I know, I know......I promised to update the blog a bit more frequently than every two months.....
Better late than never - and now I'm here. Thanks for your patience ;)
Soooooo, I left Saba on the 6th December after a fantastic last night in the true Vortex spirit :D Ken left same time as I (pure coincidence), so we took the ferry to St. Maarten and met up with Bruno and Juliska there. It was an amazing feeling of relief to see Saba disappearing, the water was flat, the weather nice and we were both quite happy to be off the rock. At the same time, I was sad though: I met some really nice and quite a few fantastic people on that little island; people I'll hopefully meet somewhere someday.
46 hours later I arrived in Khao Lak (Thailand, north of Phuket) trying to convince my body to ignore the 11-hour time difference.
My new boss, Heinz, was nice enough to let me relax 19 hours before starting work and I moved into my new home. Well, "home": an empty room with a bathroom. Brand new, but no furniture and no warm water - and it's about a kilometer up a very dark unpaved mountain road. It's quiet though - except all the jungle noises ;)
I worked 14 hours per day on average, mainly teaching courses, so I earned quite good money in December. I was also very, very tired all the time. Finally, there was light at the end of the tunnel: I had a day off on 1st January. Party-time till 5 am. Yah mahn :D
The atmosphere in the company has been really, really bad. People leaving every day. Yep, actually worse than my last employer. I only stayed because I knew it was for a limited period of time, having a job waiting for me in Malaysia.
And then things changed rapidly this week.....Heinz was fired and I was offerered the position as operations manager. Earlier in my diving career than I'd expected, but I've been doing the majority of office work here the past two weeks anyway, so I'm pretty sure I've got it covered. The employees/freelancers who refused to work for us last week are all back again and everyone is happy. At least he's not such a tough act to follow ;)
So yeah, no Malaysia for me this time. I'd really been looking forward to a chilled year down there and to work together with the Debs again, but I felt that this opportunity was too good to let go.
I'll be in Khao Lak until the end of season (mid-April) and then I'll spend low season on Phuket, instructing and guiding. Mid-October I'm going back to Khao Lak to start up for the next season. Next week I'm going on a visa run to KL to get the work permit sorted.
All of this is the plan anyway. But as you all know (by now), my plans do occassionally change ;))
Apart from work, I haven't done much here. I've met some nice people, but haven't gotten into that Vortex feeling (yet)
I've invited the staff out for dinner etc on Friday night though - and told the office manager she has to fill in for me till noon on Saturday; it's good to be the boss *lol*
Another good thing about this job is that I'll be spending a lot of time in the office, which should (!) give me more time to update the blog and possibly even post a couple of pix ;)
Debbie is coming to Thailand next week on her way to the Perhentians, that's something I really, really look forward to. Quite a few things we need to talk about, quite a bit of vodka we need to dispose of.....
Oh, and I'm going to move to a place with furniture and (gee such luxury) warm water. And a fridge. Which means I can keep the tonic for the vodka cold ;)
Enough for now, must work a bit again - just had to take care of my bad conscience first
Laters (sooner)
xxx
No comments:
Post a Comment