Thailand travelogue

The jinx has finally been cleared!!!!

Confused???. Which jinx? Wasn't this supposed to be a travelogue. Well the background is, I had always joked with my friends (during our mock sessions on palmistry ;)) how I lacked the travel line and somehow many events proved this. I never made it out of India. So finally I did make it to the destination I had dreamt of for the past 6-7 years. Phuket - the place with beautiful beaches and amazing marine life. Ever since I had seen photographs my best friend from school had clicked, I was dying to go to Phang Nga bay canoeing throughs the caves formed at the base of the islands. You will have to wait till you read more on that.

When things have to happen they just do. We started off (BTW, this we is me n my friend Sawita) from Pune on 26th Oct 04. Let me pat my back for making this trip happen in 10 days flat. Sawita was in between a job switchover. She was back from a scuba diving trip to Goa just a day before. We went chatter chatter most of the time from Pune to Bombay. The rest of the time Sawita was unknowingly falling off to sleep (remember her Goa hangover :)) Sawita I can prove it....check
out my video. The flight from Bombay to Phuket was okay. I was complaining about Thai airways not providing any chocolates and sawita was confused why I was acting like a kid. During my flight I was quite uncomfortable. I was not appreciating the pressure inside the plane. I put on my head set and went all the way sleeping. Once in Bangkok, we went thru the chores of visa and immigration and blah blah and were put up on the connecting flight to Phuket.

Phuket is like Goa umm not really. You will have to sweep and scrub Goa 10000 times before that (well let me make it 1000. I am proud to be an Indian). Good roads. I was dying to drive the taxi which came to pick us up. The taxi was a superb Toyota. Please give me the wheel, there are no potholes but I controlled this urge because I cannot drive a car....i mean I cannot drive beyond the speed of 40...I have never done that....the cycle in front of me never allows me to do such forbidden things. I love Thailand for that.......no no....I am still a proud Indian and I love Pune. Its just that I fancy bigger cars. Okay back to the travelogue. Phuket runs on Toyota's and Honda bikes (similar to Hero Honda street). You do find a variety of cars but Toyota rules.

Day1 - 27th
My first attempt of speaking with locals - I wanted to know what was the model of the car I was sitting. Thailand does not speak English at all. Even the best hotels have staff who can barely understand their clients. We were put up in Duangjitt resort. A superb resort spread over a few acres of land. The best thing about the resort was its lavish swimming pool. Inspite of the hot sultry weather and my wish to stay without a tan, I could not control myself from taking a leap into the water. In the evening, we were taken (our trip was preplanned) to the Phuket Fantasea show, a Las Vegas style show full of theme costumes, sets, lights, music, jugglers etc. We moved around from one stage to another. The final show was a grand display of Thai culture, an elephant show, a circus as well as a drama where the action sequences actually had a horde of elephants moving on stage. The elephants made an entry from the audience side. A superbly managed show (15 -20 elephants on stage with fireworks and torches..scary).

Day2 - 28th
A superb breakfast and we were off to a tour of the James Bond island. The movie 'The man with the golden gun' was shot here. The name of this island in Thai is Koh Khao Phing Kan. We travelled for around an hour in a boat to reach this place. This island is the the Phang Nga bay
area and is one of the many islands that dot this area. Phang-Nga Bay is one of the most impressive regions in Thailand. Steep, bizarre shaped limestone rocks, some densly covered with plants rise out of the sea. Using rubber canoes we were paddled through small caves to reach the
lagoons inside the rocky islands. Some lagoons are accessible at low tide only. This is sea canoeing, something I was dying to do and yes the experience was just amazing. We had lunch in a restaurant built over sea, close to the shore, easy storage for live fish :) We also saw a
museum consisting on of stuffed sea life. Next we went on naka beach for swimming and kayaking. We then spent time rowing a kayak. I wish I would have taken the Pattaya package and done the sea walk instead...my only regret. After we came back we went for a walk alongside the Patong beach
shopping. DVD's are for 100 bucks!!!. Opposite Patong beach is a store called Ocean Plaza. I regret not having done shopping there. Lalach buri cheez hai. I was told Bangkok was cheaper but we really never got a chance to do shopping in Bangkok. We had nice thai curry and rice for
dinner with live music playing.

Day3 - 29th
Day 3 was a day for snorkelling. Snorkelling which I did in Lakshadweep was quite different than this one. I was in very shallow waters at Lakshadweep. Here I was in deep water but I did not get to see as much variety of sea life as I was expecting. I wanted to buy an underwater camera but could not find a store. Language was the major barrier in getting to know places. After snorkelling we went to the local market on the island and it was full of shops selling these cameras.....isko kehte hain bad luck hich kharab tha.

