Phuket

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After a late night of staying up with the group to say goodbye (they left at 5 am), I got three hours of sleep before meeting up with Emma and Erin. We headed straight to the travel agency to finalize the plans that they had already worked out. Afterwards, we had a relaxing day in Bangkok and just walked around looking at the street vendors. We tried to bargain for fisherman pants, but it seems like my bartering skills had worked better in Cambodia than here. Later that afternoon, a mini-van picked us up from the hotel Emma and Erin were staying at, and thus began my first experience with transportation in Thailand.

I knew that it was a long bus ride (approx. 13 hours), but I figured it would be just one bus ride, so I could just sleep the whole night. However, I was soon to find out things worked differently in Bangkok. First, we arrived at a main bus station, where people were converging before heading to many different locations in the South. As it poured outside, we waited in a little awning for at least 45 minutes before getting onto a bigger bus. But it wasn't smooth sailing from than on. After a noisy ride where I was stuck sitting close to a gang of 15 year old boys from UK who chattered away none stop, we stopped at midnight. They told us that we had to wait half an hour before switching to another bus. It turns out we went back on the same bus after 45 minutes, and onwards towards Phuket! We stopped again at 5 am for an hour before going to another bus. I found out later that Thai transportations are notorious for stopping at random places for no reason other than for us to buy stuff from their friends' restaurants. Eventually, we arrived in Pantong Beach, Phuket in the afternoon. I was exhausted from the lack of sleep and all the bus switching. We took a short nap before venturing out to the beach.
Our first two days in Phuket were met with clouds, strong wind (so strong there were red flags on the beach to warn swimmers), and thunder storms. Although the beach was still beautiful, it was not quite the same colour as the postcards. We spent a day at Patong Beach, and then another at Kata Beach. At both beaches, there were surprisingly not a lot of tourists. Although Patong is definitely more neon-lit, it was not over crowded. Kata beach was gorgeous. It is much smaller than Patong, sandwiched in a little bay. When we arrived there, the sun had temporarily broken through the clouds, lighting up the waves. We had dinner right on the beach and watched the sunset.

After two days of beach bumming, we decided to join a day tour around Phuket. Because the weather hadn't been that great, we decided it was safer to do a city tour. The tour included going to see a rubber trees being tapped, visiting a cashew factory (and eating a lot of samples!), seeing a pineapple plantation, a trek through the jungle, and a canoe ride around a mangrove forest. The cashew factory had more flavours of cashews than I imagined possible! All the samples we were given basically became lunch for us. During the jungle trek, we hiked to a small water fall, and also visited a gibbons rehabilitation centre. The afternoon ended with a relaxing canoe ride around islands of mangrove forests. We even saw "walking fish", a type of fish that could crawl on land with its front gils. Although the trip was a little cheesy and we were with middle aged people, it was good wholesome family fun! (and made us appreciate being young more!)

During our last day in Phuket, the sun finally broke out! We were enticed to take a dip in the ocean before going back to the hotel to rest up for our trip to Krabi!

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