The plan for the day was to move from Phuket to Koh Samui – this turns out to be a little more complicated than it would seem on the surface.

Turns out there are a limited number of ways for us to actually do this:

1. Fly from Phuket to Koh Samui – there is only one airline in Thailand that does this and we decide that the price of the ticket(s) plus the taxi to the Phuket airport is more than we want to spend.
2. Rent a car and drive yourself – the distance is not all that far (about 4-5 hours) but the cost of renting the car one way is a little excessive, and Mrs. Columbus and I are not yet convinced that driving here with the small people in the car is a wise choice (they drive on the left side of the road here)
3. Hire a private car and driver – this was our leading choice, but it seems that none of the ‘travel agents’ want to sell you that choice.  Certainly there are people with vans that would do this, but finding them seems to require a little more local knowledge than we have acquired.
4. Sign up for the packaged trip – this is conceptually the same as number 3 above but with other people going to the same place in the van/bus with you.

Given our options and costs we decide to do number 4, but in our 2nd lesson of the devil is in the details, we find that it is not exactly as we are expecting….

The journey from Phuket to Koh Samui involves traveling by road from Karon Beach to Donsak where there is a harbor with ferry service that takes you to Koh Samui where presumably you get a taxi to take you to your hotel. Seems simple right… Well the driver shows up to our hotel at 7:40am to pick us up (we are the first pickup) and manages to load all our stuff into his van – this is a feat unto itself as we have a total of nine bags, but he manages to jam them into a space that looks like it will barely fit 4. So off we go to pick up the rest, stopping at another Karon hotel to pick up 2 more people, and then to Kata to fill the last 4 seats. All of these people have had their bags jammed into various nooks and crannies and the van is so full that one of the last people has to ride up front with the driver.

We also learn during all of this that the van will not be going straight to the ferry at Donsak, but rather to Surat Thani where we will be off-loaded and switch to another bus for the trip to the ferry.  Anyway we try to get comfortable and settle in for the 4 hour trip to Surat Thani.  The van is not so packed as to be uncomfortable, but there is not a lot of leg room and stretching out is basically not possible – kinda like riding economy on an airplane.

4 hours later we arrive at Surat Thani we are ushered into a little ‘store’ that is more like a stall in a market and told that we will wait here for the bus to Donsak – it will be there in an hour.  So we settle in to wait, but the shop is hot (not air-conditioned), and the chairs are not all that comfortable so it looks like it will be a long hour.  As it turns out it is not an hour at all, but basically an opportunity for them to sell you more package tours, day trips, return trip, etc. Once everyone has been through the grinder, the bus magically appears (about 30mins) and we climb aboard.  Now this is a real bus, like a touring bus, and it will take us the next 1 hour leg of the trip to the ferry.  The bus is air-conditioned, but not all of it is working properly, and as Mrs. Columbus learns seating location is everything because her air conditioning does not work and the bus starts to get a little stuffy. The kind operator does come back about 3/4 of the way through the trip and realize how warm it is and turns her A/C on for the last few mins of the trip.

We get to the ferry and the crossing is uneventful, and after a bit of confusion and some haggling at the pier we get a taxi to our hotel and we are done for the night.

Rule #1 of any vacation to another country is this: most of the time you are likely getting lied to or taken advantage of by the locals.  While this is usually not done maliciously, but rather to maximize profit, or to give you what they think you want vs what you actually asked for, it almost always means you are in for a surprise at some point.  We will certainly get better at this over time, but we got a good reminder of this on our adventure of the day.

We booked a tour through an ‘agent’ (where tour agent equals person who sells stuff to tourists – vs someone knowledgeable who has done this before) to take a tour of 4 islands off the coast of Phuket – Phi Phi Ley, Phi Phi Don, Ko Kai, and Koh Yai.  The tour starts at 8am with a trip from our hotel to the marina to catch our boat. When we get to the marina they sort of herd you like cattle to your boat, and your first surprise – the boat you are getting on is not the same as the boat that you thought you were going to be on. This meets with a few protests by some of the others on the trip, but it is all covered in the blanket ‘subject to change due to weather or sea conditions’ in the brochure – none of this means anything to the boat operators who either don’t care, or don’t understand, but they have been doing this for a long time and someone yelling at them in Farsi is not going to change the way things are.

