Plenty of people have told us that Phuket has had its day, but we decided to check it out anyway. We decided to stay at Karon beach, 10 minutes south of the madness of the much busier but much less pretty Patong beach. Even so, after a nice afternoon on Karon beach we decided to take a taxi to Patong to check out the famous nightlife on Bangla Road. At the end of the night we certainly had no regrets about staying further away. The best atmosphere was found on the street, where you could freely drink 7-11 bought $1 beers. The less interesting and stuffy bars didn’t even allow free access to restrooms in exchange for overpriced drinks.
At the end of the night we decided to see a ping pong show, not because we wanted to but because it’s what everyone else does. As expected, it wasn’t one of life’s must have experiences, but there’s probably no need to go into too many details on this blog (might save that for a future therapy session).
The next day we had a nice sleep in before heading to a well-hidden local Pad Thai shop for the best, and cheapest, Pad Thais we’d ever had. That meal ended up being the first of many, as we planned the rest of our time in Phuket around the shop’s limited opening hours.
The next day we had a nice sleep in before heading to a well-hidden local Pad Thai shop for the best, and cheapest, Pad Thais we’d ever had. That meal ended up being the first of many, as we planned the rest of our time in Phuket around the shop’s limited opening hours.
That afternoon, we wandered to the nearby Kata beach, which we felt lived up to its reputation as the prettiest on Phuket island. There’s been a lot of press back in Australia about beach vendors being swept of Phuket’s beaches, and although we don’t like the threat to locals’ livelihood, we did enjoy the relaxed atmosphere on the beach and thought the balance was about right (since we only had to walk a couple of meters off the beach to find someone selling cold fresh coconuts).
For our last day in Phuket, we took a day trip on a tourist boat to ‘James Bond island’, the pretty limestone island featured in the movie ‘the Man with the Golden Gun’. The trip also allowed us to go for kayak rides and swims around other limestone islands and caves, and despite big crowds was a lot of fun.
The following morning we took the first ferry to the famous Phi Phi island, where we’d arranged to stay one night (we couldn’t justify paying the daunting prices to stay longer). After a nice long swim in Phi Phi’s largest turquoise beach, we had an amazing curry lunch from a tiny street food stall in the middle of the island. Later in the afternoon, we hired a private boat to get to Maya Bay, the idyllic paradise immortalized by the Leonardo DiCaprio film, ‘the Beach’. We arrived at 3:30pm when most of the day trippers had left, allowing us to enjoy two hours leading into sunset in relative peace and quiet.
We knew we only had one night on Phi Phi to enjoy it’s famous nightlife, so after returning from Maya bay we set about making the most of it. After several beers and cocktail buckets, we ended up at a unique beachside bar featuring fire jugglers, skipping ropes and a limbo bar. The only thing the bar didn’t have going for it was proximity to our hotel, which made for a long stumble home at the end of the night.
We spent most of the following day recovering by our hotel’s pool and on Phi Phi’s pretty beaches, before taking the late ferry to our last Thai destination, Ao Nang beach (the main beach town in Krabi). Ao Nang has lots of nice bars and restaurants, but the beach itself is not spectacular by Thai standards. Like most other tourists, we used Ao Nang as a base to explore the much prettier nearby beaches of Railay and Pranang.
Throughout our time in Southern Thailand it seemed that every beach we visited was prettier than the last, and, true to form, the Poda and Tup island beaches we visited on our last afternoon were our favorites. We were also really impressed with Krabi generally, and would recommend it to anybody turned off by the more tourist affected (but still, we thought, enjoyable) Phuket and Phi Phi Islands.
After a little over a week touring the most famous beaches in south west Thailand, we flew to Malaysia. More on that in our next post.