Today's Thoughts...
Saturday: So we finally made it to Phuket after much delay and Dylan jumped on board to join us Friday night. We crashed in Patong on Patong Beach, Phuket, enduring the ridiculousness of Patong night life. Very much like a huge adult carnival filled with ladyboys and ping pong balls. More than most of us expected I think. Flashing lights, discoteques, costumes, drinks everywhere, and lots of foreign men; sort of like a big bachelor party. Having our ample fill of that, we got up the next morning and piled into a cramped minivan with a bunch of others from around Europe and the US (Holland, UK, etc.) and bump bumped our way over a mountain to the seaport. We grab tickets set to leave at 2pm and jump onto a pretty decent sized daytime cruiser. After baking in the sun for two hours, the boat finally takes off at 3pm (no questions asked of course), and we dock into Koh Phi Phi (pronounced Ko Pee Pee) just before 5 covered in sea salt spray and more sun. After being hassled along the pier (“Need taxi? Want taxi? Where you go? I take you there. Have hotel? Want booking? I take you there. Come, come!), we make it to our own personal long tail to head to our hotel. So a longtail is what’s in the picture; sort of gondola-looking thing decked out with colorful ties and flowers. Agile men with feet for hands clamber about around, over, and under these things navigating a cross between a car engine and a propeller than juts out in the water. The most rudimentary form of easy transportation. We hop in and in ten minutes glide or rather half glide, half bump, half jettison our way into shore, our own personal private hotel beach. So it turns out we’re staying in a resort…not a hotel. A crew of Brits welcomes us onshore to their slice of paradise; the saying sticks ;P Greeted by a sun-kissed Thai man with long, fluffy hair adorned with beads and colorful string we suddenly realize-- we’re not in Chiang Mai no more.
Our villa is a HUGE tree house with two large rooms, a wraparound deck terrace, reggae music, a huge staircase, and our own kittens that seem to adopt us for the week. Two hammocks, a rocking swing, and a huge wooden table with glasstop; it’s blissfully wonderful. Now I’m not one to complain about modern amenities at all. I love roughing it as much as the next girl; not that that description sounds like roughing it at all, but the no AC issue damn near killed me by the end of the trip, quite literally. No one told us that killer mosquitoes would appear religiously every night to pock our skin and suck the living daylights out of us. I felt like I was trapped in a Hitchcock film some nights. Me, mosquito net closed all around me, poised, listening, my ears flicking every so slightly with the wind. I crouch, hidden tiger position, wait, rocking slightly on my heels and—bzzzz! GOTCHA! And that’s for your little friend too! It was all out war and though I took down at least, at least 20 of them (being generous here), I still managed to limp home from Phi Phi with 46 bites covered my arms, legs, back, hands, rear, and forehead. How the heck they got to those last two, the world will never know.
That night, in sheer awe of this island getaway, we dive right into the warm warm waters and spend most of the evening frolicking along the beach before we venture into town for a deliciously overpriced meal. I’ve got to hand it to Phi Phi; the place is gorgeous, but the prices for food are outrageous. Of course I’m complaining about $10 dinners and $7 lunches, but that’s absurd in a country where you pay $2 for lunch and $4 for dinner on average. Simply preposterous! But I will say we chowed down on some fine Thai and Italian food, the latter being the choice items on the menu at every restaurant we ate at. Pizzas the size of your head, yummy rice and curry, and buckets, buckets, buckets!! That night we discovered the magic of Phi Phi night life—small colorful buckets of mixed drinks and cocktails! WHAT?! Whoever came up with that idea was a sheer genius. Take one colorful bucket, add lots of ice, many shots of whatever’s behind the bar, and the mixer of your choosing and viola! Recipe for liquored success! We ordered a few buckets and sampled them all, some for better, others for worse. But, a bucket? Why?! Not exactly world's chic and all, but highly functional.
Anyhoo, we rolled into one bar, Tiger Bar, one of the places where they pass out free buckets on the hour. After wrestling with some stank bargirl who refused to give me a bucket after we waited in line and she served all my friends, I snatched a bucket from her filled with weak whiskey (Southeast asian drink of choice) and coke. Not the best drink ever, but it did the job. It did the job so well that within no time, still sober mind you, Becca and Dylan decide it’d be a great time to hop up on the stage and… pole dance. Horrific sight if I do say so myself. Not Becca, but Dylan’s midair poses on the pole (now tell me again when he master air aerobics?) sent us and everyone else in the bar into stitches. Worse still when he dedicated his antics to me and managed to straddle/climb the pole amidst hysterical laughter.
To close the evening, we headed to Reggae Bar where they hand drunken tourists a pair of Thai boxing gloves and gear and say go for it in the ring. Becca decided this would be a fabulous idea and jumped right on in to box with a British girl she had just met. This followed an episode between a very drunk girl whose friends kept egging her on and what appeared to be a certified femme fighter who knocked the crap out of her and then hugged her at the end, so we were all more than a little concerned. But Becca held her own, complete with ringside pit crew hydrating and toweling her periodically as we cheered from the sidelines. Though she whopped the girl good in 7 rounds, somehow the Brit was declared the winner. Didn’t matter though. Becca was still awarded her very own victory bucket and bottle of water. Not satisfied with fighting escapades alone, we befriended the British girl, Margot, and her posse of British guys and headed down to the beach for the beachside clubs into the wee morning. Standing on the receding tidal flats with squishy wet sand between our toes, we couldn’t help but grin like idiots and collapse. What a night.
The remaining days of island escape TBC :)
