Phuket

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First time I saw this world was in the 90’s, when Ukraine just opened up and started being flooded with chinese, turkish and polish produce, sold on flea markets. My mother bought a purple winter coat, which had a picture of rainbow palm tree stitched on its side pocket, together with the word Phuket – don’t ask me why. I had no idea what it meant, not to mention imagining that I could ever be at this place with its palm trees and bright happy colours.

Phuket is an island, but connected by a bridge to the mainland, so when driving it’s hard to notice when you cross the border between the two. It’s also less than one hour flight fromBangkok, kinda likeAmsterdamfromLondon. Next to us on the flight were sitting an American white lady with her 5 year old daughter, who was fromChina. The girl’s father and brother were inChina, said the lady.

<!---->- <!---->Tell me a noun

<!---->- <!---->What’s that, mommy?

<!---->- <!---->Person, place of thing

<!---->- <!---->Hmmm…. Seatbelt!

<!---->- <!---->Ok, now tell me an adjective

<!---->- <!---->What’s that?

<!---->- <!---->A descriptive word… how do you describe a seatbelt?

<!---->- <!---->Funny!

<!---->- <!---->Ok, and now a verb…

And so on, about a dozen words. Some of them were first in Chinese, and then translated by the girl into English. The lady was writing them down in the appropriate places in a notepad that already had a short story, lacking these few words, printed in it. When all the words are pasted, she would read they story aloud and they both would laugh.



From a tourist point of view, your place on the Phuket island is defined by a beach you hotel is located at. At the airport, after I finally had found a piece of paper saying what hotel we booked, we were bundled into a minibus and the beach holiday commenced. Half way through the bus stopped at a local office, passengers had to get out and tell the lady in the office the address of their hotels. She wrote these down in thai to the driver. First largish beach town, Patong, full of restaurants, thai massage places, tattoo parlours, beach clothes stalls and custom tailor suit shops. Ads are in Thai, English, Russian and Swedish. Turns out we landed on an island invaded by the Russian and Scandinavian tourists, with rare appearance of the Americans, Brits, French, Dutch, Italians and Chinese. We stayed at the Karon beach in the southern part of Phuket, and I swear I have never seen so many Russian-speaking people on the streets – outside ofUkraineandRussiathat is, so many Matreshka-tour companies and Russian menu Available messages. To be fair, fans of smorrebrod’s and other Scandinavian delicacies wouldn’t go around hungry either at Karon. This of course is reflected in the thai restaurant food, it is adapted for Europeans, and the first two days I struggled to get a decently spicy curry or soup. Then we figured out that small eateries are luckily less accommodating and serve cheaper and more authentic food, and we stuck to the two that served great pineapple and banana honey pancakes and killer-spicy curry on request, supplemented by a variety of fruit shakes, teas and alcohol. We didn’t consume the latter, I felt like I would have had a heart attack in this heat if I have had any alcohol at all. Although people at the tables around us usually seemed to have stronger hearts, and livers too for that matter.

I was trying to figure out the way of surviving the heat in large quantities, and this is what I have come up with:

<!---->- <!---->Do. Everything. Slowly. Walk slowly, especially if carrying heavy things. Don’t rush anything and don’t worry to be late. Better late than dead.

<!---->- <!---->Go to the beach soon after sunrise, when the sea is clear, snorkelling is great, the beach is empty and the shadows are long. This way you have a better chance to avoid being sunburnt, although it didn’t work out for us. We got burnt on the first morning of looking at the fish in the nearest rocks, this is just snorkelling, without even lying on the beach as such. Close to sunset the sun is mild too, but the sea is rubbish, mainly due to the tide being out. Another thing is that the sun sets unusually fast, in simply drops vertically into the sea. This paints beautiful pictures in the sky, pink, gold, white and blue, and wonderfully lights up the clouds in the eastern part of the sky. But we could never estimate correctly how much light-time we have left to swim in the rocks, and you really don’t want to get caught up there in the dark.

<!---->- <!---->Hide somewhere between11am and3pm, a room with AC is the best. If not, just find some shadow, and don’t move much. Nap.

