Here we are anchored at Nai Harn again! It's one of our favourite anchorages in Thailand, we love the people and the area but boy, was it a shock to come around that corner and all of a sudden see so many boats after over a week of being on our own. We thought that the crowds might have thinned out a bit as everyone sailed off through the Red Sea or off to explore the Similans and the Surins but it seems that people are still turning up. We had planned on stopping at Bang Tao on the way South as we had heard that they bring the elephants down to the shoreline in the afternoon and you can play around with them, take photos and sometimes even get a kiss from one! But the Makani Kai had other ideas, the autopilot decided to start playing up. With our departure date for the journey home creeping ever closer we decided that it was more important to get the autopilot fixed as soon as possible and so, continued on to Nai Harn where we organised a motorbike to go and drop it off to be fixed the next day.

I wasn't too disappointed, I love Nai Harn and there were plenty of things that we can do here. When we arrived we were a bit tired from having to hand steer for 6 hours and although we could hear something going on onshore we had a quiet night on the boat. The next day we took off to boat lagoon, we dropped a gas bottle off to be filled on the way and I can say that I am starting to feel like a local on the back of the motorbike. There we were, Jay riding and me on the back cradling the gas bottle on my lap, something that no doubt in Australia would be completely illegal and that there is no way I would do but here it just seems natural. Nearing boat lagoon we had our first near miss on the motorbike, a local guy zoomed past us with a Thai girl on the back of his bike, he had a truck to his right and ahead of him was another Thai guy on a motorbike who seemed to be in some sort of a daze, he was weaving lazily in the lane and seemed to be off with the fairies. As he went to pass the weaving guy he clipped him, knocking his bike out from under him. To his credit the guy off with fairies came to pretty quickly and landed on his feet, not worrying about his bike which was sliding across 3 lanes of traffic. Luckily Jay had seen what was about to happen and managed to swerve around the bike and the guy as he ran up the road chasing after the bike that had clipped him while yelling out to us to stop him. That would have been a heated conversation!

When we arrived back in Nai Harn after our day of running around we noticed that a heap of street stalls had been set up as well as a big stage for a band. We spent some time wandering around having a look at what was on offer, after speaking with one of the stall holders we found out that it was a festival to celebrate the completion of a new building within the temple there. At Nai Harn rather than masses of tourist accommodation everywhere a lot of the land is owned by the monks which is why it hasn't been built out. The temple at the back of the restaurants that line the beach is quite a large one and they had been constructing the celebrated building the last time we were here. The festival had been going on for a week and this was the last night. We bought a couple of things, Jay a couple of $3 t-shirts and me, some hand-made delicate looking wooden flowers, we watched them making them using paper thin pieces of wood. Returning to the boat we decided to relax for an hour or so and journey back in to experience the last night of the festival. When we got back in there were people everywhere! We ran into a couple of yachties we knew but the majority of the crowd was Thai. Lights hung from trees everywhere and the smells from the Thai version of a snack stall wafted through the air. We decided to try some of the delicacies for dinner avoiding the Thai favourites of deep fried cockroaches, grasshoppers and big fat grubs we settled instead for spring rolls, baby octopus on skewers straight off the barbeque and Thai fish cakes each accompanied by a spicy sauce. Jay topped off his meal by having a coconut ice cream where the Thai man cut a coconut in half, scooped the flesh from the sides and filled it with tiny scoops of ice cream.

The area in front of the stage was crowded, bands played popular music in Thai and comedians did their best to warm up the crowd, while monks off to the side in part of the temple blessed and spoke with people! At the front of the new building a thin rope was pulled up and down by volunteers from the temple laden with bank notes as people donated money. We wandered off through sideshow alley where you could throw darts at balloons to win prizes and off to another stall we had visited during the day, we picked up some mango wood vases that the lady running the stall discounted so that she wouldn't have to carry them back to Chiang Mai. We decided to leave the Thai's to their party and headed back to the boat, the celebrations continued on into the night complete with fireworks. The Thai's certainly know how to party.