phuket

While our experience of Phuket was generally very positive, perhaps due to visiting in very low season, one of its annoyances was still in full swing: the powerful transport cartel that rules Phuket’s Western shores, resists all attempts to improve the abysmal state of public transport in Phuket and charges an arm and a leg to take you anywhere. I’m aware true travelistas would throw caution to the wind and vroom glamorously around the island on a rented moped, but ever since I heard what a state coroner had to say about motorbike travel I’ve been nervous about it. So the next best alternative was to engage a driver, and after a bit of research we contacted Daj, who is very popular with Tripadvisor forum members.

He picked us up at 10 a.m., and we headed south, passing Karon viewpoint on the way to the gorgeousness at the top of this post, Nai Harn beach.  I don’t know what it’s like in high season, but on this low season Sunday morning it was pretty idyllic.

It’s popular with families because of its little lagoon that stays calm even as monsoon season waves crash onto the main stretch of beach. (I experimented with adding a texture when processing the photo below. I like the end result, but would be interested in your opinions: evocative or naff?)

This family parked right next to the sand and picnicked while their kids played in the shallows.

Once I’d managed to tear myself away from photographing Nai Harn beach, we drove on to Ya Noi viewpoint, which doesn’t photograph too badly itself.

At Rawai fishing village, I nearly fell prey to a very persuasive hard-sell. I bet she’d have overcharged me too.

The tsunami caused less destruction to Rawai than the west coast of the island, but I still found the sight of the children playing in front of the tsunami hazard zone sign poignant. I was delighted when I realized they were not only playing zero-point[1. I did a quick Google to see if I could rustle up a description of zero-point for non-Asian readers and found this bizarre video, apparently produced as some sort of outreach effort for the Youth Olympic Games Singapore’s hosting next year. The “fun” URL they’ve come up with for more of this stuff is “whyohgee.com.sg”. I think “doubleu-tee-eff.com.sg” might have been more appropriate.] – one of my favourite childhood games that I’d somehow forgotten ever playing until seeing them – but playing some of the exact same “stages” of the game that we did twenty years ago.

While waiting to work up an appetite for lunch, we went to see the Big Buddha, already seen in distant evening silhouette in the previous post, and really damn freaking big when you’re up close. The statue is still under construction and surrounded by scaffolding, which makes for easy cheesy faux-spiritual photo captioning as follows. (I tried another texture experiment with the photo – again, opinions appreciated!)

Wat Chalong doesn’t have the history or ornate decoration of other temples you can see in Thailand, but it does feel like it has a life as a local centre of worship beyond its tourist visitors, which is what I always hope to see in religious sites I visit.

For lunch, Daj drove us to Phong Phang Seafood at Palai bay. Upon walking in it was immediately obvious that this was the sort of place where all the guides take their tourists – it even had a separate room where all the guides were eating their own lunches – but the food turned out very decent. The “apple balsam leaves salad” (sounded interesting, but I still have no idea if that’s the correct name of the leaf or not) in the photo was the first dish we’d had in Phuket where we found the level of spice remotely challenging, so given our reasonably high tolerance for spice I’d say the restaurant hasn’t totally watered its food down for tourists. The ambience is pleasant too, sitting in breezy shade looking out at long-tail boats in the bay. I scampered a few metres down to the beach after lunch for this picture, which I quite like.

After lunch we went to Khao Kad viewpoint at Cape Panwa (my photographs weren’t very good) and the monkey mangroves at Ko Sireh. It was rather depressing that visitors are not in the least bit discouraged from feeding the monkeys here (we didn’t), so I expect some of the monkeys just spend a lot of their day lounging by the river eating fruit that literally landed right at their feet.

In accordance with my strange tendency to be besotted with every kind of animal baby except the human baby, I squealed a bit at this.

In conversation during the drive, Alec asked if Daj knew a good place to buy muay thai shin pads and most conveniently, it turned out that Daj has been doing muay thai since he was a child. He said that for good quality shin pads we could go to Jungceylon (snazzy tourist mall at Patong) but for cheaper stuff there was a place in Phuket Town that locals would usually go. I expressed the view that we should buy shin pads at a value commensurate with the quality of Alec’s muay thai skills, so we went to Phuket Town.

