Queen's Cup, Samui Golf Tournament, 16th-19th June, 2011

Queen's Cup, Samui Golf Tournament, 16th-19th June, 2011

Later this week, for the second conseuctive year in a row, the Queen's Cup Golf tournament will visit Koh Samui between 16th and 19th June at the Santiburi Samui Country Club, part of the Santiburi hotel.

Due to Bangkok Airways’ success in organizing Bangkok Airways Open – Asian Tour for 4 years consecutively, The Sports Authority of Thailand decided to cooperate with Bangkok Airways to organize Queen’s Cup Samui Golf Tournament- Asian Tour for the first time on Koh Samui in August 2009.

Continuing from last year’s successful debut, Queen’s Cup Samui Golf Tournament – Asian Tour makes it return for a second consecutive year in June 16-19 , 2011 at the Santiburi Samui Country Club. The total prize is valued at $300,000 USD.

The Asian Tour offers 30 tournaments with total prize money worth over $37 million USD. As the official sanctioning body for professional golf in Asia, the Asian Tour leads the development of golf across the region, enhancing the careers of its members while maintaining a commitment to the integrity of the game. The Asian Tour, through its membership of the International Federation of PGA Tours, is the only recognized pan-Asian professional golf tour in Asia. This unique feature positions the Asian Tour at the pinnacle of professional golf in Asia; providing its events with Official World Ranking status.

Bangkok Airways in cooperation with the Sport Authority to Thailand invites you to witness your favourite golf pros swing out on Samui at the;

QUEEN'S CUP BANGKOK AIRWAYS-SAT SAMUI GOLF TOURNAMENT 2011 for a prize of US$300,000.

If golf is your thing, you might to make your way over to the Maenam hills this week.

Camille

Djeh Mui Restaurant, Maenam

Djeh Mui Restaurant, Maenam

This restaurant is located in Maenam, facing the Police station, directly at your right hand, down a little sandy soi. It's been around for as long as I'm on Samui, which is around 12 years or more and although the place is upgraded a little bit, it still has the authentic atmosphere as it had 12 years ago when I visited for the first time, the long (shaky) bamboo tables with the small chairs.

Djeh Mui means something like Khun Mui, in Chinese though. Djeh is similar to Pee or elderly. Funnily enough Mui is not from Samui but from the mainland. Her place is mainly known for excellent Khanom Jeen, Kwetiao and pork leg on rice or Kao Kaa Muu plus various Thai desserts.

The front of her place, as seen from the main ring road

The kitchen inside with some big pots on the stove!

The interior, very basic but always busy around lunchtime, they close early, around 3 or 4 pm

Khanom jeen with assorted vegetables, an impressive sight

The Kwetiao, noodle soup with chicken, great taste!

The standard Kao Kaa Muu or pork leg over rice in, a simple but delicious meal at Djeh Mui

One of the Thai desserts, Khanom waan Teng Thai or Thai Melon in a coconut soup

The 'Khanom waan' or Thai dessert display

They also serve a couple of fairly unusual and hard to find drinks like the one above, Naam Kra Dchiap, a sweet drink made form flowers and good for your intestines. We also had a Naam Rakam which had a yellow color and tasted a little bit more sourish and was very refreshing!

With four people we had a whole bunch of dishes, desserts and drinks for way under 400,-THB, well worth your lunch time! This is some very authentic Thai food but not necessarily spicy at all, be careful with the Khanom Jeen sauces/curries though.

Camille

Situation on Samui worsening, airport closed

Situation on Samui worsening, airport closed

The rain has been relentless today and by 4pm the airport was officially closed, this is on BKK Airways Facebook page, funnily enough nothing is listed on their website;

All flights to/from Samui are cancelled due to bad weather. Passengers can contact 02 270 6699, 1771 or 077 422 512-9 (Samui Office) for rebooking the flight. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Lines of people at Samui airport today

Samui airport today

Maenam area today

Chaweng today

The situation on Koh Phangan is not that great, see picture above and on Koh Tao long term residents report about flooding as worse as they have ever seen and they're slowly running out of food and drinking water.

