Ha Long Etc.

Halong Bay

Halong Bay is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with nearly 2000 limestone islets. I built my current itinerary around seeing Angkor Wat and staying overnight on Halong Bay, which necessitated seeing Viet Nam north to south, working back toward Cambodia.

It's been worth it - Halong Bay is beautiful and mystical.

Part of that is arguably undesirable. Viet Nam apparently has 300 hazy days per year. I haven't worn my sun-hat once. Views from the roads outside Hanoi were hazy, as though seen through a fine mist of light smog.

Halong Bay was worse. Every view was in shades of grey as though seen through the morning mist - all day long. Would have been nice to get some photos just showing the islets, rather than the atmospherics.

I was up to see the sunset and the following sunrise. However, neither was visible - the greyness just faded to black and then got bright again.

Still worthwhile and unforgettable, though.

The Economy

So Viet Nam is a communist state. Really??? Every city-centre house (at least in the old quarter of Hanoi) has a Money Face - the front room downstairs is turned into a shop and tended by the grandparents (no wage bill). I've seldom seen anywhere more driven by private enterprise!

Apparently, the big change was in 1986 which saw an end to collective farms. The land was distributed, with 360 square metres per person. So a family of five would get the best part of 2 hectares, which wouldn't need 5 to farm. The others turning to handicrafts.

Some colloquial names for food found in a field probably date back to before that time:
Flying prawn - Crickets
Paddy field chicken - Rat
Baby tiger - Pussy cat

Guide Giang isn't tall. She puts this down to a great lack of calcium in the diet of her whole generation. They all now take condensed milk in their coffee because that's what they were used to as children.

Houses

Houses in and around cities look like they're built on standard plots - maybe 3 to 5 metre frontage and 10 to 15m deep (e.g. 45M² as 3x15). Some occupy double plots. Apparently, tax is based on plot size, so there's an incentive to build high. Additionally, each plot is developed independently, by contrast with the UK where a street or block is filled with houses of one design, maybe mirror-imaged. Modern estates mix a half-dozen standard designs.

The effect is to make Vietnamese streets look like rows of broken teeth - all different heights and shapes. Sometimes an 5-metre wide 3- or 4-story house is the first built in a new street; looking weirdly thin in the middle of a field!

Death Rituals

Viet Nam is supposedly 85% Buddhist, but most are non-practicing leaving the likely figure at 15%. Buddhists believe in reincarnation, and so in the north of Viet Nam they bury their deceased for only around 3 years. After this time the body should have decomposed (chemicals can assist if not). The remains are exhumed and it is the job of the eldest son to clean the bones. The cleaner, the better the form upon reincarnation (potentially as an animal). The bones are then finally reburied in a different cemetery.

Hoi An

Da Nang, just up the coast, is a big port where a growing number of big hotels has been built over recent years, with the hope of turning the current rare tourist into a huge local industry.

Little Hoi An is by far preferrable. Ancient, small and picturesque - small enough to stroll round with great cafés and local market stalls.

It has flooded twice a year for a very long time and the locals take it in their stride. During the day before my arrival, the water dropped about 2.5 feet (based on the dark line and freshly-dated chalk mark added to the collection on the wall of the old merchant's house. I took off my shoes and waded through their back room to look out the back door; being warned about the invisible stairs down to the quayside.

I took a similar stroll today and the water has fallen another 4 feet, as guaged by the length of the brick legs on the old Covered Chinese Bridge.

I like Hoi An, and I haven't even seen the beach. Nevertheless, it's an early flight to Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon) tomorrow.

Viet Nam

Viet Nam is proving to be very interesting indeed, but that's true in large part to our local guide Giang ("Zang" but the language has no F, J, W or Z). She is pretty much the perfect guide, not only giving facts about places and history, but an excellent insight into social and cultural matters and issues facing her nation. This gives a much richer experience to us, and I'll relay selected highlights.

On the subject of names, Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language, so it's Viet Nam, Ha Noi, Ha Long, etc. Westerners don't have this constraint and so run names together. Apparently, Viet Nam has asked to be spelled that way in offical references by foreign governments; that might get ignored, or we might cope as with Beijing and Chennai.

