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Published: September 26th 2022
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Patong, on the west coast of Phuket island, is hedonistic holiday hell for some! Come in the wet season as the country starts to open up after a pandemic though, and it's much calmer and a nice place to stay for a few days. Even more so if you manage to find a great hotel like the
R-Mar Resortand Spa. What a great place to chill out by the pool in the afternoon after a morning of walking up and down the beach. That's pretty much what we did!
There was another reason for our visit. Patong has a small
immigration office, much quieter than the one in Phuket Town and even more so in these strange times. We went there at 1pm on the Friday afternoon just as they were opening after lunch. We had grabbed the right forms in Phuket but it wouldn't have been a problem to fill them out then and there. We had also got our photos sorted out previously as the ones required are not the standard passport size. Why doesn't that surprise us?! The staff couldn't have been any friendlier or more helpful which was a very pleasant surprise. After taking our paperwork and payment
(1900 Baht, approximately £40, EACH!) we were told to come back an hour later. That gave us the chance to nip out for a kebab for lunch, stretch our legs, admire some of the nearby murals and return to a new stamp in our passports right on time.
Walking up and down the beach, we found the northern end to be the nicest. It's hard to imagine what horrors happened here not so long ago. When the tsunami struck the Andaman Sea back in 2004, Patong took the brunt of it in this area. There are some awful videos on Youtube if you are really curious. The town has more or less recovered, but just as it got back to 100%, along came Covid! There are real signs of the hardship a holiday resort like this faced. Not everything is open, and that goes for shopping centres as well as hotels, bars and restaurants.
We actually found the restaurants we liked were a few streets back from the seafront. They were generally simple affairs with cheap, tasty Thai food. We did push the boat out for some Middle-Eastern cuisine one night and that was superb. We also found
some German schnitzel but, although it was delicious, schnitzel it was not! As for bars, well the busiest area in town is the walking street of Bangla Street, but it's quite sleazy and with far fewer tourists than normal, they are quite in your face. Neither of us wanted to see a ping pong show (use your imagination!!) and the tickets for the Muy Thai Boxing were prohibitively expensive. We found we enjoyed sitting outside the
"Beyond Patong Food Market" where amazing food plus cheap beer and cocktails were in bountiful supply and without the merest hint of sleaze around us.
So as you can probably tell, Patong itself didn't do a great deal for us. It was a necessary evil though, and we made the best of it.
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Necessary evil
A short stay in any location can be good. Seeing the good and the not as enjoyable side of a country provides balance.