As we are leaving the pier the guide tells us that we are going to be going to Phi Phi Ley for some sightseeing including a stop at Maya Bay, Phi Phi Don and a stop at Monkey Beach, and then off to Ko Kai for lunch and some beach time and then back to Phuket – as you and I both noted this is a little different from the trip I described above.  However Mrs. Columbus and I are becoming more ‘seasoned’ and reason that given we are already out at sea there is not much we can do about it and settle in for the ride 🙂

Phi Phi Ley is the smaller of the 2 Phi Phi Islands, and was used as the setting for the movie ‘The Beach’ with Leonardo Dicaprio.  The island rises out of the sea with these towering limestone cliffs that soar 100s of feet into the air, and then open into small hidden coves and bays with spectacular beaches.  Phi Phi Ley is part of a nature preserve and there is no commercial development here – certainly a welcome relief on the ecosystem as everywhere else is infested with tourists – like ourselves 🙂  You can arrange to camp overnight on the beach at Maya Bay, but there are no services and it is truly camping only.  That said in the daytime the beach is literally jam packed with boats and day trippers and it is a little bit sad to realize that such a beautiful place loses it’s serenity with all the people crowded there.  Still a beautiful place, and definitely worth adding to your places to see list but I’m sure far different from what it was 10-15 years ago.

Our next stop is at Phi Phi Don. This is the larger of the 2 islands, and where all the development is.  For reasons unknown we don’t really stop here tho, but just pull up to the pier for a few minutes so that some people can get off (obviously part of yet another tour). This is a little unfortunate as an hour of wandering around here would show a lot, and is interesting – there is a beautiful bay and beach on the opposite side from the pier, and the cluster of buildings they call a town is worth seeing if only once (I saw this on my trip last year but thought it would be interesting for the family). Phi Phi Don was one of the harder hit locations in Thailand during the tsunami that hit SE Asia in 2004 – the low sand bar where the ‘town’ is built was completely swamped by the wave that swept across, and most of the buildings were leveled.  The island recovered quickly, and everything was rebuilt and prolly a little more – and while it is clearly there to service the demand, the footprint of people on this island is likely going to prove to be more than the island will be able to absorb over time (for the Seattlites think Mercer Islands with no infrastructure with 2x the people on it)

We pull away from the pier and go up the coast a bit to a little isolated beach on Phi Phi Don that is totally populated with monkeys – the beach is about 1/2 an acre in size, and there must be 30+ monkeys running around there – the beach is totally surrounded by a bunch of cliffs that I’m sure the monkeys can scale, but for people the only way in is by boat.  Almost every tour boat must stop here as the monkeys are well conditioned to come around looking for food handouts.  It is cool to be able to see the kids get that close to the ‘wildlife’ and it was one of their highlights from the day.  While there are lots of places to see wildlife here, it was nice to see some that were not in captivity even tho their habitat was no where near ‘natural’. We then backed away from the beach for a bit of snorkeling before heading off to our next location.

Our last stop on the tour was at Ko Kai – while technically an island, the whole thing was more like a giant sand bar in the ocean certainly not bigger than an acre or 2.  The small size is not enough however to slow anyone down – on the island are a couple of bars and 2 or 3 restaurants, one of which we have our lunch at.  After lunch we have about 90 minutes to do some more snorkeling and take in the beach, and then it is time to head back to the marina.

The adventure would not be complete however without a small bit of extra excitement – about 2/3 of the way through the 20 minute trip back to the marina the boat stops – after a bunch of back and forth between the captain and the crew the tour guide announces to us that we are out of gas, and that they are calling (via cellphone) to the marina for someone to bring out some more – after about another 15mins or so another boat shows up, and after having a good laugh at their compadres, they tow us back to the marina, where another group of locals gets to laugh again at the boat’s crew.