<!---->- <!---->Don’t wear dark clothes, and have an umbrella with you for shade. It does make a difference. Bet this is why the ancient greeks were wrapping themselves in white sheets. Bet that was some see-through fabric too.

<!---->- <!---->Don’t sit for long in heavily airconned places. Nice as it seems to begin with, it’s an easy way to catch a cold, and if you start freezing, it’s probably already too late.

Surprisingly for me, the craving for sweets can be satisfied by fruits and fruit shakes with a very small addition of cookies. Thai mangoes are either yellow or green, but never red. Yellow ones are wonderfully soft and sweet, and, as one fruit stall informed its Russian customers (in Russian of course), are impossible to bring back home in one piece. Pineapples, apples and watermelons are a usual story. Then you have the exotic ones – durian, round spikeless leeches, natural short bananas, coconuts (these are massive and are served as a drink, with the top cut off and a straw put in) papayas, guavas (these look like big green apples, and taste somewhere between an apple and a pear, I liked them a lot) and other stuff which I can’t remember the name of, but I took a picture of one stall with all the names neatly written for suspicious customers. Which actually is not such a bad idea at all, it’s funny to eavesdrop on Russian tourists arguing between themselves whether that stuff in a bag is peanuts of beans, and later find out from the shopkeeper it was tamarind. Not that I know what it is for without googling either.

European food is offered at every food place meant for tourists, but I wouldn’t expect a great deal from it. Once Christian has ordered an Italian sausage pizza, and he got something big and round with some pieces of sausage and a lot of cheese on top, but no Italian sausage was place anywhere near this product, not to mention the non-Italian style of this pizza. Pancakes are also different, they are more like a big soft cookie, are made with bananas or pineapples and served with honey. But they are actually nice. If you are lucky, you may come across a crepe stall, get an outrageous banana nutella condenced milk crepe, walk 50 meters to the beach, sit there, chew the crepe and watch the sun dropping into the ocean – what more may you ask for? Omelettes may be Thai style, or European. Thai style is a pocket made of fried egg and filled with some vegs in tomato paste. I think some smallish places were not quite sure what to place in the dessert category apart from fruit shakes, so we have seen garlic bread there and pork fried something there. One of our favourite places had nice icecream and cheesecake though, so we don’t complain. One of the restaurant every night had people queuing, I think because they offered some Russian food that was either decent or cheap or both, but Russian food a-la vareniki is usually not on the menu.

Shopping is the big thing, next only to the beach in Phuket. Souvenirs and clothes are usually reasonably cheap sold by thai vendors, who are asking for a double price to begin with, are happy to half is quickly and don’t buckle any further. The tailor shops are apparently in a different price category, they hire the Indians to drag the customers in. I guess the Indians speak much better English and are much more insistent, indeed to convince a sweating dane to pay 200 bucks for a suit at +35C requires some skill.

<!---->- <!---->Hello sir, where are you from? Can I show you something? Do you want a suit? Nice cheap suits. Siiiiiiirrrrr!!!!

10 meters down the road the monologue repeats by a hiree of a rival shop.



Motorbikes are another big thing, everyone rides them, tourists too. They can be rented everywhere and are usually parked on both sides on the road, in the space which I suspect is meant for walking. So you end up walking on the road, between the parked and racing motorbikes, and day trip vans that overtake on the opposite side of the road. Oh, and be careful not to step on a stray dog, they are many and like to nap by the restaurants. Our first one hour walk along a road like this was quite innerving, but we got used gradually by the end of our 9 days in Phuket. Cats actually are quite rare, and the ones we saw were very thin and unhappy-looking. The rats from the drain ditches quite matched them in size.

The sea is wonderfully warm, sometimes a bit wavy, teaming with fish. Snorkelling even at “our” beach was rewarding, we saw a lot of different fish, even I saw that is by just dipping my face in the water and not diving at all. Most of the time in the mornings the water was clear enough to see for at least 5m, and the speedboats were reasonably far away.

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