We boarded minibus 1 and headed off for a 12 hour roller coaster ride that would take us across the border into Thailand, briefly stopping to clear immigration, and with just enough time to regard the huge banner stretched across the border which read "ARMY - BEDROCK OF SOVEREIGNTY". Then we stopped at an office in a border town, to find our own lunch and then climb onto bus 2. Several hours later and we'd pull up at a restaurant in the middle of no-where. This lazy stop lasted about 45 minutes or so and just when we were boarding our bus to continue, a flurry of Thai and Malay shouting preceded our bags getting whisked across to another sitting minibus, full of locals. Before we could even get to the bottom of what was happening our previous bus had vanished into a cloud of dust and car horns and we got onto bus 3 hoping for the best. Our biggest concern wasn't where we were going but that we'd get there in one piece. The minibuses are small, top heavy and narrow Toyota vans, something like a souped up Bedford Rascal, and the drivers are maniacs. In the end though, all was fine and we toppled out at the end of the line in Phuket.
Phuket may not hold onto any sense of traditional Thailand, and if your looking for an authentic experience of the culture, you could probably go anywhere else in the country and see more of that, but it seemed as legitimate a part of the Thai experience as anything else and therefor worthy of a little detour. We also thought it might be a good place to check out Scuba Diving.
We settled into Patong, Phuket's biggest and loudest town. This is Thailand's Ibiza, with it's strip of pumping clubs and bars and drunk tourists falling over themselves in the street. Every inch of pavement and every second inch of road is occupied by a trader selling knocked off DVD's, T-Shirts, tacky souvenirs and bags for those people who have bought too much of the offerings. Every street corner has the sound of tattoo guns buzzing away and a walk down to the beach (which is just across the road) is impossible without the cries of people shouting at you to buy a suit or something. Crossing the road is then a job in itself, with the traffic trying to navigate it's way through the new one way system. Such a mess has been made of it that certain streets have cars passing each other on the wrong side and then they have to push back between each other at the junctions before returning to the other correct side of the road (left). Still, all this confusion means that the convoy of trucks with giant wooden boxes attached to them advertising their wares and booming out of speakers have all the more time to tell you about the "Thai boxing, tonight, tonight, tonight, Bangra Stadium tonight, tonight, tonight, real fighting tonight, tonight, tonight" or if that's not your cup of tea, there's always the Rock Cafe which promises to "Rock your ass off".
Once you've successfully crossed the street you then have the beach to negotiate. It pays not to take your eye off where you're going, though it's easy to do with people trying to sell you jet-ski rides and all. But for those people who have not been paying attention, they risk having a parachutist land on them. The image of people being pulled up into the sky on a parachute by a speed boat will be familiar to most people, but here they have to do things a little more dangerously. Any hope of having a tranquil moment of contemplation in the heavens can be dismissed as you will be accompanied the whole time by a bloke who stands on your shoulders, holding on to the parachute strings and steers you about leaping between the cords and jumping backwards off it, holding on to your harness to control your altitude. This chap, who flits about like a monkey has no harness but Merrily rides for the whole day, ride after ride after ride.
We of course had nothing to do with any of this nonsense and instead did something very sensible and self improving, found a dive shop and learned to dive. We found three shops offering the Padi Open Water Course, all for about the same cost and picked the one next door to our hotel with it's own little pool outside it. We didn't realise quite how small this pool was though until we got in, my estimate would place it at about 4 meters by 12 meters. Still, despite it's size, it was quite adequate for our two days of classroom theory and pool based procedures. Those two days done and it was out on the boat to repeat everything we had done on the sea floor for the next two days. The dive site we used was about an hour and half out on the boat, just off the coast of an island. It was quite a large boat that took us out, owned by the diving company - Scubacat - and carried us and a few other people, who were out doing either fun dives or other courses. Lunch was provided and tea and coffee and a merry day's cruise could happily have been had by anyone who didn't even get wet. There was plenty to see, even though we weren't really supposed to be down just to see stuff. There were plenty of clumps of reef, and between these were sandy sparse areas where we could kneel or lie down and go through procedures including removing our masks, then putting them back on and clearing them of water (how do you think you do that then?) or swapping air supplies with a buddie and other such things. Probably the hardest exercise was manging to make yourself float at a perfectly stable depth, neither going up or down and doing it with nothing other than your breath for regulation. Each day we made two dives, with lunch in between. At the end of four days, we sat an exam, (which we both got 100% on - he he!) and were then pronounced certified to dive up to a depth of 18 meters anywhere in the world.
