Finding Nemo

ok ... last of four days in Krabi today and i'm starting to worry about having nothing planned past next week. !

It seemed like such a great way to travel .. planless that is ... but now people are worrying me with stories of fully booked hotels from now till xmas for high season and I have an urge to book the next three months worth of rooms - so as a happy compromise I'm trying to find cheap and easy ways to get from krabi to chiang mai and on to siem reap and then once I know I can get there I'll worry about accommodation.

In the meantime the last few days have been great ... Toby has already seen so much that I can just tell how amazing this experience is going to be for him. On our first morning here we went for a walk on the beach and he discovered a dead starfish and a dead puffer fish (huge!) both of which we let him poke / turn over with a big stick. He was fascinated and really enjoyed exporing them .... and the view from the beach itself was amazing. That may have been entirely natural but I have my suspicions that the elephant that proudly marched into the water in front of us on day two was staged for tourists ... although 1) no-one wanted any money and 2) there weren't that many of us around. Even so Toby absolutely loved stroking it although his initial reaction of 'Wow - an elephant ... Now can I see a giraffe daddy?' made me wonder if he realises how special this all is !!!

And as if all this wasn't good enough at broadening Tobys horizons .... even I may be mellowing to it all. When the friendly German couple with a child mentioned that they were also thinking about hiring a private longboat to Island hop and why didn't we share with them .. to my amazement I didnt recoil with horror and scream 'of course not ... get away bloody foreigners' but actually found myself agreeing that it might be a nice idea.

So today we went to some of the most beautiful, deserted Islands I have ever seen and swam with incredible fish ... we even saw a 100% replic Nemo standing outside his sea anemone guarding it ... although it was too deep for Toto to see. He did however feed some fish from the beach as they swam in shoals arond his ankles.