Viet Nam = People of the South (w.r.t. China).
Ha Noi = (city in the) River Bend
Ha Long = Dragon Descending (and spitting out pearls that became the thousand-plus islands in the Bay)

The traffic in Ha Noi (Hanoi - seems worse than that in Cambodia. In both vehicles will:
a) drive down the wrong side of the road if that's their quickest route,
b) turn diagonally across the opposite carriageway and stop there until their exit is clear,
c) generate as many extra lanes as they fancy, including driving on the wrong side of the road whenever passing slower traffic.
All of that seems to work in Cambodia, because it feels like they're prepared to cut each other enough slack. It might be the same in rural Viet Nam. However, Hanoi has the big-city urgency thing, and people push on hard until maybe too late. Doesn't feel the same at all.

A striking thing is the "take" here on the Vietnam War (or the American War, as the locals call it, to distinguish from the French War). Viewpoints expressed (not necessarily contradictory) include:
Nobody won, because so many people died.
The Americans "won" because they achieved their objective of stopping the spread of communism - without the war there may have been up to 5 further communist countries.

My ignorant interpretation is that the North Vietnamese must have seen themselves as freedom fighters, having lifted the yoke of French colonial rule from half of their country. My visit to the "Hanoi Hilton" prison detailed the way that the French originally claimed to be bringing civilisation, but actually closed schools to suppress resistance and tortured and killed prisoners. The Americans would therefore simply be involved to continue imperialist occupation. That's not the way I've thought about it before.

Weigh Angkor

I like the Cambodian way of naming things. Tonle Sap apparently means Big River. Why would you want to call it anything different if that's unambiguous for you and everyone you care about?

In a similar way, Angkor Wat just means City Monastery (blame the local guide if that's wrong). It used to be surrounded by a city built of wood, but the Siamese army burned it down 8 or 9 centuries ago. At least twice.

The current name of the nearby city is called Siem Reap, which means Siamese Defeated. I suspect this name is later, because parts of Angkor Wat are blackened by the smoke of pre-Siem-Reap burning down.

The best bit for me was starting at 4:45am in the pitch black (my friends won't believe I said that), walking in with just enough light to see, arriving with a hint of purple in the sky and then photographing Angkor Wat for 45 minutes solid as the purples climbed to pinks and oranges and finally the burning orb of the new day stared over each higher tier of the building in turn, daring us to stare back at the irresistible new day.

Less (strictly) romantic was the fact that 350-500 other people were also trying to get into the exact spot that would yield the best photo, so cameras were held higher and higher to try to avoid getting each other in shot. Eventually I stopped shooting the temple and took aim at the thronging horde. If you get lemons....

Other temples followed - Angkor Wat is in a huge "park" area with many other temples. Next best was probably the "Tomb Raider" Jungle Temple. Fascinating and amazing to see tree roots tilting Walls and demolishing ceiling arches. I suppose it wasn't too busy - only a 15 minute wait for a gap in the stream of visitors each time one wants to photograph a scene instead of mainly the seers.

Wouldn't have missed it, though. A day to remember. And Vietnam tomorrow night, provided the letter of invitation successfully turns into a visa.

Phnom Penh

In Phnom Penh I was supposed to be joining an organised tour on Tuesday night, but landed on Monday night. Hence I had a day to do the things that weren't on Tuesday's itinerary.

After some soul-searching, I decided that I WOULD visit the Khymer Rouge "killing field" at Cheoung Ek, 15 km outside the city. I could describe it, but there are descriptions elsewhere. I haven't been to Auschwitz, but it must be very similar.

On Tuesday, the group visited the genocide museum - a former school that was turned into a prison, interrogation and torture centre. Of the nearly 20,000 people taken there, only 8 are known to have survived.

I think there are some terrible truths that one has to face as part of humanity, and trying to prevent the same happening again.

Lighter matters:

Phnom Penh has many aspects similar to Bangkok, but overall it seems far less prosperous, mostly less modern and grubbier - like an overgrown town compared to "world city" Bangkok.

For the remainder of Monday, I visited the Russian Market - a low, flat building with rows and rows of separately-owned stalls selling a huge range of things. I didn't buy any hand tools, car spares or electrical components. I did stop at one T-shirt stall where the owner accosted me in English and bought a few of my favourite type of souvenir.

