Day 23 - 2022 Explorers of the Year

I had an absolutely rubbish night sleep. I could hear trance music in the distance, but I can’t blame it on my lack of sleep.

At 9.30am we got up & still full, headed down to breakfast. We had the same again & were surprised to see Lucas helping out. It was very busy, but he told us most people were leaving later during the day.

It was a bit of a grey day, so we decided this was the perfect opportunity to explore the island on foot. We initially headed for Sunrise Beach, which is a long white sandy beach on the easternmost side of the island. We passed a couple bars that still had drunk/hungover revellers who it appeared hadn’t yet been to bed this year.

After walking the length of the beach we concluded that we much preferred our beach at Sunset Beach. Our research before booking paid off! It didn’t help Sunrise Beach that it was quite windy, which made the sea too choppy to swim in & difficult to lie on.

We returned to the centre of the island via the locals village behind Sunrise Beach. Extremely loud techno music was blasting out of a hut for no apparent reason & inexplicably it had been going since New Years Eve night. We know because it’s the music we could hear from our hotel nearly a mile away. The village was quite frankly a bloody mess with a lot of rubbish littering the walkways. We did spot a water monitor that slid into a pond when we approached it.

We then walked the length of Walking Street to Pattaya Beach & the scene of last night’s big firework display. There was still plenty of evidence of it on the beach with discarded sparklers & spent rockets. This was another place in need of a good clean up!

Having walked along Pattaya Beach without finding anywhere suitable to quench our thirst, we followed a road up off the beach & within minutes we were back at our Bayview Sunset Resort. Instead of going home we walked back to Walking Street & sat ourselves down at Ja Yao Restaurant, which turned out to be staffed by slightly surly, but very camp transvestites. One waiter changed from t-shirt & jeans to a frilly blouse & pantaloons during the time we were there.

We shared 4 well earned large Changs having walked 4.54 miles that morning according to my watch & just watched the world go by. We resisted the urge to eat, but made our mind’s up that we would just have a series of street food snacks that evening.

We returned to our resort & booked our next accommodation for a few days time. We then decided to unadvisedly have a power nap & woke up at 6.30pm feeling groggy & not really in the mood to go out.

We forced ourselves back out & stopped in OMG Bar for a quick drink before we ate. The bar was a sports bar with premiership football playing silently on TV screens & a decent drum & guitar duo playing cover versions live on stage. It was a great atmosphere & we stayed, slowly supping our beer, until 9.45pm, when hunger got the better of us.

We walked back to where the street food stalls had been cooking to discover to our horror that they were all packing away without a morsel of meat left to buy. We had to make do with just a banana & chocolate roti each, whilst listening to the “Yoo Hoo” of Madam Yoo Hoo every time a westerner walked past her restaurant opposite.

Jackie felt full after her banana roti & apparently so did I! We walked them off going back home.

Song of the Day: Just the Two of Us by Grover Washington, Jr., Bill Withers.
Under the Bridge by Red Hot Chilli Peppers.
Creep by Radiohead (Album version only).
(A selection of some of the songs played by the band OMG Bar).Read more