The worst for Samui is still coming with a predicted 260mm of rain tomorrow. Wind Guru is predicting more rain tomorrow with a lot less wind but by Thursday things should have calmed down again.

If you find my blog and updates useful, don't feel embarrassed by donating some beer money! Plenty of buttons do the trick here and if you want to book your hotels on Samui or in Thailand, please use the links provided. It all helps to keep this blog going!

Camille

Some video's of Samui's March 2011 flooding

Some video's of Samui's March 2011 flooding

Have a look of some of these video's, apparently at some areas on Samui the flooding are worse compared to November 2010.

This is in Lamai

This is also in Lamai

This is between Maenam and Bang Po

The airport is currently still open but there are delays.

If you find my blog and updates useful, don't feel embarrassed by donating some beer money! Plenty of buttons do the trick here and if you want to book your hotels on Samui or in Thailand, please use the links provided. It all helps to keep this blog going!

Camille

Samui style car parking!

Samui style car parking!

Driving around the island this week, I noticed some strange parking style habits amongst my fellow islanders.

The first one that got my attention was this car whose driver managed to wrap his car around an electricity pole 10 meters after a sharp, 90 degree angled curve in Plai Laem, not too far away from where I live. Now in itself that is not so hard to do, but to manage this within 10 meters of said curve is a rather astonishing feat.

This picture shows the angle of the wrap around.

This picture gives you an idea about the power that the pole had to deal with.

An overall idea how the car is positioned. It's pretty interesting to try to figure out how this happened. If this is your car, don't be shy, you can post anonymous and let us know how you managed to accomplish this!

A couple of days later, to be more accurately, today, I'm driving around Samui and I see this car parked in-between the Maenam post office wall and an electricity pole. What is it with electricity pole's this week?

As you can see in the picture, he missed a big, red letter post box and a telephone booth and he skidded across the road to park his car against traffic direction. Pretty astonishing!

It was a bit of a tight fir as this picture shows. Amazing talent out here on the road, but don't have yourself fooled, safety is not always an issue here!

The first car pictured here was moved away after a couple of days, this second car was moved later in the day, when I passed by again, I just know that the car wasn't there yesterday!

Safe travels.

Camille

Protest demo against oil drilling in the Gulf of Thailand

Protest demo against oil drilling in the Gulf of Thailand

As already reported earlier this week with a text message and a photo post, today was the big day for the demonstration around Samui's ring road.

Due to various reasons I couldn't have a loom until shortly after 10am, the demo being scheduled to be held between 10am and noon. I only covered a short distance, between Tesco Lotus in Chaweng and the post office in Maenam.

Some places were really crowded, especially in front of hotels or resorts but in-between there were plenty of long and empty stretches. The kids in the picture above even had custom made t-shirts!

It was nice to see many people involved though and being rather enthusiastic, both Thai and Western. Above shows school kids from the Bophud government school.

It seemed to be well organised and cars with loud speakers were making the rounds, keeping everyone involved. There were also thousands of little flags distributed in two languages (Thai and English) asking to stop the drilling.

All in all it seemed to be a rather successful event with many participants, which is always good to see. Although my expectations of being able to stop the drill are not that positive, this was a well organised event.

Camille

Island life

Island life

A day in the life of an islander it almost seems like in this post. This morning I was well on my way to Nathon to visit the local Immigration office to pick up the stamp for my yearly visa extension when we firstly encountered a massive black smoke plume over Maenam, similar to the one there was a bit over a year ago when a car crashed into the 7-11 in Bang Rak.

This time a fire was raging next to or almost in/on a new construction site next to the Maenam river and all the construction junk and wood was ablaze in a massive fire, blackening the whole side of the construction site/building. Interestingly enough, immediately next to the fire was this row of machines which didn't look like they would take a fire on their paint too well, so after a quick picture or two it was time to move on to Nathon again.

