Karon Beach, Phuket

I had a fantastic week in Thailand with P. Thailand is amazing – pure perfection and beauty. The hotel was absolutely beautiful with wonderful ten degrees air conditioning. It was lovely to enter that cool room and jump on the bed for a pillow fight! The food was lovely but we mainly stuck to Western food, since we’ve been eating mostly Asian food for the past three months. Yes, that’s three months - a quarter of my year in Cambodia over – unbelievable! Phuket is quite expensive for Thailand apparently and was pretty expensive compared to what I am used to in Cambodia, but in saying that, it was still very very cheap compared to Ireland. Don’t know how I will cope if I return to Ireland. Buying the same stuff but for ten times the price and a lot of the time, much better quality over here!

Thai people are absolutely beautiful people, so friendly, unassuming and usually very respectful, inoffensive and are not in your face when trying to sell you stuff. Quite a change from the motodops in Phnom Penh. The people are very different for neighbouring countries.

We went out most nights and the first night was spent helping P to avoid the many prostitutes that were after him. He finally accepted that they were not going to bite his head off so we just enjoyed their company after that. There are prostitutes in every bar we went into. Lovely, young, girls who spend their time in bars trying to hustle Western men. I saw seventy year old men with girls that looked barely out of their teens. It was quite perverted.

Karon beach where we were staying was absolutely amazing. The weather was weird. The first day on the beach it was a bit cloudy but hot and we both got burnt without realising it. I tried to convince P to put on sunscreen but due to the clouds he declined. Its strange, I put on factor 40, a hat, a t-shirt, my sarong, and stayed under the brolly and I got burnt to a crisp. P put on factor 12 and lay in the sun all day and tanned – not fair. I don’t particularly care about the colour but the burning burns!

Anyway half way through the day it started to rain. It was an early monsoon. So we went to the sea to swim in the rain. It was like stepping into a bath. The sea was warm and the rain was cool so we stayed submerged for an hour. I did enjoy the contrasts. The rain passed and the blue sky broke through and lasted for the rest of the week apart from a few thunder storms at night but good weather during the day for the most part

Patong is the next beach north from Karon and is quite the party town with flashing neon signs and water guns. New Year celebrations in Thailand and Cambodia were in full swing so I celebrated 2006 New Year for the second time. The local tradition is to throw water on everyone around you, which means a market for supersoakers, especially passing tourists. So on our first visit to Patong, we got all dressed up and within thirty minutes we looked like drowned rats. Quick jump into an Irish bar to escape the wall of water. We were the only Irish there and the band was playing Irish music so we made some requests and had a sing song between the two of us. The Thai band loved us. The first night if getting soaked was fun and a laugh but it continued for three more days and nights, so it got slightly annoying by the end. It also provoked some stupid associations on my part. It sounds silly but seeing all those guns in everybody’s hands made me uneasy.

So all week I was thinking of the tsunami as I floated in the crystal clear water in the sea. I thought of the people who must have been swept out to sea when the ocean retreated. I also thought of all the people who were on the beaches, just as we were – on holidays. Another thing that gently reminded us of the otherwise completely recovered resort was the bits and bobs that was washed up on the beach each morning after the thunder storms. A shoe, or a headlight off a motorbike, a piece of decking floating in the sea one day, which had been varnished at some stage but had also been clearly in the sea for some time. These all reminded us of the tragedy, but on the third last night we got talking to this Swedish guy. He was in Thailand when the tsunami struck. He was part of a group of thirty four friends and family in Thailand for Christmas. Out of the thirty four friends and family, twelve returned home alive. Twenty two people from their group died including two pregnant women. Over 800 Swedish people died altogether. Most of his friends who died were on the beach. The only reason he wasn’t was because himself and his girlfriend were trying to settle their new baby into a sleeping pattern. They were on the third floor of the hotel and the waters completely submerged everything up to the second floor of their hotel. He saved two people himself. Their group are all returning this November to commemorate the event.

We flew from Phuket to Bangkok in the middle of a lightning storm (at night), which was a little spectalular even if air crash films were running through my mind. Other than that, it was just a lovely holiday.