Bikini donned, belly sucked in, I reconvened with The Parents on the beach. We settled ourselves on some sunloungers on a raised wooden platform (to keep that pesky sand away presumably!)and ensured that book, ipod, water and suncream were easily reachable so that movement from said sunloungers could be kept to a minimum. Well, The Mother and I did so anyway. The Father can sit still for approximately five minutes before he gets bored and looks around for something to do. The Husband is the same; it must be a male thing. He was quite content to sit still for a while however, as we were unexpectedly entertained for the first 20 minutes or so by a performance group known to us as Le Vimarn Staff. They had obviously decided that 10am, when many people were already on the beach, was the best time to deliver the aforementioned wooden platforms to their allocated spots. Of course, they had to move the sunloungers that were in those spots out of the way before placing the platforms down and moving the sunloungers onto them which, as you can imagine on a full beach, caused mayhem.
The couple next to us came back from a swim to find their sunloungers in the bushes as five men (three watching and two actually doing the work, as is usual in Thailand)scuttled around, trying to work out the best way to get the platforms off the tractor used to transport them onto the beach. At least they were actually away when the men moved their beds and belongings out of the way. Guests further down weren't so lucky. They were asked to get up and move away when the platform construction team moved in. The whole fiasco wasn't helped by the fact that they spent about five minutes each time scratching their heads and trying to work out the best way to get the platforms off the tractor, which angle at which to put them down on the sand, and then how to get the sunloungers onto the platforms. Safe on our platform (there when we arrived), we thoroughly enjoyed the show.
The rest of the day was spent reading, sunbathing, swimming and snorkelling. Previously too terrified to do so, I cleared a hurdle by snorkelling on my own for the first time, something of which I am very proud. I was startled a few times by some thin pointy fish swimming near the surface that, from the corner of my eye, looked distinctly like sharks but, other than that I was perfectly fine and discovered I actually preferred going out on my own. For one, it feels like more of an adventure, like you're discovering a whole unchartered underwater world for the first time (yes, I knew that I had only swum a few minutes out from the resort beach and many guests would have done the same but it felt unchartered to me!). It also meant that I wasn't in danger of being kicked in the face by the flippers of the person I had gone out with as I followed them meekly round the coral. The snorkelling was good, very good as a site that you could swim to from the beach. The resort had the best of both worlds really. A large sandy-bottomed area of calm sea to swim in without worrying that you are about to step on a giant sea urchin, and a few metres out, a large area of coral teeming with fish.
The afternoon concluded with a prematurely halted game of beach tennis. The Father, after having sat down for at least ten minutes, had been pestering the Mother and I to play with him and I finally relented. Unfortunately, not two minutes into the game, my ankles started to itch. Then my arms. Then the tops of my thighs. Sandflies. As soon as the sun started to lower in the sky, the sandflies came out in their droves. Of course, they only seemed to attack me; The Parents were completely unaffected, which meant that The Father was even more disappointed when I announced that we had to stop and go in. He said that it reminded him of the time when, as a child, after spending hours trying, he at last convinced his parents and all of his four siblings to play French cricket. His youngest brother was then promptly sick and the game was over before it began. At least we managed a few hits before retiring to our rooms.
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