Phuket with Ben

AKA Embracing our Inner Tourists

I'd always assumed that one day I'd sail to Phuket and see the amazing karst landscape from the deck of a boat but now that I've given up crewing it seems less likely that that will happen. So, since I was so close, I figured I'd just go. I asked Ben if he'd like to join me or if I should make the trek after he’d left. He said he'd be happy to come with. He's very amiable that way.

Flights, an hour and a half each way, less than $40 CAD round trip, took about 15 minutes to book, and a hostel at Kata Beach about as long. And we were off.

We were only there a few days, and it's not really our kind of place as it's VERY touristy, but we decided go with the flow and embrace our inner tourists.

We had an excellent time. Here is a short list of a few of our wins:

• We arrived well after dark but nonetheles went out and had a great adventure exploring the beach the first evening.
• We played a dinosaur themed mini putt in a park so fantastic I wrote up a tripadvisor report, something I very rarely do.
• We hiked to Karon beach for an ocean swim. The beach was, in it's own way, as good as Burkes. I cannot offer higher praise. We had so much fun swimming we managed to end up with serious sun burns!
• We walked into a super classy hotel for a cooling swim in their pool. And french fries and beer at the swim up bar. (OK so we were still being ourselves.)
• We visited even more of the tourist district… walked till we were exhausted.
• One evening we found a lovely little bar full of character where Ben drank beer, I, margaritas, and we played pool for hours.
• I wanted to see the famous, and very touristy, James Bond Island so we booked a full day tour. Because it's low season we were given 60% off the ticket price without even asking and then the tour was fabulous including, among other things, awesome kayaking through dark bat infested caves in one island and majestic cenote-like openings in the cliffs of another.
• We watched The Man with the Golden Gun and were horrified at the 70’s morals throughout it but loved seeing all the places we'd been.
• Phuket Island was bigger than we'd anticipated, and hillier, and more congested, and given the immense amount of time we'd put into planning our venture (joke) we found ourselves crisscrossing it more than once but we could only offer praise to the minivan transportation system and all the drivers we had.
• Ben found exactly the item he'd been commissioned to buy by a friend. (He also bought himself a bouncy ball and a pokeball and a dino egg toy!)
• And, of course, we continuously ate excellent food: thai breakfast soup and deep fried squid and sweet luscious pineapple and endless other delights…

It was a great couple of days!

Wait, what, is this the Barron Canyon?

Dinosaurs...

... and dragons ...

... and bowls of breakfast soup!

Yipee!

Bangkok with Ben

Flying.

I flew from New Zealand to Australia and then right across the whole of Australia.

Unbelievable.

The coastal cliffs and sprawling city of Sydney quickly gave way to rolling green hills, to a swath of flat brown farmland and then, then...  

Then hours and hours and hours of ecru, ochre, orange, and red scrublands, huge endless empty dry drainage systems, outlined with small intermittent scrubby bushes, cutting across an inconceivably vast barren land. Looking down it seemed incomprehensibly inhospitable, alien, and enormous, the very occasional dirt roads or short sloughs of beige water going nowhere, the land so red at times it was crimson. Real life abstract modern art patterns painted with a palette of warm and neutral colours on a flat canvass measuring thousands of kilometers in every direction. Amazing.

Eventually we fly over the mines at Burrundie, over Darwin, and out across the Timor Sea.

And then across Indonesia, the countless thousands of Islands spotting the Banda Sea, Molucca Sea, Celebes Sea, and finally the South China sea. I wanted to write about the green of these islands, of their white beaches, the turquoise water surrounding them, the blue of the ocean, and how these colours and textures contrasted so greatly with the Australian outback but actually the second part of the trip was pretty cloudy so I didn’t see that much.

It was like this for hours!

Bangkok with Ben.

I did the aforementioned flight in order to get to Bangkok to hang out with my oldest son, Ben. I don't think I've ever done a week away with just him before. It turns out we're excellent travel partners.

Eschewing the regular tourist traps we almost take the wrong river boat by mistake (180 baht for just a few stops) but manage to get the locals’ one instead (15 baht for miles and miles) and we travel it far enough that the locals ask to take selfies with us! We end up at an endless market where we sample durian fruit (delicious but so smelly it's banned from public busses) and bbq’d meat on a stick (yummy pork slivers, and something that might have been chicken and tofu balls, and another one that was even more indecipherable, maybe goat tongue?).

One day our goal is to get to the top of a modern skyscraper that intrigues both of us. We fail in that quest but happen across a Hindu Temple, climb to the 9th floor of an apartment building and swim in the infinity pool we find there (yes, in a white bra and knickers, again, will I never learn), and go out to a Thai movie.

