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Published: July 30th 2006
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scary hotel in Phuket Town
hotel featured in movie The Beach-stayed there purely out of desperation A few days ago (sorry, I'm having a real problem remember days and dates) we arrived to Phuket town in the evening after having our flight from Bangkok delayed. Out of desperation we spent the night in a guesthouse called "On On" that Wendy later recognized as being in the movie The Beach. Walking up the shoddy stairs made you feel like you would fall right through them, and the building must have been a warehouse in its previous life judging from the stark run-down narrow but high creepy hallways. The room was clean at least, but poorly lit with almost no natural light.
After our night in Phuket town, we took the bus to Kata Beach over on the west coast of Thailand-a 45 minute ride. There we hunted around and found a 4-day open water scuba dive course to start the next day. We were given our manuals and told to read through page 175 for class. I was about 50 pages short when I feel asleep not that it mattered since we ended up watching videos on each chapter any way. Alas my short-lived diving career ended after a few hours of videos and an hour in
Sunset
Karen Beach the pool. Under water they had us breathe with the tank, which I could do but I didn't feel that comfortable with. The next step was to take out the regulator (the thing you breathe into) under the water to simulate losing it, blow a stream of continuous bubbles, and find the regulator, stick it back in your mouth, and blow into it before resuming normal breathing. As I watched the other 3 people in my group each do the step with no problem, I felt a growing sense of panic. What if it took me awhile to find my regulator floating in the water? What if I ran out of air or the regular didn't work? When it was my turn I took out the regulator, blew a stream of bubbles, found my regulator eventually but when I did I felt like I had no air left, so I instinctively sucked in instead of blowing out first to clear the water and sucked a bunch of water into my lungs. I emerged coughing and panicked, and started hyperventilating. It took me awhile to calm down. It turned out that my stream of bubbles was too much which was why
Money CAN buy everything
old white guys with Thai prostitutes, Kata Beach I ran out of air. I decided to give it another try, and I ended up being able to do it but later I choked up again and the instructor sent me home saying it wasn't safe for me to continue after having that happen twice.
Yesterday I took a surfing lesson from a 17-year-old Somalian guy down at the beach. It was really laid-back, and though I paid for 2 hours it ended up being almost 3 since we took breaks and he wasn't in a rush. The weather was gorgeous-unlike today since it's pouring. After the lesson, I hung out at the surf school kiosk and met this girl from Boston who's been teaching English here for the last 9 months and is friends with the surf school boys-maybe because they share a love for Thai pop music. A couple of other foreigners who live here also came by and hung out for awhile.
Last night we heading over to Patong Beach, which we had been hearing about since arriving in Phuket since it's the major party destination and notorious for their bar scene with drag queens and loads of prostitutes. The one main street with
the bars and clubs was lit up like Vegas and after paying a few dollars to have our pictures taken with some transvestites that really looked like women, we stopped at a bar to watch some lady boy dancing up on pedstals. Some of the dancers were really beautiful and there was no way I would be able to tell that they were men if I saw them on the street. Unfortunately, I got a flash of way more body parts that I wanted to see. An occasional breast was fine, but I was flashed by something even more intimate, and I have to say that surgery is absolutely amazing. It looked normal. The most bizarre thing about the night scene was how there were whole families walking around (Muslim, European, you name it) with small children, snapping pics with the nearly naked lady boys. At one point I saw a father try to put his 5-year-old son up on the pedastal to dance with the transvestites but the boy started wiggling and crying so his dad pulled him back. Weird.
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