Phuket is beautiful, like all my students say.

During our trip there, they almost left my bag at a way-station. After moving it just inside the sliding door (for some reason it no longer fit in the back where it had been most of the trip), it had to be taken out along with some large box when we stopped, so that people could get on and off the bus. We had gotten back on the bus and driven just a little ways when we realized that we were back at the same way-station. After speculating that perhaps we had accidentally left a passenger, I noticed my backpack and the large box still sitting near the food vendor. I had actually been thinking earlier that everything important was in my shoulder bag that I had with me, so the only thing I would be out is clothing if, for some reason, my backpack was lost or left somewhere. I need to not speculate about things like that in the future…

Lara and I arrived at our hotel (The Sleep Here) around 9:30pm, after 7-ish hours in a mini-van in the very back seat. I really hate road trips. It was supposed to be a room with a king-sized bed, but the woman chuckled when we mentioned that it was only a queen and not a king. Huh…

After showering and relaxing for a bit, we decided to head out to Bangla Road, the famous road in Patong where all the nightlife is.

I would have been happy finding a place to smoke hookah and people-watch but that wasn’t in the cards. First we went for dinner. There are no Burger Kings in Hat Yai. But there is one along Patong Beach in Phuket. We searched it out and, while she treated herself to a double Whopper with bacon, I chowed down on an X-Long Chicken Sandwich (That’s what they called it. It was the same size as the chicken sandwich back home.). I was worried that it wouldn’t taste the same, like how the McDonald’s cheeseburgers aren’t quite right here. It ended up tasting precisely how it should. I was elated. It was so delicious. Yes, I am excited about a chicken sandwich that tastes like home. Don’t judge me.

After our happy mastication, we ventured back out on to the street to find a place to have a drink and relax for a while. Bangla road is not my cup of tea. It is a walking street that consists primarily of go-go bars and dance clubs along each side. The crowd is made up of foreign men, bar girls, lady boys, hawkers, and a handful of foreign women. You can’t walk five feet without someone trying to get you to go to a ping-pong show (you don’t want to know) or to take a picture with a lemur, giant iguana or lady boy (decked out like a Vegas showgirl). We eventually found a bar called the Sunset (all made up inside like a London pub with a phone box, tube signs and football and rugby paraphernalia). We sat at an outside table and ordered a beer and a pina colada.

Side note: prices in Phuket. ‘Extortion’ is the only word that accurately describes the cost of goods and services here. Motorbikes wanted 100 baht to go a distance I normally pay 15 for. I paid them 50 and even that was excessive. Tuk tuks charged 500 baht to go pretty much anywhere. Long or short distance. Most of the money we spent was on transportation.

After people-watching for about an hour, Lara decided that she must go dancing. We had passed one discotheque on the way back from Burger King along Patong Beach. They told us at the door that the cover was 200 baht each. I hate cover charges. We did not go there.

I told her I had seen another one on Bangla Road (in fact, we had probably passed many of them, but we were going for the non-go-go dancer ones). This one was called Hollywood. Giant farang bouncers at the door checked our bags to make sure we had no weapons or bombs and we ventured up the stairs to the dance floor. Which was a sea of foreign men (either white or middle-eastern) and Thai bar girls. In the course of the couple hours we were there, I think I may have spotted four other foreign women, max. The experience really made me disgusted with white men.

We tried to order some drinks from the bar, but, apparently, you have to be a Thai woman in order to do that. So, we ordered from a waitress instead. After we had been there a while, one of the bar girls dragged us over to one of the bars and tried to give us free drinks (there is a sign on the bar that says “Free Drinks for Thai Girl Only”). She handed me a shot of tequila which I handed to Lara which was snatched out of her hand by one of the (white) men who works there. That was interesting. We hadn’t asked for free drinks. The bar girl was just trying to be friendly. We ventured back over to the area we had been dancing in before this all occurred and, a little while later, the same girl brought another shot of tequila (which I again passed off to Lara). This time, no rude bouncer grabbed the drink away. After that, we were left in peace to dance the rest of the night away (at this point it was probably 3am).

I had actually been ready to head to my comfy hotel bed for quite a while. We eventually made our way out of the club and hailed a motorbike. He wanted 100 baht each to take us back to the hotel. Over my dead body. We negotiated it down to 50 each and headed home.

