Seaman Anoreth Ping! In which the Seaman discovers that alcohol causes dehydration and that's No Fun.
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We are in Thailand again, but in a different and less ghetto town called Phuket. We anchored in the bay, far enough away from the pier that it takes the incredibly slow water taxi a good 30 minutes to travel the three miles from the ship to the dock.
I bought a switchblade in the mall. It's extremely cool. You can't even tell it's a knife until I open it. This is a nicer place than the last one. The water is clear enough that you can see 20 feet down. There are sharks (hammerheads mainly), and flying fish. Also there are a good many jellyfish, ranging from large numbers of a gigantic pink variety that is fairly harmless to man-o-wars and Australian Box jellyfish, which are the size of a ping-pong ball and can give you instant cardiac arrest if you get stung. And there are those striped sea snakes that Jeff Corwin is always going on about. I'm not going swimming here.
Also, last night on watch, I saw several enormous bats flying around. Those were cool. Nobody else thought so. It rains a lot here. There are stray cows wandering all over the streets, plus the usual dogs and rats and small kids. We went and got drunk the first night here, at a bar with a large metal statue of Predator at one entrance and another statue of Master Chief at the other door. I'm done getting drunk now, because I had a bad hangover afterwards and had to handle lines in full sun all day. Not fun. I'll wait on that until we go somewhere where there's a pier to tie up to.
Today (Monday/Tuesday) I'm going to get some sleep, but tomorrow I'm thinking about going around to some Buddhist temples. I hear they have architecture in them. There's one visible from the bridge ... it has a huge statue of Buddha on top of it, like Christ on the mountain. Should be interesting.