Thailand Arts & Recreation

Relax during the day and parties during the night in this beautiful island full of young people. The most exciting events are the Full Moon party (trance, techno, drumbass, reggae, commercial - every kind of music - every full-moon night at Haad Rin beach) and the Half-Moon festival (tribal trance huose music in the jungle, during some waning or crescent moon nights); besides there are also a lot of blackmoon events.

I notice this morning that somebody has hung a sign on my door during the night which reads "Please no molest". Always nice to know the management has my best interests at heart... I'm already quite at home in this hotel. To get to reception from the street, you have to walk along a private driveway which makes me feel like royalty. After experiencing the dilapidated condition of the streets beyond the hotel, it's like stepping into another world: the trees play lift music at you from hidden speakers, and at any moment you expect a little man to appear from nowhere shouting "Da Plane, Boss, Da Plane..." and for Ricardo Montalban to emerge from the trees to fulfil your every dream. But I digress. I'm staying on the 5th floor. On the 4th floor, rather puzzlingly, is the lobby, and then on the lower levels we have the two Olympic swimming pools, fitness centre, two private beaches, Shopping Mall, five restaurants, Thai Massage Suite with ten private rooms, Conference facilities, Ballrooms, Banqueting Hall, two full size indoor squash courts, three tennis courts, and a partridge in a pear tree. I awoke this morning to the sight of the sun rising over the sea outside my balcony, and wondered briefly where Thailand had been all my life. After a while, I dragged myself out of bed and headed once more for the beach road, where I ended up at 10.00 this morning sitting in a shop with the quaint and not altogether authentic local name of Mister Donut. Cup of coffee and box of Donuts packed away, I felt like I could finally face the day - So I headed over to the travel shop to book a day trip tomorrow to the beautiful nearby island of Koh Samet, which my trusty guidebook of Thailand promises me will be a trip I will not forget. I've also extended my stay here until I leave for Phuket in five days time, courtesy of American Express, so I can kick back and relax for a while without having to worry about returning to dreary Bangkok on Saturday! A typical day here in Pattaya goes something like this: "Oh what a pleasant day, think I'll go for a stroll... My, it's a bit hot out here, probably should've worn a hat... Where did that mirage come from?... My legs appear to have stopped functioning... Please call me an ambulance for these third degree burns!"
Around mid-day, the sun decides that it's about time it made an appearance, and it suddenly goes from being hot but tolerable in the morning to being like Death Valley on a bad day. Still, nobody tells muggins here this, do they?
So, like mad dogs and Englishmen, I went out to find somewhere to get my first roll of film developed and to buy some more for Koh Samet. I should have suspected what was coming from the fact that even the dogs were laying in the street, tongues hanging out, lapping hopefully at puddles and barking "Kill me now" as I passed. I'm not going out in the mid-day sun again without a ten gallon tank of water strapped to my back, I can tell you - And I have the third degree burns to prove it. Much to my surprise, the shop said that my film would be back in two hours. This impressed me - Back home, the current situation is that if you take a roll of APS film to be developed in a small local chemist, the shopkeeper looks at you as if you have just told him that you intend to make love to his daughter and does he know the fastest route to the local Ann Summers store, and then he has to consult with somebody else on the phone to decide how much to charge. Then he informs you that they don't know what APS is and that developing my film will involve sending the film to Thailand for processing where they can do it in two hours(1). So, what are my impressions of Thailand after the first week? Well, apart from Bangkok with its all-enveloping smell of Sulphur from the drains, I could spend a lot longer here. The only mild irritation is all the street vendors trying to sell me stuff I don't want wherever I go - And if one more beautiful nymph grabs me by the arm on the street and says "I come with you now - We go Focky-Focky", I think I shall scream. And there's something you don't hear me say every day. (1) Obviously, since writing this journal we've gone from APS to Digital photography so this situation has not only got better but the whole concept of taking film to a shop to develop is becoming pretty much obsolete. This also explains the lower quality of photographs on this trip than on my later travels, as all film taken here had to be developed and then scanned and converted to digital later.