I don’t think I have stayed up until 4am since I was in my early twenties (which was a decade ago). I can’t do it anymore. I’m old. At 32, I am officially old. Midnight is my cut-off, I think. Especially since I can’t ever sleep more than six hours, no matter how late I go to bed. Which just wreaks havoc if I have been up a good 4-5 more hours than I am used to…

Fortunately, the plan for the following day was to go to the beach. That’s it. No tromping around and site-seeing.

We thought we would take the ‘free shuttle’ from our hotel to Patong Beach so that we could get some breakfast/lunch before we started our day (ended up having Burger King again). The woman at the front desk was very confused when we asked her about it. “No shuttle, start 200 baht.” Uh, no… Twice in the listing for the hotel it mentioned the free shuttle and had pictures. I brought the listing up on the computer so she could see herself (and also pointed out the king size bed). She kept saying ‘don’t have’. I told her that the listing was a lie and that I would have to give a poor review. “Oh, but good price.” Yeah, it’s a good price, but we would have paid more to stay closer to the beach instead of having to spend money on motorbikes. And it’s false advertising. Try explaining that in this country… So, she offered to move us to another hotel (one of the other two we had looked at) that was owned by the same person. In fact, all three that we had looked at were owned by the same person. And all listed free shuttle. And none of them provide it. But now we at least had a king size bed. So we started at the Sleep Here and ended up at The Lavender. Which was much nicer. And the same price.

Lara’s friend from Egypt was in Phuket on her honeymoon. They hadn’t seen each other in four years. The newlyweds were staying at the Amari Coral Beach in Patong. I looked it up on the map and it was set on a hillside with a tiny private (coral) beach. She got in touch with her friend and they (Sondra and Omar) had planned to go out on the motorbike for the afternoon, so Lara and I went to Patong with plans to meet them later.

Oh, Patong… Same as everywhere else, you can’t walk five feet without someone trying to sell you something. In this case, rent one of the many beach chairs lining the shore. Two hundred baht per. We walked the whole shoreline and didn’t feel like staying there. Since we knew that her friend’s hotel had a private beach, we decided to crash it.

Walked to the top of the hill and in the front door like we owned the place. Went down the many floors, past the very nice pool (which we thought we might go back to later) and down another flight of steps and we were on the beach. Very small, but nice. We could actually leave our stuff without worry of being robbed. There was only one other couple availing themselves of it.

Unfortunately, there were some rather large rocks hidden just below the surface not too far from shore. So, we had to cautiously float around. Sustained a few scrapes to my ankle and the top of my foot, but other than that, unscathed. Remained there for about an hour or so. Just floating and talking.

We decided to head up to the pool, but Lara got her friend on the phone and found that they were at Kata Beach. From the concierge, we were told that it was about 20 minutes away. Cheapest transport we could find was 500 baht. Really had no choice. We hopped in the van and were taken to Kata, just past Karon. When we finally located her friends, we grabbed a couple of beach chairs in the shade and paid our 200 baht apiece for them.

The newlyweds had brought their own libations and poured some drinks (I opted for Pepsi, straight up). We lounged around and talked for a while. Omar and Sondra went to play in the ocean for a bit while Lara and I kept guard over all the belongings. When they returned, we ventured out.

There were some pretty good waves going on. We went far enough out to be able to ride them as the came in and broke. For some reason I had it in my head that salt water wouldn’t affect my eyes like chlorine does. I can swim in a chlorinated pool with my eyes open for hours before they start to feel irritated. Salt water? Not so much. One splash in the face and my eyes are burning and I can’t open them for a while. So, I kept my head out of the water as much as possible. A couple of times we got sucked in by the undertow, but all in all, we had a blast floating around in the ocean for about an hour before we gave up and went back to our beach chairs. I knew I would discover later that I had sand sediment in places one should never have sand sediment.

We had seen the Hard Rock Phuket on the way to Patong Beach that morning and at the time had thought it would be a cool place to have dinner. Somehow plans to meet up with the happy couple for dinner had gotten pushed to 9pm and then to 10pm and Hard Rock was thrown out the window all together. There was no way I could hold out that long for dinner. Lara said that she needed a nap to recharge for another evening of dancing (gulp) and planned to sleep the rest of the day until we went out. Wanted me to wake her at 9pm. When we got to the hotel, there was a little restaurant on the corner. We ordered some take-away. She went back to the room to avail herself of the shower while I waited for our snack. Which took at least a half an hour.

