Graeme's travel journey

                                        Chicken and cashew nuts with vegetables and sauce                                                                    Barebecue fish If someone had told me three years ago that I would be spending half my time in Thailand I would have scoffed at the idea, but life has a way of changing, of steering you in a direction that you hadn’t foreseen. And this of course is the setting for my non-fiction book that I am now working on. I probably used the wrong word before in saying it was finished, what I should have said was that the first draft had been completed. On starting the proof reading and editing I found that I needed to weld the chapters together in a way that the reader could follow the story because I use interludes of other forays, other travelling destinations within Thailand, like Udon Thani and Kamala Beach. I suppose one could say it is written in a nonlinear sequence. Each chapter still demands that there be a connection.

I am currently sitting in my poolside room in Kamala Beach in Phuket with the air con on. The room is only costing me five hundred baht a night (twenty dollars Australian). Today it has reached thirty four with a high humidity that causes me to sweat no end. A swim in the ocean and another in the pool only soothes me for a short time. I have learnt the advantage of siesta time here, in other words rest up in the afternoon if it is too hot. The mornings and evenings are for moving around. It’s quiet here at the moment as it is the low season, but then I like it like this. I have caught up with a couple of fellow Tasmanians and enjoyed the local cuisine. Rice soup being one of my favourite meals, it is easy on the stomach and filling at the same time. I can buy it here for ninety baht (about three fifty Australian). Breakfast, eggs on toast, bacon and an orange juice cost me one hundred and ten baht ( a bit over four dollars). And the beer is usually eighty baht, sixty when it is