What Comfort Zone: Phuket

For those of you who didn't hear, Tim and I went to Phuket (pronounced Poo-ket not with an F) this past week for spring break. Phuket is a small island in Southern Thailand.

We were supposed to go to Bangkok about a month ago with a few of our swimmers for a swim meet. That trip was canceled due to the protests by the Red Shirts. Originally we were not going to go anywhere over spring break, because we assumed we would be tired and want the rest after traveling with the students a week before break. As you can assume we decided to go somewhere since we didn't get to to to Bangkok. Tim called a travel agent to see what/where we could get some good deals. 3 days later our trip to Phuket was set up and paid for!

So April 5th we set off to Phuket. We flew Seoul-Hong Kong-Bangkok-Phuket (about 7 hours total). We arrived in Phuket exchanged a little cash then caught a cab to our hotel. As we were getting in the cab the driver said something to another driver, in Thai. The 2nd driver then asked us what hotel, then he relayed the information to our driver. We were off. After a little while our driver called someone, then about 10 minutes later we pull into, what looked to be an abandoned strip of store fronts. There was a van parked and one of the stores seemed to have a light on. I squeezed Timmy's hand hard as we pulled in.. "what are we doing? where are we?" The driver didn't speak a lick of English. He went into the store, which happened to be a place where you can book tours around Phuket (we realized this a few minutes after we pulled up). A lady walks out and sits in the driver's seat. She then asks us what hotel and translates the information to our driver. Apparently our driver was confused, there are 2 hotels called IBIS and he needed to know which one we were going to. Phew... that was not what I thought was going to happen :). The lady then gives us an advertising bit for a day tour to different islands around Phuket. We had been wanting to do that, so we were willing to listen. As we pulled out of the sketch parking lot we had been successful; our driver now knew where he was going, and we had set up our day trip to several islands around Phuket! - it just fell in our laps

resting in our hotel lobby one afternoon

That is just one of many strange things that seemed to happen over trip. For the course of 5 days we hung out at the beach, went shopping at local markets, rode elephants (my favorite!!), did a day tour to local islands (including PhiPhi and stopping at Monkey beach where we fed and hung out with monkeys), reading, dinners on the beach, getting massages (yes Timmy got one too; a foot massage. I got a Thai massage) and so on. We took over 500 pictures of our vacation and loved every minute of it!

Saturday morning we flew from Phuket to Bangkok where we had a night layover. We already had a hotel set up in the Business district. Getting to this hotel was less eventful. We arrived around 2pm and didn't want to stay in the hotel. So, we went for a walk, we walked through a mall and through a park. Then found a place to eat. Really the only thing to tell from our less than 24 hour time in Bangkok is that as we were walking down the streets we heard screaming , horns honking and all sorts of things, then 3-5 trucks at a time, loaded with Red Shirts, would drive by making a ruckus. Apparently there was a HUGE protest that evening. We weren't threatened or scared, but it was interesting to see. Once we got back to Seoul we found out that some of the Red shirts had been killed in the protest that night.

Park in Bangkok

Now for a fun question: Who can guess which ethnicities Timmy was asked if he is and which ethnicities I was asked if I am.... Australian, French, Russian, and British? As we would walk down the street past the markets we would be grabbed and asked a series of questions... all they wanted was for us to buy something from them; they thought this would happen if they were friendly.. well we got very annoyed by it because we would pass the same people each day and they would do the same thing... so we began to ignore them, that's when the guessing began. They would say "My Friend.... where are you from? ... (no answer from us)... Hey Aussie..." we got a kick out of it!