I went out with them for about an hour and a half and then had to throw in the towel. I knew we had a long trip back the next day and it would be wretched if I didn’t get a good night’s sleep. We went to the Red Hot Chili bar that actually had a good band playing covers. They sounded phenomenal and had great stage presence. After we were done there and Lara proposed heading back to the Hollywood Discotheque, I tagged out. She had already told me earlier that if I needed to go home earlier than she was ready, it was no problem. She was more than happy to go dancing by herself. And she still had Sondra and Omar for a little while at least.

The motorbike tried to get me to pay 100 baht for just myself. Not a chance. I told him 50 and he kept saying 60 and smiling. I kept saying 50 and smiling back. When I got to the hotel. I gave him 50, thanked him, and walked away.

The trip home… (sigh)

When we got the van from Amari to Kata beach the previous day, we had arranged with the driver to pick us up and take us to the bus station so we could get back to Hat Yai. Once we got there, we hoped to be able to buy tickets on the mini bus and take the 7-hour trip home. You can’t really work on hope in this country…

We arrived there at 11:30am to buy tickets. They told us that the mini bus was gone for the day. Somehow one of the busiest destinations in Thailand (even in the low season) only has one mini bus per day? I find that really hard to believe. But they insisted. This meant that we were forced to take the big bus, which we were told would take seven and a half hours. Hahaha. Yeah, right. In your dreams. On the upside, there was a toilet on board and we each had two seats to ourselves which allowed us to sleep off and on.

A trip that was supposed to take seven hours took close to 10. Our driver chain smoked most of the trip and stopped frequently. He also almost rear-ended a parked car when he got out one time and didn’t put the e-brake on. He ran back fast enough to pull it just before smashing in to a small, white Toyota. If that weren’t enough, we blew a tire. He drove on it for about 20-30 minutes (at a crawling speed) before he found somewhere to service it. We waited at this small market for close to an hour getting the tire repaired or replaced or whatever they were doing. After resuming our trip, he was still plodding along. I mentioned this to Lara because it didn’t seem like the new tire made any difference. After more than an hour of a snail’s pace, he stopped again. Mind you, each time he stopped, it was for at least 15 minutes.

I wandered across the road to the market to see what I could find to drink. I was surprised when I walked past a man selling ducklings and chicks. Not because of what he was selling but because, in addition to yellow, they were red, green, blue, pink, purple and orange. And only 10 baht. Yes, I was sorely tempted to purchase a purple baby chicken. But I refrained.

When I returned to the bus with two sodas, I heard them using the impact wrench to tighten the lug nuts. Oh. That’s why we had been creeping along. I don’t know why they didn’t tighten them adequately when we had the tire put on (I heard them using an impact wrench then, too) but, now we were moving quickly. In fact, more quickly than we would have liked, considering this driver’s track-record. He was taking curves like he was in a low-profile car, not a 15-foot-tall bus. I’m sure he was just trying to make up time, but that wouldn’t matter much if we died on the way.

He stopped again in Trang or Pattalung or somewhere so that we could get our ‘free meal’. It was really just 15 baht off of whatever food we bought from the one vendor at the way-station. And it was all yellowish-green soupy stuff. I don’t have much appetite on road trips anyhow and this solidified that.

We finally rolled in to Hat Yai close to 10pm. They dropped us at a bus station near Greenway, the weekend market area. Rafik was originally going to pick us up, but since we ended up arriving so late, Delilah was already asleep. Lots of people still around, but we had to walk a ways to find a tuk tuk. We found the round-the-town songtaew and got on, but he just sat back down and continued eating. No one was getting on with us and we didn’t think he would leave until he had more passengers. So, we got off and negotiated with a tuk tuk driver. He wanted 50 each. We got him down to 40. He thought, for some reason, that he was only taking us to City Home apartments. When he found out this wasn’t the case (even though we had told him our destination before getting on), he made a fuss. We ended up paying him the hundred anyhow. Lara had gone to sit up front with him to tell him where to go. He tried to get me to do it, but I wouldn’t have known where to go AND I was tired of him asking if I was married and if I wanted to be his girlfriend. Which he apparently kept asking Lara when she was up front. She told him that she was married and her husband was big. And that I had a boyfriend and he also was big. I don’t think it really mattered. Thai men are pretty single-minded when they get an idea in to their head.

After getting a car service to take me home to Songkhla (500 baht), I finally walked in to my room close to midnight. I hate bus travel… Next time, we drive.