We didn't hang around long in Phuket after that and headed off to the station on the mainland, where after a power cut in the station and a few hours delay we caught the sleeper train up to Bangkok. At first, on boarding the train though, we found one of our bunks had been pinched, obviously by a passenger who decided the train would never reach us. Rather than getting embroiled in a dual language argument we had a brief glance up and down the carriages for the conductor so he could deal with it on our behalf. But with no sign of the conductor, we took upon ourselves to wake the intruder up, only to discover that the reason we couldn't find the conductor was because he was sleeping on our bed. I've never seen someone jump as fast or as apologetically as he did, landing with both feet on the ground and the bed already re-made for us faster than you could say Boo!.
Phuket may not hold onto any sense of traditional Thailand, and if your looking for an authentic experience of the culture, you could probably go anywhere else in the country and see more of that, but it seemed as legitimate a part of the Thai experience as anything else and therefor worthy of a little detour. We also thought it might be a good place to check out Scuba Diving.
We settled into Patong, Phuket's biggest and loudest town. This is Thailand's Ibiza, with it's strip of pumping clubs and bars and drunk tourists falling over themselves in the street. Every inch of pavement and every second inch of road is occupied by a trader selling knocked off DVD's, T-Shirts, tacky souvenirs and bags for those people who have bought too much of the offerings. Every street corner has the sound of tattoo guns buzzing away and a walk down to the beach (which is just across the road) is impossible without the cries of people shouting at you to buy a suit or something. Crossing the road is then a job in itself, with the traffic trying to navigate it's way through the new one way system. Such a mess has been made of it that certain streets have cars passing each other on the wrong side and then they have to push back between each other at the junctions before returning to the other correct side of the road (left). Still, all this confusion means that the convoy of trucks with giant wooden boxes attached to them advertising their wares and booming out of speakers have all the more time to tell you about the "Thai boxing, tonight, tonight, tonight, Bangra Stadium tonight, tonight, tonight, real fighting tonight, tonight, tonight" or if that's not your cup of tea, there's always the Rock Cafe which promises to "Rock your ass off".
Once you've successfully crossed the street you then have the beach to negotiate. It pays not to take your eye off where you're going, though it's easy to do with people trying to sell you jet-ski rides and all. But for those people who have not been paying attention, they risk having a parachutist land on them. The image of people being pulled up into the sky on a parachute by a speed boat will be familiar to most people, but here they have to do things a little more dangerously. Any hope of having a tranquil moment of contemplation in the heavens can be dismissed as you will be accompanied the whole time by a bloke who stands on your shoulders, holding on to the parachute strings and steers you about leaping between the cords and jumping backwards off it, holding on to your harness to control your altitude. This chap, who flits about like a monkey has no harness but Merrily rides for the whole day, ride after ride after ride.
We of course had nothing to do with any of this nonsense and instead did something very sensible and self improving, found a dive shop and learned to dive. We found three shops offering the Padi Open Water Course, all for about the same cost and picked the one next door to our hotel with it's own little pool outside it. We didn't realise quite how small this pool was though until we got in, my estimate would place it at about 4 meters by 12 meters. Still, despite it's size, it was quite adequate for our two days of classroom theory and pool based procedures. Those two days done and it was out on the boat to repeat everything we had done on the sea floor for the next two days. The dive site we used was about an hour and half out on the boat, just off the coast of an island. It was quite a large boat that took us out, owned by the diving company - Scubacat - and carried us and a few other people, who were out doing either fun dives or other courses. Lunch was provided and tea and coffee and a merry day's cruise could happily have been had by anyone who didn't even get wet. There was plenty to see, even though we weren't really supposed to be down just to see stuff. There were plenty of clumps of reef, and between these were sandy sparse areas where we could kneel or lie down and go through procedures including removing our masks, then putting them back on and clearing them of water (how do you think you do that then?) or swapping air supplies with a buddie and other such things. Probably the hardest exercise was manging to make yourself float at a perfectly stable depth, neither going up or down and doing it with nothing other than your breath for regulation. Each day we made two dives, with lunch in between. At the end of four days, we sat an exam, (which we both got 100% on - he he!) and were then pronounced certified to dive up to a depth of 18 meters anywhere in the world.
We didn't hang around long in Phuket after that and headed off to the station on the mainland, where after a power cut in the station and a few hours delay we caught the sleeper train up to Bangkok. At first, on boarding the train though, we found one of our bunks had been pinched, obviously by a passenger who decided the train would never reach us. Rather than getting embroiled in a dual language argument we had a brief glance up and down the carriages for the conductor so he could deal with it on our behalf. But with no sign of the conductor, we took upon ourselves to wake the intruder up, only to discover that the reason we couldn't find the conductor was because he was sleeping on our bed. I've never seen someone jump as fast or as apologetically as he did, landing with both feet on the ground and the bed already re-made for us faster than you could say Boo!.
1 comment:
This trip would have been great to watch as a travel documentary or even better a series of documentaries. I look forward to every post you make.
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