This is a great place to stay. There's no restaurant in the hotel, but it's easy to find plenty of eating places withing a ten minute walk so we didn't stress it. A laundry service is two doors up the street. If you walk out to Phetkaseam Road you are almost diagonally across the street from a huge shopping mall that includes a Tesco Lotus. A 100-metre walk in the other direction and you are on the beach. You don't get a sea view, but for a double occupancy family room at £23 a night for the two of us I don't really care.
Lisa took the double bed, since she has a single one at Chetawan. I have a king bed at Chetawan, so sleeping on a single is cool with me. When we sat on the beds for the first time we wept for joy, because the nearly-forgotten sensation of a memory foam mattress was overwhelming. These beds are comfy!!! Yay!!!
Both of us slept well and in the morning sprang, well-rested, from our beds with glad cries. We've decided we like this place. http://www.abguesthouse.com/engindex.html. You could do a lot worse than stay here. There are much larger and posher places to stay, and the king even has a place on the beach for holidays, but in terms of value for money we are on a stone-cold win.
We studied for a while, then went down to the beach to have a look. We saw a mountain in the distance, with what looked like a temple on it. This is the Khao Takiab Temple on Monkey Mountain. We started walking down the beach towards the mountain, and agreed that we were very contented with the beach and the sea.
The tide was coming in as we walked further down the beach. By the time we got to the highrises, we were forced to end our walk and clamber onto a handy boat launch. This is when I realised that the sea had taken my flipflops, which I had stuck in my pocket. We walked back to the main road and caught the next green bus headed in the right direction.
One stops a hire car or bus by standing in a visible location, stretching out your arm and making a gentle downward patting motion with your hand. The green buses will stop no matter where on the street you are. There aren't any designated stops, you just get on, pay the attendant the fee (in Hua Hin it's 10 Baht, in Salaya it's 8 or 9 Baht) and ring the bell when you want off. It's so easy.
A green bus:
We got off at the mall and went in search of a new pair of flipflops for me. Though I walked around barefoot through much of the place, no one even raised an eyebrow. I found some Adidas flips that were just right and was shod once more. We had talked about finding me a rucksack and ditching the overnight wheelie bag so we had a little look around for one and found one I liked. I didn't have any Bahts left so I asked Lisa for the cash.
She reached for her money and realised that it wasn't there. She had been carrying all of it, everything she had. This was money for all her expenses, including the travelling she was going to do after she left Thailand. Oh god. We went back to the room to regroup, and on the way I said we should have a really good look around the room, just in case it was there. We didn't have a hope, and I was already planning on how far I could stretch my cash to help her out. I couldn't replace the three grand she'd lost, but I could at least sort her out for the next little while.
We got back to the room, dejected and still damp from our incoming tide challenge. They had tidied the room for us, and even though we'd left books and notes all over Lisa's bed they had replaced them as close to their original locations as possible after making the bed. Lisa started looking through her gear and after about five minutes she let out a cry and held up the bloody money pouch.
I stayed mad at her for about 10 minutes.
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