A Spell In Phuket

Its 4am on a Monday morning, and I just can’t seem to get myself to feel particularly sleepy at all, so I figured I’d add another installment to this travel blog. I’ve made a promise to knock off at least three days of travel time in blog writing every week here, and hopefully I’ll be able to go even a bit faster. The irony is that this installment right here will probably be three days in one go, but all the better. And sorry, no pictures this time.

So I wake up early in the morning to get ready to get on a bus to go to Phuket.  Guess who’s outside of my hotel? If you guessed that it was Ms. “I Country Music, Like Singing”, give yourself a pat on the back. I did my best in kindly persisting that I was going to go to Phuket without her. I got some simple breakfast stuff from a Starbucks across the street, and a couple of bottles of water, and came back, wondering where the hell my van away from this girl was, awkwardly putting up with strained goodbye conversation for a full fifteen minutes before the van finally pulled up. I hopped in, and we pulled away . . . about twenty feet, before coming to a stop for five minutes, awkwardly entrapping me next to the window just perfectly so that I could do little other than wave goodbye for the entirety of those five minutes.

When we did pull away for real, I sighed to myself and turned around to see my fellow passengers, a couple of old Aussie guys. One asked “She your girlfriend?” To which I could only respond “She sure would like to be.”

I slouched back in my seat and allowed myself to breathe normally, easing into the comfort of the next destination. After a few minutes, I sat up again and surveyed the passengers of the van one more time, noting that each Aussie was sitting beside a Thai woman. So apparently I wasn’t a part of the club.

I talked to them anyway (the guys, that is, the women couldn’t speak English worth a damn, of course), and found out their habits of traveling to Thailand when they can. Pretty standard fare by now, but I have to say its still weird actually talking to those guys, you know, the ones with silver hair and 20 year old Asian girls hanging off their arms, pawing at them from time to time.

Not too terribly long after, I was at a transit point of some sort. I ended up having to transfer buses a couple of times en route to Phuket. It was quite a hassle, in all honesty. The first transfer gave me a whole new round of co-passengers, including a few Thai people making local journeys, and other travelers like myself. In particular, there was one quite self-assured young lady currently living in Central Valley, California, with her own organic farm, and an agricultural science major from somewhere in Middle America who is currently doing some research in Indonesia. As well as an older British guy. The first two ended up in the middle of a long-winded, heated discussion about an appropriate way to treat the entire system of agriculture, pretty much. It made for rather strained travel-talk, and at one point, the hippy residing in Central Valley went so far as to claim that all you have to do is treat the soil right, in response to the other girl’s question “What about genetically modifying (some plant, I don’t remember what) just to fortify it with Vitamin (something or other. Hey, I’m not the Agricultural Scientist here, alright?)?” Whatever the plant was, it was one that definitely did not come with vitamin X. Yet somehow, just taking proper care of the soil is supposed to drastically alter the makeup of anything you grow such that it can confer the ability to have anything we want in it, regardless of what its normally constituted of.

If you’re not following me, it doesn’t matter, as the point was that it was a conversation I don’t think you’d really want to follow. It was made all the more farcical by the fact that the girl doing research in Indonesia gets car sickness, particularly when turned around to face a passenger in a seat behind her, so had to take breaks between arguing this out.

Sensing a need to break things up a bit, I guess, that older British guy decided to speak up at one point, and regale us with the stories of his travels in Cambodia.

That was well enough at first, and he certainly had a somewhat interesting tale. It would’ve been nice if he could have prefaced it with the fact that it would take the better part of half an hour to tell, though. I doubt I was the only one who stopped listening after the fifteen minute mark.

Oh the joys of traveling. And did I mention the girl with a farm in Central Valley was toting a digeridoo? I mean, really? Talk about playing to form.

In any event, our 2.5 hour bus ride to Phuket somehow transformed into a 4+ hour ride. We were pretty frustrated at the three hour mark and the third bus transfer, but there was little to be done about it. Eventually, though, we finally hit the border between the coast of Thailand and the bridge to Phuket (technically an island), and our driver was going two times the speed limit, so at that point it was pretty well assured that we’d get to our final destination fairly soon, and so we did.

