20 Oct 2006 - Arriving in Phuket

Arriving in Phuket
The flight to Phuket was uneventful except for this momentous thing that happened – Dion spoke to his neighbour. This is ground-breaking news because he likes to be left alone to read – I'm more the socialiser.

When we arrived at the airport, I was very pleased to see that there were ATMs in the airport building so I immediately withdrew 4000 thai baht (with the exchange rate, this worked out to about R900).

The tour operators (Tour East) were easy to find outside the terminal building in their navy pants and green and white shirts. We'd been told on our itinerary to look out for them.

Unfortunately, all the smokers were also outside. I keep forgetting how many people smoke because at home, we're very rarely with smokers. None of our friends smoke so it's really weird for me. Anyway, we set off shortly in a lovely air-conditioned minibus with 2 other couples.

Some parts of Phuket reminded us of Margate in KZN. Typical beach resort town.

Hotel
Our hotel was aptly named Tropical Garden Resort. It looked like we lived in the jungle. Lots of beautiful, lush green vegetation everywhere with big palm trees and lots of brown wooden furniture.

The showers around the pool are covered by ferns and so are all the pipes and equipment so it's as if the pool was just built right in the middle of a tropical jungle. Lovely.

We were escorted to our room which was 6 floors up (but first there are a couple of staircases anyway so who knows how many flights of stairs in total). Those poor porters deserved a HUGE tip after hauling our luggage up all those steps.

It turns out that the gorgeous green suitcase is not very practical. While it is smallish in dimensions, when packed, it is very high so looks quite fat. Thank God for the wheels on that thing.

Room
The room was just as beautiful as the pictures I posted earlier on the blog. It had a tiled floor which was lovely and cool to walk on.

Our perfect timing ensured that we arrived smack bang in the middle of a power outage on the main street so we had no aircon.

I was so hot and tired that I unpacked, undressed and (Dion says) fell asleep for 3 hours. He also slept for some of the time.

When we woke, we showered, dressed and attended to our priorities – buying our internet card so we could do banking and pay some money into the credit card. I couldn't do it from home because I was so busy prepaying bills like Telkom, water and lights, etc that I exceeded my balances on the payment limits.

That done, we had cash, stocked-up credit card and we were ready to shop!

Walking around on the first afternoon & evening
It was very clear that we'd need more shorts because it was so hot. I'm not a person who gets hot easily but I was sweating buckets! However, everything was name brand and I'm just not a name brand kind of gal. I know I'm weird but that's me. I actually don't like the look of names on clothes unless small and discreet. Very.

So the search continues.

We bought lots of water, purple-sequinned slops (look very glamorous) and some souvenirs. We made a list of people while we were waiting for supper to arrive and very quickly we had 40 on our list.

Speaking of supper, literally every 2nd or 3rd shop is a restaurant. The hostess stands outside trying to get people to come in and eat, or at least come look at the menu. Aside from restaurants, the main businesses are massage parlous, tailors and clothing stores.

On our walk through the town, we identified a number of places we'd like to eat at – a place right on the beachfront and another place I called the Happy Place (lots of lights and bright coloured table cloths).

Supper
We eventually decided to eat at Natalie's – I was sold the minute the hostess said "free salad and fruit between 6 and 10". We had salad with lettuce, cucumber, cabbage, tomato, carrots and pineapple (M only). For main course, D had beef noodles with soya sauce and I had Thai style rice with chicken. Both delicious.

We had Fantas – strawberry and orange – and fresh pineapple and watermelon for dessert. Lovely and healthy.

Entire meal cost us Thai Baht 280 (about R60)

On our way back, we collected lots of tour brochures. I read through each, noting down all the salient points, so that we were prepared for our meeting with the tour guide the next day.