I booked a massage and meant to go for a walk down the riverside after, but got so relaxed that I just chilled out until the tour group met for the first time over the evening meal, driven to and from a restaurant by Tuk-Tuk. There are 10 of us plus the guide, and all seem to be friendly and pleasant people

Tuesday began with a cyclo ride round the town, ending at the Royal Palace. The local guide gave us a potted history of Cambodia, concentrating on recent kings and French colonial rule. Then we walked around for what felt like ages and boarded a coach to the National Museum where another guide gave us yet more information than I need with my current level of freshness.

When the organised tour ends, 7 of us decide to hire a river boat. This proves a good decision, as we have a lovely time chatting together and see a floating fishing village and many shacks with backs propped over a steep river bank on long poles. It's amazing how differently some people live.

Wat Ho

As world culture gradually gets homogenised (religion aside), travel becomes more and more about ringing the changes - compare and contrast.

Lots of the experiences I've had over the last couple of days are quite similar to things I could have done in London, but FELT very different.

Public Transport
I used the Skytrain (BTS) a lot [Docklands Light Railway]. My hotel has turned out to be quite well located, at the interchange between the Asok Skytrain and Sukhumvit underground (MRT) [tube] stations. The hotel is a long way from the historic centre where nearly all the sights are, and neither BTS nor MTS go more than half-way there.

Congestion
Bangkok has London beaten here, it seems to me, with much worse traffic. It could be the Tuk-Tuks that enforce this impression, hundreds weaving in and out of other traffic, changing lanes incessantly.
In any case, it takes AGES to get anywhere by road - eventually a deterrent from going all the way into the historic area every day (but see below)

Sights (1)
The first place I went on the Skytrain was Victory Monument [Trafalgar Square if it had twice as many lanes of traffic round it, all full, and no way to get to the middle]. This is one of many places where a walkway sits below the Skytrain track but well above the roads, lifting people above the noise and fumes.

Places to Wander
After peering at market stalls round Victory Monument, I decided to stroll off down some random backstreets to see what serendipity would turn up. In this case it didn't, really. The canals on which Bangkok was once apparently built are now absolutely filthy and threatening to health, but strangely not very smelly.
I ended up under a long elevated motorway, where there were lots of stalls and eating places, all for locals.
This was moderately interesting but, after walking for ages I checked my map and found I was stuck the wrong side of a canal, veering away from anything I wanted to see.

Scams
I now fell for two in a row, but no hard feelings.
1) Below the motorway, I hailed a passing Tuk-Tuk and asked to be taken to the Emerald Buddha temple. He named a price - 200 Baht or £4. I agreed, as it wasn't going to break the bank, but wondered what it should have cost. I later heard that a Tuk-Tuk should cost 100B per hour, and it took about half an hour (a large part in traffic jams). I guess it should have cost 50B or £1, but it got me out of a hole so good luck to him.
2) As soon as I got to the temple, an official-looking chap said it was closed for prayers for the next 90 minutes but, as luck would have it, the Thai government had an incentive scheme going so a Tuk-Tuk driver would take me some places for 20B and bring me back after. First we went to see a big Buddha statue then we went to the "Thai Centre" that the government was backing. This turned out to be an ordinary tailor's shop (I heard later from a metered-taxi driver that the Tuk-Tuk driver probably got 200B from the shop for taking me).
Anyway, I'd heard good things about cheap Thai bespoke suits so I thought I'd see. I chose good quality cloth, but was surprised that 2 suits would be £700. I said I might just be able to justify it at half that price and, because I was genuinely ambivalent, stuck to that. Eventually he did meet that price (2 suits in different material, each with spare trousers). It was only afterward that I thought it wouldn't be such a bad thing to give myself a treat.
I think I must have got a reasonable price, because the salesman was quite sullen once the deal was made. Later I told a taxi driver what I'd paid and he said he'd expect 3 suits at that price. That made me think I'd done pretty well - a tourist (only there to be ripped off, surely) paying only 50% more than a local - not too bad.
I've received the finished suits now and am quite pleased with them :-)
The driver then took me to a jewellery shop, which didn't detain me long, and said he'd take me back. I insisted he take me to the other place mentioned in the 20B pitch, and enjoyed clmbing the Golden Mount and the views from the top.

