Christmas Eve

John loves to fish. That warm queasy feeling you get when you are sitting overheated, bored stiff, mosquito bit and sweaty in a creaky boat in the middle of some godforsaken watering hole is something he just lives for. I do not share his enthusiasm. This is part of the reason I had so many sons - I needed someone to fish with my husband.

Christmas Eve, we absolutely had to be back by 7. As part of our Island Experience on the First Resort, we had to commit to the Gala Dinner. This cost $385RM per person, 1/2 price for Andrew. It was an extravaganza we were not going to miss. But before that...well! We had all day! So John booked a fishing trip. Sadly, the price went up considerably with the 5th person, so I offered to stay back, lie in a hammock on the beach and read. They headed out in a rickety boat, and I settled in. Aaaahhhh.

They returned at noon. Fishermen get up early, and a 4-hour schtick is over in no time. They were famished, and so we decided to head out to the mainland and find a hawker stall where we could pay less than $200RM for lunch. When we arrived at the dock, we told the Resort Guy that we were looking for a nice little place to go, close by, where we could get some lunch and do a little souvenir shopping. He told the cabbie to take us to Kuah. We had no idea where this was, and were ill-equipped - as in no map - but we trusted the guy and piled in.

This cabbie had minimal understanding of English. As in not one word. He rocketed past the airport, spooled around a traffic circle, got on some freeway, and took off. We had no idea where he was going. We sat there for a little while - we had, after all, told an English speaking guy what we wanted to do. 10 minutes or so into the ride, John turned to me and said..."Where the hell are we going?" Naturally I had no idea. So we tried to ask our guy. We talked, he turned around, smiled, laughed, and said stuff like "Americans" and "Tomorrow" and "Kuah." We made him pull over and pull out a map. We pointed, he smiled ("Americans") and took off again. Finally John said something like "No pay!" and the guy screeched to a halt in front of a tacky shopping mall, charged us $36RM and left us for dead.

We went into the mall and had a crappy overpriced lunch. We strolled around a bit, determined to get our money's worth, and finally left empty handed. We hailed a cab back to the dock ($36RM) and arrived in time to watch the 5:30 boat leave...we had a half hour to wait. We sat in the bar and talked to a couple of Kiwis who had spent the last 10 years or so circling the globe in their yacht, knew everything about everything, had precious little affection for our president and were not loathe to point any of that stuff out. They were a riot. We were back in time for dinner...but the dinner is another blog post...

(The exchange rate is $3.35RM is $1.00US. Kiwis are New Zealanders...)