A day of high jinks and celebration

After our usual panic to get to breakfast in time, we headed over the road and onto the beach for some high flying adventure. We’d spent the last few days watching the professionalism of the Para gliders and they seemed to be doing a reasonable job. They send a driver up with the passenger, this dude breaks all the OH&S ever written and basically jumps on at the beginning (no harness or safteyline), pulls the strings correctly to get it airborne, then swings up and sits among the strings while the flight goes on and then helps guide the whole show to a gentle landing, which is required when the tides in as there is not a lot of room on the crowded beach in the situations. The tide was out for us however and the beach was mostly empty . And so we went. Isabel up, Isabel down, Louisa up, Louisa down, Rosemary harnessed, Rosemary can’t breathe, so Neil goes up, Neil comes down and there’s a hitch – one of the dudes helping was not looking and they almost landed on his head, not sure what exactly happened but the result was he ended up being dumped onto the beach unceremoniously, being dragged along on his knees by the parachute until they managed to bring the thing to halt. It was rather poignant that the song playing in the background was Flo-Rida (Get low) and he did indeed “hit the floor” and was indeed “low,low,low,low,low,low,low”. Luckily for them the only result was two scraped knees, a wounded pride (although in true style he jumped right up said he wasn’t hurt and walked off into the ocean to wash off) and no law suit. Rosemary flew without hitch after all of that and we were all very exhilarated after the adventure.
Afterwards we all headed off for massages, manicures, pedicures and hair braids – well O.K. not all of us got all of those things. Splashing around in the pool combined with a few shopping walks in order to tidy things up was the order of the afternoon before we got ready for dinner. Experiencing the change of the guard Phuket style (they have police watching the lifts), we then had a big surprise as a birthday cake was delivered to the door with Rosemary’s name on it. Someone let the cat out of the bag and it was a jolly good thing they did too, because none of us had thought to do so.
So we had dinner and have started to pack for the long trek home, this involves a 10 hour transit stay in Singapore – therefore we have no idea whether this will be the 2nd or 3rd last blog of the journey.