Thai wine service

I slept late and by the time I finished writing it was time to meet Mike, Kokonutz and Uncle1K for lunch at Rundtårn. They had the best steak in town and we all ordered the filet topped with bacon. Mike had told us the local beef had improved remarkably in the past year so we ordered the Thai beef instead of the imported Australian cut that had previously been preferred. It was pretty good for 290 baht ($7) each including salad bar.

After lunch it was time to go to the beach. I showed Kokonutz and Uncle1K my deluxe suite at Sand Inn and we changed into our swimsuits and walked the block down Bang La Road to the beach. We selected four beach chairs near the swimming area and paid the steward 50 baht ($1) each for use of the chairs and parasols, which he set up. I ordered a bottle of water for 20 baht (50¢) and proceeded to relax until it was time to swim. Uncle1K watched our stuff while Mike, Koko and I tested the water. The temperature was perfect, as was the weather in the upper 80s. We splashed around for quite a while and then returned to our chairs.

We had to leave the beach around 4:30 so Koko and Uncle1K could make their flights back to Bangkok so we all walked down Bang La Road to the Sand Inn and changed. We gave them passionate belly hugs goodbye and then Mike and I walked back to the beach road to schedule a dive trip with Scuba Cat ( www.scubacat.com ), a good outfit that we had used many times before. As in the past, they had a live-aboard boat orbiting the Similans with transport back and forth every day so we could design our own trip. We decided to leave tomorrow and stay for two nights. I asked for the past-customer discount and they threw in the equipment rental, about a 10% savings. It ended up costing 14,900 baht ($355) each for the three-day, two-night, 11-dive trip. We paid with our FirstUSA Mileage Plus cards because they only have a 1% markup on foreign transactions and then walked back to Sand Inn and cleaned up and rested for dinner.

Mike had found a new restaurant, the Aloha Villa, just past Mr. Good’s on 200-Year Road. We stopped at the supermarket to pick up a bottle of wine and ended up getting both a bottle of red and a bottle of white French table wine. We paid for them, 330 baht ($8) each, and took them to Aloha Villa where we were greeted with smiles and sawasdees. We pointed to a lobster and some tiger prawns and ordered them up, the lobster Thermidor and the prawns barbecued. We were shown to a table and we pulled the bottles of wine out of their plastic sack. Waiters gathered around and talked amongst themselves. Finally one of them asked which we would like first, the red or the white. We said please open both of them. Mike explained in Thai that we would like the white wine put in an ice bucket, but not the red wine. They took both bottles away to the back of the room and we ordered some spring rolls as an appetizer.

The spring rolls came and were delicious. In a process that took fifteen minutes and at one point involved five staff members, they finally brought back the red wine in a basket and the white in an ice bucket—unopened. Then one waiter slowly and proudly brought out the corkscrew and reverently opened the various attachments to prepare for opening the white wine, which he did as I mumbled to Mike, “Bless this our holy hand grenade…” When he finally finished pulling the cork out, gently, millimeter by millimeter, then closed all the corkscrew attachments, Mike politely asked if he could take a look at the corkscrew. The waiter handed it to Mike, who grabbed the red wine and whipped out the corkscrew, attempting an end run. It was no good, though, because another waiter saw Mike trying to use the point of the screw to cut the foil and gently took the device away and used the correct implement, the hidden knife on the other end, to do it. He was on a roll so he pulled out the cork too and we finally had wine. The lobsters and prawns came out and were superb. We got the inexpensive check-bin and strolled over to the Rock Hard for a nightcap and show, but with a 6:30 pickup tomorrow morning we didn’t make a late night of it.


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