We were let out at a proper bus stop, and I brought out my SE Asia guidebook to get an idea of where to go for lodgings. There was a hostel listed that looked on the map as though it were fairly close by, in walking distance, so as the other people I had just endured a minivan trip with were allowing themselves to get hustled by the local tuk tuk fleet, I hefted up my bags and set off in what I thought was the proper direction.

Fifteen to twenty minutes and one absolutely useless Westerner later, I found out I had read it correctly, and so began my longer than expected stay in Phuket. I was planning on only staying one night in Phuket, to meet up with a friend of mine from Shanghai who was currently also vacationing in the area with her boyfriend, but ended up staying three nights. After checking into Phuket Backpackers, I surveyed the area for some food, and got some fantastic pad see ew and iced coffee, then bought a Thai SIM card for my iPhone so I could actually give my friend a call.

Unfortunately, it was already well progressed into the afternoon by this point, and my friend was probably out enjoying the warm waters, so I ended up not getting any response until a few hours later. After waiting around to see if she’d respond at all for an hour, I set out from the hostel and just hoofed it in a random direction, to see what I could see of Phuket town. I had a vague impression that some direction would take me to the water, in due time, but an hour later, I decided I probably had gone in the wrong direction, or at least not in the quickest direction, and that I should probably give up and head back towards the center of town.

Along the way, though, I did get to see a nice slice of Phuket that most people would probably never see. Even the Thai people were surprised to see me there; the beaches were all at least 10-15 minutes away from where I was at that particular moment, and the beaches are the only reason people go to Phuket (although it has quite the reputation for its nightlife, too, though I never saw it personally). I got a couple of offers for motorbike taxi rides, who all seemed generally perplexed by my unwillingness to hop on.

I ended up passing the rest of the night easily enough. I got another nice meal, finally got a response from my friend, agreed to meet up the next day instead, and then just hung out at the hostel for the rest of the night, drinking some Chang while watching, appropriately, The Beach. I had actually never seen the movie, I just thought of it as that one movie Leo made a little while after Titanic, before I started actually respecting him as an actor.

When you’re in Thailand though, especially when you’re in South Thailand, its hard to get away from the movie, taking an island off of the coast of Thailand as its main set location as well as integral to the plot. While I was in Krabi, I could have gone on a boat ride to that actual set location, if I had felt so inclined.

So I watched; it wasn’t a particularly good movie, but the whole enclave of backpackers in it sure did ring a bell in my mind and heart, and so it probably resonated with me more than it would the average viewer.

Three Changs later, I was good and well ready to go to bed, so I scrambled up to my dorm room and hit the sack.

When I got up the next morning, the first thing I did was go get some more of that delicious pad see ew, then caught a bus to the part of Phuket my friend was staying at. On the bus, I first started talking to a couple of nice young ladies from Holland, before I realized I was sitting next to a group of Americans who were currently teaching English in China, who were all about the same age as myself. I ended up talking to them for the rest of the ride, and ultimately inviting them along with me to meet up with my friend and her boyfriend. This had the added bonus of making it less awkward to hang out with the couple, as it would be far too easy to feel like a third wheel, especially since I didn’t like the boyfriend much anyway. Having more people around would thin out those feelings a bit, and it worked like a charm.

I neglect to mention the fact that I actually walked the length of this damn beach twice before finally finding my friend and her boyfriend; I did that part alone, and right before I ran into the couple, I re-ran into those three Americans from the bus, and thats when I invited them along.

Anyway, we all just hung out in the water for the next couple of hours, mostly, tossing a frisbee around. It was a lot more fun than it sounds, with the only problem being that there was a weird sharp pinching sensation all over our bodies; what would be the cause of this, I have no idea, but we all felt it. It hurt like heck, but we just ignored it as best we could and struggled on. A little later, we got out of the water and relaxed on the beach with some simple cocktails brought over to us from a typical beachside bar shack, and chatted for a while. One of the Americans had opted to stay out of the water the entire time, so we caught up with him in particular. I still dont know why exactly it was that he had stayed out, but so be it I guess.

