Avet Vagari: Good Friends in Phuket

In Ampangan Woh, I was rarely alone. There was zero privacy in the village where I lived, and for the better part of a year I shared my sleeping space with three other people, each of us lined up side by side on the floor with less than two feet to ourselves. In the night we often rolled into one another. It was common that my shower was interrupted by someone looking to wash dishes or clothes or simply shower as well. I ate all my meals with at least two other people, but more often five or six other people. After eight months of never being on my own, I was glad for the privacy that traveling alone provided (I’ll own up to being the only budget traveler who refers to shared dorm rooms as “privacy”). It was good to have some time to reflect on the last year of my life – what I learned, what I learned about myself, and where to go from here (the jury’s still out on that last one, so quit asking!).

All that being said, after a week of being by myself, I was feeling a little bit lonely, missing having people around to share meals with (and cut me off when I’ve been eating too much green curry) and just chat with. From Koh Lanta, I hopped on a ferry to Koh Phi Phi, with its stunning cliff faces and blue blue water, and from there switched boats for one bound for Phuket, where a good friend and former roommate has been working for the last year. She was finishing up her last week of work at the time, so I was ready for some good celebrating and catch-up time.

View of Phi Phi from the ferry

Hi and Bye, Phi Phi!

I arrived Wednesday afternoon, and she met me at the ferry (it was so nice to see her after so long!) and we scootered over to her house. We drove more or less straight west across the island, so she pointed out some of the sights to me on our way (her school, her favorite pad thai place, her favorite vegetarian restaurant, her dentist…). I hopped in her (wonderful) shower, threw in a load of laundry, and stretched out in her living room, enjoying the comforts of having a real home. We hung out there until the evening, when one of her friends came over to join us for dinner. We drove up to a restaurant she actually told me about eleven months ago, set high above town on one of the island’s numerous mountains, with a view of the valley where the town of Patong is. After dinner we took a bus down (one of the bikes was complaining about the slope, and we didn’t feel safe taking two people down on it; but taking the bus allowed us to read the sign behind the driver, which was an apology: The restaurant is located on top of a hill, and therefore the bus needs to travel at a minimum speed, which “might give you a fright” in order to make it to the top.) to Patong, Phuket’s infamous bar and club scene which is especially popular among the sex tourism crowd. It was pretty sickening to see how out in the open it all is, especially having just finished reading the memoirs of one of Thailand’s extremely young sex workers. Crazy bars and clubs aren’t exactly my scene anyway, but I did have a good time, once I trained my eyes to look away from the tables of obviously mismatched couples surrounding us.

Thursday Katty had to work, so her visiting boyfriend (currently working in Northern Thailand) and I spent a lazy day half-heartedly looking for jobs and just relaxing at the house (it had been a rough week lounging at the beach). We had a movie and take-out night, which was fun, and went to sleep early. Friday morning, while Katty was working, Tim and I drove to the immigration office, to get my visa issues settled, which was easy and relatively hassle-free, and then we met Katty and her coworkers for lunch near their school. All but a few of them are leaving in the next few weeks, and either returning to their home countries, or finding work elsewhere, so it was their last day. We had a lazy lunch, and most people agreed to meet later in Patong, before they returned to work. Tim and I spent the afternoon at a tiny but beautiful and almost empty beach – Iguana Beach, although I didn’t see any, enjoying the sunshine and watching the waves from our comfy little cabana. Katty joined us once she’d finished work and we spent a while longer there, before heading to an Italian restaurant for dinner, and then back to overwhelming Patong. With a much bigger group than we’d had on Wednesday night, it was a lot more fun, but still not my favorite place in the world.

Iguana Beach

Too cloudy for a good sunset, but still a beautiful place!

