Honeymoon in Phuket

Phuket is an island off the Southeast of Thailand, though it is accessible by bridge from the mainland at the north end of the island. It was famously hit by the tsunami of December 2004. We visited Phuket on our honeymoon in June 2006 and there was almost no evidence of the tsunami’s destruction. Curiously, we only saw one small plaque which was barely noticeable in memory of the victims. There are warning signs and tsunami evacuation routes that we suspect have been recently erected. However, if you had never heard that Phuket was hit by the tsunami, you would never know. Both their repair and rebuilding efforts were completed quickly or the majority of the devastation was in human life and not to the physical structures.

The people of Phuket are their best asset. They are hard-working and so friendly and polite. Everywhere you go, people greet you with the traditional Thai “wei” – bow with hands in the prayer position – and saying “Sawatdee kha.”
The scenery of Phuket is breathtaking. Phang Nga Bay, west of the island of Phuket, is full of many “sea mountains”, limestone islands dramatically jutting up hundreds of feet in the air. The scale and awesomeness of these islands are difficult to capture, even with our video camera.

Phuket is very hot and sticky in June. It was about 88F everyday but felt so much hotter with the humidity. The ocean water is beautiful and clear but also very warm. A dip in the ocean is not nearly as refreshing as we expected. There was usually a quick tropical rain every afternoon but never lasted very long. If we were sitting by the pool, we usually just waited it out under the umbrella.

Thai food is excellent. I never liked Thai food in the States, mostly because I thought the satay was too peanut buttery. But in Thailand the flavors are much more refined and subtle, except for the chilies. Thai people like their food very spicy. For a dish they serve tourists, they use 3 chilies where they would use 10 chilies in the same dish if they made it at home. And 3 chilies are still really spicy! My favorite dish was green curry chicken. Many traditional Thai dish uses fresh lemongrass, galangal (Thai ginger), Thai basil and Kaffir limes. If you like fish and seafood, you’ll love the Phuket cuisine.

Quick Tips:

There are a lot of things to do in Phuket – touring neighboring islands, deep sea fishing, spa visits, sunbathing, kayaking, snorkeling, diving, shows, and shopping. We found the snorkeling to be average. It hardly compares to the Caribbean and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. When shopping, remember to haggle - they expect it. You can usually talk them down to less than half of the price they start with. Although sometimes, it seems silly to be haggling over 50 baht which is a little over . You can find good buys on Thai silk, teakwood trinkets, gems mined in Thailand and pearls from Phuket.

Best Way To Get Around:

Remember to drive on the left in Phuket. And watch out for all the mopeds! We rented a car for a few days. My husband wanted me to drive since I lived in Britain for 7 years and was used to driving on the left. However, I was too scared of hitting the mopeds. They come out of nowhere and zoom all over the road. It’s chaos! One day we passed a school just as it let out for the day. We saw entire families riding one moped – dad was driving with one kid standing on his lap, mom in the back with 2 kids on her lap wedged behind dad, and noone was wearing a helmet. There were “school buses” that were trucks where the kids sat or stood crammed in the bed of the truck.

The Crown Plaza is a 4-star hotel in the quiet Karon Beach section of Phuket. It has several nice pools, bars and restaurants. Though not on the beach, the Crowne Plaza is located directly across the street.

Upon check in, after an 18-hour flight and a harrowing taxi ride, we were kindly greeted with a cooling lemon infused drink and cool wet towels. A bellboy loaded our luggage and we were driven to our villa on a golf cart, via the narrow walkway paths of the hotel grounds.

We had a Lagoon Villa room with a King bed. There were flower petals elaborately placed on the bed in the shape of a heart. There were flower petals and blossoms floating in our oversized bathtub. The bathroom was very large with the tub for two and a separate shower. Our room had a private terrace overlooking the narrow lagoon, and a plunge pool and outdoor shower. The plunge pool was the best part about our room. Phuket was very hot and humid in June and we looked forward to our afternoon dips in the plunge pool. Our room cost 7200 Thai baht = $190/night.

The main pool was very nice and never crowded. We appreciated the tiki hut which covered a small portion of the pool. It was nice to be in the water without having to be in the sun. Mojitos and daiquiris were the favorite drinks at the pool’s swim up bar. My husband tried a Rambutan daiquiri, made with the native Thai fruit. A rambutan is a strange looking fruit. The outside looks like a kiwi with longer spiky red hair. The inside looks like an egg, has the texture of a pear, the color of a melon and the taste is a cross between a pear and melon. The bartender showed us how to peel the fruit and remove the pit, and let us try to the fruit. It was from this bartender, named Porn (I kid you not!), that we learned the hotel was recently sold and would become a Movenpick hotel within a week.

The hotel has several restaurants, a gym, an art gallery, and a couple of pools.
We spent a week at this hotel and then a week at the JW Marriott Phuket. Although the Marriott is a more luxurious hotel, I preferred the Crowne Plaza because of the fantastic villa room with the plunge pool and the location was so much better.

One tip we’d like to pass on: book your taxi to the airport the day before your flight. We asked the front desk to call us a taxi when we checked out, and it cost 3 times what it cost us to get from the airport to the hotel. The front desk clerk told us it would have been much cheaper if we had booked it 24 hours in advance.

NOTE: This Crowne Plaza hotel is now a Movenpick hotel. It changed hands the week after we stayed there.

Located at the North end of the island, this hotel is very isolated. There are no restaurants or tourist sites within a 30 minutes drive. The hotel is beautiful and the service is fantastic. The lobby is decorated in a grandiose Thai manner. It has a view of the reflecting pool with the ocean in the background and overlooks the Lotus pond and main swimming pool below. Every night, musicians play on an underwater platform in the middle of the reflecting pool while a dancer twirls around them with batons aflame.

