I have made it to Phuket successfully! Every part of course was an adventure.
My arrival to Phuket came a couple hours late. The boards in the
The only highlight of my flight was one of the most beautiful above cloud sunsets I have ever seen. The light filtered though many layers of clouds and caused sunrays, orange, red, deep blue, and purple colored dramatic excellence. (no picture sorry)
Upon landing I was treated with a 1.5 hour minibus ride that was supposed to be 20 minutes. Long story short they had no idea which town my hotel was in and we took an island tour.
Wednesday morning I was awakened by jetlag at
After walking and realizing everything was closed this early I decided to see sites instead of stores. I found a taxi driver that would drive me from site to site and would wait at each place while I took pictures. Eventually we found a 30 meter tall sitting Buddha statue. I climbed the temple to take pictures, removed my sandals as required, but still managed to make Buddha angry.
On the way back down the stairs, I realized the steps seemed very slippery as it was raining. I reached for the handrail and before I could get to it, my feet were already in front of me and I was headed down the stairs—all the way down the stairs. I’m not sure how many obscenities I uttered but when I got to the bottom and just laid there trying to figure out how many bones I broke, a kind Buddhist Monk came out of nowhere and said, “Walk slowly, walk slowly, must walk slowly.” He may have been trying to tell me to get up slowly but either way I found it hilarious that I just swore all the way down a Buddhist temple.
I gashed my arm pretty good and had additional scrapes on my ankles, and other arm. My tailbone took quite a beating too. The taxi driver ended up taking me to the clinic for some gauze and to get cleaned up. I paid a whopping 100 Baht for the service and medical supplies. I asked for extra gauze so I could keep changing the dressing and she handed tons over with a brand new roll of medical tape. That’s 3 bucks US in case you are wondering! Pretty good considering she worked the wound for 10 minutes.
Off I went to
My next adventure might seem naïve to some of you but I enjoyed it and don’t regret it. I was approached by 2 Brits about a free prize based on some scratch tickets. I scratched and won a t-shirt on the first card, and the grand prize on the second. The grand prize ended up being a 1 week vacation in a nice resort in either Phuket, Ko Samui,
So to collect my prize I had to sit through a 90 minute timeshare presentation. It ended up being pretty cool although much longer than 90 minutes (the guy was new and slow at his job). They drove us to 3 different resorts in the system and at each place he offered me a drink to relax while we were waiting for the next transport. When all was said and done I had 4 non-alcoholic mixed fruit shakes and a full lunch, all at beachside spots and resorts. While it hadn’t been my original plan for the day, it was a pretty great alternative considering my tailbone and arm were throbbing. I guess Buddha was apologizing for his harsh treatment earlier in the day.
Later in the evening, I caught up with Ryan and Alexia. (for those of you that don’t know, Ryan and Alexia are close friends that paved the way for me to be here. They did all the research ahead of time, made all the mistakes for me, and now I get to steal of the fruits of their labor). They were arriving from a