I had a pretty fair idea of what I wanted to do in Phuket before I even left England, thanks mainly to the amount of people who suddenly turned out to have been here and wanted to tell me all about it. So, when my tour rep turned up in the lobby this morning with his clipboard, hard-sell face and book entitled "1001 ways to get people to do what you want them to do", he was rather surprised to find that it took him all of fifteen seconds to sell me on the idea of doing exactly what I came here to do in the first place. He probably got promoted. So, clutching my tickets for a trip to Phi-Phi Island and to the beautiful bays around the coast over the next two days, I set out to see Patong by day. As with all places, the town is considerably different without the beating music and bright lights of night time. In fact, it was quiet and relaxed this morning, full of couples walking along the beach arm in arm. At the first travel shop I came to, I booked myself onto an "Introduction to Phuket" tour which was leaving within the next few minutes and which confidently promised to show me some of the sights of the island in 4 hours. This tour set me back the princely sum of 300 Baht - about a fiver - so I didn't really expect much more than a basic drive to a couple of temples. On the whole, though, I think it was money well spent: The "English Speaking" guide was obviously from the Chinese school of English, and spoke so fast that it was hard to believe he was speaking English at all, but for 300 Baht I wasn't about to complain. Christ, for that sort of money I think I would've been quite happy with the Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show! I did start to get a bit annoyed with the way the guide kept saying "Yes?" at the end of every sentence, though, as though he was trying to convince himself that he was telling us the facts. And I did start to become a bit sceptical when he informed us matter-of-factly as though talking to a group of 5 year olds that they have to train monkeys to pick coconuts for them as they have discovered that only monkeys can avoid the poisoned fruit on their trees. It apparently takes 6 months to train a monkey to do this, and there is a University for monkeys in Bangkok for this purpose, we were informed. I have just one problem with this. If it takes 6 months to train a monkey to not eat poisoned fruit, what do they do with all the dead monkeys? Our first stop on the tour was at a lookout point at the very top of the island, where we all scurried off to take our first photos of the breathtaking scenery. This is one thing that Phuket has in abundance. According to the guide, who I was starting to think was making it all up as he went along, parts of Jurassic Park were shot on the island - although people disagree as to exactly where and when and nobody seems to actually be able to remember any camera crews or anything. Looking at the views of the forests and beaches stretching away to the horizon, it certainly isn't difficult to imagine a few Raptors down there though. The highlight of the day for me was our afternoon visit to Wat Chalong, a supremely beautiful Buddhist temple built on a traditionally grand scale and somehow exactly the opposite of what I was expecting from Phuket after the obvious excesses of Patong Beach. In fact, the place is such a culture shock after arrival in Patong that it takes quite a while walking around the extensive gardens and market stalls before you even feel worthy to set foot inside. Wat Chalong is the pride of the island, a fact that was obvious just to hear our guide talk about it's history and the miracles said to have been performed there as though he considered it his honour to pass on every drop of knowledge he had ever learned about the place.
