Chatting about Cherating

East Coast Malaysian Peninsula is supposedly in monsoon season (or the wet part of the monsoon climate system, thank you Mr. Nagle), but Cherating has refused to comply, brazenly sporting blue skies and hot, hot sun. Cherating is a beachside town made popular by the first Club Med in Asia - which appears to have skipped town along with most of the tourists. There are a slew of beach bungalows and very few restaurants along the pristine stretch of sand we've been calling home for the last 3 days. Our days have been filled with beach strolls, swims in the South China Sea (words I never thought I would be writing), and sarong fort building on our porch to avoid the scorching late-afternoon sun.

We have also been spending a lot of time trying to avoid our friendly and talkative neighbor. His name is Joel (aka Joel the Creeper, Joel the guy with Aspergers, Joel the Conspiracy Theorist), he is about 60, from Massachusetts, and won't stop talking...about how the American navy is causing the 5 year drought in Australia; Ralph Nader is not an environmentalist because he condones native american whaling; while traveling in India, he carried and regularly used an electric stun gun to keep away beggars and generally get himself some much needed space (he went through 9 batteries in 3 months); Thai farmers should be shot to make enough room for the thai elephants to be freed from their slavery in the tourist industry and returned to the wild; every 6th grader should know how a nuclear bomb is put together; and finally, how he was sitting with this American girl in a bar in Bangkok and she was being heckled by this street seller guy (which is common enough) and she had just had enough so she whipped out a bottle of hairspray and a lighter, using them as a make shift flamethrower and LIT THE HECKLER ON FIRE. Most people where then looking at the man on fire, Joel reported, and they were able to skulk away.

We tried to do some horseback riding on the beach in honor of Kate's 26th Birthday (huzzah) but either the horses were sick or the instructors were too hungover - we don't speak Bahasa Malay. Instead, we played frisbee on the beach and immortalized our travels in snackfood diarama on our porch. Tomorrow we head to Kuala Terengannu for a night before a few days in the Perhentian Islands.