Bicycle ride from Mai Khao Dream to Aleenta, Natai beach, Phang Nga, Thailand

 Took a bike ride from Mai Khao Dream to Aleenta along Natai beach, at a distance of 8km.  Very nice to see some old friends at Aleenta.  Also, noticed some new changes - a new staircases from the pool villa area to the pond and the tent outside the restaurant.

Shadow yoga, at Aleenta Phang Nga, Phuket

Thanks my friends for all the below difficult posing. Note they were on a narrow slippery curd with water.

Photos by Pixmation, in Phang Nga Thailand

The photos below are posted at the courtesy of Pixmation. A reflection of the local living in the west coast of Phang Nga, Southern Thailand.

Into the light

Once in a 365 days - an alternate scene at the beachfront suites of Aleenta

According to Aleenta, they would hire a crane to flatten the beach once a year, usually after the monsoon season (October). We were lucky to see this interesting scene a crane off the beachfront suites. Don't worry. It went so quickly that only for an hour something it's done. This is something nice of Aleenta to keep this beach in shape. I see they hire many locals to clean the beach every morning and afternoon.

The roster of our cameras and gears

My friends (2) and I brought these stuff for the trip to Phuket.

1. We missed putting some price tags to make it look like Boardway (an electronic store).

2. Left to right: Canon 60D with 28-70mm lens, Panasonic TS3, Olympus EPL-1, Sony TX10, Olympus EP-2.

3. Canon 550D with 17/40mm F4L lens, Canon 70-200mm F4L lens, Canon Rebel T2i (550D) with hand grip and a Holga F60mm lens, Canon 10/22mm F3.5 lens, Canon 50mm F1.4 lens, Canon 100mm F2.8L lens, Canon 24-70 F2.8L lens.

4. Mamiya medium format film camera, Lens baby, 3 Canon 580EXII speed lite, Canon 320EX speed lite.

*remarks: 60D is indeed a very nice reasonably priced camera. 550D is also very nice in terms of weight and handy performance. Then on the Mamiya medium film format camera - I see why Pixmation was hunting for it. Again, digital can't replace optical in some areas. Simply a F8 aperture can perform so well on the DOF. Most of all, due to its large contact of optical source at 55x55mm (3,025) vs 35x22mm (135 film format or full frame DSLR) (770), 4.3 times larger, the color and the light texture are very rich.

With the Andaman Sea

1. at Maya Bay, Phi Phi island. All the others at Natai beach, Phang Nga.

At Andaman sea....

A sunny day at Aleenta Phang Nga

Took the first 9 photos in morning time, then the last one at sunset. All day so sunny made up for the 2 days of raining.

Level 3, the seafood restaurant, Aleenta Phang Nga

The ex-French restaurant The Table was renovated last time when I was here. According to the chef Jean Louis, having a seafood restaurant seems to be more attractive to tourists. Here we have Level 3. On our arrival a team of staff were waiting to greet for our arrival at the restaurant. So good to see them again on the last night.

-We tried a Greek salad (photo 7). Surprised to get some beetroot jello to enhance the sweetness of the salad. The bread was lovely.

-Then on the soup, we tried Lobster and blue crab bisque (photo 8). This is on an extreme to what I had in the Andaman Grill of JW Marriott Mai Khao. It's not salty but fresh with a touch of blue crab flavour.

-On the main course, we tried the spaghetti bolognese in 2 styles (photo 9). The one in the bowl is with roasted ink spaghetti to be mixed with the soft spaghetti in a nice meat sauce. So you would have some crunchy texture. Quite creative. Then on the left is the soft spaghetti with 2 crunchy parmesan cheese. So this one is more tasty with less crunchy.

-The other one is monkfish (kind of a flat body shark) tenderloin (photo 10). The shark's meat is quite hard to chew. Also it can be very smelly. This one is quite tender and not smelly at all.

-The last one is the dessert sampler. The presentation is very nice. Check the green noodle. It's a mint spaghetti. At first, I thought it would be like a cough syrup but it's not. Quite refreshing after the various sweet sampling.

*remarks: I noticed blogger has changed the photo viewing. You can click the photo for a larger view. Then you can browse the photo in larger view with the keyboard arrow left/right.