Our final day in Kata Beach started out with a huge mistake. The final part of our spring break trip was planned to be a four day tour through the south-Thailand jungle, and we both thought we were going to be picked up from our hotel on Monday morning. Bright and early Sunday morning, we were awoken by a phone call to our room informing us that Siam Safari was in the lobby and was waiting for us to leave for the jungle tour. We ran downstairs in our PJs, and as a van full of other tour-goers watched, listened to the tour guide tell us that our start date, March 14, was indeed today (Sunday) and not Monday as we had planned for. We were totally on island time and got the days confused!!!
As we were nowhere near packed (in fact, I believe I had an item of clothing in every corner of our room) we knew we couldn’t be ready in less than an hour so we asked for our options. They said they couldn’t keep the rest of the group waiting, and that our only option was that they could come back for us at noon but that we would miss the morning elephant ride. I was bummed, because one of the things I was most looking forward to was riding an elephant, but I knew it was our fault and that we didn’t have any other choice. We went upstairs and I started packing, but Molly got on her computer and went to Siam Safari’s website. She saw that there was a three day tour that departed on Mondays and included pretty much everything the four-day tour included. We had the hotel make a few calls, and we got our tour switched! Thanks to her quick-thinking, we were able to have one last day in Phuket as planned and I was still going to get to ride my elephant.
That day we decided to go inland to Phuket Town to do some shopping and to see a giant buddah that we had heard about. We found a cab driver that offered to be ours for the day for about $20 USD, and our first stop was the buddah. Since Thailand is about 90 degrees and sunny during the day, I had on shorts and a short-sleeved shirt and the people at the entrance to the Buddah made me wear a sarong to cover my legs. They have a pile of them at the entrance for tourists that don’t fit the dress code. We strolled through the temple at the foot of the buddah, where monks dressed in orange were teaching a group of locals, all sitting cross-legged and listening intently. The actual buddah was definitely giant, and it was covered in bamboo scaffolding. It had no eyes, and there was a sign that said something like “Eyes will come in December”. We walked the perimeter of the complex, took some pictures, and were on our merry way.
Our next stop was Phuket Town, and as we drove through the city, we noticed that many of the shops were closed! Our driver told us that on Sundays most of the shops are closed, and that on hot days all the shops close during the afternoon and everyone goes to the beach. We decided this information would have been helpful before we were actually in Phuket Town, but then the driver wouldn’t have made his money. The driver managed to find a market that was open, and we shopped for about an hour, but we decided we would have rather spent the time at the beach.
The cab ride back to Kata Beach was informative because the cab driver, in heavily accented English, managed to give us some background about the political unrest that was happening in Bangkok while we were in Phuket. We learned Thailand has a very corrupt government, and there’s a huge percentage of the population (the Red Shirts) who want the leader to step down and give power back to the democratic leader whom he overthrew a few years ago. The driver talked about how the government spends big bucks on throwing fancy parties, buying helicopters and supplies for an military that is virtually non-existent, etc. That day there was to be a huge demonstration in Bangkok. Throughout my time in Phuket I noticed there were always lots of vacant cabs, it wasn’t hard to get into a restaurant, the beaches were half empty, the bars weren’t all that crowded…this was because of the demonstration. Everyone was being warned to stay out of Bangkok because of the unrest, and this had been greatly hurting those in the tourism industry as Bangkok is the hub to the rest of Thailand. Luckily, if we hadn’t been told we wouldn’t have known anything was going on at all.
Pictures: The Big Buddah; locals being taught by a monk in the temple.
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