Pretend Home in Phuket

From my last post about our time in Chiang Mai, I focused on the burn out Nathalie and I were experiencing. We had reached a breaking point and needed to stop. We booked a diving trip out to the Similan islands but, as that was nearly ten days away, we thought it would be more fun to kill the time down on the coast instead of in the sweltering heat of the highlands.

 We spent one morning in the hotel trying to figure out what we'd do, mainly based on where we'd get the cheapest flight. Based on that, we wound up working our way to Phuket, with the goal of renting an apartment and pretending that we weren't traveling for the better part of year.

Our best friend for a week

Traveling around Thailand is relatively easy and reasonably affordable. On top of the overnight trains and extensive bus networks, there is sufficient competition in the low-cost airline sector, making last minute air travel accessible both in terms of budget and schedule. We wound up booking with Bangkok Airways, "Asia's Boutique Airline" (they even refer to it as such over the PA in the airport). The airline is a mix of business class travel in an all economy class cabin. Each flight, passengers are served a hot meal (on one of the segments, it was shrimp pad-Thai) that is served with real silverware. They have dedicated business lounges that are accessible to all passengers flying with them.

We couldn't find an affordable option to Phuket directly, but were able to snag a deal down to nearby Krabi, home of the Krab people. Before leaving Chiang Mai, we started looking at where we wanted to go. We had already been to Ko Lanta and started looking at neighboring islands for some beach time. Unfortunately, we couldn't find anything within budget and instead decided to look at Phuket itself.

Phuket, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is Thailand's largest island in the Andaman sea. It developed as the hub for what is known as the four "S's in the tourism industry (Sea, Sun, Sand and Sex) back in the eighties and has built a reputation as a bulk holiday and time share destination for Europeans. It has gotten so big that the airport even has direct flights coming in from both eastern and western Europe, meaning that travelers don't even have to bother with Bangkok to get to the beach.

This mass tourism doesn't appeal to neither me nor Nathalie. The main town of Patong is only marginally better than Pattaya in terms of crowd and facilities, and the beachfront overcrowded. Like Pattaya, there's an abundance of holiday apartments being built of speculation and an English-language local TV channel. If these similarities weren't enough, many of the developers in Pattaya also invest in real estate in Phuket.

However, Phuket is a big place. It takes about an hour to cross from north to south and is even subject to traffic jams. Thanks to the real estate boom, finding a place to stay, especially a furnished apartment, wasn't difficult and certainly affordable. Via Air BnB, we found a one-bedroom studio in the central town of Kathu.

Away from the rush of Patong and Phuket town but located conveniently between the two, Kathu is predominately Thai, with newly developed apartment buildings scattered throughout the district. Our flat was located next to the Thaung Thong evening market and not one, not two, but three 7-11s. The market sells mostly food, and to supplement that, there's a Tesco supermarket just down the road.

Krabi, home of the Krab People

After transferring in from Krabi (we spent a night there and left for Phuket the next morning), we arrived in the apartment in the early afternoon. We met the owner, Tim, who, along with his Thai wife Risa, were renting out a few units they had purchased as investments. He was a very laid back dude; glad to help, joke around and share his take on the island. We rented a scooter from him and, after getting his advice on what to do on the area, he left us to enjoy our new flat.

I'm not quite sure how to describe our feelings at that moment. I guess the closest way would be to call it some sort of mixture between the excitement of moving into a new apartment, the joy of Christmas morning, and oddly enough, that release experienced the moment you leave work on a Friday evening before embarking on a week off.

This was the first time in almost two months that we weren't in a hotel. We didn't have to get up before 10:00 in the morning to have breakfast. We didn't have to pre-clean for room service. We had a couch. We had a (well-equipped) kitchen. We had freedom.

After reveling in our new place, we headed out on the scooter to get some food from the grocery store and the market. Only a few days earlier, we had taken an afternoon-long cooking course in Chiang Mai, and, in addition to the one we did in Laos, we were eager to put what we had learned to work.

We came back from the market with everything we needed to make pad-Thai and hot basil chicken, two of the Thai dishes we had learned earlier in the week. As some of you know, I get a kick out of cooking, and I don't think I've ever gone this long without cooking since I moved away from home 12 years ago. I didn't realize how much I missed it. My skills were a bit rusty, but within minutes, everything came flooding back. Once we finished cooking, we sat down and ate what was without doubt the best meal we've had since we started the trip (it barely beat out the dinner we had in Ko Lanta after traveling 22 hours to get there).

Spring roll station on the kitchen table

Nathalie and I spent the next few days doing one thing and one thing only: nothing. We slept late, cooked breakfast, watched TV, read, worked out in building's gym, took advantage of a nearby pool we had access to and went out shopping when we felt like it. For those moments, we were at home. Thailand didn't feel so foreign. Even going to the local market, where we were literally the only gringos there, was different than any other bazaar we had been to. We didn't get treated like walking wallets, rather we were just customers. Through the cunning use of the Google translate app on my phone and my ability to smile on queue, most language and cultural barriers disappeared. We were living Thai and loving it.

After a few days of sitting around doing the exact opposite of what most people come to Phuket for, we reluctantly set out to see a bit of the island. We spent an afternoon cruising around, visiting a small waterfall, checking out Patong, and finding a beach. In all honestly, none of it really stuck with us.  We missed our little nest and, after giving up the charade, returned back to the comforts of base camp.

Breakfast

Six days after we arrived, we had to leave for our diving trip. Before we left, we wound up booking our next flight which would take us not only back to Bangkok, but shoot us off to Vietnam. However, the lesson learned from our marathon travel earlier in the month and the wind down in Phuket was fresh in our minds, and as such, we booked another couple days back in one of Tim's apartments after our diving trip. We knew that we'd need some decompression time after diving (apologies for the bad scuba pun) and we thought we'd be better off doing it some place familiar, instead of making yet another change.

As I write this, I'm sitting on our flight to Ho Chi Minh. We're going to give Vietnam a shot in hopes that whatever lessons we've in enlightened with during our first two months will carry us through the next stage in the journey. Something tells me that we'll wind up crashing somewhere comfortable in between, to enjoy the simplicity of living yet again.