Two vodka tonics later, the sunburns I had incurred from my frollicking were already starting to make themselves known to me. Figuring there was little I could do about it at this point, I just decided to deal with it, and hop back in the water for another short while, trying to strategically keep the parts of me that I thought were burnt out of the direction of the sunbeams, not really thinking about reflection from the water’s surface foiling my plans.

We weren’t in too much longer though, because me and the other Americans wanted to catch the last bus out of this beach back to Phuket town, and we thought the last bus left at 5pm. When we walked to the bus stop, though, we found out that in fact the last one departs at 4:45pm, or maybe it was 4:30. Something like that. And it was definitely past that time. A bit bummed, knowing we’d have to pay far more for a tuk tuk back rather than using the bus (the tuk tuks on Phuket in particular are extremely well organized and extortionate), we decided we might as well all just enjoy the night here at this beach together, and so we headed off in the direction of the hotel my friend was staying at, so that she and her boyfriend could change or whatever, and me and the other Americans headed on to just see what was around in the area.

We stopped by a muay thai boxing training place, and watched some guys go at it for a bit. They weren’t staging full blown performances, and it was a pretty even mix of Western and Thai practitioners, but it was still enjoyable enough to watch for a short spell.

After that, we double-backed to a small smattering of bars, to one that had a pool table, and decided we’d play some team pool for a while. We were uniformly terrible, which actually worked out quite nicely. Maybe thirty minutes later, my friend and her boyfriend showed up, and we played a few more rounds, before heading out to get some dinner at a place that wasn’t as overpriced as everywhere else, then picking up a couple drinks from the convenience store and heading out to the beach to enjoy them, where no one else was.

An hour later, perhaps, the lights shut down all around us. Jarring though it was at first, it ultimately offered us a really, really gorgeous view of the stars, and all of us were caught up in appreciating it at the same time. It was really, honestly, splendid.

We talked about nothing, as people do, and made our peace with our drive to do that lacked a reason to be, and some time later, felt we had done our time, and said our goodbyes, so that the three new Americans and I could pile back into a tuk tuk towards Phuket Town.

When we got back, it was still a bit early for me, only maybe 11pm or so, so I stayed in the common area of my hostel yet again, watching whatever everyone else had selected for the day, which in this case was a bad cop movie starring Christian Bale and John Leguizzamo. I don’t remember the last time I saw a movie with Mr. Leguizzamo. This was also the worst acting I’ve yet to see from Mr. Bale. But it helped to pass the time, along with my computer, until it was once again sufficiently late enough for me to try to sleep.

By this point, my sunburns were already incredibly raw. I had spent the evening slathering on aloe vera, and I was not looking forward to lying down. It seemed as though my entire back and upper arms were scorched. The sheets proved to be cool to the touch though, and actually helped me get through the night.

When I woke the next morning, I wasn’t quite paralyzed by the pain of the sunburns, but it wasnt too far off either. So I decided not to leave Phuket this day, and instead allow myself a day of sitting almost entirely still to try to begin the recovery process from the burns. I could tell that putting on my backpack straps would’ve been like corporal punishment, so this was the best I could come up with.

The only thing I did that day was get another awesome round of pad see ew. Aside from that, I had to continue slathering aloe all day, and I think I watched three movies in the common room there. Not very exciting, I know, but its all I could manage.

The next day, I went to get aboard another bus, to get back to Surat Thani, then board a train to Bangkok. It was another overnight train, but this time, alarm in hand, I was a bit better prepared for it. I had to wait a few hours for the train to arrive, then take off, as my bus was just thirty minutes late in getting to the train station, but such is life.

At the train station, I met a young Swiss kid who was traveling all on his own, about 18 or 19 years old I think he was. The two of us ended up hanging out for the next hour or so, waiting for the train to arrive. When it did, we went to our separate cars, but they were right next to each other, so after packing everything in and getting ourselves ready for the end of the night, we then hung out in his compartment for a couple of hours, being served dinner and a drink or two, and talking about politics, mostly. Eventually we notice people looking at us slightly upset, and see a sign that requests people basically shut up after 10:30pm or 11pm, something like that, so we decide to call it a night, and get some rest. This time, I got a lot more sleep than when I first took the train from Bangkok down to Surat Thani, probably down to the medicinal powers of Chang.