Asia2004 - Mike's Journal

Mike's Journal

28 Nov, Phuket

Sunday, November 28 – Phuket

Slept in far more than we’d intended. Woke up ~10 AM! After a sluggish start, due to wandering around looking for coffee and breakfast, we book a cheesy tour of “James Bond Island”, or Kho Phing Kan, in non-touristese. It’s the place where Scaramanga’s lair was supposed to be in “Man with the Golden Gun”. First, a minibus ride partway to Phuket town, and an air-con bus ride off the island to the north, into Phang Nga province. Keli and I amused ourselves by playing with some exotic Asian fruit for a while. We stopped first at a Buddhist temple in a large cave complex, with a huge golden reclining Buddha and steps carved into the rocks going way back & way up into the cave. There were a lot of monkeys (fish eating macaques?) outside the caves, being fed by tourists. We mostly ignored them. Then back on the bus for the short drive to the boat launch.

We got on the longtail boat - a long, canopied, but otherwise open boat with benches, powered by a motor with a long propeller shaft sticking out behind. We bought two dozen Chang and Singha beer with us and sat at the back of the boat. We’re going to be the rowdy loud bunch again! We motored out through a long narrow channel lined with mangrove, then Phang Nga bay opened up in front of us. Huge archipelago of tree-capped limestone islands, rising vertically out of turquoise-blue Andaman sea, to heights of hundreds of feet. Just spectacular, words (nor even pictures) couldn’t do it justice. As we motored around the island, the weather turned. The boat was beached under a huge outcrop of rock with a cave nearby, as we watched a curtain of rain envelop the nearby islands, then come and blow over us. Didn’t get too wet thanks to the boat’s canopy and the cave, but it wasn’t good for electronics. Both Dups’ and my cameras stopped working soon afterwards.

Then we headed on to James Bond island. Pretty tacky and touristy, but the vertical limestone Karst stack rising out of the water just off the beach is really a remarkable sight. Emboldened by the several beer we’d each drunk by this point, we thought it’d be cool to wade part way out to the sea stack (noone else was doing this). Dups and Keli discovered the hard way that the sea bottom there is sticky mud, very difficult to walk in without falling over. Much amusement, and some great photo sequences, ensued.

We sailed – well, motored – on, through a short sea cave, to a fishing village on stilts called Ko Panyi. We had some pics taken with a tame white-bellied sea eagle, walked through the town – all on stilts – and saw the kids in the local school playing soccer, met a cat called “Punaam” I think, and finally back to the landing and the bus back to Karon Beach.

We ate dinner at the Papaya restaurant, where I made the mistake of ordering my “Thai-spicy” red curry in Thailand. Delicious, but so hot I couldn’t eat it without severe pain.

We then walked down to the deserted Karon Beach with two bottles of wine in tow. We sat there for a while, drinking the wine, and watching the lightning on the horizon, then I went into the water to do some swimming and body surfing in the good size waves that were hitting the beach. The others soon joined me. One or two of the waves were big enough to flip me head over heels and smash me against the sandy bottom. Still, a great time was had by all, I think.

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