The plan had long been to spend much of this winter in Australia (summer for them) for the hang gliding competition season. The question had been just how much time and when to actually show up. When Gay invited me to join her for a week in Thailand at the conclusion of her own vacation there with her daughter, the answer was found.
We met in Phuket on October 24rd, upon which I was whisked immediately into a waiting car, and driven around the Phang Nga Bay to Krabi. There we waded out to the boarding ladders of a long-tailed boat to be ferried to a small resort on Railay Bay West.
We spent the rest of that day and the next swimming and rock climbing (a first for Gay) and contemplating scuba and other plans for our other days there and elsewhere in Thailand.
On my second night in Thailand, however, I woke in a sweat and spend my remaining five days there fighting a fever, peaking a few times at 39.4C, seeing little else than the linens in my face and occasional blurry views of the ceilings.
So much for my philosophy of willing illness away. Gay, far more pragmatic, came equipped with a medical kit sufficient for anything short of minor surgery and lovingly took care of my useless slumping lump of a body for the rest of the trip.
We did manage a few days in the north in the city of Chiang Rai, but I saw little more than my pillow.
Still, of what I saw, it was beautiful.
