Biker Chick

I have managed to locate what appears to be the "hot spot" in town, and it has provided me with some good company. They have a great menu and show a movie at 7:30 every evening, so I've been having dinner there and catching a show at the same time. Nothing like traveling to the other side of the world to eat your dinner in front of the TV! They also have a decent live band later in the evening which is fun. My first night, I met a couple of gorgeous 20-something sisters from Saskatchewan whose next stop was a bible camp in Malaysia. Go figure. I also met an Aussie and Brit team (Daniel and Wayne respectively) as well as a Thai tattoo artist who kept me well entertained for the evening.

Yesterday I rented a motorcycle to tour the island a bit. It costs about $5 per day and they are automatic, so it doesn't require much talent. Still, I'm not exactly comfortable on anything with 2 wheels - can't seem to forget losing a couple of front teeth in a bicycling accident 20 years ago. Add in left-hand drive, very narrow roads and insane drivers and it makes for some nerve-wracking driving. I was going so slow most of the time that even the pedestrians were passing me. Managed to get it up to about 40 kph on the straight, flat stretches (Jim are you impressed?). Speaking of straight flat stretches, there are two of them on the entire island and the rest of the roads are steep hills often with hairpin curves. Very pretty as long as you're not driving.

I stopped in for a hike to a much-touted waterfall, which was indeed beautiful and a great place to cool off. However, I found the word "hike" a bit misleading - I followed a very well maintained path for about 500 metres to get to the falls. Still no hope of me getting any exercise before Bhutan - I hope I don't absolutely collapse on day 1 in the mountains.

I had lunch on a very cool pier at the extreme south end of the island. Pier is a bit of an understatement as it's basically an entire village built out over the water. It looks as though they built this great pier and then it just kind of sprouted appendages in all directions. All the dive organizations for the island are located there.

Today it is absolutely teeming with rain so will likely stay indoors. The rest of the week doesn't look much better, so it could be a pretty quiet time. I don't really mind - the downtime is nice.