This is my first visit and I arrive on Wednesday (16-Sep) to a… rainy Phuket. It was quite a turn off and all of us were quite disappointed, since the main objective was the sun and the nice beaches there. Anyway, the weather did start to clear up a little in the afternoon and the days after, though we get rain often in the early hours of the morning.

The sand on the beach is very fine, not the variety you get at the old playgrounds in Singapore (which we don’t see anymore these days). The waves are rather deceptive and while it laps harmlessly at the shores some distance away at times, the next one could rush up all the way and one would find himself knee deep in water. The pull back of the waves is so strong and I almost fell into the water once. My friends who went swimming had a ‘near death’ experience as they struggled against the waves back to the shore when they got too far out. The lifeguard appeared a little upset as he blew his whistle loud and repeatedly while he waited impatiently for them to come back nearer to the shore. (I personally didn’t understand why he wasn’t down in the water though, but it was later we saw him running back with a surf board while we headed back to the rooms.)

Beyond the beach, my first impression when looking at some of the more urban areas near Karon beach was that it’s like Singapore stuck in the 80s. There doesn’t seem to be too much traffic around either around the beach areas (or at least the areas I am in) and all transport are either by hiring private cars (and if more than 4 then they are SUVs and Minibus) or the ‘Tuk Tuk’. One can bargain a little before the trip starts and usually you might get a 50 – 100 baht discount off the regular price from the drivers. As for taxis, I recalled I only saw one taxi on the way from the airport to the resort.

At the later stage of our trip we have given up on the ‘Tuk Tuk’ and just hire a private car to take us to the Phuket shooting range. There is a counter at the resort’s lobby which will call one for us. Surprisingly, one can also bargain at the counter. The driver will show up usually like 10 ~ 15mins later (or at an arranged time). This is where we befriended one of the drivers and he complained a little about how the ‘Mafia Tuk Tuk’ (i.e. ‘Tuk Tuk’ syndicates) makes life difficult for those driving hired private cars. For e.g. if he gets a call to pick up a passenger in Karon and then drop people off in Patong, he will have to return with his empty vehicle to Karon or respond to another call before he can pick up another passenger. If there’s a prior agreement to a return trip as well, then he park and serve as a tour guide as long as the passengers did not object to it. He seems to be unhappy that the ‘Mafia Tuk Tuk’ work in concert to drive the cost up for all tourists even though he agrees it doesn’t really matter to the White Men as their powerful Euros, Pounds and American Dollars makes everything cheap to them in Thailand after the currency exchange.

I joked with my friends that we have ‘Mafia Tuk Tuk’ in Singapore too, the largest being Comfort Delgro. We agreed that if the government gahmen isn’t strong enough to be in control, then another power will always step in. While it is not necessary good for these syndicates to fix prices and run others out of business, it also creates and maintain some semblance of control. At least now tourists don’t end up being charged / cheated by ‘Tuk Tuk’ drivers quoting ridiculous fares. In a way, it is really a double edged sword and nothing we would complain about.

As for the shops at normal tourist locations like Patong, the driver says that the prices for some items are usually inflated once the people there identify us as foreigners. The ladies in our group usually help us to bargain the prices down and that is when I noticed that some of those shops there are now run by foreigners from Myanmar and India.

After arranging with the driver for another trip, he took us to a place where the seafood is nice and cheap that night. The place looked a little remote and like Punggol in Singapore in the past. On the last day, he took us to the night market at Phuket Town, and also arranged for a minibus to pick us up and send us back to the airport. Apparently, it’s a business some of the drivers in Phuket run at the sides in the face of the limitations placed by the ‘Mafia Tuk Tuk’.

In general, the food in Phuket is nice, and I think they probably watered down their Tom Yam way too much to make it not spicy for the tourist. The coffee they made is great and it puts all the coffee made in Starbucks, Coffee Bean, TCC etc to shame. (Hey, at least I didn’t feel more thirsty after I drink their coffee and I can’t say the same about our coffee here!) There’s obviously no problem with hygiene there since I didn’t get a stomach upset for all the 5 days I am there. Even though the water from the taps in the hotel can come out brown at times, all you need to do is let it run for awhile and it will then be clear. That was a clear sign you can’t drink it off the tap though among the guys, we just boil it and drink it anyway, at times without checking whether the water that comes out of the tap is ‘naturally colored’ or not! Either way, it did taste a little funny but we couldn’t really quite sure what it tasted like.

As to the locals, most of them are friendly though not all of them are conversant in English. None of them were actually outwardly rude. However, it might take one some time to get use of their accent and English pronunciation. Being a non-English speaking country and where it only started teaching English in schools only recently, one has to give the Thai people credit for trying to accommodate us and attempt to speak our language to serve us.

It wasn’t long that our trip in Phuket ends, and because of the weather we didn’t manage to take a boat out to the surrounding islands like Phi Phi. I guess I’ll be returning again to visit those places some time next year.

So long, Phuket… see you again next year.