhism came to Thailand from India via Sri Lanka.

You can argue about religion if you want, but Buddhism at least creates, or allows an environment where people can live gently, kindly, generously with one another.

We walk out and just go walking down random streets, through interesting shopping streets, or quiet residential steets and paths, and through rather poor and wanting areas all without any concern for ourselves, and always with great friendliness and even affection from everyone we pass.

OK, more to specifics...

Not much to say about it, if you get it, or if you have experienced it, no need, otherwise a waste of words.