Back from Thailand, getting ready for my honeymoon

  Samui, Thailand
Monday, March 10, 2008

I've been back in London for almost a week now. The 2 weeks in Thailand passed by so quickly. Jim and I were busy with wedding preps in Koh Samui. It's not that there was loads to do, it's just that it's Thai time so it takes longer to do get things done. Koh Samui airport is so nice. The toilets are spa-like. People in Samui are really nice and it seemed so safe there.

We stayed at Secret Garden on Big Buddha beach for the first 2 nights before moving to our villa a little further along the beach.

Our villa on Big Buddha beach

John, the owner on Secret Garden was really helpful. Our villa was huge and a great place for friends to hang out at. Anantara was beautiful, I wish we'd had more free time to make use of the facilities.

Our wedding was amazing. Better than I could've hoped for. The ceremony was slightly confusing for us and our guests. I wanted to have a Buddhist ceremony but it would've been good to have a bit more explanation about what was happening. The ceremony however was very peaceful and meaningful.

Monks chanting

The chants of the monks were extremely powerful. I went into a trance-like state. I felt sorry for Jim who was sweating in the heat. The ceremony continued with the monks bonding us with pieces of ropes and then blessing us. Afterwards, it was the turn of our guests to bless us by pouring water over our hands. PHOTO_ID_R=water-blessing-ceremony.jpg]Jim's dad almost poured it over my head. Our family then tied blessed pieces of string around our wrists.

Problems with the ring

We moved to the beach for photos and of course the most important part of the day - food!! It was so scrumptious. Has to be the best Thai food I've ever eaten before. There were so many different flavours, I wish I'd eaten more. We had a couple of surprises up our sleeves for our guests - the first one being the fire dancers.

Fire dancers

They were great to watch. We also had some female Fiji dancers to add to the performance. The second surprise was having 40 love lanterns. They looked so beautiful as they floated off into the sky. I said to Jim "this is a wicked wedding, the best I've ever been to". We could see that everyone was enjoying themselves.

Up up and away

After the love lanterns we moved to the ballroom to continue the party. Most people were dancing to the band and then Jim's dad John did a line-dancing lesson. Everyone loved it, Great success! Unfortunately, the party had to end at midnight so we invited people back to our villa. As soon as we sat down in our honeymoon suite, we just felt too tired to go to the villa and party. At least our friends had a good time partying at the villa.

Eventually everyone had left Samui after a few more days so we headed to Koh Tao and found my friend Gabbie in a classroom a bit stressed out. She had just completed her final test for her PADI open water divers course. She wasn't enjoying it. Jim and I enrolled onto the Nitrox course. Not too much studying to do luckily. The weather was awful, raining heavily for our first 2 days there. Luckily, the weather was nice on the day we did our diving. For our first dive we went down to 30 metres and saw a reef shark, yeh! The coral around Koh Tao however, was spoilt. Not the best place to dive but the atmosphere on the island was great. It was just so chilled out there. When we headed back to Samui, it felt like going home. We went back to Secret Garden for a couple of nights. It seemed so quiet without our friends around.

Outside Asia divers in Koh Tao