Once we arrived in Nathon and were about to drop off passenger in our car who was taking the ferry to the mainland, all the cars that paraded over the island since the end of Buddhist Lent day were gathered in Nathon to select a winner for the year. We didn't wait around for the final result since we had plenty to do but funnily enough the girl in the right bottom corner of this picture managed to pull off a typical Thai thing; posing in a picture. She saw me with the camera and in a kind of Pavlovian reflex she immediately went into posing mode and had a giggle about it when she figured that she had managed ending up posing on this Farang's picture. I've never seen the girl before!Nice car though, isn't it?

More action around the Seatran pier in Nathon for the car parade.

We planned to visit an eye doctor in Nathon for my wife but couldn't do this in the morning because there was no parking space available, all was taken up by visitors to the parade so we decided to come back in the afternoon after I found out that I went to immigration without my passport (a fine D'oh moment) only to find out that they were closed/had a break for another hour when we showed up in the afternoon again. A third visit to Nathon for the eye doctor is in the making! Stay glued to this blog for updates.

We also had the 30.000km check by Ford taken care of for our car after we left Nathon in the morning.

In between trips to Nathon we also visited the brand new Tesco Lotus branch in Lamai and had lunch in our favorite Kao Man Gai place which is now directly located next to entrance to Tesco Lotus in Lamai.

A typical day in the life of an islander? Well maybe, at least we got some things sorted and taken care of, slowly but surely, in a nice slow way being not very efficient. yeah, that sounds like island life ;-)

Camille

The Ghost Road construction has been completed

The Ghost Road construction has been completed

The Ghost Road, or locally known as Thanon Pee, is a short cut between Bang Rak and Chaweng. The road was in a very bad state however and at some point, turned out to be one of the most dangerous roads on the island, with broken concrete in many places and where sometimes iron rods were sticking out and literally shish kebab-ing motorbike drivers. On top of that there were massive sand 'hills' on the road which you had to take on. All in all, not a very nice road to travel.

A lot of damage was done by overloaded trucks who sped down the narrow road to save time and distance using the road as a shortcut.



Now after almost a year of construction, believe it or not, the road is completed and looks great, no bumps, no sand hills to climb and no holes in the ground or cracked concrete. There's even a sewer installed and during some very recent hard tropical rains, there was no flash flooding along the Ghost Road!

The only minor little hick up I saw, is that towards the junction, halfway down the road, some of the electricity poles were in the way of the new, wider, road. Rather than moving the poles back half a meter, the road was just constructed around the poles. Not as bad as in this picture, in Maenam but the effect of widening the road is lost in this little section of the road.

Since I used this road a lot, I'm very happy that it's construction is completed and I just hope that the road will last for a while!

Camille

Temple fair in Maenam

Today we went to the Temple fair in Maenam.

Just to give you an idea on what to expect on an average temple fair or party, here's some pictures.



Since we're in Thailand, remember, food is never far away. Here is a display of some extremely sweet sweets. Furthermore there are various Thai junk food variations available, like the squid in the picture below.

Lovely squid though, filled with squid eggs! Besides this, there are various fruit stands and small restaurants with a variety of meals to choose from around during a temple fair.

Thais like to gamble and play games, this is a classic, at least 3 or 4 different throw the darts at the balloon places where at this fair, complemented by various places where you can put bets on numbers, like in what number will the ball roll.

There are dozens of places like this, where you can buy cheap clothes, in various styles, male but mostly female (what's new, shopping wise!). Also all kind of add ons like jewelry are on sale.

A classic on each fair, a place where you can get house hold goods. This one was about three or four times the size of what is shown in the picture and they sell loads of things for the house hold. Plastic buckets, pots and pans, matches, lamps, hammers, you name it, they most likely have it!

If you know of a Temple fair to be held somewhere near you during your stay in Thailand, definitely try to go and check it out. It's lots of fun and later on during the night, they also have established or lesser established bands and/or musicians perform at various stages. An interesting experience that shouldn't be missed and it makes for great photo opportunities as well!

Camille

Feeding time on Samui

For the restaurant lovers on Samui,

There hasn't been a review of restaurants for a while now, this doesn't mean however that we don't go out to eat anymore! Not at all! We just haven't visited any new places but there are plenty of old faves that I can highly recommend.

