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Published: February 25th 2010
Busy Beach
and this was supposed to be Phukets quiet pretty beach!!Sorry we haven’t posted for a while but, as you can read here, we haven’t really done a lot and it’s been great as we at last have our holiday within our holiday. We caught a cheap flight from Bangkok to Phuket, having only really heard of the island via Holiday programmes and coverage of the Tsunami. Our main reason for staying on Phuket, apart from checking it out was that Chris wanted to look at the possibility of getting a knee op, as Thailand is a popular destination for medical tourism. We booked into a little hotel in Phuket Town in the centre of the island and set off to check out the beaches. After asking advice we were told that Kata Beach was the prettiest and quietest, so we hopped on a songthaew (local bus). The songthaews run from all the beaches into Phuket Town and so a visit to a different beach, while you are in Patong for example, often requires a rickety couple of hours; no wonder people don’t. We arrived in Kata, thinking that we’d find a little secluded spot and settle in for the day....doh!! It was absolutely packed with wall to wall sunbeds and
Ao Nang
not a bad view while on the Ferry parasols. Admittedly it was a pretty beach, although somewhat spoilt, and we found a patch of spare golden sand and started to top up the vitamins. After a short swim in the Andaman Sea we decided that Phuket wasn’t what we were looking for. Apparently Patong, the main beach is even worse. We decided get the songthaew back and explore a bit of Phuket old town. It has some nice old markets, shops and generally while not quaint is a pleasant base. Thanks, yet again, to “Rough Guide” we found a little Italian restauraunt, La Gaetana, tucked away on a busy street and enjoyed a really nice diversion from the £1 daily food budget. Lisa says the chocolate desert was to die for and, according to the extremely attentive owner, contained absolutely no calories - not sure he was being quite truthful but who cares.
The following day we visited the Phuket International Hospital, chosen after fairly intensive internet research. The sequence of events were pretty standard, register, wait in A&E, see Consultant (not triage), get X-rays, see Consultant again, look at X-rays, and discuss possible treatment options. When I say pretty standard it obviously differs from the NHS,
Island Home
basic but we called it home for a week. the hospital is spotlessly clean, the waiting times are no longer than 10 minutes for anything and it is incredibly cheap. The whole process, registration, 3 X-Rays, two consultations with the orthopaedic surgeon & prescription medicine took 45 minutes and cost £28. Even the full reconstructive knee surgery package, which was discussed, only cost about £6000. I wonder on what the millions given to the NHS by this profligate government has been spent? The trip also convinced us not to hire a moped/motorbike as there were a large number of, what appeared to be holidaymakers, sporting various injuries associated with coming off a bike. Later in the day we visited the immigration office because we realised that 30 days on our Visa was not going to be enough only to discover that we didn’t have a visa, only a visa waiver, so it couldn’t be extended for more than 7 days, ooops. Time to reshape the plan we don’t have again then.
We weren’t sad to leave Phuket behind and after talking to various people and consulting the Rough Guide bible we decided to try Koh Lanta. The ferry journey from Phuket is mad, you think you are catching
Long Beach
and we walked it every day (had to make room for the beer!!) a boat to another island but you are catching a boat to the middle of the Andaman Sea, when suddenly you dock with 3 other boats and baggage (not labelled) is thrown from one to another, then hordes of people try to hop one way or the other and all you can do is hope that you are on the right boat (and this can happen a couple of times) during the journey. Finally on arriving in Ban Sala Din, the ‘capital’ of Koh Lanta, we hoped that our booking, or more like tentative arrangement between hotel receptionist who didn’t speak English apart from “Hello” and Brit whose Thai was limited to “Sawat dii khrap”, was okay. Sure enough in amongst the throngs of offerings of “Taxi, Taxi” & “where you stay mister” and “special massage mister”, oh no that was Bangkok, was a couple of locals holding a sign saying “Sea Pearl Lanta Cottages”. After a short but painful journey stuffed in the back of a pick-up we arrived at a couple of rows of thatched huts. Checking in we found out it takes about 30 seconds at a slow walk to get us from our hut to a
beautiful, golden white, 3Km long beach, great start. The hut was a, well basic, en-suite/wet room with cold water shower, big wooden bed, mossie net and fan. This is the Thailand we were looking for. Straight into the sea to cool off and then stretched out on the very warm sand, the stresses and strains of constant travelling (yep it really does happen) started to melt away. We were staying on Ao Phra-Ae Beach (or long beach) on the western side of the island and at 6.30 we sat to watch the sky turn from blue to orange to a beautiful deep red and the sun dropped suddenly over the horizon to let the man in the moon have his time - lovely. Our 2 night stay was quickly extended to 7.
