kitsch

Back from our sweaty day in Phuket Town we changed clothes and recharged a bit in our hotel before heading out for dinner. Kata and Karon dining options seemed much of a muchness, but since we hadn’t been to Karon yet we walked in that direction. The bars lining the road were totally dead on a Saturday night – each had one or two guests at most, and some only had a group of bored girls lounging around. We wondered if it was because it was still early, about 7.30 pm, and if things would liven up for them later.

We’d had a late lunch, so we still weren’t very hungry by the time we’d arrived in Karon. Most adults would have had a drink in any of the struggling bars, but in our case we had already spotted the Dino Park minigolf. As regular readers may know, our penchant for minigolf coincides with our penchant for surreal kitschness and bitter, unsporting competition, so this was impossible to resist.

When I was in primary school a dinosaur exhibition featuring animatronic dinosaurs came to the Singapore Science Centre, and bearing in mind that this was several years before the release of Jurassic Park, it was the most amazing thing to hit my young brain until I watched Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves and discovered Kevin Costner and hormones. Phuket’s Dino Park is kind of like being with those old-school dinosaurs again, except in a dramatically landscaped setting complete with rivers, high waterfalls, appropriate ambient sounds and a huge, spectacularly erupting volcano.

The dinosaurs are life-sized, or at least close to it. I’m not enough of a long-neck connoisseur to be sure if their long-necks are Littlefoots specifically, but they definitely have a Cera, Petrie and Spike. (Youtube diversion: It’s crazy how familiar I am with every clip on Youtube from the first movie, it feels like as if I only watched it yesterday.) If you have a kid, I cannot imagine how they will not love this, but it would probably be less fun during the day due to the heat. By night though, it’s pretty amazing.

We were so enthralled with the place that I even stopped caring who was winning or losing. Though to be honest, complexity of minigolf hole design is not one of this place’s strengths. For example, here are the obstacles you’ll encounter at the first hole.

Still, for all the reasons I mentioned above, I loved it and would highly recommend it, unless you are too cool for minigolf, in which case I would wonder why you even read this decidedly uncool blog to begin with. And for 240 baht each, it was cheaper than our neighbourhood minigolf in Singapore, which has NO DINOSAURS, NO VOLCANO, NO DINO POO OBSTACLES. (Vitalic diversion: No guitars, no drugs, no leather either.)