Phuket

Finally at the beach. We stayed at an ecoresort that was kind of out in the middle of nowhere. Accommodations weren't that bad, but everything else was US prices. We were trapped. It's a good thing this resort had their own island, or we would have been bummed. On our first full day we booked a snorkeling/SCUBA trip so I could wait the required 24 hours between diving and flying. The night before, however, we got a call that the boat was broken, so we decided to spend the day on the island instead. We took a longtail boat out to the island in the morning, and there were free snorkel rentals and kayaks. The water was wonderful the day was relaxing, and we proceeded to get our first sunburns of the trip. So what do we do? We follow up with a fancy spa package with a massage and a salt scrub. Let me strongly not recommend a salt scrub when sunburned. Baaad idea.

Since we had already spent one day at the beach and it was now too late to go diving, we went on the kayaking trip (thanks Rebecca and Phillip!) we had on our honeymoon registry. We checked out of our room, stored our luggage and drove to the other side of Phuket to start our trip. At the boat dock, there were a bunch of little net-pen aquaculture operations, so I nerded out again and started asking questions about what they were growing and stuff. It's really interesting how much less squeamish people in Asia tend to be about their food. In the middle of this kind of gross harbor, there were a bunch of fish being grown that would be consumed locally and it just wasn't a big deal. Now I'm not a fan of net-pens in general, but I thought this was an interesting little operation.

So, on to the trip. After a long boat ride, we took a break at a little beach with about 7 other tour boats. Our trip was a fully guided trip, and I assumed that meant we would have a leader and Eric and I would paddle. Oh no, we didn't even get paddles. A guy sat in the back of our boat and did all the paddling and steering. Our driver in particular did all the talking too! The hongs are a series of caves and lagoons in the limestone island on the Eastern side of Phuket. When the tide is low you can paddle into a cave and come out the other end in lagoon. Unfortunately it was high tide when we were there (none of the guidebooks tell you to look at the tides when booking your trip), and we couldn't paddle into many of the caves. So what do the ocean folks do in this case? Jump in and swim. There was about 2 inches clearance between the surface of the water and the ceiling of the cave, so if we really go stuck, we could get some stale, damp air, but we didn't get stuck. Getting into the lagoon was easy. Duck under water and swim towards the light. It was clear when you had cleared the cave. The other side was beautiful. We were the only ones there the center was filled with mangroves and birds, and supposedly monkeys too, but our chatty guide started "calling" the monkeys for us, which was unsuccessful. Getting back into the cave was the tough part since we were going into dark and couldn't tell where the low tunnel ended and the more open cave began, but we made it (obviously).

We repeated this in a much longer, darker cave where we actually walked through the tunnel. Yep, this video is 2 minutes of pitch black.



Even worse, though, were the people who paddled into the cave. They had to lie on their back and cross their arms on their chests like they were in a coffin, and were pushed through the cave with the cave ceiling inches from their face. Freaky.

After the boat ride back, we drove back to the resort (right past the airport), showered up and headed to the airport to return to Bangkok and head back to SF the next morning.