The temple had a major part to play in the war between Chinese secret societies in the 19th century. At this time the island was something of a power in Tin Mining, and Chinese workers came looking for work and started to create societies. Unfortunately, the workers started to get a bit upset when the owners of the land and tin mines decided they weren't about to allow them to partake of opium as they were used to, and they took it upon themselves to begin a murderous rampage. Locals fled to the temple where the Abbot did all that Buddhism would allow which was help rally the people to fight back against the attackers. Despite quite rigorous fighting from the Chinese side, the opium finally got the better of them and they were overwhelmed by the locals. When this all got back to the king the Abbot was called before him for a well earned promotion, and Wat Chalong became a royal temple. The temple is filled with statues, and every single inch of it is covered in gold as I should have come to expect by now. The walls are covered in paintings depicting the Buddha's life, and statues of previous abbots adorn the corridors. The grounds are amazing, gardens stretch out in all directions and are a pleasure to walk around, and today there were market stalls set up on the boundaries through which I spent a good half hour of browsing: just sitting in the grounds in silence for a few minutes is almost enough to make you want to take the vow. One room of the Wat was full of locals praying and we tiptoed respectfully through watching them meditate or sit in silent prayer, although none of them seemed to be remotely bothered or worried by our presence. Buddhists are, of course, nothing if not understanding and tolerant - something which is refreshing to say the least after spending a lifetime in the West where everything is stress and rush. Some would argue, for this reason, that Buddhism is in fact not so much a religion as a philosophy. It is, if you are interested in a slight digression at this point, a set of teachings based entirely on, not the belief in any particular divine entity, but the words of a man called Siddhartha who achieved enlightenment around 2500 years ago at the age of 35 while sitting under a pipal fig tree. These, naturally, were gentler times when a name like Sid Arthur meant you were a respected prince rather than a wheeler/dealer type from the east end of London. Anyway, Siddhartha Guatama was born and raised in ancient India in the region now known as Nepal, and had spent his early life as a prince, being given whatever he desired before being married off at the age of 16 to his cousin. He seems to have led something of a sheltered life because only as he approached his 30th birthday did he decide to actually leave the house and survey his kingdom. It must have come as something of a shock to come across the sick, the old and the dying for the first time because Siddhartha promptly announced that he needed to find the path of enlightenment, packed his bags and headed off to devote the rest of his life to abstinence from all worldly pleasures in an attempt to prevent such unpleasant things as death and old age from happening to him. Over the next few years Siddhartha became a beggar, studied under several hermit teachers, brought meditation down to a fine art and just about managed to starve himself to death by taking abstinence to the ultimate extreme and restricting himself to a leaf a day. To paraphrase the teachings of Buddha slightly here, this is the point at which Siddhartha decided he needed a new plan.
So Siddhartha created the "Middle way", which has a slightly different meaning depending on which branch of Buddhism you listen to but which is essentially a transcendental path away from self satisfaction and worldly pleasures and towards the pursuit of wisdom and enlightenment. Settling down to meditate under the Pipal tree, he told his companions that he wasn't going to get up again until he had understood the truth about everything - this he duly did after several weeks, but not before all his friends had, unsurprisingly, gone home. Siddhartha Guatama had finally achieved enlightenment and become the Buddha, or "Awakened one".
Enlightenment brought with it an understanding of the four noble truths of Buddhism, which would appear to be a series of statements which connect together logically - we crave our desires (some wish to attain pleasure, some wish to attain happiness, some wish to kill and some wish to love, etc); these cravings lead to suffering; to relieve suffering one must eliminate craving; to eliminate craving, one must follow the Eightfold path: correct outlook, correct intentions, correct speech, correct actions, correct work, correct amount of effort, correct mindfulness, correct amount of concentration. Following the Eightfold path will ultimately lead anyone to the state of Nirvana which, as a child, I firmly believed was the next state over from California! Of course, the western way of thinking tells us that happiness is whatever we want it to be. If you find true happiness in meditation and giving up all earthly vices, then that's fine - but if your idea of supreme bliss is going out on a Saturday night, getting totally rat-arsed and waking up in somebody else's bed, then that's fine too. I came across the following story while updating this entry, which I thought I would share with you for it's humour value. It would appear that one of the ex-abbots of Wat Chalong, Luang Poh Cham, was promised by a local girl that she would cover his genitals in golf leaf if he cured her with his magical walking stick. However, after being cured she subsequently forgot about her promise and fell ill again because the Thai's believe that breaking a promise will result in evil falling upon them. The girl's parents returned her to the Abbot for an explanation, whereupon he saved the day by sitting on his walking stick in such a way that it stuck out from the front of his robes and the girl was able to coat it in golf leaf, become cured again, and remain none the wiser...

