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Published: August 8th 2007
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Which Thai beach to choose? After successfully obtaining our Visas for Vietnam in 24 hours in Bangkok, our immediate task was to choose and book a Thai island to go to for 5 days, before later starting our trip around Cambodia and Vietnam. The choice of Phuket may sound an obviously predictable one, but it came down to a combination of budget (Phuket was cheaper to get to than Ko Samui) and the fact that we'd already stayed in Leading Hotel of the World, 6 star luxury on Krabi on our honeymoon, so going back would be a huge let down.
After loving the tranquility of Langkawi we were keen to avoid beered up, party town of Patong on Phuket, so chose Kata, which appeared a good balance between quiet and availability of cheap accommodation and eats.
Kata/Karon Let's get this straight from the outset: Phuket is very commercialised and overdeveloped close to the point of ruining it as a picture postcard perfect beach gettaway. There is the usual aray of tat selling shops and an abundance of Tailors trying to woo you in for a fine, "special price today, just for you sir" suit. That said, we
still thoroughly enjoyed it.
Kata was much livelier than we'd expected. In fact, I'm amazed that guys haven't discovered this place as a stag do venue - it would be perfect, but please don't as this really would spoil the place! There were seemingly more bars than tourists, with beautiful young Thais trying to entice you in. Walking past these bars to get anywhere else, was always entertaining, with some of the girls with straight to the point chat up lines like "I need some man tonight!".
It was back to backpacker mode - none of this late internet deals on 4 star hotels, like in Langkawi (blog :
Escape to Paradise - Langkawi). We stayed at the 3rd Street Cafe guesthouse on Kata night bazaar. Surrounded by bars, this did make it a little noisey, so again the ear plugs came in great use! Other than that though, this place is more like a boutique hotel than a guesthouse. As we got to know Kata, we soon found there was plenty of alternative guest house accomodation that would have been cheaper - although not as nice.
Kata itself was a hotch-potch of slightly drab, run down looking buildings, intermingled with
restaurants and resorts that have had a bit more money spent on them. Many of the restaurants had slightly strange mixes of Western and Thai food, amongst other cuisines. We went for the more traditional Thai sounding menus and didn't want much to do with restaurants offering home away from home food, such as Spag bol! This often meant we were eating in restaurants that were more like the locals' homes that they'd opened their front rooms out to anyone who cared to eat and watch Thai TV with them and keep the younger members of their family entertained. I ended up spending one meal zooming a matchbox car to and throw across the restaurant floor with one such 5 year old. These were superb places to eat - friendly, welcoming and above all, genuine, traditional and tasty Thai food for about GBP 1 per main dish. We had some great times in such places, chatting with locals and keeping their kids entertained!
As for beach life, well, we had a choice of 3 beaches : Kata, Karon and Kata Noi. We split our time fairly equally between Kata and Karon, both within 10 minutes walk from our guesthouse
in either direction. Kata is the slightly more photogenic of the two.
Tsunami I can't close this blog without a word on the Tsunami. Cerainly we saw little sign of what happened here 2 and a bit years ago, but there were lots of seemingly newly developed looking sites - resorts, restaurants etc. Having not been to Phuket before it's hard to identify how much the place has changed. Strangely though, despite having been to equally badly affected Krabi just 8 months after catastrophe, I thought more about the effects of the Tsunami here. There was quite a lot of debris on parts of the beaches, where ocassionally you'd see a child's shoe washed up and wonder what story it might tell. Certainly though, I was never in fear of my safety, just respectfully thoughtful of what must have happened here. Ironically though, there was another Sumatra earthquake of 4.9 on our last day in Phuket, that made Bangkok Post front page news because it was felt and caused some panic in Phuket. There was no damage and we were blissfully unaware. The island does now have an early warning system and there was evidence of evacuation routes at
the beaches and towns - the only visible legacy of what happened.
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