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| Representative Temperature for our Tour Duration: Dec 14-20. |
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| Phuket, Bangkok & Pattaya |
ravel is generally a pleasant thing to undertake, and this winter's tour of Thailand is no exception.My wife and I toured 3 cities, Phuket, Pattaya, and Bangkok, in that order, as can be seen in the Google Maps snippet on the right. Except for Pattaya City, which we reached by road from Bangkok airport, the other two places were reached by air.
Thanks to my wife who communicated for several weeks in finalizing the tour itinerary with the travel agency, which shall remain unidentified.
In general, we were surprised to observe that the cities were not particularly cleaner than those in India: It'd seem that most Asian cities share this property, save for those in Japan. (Disclaimer: I have only toured a handful of countries in Asia).
The temperature, it can be said, was generally hot and there was no need for me to have packed jeans at all! Shorts and T-shirts would suffice for all of these places, as can be seen from the screenshot of the watch face on my Apple Watch above.
Dec 14, Bangkok, Phuket
We arrived in Phuket via Bangkok, and the tour company had arranged for transportation from the airport to the hotel we would stay in. Since the check-in time at the hotel was 2:00pm, the tour representative at the airport proposed to us that we'd do the city tour, scheduled for later in the day, right from the airport itself. We were surprised, but went along for the ride, so to speak.
On the way, we got a tour guide. A friendly one, I might add. In order to make us feel comfortable, he said he'd take us to a nice Indian restaurant, which was decent.
I don't remember the guide's name, but the poor fellow, as good as he was, was not fit to be an English-speaking tour guide. How our tour company got him in, is a mystery to us. By the end of the day, however, I had communicated with our Tour agent by WhatsApp, and the fact we were not happy got conveyed in turn to him, for which he apologized in broken English, of course.
As we checked-in, another tour representative met us and discussed the activities for the rest of the Phuket stay, described the tour the next day to Phi Phi Island. Advised not to take our passports with us, and to have an adequate supply of sunscreen lotion, etc.
We finished the day by eating a simple dinner at the hotel restaurant, a ฿500 affair for 2, and taking a stroll along the neighborhood roads.
Dec 15, Phuket, Phi Phi Island
We had to get ready rather early for the ferry excursion to Phi Phi Island, not an exciting prospect while on tour, but it had to be done. The itinerary specified a 7:00am departure from the hotel, and the hotel would not open the breakfast area until 6:30am.
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| Folks from Bangalore, co-tourists on Phi Phi Island Ferry |
We promptly followed the recommendation on sunscreen lotion and bought a trivial amount of the lotion for ฿300 at a shop in the ferry terminal. My wife had thought it would last us for the tour, but it got used up halfway in Pattaya.
While probably all of the people on the ferry were out-of-Thailand tourists, there was one group that we befriended through interjecting in their conversation, in Kannada: A group from Bangalore, right. They were all employees of a finance company and were vacationing. We discussed with them, in Kannada, everything from Prime Minister Modi, President Donald Trump, even to my birthplace: It so happened that the founder of the company also hails from the same town.
We spent a few hours on the Phi Phi Long Beach resort. Although our ticket package had snorkeling included, the snorkeling company warned tourists that people who didn't know swimming were not advised to engage in the snorkeling excursion. That eliminated both my wife and myself immediately.
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| Yummy mangoes! |
After a buffet lunch that included Indian -- surprise! -- and Italian dishes, we returned to the small boat which had gotten us to Phi Phi Island (from the Big Boat).
We reached our hotel by about 5:00 pm or so and, after a shower, we stepped out into the town to get a bite to eat. After dinner, we were attracted to mangoes on the roadside, which we promptly bought and ate at the hotel as a late night snack.
Dec 16, Pattaya
The road journey from Phuket to Bangkok was quite eventless. The drive from Bangkok airport to Pattaya city, though, was remarkable in the sense that whatever attempt we made at any conversation with the chauffeur were either responded to by silence, or by monosyllabic utterances. The good news was that the itinerary we had gotten from the tour company had alerted us that the drive would be about 2:30 hours. But, in fact, it got finished within a little more than an hour. We were left to explore Pattaya by ourselves until another tour representative would contact us. She convinced us that it is valuable to pay ฿2,000/person for a package of parasailing, sea-walking, high-speed boat-ski, and a banana boat ride. And, as part of our tour package, she would take us later to the Alcazar Cabaret Show. The show was quite a visual feast, not to speak of a Bollywood number or two that they presented. A pleasant experience, I'd say.
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| Discovery Beach, Pattaya |
Dec 17, Pattaya, Coral Island
Next day would prove to be quite interesting. To start with, I lost the camera lens cover somewhere on the Discovery Beach.
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| Vidya, parasailing |
We boarded a small boat as a means to get to a larger one, from which the tourists would do parasailing. We had never done anything like that before, and the adventure spirit in us had already made us pay for it the previous night.
Parasailing, it must be admitted, we both liked. You can see in the photo at left Vidya with all the harnesses ... Unfortunately, because of the succession in which Vidya and I parasailed, only I was able to capture her in the air; she was not able to capture me similarly.
The evening was free for us to roam around, and we walked back and forth on the Beach Road. Quite a variety of shops. One of the salient features of some of the roads in Pattaya is the incidence of massage parlors: Almost every other store on the road is a massage parlor!
Dec 18, NongNooch Gardens (Pattaya), River Cruise (Bangkok)
NongNooch Gardens is about a 45-minute ride from Discovery Beach. It has quite a collection of desert plants and, to add to the attraction, has some live elephants and tigers too. The elephant show is quite enjoyable where the elephants, even baby elephants, display some interesting skills with their trunks, skills such as dart throwing, etc.
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| Artist on the cruise rendered Bollywood songs |
One remarkable aspect of the cruise was the well-meaning, but sometimes off-key, renderings of Bollywood songs by the singer on the cruise. Guests didn't mind, of course, and grooved to many of the numbers.
Dec 19, Safari World (Bangkok)
This aspect of the tour was the most disastrous: The transportation vehicle dropped us off at the entrance of the venue about an hour late, primarily due to somewhat unstructured attempt at picking up tourists from various hotels. Our hotel was the first on the pickup circuit, and we probably felt it to be most monotonous.
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| A freely grazing Zebra, on the. Safari |
The venue had several attractions many of which you'd find in a Sea World (San Diego), a Universal City Studios (Hollywood) and similar venues. Thus, it was not of any great fascination for many of the American tourists.
As part of the tour, lunch was provided and it was quite nice. And, because many of the tourists from the Indian subcontinent, the buffet lunch had ample Indian-based dishes.
The 'safari' portion of the tour only happened at the end of the visit and that, too, as a surprise. Even as we were thinking that we were on our way to our respective hotels, we suddenly found ourselves negotiating curved roads with freely moving animals on either side.
Dec 20, City Tour (Bangkok)
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| In front of the Golden Buddha |
Some of the roads in this part of the city appeared to be somewhat wider boulevards, but we didn't get a chance to understand what existed on either side of the roads.
Afterward, we retired to the hotel and waited to be picked up to go to the airport for the return flight back to Bangalore.
Overall, an ok tour. A check on one more country we have visited: Thailand.
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