Phuket

Finally, after months and months of winter, I am in real summer weather! And I am loving it!

Patong Beach

On Saturday I arrived in Phuket and met Jo at the airport, where we shrieked with excitement due to the fact that we hadn’t seen each other in about five months. We took a taxi all the way down very long and windy roads to Patong; the most famous beach (/tourist) area of Phuket. Once we’d settled in we wondered down to the beach and I realised it was the first time I’d seen a beach since California, in my very first week of this trip. Patong beach is covered in tourists, but a lovely beach nonetheless. We came back to shower and change before we headed out for dinner & shopping. We explored the Patong night markets, brushing up on our bartering skills. I think we did pretty well! We bought some bracelets and singlets, all at a very good price! 

The next day we were both exhausted, and decided to spend the morning relaxing by the pool in the 32 degree heat! Turns out my “waterproof” sunscreen is not all that waterproof. Ouch. (The next day we went to buy sunscreen and the best they had was 15+! Seems crazy, in this climate. After much searching I did eventually find 50+. That's more like it!)

In the afternoon we signed ourselves up for a half day tour. First stop was the big Buddha. It was much like the Buddha in Hong Kong, except a bit smaller..and this time I could actually see it! No fog! While there we also got an incredible view over the coast. The next stop was the Cashew Nut Factory. I never knew that cashews came off a fruit that grew on a tree.. Guess I never thought about it! I also never would have guessed that all the cashews are broken out of their shell one by one by hand- not by machine! They had all sorts of cashews for us to try; from wasabi to chocolate to, our favourite, honey sesame. Delicious. Afterwards we had a quick stop at some random store that sold all sorts of nice-smelling products which didn’t interest me too much.

Wasabi cashew nuts..not actually that spicy!

The last stop, and the whole reason we signed up, was the market! We went to the Phuket Weekend Market, and spent an hour and a half shopping. When that hour and a half was up we were wishing it’d been more like five hours. Such a great market! Their prices were much more reasonable than in Patong, which meant that you couldn’t barter as much, but you still got a very decent price. Between the two of us we may have bought 20+ pairs of sunglasses. Not all for ourselves, of course.. We also got more bracelets and singlets. These seem to be the most common items!

Amazing costumes!

Other people on the tour had recommended that we see the Simon Cabaret show, so we asked the guide to book some tickets for us and quite enjoyed it! It was a ladyboy show, but you’d never know! Jo reckons some of them had masculine faces but given that I forgot my glasses I couldn’t really tell. It reminded me a lot of Priscilla, mainly because of the costumes; there were a lot of feathers! And the song choices.. It seemed to be a round-the-world theme. They had Kylie representing Australia, and other songs from Egypt, Japan, America.. All over the place. Bit of fun!

Cleaning our feet...

The following day we were aiming to have a relaxing day on the beach. However our first stop was the post office, to get rid of all my winter clothes. When we walked out of the post office and across the road we managed to walk straight into tar. Our thongs quickly got stuck and I fell over; covering my knees and hands in tar. Our thongs were ruined. We were covered in hot sticky tar. Not nice. Locals told us that the best way to get it off was to scrub it with gasoline. Luckily, in Thailand you can buy bottles of gasoline from every street corner. We got a tuk tuk back to the hotel and sat in the bath for an hour scrubbing our feet with gasoline (and quickly following that up with a lot of soap and water!) It was disgusting. We had to use clothes as rags; luckily we both had clothes we were intending to throw out at some point before returning home. Gross.

Trying to pretend like I'm enjoying it..

Eventually we did make it to the beach, but not until after 4pm! The whole day was quite overcast (probably a good thing, given how much I burnt the previous day) but still very hot. After a delicious Thai dinner we decided to try fish who eat your feet. I really don’t know what they’re called. The picture might help.. Literally though, you put your feet in a tank and the fish eat the dead skin off them.. Given what our feet had been through that day, we thought they could use a cleanse! We were slightly worried the tar and gasoline may have killed a few fish, but they seemed to enjoy our feet.. Fish nibbling on my feet freaked me out, I only lasted about 2 minutes. Jo probably made it to almost 10 minutes- a very good effort!!

In the evening we went to a few more markets where I was about ready to strangle some of the shop keepers. They’re sooo persistent. As soon as you walk in they follow you, less than a metre behind telling you about every single item in their shop. I told one of them that I just wanted to look, and asked if he could leave me alone. He told me it was his job, and I politely said that if he left me alone to look I might actually buy something but this just caused him to think that he needed to be more in-my-face. At this point I turned to him and, rather angrily, told him that I would refuse to buy anything from him because he was being so obnoxious. I can’t even explain how annoying it is.

Once we’d just about spent all our money we decided to head to the beach. We had a swim. It’s nice that it’s still warm enough at 1am to go swimming! We got a tuk-tuk home.. The tuk tuk’s turn into little party cars at night, with their music raging, and their neon lights on! They love neon lights on the cars in Phuket!

This morning we’re getting a ferry over to Phi Phi island.. My birthday tomorrow and Jo’s birthday the day after!!!