It has been a while since we posted anything here, which is mostly my fault, because I neglect to take pictures of things and also because we neglect to do anything interesting. Yesterday we tried to go to the zoo at the top of a department store but that was closed because it was a Buddhist holiday, so I can’t really say anything about that. We did go to Hong Kong, and I mostly forgot to take any pictures, except for this, of a beach on Lamma Island:

We were staying on a houseboat, but it’s hard to get good pictures of a houseboat if you’re on it, so that’s what happened. Obviously we could have gotten pictures of it from the little sampan that took us to it, but we didn’t remember that. Next time. We’re going back next month, I think?

And then Kim went off to Los Angeles to see a baby, and Harriet and I were left all alone, so we went to the beach. More particularly, we went to a place called Dolphin Bay, which is on the coast south of Hua Hin, about four hours from Bangkok. Dolphin Bay is a resort full of children mostly because it has a water slide, like so:

You can imagine. The children go up and down the slide all day. There are probably other things to do at Dolphin Bay but we mainly did that and Harriet is now reasonably good at going down water slides. There’s a beach, but we didn’t do very much swimming because the water was full of enormous jellyfish:

The jellyfish come in “clear” and “brown” varieties, of which this is the “clear,” bigger than the brown ones we saw in the water. I don’t know which if any of these are poisonous. If anyone wants to send us a field guide to jellyfish identification, maybe that would be useful? Probably there is an app for that. But even though they proudly declared the end of the rainy season last week, it has rained and rained this week, so we couldn’t have spent that much time on the beach even if the water hadn’t been full of jellyfish.

The other thing there is to do at Dolphin Bay is to take a boat and go to Monkey Island. “Monkey Island” is not a very Thai-sounding name, but does not tell me any better, so there you are. It’s the big seaward island to the southeast of Dolphin Bay. It is an island that is full of monkeys and does not seem to have any people. The local fishermen are happy to take you there. Our boat was dog-themed and showed the Thai flair for baroque wiring:

From a distance Monkey Island looks like this:

Forbidding! Then you get closer and it looks like this:

There is a beach that is full of monkeys:

Really full of monkeys:

The fishermen bring bags full of bananas and when the boat gets close you throw the bananas to the monkeys and the monkeys eat them. Inevitably there’s a lot of speculation about whether or not the monkeys can swim. Of course they can:

We were not eaten by that monkey: the fisherman threatened him with a monkey-stick and he jumped off the boat and swam back to shore. Then we went to another island, closer to shore, which didn’t seem to have a name, so I will call it Non-Monkey Island:

That name is not entirely correct, as this island seemed to be inhabited by precisely one monkey, who wondered if he might come on our boat:

No. This monkey seemed to have some kind of history with our fisherman: possibly he had been punished by being exiled from Monkey Island? It’s hard to say. Maybe he was a brave pioneer. One does wonder how the monkeys ended up on Monkey Island and (mostly) not on Non-Monkey Island; one wonders if the fishermen installed them there so that they might be able to ferry the tourists out to see them. Clearly what the monkeys should do is to go back to the mainland and invade Dolphin Bay which is full of food and also has a water slide. Go forth, brave monkeys:

More later, if anything ever happens to us.