laurajenkinson

A Pakistani in Patong

Sunday June 23rd, 2013 – Patong, Thailand 

Butterfly Pea drink

Yet another fairly early rise – whyyyyy is it so easy to get up early when on holiday? I guess the heat and light helps.. especially compared with a -1, black as night, morning in Christchurch. Another amazing breakfast – pastries, donuts, waffles, eggs, bacon, fruit, fried rice.. take your pick, followed by the massage deal of the day – 2x cocktails, canapes, and an hour and a half of massage bliss.

We decided to take a trip into Patong for the day – the resort has a daily shuttle departing at 12pm or 3pm, for 300 THB per person, per one way – and we would get a taxi back to Nai Yang. During the 40-odd minute drive down to Patong, we passed through Phuket Town where we happened to see the biggest, ugliest, hairiest spider I have ever seen scuttling across the car in the lane next to us. I really wish I got a photo of this for you, but it climbed under the window shade where the driver then jammed it’s leg in the window

I truly think that I would have a heart attack if that thing was inside my house.. at this point I was feeling pretty happy about our weather conditions back home that don’t allow disgusting creatures like this to want to hang out in and around our houses. While I didn’t manage to photograph this particular spider, I have attached a picture of another freaky looking spider we saw in a web during our Elephant trek – our Elephant trainer reckons it’s not poisonous but with such bright colours, how could it not be?! A colleague of mine came to the conclusion that it is a bird eater…. can you find it in the photo?

So when we finally arrived in Patong, our driver dropped us off at Jungceylon Mall (we later realised that this is because the one way system at the beach front makes it too hard for them to get back north) where we had some food and made our way towards the beach front to find a tailor to make a suit for Craig. We stumbled across a tailor down a side street (which isn’t hard, as every second shop seems to be a tailor) called Princes, where the sign outside promised a jacket, pants, shirt, vest and tie for 95 USD ($122 NZD/2944.00 THB). However once inside, the sneaky (albeit quite lovely) Pakistani owner let us know that this included stitching and measurements only – the material is separate. In the end it cost Craig 5000 THB ($161.35 USD/$207.70 NZD) for just a jacket and pants (a tie thrown in for free in the end).

What we weren’t expecting though, was that this required two further fittings and also a pick up. As this was the case, we scheduled the first fitting for later that evening, and grabbed a Tuk Tuk over to Karon Beach for dinner. I remembered Karon as being a prettier, more quiet beach with lots of nice beachfront restaurants. I didn’t remember it being so hard to find one that wasn’t seemingly aimed at the Russian market, but in the end this seemed impossible so we sat down at at a resort restaurant with an outdoor area and had a couple of pre-dinner cocktails. We chose the one with the ooga-booga face because it had an ooga-booga face (not being racist in any way, it just reminds me of Crash Bandicoot)… it was quite tasty though! Although when some man plonked down a tray of smelly fish, it was a bit of a turn off and we ended up going elsewhere for dinner.

Volcano cocktail

A quick trip back to Patong (dropped off at Jungceylon again, of course!!), and a quick look down BangLa Road where we couldn’t resist a pic with the wee cutie on Craig’s hand (I do know this isn’t very PC, but it was just so cute), and we had the first fitting completed and jumped in a taxi back to Nai Yang Beach – 900 Baht, ouch! We did get the pleasure of discovering this song though… tempting itunes download for sure! Listen to the song here!

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