Day4 - 30th - We had the day off to do our own things. We went around the market near Patong beach. There were quite a few things to buy. Thailand specialises in handmade paper and you get many articles made out of it like phone books, diaries, writing pads and photo albums
which you can buy as gifts for folks back home. That night we were off to Bangkok.
What a change. Bangkok means wide roads, heavy traffic and cars...lots of them. What a variety. We stayed in downtown Bangkok in Royal Benja hotel. The trip so far was so nice happening. We
went out for dinner and realised that life is not as good here as it seems. The place was full of escorts trying to woo guys. The food just didn't taste good anymore.

Day5 - 31st - A half day city tour of bangkok was on the agenda. We first went to the golden buddha temple. A huge statue of buddha in solid gold sits in the middle of a small temple. Devotees throng this place. Along side are statures of three disciples of Buddha. It is said
that many disciples of buddha left India to spread the preachings of Buddha. Three disciples came to Thailand and slowly spread the meesage and thats how buddhism became the main religion in Thailand. It is said that Buddhism in different countries therefore has various versions. The message of Buddha was spread across as understood by the disciples. Temples are called Wat. Thai architecture has its own unique style of paintings. Unfortunately since I am writing this part of
the travelogue after a long time, I forgot the name. Next we went to another temple housing a huge huge reclining Buddha. On the way we saw the new and old palace of the king of thailand. People hold him in high respect. We saw few more places.

We were then dopped to the weekend market. This is a wholesale market and you get everything here..almost! Just name it. We saw a huge section selling pets, all kinds of dogs, cats, birds, fish and yes even turtles. There was a section selling food items fresh/packed and fast food. Some shops selling gift items and hand made paper items. Intially Sawita bought some dvds. Then we went around the market trying to analyse what all we can buy as gifts for family and friends back home. We nearly finalised on some clay pen stands in various animal forms. Deciding to buy them if we got a better bargain, we moved ahead to a shop selling lanterns and that when Sawita realised that she had been pickpocketed. And the search started....... We went back the way we
came enquiring on the way and we finally erached the dvd shop. Sawita was quite upset. It was finally decided that she stay near that shop and meanwhile I pick the pen stands with whatever money was left with me. When I went back to Sawita, I saw her all excited and smiling. She had
got her wallet!!!!!. After I had left, Sawita put her dumb charades skills to utmost use trying to explain to the locals that she had lost her wallet. Finally some people together figured out what had happened. Someone pointed her to the watchman. He asked her to wait a second and he was back in a minute with her wallet minus her cash. At least her cards etc was saved. We heaved a sigh of relief and started our journey back to the hotel. It was 1 noon and we were now hungry. We had to get back to the hotel with the money I had hence we skipped lunch. We were quite far from the hotel area. We started in search of the local train. We new the station name. We walked for quite some time in the hot sun. Actually we were told that the station was quite near to the market. We kept walking for a long time with whatever directions we were getting but the station was no where in sight. When we finally reached we realised that this station was not for local trains. Huh!! We decided to take a taxi to our hotel. We wanted to be doubly sure if the taxi guy understood where we wanted to go but each time we asked him a question he used to stop. He then asked us if we would like to take the highway or the inner road. Unaware as we were, we asked him to take the inner road and thats when we saw the real traffic in bangkok. We were inching our way and we could see the meter run. Phew! After some 10 min which seemed like hours we had just reached back to the market place. We decided to get off the taxi. We just had to open the mouth and as usual the taxi guy stopped LOL. We paid his bill and we realised the station we were looking for was just next door. Life seemed so much easier then. We took our ticket and were back to our destination. We got out at Sukhumvit stn. and started walking towards our hotel. We had to go to soi5 (i.e. lane 5) and we were at leat 50 lanes away but this did not bother us majorly beacuse we knew where we were. All we had to do was walk those few lanes. When on foreign shores, it is so heartening to know you are not lost. It was nearly past 4 and the sight of McDonalds was a very welcome sight. I had never appreciated McDs so much before. Us din dua di maine. Just
to tell you, thankfully we had enough money kept in the hotel safe hence the rest of the trip was fine. Weekend market is worth a visit but it comes with a small warning 'Beware of pickpocketers'.

Day6 -1 Nov
It was the day for safari world. I wouldn't get into the details of what all we saw. It has a variety of animals but what I want to point out is that the number of animals was huge. You can see a huge herd of zebras, huge no of giraffes. Everything was in huge numbers. Here in India you can see one animal or two caged in dirty and small cages barely enough for them to move. Things are improving here in India though. The entire place is well planned out, gives you
directions and has well maintained loos all over. One more interesting thing, the penguin show had Indian songs playing. All Indians started dancing to them. The song - remix of 'yeh desh hai veer jawanoka' was a hit. Its nice to hear our language in a foreign land. A cowboy style drama was also staged as part of entertainment.

Day7 - Last day in Thailand.
As we waited for the pick up car to airport, I had an idea. Together me and Sawita sang a Thai song. I have a recording to prove it....LOL. Now the truth. For all those who have seen
us sing the Thai song, it was also penned by us using all the words in Thai which we had gathered in one week or the names of the places we visited. When we fell short of words we put on the tv and got something which rhymed ;))))

I had a good time in Thailand, please do visit.