Yleisön pyynnöstä ;o) ... Antoine was asking for some blogging from Thailand so here it comes.
(Well, some of the pics have been in Flickr for some time and as 1 picture tells more than 1000 pics...)
Very nice 2 weeks with the family indeed. Amazingly good food, nice weather and most of all very frienly athmosphere. Brilliant !
Anyway the thing I want to blog is the sad episode of my "6 day for enjoying windsurfing":
I did quite a bit a fantasizing and planning to windsurf in Phuket for several days. After some Googleing I found something which sounded very good - http://www.phuketwindsurfing.com/ owned and run by Patrick Casiglia. Patrick was very helpful and nice, and once we got there I contacted the him and rented the board for six days. Patrick has lived in Thailand for 15 years and had some interesting insights to beautifull Thailand. He told me that after the tragic Tsunami the goverment had forbidden to have board rental facilities in th beach which has made the whole rental business very "challenging". Anyway 6 days of paradise ahead of me he took me with a new 8.5m2 Gun Sail and Starboard board to our hotel (45 min drive from Patricks home from where he now runs his business). Pretty much straight away I directed to the sea with the gear fulled with excitement.
I put up the gear and off to the sea I go.
(Well, some of the pics have been in Flickr for some time and as 1 picture tells more than 1000 pics...)
Very nice 2 weeks with the family indeed. Amazingly good food, nice weather and most of all very frienly athmosphere. Brilliant !
Anyway the thing I want to blog is the sad episode of my "6 day for enjoying windsurfing":
I did quite a bit a fantasizing and planning to windsurf in Phuket for several days. After some Googleing I found something which sounded very good - http://www.phuketwindsurfing.com/ owned and run by Patrick Casiglia. Patrick was very helpful and nice, and once we got there I contacted the him and rented the board for six days. Patrick has lived in Thailand for 15 years and had some interesting insights to beautifull Thailand. He told me that after the tragic Tsunami the goverment had forbidden to have board rental facilities in th beach which has made the whole rental business very "challenging". Anyway 6 days of paradise ahead of me he took me with a new 8.5m2 Gun Sail and Starboard board to our hotel (45 min drive from Patricks home from where he now runs his business). Pretty much straight away I directed to the sea with the gear fulled with excitement.
I put up the gear and off to the sea I go.
...and then came the waves :o(
Not even big ones - just bigger than what I've gotten used to in Finland. I did not manage to really get on the board before I was down again. Then I noticed that I've put the mast too much to front so whenever I actully got going the board actually started to dive. Shit !!
Anyway I kept trying. Then few quite much bigger wave fronts threw me totally around with the gear, and suddenly I noticed that 2 lattas (blattens) were broken - SHIT !!!
1.5 hours of trying to surf - huge humiliation and a 200€ bill. Plus the fact that I should have really paid the whole sail (409€) to Patrick which could not afford to do. Double-triple-shit.
That was it ... called Patrick, did not reach him, send a SMS bringing the bad news, felt like shit.
Next day we did some serious negotiations (being a beginner I did not know that none of the gear is actually insured) and both of us were 10000bath poorer :o((
After the "transactions" I marched directly to the hotel room, had about 3dl of Bowmore whiskey, read a book (Angels and Demons by D. Brown.. yet another ultimate salaliitto description) and after about half an hour I felt numb (due to whiskey) but OK.
Elämä on Laiffii !
1 comment:
Damn. Life is hard. But I suppose giving others the pleasure of reading about your adventures pays back some of the financial investment you made. ;o) Eija, reporting live from San Francisco
Post a Comment