For starters, Aux Amis who have relocated to Bophud, don't forget their Mussels day on Tuesdays or how about Il Molino for some good Italian lunch or rather, the best Italian lunch on the island. Angela's bakery in Maenam remains high on the fave list for breakfast and lunches.

Today we had lunch at Dcheed 2 in Chaweng on the ring road, man, are those sateys tasty!

Or how about lunch or dinner at Gai's in Maenam, an old fave that stills rocks my boat!

If in Lamai, we always visit this Kao man gai place, make sure not to miss it.

Last but not least, our almost neighbours; Clok Lana for some awesome Isaarn food.

As you can see, we're still eating out, these are some of the places we've recently been to and had good food, over and over again!

Hope you can find the restaurants, they're worth it. Some are very authentic and not to be found in any tourist guide. It's appreciated that if you do find them to let me know if you liked them.
Please post on the blog.

Camille

Chinese Temple, Maenam

The Chinese Temple in Maenam

Makes for a different Temple experience. It's a small but beautiful temple close to the beach in Maenam. At the traffic lights in Maenam, at 7-11, go down to the beach and when you're almost at the end of the road, there's a right turn, that leads you to this Chinese Temple, located at the next corner.





A frontal view of the Temple with clear differences compared to the Thai Temples.

There are many Chinese on Samui and most originate from the island of Hainan and brought their Chinese religion along with them.

Inside; the rich and colourful main altar of the temple.

Upon entering, on your left hand in the corner close to the street, there is this small table with some old black and white pictures on it. This is the stuff I really love to see and discover, a peek into the old Samui.

Inside the Temple, a sample of the intricate and colourful artwork the Temple can boost.

Outside the Temple again, across the road, where this small statue is located, which meaning I still need to find out.

On a tour around the island, this would be a nice and convenient quick stop just to experience a different kind of Temple. It's located very near to the beach and there are few places on the beach where it's nice to sit down, relax and have a drink.

What is a better way to finish this Chinese Temple blog entry with a link to the Students for a free Tibet blog.

Camille

Sunny day, dream away..............

Sunny day, dream away..............


.................At this nice beach in Maenam.

Just to show how beautiful the weather has turned the last few days, getting ready for the April heat!

Maenam beach with a bit of Koh Phangan in the background.

Maenam beach, lazing away under a palm tree.

Phuket is also going into a hot spell, see Jamie's Phuket weather blog for more news.

Angela's Bakery, Maenam

Angela's Bakery is by far my favourite Bakery on Samui.

When they opened, a bit more than 7 years ago, I used to live almost behind the bakery and next to Angela, the owner. I'm just a tad little bit longer on the island than when Angela opened her doors for the first time and she's still up and running and I'm still enjoying eating there.



Now I live a bit further away from Maenam, so I don't visit that often anymore, as I used to do, but it's still a fave stop whenever I'm around. The bakery is located at the ring road, at the very beginning of Maenam, a little bit further down from the Police station, if you're coming from Bophud, at the opposite side of the road.

It's definitely not a plastic table and chairs establishment, in contrast, the way they decorated the restaurant is very cosy and gives you a 'home' feeling.

Besides a very nice menu, with plenty of choices in Western and Thai food, with great salads, sandwiches and German and English dishes, one of Angela's teasers are her cakes! In the cooler in the background on the left, one can find amazing Apple pie's, triple chocolate cheesecakes, Tiramisu's and much more.

One of my fave dishes at Angela's is the Creamy Chicken Hash, as pictured above. A nice full plate of Chicken hash!

Angela's Club Sandwich is one of the best Club Sandwiches available in Thailand, in my opinion. Nicely done with fried chicken and plenty of other ingredients. All freshly made.

She also make birthday cakes and for more info on this, please call 077 427 396 and she makes fantastic wholewheat breads.

It's only open till 6 pm, which makes it a perfect place for breakfast and lunch. Another one I can highly recommend.

Camille