How normal people go on holiday

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I've been enjoying my time off the beaten track immensely. The people you meet are, on average, pretty interesting folks with a sense of adventure. So Singapore and Kuala Lumpur left me a bit cold - too big, too impersonal - and Georgetown on Penang was way nicer to be in. It's a compact, lively city with great food and a few interesting sights.

It's also a popular visa run destination for Thailand, meaning that people head there for as long as it takes to renew their Thai visa before heading straight back to Thailand. You get a funny mix of people there as a result. It's pretty interesting, or sometimes kind of funny. Example: I met two girls from Bristol who made me laugh by complaining about Penang a lot and saying things like "oh, I didn't know you could get Indian food in Penang". Now, for those of you who don't know anything about Penang, it's famous for its food partly because it has a substantial Indian population, and it has to be impossible to walk round Penang for long without finding an Indian restaurant. Anyway, I thought it was funny, because they'd clearly not bothered to look round before deciding they didn't like the place.

Then I got to Phuket. Normally the idea of going to Phuket would be anathema to me, seeing as it's Thailand's version of Cancun. It just makes practical sense, as I'm going on a four day dive boat trip and I needed to visit the dive centre in Patong, plus I wanted to fit in a day kayaking in Phang Nga bay and all these trips collect from Phuket or Patong, plus I need to arrange transport to Bangkok for the day after the dive boat. Clearly basing myself somewhere small and out of the way was going to make that harder. Patong is everything I expected. I'm not complaining, but really it's trashy as all hell, and it's full to bursting with sunburnt, rowdy holidaymakers who don't seem to give two shits about Thai culture - they've come all the way from England/Russia/Australia just to get drunk, get laid and get sunburnt. The beach is a vast sea of sunloungers.

The evenings are buzzing and lively, and contain at least 57 varieties of wrong. There's a guy on one of the main streets, where three bars compete for musical supremacy with a cacophony of rock, who stands there with a very unhappy-looking iguana getting people to pay to have their photo taken while holding it.

It's actually hard to go on errands. The Somebody Else's Problem field appears again - not in that things are hard to find, but that you have to look for them by trying to catch glimpses out of the corner of your eye. Why? Because if you make the mistake of looking directly at any shop you are immediately pounced on and subjected to the hard sell, sometimes physically grabbed and dragged towards the displays. It gets tiring and time-consuming extracting yourself from these sellers, so I've had to adopt the Bodysnatcher Pose™: pretend you've been possessed by an alien with no emotions and walk intently but at a relaxed pace down the road staring into middle-distance and ignoring anyone who tries to talk to you. It's the only way to get from A to B without buying lots of tat that you can't fit in your rucksack.

Oh, and while I remember, all that business with the Thai visa? Pffft. I decided not to bother with the visa, because I found an onward flight online for about the same cost, so I qualified for the visa on arrival at the border. Did they care? No. They stamped me in for 30 days without asking for anything.

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