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…