The place the locals shop is called Supercheap, and is pretty fantastic. It’s in a dim, cavernous warehouse space bigger than any hypermart in Singapore, with an incredible range of choices for anything you could dream of buying. It’s difficult to capture in pictures and I didn’t wander too far from Alec and Daj while they were poring over the shin pads for fear of getting lost, but I saw electric guitars in the distance, multiple three-tiered shelves of children’s tricycles and more varieties of rice than I have ever seen in one place.

Once the boys were done with their shopping (Alec got his shin pads, Daj got craft scissors for his daughter), Daj drove us to his friend’s muay thai gym to let Alec have a look at it, but unfortunately they don’t train on Sundays so nothing was going on when we got there. The last stop before dinner was the obligatory sunset at Laem Phromthep, and Daj had got his wife and daughter to meet him there. We didn’t find the crowds detracted from the experience, though perhaps it’s different in high season, but as scenery goes I was a little underwhelmed. Sunsets are always beautiful, but this spot probably isn’t so significantly more beautiful than other sunset views in Phuket as to justify the hassle of finding a parking lot.

We ended the day in Rawai again for dinner, with fish grilled in salt, fried chicken with garlic and pepper, clear sour seafood soup, steamed rice and 2 Cokes for under 500 baht. The chicken was a disappointment (soggy) but the seafood dishes were unsurprisingly fresh and generously portioned. They initially brought us an insipid sweet’n’sour sauce with the fish so we asked for something spicier and got the proper Thai stuff. I always blame stuff like this on the white dude who goes around with me.

Finally back at the hotel, we bid farewell to Daj. For anyone who comes across this post while researching a trip to Phuket, we found him professional, cheerful and responsive to our particular requests, such as going to Supercheap for the muay thai gear, and his English is fairly good. I’m sure that finding our own way around Phuket on rented transport would have been lots of fun in a different way, but we were happy with our day with him.

Phuket Town doesn’t seem to be regarded as a must-see spot in Phuket, and if you’re already familiar with Straits-Chinese culture from, say, Penang, Malacca or Singapore, those are certainly better places to experience it than Phuket Town. But perhaps in the same way that some travelling Chinese gravitate towards foreign Chinatowns to see what “their” version of “us” is, this Peranakan and unofficial Peranakan (given that ang moh Alec probably knows more about Peranakan food and culture than the average Singaporean, I think he’s allowed that status) decided to check out if Phuket Town could compare to our beloved Katong and Joo Chiat. The short answer is that it can’t, but it was still more fun than sitting on a beach the whole day.

My research had indicated that the Kata beach taxi cartels won’t accept less than 400 baht for that trip, so I smilingly insisted on that in the face of offers for 600 and 500 baht. We took the cab to the area around the Robinson’s store, where a 70s UFO building made me happy and a cardboard cutout child gave me the creeps.

In the central touristy area of town, we stopped for a drink in China Inn, failed to see the Shrine of Serene Light (the travel agency next to it was being renovated and the path to the shrine was blocked by rubble) and took a gander down Soi Romanee, which was pretty but seemed devoid of life except for a few other tourists, a couple taking wedding pictures and this kid feeding pigeons. (Click on any photo in this post to see a larger version, by the way.)

With our tweeness quota fully satisfied for the day, we walked to Natural Restaurant for a late lunch. It’s a bit of a walk from the historical streets but the famously wacky decor is worth the visit, and while I’m normally wary of places with voluminous photo menus, the simple, delicious lunch we had there was one of our best meals in Phuket: winged bean salad (it’s hard to find winged beans in Singapore so I was really happy about this), fried catfish with chilli, steamed rice, beer for him, lemongrass juice for me, less than 500 baht in total. I highly recommend it, except that you may want to avoid menu item number 163.

We wandered around a bit more after lunch, not really looking for sights but enjoying the low-key feel of this part of Phuket where nary a souvenir stall or travel agency had set up shop.