The next day our quest is to find a bar like the one we saw in the movie. We eat street food till we're bursting; small spicy omelettes, sticky coconut rice baked in banana leaves, roasted sugared pineapple, and more skewers of unidentifiable meats. We briefly consider battling the busfulls of Chinese tourists swarming the imperial palace, because we're sure it's fantastic, but choose instead to test the things on offer at 7 Eleven, like small pots of coconut milk floating with black beans and seaweed jelly, and then get lost in Chinatown, go out to lunch somewhere where no English is spoken, and end up with seafood soup that was not at all what we thought we'd ordered but incredibly interesting and so cheap it's practically free.

And it is, for both of us, another perfect day.

The building we couldn't climb behind one we visited on the way.

Apartment pool!

River boat.

Me, Ben, and Steph.

Snacks we didn't eat.

Fautaua

(You'd think that by now that I'd be good at booking flights. But no. I'm not. I'm too indecisive. My modus operandi goes sort of like this: look up prices, wait a couple days to think things over, decide something, realize prices have gone up in the last few days, panic, start the process over. It often results in me staying longer than I'd intended to. So then I feel I ought to do something. Today I hiked Fautaua Valley.)

Fautaua Valley AKA Flowers, Ferns and Falls

Step 1. Recommended. Put on bikini or at least colourful undies. (I didn't do that.) Take food and water with you. (I did do that.)

Step 2. Recommended. Buy a pass at town hall. You only have to visit about 6 offices to find the right one, and, though no one will ever ask to see it, it only costs $6 and it's the right thing to do. (I did do that.)

Step 3. Take Avenue Pierre-Loti to get to trailhead. I walked right from my hostel, which took about an hour, but you can also drive or take the local bus.

Step 4. Hike the narrow gravel road along beside the river. The vegetation is lush and verdant, a plethora of greens caressing the eyes, and the air is heavy with the fragrances of various flowering trees. This also takes an hour.

Step 5. Cross the bridge to fairyland.

Step 6. Hike the steep rocky and rooty path up past bamboo stands and enormous ferns and all manner of weird and wonderful plants to the lookout. Beware the tiny coloured lizards that scurry away spooking you on occasion. One more hour.

Step 7. Go past the lookout, turn right at the stone wall, and gird your loins. The next section down to the pools is very steep and very slippery and just a little scary.

Step 8. Swim (even in white bra and panties if that's all you've got), eat your lunch, and enjoy!

The forest was lovely, cool and dark with flowers strewn about.

There was a rope along this part of the path because it was practically vertical. Also slippery. It was a long rope. There were several sections like this. Fun!

One of a string of pools above the waterfall.

You could slide from pool to pool...

... right to the very lip of the falls.

Bonus: Once around the loop.

Tahiti is made up of two volcanoes joined together by an improbably small flat low isthmus. Unlike the Hawaiian islands which tend to be very wet on one side and very dry on the other Tahiti is almost uniformly lush and verdant. Many moons ago the Polynesians had quite isolated communities in the valleys that cut up from the shore but now there is a narrow strip built up almost continuously along the coast and the interior is left wild and wonderful. That's an oversimplification of course, some streets do lead off the main road, especially near the capital, but almost everything, houses and churches, shops and schools, cows and coconut plantations, tin-roofed shanty towns and five star resorts, is squished into a thin band between the ocean and the rugged green hills. Travelling the road you feel you've seen it all. Certainly no trip here would be complete without a quick trip at least once around.

There are different ways to accomplish the loop. If you have $100 extra and can drive confidently in foreign places you could rent a car. That would be the best plan. (I fail on two counts.) Alternatively with $100 extra and the patience of a saint you could take a tourist day tour. (Again I fail on two counts.) If you're lucky you meet someone else who's rented a car and will let you schlep along. (Didn't happen this time.) Or you could hitchhike - though 120 km is quite a long way for that. Another option is to do the circle on the local busses. They are pretty beaten up, with the seats ripped and torn, but that just makes them feel (if I can say this without being too racist or elitist) more authentic. And they have one great plus, they're cheap, less than $10 for the circuit. But it's also an agonizing choice for those of us who list indecisiveness as our best quality. The busses don't run on a set schedule. They leave endpoints between 5 am and 5 pm when 80% full, likely about once an hour, but it depends. So when you start the circle in the morning, you have to have at least some idea how often you're going to jump off, because each stop may, or may not, include a long wait for the next bus after you're done visiting. Is it worth getting off at the the blowhole? the three waterfalls? the one dirt road that cuts right across the island? the lovely little museum you remember from last time you were here? and oh, oh, oh, look at that amazing craft fair! (Though, please, don't get me wrong, I freely admit that any day this is your greatest problem is likely to be an awesone day.)

It rained the day I did the loop, and I had to wait more than once for the next bus, but I'd forgotten how interesting it is to stand huddled under the bus stop shelters and chat with the other people waiting (a grandmother, two teens, a pineapple farmer who invited me to stay on his ranch for a week…). Usually when I'm travelling I have far too high a ratio of interaction with other tourists VS locals, and I can attest, I have first hand experience to back up this statement, not many tourists do the loop on local busses. (I wonder why not.)