Our last month in Thailand has been one extraordinary whirlwind, celebrating Steve’s 50th birthday in Phuket and making a tour of Southeast Asia.
So much has happened and I’ve neglected posting for so long, that I’ll need to split up the blog into a few parts. Here’s part 1, getting to Phuket from our last post on the Gulf of Thailand.
From my last post, you might remember we had some rain in the forecast, but we were well ahead of schedule to get to Phuket by Steve’s birthday, so we slowed down and took some rest days at some beach front villas between Hua Hin and Chumphon. We weathered a few rainy days this way and slowly made our way south in between rain showers.
After Chumphon and spending weeks seeing mostly Thai tourists and locals, we decided we were getting a little tired of being the only farang around, so we hopped on a ferry to Koh Phangan. Yes, it’s the home of the infamous Full Moon Party. No, we had no interest in going, and it wasn’t even full moon.
We met very few cycle tourists on this leg of our trip, but we did run into this couple just outside of Prachuap Khiri Khan.
The impending rain made for some stunning clouds.
Rain on the horizon from our beach bar on Koh Phangan.
Our day was cut short for rain but we found this empty beach front resort in Little Sweden, an area of the Gulf Coast popular with Nordic expats. The Norwegian owner let us stay one night but unfortunately the next day was booked solid for the weekend, so we had to push on in some light showers.
Happy Norwegian kitty!
Our beach bar on Koh Phangan. We had a cute bungalow nestled in the trees behind the bar, and the owner was super friendly.
Our beach bar on Koh Phangan after a furious storm swept through! The owner seemed totally unshaken by this, and the bar continued service anyway, so it’s all good!
After the storm came in, we had 4 more days of rain forecast. We stayed an extra 2 nights on the island before getting island fever and risking the rough waters on the ferry to Surat Thani, and maybe we should have waited!
We were the last to board the high speed ferry, and as soon as we got on, before we’d secured our bikes, the captain fired up the engines and zipped off at 40mph through rough choppy seas. It was all we could do to keep ourselves from getting tossed overboard, nevermind hold onto the bikes, with huge waves rolling over the deck of the boat, drenching us and our bikes in salt water, corrosive to our bike components. I held the rail with one white knuckled hand and my bike with the other while we tried to tie them on the railing with a piece of rope. After getting drenched twice, I ignored the staff telling us we had to keep the bikes outside, yelled “nahm mai dai” (can not water – lol close enough) and pulled my bike into the passenger compartment.
The staff made us stand in the aisle blocking everyone and would not let us put the bicycles in an empty row of seats that were being repaired. We could barely keep our balance, and when we made a short stop to pick up new passengers, the crew disappeared to help them board, and we said screw it! We leaned the bikes in the aisle of seats and sat down ourself in the row in front of them. It mustn’t have been a problem because the crew didn’t say a word to us when they returned. Finally the water got calmer as we neared Surat Thani, and we hopped out, rinsed off our bikes with the rest of our bottled water, and cycled a few km in light drizzle to the same hotel we stayed at last time.
We still had lots of time before we needed to be in Phuket, so we decided not to head straight there, but to continue along the drier Gulf Coast towards Nakhon Si Thammarat and then cut across to Krabi, and finally island hop from Krabi to Koh Yao Noi and finally to Phuket. This turned out to be a really local area with no tourists. The locals were very friendly but surprised to see us and we were the topic of lots of conversations.
He’s almost 50!
Not the same full moon party that you know about!
Ngu Ngu! This little guy scared us at our bungalows. We had an interesting time at this hotel. It rarely sees foreigners, and so they didn’t speak great English, which we expected, so I talked in Thai as much as I could. They seemed to be a mixture of surprised, dubious, and a little cautious about my ability to speak basic Thai. I heard them talking about the farang speaking Thai while we were at the restaurant.
I decided to order a local dish that’s popular in the south, orange curry. I didn’t know it came in this color! It’s not one of the dishes you can find at Thai restaurants outside Thailand. It is meant to be firey hot and a bit fishy. When I ordered it, I said confidently in Thai that I can eat spicy food. When it came out and I started eating, I felt like all eyes were on the farang to see how we would handle this super spicy dish.
It was at the very top of my spice tolerance, and it was quite good. I would order it again, though I prefer the creamier curries. I started to sweat from the spice, and the staff were watching but keeping their voices down. Someone came in with a delivery or something and asked the staff loudly, “farang sahng a-rai?” Farang ordered what? They responded, “ghaeng som”, orange curry. He said, “ahh…”, looked at me closely and laughed, “phet ngu-ah”, spicy sweats! I laughed along, looked right at him, smiled, and wiped my brow with my napkin. He froze and said nothing for a few seconds, finally said, “mai bpen rai”, no problem, and headed out.
After dinner, the hostess confronted me on the way out and seemed totally surprised, saying I speak Thai very well. Nit noi, I responded, little bit. She laughed and looked at me suspiciously as we headed to bed.
It’s really weird the Thais’ response to foreigners speaking their language. Many times they act as if they are offended, like the Thai language is their own secret and no outsiders should be using it. Even if they hear you speak some Thai, they don’t believe you can really understand it and continue talking about you right in front of your face. I can’t count how often I hear the word for stinky, sunburnt, sweaty, etc from people just next to us while we are out cycling. But many other times, shopkeepers and locals breathe a sigh of relief that they can communicate with me, and one shop owner even said he was very thankful that I had learned some Thai because almost no foreigners do. It’s such a drastic change after being in other countries like France and the US where all foreigners are expected to speak the local language. I don’t like this attitude from some Thais but I’m happy to have learned enough Thai to make our time in this country more enjoyable.
We get the steamed pork buns (chalah pow moo) for breakfast whenever we see them, and this place in Krabi had some of the best dim sum I’ve ever eaten.
The Krabi night market was incredible! I’m glad we stayed an extra day to see this. I like Krabi Town a lot and would definitely return. Many tourists head to the overcrowded and tourist trap beaches nearby, but the main town had a great balance of excellent local culture and Western comforts. The crispy pork shown here was delicious.
We cycled to a pier that we found on Google that was supposed to have a ferry to Koh Yao Noi. Instead we found this small long tail passenger boat, and they tossed our bikes on the roof and we squeezed in below with a dozen other locals and Thai tourists. Fun trip!
Koh Yao Noi was beautiful and quiet, but we were ready to get to Phuket so we stayed only one night.
Our speed boat to Phuket hit a rain storm just as we landed, so we hung out with this kitty for an hour waiting out the rain before finally braving the wet weather on our last ride on our bicycles in Thailand. We were taking them to the bike shop the next day to be cleaned up and prepared for taking with us to Europe on the next leg of our adventure.
It turned out to actually be the second to last time that we will ever ride these bicycles again! ☹️ I’ll tell the story in the next blog!
