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…

We started the beach part of our vacation by flying south from Bangkok to Phuket.  Phuket is actually an island (Phuket Island, Phuket Province) and there is also a city on the island named Phuket; however, when tourists talk about going to Phuket they are usually referring to one of the many beach towns on the west side of the island.

We decided to start our vacation in the beach town of Karon – about 3/4 of the way down the west coast (just below the horse-shoe bay that is Patong Beach) – this is the beach that I had stayed at last year when I was here, so it gave us a semi-known starting place to begin our adventure from.

We were pleasantly surprised when we got to our hotel (the Sugar Palm Karon) and found that they had upgraded our $18/night rooms to the deluxe poolside rooms.  These rooms have a terrace that opens out directly to the pool, so you can literally walk out from your room and 4 feet straight into the water.  Needless to say the kids were very excited about this.

We had originally booked our rooms here for only 3 nights, but after settling in and unwinding here and at the beach, Mrs. Columbus and I decided to book some additional nights here and spend all of our Phuket time at this hotel.  We will make day trips out from here, but this is home for now.

Karon Beach is know as one of the ‘quieter’ beaches in Phuket as there is not a lot of night life here.  After the sun goes down you can take a quiet walk on the streets to find a spot for dinner, or do some shopping at the night market.  The beach itself is incredible, the sand is a soft fine powder almost like walking on flour or powdered sugar – in fact the sand is so fine that it sort of ‘squeaks’ when you walk on it.

We have spent our first few days here mostly just lounging about (and getting massages) but are planning an excursion to Phi Phi Island, and likely a day tour around the island with a private car.  We have so far been able to fill our days with walking on the beaches and around the streets.

I may have to upgrade Mrs. Columbus’ status to maybe Lewis or Clark, as she has now stepped up and eaten the street food!!  After saying fairly strongly that she was unlikely to eat anything ‘from one of those dirty carts’ she succumbed first to the banana pancake, and now to the chicken-on-a -stick….

We took a tuk-tuk up to Patong Beach yesterday to have a look around and do some shopping.  Patong Beach is like the New Orleans of Phuket – it is a much busier beach, and shop after shop after shop, all peddling the same knock-off goods as the last store.  I suppose if I was say, 5 years younger and single it would be the place to go, but now it just seems like a whole lot of busy to me.  Even the Great Adventurer herself had gotten her fill after a couple of hours.  Of course as the suns sets, the more adult-oriented part of Patong comes alive, and all of the illicit things you hear about become available – fortunately for us we were ready to leave before I had to answer a bunch of difficult questions from the small people.  It was good to see and have something to compare to, but made us that much more grateful for our quiet little place back in Karon.

We have moved on to Phuket – Karon Beach – from Bangkok, but I will talk more about that in another post.  For now I need to just wallow for a bit in a topic that is near and dear to my heart – massage!

I became quite enamored with the joy of a good massage last year when I was here with my brother and my parents.  I was a little cautious at first as the thought of a strange person touching me was out of my normal comfort zone, but I was convinced to give it a try – well after the first time it was like being addicted to crack, and became part of my daily ritual.  And at 300B (about $8 US) for an hour, who could refuse.

Well I would be lying if I did not admit that appeal of returning to Thailand for some of that oh so splendid self indulgence was not part of my motivation to return here, and now that I am back by the beach it was time to dive back in.

For those that have never experienced Thai massage, it shares very little with what we would think of when we get a massage at the Gene Juarez, or even those saucy moves you used back in college when trying to impress the ladies.  Thai massage can only be described as a woman half your size trying to teach you body how to become a pretzel.  The first time you experience it, you get part way in and think that you are really a punching bag at a Thai kick-boxing school, and wonder what on earth have you committed yourself to.  But by the time the massage is complete you fall into this gelatinous state of nirvana and wonder a) why it has taken you so long to find such a wonderful thing, and b) when can you sneak away for your next one.

As you lay there in your tiki-style hut and just let yourself relax while the masseuse works you over you very quickly tune out the world around you and let the gentle breeze just soothe and relax you.  My words here don’t do it justice, but if you ever get the chance to get a decent massage on a beach it is an experience you will not soon forget.