Saturday, we woke up unsure of how to spend the day – a few suggestions were tossed around for a while, until one of Katty’s friends said he wanted to go to a beach and a bar in the south of the island. As it was quite a drive, we decided to find a guesthouse and spend the night down there. The drive down was spectacular (since I don’t drive motorbikes or scooters, I had the easiest job and had the luxury of just looking around – thanks Tim!). We drove up and through the mountains, which gave us a great view over the sea and the (shrinking) jungle in the middle of the island. Even from so high above and so far away, it was easy to tell how clear the water was. We found a guesthouse quickly, and then made a beeline for the beach. We bypassed the more popular Naiharn Beach and laid out our towels instead on Ao Sane, a smaller and less crowded beach set behind a resort, so that it seems almost private and attracts a curious mix of locals and foreigners. The sand wasn’t the fine white almost silky sand other beaches brag about (in fact it was rather pebbly and painful to walk on) but the water more than made up for it – it was clear, blue, and cool enough to feel refreshing, and the rocks rising out of the sea made it very scenic. We did head over to Naiharn for the sunset, which would have been blocked by cliffs to the west of Ao Sane, before a dinner of (surprisingly acceptable) Mexican food and an evening of drinks at a nearly empty bar (some of our group drove out to the next town to hear a Thai band play, but I’d actually just seen them in Koh Lanta and was feeling to tired to enjoy myself there, so Katty and I just headed to bed).

Ao Sane beach - rocky terrain but beautiful water!

Sunset over Naiharn Beach

Sunday was a food poisoning day. I did feel well enough to tour the night market in the evening (but not well enough to digest more than iced tea). The market was huge – much bigger than those I’d seen in Malaysia. It went on and on: aisles of food, drinks, clothes, accessories, electronics, you name it, plus a bouncy castle. We met Katty’s parents and sister, who’d just arrived for a short visit, and had a great evening, much lower key than going out in Patong.

Monday morning, we all headed up to the north of the island, where Katty’s parents were staying. We spent the day making full use of the hotel’s beautiful and luxurious beachside pool, had a nice walk down the beach (where we were all impressed by the waves, which seem to have sprung up overnight in Thailand) and had a few delicious sandwiches for lunch (food poisoning officially gone). I was planning to head to Bangkok that night on the 12 hour overnight bus, but I just wasn’t feeling up to leaving – we were having such a good time in the pool and at the beach that I decided to stay one more night. We all had a great dinner at a kind of DIY barbeque buffet. Set in the center of the tables was a kind of bowl (heated by a fire from below) with a dome in the center. Along the wall of the restaurant were various kinds of meat, seafood, tofu, and veggies, as well as sauces, spices, and limes. The dome was hot enough to cook the food, whose juices ran down into the bowl, which serves filled with boiling water, and to which we added noodles and raw veggies, making a noodle soup to be eaten with the grilled meat (or tofu or seafood). It was so good, and so much fun to sit there cooking together while we ate. We returned to the hotel, where Katty’s parents had invited us to stay for the night (in the best bed I can remember). We chatted and hung out for a few hours, before heading to bed.

Tuesday morning, we got up, shared in the hotel’s enormous breakfast buffet, and then headed south to see some of the actual sights of Phuket (not that I hadn’t enjoyed seeing Katty’s dentist’s office). We drove to Wat Chalong, one of Phuket’s more well-known temples. It was gorgeous, with several smaller temples within the complex. The first one had a gleaming red and gold roof, with a shrine inside, but most fabulous, I thought, was the second one we went into. The ground floor was so full of Buddha statues that it was almost difficult to navigate around them. The other floors were similar, if less packed, but I loved the bright murals covering the walls, and the view over the landscape from the top floor. I also liked the banister of the staircases – a sparkling green dragon whose tail spanned the length of the staircase, and in whose mouth people have placed coins for luck or as a prayer. We left the temple and drove straight up, to the mountain on top of which the famous “Big Buddha” sits. It’s exactly what it sounds like: an awe-inspiring, enormous white statue of Buddha looms over the island of Phuket, and he can be spotted from various points along the road. It’s impossible to describe how gigantic the statue is. From there we returned to sea level, where I grabbed a taxi to the bus station in order to catch my 7:00 bus from Phuket to my next destination: Bangkok.