Beaches & Islands in Phuket

After a very enjoyable, but quite tiring trip around China, we spent the next couple of weeks chilling in Thailand......

Our first 5 days were spent at the Katathani Beach resort which is on the Kata Noi beach in the Phuket region. As you can see from the photos it was very nice. We spent our time there mainly relaxing by the pool/sea, having massages and spending far too much money on rip off food at our hotel resort due to a lack of available alternatives. We also had some trousers made at the local tailor. Not that there was any room for them in the bag......

After our stay here we moved to our next resort Thavorn Beach Resort. Here we stayed in cute little bungalows. This was a much more traditional Thai style hotel with loads of budahs and the famous Marissa who was turned into a mermaid. The majority of the complex was lovely with loads of statues and flowers, but after getting bored and going exploring we found an old disused pool, a bonfire next to the tennis court- no tennis for us then, and a pier which was practically crumbling down and covered in rust (not exactly like the nice picture in the brochure).

Whilst in this resort we got a tuk tuk into Patong town and had dinner and went to an irish bar. After another day by the pool it all became too much so we hired a jeep and went exploring. Due to the pretty awful weather conditions, after spending about 10 minutes at the waterfall and gatecrashing another resorts' restaurant for lunch, we spent ,most of the afternoon going round the Tesco's and Boots at there massive shopping complex- what fun! We then got lost in our Jeep for a bit to kill some more time in the pouring rain. Lucky for us we had a roof- most people were on mopeds or  Hylux's- see photo of the wet people.

After 4 days in Thavorn we got a boat from Phuket port to the Phi Phi islands about 1.5 hours away. Here we stayed at the Phi Phi island village which was beautiful. What we weren't told was that it was completely isolated from the main town- we couldn't walk there and the only way was by boat which cost about 25 quid!! All food and drink was majorly over priced and pretty crap so we did make a trip into the town one night. Just our luck- rather than rain at about 5pm like it normally does, the weather was wet and windy at 7pm when we got our boat. After a 10 minute walk through the woods and getting lost in the dark, we finally found the beach and rolled our trousers up to wade into the sea and get on our boat. The boat trip was quite cool in the stormyish weather. We jumped out at Ton Sai (the town) into a sea of rocks. After being spiked a bit we put our flip flops on and spent the rest of the night with wet sandy feet and soggy flip flops!!

After such an enjoyable time on the boat, we decided to hire one the next day for a trip round the islands.... Terry got the opportunity to test his underwater camera kit and took some interesting pics and videos.

After a relaxing few weeks we headed up to Bangkok to start our next trip The Great Indochina Loop.