After leaving Mae Hong Son in February 2002, Tanya and I headed for the gulf of Thailand. Ultimately, our final destination in the country was a small island resort off the coast of Krabi, a place which Tanya knew little about as I had been keeping it a closely guarded secret. On the way, however, we had a few days to spare and had decided to spend them in Phuket so that I could show her the beauty of Phi Phi and the surrounding scenery that I had loved so much on my previous trip. This time, however, I had booked us into somewhere a little further from the nightlife of Patong. The Central Karon Village is a resort complex on the top of a hill halfway between Patong and the nearby village of Karon and, from the pictures in the brochure, the resort looked to be not only extremely romantic but also positioned just far enough away from Patong to afford us the peace we were looking for while still being within reach of the shops and restaurants (1). Almost as soon as our taxi turned off the road and drew up in front of the lavish looking reception building, I knew the Central Karon was going to be everything I'd hoped it would be. Built on the side of a steep hill overlooking Karon Beach and the bay, a narrow private road zig-zags downward between rows of wooden villas supported on stilts. The road is truly private, only being just wide enough to allow two narrow golf carts to pass each other carrying guests up to reception at the top or down to the swimming pool by the beach at the bottom of the hill. Flights of steps wind between the villas, connecting each flat stretch of road and creating the effect of several levels as you make your way down to the beach. Telephones are positioned at intervals along the side of the road, so that anyone wishing to get anywhere without having to climb the hundreds of steps between the villas can simply ring for a golf cart to come and collect them. It felt a little like being on fantasy island. The room I had booked for Tanya and I was grandly titled a deluxe villa, and we were driven on our golf cart to the nearest telephone point from where the driver helped us carry our luggage up the remaining steps to our accommodation. Entry to the villa was through a small wooden patio which, due to the stilts holding it up against the edge of the hill and the steps leading away in both directions, also doubled as a balcony on which we could sit and watch the sunset or watch the almost non-existent waves on the sea through the trees. Our patio doors led into a small cosy bedroom, most of which was taken up with an eastern style four poster bed over and around which had been draped mosquito netting, and waiting for us on the pillow was a single red flower. Adjoining the bedroom was an en suite bathroom which, bizarrely, contained a large open window over the top of the shower which flooded the room with light during the day and showed us the stars at night. The amount of light in the bathroom also served another purpose because, even more bizarrely, the room also contained a small indoor garden in the form of a selection of plants planted in a bed of soil along the length of one wall. To me, the villa was perfect - and yet it was not the most expensive option. For the mere cost of one arm and two legs, we could've probably just about afforded to stay in a poolside villa or have our own spa in a private outdoor garden, but both of these options seemed to me to be rather missing the point - who wants to stay at home in their villa all day taking baths when you're in a place as beautiful as Thailand? For the same reason, the fact that our room also boasted satellite television, on demand movies and a well stocked mini-bar totally passed by me un-noticed. We were far too interested in having a great time around the resort and planning our visits to nearby islands to take any notice of trivial things like that! There were plenty of choices at the resort when it came to food. At the top of the hill, next to reception, the Cliff Bar and Restaurant allowed us to sit outside sipping cocktails at sunset or have dinner surrounded by panoramic views of the Andaman Sea. On the other hand, if all our energy had been sapped by spending all day taking part in strenuous activities such as laying by the pool or shopping in Patong, we could opt to walk down the hill rather than up it and have dinner at the Bayview Restaurant overlooking the pool. This was generally more of a buffet set-up and we found that we could usually just wander in, mention our villa number and load up our plates. The chef looked to be constantly busy behind the counter, steam and delicious local smells emanating from his general vicinity throughout our meal - every now and again, he would emerge from his hiding place with a giant platter of mouth-watering delicacies and set them down at somebody's table before disappearing back into the makeshift kitchen. The Bayview did exactly what it said on the tin, affording us particularly spectacular views of the Andaman sea and the bay beyond the pool, and was a delightful