Sights (2)
Many of Bangkok's top sights are temples (Wat in Thai). One can only see so many. I remember visiting Rome many years ago, and feeling "all churched out."
The complex comprising the Emerald Buddha (solid jade) and surrounding temple buildings were extensive and very impressive, as was the royal palace - French walls, Thai roof, specified by a king well travelled around the world at the time.
Bearing in mind I'd only landed 6am that morning and just popped out to fill in the time until I could check in, I reckoned I'd "done" half of Bangkok, so resisted offers of a canal cruise and got a ride back to the BTS with the taxi driver who gave me the inside track referred to above.

Traffic Antidote
Saturday's road congestion nearly deterred me from going into town again, but on Sunday I thought I'd try a river trip. This turns out to be how to travel quickly where BTS and MRT don't reach. I got the Skytrain to "Central" (S6) and got on the blue-flag tourist boat that runs up the river with some commentary in English (25B one way).
It good enough that I went to the end and came back to where I planned to get off (although the northern-most part isn't really worth seeing).

Sights (3)
Wat Pho IS the most-must-see temple complex, complete with vast reclining Buddha.
I then went across on the little ferry to see Wat Arun (3B each way). Unfortunately, the grounds were full of military people, mainly in dress uniforms but some in green with guns for security. I guessed it was a graduation ceremony, and couldn't get any closer. At least I saved someone else the fruitless crossing a bit later.
I hopped on an ordinary Orange-flag river bus and got back to Chinatown for 14B.

Street Market
When I was a teenager I worked on a stall down Walthamstow Market. The street market reminded me of it a lot, but then I followed it into long narrow alleyways and we were back in Bangkok again. There was only room for one file of people each way between the close-packed stalls, which meant a problem whenever anyone stopped to look at anything. Hectic and different. I hailed a taxi to get me to Hua Lompong mainline train station. This had welcome calming air-con but concerning lunges between minuscule gaps in lanes of traffic jam, with many near misses. Back from there by MRT.

Filthy-Canal-Express-Bus
On Monday morning, I followed another route into town as described in Wikitravel. Skytrain to N1 then big motorboat bus on the remaining navigable canal. This whizzed along, causing lots of spray. Unfortunately, the spray was the filthy canal water. The boat has blue nylon-cloth sheets along each side, that can be pulled up to shield the spray. A choice between seeing something and catching something!

I returned the same way, and carried on back to the airport (Skytrain from Asok to Thaya Thai, then the cheap City Train to the airport, and thence Phnom Penh.

Bangkok at speed

Greetings from the roof of the Park Plaza Hotel, Sukhumvit, Bangkok. I'm seated by the pool with a Margarita (and a Margarita chaser). My zippy-off-leg-pants are zipped off and I've discarded my shirt. I'm recovering from my own little whirlwind.

As previously described, I was supposed to return from St. Lucia on Monday morning, chill and pack slowly, then depart for Thailand on Thursday night. Hurricane Tomas screwed that, so I didn't get back until Thursday morning, leaving me with 12 hours in the UK, half spent getting in and out of airports - tight enough to be considered heroic (foolhardy). I tried for an extra 24 hours, but only got half that - leaving me with 25 hours in the UK.

Now, I'm quite a seasoned traveller and can pack for a week working away in about 10 minutes. However, this trip was by backpack, in Tropical climes and had visa complexities that needed to be exactly right.

In the end I kept my taxi to Heathrow waiting nearly 20 minutes, as I finished preparations. That wasn't as bad as it sounds, because the driver was a friend and colleague of my friend and housemate Phil, and she spent the time sitting on my sofa, playing with his baby daughter.

In that past-last-minute gap I booked this hotel - a lot more expensive than I'd have liked, but necessary.

It was odd to be back on a plane waiting to take off again so soon, but obviously relieving to have achieved the turnaround.

The Thai International Airways flight (11h20) was a 747-400, but had a state-of-the-ark entertainment system - one movie at a time projected onto a central screen. The films were good and modern, but unfortunately I'd seen them all on the BA 777 touch-screen, personal choice, pausable system to and from St. Lucia. Still, Thai flights are much cheaper than anyone else's and that has to come from somewhere - no complaints about legroom, though.

The flight landed in Bangkok before 6am and I proceeded to visa-on-arrival, only to be told Brits don't need one. Consequently, I went through the one of the 3 immigration zones furthest from the plane and was relieved that all 3 open into the same huge baggage hall.

Into town on the City Train, stopping a few times and hence cheaper than the express (15 Baht or 60p).

