We got a few hours of bright sunshine at last. Perfect for laps in the pool and beach walking. But necessity also helped us discover that eating cheap crap is just as good, if not better than the fancy-schmancy pants places we've been going to so far.

But first, we decided to honour the sun more than our promise to visit our benefactors of our "grand prize" of yesterday. There was nothing they could offer that we really wanted anyway -- we already knew which prize option we were going to get: free holiday at their spa/resort. Yay. It wasn't easy to avoid the pair 'cos there's only one Chaweng Beach Road and anyone plying the streets could spot us easily from a mile away. We encountered them twice but after firmly telling them that we were not interested in their product, they finally left us alone.

Our grand lunch plan was to go find this awesome sushi place called Hagi. From our hotel, we walked right up to almost the end of the road (about 45mins walking time) and found ourselves at a magnificently posh-looking resort which we had to enter to find our restaurant. We found it all right, but discovered it only opened at dinner time! All that walking for nothing.

We took so long to get there, we were getting late for our afternoon appointment. So we settled on eating at "Exotic Thai Food" instead, a local kopi-tiam equivalent. The food quality was good, pineapple rice especially, but the prices blew us away -- a small fraction of what we had gotten used to paying. And a godsend too, as we're quickly depleting our financial resources anyway.

We rushed back to our hotel where June booked us for an aromatherapy spa package. Spent a glorious afternoon getting pampered with a soak in a hot tub, a body scrub and while June went mild, I opted for a medium pressure rubdown to ease my knotted back and neck. A masseuse with strong fingers, scented oils, orchids in my bathtub... I could get used to this sort of treatment. Yes.

After a short nap in our room while we waited for the rain to go away -- it started raining again while we were at the spa -- we went out looking for more cheap crap. Found the Khaosan, a restaurant/bakery nearby which we always kept walking past because it was always crowded. We were lucky to get a table so quickly and we had some lovely tom yum soup with a generous supply of prawns and straw mushrooms, and more prawns fried in garlic and pepper on rice. So much garlic... vampires aren't going to bother me tonight. And neither will June. Bah.

Well, it's been a short trip. Last night in Samui, then we're back home tomorrow. Then we'll start loading up our holiday snapshots, if you're interested.