place to relax at the end of the day. Both restaurants, however, are pretty popular local destinations - so much so that you can even book a table on the internet before you've even booked your room. Getting from the resort to the shops and nightlife could be done in one of two ways. If we were feeling lazy, we could get reception to call us a taxi. These usually turned up pretty quickly, but we wouldn't have really cared even if they'd kept us waiting as it would've just been an excuse to sit at the bar next to reception and gaze out to sea for a while. Alternatively, we could decide to get some exercise and set off on the long downhill walk in either direction - one way would eventually lead us into the town of Karon, the other to Patong. Either way, the downward journey was very easy - it was the return up the hill which taught us a thing or two about fitness. As a general rule, we walked to town and then got a taxi back. Actually, the taxis in Karon and Patong were not at all what we had been expecting as westerners. Rather than being comfortable enclosed vehicles as we are used to back home, a local taxi in Phuket usually consists of a guy driving a fairly old small truck with a cab up front and a rickety carriage on the back with a single long hard wooden seat on each side. The back of the carriage is completely open for climbing in and out, and the two sides consist of two long glassless windows through which you are more than welcome to fall whenever the taxi goes over a bump in the road. If you're lucky, the driver might even notice and come back for you. The small seafront town of Karon is a world away from neighbouring Patong, if you'll excuse my strange bending of the English language for a moment. Rather than being a loud vibrant place, Karon attracts people looking for a simpler holiday and provides only the amenities to get from one day to the next. It is, however, Phuket's second most popular tourist resort for precisely this reason. There are no streets of nightclubs or rows of packed restaurants, a refreshing fact which proves that the popularity of a resort doesn't have to rely solely on how much there is to do - on our first trip into Karon, it took me a while to even find a cash machine - and afterwards I rather wished I hadn't as it told me it was out of cash and then took the money out of my account anyway.There are a couple of low-key restaurants and bars as you enter the town from the direction of Patong, but very little beyond. Karon does have a street which runs along the beach, but it is lined with hotels and spa resorts rather than attractions. The sand is of the pure white variety you would expect to see on the outlying islands rather than the tourist destinations, and according to the website for the Central Karon Village it is known for squeaking loudly when stepped on. Personally, I cannot vouch for this as I have never encountered squeaking sand in my life and would probably run quickly in the opposite direction if I ever did, but I can certainly recommend Karon Beach as an alternative to the junk food wrapper covered seafront that is Patong - especially since the larger fast food chains have begun to descend on the area. This is very much the place to stay if you don't want to be woken up in the middle of the night by a drunken bar crawl staggering past your front door, and Patong is very much the place to stay if you want to be on a drunken bar crawl that gets to stagger past somebody else's front door! In contrast to Karon, Patong has become the favourite destination for young people looking for a wild, drunken orgy of parties and bars. There are even distinct heterosexual and gay areas of the resort. Back in the 80s, Patong was a quiet seaside resort just like its neighbour until westerners suddenly decided that it was surrounded by such beautiful scenery that it really was the place to go to get drunk and not appreciate any of it. This seems to be quite a popular theme with Europeans - find somewhere really stunning and cover it in fast food wrappers as quickly as possible. These days, Patong is very much the hub of activity on Phuket and contains the vast majority of its nightlife and restaurants. To be fair, if you're looking for somewhere to eat or shop on Phuket or you want to go out for the evening to a reasonably sized club, then Patong is the only real choice - but personally I would always stay elsewhere and go in for the evening. There is a large shopping centre in Patong, spread over several floors and selling everything from cheap clothes thru wines and spirits to souvenirs. Due to the large communities of new age holiday travellers and old style hippies heading out to Thailand for the full moon parties and island life,the clothing here tends to frown in the face of traditional style and you'll see many people wearing more gypsy style clothing, and this is openly available in the clothes shops throughout the island - although bargains can be picked up quite easily on clothing in general, especially if you're willing to take the risk