I disembarked at Makkasan station and found a taxi. The driver wanted to ring the hotel and I couldn't understand why, so told him not to bother. Being spoilt in London and Reading, it didn't occur to me that he might have no idea where it was, despite showing him the full address (in English / Latin alphabet) on my iPhone.

I had a map and pointed at where we were and where I thought the hotel was, and he set off the opposite way up the relevant road. At least six stopping-to-ask-someones later he turned around and went to where I pointed in the first place.

I couldn't grumble - he might have gone straight there if I'd let him ring, so it was my fault. The overgrown fare was still all of £4!!

One reason I needed to book a hotel was that I reached it before 9am but couldn't check in before 2pm. Hence I needed somewhere to dump my bags, etc. The other reason was stress reduction - the hotel as a known factor and one less to worry about.

So there I was at a loose end between 0900 and 1400 and bag-free, so I went off exploring.

[At this point in writing, the lack of sleep, battered body clock (Carib->Thai = +12hrs aaargh!) and Margheritas have got the better of me so I'll "retire hurt" and resume later.]

Changeable South-Easterly

If you've looked at some of my older posts, you'll have seen my efforts to develop a route to drive round the world, and noted that I haven't gone yet.

The main reasons, in descending order of importance, are as follows:
1) I didn't find anyone to go with. I only looked among friends and acquaintances, not online because I was sceptical about working out from a fairly short meeting whether I could spend months with someone. I thought about going alone, but didn't reach that point, because...
2) It isn't as easy as it sounds. You need visas, mostly in advance, from the edge of Europe to either Thailand or Namibia. The "Stans" on The Silk Road most notably. That rather turns a voyage of discovery based on happy accident into a tightly-scheduled route march. The Americas are a notable exception to this. In addition, there are impassible bits a vehicle would need to be floated past: Atlantic, Pacific, Myanmar, Darien Gap.
These all conspire to make dragging a vehicle round the world seem quite a chore.
3) Global economic meltdown, well at least its implications on getting a job on my return.

So I thought I'd look at the big trip a different way. No vehicle, which means public transport. Solo, which means one has to stay in hostels to meet people. Standard backpacking, then.

I didn't know if that would suit me, so I gathered 5 weeks off work to trial-run this new style of travel.

Then I met Clare and everything changed. Her employer will let her take a 6-month paid sabbatical, to which can be added a month's leave, but she's currently making a new role her own, and so can't go until 2012.

6 months obviously isn't long enough to see the whole world in depth, but South America currently seems a good fit, particularly due to visa-ease. That would mean going for the early part of a year to hit the Andean summer. Clare and I are starting to consider taking the first half of 2012 off, returning in time for the Olympics. We'll need to compromise between our different aspirations, as it'd quite likely be a once-in-a-lifetime thing for both of us.

So now I'm not thinking of backpacking solo the way I was, and so I don't need my trial run of that style. I do have my month of leave booked, though. Clare only had a week's leave, so we went to the Caribbean, as I wrote last time.

Clare isn't attracted to the Far East, but I am. So that makes it a good thing to do when she can't come. To get the most out of my trip with the least organisational overhead, I decided to go on organised tours.

Hence I'm writing this on a looooong flight to a 3-week trip to Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

This involves a lot of flights, taking my tally of airports travelled from, to or through from 66 to 72 (as close as I can reckon):

5th-6th Nov Heathrow (LHR)-Bangkok (BKK) TG911
8th Bangkok-Phnom Penh (PNH) TG584
11th Phnom Penh-Siem Reap (REP) K6101
13th Siem Reap-Hanoi (HAN) VN842
17th Hanoi-Hue (HUI)
20th Danang (DAD)-Ho Chi Minh City (SGN)
24th Ho Chi Minh City-Bangkok TG551
24th Bangkok-Heathrow TG916

Here goes :-)

Clare and Hurricane Tomas

Now I only normally write here about "adventure" holidays. However, the Caribbean trip I've just returned from converted itself into one of those.

First, though, I need to introduce Clare, my new love. We actually met a couple of years ago in a group of people-who-meet-to-do-things that I found via the Internet (www.social-and-single.org). Clare doesn't match my historic "type", but fortunately the group kept us in proximity long enough to enjoy each other's company, become friends, and then become romantically interested.

