August 29, 2024
This house we rented, it is a special place, a quiet place far from the chaos and noise of the city. There are only a few other houses around inhabited by reserved and discrete people. You rarely hear a car, a voice, or a lawn mower, just birds, including peacocks, some rain, and trees frolicking in the breeze. Yet, we’re just up road #4, a 15 minutes drive from Hua Hin and a 10 minutes drive from the nearest beach — Sinoi beach.
The original owners, who sold the house to our landlords, did a wonderful job remodeling and furnishing the place (the deco is a bit too “Thaish” but can live with it). It is surrounded by greenery; plants and trees which are part of the patio encircling the property, and others that belong to the forest that extends on the north side. Upon entering the house there is an open space with the dining room and the kitchen. To the right side, sliding doors open into a TV room which can also have the function of a living room. There are three bedrooms, two guest bedrooms to the left of the open space and the master bedroom next to the TV room. The TV/living room and the master bedrooms have large folding doors with glass that give access to an outside corridor surrounding the east and north sides of the house, and a baranda with views of the mountains and a fraction of the sea. It has become the place where we have drinks at the end of the day. The south side of the corridor also connects to a small swimming pool mainly used by Woland to cool down after a morning walk. I talk about “guest” rooms, but most of the time it will be either Natalia’s mother or my father, plus the girls. In fact, one bedroom will be Sofia’s in the near future. She is enrolled in an on-line school for 9th grade and will be coming to live with us in early November.
Natalia “moved here” on August 1st and I joined when I came back from Cameroon on August 10th; I came directly from the airport and haven’t been back to Bangkok since. We can’t move to Hua Hin permanently because Natalia has to be at her office in BKK 4 days a week. But she also gets one Friday off every other week so we plan to commute: Monday to Thursday in BKK together, Friday to Monday in HH together, she goes back to BKK on Tuesday and comes back on Friday, I join her again on Monday until Thursday. Well, that is when both of us are in Thailand.
Years back I was doing some work on Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). It’s like measuring life expectancy but taking into account the burden of disease; one QALY is equal to one year of life in perfect health, including mental health. I speculate that living here increases our QALYs relative to what they would be in BKK, specially for Woland. Early in the morning with go either for a walk/run at the beach or a hike on the trails nearby. We work until noon, Natalia in the dining room, I in the master bedroom which has a large wooden desk and a couch where Woland keeps me company — in BKK Natalia has the office space and I work from the living room, the kitchen, or the bar. After, we take Woland to play ball, to the beach if we didn’t go in the morning or just outside the house if he already had time by the sea. Back at the house I workout and then work until around 18:00 when we have drinks at the baranda. Dinner follows, either in-house or outside, some times with riends; our social live here is more osé than in BKK, maybe because it is easier to get around and meet people. The weekends are beach and reading days.
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BEHEMOTH is on the hard at Manzanillo Marina and Boat Yard. She was towed there late last week and will most likely stay until the end of next week. Alexander, the Blue Monster expert, is coordinating the repairs of the propeller, shaft, and couplings. I might also ask the yard to antifool BEHEMOTH’s bottom. In addition, Cesar the electrician needs to do some work on the battery charger/inverter that was malfunctioning. Otherwise, BEHEMOTH is ready to go.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I plan to travel to Cartagena at the end of September and sail to Panama with my son Juan David around October 4th.
Sailing to the Pacific 