So 2 days in at our spot in Phuket, I am a couple of massages to the plus column, and getting down into a very zen-like spot.  Even the Great Adventurer herself tried one out yesterday and she is quickly realizing why I like it so much.  Oh yes, and much to my delight I find that the off-season has caused some contraction in the local economy, and the price for my 1 hour session has dropped to 200B (about $6) – ahh the life…

For our 2nd day in Bangkok we decided to take a day trip out to see some one of the many historic sites. We wanted to go out to Ayutthaya to see the ruins there, so between our trip to the Palace and our river tour yesterday we stopped at a Tourism Authority to see what our options were.  There were several pre-packaged options, but after haggling the price a bit and evaluating the options we decided to hire a private van and driver for the day.   For 2000 Baht (about $60 US) we got an air-conditioned van and english speaking driver and could go anywhere we wanted as long as we were back by 6pm.

Our driver picked us up at 8:30 and we headed out for Ayutthaya.  The drive from Bangkok is about 1.5 hours and we settled in for our trip.  Bangkok seemed to spread out for about the first half of the trip, but once we cleared the city the smog started to thin and it was a beautifully clear day.  You don’t really realize how dirty the air is in the city until you leave and have some point of comparison, but Bangkok seemed to be fully engulfed by a reddish-brown haze as we looked behind us.

Summer Palace Bang Pa-in

Our first stop was about 1 hour outside of the city at one of the many summer palaces – this one in Bang Pa-in.  Construction at the Summer Palace was started in 1872 by King Rama V and is about 20 acres of manicured grounds, water features, residences and ceremonial buildings.  The Palace is used by the current royal family only for special occasions, so is open to tourists and visitors most of the time.

While the weather the day before seemed hot, it was only an introduction to real heat – without the protective smog layer and clear skies it felt like we were having a brief tour of the sun.  Luckily for Laurie the guards at the gate loaned her a special shirt to cover her shoulders, with the added side benefit of being able to soak up an extra gallon or so of sweat.

The Palace grounds however were so inspiring that there were times when we forgot the heat and just soaked up the beauty and tranquility of the place.  After seeing both the palace in Bangkok and the palace here we came to two conclusions: 1) it is definitely good to be the king, 2) with the palace at Bang Pa-in why would you ever want to go back to the palace in Bangkok.

Ayutthaya

Next it was off to Ayutthaya.  There are more than a dozen different temples and ruins throughout the area, and the modern city has grown up in and around the historic sites.  We clearly don’t have time to see them all (and likely not the perseverance as the small people are getting a little temple weary) but our driver takes us to the highlights.  We end up seeing 3 of the more famous spots, including the temple of the Reclining Buddha, the ‘Face Buddha’, and the ruins of the old palace.

We did stop briefly for lunch, where we had a great meal on a floating barge on the river, and then also at a little ‘safari park’ as the one thing Jackie wanted to do on here birthday was ride an elephant.  So the kids took a short ride on the elephants while I stayed back to take some photos of Mrs. Columbus (the Great Adventurer) taming a fierce jungle cat!!

The temple of the Reclining Buddha is a regular stop on many tours because the image of the Buddha in a reclining position is not very common – from what I can gather there are only a handful in all of Thailand, and coupled with the fact that the main temple here is almost completely intact, it brings a lot of people to worship as well as tourists to see the grounds.

The ‘Face Buddha’ is at the Ayutthaya heritage park, and is part of the original temple / palace complexes here that were built in the late 1300s.  The entire complex was damaged during one of the may conflicts with the neighboring regions, and the city was mostly leveled in 1767 by the Burmese army.  As part of the temple razing, the Burmese Army defaced the Buddha images, mostly by removing the Buddha’s head as sort of an Asian ‘in your face’.   At this set of ruins, one of the Buddha head statues was engulfed by the roots of a tree and has grown ‘into’ the tree over the 100s of years that it sat there.

It was a bit daunting to walk through the grounds and realize that 500+ years ago people were building these great monuments and we were able to still see today some of their efforts.  In looking at many of the ruins it seems that time will not be on their side, and even though there are ongoing restoration efforts being taken on all of these sites, the sheer forces of nature are slowly wearing things down.  I am glad we took the time to come and see it while we can, as I’m sure that it was different 10 years ago, and will be changed again 10 years from now.

After a long hot day of touring all of these sites we re-hydrated ourselves with what seemed like gallons of water and climbed back into our air-conditioned van for the trip back to Bangkok. We got in an hour or so at the hotel pool (very refreshing) and then out for dinner and into bed.  While out for dinner we encountered our first round of rainy-season weather – while searching for a place to eat, the skies literally opened up in a torrential downpour that lasted for about an hour or so before clearing off.  We did get caught in the front part of the storm while dashing for a restaurant, but even though we did not have to go far, we were well soaked by the time we got about 2 blocks – it is a good thing the rain here is warm.