Dolphin Bay is beautiful. Just a single palm fringed road runs right around the bay and out in the water limestone islands. The bay is lined for about a mile with mostly family run eateries that serve you on the beach under palm and pine trees.

One such is owned by "Jimmy The Egg" A brit who's settled here after a life time as an adrenaline junky and painter decorator!. Now he owns the searchlight bar and restaurant as well as "not just the biggest free range eggs farm in Thailand, but in all of Asia!"

Jimmy regularly delivers industrial quantities of eggs to Bangkok where we had often seen vendors with huge piles of eggs. We'd assumed they were hard boiled but Jimmy suggests that barbecued is the thai favourite.

"How do they cook them?" Asks kim.

"Low and slow" replies Jimmy.

"What in the shells?" Asks my favourite blonde!

Tonight it's 50% off all wines in the Dek Dek Bar. Have dug two graves!

Having been to Thailand a fair few times we're well aware that you're rarely more than 200 meters from a laundry service. Mrs Leung has a laundry service shop and "Smutty and Coffee" outlet. I tried to get just Smutty but apparently you have to have the coffee as well.

Mrs Leung is roughly the same size, colour, weight and textutre of an monkey nut and appears to be around 200 yeras old. Mrs Leung charges 50 baht (90p)to launder 1KG of washing. Looking at her, Mrs Leung would ciost approximately 150 baht to launder, boots,socks,vest and all.

Mrs Leung has a bench behind the counter of her Coffee and Smutty outlet upon which she sleeps throughout the heat of the day. We need to wake her to weigh our laundry and to retrieve it, washed, ironed, buttoned and folded as new.

Mrs Leung has laundered pretty much all we have with us (4KG) for 200 baht (4 quid) roughly the equivalent of what our hotel would have charged for 2 pairs of undies and 2 pairs of socks.

The food is cooked in a kitchen across a single track road and the kids bring it over and serve it to you under pines and palm trees with your feet in the sand. We have 2 large beers, 2 small beers, Basil fried beef, sweet chilli chicken, stir fried vegetables and 2 loads of steamed rice topped off with 2 large gin and tonics. 650 baht.......around 12 quid.

The entry to the bay is be-jeweled with Squid boats showing neon green lights to attract the creatures onto the hooks. Tonite one of the squid boats is beached on the shore while the crew try to repair something or other....

Today we took off to Kuiburi National Park. It has one of the largest populations of wild elephant in Thailand. The trip to the park is spectacular. All emerald jungle and mirror like shrimp farm lakes which reflect the surrounding mountains and snow white egrets which flock for free prawn cocktails.

Once at the park we're taken to the ranger station to meet our guide. A diminuitive 17 yera old thai girl intoduces herself.

"Miew" she says her name is.....When she says it, it sounds like a pissed off kitten waiting to be let in the front door on a frosty morning....."Miew"

We introduce ourselves as "Kim, John,"..... Un adds Kim..........."Ohhh!" chuckles Miew, hand before her mouth, "I can't forget that"....within 30 seconds she has, we all look alike to her.

Miew takes us to look at a map so that we can understand our route through the trackless jungle. The map has a huge 300 square mile blob of jungle, a brown line runs from a "you are here" note, to somewhere in the jungle. "We go up this track and then come back" clarifies Miew. We feel safer and more secure in the knowledge.

They probably only let us see the map so that we won't be eating the guide and drinking our own urine within 10 minutes of getting a flat tyre. To be on the safe side I appraise our fellow travellers, that driver should keep us going for a few days if the worst should come to the worst.

I instantly regret not paying more attention to that program on TV where a ghastly know it all strands a bunch of sociopaths on an island so we can watch them all starve to death. I know they're continually starting fires by scraping knives over stones. Problem is I have neither a knife nor can I see any stones. This means we may need to work fast and use the heat in the engine block to cook some thing / (one?) in the event of a catastrophe.

So it's the driver, broiled on the engine block.......

We clamber into a flat bed 4x4 and trundle into the jungle. A few miles in we come across a Guar.........I write "Guar" as if I knew, and indeed expect you to know what a Guar is. Turns out Guar is thai for f*cking great black buffalo. It munches a tussock unconcerned and fixes the 4x4's headlights with a "come on then if you think you're hard enough" glare....we don't and drive on.

Oliphaunts

The truck rumbles on under the canopy of the jungle, it's pressure cooker hot and the air is filled with white butterflies. Eventually we arrive at a water hole and a pair of elephants come out of the trees into the water and submerge themselves, using their trunks as snorkels. Out the other side they treat themselves to a dust bath. It's such a thrill to see these beautiful wild creatures up close and they genuinely look happy.

We set off to another viewing point and the skies open, it rains like it can only rain out here.

"It is velly much laining" trills Miew.

A statement rendered somewhat redundant by the fact that water is lapping around our shins. When it rains here it's like standing under a pump!I In seconds we resemble the contents of Mrs Leungs washer during the "soak cycle" . Indeed it lains and lains and lains. With only two umbrellas between Miew, Kim and Myself we are soon so soaked as to not make it worth worrying about any longer.

Miew has spotted an herd of Guar..... in the distance. "You get out and come see," she shrills.

"Is there a single bloody thing we will learn about a guar by getting out of the truck that we can't learn from staying in it" asks Kim through the thunderous down pour. The only thing that isn't soaked is 5 inches of seat we're sitting on and we didn't want to give it up.

"Get out come see" chirrups Miew.

The driver is safe ......Miew definately gets it first if the road is washed out. Young as she is she won't take much cooking.....

"I didn't know we were only 40k from the nearest Tesco Lotus Express". I rehearse, for the inevitable court case when found gnawing a half cooked shin bone afer being stranded for 25 minutes.

There's excitment on the strip along the beach. It appears that a road crew is setting up a PA of roughly the same dimensions as used by Led Zeppelin at Knebworth......... on the beach.

200 meters up the road on the landward side The Who seem to be setting up to play woodstock.

At 6:30 it all kicks off. Kareoke at ear splitting volumes. The thing about kareoke here is that the enjoyment is purely the "singers" I put "singer" in " exclamations" because Squawker would be more accurate.