Days 83-86: Phuket, Thailand

We took a short flight from Penang across the border to the resort island of Phuket to avoid the long train and bus ride up from Butterworth (the airline is called Firefly, a big hit for fans of the TV show, such as Mary!). We made some friends in the airport by retrieving their ATM card from the machine. With our new friends, we proceeded to share a shuttle bus down to the (infamous?) Patong Beach. On the way down we stopped briefly at a travel agency where they tried to sell us tours, but we spent the whole time playing with their cute kitten.

I’m sure Patong is nowhere near as bad as the real centers of the Thai sex industry (such at Pattaya), but there were prostitutes everywhere! Mary didn’t recognize them as such, and there is some question as to which of them were simply women looking for farang (western) husbands, but many were clearly working the streets. At times it seemed that every third western man we saw walking down the street had a Thai woman on his arm (frequently half his age and vastly more attractive). On the streets with all the go go bars and nightclubs, there are lines of women just standing around, all dressed up and waiting for company. The bars are also filled with women, to keep the men interested, and presumably buying drinks.

That aside, Patong is a nice town, with a lot of great food. We found a small restaurant with reasonable prices and had such good Tom Yum soup that we decided to come back several times. The soup got spicier each time we came back, starting with no chilies (but a spicy base, hotter than anything you’d get in the states) and gaining about 3 chilies a visit, until on our last visit it reached our limits – how much hotter it would’ve gotten is hard to say, but it did seem they were reaching a limit as to how many chilies they could fit into the bowl! They had a lot of other good food too, but the soup was definitely the highlight.

Patong originally became popular due to its beach, and it hasn’t gone anywhere, although there are many more beach chairs on it now. We spent a relaxing day on the beach, interrupted only by the passing trucks blaring the details of tonight’s Muay Thai boxing match – every night is the biggest match of the year! Later on, we got Thai Massages to relax our sore muscles from a day on the beach! Very relaxing – great on the legs, perhaps not refined on the upper back, at least where we got them. And not sketchy at all, despite the reports we’d heard beforehand about what may or may not be included in a Thai Massage.

There's a lot of great snack food on the streets of Patong (although not much in the way of real food), including roasted corn on the cob, fresh fruit, and "Pancakes" -- thin crepes stuffed with sweet and savory fillings, including our favorite of banana and Nutella. Great for keeping you going while walking around the town and watching all the other tourists and locals!