Phuket, Thailand

Days: 47-52
Miles Traveled: 24,187
Countries Visited: 10 (includes the separate 3 week trip to China in April)

As you probably determined from my previous blog post, Bangkok was one of my least favorite places of this trip so far - well, now Phuket is one of my favorite places!


Beautiful beaches, warm and clear waters, unbelievably friendly people, fantastic scenery all around you, and everything is dirt cheap! What more could you want?

For starters, I have had a couple of people ask me about the pronunciation of Phuket - it's Poo-ket or Poo-ged...so get your minds out of the gutter! It's an island off the coast of Thailand and therefore it's actually Koh Phuket or Ko Phuket (Koh or Ko means island in Thai)...just like "Operation Koh Samui" - bonus points to anyone that can name the film (except Geb, the human movie quote database).

The island has 8 or 9 small villages and a couple of larger towns on it one of which is Phuket Town. I mainly stayed on the west coast of the island but ventured over to the east coast (where Phuket Town is) one day.

I have to apologize in advance for the lack of pictures in this post but I'm having some camera problems. I have two memory cards that I'm swapping out every few days and while I can see all the photos on my camera, I cannot download the pictures from one of the memory cards onto my iPad (I even tried a computer in the hotel's business center but no luck). Hopefully I'll be able to figure it out at some point and post the other pictures. Needless to say I've stopped using that card.





I stayed at the Dusit Thani Laguna Resort (pic of hotel and view from my hotel room patio) which is part of a larger complex of 5 luxury resorts located in the northern half of the island. If you want seclusion, your own golf course, no touts bothering you every 30 seconds, and relatively empty beaches - this is your place! However, if you're looking for the "party beach" you're only about 20 minutes from Patong which is the crazy tourist town - also known as the "red light district" of Phuket. I spent a few days and more than a couple of nights in Patong but enjoyed being up at the Dusit for several rounds of golf and lazy days on the beach watching the sunset. On Patong Beach, you're attacked by touts selling everything from massages and tattoos to t-shirts and little wood carved elephants. It's more than a little annoying. Some sell cold drinks...and will even do your laundry!


If you need to relax a little yourself, turn your speakers on and watch this short video of the sunset. I'm sitting about 20 yards from my hotel room patio while shooting this video.

While on Patong Beach, I had to partake in all the touristy stuff - parasailing (which I haven't done in 20+ years), rode an elephant, and went jet skiing. Interestingly, it is illegal to jet ski on the beaches in Phuket - but on the beach there are probably 30-40 jet skis lined up with twice as many touts trying to get you. Apparently the laws are loosely enforced here. I think I was only 9 or 10 in Mexico the last time I went parasailing so that was a fun little diversion. (The pictures from this day are on the bad memory card - sorry!)


(Patong Beach on a different day...it was obviously cloudy)
As part of the deal with my hotel, I got unlimited free golf which sounds awesome if you're prepared for it. First, I obviously don't have my clubs with me so after renting clubs, shoes, buying golf balls ($27 USD for a sleeve of balls...yes for 3 golf balls!), and paying the caddie it came to about $290 USD for 18 holes. So much for "unlimited free golf"...they know what they're doing! I still played twice at the Laguna Phuket Golf Club which was a nice golf course but fairly short (6,200 yds) and fairly easy. Funny thing with the caddies - they're all women, barely speak English with the exception of "dogleg right" and they don't bother helping you read the greens other than "it goes left"...yeah, thanks! I should have guessed they'd be bad when the cost to rent the shoes for 18 holes was 300 baht (~$9 USD) and the cost for the caddie for 18 holes was only 250 baht (~$7.50 USD). One of the caddies in our group spoke a little more English and told us there were 240 caddies at this course (all women) and it's a lottery for them based on how much play they get each day. She said she only works 1 round a day and then usually has 2-3 days off before her "number" comes up again in the lottery. She was probably just trying to make us feel bad for her so that we'd tip more...we fell for it anyway! (pictures of the course are also on my other memory card)

The recent terrorist attacks in the rest of Thailand definitely had an impact on the number of people in Phuket as well. The beaches near the Laguna were all but deserted.


Patong had a few more tourists, but even so you could look into most restaurants during what should be peak hours and only see 3-4 tables taken and 30-40 empty tables...at every restaurant!

The food, however, was fantastic - everything from the higher-end restaurants to the street vendors. Some of the street vendors sell fresh fruit - I quickly fell in love with two fruits in particular.


The rambutan (the red hairy looking thing) was very tasty - a little sweet, a little sour and very juicy! You can buy them from the street vendors for 10 baht each, but with a little bargaining I was getting them 5 for 20 baht (about 12 cents each). For all I know, I'm probably still getting ripped off! The other fruit I really liked were these tiny little bananas. I'm not sure if they have a special name, but they have a stronger flavor than a regular banana. Same banana taste - just a lot stronger. The first two mornings, I had a bowl of fruit in my hotel room with some apples, oranges, and these little bananas. On the third day I saw the fruit lady restocking the bowls and she had rambutan in her cart so I asked if I could trade in two apples and two oranges for more rambutan and the little bananas. She had no problem with it. On days four, five and six when I came back to the room in the afternoon my bowl was filled with just these two fruits...nice! It's the little things that make for great service...both figuratively and literally!

If you read my previous post, you saw that I was disappointed with the cleanliness of Bangkok. While there was still a lot of poverty in Phuket, it was very clean, no bad odors, and there was the pride again that I saw throughout the rest of Asia. I'm not sure what it is about Bangkok - but I still can't believe how bad it was there.

I forgot to post one picture on my Bangkok post. As I was walking through one of the markets, I came across this gal selling teeth - individual teeth, bridge work, dentures, etc. Apparently there's a market for this??


Overall, I loved Phuket and would definitely want to go back if the opportunity ever comes again. Next stop is Dubai which should be fun because I was there 4 years ago and would love to see how things have changed in those 4 years - especially now that the government is basically bankrupt compared to the 20%+ GDP growth they were experiencing the last time I was there.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Choeng Thale,Thailand