Phuket-Thailand June 2008

Early Saturday morning we checked out of the Mandarin Oriental in Singapore and headed to the airport to fly to Phuket Thailand. It was a short flight, when we arrived we picked up our rental car and headed out for a day of adventures. Thailand is not as English friendly as Singapore and it felt like more of a third world country. It was very green and jungle like and beautiful. We drove to Phang Nga Bay about 45 minute drive. We parked the car at a boat dock and luckily found an American that spoke Thai so we hooked up with him and his family and hired a long tail boat to take us out to see the beautiful Phang Nga Bay. Wow! It was amazing! There are views of literally hundreds of limestone cliffs rising over the sea up to 1,150 ft high. Inside many of the stacks are narrow tunnels and sea caves. The waters were very calm and it was covered so we were protected from the rain and sun, making it a very nice boat ride. The famous James Bond Island is located in this bay, this island was shown in the James Bond movie “The Man with the Golden Gun”. All the tourists seem to stop here so it was very crowded but we stopped and walked around the island and explored some of the caves. Then we cruised over to Koh Pannyi (Sea Gypsy Island) This is a remarkable village, the whole of it built out over water on stilts and with a giant rock monolith behind it. We ate lunch here, they had nets of live fish and lobster and crabs and we picked a fish and they went and killed it for us and cooked it up for lunch. I usually don’t eat fish but I figured it was the safest thing to eat since it was fresh! It was actually really good, but they served the entire fish with bones and all, I couldn’t look at it so Brett picked it apart for me. We took a walk around the village and then got back on our boat. We cruised back to our car. What an amazing and fun afternoon!
We then had to drive another hour or two to get to our hotel for the night. We stayed in the Hilton Phuket Arcadia, right by Karon Beach. It was a very nice hotel with a view of the ocean from our room. We stopped at the beach and watched the sunset, it was beautiful, the ocean waters were very warm. Allden wanted to run straight out into the water, so I took off his shoes and let him put his feet in the water and sand but he didn’t like it too much and threw a fit. Our hotel was very nice and had a huge property with land all around it, a nice swimming pool and gardens to walk around. We ate dinner at the hotel and enjoyed the live music.