June 13, Phuket: Mom and Dad, Sorry in Advance (Signed, Alex and Mike)

With a decent night’s sleep behind us, we were feeling a little adventurous. Well, sort of. This requires explaining. There’s a lot to do on Phuket – nature tours, fishing charters, boat rides, etc., and we’ve signed up for some of that – like a canoe trip through some caves on the 14th. But the common way of getting around here – other than a tuk-tuk, which is like a small taxi – is on a moto. And Alex and I decided to bite the bullet and rent a moto or two and check out the rest of Phuket Island that’s not Karon Beach. Chris wisely chose to spend the day catching up on a book beachside and poolside.

We had several obstacles to successfully obeying traffic laws:

1. Driving here occurs on the LEFT side of the road.
2. Many road signs are completely in Thai, which is entirely unreadable.
3. The prevailing traffic pattern makes Chinese drivers look sane – passing into blind hairpin turns on a tree-covered hill with nothing but the ocean below is the norm, along with there-are-only-two-lanes-but-the-traffic-is-four-cars-wide driving.
4. We had driven a moto a collective three, maybe four times.
5. Spontaneous rainforest-like downpours rendering roads wet and dangerous.
6. And, perhaps a catch-all category, my continuous propensity to find the absolute worst-case scenario involving law enforcement/other authority figures.

However, despite what we may call overwhelming odds, we made it. And how. There was only one breakdown, and it was my bike’s inability to exceed 50 km/h. (We remedied that problem pretty quickly.) Anyway, I don’t have a map of Phuket handy, but if you do a quick search on Google, you can see that Karon Beach is on the western side of the island. We drove south, to the southern-most point, and then rounded the corner to Rawai beach, which offered incredible lookouts. We stopped for lunch in Rawai; here’s a couple of pictures:



Tough living, as you can see. Anyway, we continued along the eastern side of the island and reached a lookout near Cape Panwa, which was almost exactly across the island from Karon (on the opposite side), and climbed a “lookout tower.”



This place offered absolutely stunning views. Hopefully this works – I took a video there, and I’m going to try and post it here:



We got back from our bike adventures (returned the bikes unharmed, parents), and re-joined Chris on the beach. It was raining around sunset time, which made it tough to take photos, but we took in the sunset through the rain and then had a couple of cocktails at the swim-up bar before dinner. One round was made out of a coconut, and the other out of a pineapple. Pretty impressive stuff.

We showered, and then climbed into a tuk-tuk and took the short (3-5 kilmeters) trip to Patong, which is the main beach town of Phuket. What followed was absolute mayhem. Basically, on bar-filled streets, Westerners and Thais alike pack the streets like this:

Each bar has its own phalanx of Thai women whose job, rather, duty, it is to get you to fill empty seats at these places. In some cases, they can be quite forceful. Murph was tag-teamed by about three Thai girls in the picture below:


I won’t say too much more, other than to add that there is definitely a seedy side of this town that we thankfully haven’t explored. It’s not uncommon to see 50-something Western men and young Thai girls walking around hand-in-hand. And some of the bars are definitely fronts. But we stayed in the well-lit areas, enjoyed the night in Patong, met some new people, and made it back around 12:30 or so. We’ve got a canoe trip tomorrow to some of the caves found on the smaller islands off the coasts to the north of the island – so we’ll get more up here soon.

Thanks for reading!

Mike