Traditionally, I understand that the woman recognises these things well before the man, and so it was here. I really should have twigged when the group was supposed to see a movie, which wasn't then shown, so we went to the pub instead. The evening chatting with Clare was much more fun than the film would have been.

Things came to a head when we arranged a pub visit for the two of us, just as friends - not a "date". Both of us actually wished it was a date but didn't know how the other felt. We now refer to it as "the date that wasn't a date, that was."

That was a few months ago and, as things developed, we decided to go to St. Lucia to use up the rest of Clare's leave for the year (I'd saved up rather more).

I wanted to go to one resort, but they didn't have any available rooms with air-con. So, after more perusal of TripAdvisor (bless its name), we booked at the Bay Gardens Beach Resort (#10 in SL). I'd already been stimulated to write a report myself for the first time (a resoundingly good one), when events took a turn.

A very fast, spinning, hurricane-shaped turn.

We'd booked a Friday sunset cruise, which was cancelled due to a weather advisory, but the evening passed uneventfully so we thought nothing more of it.

On Saturday there were blustery gusts playing boisterously with the tablecloths during breakfast, and talk of a storm on the way.

Tomas escalated into a category 1 hurricane unexpectedly. The winds grew during the afternoon to be quite impressive, and we spent the evening happily in the open-sided hotel bar/restaurant next to the beach, drinking and watching lashing horizontal rain.

We didn't really have any deeper appreciation of what we were seeing. After all, this was only a Category 1 hurricane and surely the Caribbean islands see much worse than that?

I think the problem was that Tomas was so slow-moving (9mph) that it sat over the island for a very long time and dropped a LOT of water.

We were supposed to be flying out on the Sunday night, but when the wind was little reduced that morning, it wasn't surprising when the BA flight out didn't leave Gatwick.

The St. Lucia ports authority (SLASPA) was appallingly poor at communicating, making no reference to the hurricane on its website and, very misleadingly, leaving the previous day's successful arrivals/departures up, dated as today's - suggesting all was fine when it wasn't.

After lots of Googling for news we eventually found a blog post from someone about 5 miles away reporting the Communications Minister statement via Radio 100 saying the international airport could be closed all week.

This wasn't good news, as I had to be back in the UK to fly out for another holiday on the Thursday (see next post for details).

The hurricane had done a lot of damage, mainly in the South of the island, killing 15 at last count and cutting off roads to capital Castries, tour-stop Soufriere and many other places including Hewanorra international airport. Obviously, though, coastal places on an island aren't cut off by boat, once the sea is calm enough.

We met one woman who was evacuated to our hotel (I think from the Jalousie Hilton). She told a horror story of 48 hours without power or water, inability to sleep due to sounds of mudslides, a (consequently) disappearing swimming pool and a 2am evacuation by 3 catamarans, overloaded and still insufficient; with disorganisation leading to some "survival of the fittest" :-(

In our 4-year-old, concrete solid, low rise hotel we had a few small, wind-driven leaks, minimal power blips and, eventually, Tuesday night without water in the taps. The staff stayed on to look after us throughout, rather than trying to rejoin friends and family. If we were impressed before the hurricane, we needed superlatives now.

With my following travel plans under threat, I had to try to get back to the UK by Thursday. I rang Kuoni in the UK. When the duty officer rang back she was unnecessarily short, emphasising I'll-temperedly that the airport was shut and implying I was unreasonable in wanting to bring myself to attention at this point. I imagine that she'd just been on the phone with someone who had been demanding miracles and had carried that over.

It was disappointing, as I've used Kuoni many times over 20 years and expected more professionalism. This wasn't particularly redeemed because she never contacted me again and, when Castries was again reachable and LIAT air shuttles started from there to Hewanorra airport, Virgin Holidays snapped up the seats for their passengers while the local Kuoni reps were still trying to come up with transfer solutions.

It did all come out OK in the end. The rep got us on the air shuttle (although I had to pay $50US per head while Virgin paid for their people). Relieved, I didn't mind too much sitting 7 hours in Hewanorra waiting for our BA flight, coincidentally awaiting reunion with my case that didn't make the first shuttle.

St. Lucia was fabulous, and will be once again when they've restored power, water and roads in the South of the island. And I have to thank again Bay Gardens Beach Resort and all its staff - definitely where you want to be if another hurricane ever visits.