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Published: July 24th 2009
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Arriving at samui airport we thought we were at an outdoor shopping mall. After you check your bags in, there is a long pedestrianised street with lots of shops leading off of it, and some restaurants. Very weird but the nicest airport ive ever seen! We arrived at the plane after getting on 1 of those buses that take you along the runway and once we saw the plane we were getting on we nearly turned back! The plane was a little bit bigger than a private jet and the propellers were exposed like a little war plane and i felt sick just looking at it! The flight was fine and we arrived in Phuket from Samui in just over 40 mins.
We stayed in a guest house based in the gay ghetto of patong, a lively resort not unlike Brighton in many ways. The guest house owner was the man we met at the full moon party and he gave us loads of good information about where to go etc. The following day we decided that as my hair was growing like a tree i needed to visit the hairdressers. Sophie got a trim and I asked for my
hair to be cut slightly shorter but keeping to the 'style' I already had. As Im blind when i take off my glasses, I couldnt see what the hairdresser was doing, only that he was cutting, and cutting , and then a bit more cutting. I was worried that I was either going to have no hair left, or have some sort of mullet. I put my glasses on when the hairdresser finished cutting and i was delighted by the fact i had neither no hair nor a mullet but slightly horrified by the fact that I looked like a Manga cartoon character. Didnt help that Sophie burst out laughing when she saw me ...:'0(
That evening we went to a bar in the gay bit, but not before an eventful mealtime, I will leave it there!
The next day I realised that my bank card was either lost or stolen, and both of us realised we had money missing from our wallets so we decided to get out of Patong and move on.
We took a cab to Phuket town which is the capital of the island, and it was minging, smelt funny and had rats running
about! Luckily this was only the outside, and for 1 night so we stayed in our nice hotel until the next morning where we took a ferry to Phi Phi. We had the option of staying in the main bit but in some very dubious accommodation or blowing the budget and staying in a quiet bit of Phi Phi in a nice hotel. We chose the later, and after a nice ferry crossing (i.e me not puking) and sunbathing on the top deckwe got to Phi Phi. The journey took about 90 minutes, and then we stayed on an extra 35 minutes for the ferry to get round the island. We then had to transfer into a longtail boat which I nearly had a tantrum about having to get into due to it looking very unsafe, and not being allowed to carry our bags on we sailed to our resort. The whole time I was panicking about our bags, I know it sounds a bit trivial, but these bags have our ENTIRE lives in, and wed be stuffed if they got lost.
Upon arrival we were greeted with delicious fruit cocktails and cold wet towels and told to sit in
the bar whilst a member of staff saw to our check in. We sat there enjoying the service whilst I kept my eyes out for the bags! That evening we went to a hilltop bar and watched the sunset and ate dinner on the beach. We got sporty at this hotel and played tennis, went swimming, snorkeling and a bit of table tennis. We also went on quite an eventful excursion...
Maya bay is the beach where much of the filming took place for the film the beach and sophie thought it was a good idea to have a boat cruise around the islands as there wasnt much going on in resort. As soon as I met the boat driver I had a funny feeling about it. We hired our own longtail boat and the driver told us to get in, there was a metal device hooked over the side of the boat which was meant to be some kind of ladder into the boat. Sophie got in fine and I struggled a bit eventually rolling into it and out of the corner of my eye I saw the driver sniggering. We set sail and just our luck the
weather turned and the waves got larger and choppier. At this point the boat driver thought he was Lewis Hamilton and started zooming over the waves. All I had running through my mind was that this little wooden half rotten boat probably wasnt built for conditions like this and I wondered if wed get out alive! 40 mins into the journey we arrived at Maya bay. As beautiful as it was it was packed full of boats and people and our delightful man had trouble mooring. At this point both Soph and I felt sick as dogs and were dying to get out so we could sit on still land for a minute. The imbecile couldnt moor and decided to leave without explaining what we were doing. I felt that I was going to hurl at any moment so I asked Soph to tell him to take us back to the hotel. He diverted us as I was very ill indeed, and made us go around another bay. Once we finally got back to the hotel we complained.
After 3 nights in Phi Phi it was time for us to leave and we got the longtail boat to transfer
us to a ferry to take us back to the main town and pier. We then got a different boat to take us to Krabi. This ferry was a bit of a shambles as the weather was very bad so every surface was slipperly. We had to get our bags on and off the boat ourselves (the other boats do it for us as it is safer) and when it was time to disembark we had to climb up a near vertical ramp which I nearly fell backwards down about 10 times. Krabi town was dark dingy and also a bit smelly (reoccurring theme here!) so we decided upon arrival that we didnt want to stay. We asked the hotel to book us a bus/boat ticket to Langkawi which was a long journey into Malaysia.
At 7am the next morning we got into a minivan and set out for Langkawi. We didnt know how we were going to get there exactly, how long it would take or any other details. We sat in the minivan for about 4 and a half hours with the driver stopping occassionally to go for a wee or to buy petrol with no explaination,
and no offer for us to get out either. Eventually we got to a southern city called Hat yai where we boarded another minivan to take us to Satan pier where we could get a ferry. The ferry was about an hour and this time I wasnt sick - yay! So this brought us to Malaysia, goodbye Thailand after 6 weeks.
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