Date                 11 – 29 January 2016

The new Yacht Haven bar, restaurant and offices, viewed from the marina

Time flies when you are enjoying yourself and we seemed to be busy most days with various projects, maintenance and logistical issues.  Car hire as conveniently available at about £10 a day without too much in the way of formalities which made getting around easy.  Evening meals with Dagmar and Christoph from Flomaida and other cruisers were mainly had in the Coconut Restaurant run by a lovely Thai lady called Penn.  The bill including drinks was generally in the region of £12 and the food was freshly cooked and great.  Dagmar and Elizabeth had an interesting outing with Penn when she took them to some of the local markets where she purchases her ingredients.

Another companionable evening at the Coconut Restaurant

Dagmar, Penn, Elizabeth and the elephant in the room

Large scale provisioning was done from a variety of supermarkets, Vila Mart at Boat Lagoon was very good if a little more expensive.  Makro provided a number of trolley full to keep Caduceus in ballast.  In amongst all of this the fore and aft extensions to our sun awning gradually appeared.

The completed three section sun awning– camping meets boating?

The original intention had been to leave Thailand for Sri Lanka in company with Flomaida.  The complication was that Flomaida required their chart plotting system and other electronics replacing due to damage sustained in Penang caused by a lightening strike.  The solution for them turned out to be a return to Langkawi to meet with a technician flying out from Germany with the necessary kit.  They therefore left on 30 January and headed south whilst we followed at a more leisurely pace to meet up with them in Rebak marina, Langkawi.

During this time we took a four-day trip to Bangkok and on to Kanbanachuri to visit the line of the Thailand Burma Railway, the Death Railway, constructed by the Japanese with POW and Asian slave labour during World War II. This will form a separate diary entry at a later stage