We get back to the hotel in time to have a quick refreshing dip in the pool and then off to dinner again before we need to pack our stuff and call it an early night as we are moving on to a new location tomorrow.

All the issues aside, it was a great day, and the kids had some great fun with the monkeys, the beaches, and the snorkeling – that was what we were after so mission accomplished.

We wanted to hire a car and driver to take us sightseeing around Phuket and hit some of the highlights.  We figured we could just pick some spots and go to a location for a while and then onto the next one. Well, somewhere in the conversation with the travel person we got ourselves booked into a Phuket ‘tour’.

As we are beginning to learn sometimes things get a little lost in the translation, however, in the end while the tour was not exactly what we wanted, it was close enough.

Our travels took us first to Kata Beach – the next beach town to the south of where we are staying in Karon.  Kata beach is smaller than the one at Karon, and the town looks to be a little busier (not busy like Patong tho), but it is easy to see how the non-party crowd might like to stay here.  In fact if we were going to be in Phuket longer, or were to come back, we would likely give it a try.

Going south from there we stopped at the Karon viewpoint – basically this is a point of land that juts out from the coast and is elevated up a few 100 feet above sea level – the result is a stunning overlook of the west side of Phuket all the way up to Patong – so from one location we could see Kata, Karon, and the lower tip of Patong.  There was a tout there with some trained eagles and falcons that you could pay to have your picture taken with, and when I tried to get a few shots of just the birds he waved me off unless I was going to pay – I did manage to get in a couple of shots tho 😉

In the list of things we take small joy from, we found a Tesco store and got the driver to stop for us – this is like a Safeway back home – we needed to get some sunscreen, and other ‘staples’ and the cost to get them there was about 25% of what we were paying at the little convenience stores by the beach.

Our next stop was at the Big Buddha of Phuket – this is a 45 meter (about 150 feet) tall likeness of the Buddha that sits on the top of one of the hills that overlooks all of southern Phuket Island.  You can see the monument from almost anywhere in the southern part of the island.  The monument has been under construction for more than 3 years now and is almost completely done by hand – there is very little machinery used for most construction here.  The project is also being funded only with donations and is estimated to cost 30 million Thai Baht (about 1 million USD).  The monument is being completely covered in marble tiles, and for a small donation you can purchase one of these marble tiles and then write anything you want on the back – the tile will then be glued to the Buddha and your message will be forever embedded on the monument.  I had the chance to visit this spot last year when I was here and bought a tile for the family and listed all our names – that tile was used as part of the covering of the Buddha’s head.  Fast forward a year later and now the entire Buddha is covered in the marble tiles – each individually hand shaped to get the right outer shape (like fitting tiles on the space shuttle) – now the tiles they have left to apply will be used to cover the lotus blossom that the Buddha is sitting on, and our new message will go there somewhere.  All in all a very impressive undertaking – the views from the top of the mountain are incredible, and because the site is a temple as well the whole environment is serene and inspirational.

From there our next stop was at Wat Chaolong – while you would think that if you have seen one temple you have seen them all, each of the temples here seems to have it’s own flair, or something unique that makes it different from the rest.  These people clearly take their religion seriously as the sheer size and detail of the temples they build would take hours and hours to build and maintain, not to mention the cost.

From the remainder of our tour we mostly stayed in the air-conditioned car traveling through the fringes of Phuket city, back through Patong, and back to our hotel.  As with many ‘tours’ we did manage a side-stop at a merchant – certainly the cab drivers and tour operators get some sort of kick-back for reeling the captive audiences in – our stop was at a gi-normous jewelry store.  The store was bigger than a Target store, and had every type of stone and setting you could imagine, and if you could not find what you were looking for they had a room full of craftsmen that would make it for you.  Thankfully the sales pressure was low, the facility air-conditioned, and the clean bathrooms were a welcome sight to many 🙂

Back in Karon, a quick dinner and then early to bed as tomorrow we set out early for a tour of the Phi Phi Islands.

All this tourist stuff is by the way cutting into my massage schedule 🙁  I have only managed to spend a couple of hours in nirvana so far, and it is definitely impacting my days of vacation to massage ratio…