By about five, constant sweatiness had finally worn us down and the streets of Phuket Town had gone very quiet. Although we had been besieged by “Taxi?” requests earlier in the afternoon, there were none to be found now and we had to walk back to the touristy bit and ask a travel agency to call us one. Later the same night we would discover the awesomest minigolf experience known to man but I’ll save that for another post, and end this here with one of the views through the windscreen on the way back to Kata.

We’re not beach people so we’d never bothered with Phuket before, but it seemed like an easy trip to throw together since I needed to use up a little leave, and its low season flight and accommodation prices were very appealing. As it turns out we had a great time, which was a nice reminder for us that sometimes the road most travelled is still good fun, and not every holiday needs to be about Meaningful Cultural Experiences.

On our first day there we booked ourselves on the Hong By Starlight sea-kayaking day tour, which is pricy but so universally raved about by every source of travel information known to man that we thought we should give it a shot. Also the tour doesn’t start till noon, which makes it totally my kind of tour.

We were picked up at our hotel in a minibus and driven to the east side of the island where we boarded the boat that would take us out to the sea caves and had a simple but extraordinarily tasty lunch of fried kuay teow, spring rolls and fresh fruit.

Soon after lunch, it was time to hit the water. The tour’s focus is on the sea caves east of Phuket. These are created by the percolation of rainwater through limestone karsts, which results in the formation of “secret” lagoons enclosed by rock on all sides but open to the sky. There’s a good diagram here which explains things better.

Many of these caves can only be accessed by paddling through tunnels when tidal conditions are right, but even then, sections of the tunnels are still pitch dark, and sometimes so low and narrow that everyone has to lie prone in the kayak in order to get through without cutting themselves to ribbons on cave walls studded with razor-sharp oyster shells.

I read that previous sentence over after writing it and thought I was maybe exaggerating a little too much, but then I read this article by John Gray, the founder of the tour company we used, and realized I wasn’t. Still, it’s a credit to the skill of our guide, Kop, that I honestly never felt in a moment’s danger.

We emerged from the tunnel into the hong, as it’s called in Thailand (in Thai hong means “room” or “chamber”), which totally felt all magical and tranquil and shit.

The walls of the lagoon are pretty high (that little thing in the bottom left is a kayak) and covered in lush vegetation. I like this picture but it still doesn’t quite capture the atmosphere of paddling amongst mangrove trees through the calm waters of the hong’s lagoon, surrounded on all sides by craggy, dramatic rock-faces giving way eventually to sky.

We visited two more hongs over the course of the afternoon, each with its own particular characteristics. Sometimes the cavity in the karst would house two or more lagoons connected by a narrow channel little wider than a kayak.

I like caves, can you tell?

Before dinner, each guide helped their kayak pair to make a krathong. Each krathong‘s design depends on the idiosyncrasies of its guide – Kop’s featured carrot slices and flower buds which he artfully snipped to look like birds in flight. The last activity of the day would be returning to one of the hongs we’d visited earlier to release our krathongs – or at least, let them float for a while, and then take them back rather than litter the landscape with them. The hong was pitch dark by night, except for flickering light from the candles on the krathongs and the occasional iridescence of the bioluminescent plankton in the water (which sparkles when agitated).

On the way back to the mainland, the guides initiated a series of the sort of silly but fun puzzle games that rally groups of strangers round a table. I’ve always found boat rides at night a bit depressing, something about the fluorescent light and the tiredness of the body after an active day out, and this made things better. In general, this tour is highly regarded for good reason. It is professionally and efficiently run without being impersonal – while there are quite a number of people on the boat, you get the same guide assigned to your kayak the whole day, and the guides are a really likable, jovial bunch who try to make sure everyone has a good time. The strong emphasis on safety and environmental consciousness is heartening, as is the decent food. I’d describe myself as a mid-range traveller at most and this tour is a bit of a splurge at 3950 baht per person, but I also like to reward businesses in the tourism industry who do things with a sense of responsibility to the place they are trying to showcase. So to the good people at John Gray’s Sea Canoe company, this krathong’s for you.