that what you're buying might not be exactly one hundred percent authentic. In fact, this is very much something to be aware of when stopping in resorts such as Patong. We're all familiar with the concept of roadside vendors selling fake rolex watches, but in Thailand it is not unknown for an unsuspecting tourist to go into a large reputable looking department store, wander into the music section and pick up an apparent bargain such as a chart album for the equivalent of a few pennies, only to discover upon listening to it that they've actually got a recording of a talented impressionist covering the original songs - not something it will tell you on the CD case. One really obvious thing about the ridiculous exchange rate between the Thai Baht and the UK Pound is that nobody really knows what their money is worth from one day to the next. At the time of writing, one pound would buy me sixty-four Baht. This is never really a problem as you know that everything in Thailand is costing you next to nothing, but the confusion did prove useful to Tanya and I when we arrived in Patong and decided in a moment of madness to head for McDonalds for something to eat. While Tanya found a table among the throngs of tourists stuffing their faces, I went up to the counter and ordered - coming away with a tray laden down with food and drink which had probably cost me not much more than a pound or two. On the way back to the table, a drunken English guy came bursting through the door with his mates and knocked me flying, sending my tray clattering to the ground and spreading my food all over the floor. Stopping in his tracks, he looked momentarily horrified at what he had done before putting his hand on my shoulder, apologising profusely in a drunken slur and handing me a wad of Thai banknotes with which to replace our meals. I worked out later that he had given me enough money to pay for our first couple of days spending in resort, probably enough to have replaced our meals fifty times over - but by that time the group had moved on and we were forced to spend the change on souvenirs instead. It isn't often you arrive in a foreign country on a budget and almost immediately have somebody pay for your stay! Our stay in Phuket coincided with our first Valentines Day together, and we had dinner in one of the nicer restaurants on Patong sea front. I had, of course, tried very hard to arrange the dates of our holiday so that Valentines Day would be during our stay at the Rayavadee, the island resort I had ended up booking for the following week - but as you can imagine, getting such a place for Valentines was a little like trying to book a ticket to Glastonbury music festival the day before it starts. I didn't even like to ask how far in advance we would've had to book a table at the Central Karon Village, but the people were already lining up to get in when we left. Nevertheless, we found a romantic place along the front and were able to forget for a moment that we were in Patong and be surrounded by other couples celebrating the day. As it turned out, our stay at the Rayavadee a few days later was pretty much like an extended Valentines Day anyway. On our return journeys to the Central Karon Village in the back of a taxi, Tanya would try very hard to get me to join in with a romantic rendition of Close to You by The Carpenters. This would usually end in embarrassment, partly because it's not that easy to sing well when you're being tossed around in the back of a truck, but mainly because I've always had an unfortunatetendency to muddle all the words up between the various choruses in such a way that the song changes rather dramatically from one of the most beautiful love songs ever written into a bit of a farce. "Why do birds fall down from the sky, every time you walk by" doesn't have quite the same ring to it, and probably puts across completely the wrong message... (1) Since our stay, the Central Karon Village has been renamed the Centara Villas. Looking through the website, however, it doesn't seem to me that much has changed other than the name. When I looked, there seemed to be a sudden lack of photos of the villa exteriors, however, and they seem to have repainted the interior walls red. Perhaps the management aren't as impressed with their own facilities as we were! However, Considering where we were and how beautiful the resort was, I found the cost of staying at the Central Karon Village entirely reasonable - at the time of writing, the deluxe villa we stayed in is showing on the resort website at an online rate of 88 UK pounds per night. Many basic hotels in London charge more than this, and I don't remember any of them having majestic views of the Andaman sea. For a more detailed description of Phuket and the amazing limestone stacks and islands surrounding it, you may like to read my previous book - still available at http://www.offexploring.com/globalwanderer

Nightlife: SAFARY !! incredible, between Patong Beach and Karoom Beach. For food, drinks and live music the MOLLY MALONE´S, in Patong Beach.