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Published: November 15th 2007
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Getting up at a specifically set time is a chore in Thailand. Or generally when you are on vacation. But nonetheless, we set the alarm to 9am so that we had about 3 hrs to freshen up, pack up our last few belongings, have breakfast at the resort, take the last few pictures and check out of our room. We had set an appointment the night before at the beauty salon opposite our resort to get ourselves 'party beach' worthy...aka...manicure/pedicure/waxing/whatnot. I just remembered that I got splashed by murky water that was on the road, courtesy of some maniac driving past (pretty hard to figure out which one as they're all like that). That was some experience coz I also remember myself having some weird reaction along the lines of "WAHHHH!" and the entire street of people repeating after me. Anyways got that done after leaving our bags with the Phuket Sawasdee Guesthouse that's across the road. At approximately 1.30pm, we collected our belongings, got onto the nearest tuktuk and made our way to patong beach, passing kata, karon and freedom beaches along the way. I'd say that the next time I travel to Phuket, I'd book myself a few days
at Karon Beach as well, that's a gem. Just an endless mile of pristine white sand and the most appealing part was that it as rather less inhabited as opposed to Patong and Kata and you could actually find strips on the beach that look like it hasn't had human contact before. Lots to say for a beach in Thailand huh?
While approaching Patong beach, I realised that more developments have undergone/were undergoing developments so it was pretty hard to find our guesthouse initially. From the last time I had been there, in October 2006, I had clearly remembered a 7-11 situated along the main road, in front of the street which Little Buddha Guesthouse was located at, and I also didn't remember there being too many 7-11s around so I confidently told the tuktuk driver to bring us to Soi Nanai 1, near 7-11. Turns out, that's not a very brave thing to say as now there're almost 7/8 more 7-11s along that small condensed area, and there're actually more roads with almost the same name, soi nanai, soi nani 1, soi nani 2 etc etc. So after making about 5 wrong stops, we arrived at Little Buddha,
didn't do much there since we decided to dump our bags and head straight to the beach. The advantage of patong beach is that the entire beach, shopping, dining and entertainment district is all converged into one area, and you don't have to worry about spending money on transport back and forth. The guesthouse being walking distance from the beach, we hardly spent any money on transport. One thing I'd recommend in phuket would be to take the motorcycle taxi, basically bikes on which guys who wear these blue vests could take up to 2 people around for a mere 40 baht. Or rent your own bike or scooter if you know how to maneuver one.
The first thing I noticed was this MASSIVE new mall called Jungceylon (pronounced jung-si-lawn) that they have built in the midst of everything, it was like a scene right out of the busiest district back home in Singapore. That kinda felt weird at first, but it made the journey back and forth from the beach that much safer as it was situated in between our guesthouse and the beach, when a year or 2 ago there was a deserted, dark lil muddy track.
The mall's got everything you would need to get, plus it felt good to shop sometimes without having the option of bargaining for a cheaper price. Sometimes, even if you think the price the small stall owners give is reasonable, some weird force would push you into opening your mouth to say "What's your best price?" or "If you give me 3 for that price, I'll take it right now". So naturally when we wanted a break from that, we could turn to Jungceylon =) Past that, the only difference on Patong beach and the smaller streets like rat-u-thit and soi bangla would be more of the same looking stall having cropped up wherever an empty space could be found. Same old fake designer goods, same old sleazy white men with thai girls either straddling them or giving them a 'maaaasaaaaaage', same old overcrowded beach, same old brilliant food and sunsets.I'll be back with more on the good, the bad and the ugly of Patong Beach in a while!
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