There are about 10 bars/restaurants within about 10 minutes walk along the beach, all offering very nice, very cheap Thai fare, we would try a few. We got chatting and laughing with a really nice couple from Canada on the boat, Carmen and Steen, and as always on this trip we let good company enhance it. Speaking of company, mentioned earlier in these mutterings was a couple
Massage Parlour
given it's location on the beach, nothing untoward is likely !! of smashing young lads from London, Mark and Mark, we met them on the first day of our trip around New Zealand, spent a great few days on the trip with them, then bumped into them in a Sydney pub, well, unbelievably, walking along the beach on our first day, who should we bump into, yep, sometimes coincidences are too incredible to believe. It was great to catch up and now have a sneaking suspicion that this may not be the end of that story.
So the reason for our blogging tardiness, well our day consisted of getting up at the crack of 10 o’clock for brekkie followed by the long trek to the beach, two hours grilling to medium rare, interrupted every 15 minutes with refreshing dips in the 25 degree Andaman Sea. Pad Thai or steamed rice with chicken for lunch followed by a siesta, a couple of hours in the shade or a lovely Thai massage. Two more hours in the late afternoon grilling to medium well, an hour’s walk along the beach in the cool of the dusk, swiftly followed by an excursion to try the food and beverages of a new hostelry with our
New Friends
Someone else to visit on the next tour, Canada this time. newly found drinking companions, all the time being entertained by mad young thai chaps swinging burning sticks around their heads, now where in that schedule would we have time to write??
Seriously for a moment, if you are heading this way, independent is great, there are loads of lovely islands with great beaches, great people, great food, don’t waste time on Phuket sitting in a resort on a too crowded beach surrounded by Maccy D’s & lager louts. Spend the extra couple of hours moving on, you won’t be disappointed.
Lisa and Carmen decided that a day to trip to the town was in order, though how the hell they managed to spend 5 hours shopping in a village the size of Sutton Poyntz is frankly, beyond their partners. Oh well. We also decided that as we now weren’t going to stay on Koh Phi Phi, we should at least see it so went on a day trip that combined a trip to “The Beach” beach (Ao Maya on Koh Phi Phi Leh) to see where Leo cavorted and to do some snorkelling in the beautiful crystal clear waters, where the coral and fish on display were as
colourful as anything we have ever seen. After this a trip to see the Viking caves, wrongly named for its scratchy 400 year old paintings of Chinese junks on the cave walls, but more famous for its huge rickety bamboo scaffolding stretching hundreds of metres up into the cave roof. Using these the intrepid ‘chao ley’ harvesters spend their days collecting the unfeasibly valuable birds’ nests made by the tiny sea-swifts on the rock face for export to specialist Chinese restaurants all over the world. We then visited “Monkey Island” a funny little beach where the local monkeys live on the beach, run in the sea to meet the tourist speedboats. At first this seemed like an amusing diversion but then you quickly realise that they are ‘hooked’ on the offerings thrown from the boats, one little fellow drinking a bottle of fanta brought it home to you that it was actually quite sad.
On to the main event, Koh Phi Phi Don. It is a stunning island, very dramatic with two large hilly halves of the island connected by a sandy isthmus. This is the much photographed double bays of Ao Ton Sai and Ao Lo Dalum (or
Hey Phi Phi
Looking down on the village the village). This is where Phi Phi’s kicking nightlife and most of its hotels are centred, not for us but if you are young I can think of worse places. We climbed the very steep hill to the eastern hills and the viewpoint and, while it was a tough climb in the baking midday sun, the view of the beautiful crescent shaped bays made it all worthwhile. From here it becomes obvious why the effects of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami were so devastating as the 5m high wave crashed in from the north over the hotels, restaurants and hundreds of sunbathers while a 3m high wave came in from the south right through the pier & village. Meeting in the middle 70% of the buildings were obliterated and over 2000 people lost their lives. A sobering thought as the low lying land remains at the mercy of Mother Nature and 6 years later the rebuilding is still proceeding. All too soon our day out was over, there is no doubt it is a lovely island but excessive tourism has a downside; we’re glad we chose Koh Lanta.
Dinner with Tristan and Lucy, a young couple on holiday from
Hampshire, and Jacob and Steena, a couple of fellow travellers from Norway, rounded off a lovely, relaxing week recharging the batteries. It’s nice to just stop every now and again and it’s easy to get carried away, feeling you have to do things every day when you are on a trip like this, guess what, you don’t. Onwards to explore James Bond Island to see if Scaramanga is home.
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