We only have a couple of days left here in Thailand, so this morning Mrs. Columbus decides we should take the day and go for an adventure.  Her idea is that we should ride the local bus across the island to Phuket town, do a little shopping and sightseeing, and then catch the local bus back.

In telling stories around the dinner table we would refer to this as ‘The Chicken Bus’ as one can envision bus travel in foreign lands where you may end up sitting across the aisle from someone who is carrying their livestock with them to the next place.

It turns out that our experience was fairly civilized.  It may vary a bit by season, or the time of day you are using it, but when we jumped on at around mid-day there was only us and one other couple on the bus for the whole ride.  The bus wanders it’s way along the beach, and riders can just jump on at any point, and presumably jump off when they get to where they want to – no having to find a specific bus stop close to somewhere you want to be.  The bus runs every 1/2 hour and the fare is a paltry 30Baht (about $1) per person.  The route to town is about 20 miles, and the taxi fare to go there is about 500Baht, so it seems like a decent bargain even if all you wanted to do was go to the next beach.

We get close to the center of town and are starting to talk about where we want to wander around to, when a couple of locals jump on the bus.  We think nothing of it, but when we get to the last stop on the route, we find out that they are local taxi operators.  Basically the program works like this: the taxi drivers get a kickback (paid in gas for their car) if they bring tourists to certain shops (jewelry stores, souvenir shops, etc.) the more of these type of shops you stop at the less the taxi charge is going to be.  So mixed in with seeing a handful of things you actually want to see, you spend about 1/2 your time seeing a bunch of stuff you have seen before.

Well Mrs. Columbus shrewdly haggles her way down to just one stop (which turns out to be 4) and off we go.  All in all it is not that bad of an experience – if we had been better prepared we could have taken better advantage of the ride, as it seems like we could have gone anywhere in the town as long as we fit some stops in.  The driver is quite friendly, and he offers us a ride to the airport the next day for 600Baht (vs the 800Baht the taxis outside our hotel want) so that seems like a good deal and makes the stops at the retail shops more tolerable.

At the end of the day he drops us off at a ‘bus stop’ so we can catch our bus back to the beach.  There are other people waiting here so it looks good to us, and our driver tells us that the bus should be by anytime, or if we missed that one (we were right close to the 1/2 hour) there will be one more in 1/2 an hour before the bus stops for the night.  We start to chat up the other couple waiting here as they are going to the same place as us, and the time starts to tick by.  A local taxi driver starts to hassle us a bit, telling us there is no more bus coming and that he will take us back for 500 Baht. We are fairly confident there will be a bus, and we know that we could walk up the street a bit and get a taxi for 400Baht so we tell him no and keep waiting.  After about 40 minutes we begin to think that maybe we did miss the last bus and decide with the other couple to split a taxi back to the beach.  We flag down a tuk-tuk and he agrees to take us all back for 400Baht – as we jump in and start to pull away from the curb, we look back to see the bus turn the corner and approach our stop…….

Not that we are really complaining, the extra $4 for direct service does not seem all that bad, and we have another 20mins or so to chat with the people we met.

Finally it is back to the beach where we settle back into the rest of our routine, a walk on the beach, dinner, relax – a tough way to spend the day 🙂