Our room was very nicely decorated. The king sized bed was decorated with rose petals. The bathtub had petals and blooms floating in it. There was a separate shower in the bathroom. There was a small nook called a sala with cushions by the window, and a very small balcony overlooking the South pool.

All the restaurants were very good but quite expensive. We preferred the smaller (and considerably cheaper) breakfast buffet of the Siam Deli than the main restaurant, Marriott Café. The Marriott Café has a large dinner buffet with international cuisine. We enjoyed it but didn’t think it was a very good value. La Cuchina, the Italian restaurant, required reservations and was very fancy. The food was superb and the service was outstanding. My favorite restaurant at the Marriott was the Ginja restaurant, way over beyond the South pool. It serves fantastic traditional Thai food.

We split our time pool time between the main pool and the South pool. The South pool was newly remodeled in blue and tan tones. The swim up bar is modern and funky. You must swim through a waterfall to get to a bar stool. The pool staff are eager to assist in setting up your chaise lounge and umbrella. As soon as you are settled, they bring water, cool wet towels and a spritzer bottle to keep you cool. We preferred the main pool where the service was the same but once they got to know us, they were quick to offer the food and drink menu. Late afternoon, they offered 2-for-1 cocktails, with a long gong signaling the start of Happy Hour. This pool is very family friendly with a shallow section for kids and a waterslide. The pool is adorned with stone elephant which shoot water from their trunks.

The Marriott is situated on Mao Khao beach. It is a very narrow beach with rough waves. There are no chaise lounges set up on the beach so you need to lie on your towel if you want to sunbathe. Most people opt to sit by the pool instead. You can get a Thai massage on the beach for 400 baht, from Marriott approved masseuses. It’s a little more expensive than on Karon Beach but it is a fixed price – no haggling.

The Marriott is a very nice hotel with beautiful grounds and outstanding service. But overall, it is way overpriced and the location is really not ideal.

We stayed at the Crowne Plaza Phuket which is directly across the street from Karon beach. This quiet beach is nestled between Kata and the busy beach in Patong. We paid 100 baht ($2.50) to have lounge chairs set up for us under an umbrella. There were only 2 other couples on the entire beach. There are no lifeguards and the water was pretty rough, but we really enjoyed playing in the waves. The sand is fairly coarse and makes a zippy sound when you walk.

Because the beach is public, there are many locals trying to sell jewelry, sarongs, Thai silk, luggage, etc. The price start high but you can always haggle them down to about 1/4 of the original price. It seemed they expect you to haggle. There are also several massage huts on the beach, offering a traditional 1-hour Thai massage for about 300 baht ($8). Clothes stay on for a Thai massage. It is not a tranquil and relaxing massage but it does soothe sore muscles and the foot rub was heaven.

We booked the FantaSea show mainly because it was touted as the best tourist attraction in Phuket. After seeing the show, we didn’t quite agree with that.

The FantaSea village is a small area of restaurants and shops leading to the Palace of the Elephants theater where the show is performed. It is filled with lights and glitz and feels like a mini-Disney. Along the street are vendors, outdoor stage acts, elephant rides and carnival games. Our shuttle bus from the hotel arrived 2 hours before the show so we wandered around aimlessly and eventually ended up sitting at a bar watching a band dressed as the Flintstones play barely recognizable '80s music. This band was so bad that we were quite entertained.

We booked the FantaSea show through the Concierge Desk at our hotel. There is an option to purchase a Buffet Dinner and Show tickets but we had heard from other guests at our hotel that the food at the Kinaree Buffet Restaurant was only fair. So we bought just the Show tickets. They offer "Gold Seats" for an additional price (250 baht) which supposedly have a better view, but the theater is small enough that any seat is a good view. Transfers from and to the hotel by shuttle bus are included in the price of the ticket.

When you enter the theater, there is a Camera check area. We tried to hide our camera in a pocket - not so that we could take pictures at the show but because we didn’t feel comfortable leaving our camera with them. But we didn’t get away with that. They look through bags and pat down your pockets. However, it is a very efficient process with fast moving lines for checking the cameras and picking them up after the show. As we walked through the hall towards the theater, there are a few stops along the way where you can get your picture taken with a baby lion or elephant, for a fee of course. But I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the poor creatures.

It is a Las Vegas style show but tackier. There is a very large cast of singers, dancers, clowns, acrobats and over 30 elephants performing on an elaborate set design. A narrator speaking in English tells the story of the mythical Prince of Kamala interweaving Thai history and culture.

The show was bit boring, and hard to follow. And the glitzy dazzling FantaSea Village was just too cheesy and commercial. It isn’t a true representation of Thai life and culture. This is not something you need to put on your must-see list.

The park is open 5:30pm - 11:30pm but is closed on Thursdays. The show starts at 9pm and lasts just over an hour.
www.phuket-fantasea.com

The one thing I really wanted to do while in Thailand was Elephant Trekking. There are a few companies that offer this but we booked the 6-in-1 Safari Tour with Island Safaris through the concierge at our hotel. It was a 4 hour tour which included Elephant Trekking, Canoeing, an Ox-cart ride, Monkey show, Elephant show, and demonstrations of traditional Thai Boxing, Thai Cooking, Rice Farming, and Rubber Tapping.

We took the morning trip which included an 8:30am pick up at our hotel. We arrived at the Island Safari site which was set up with different areas for each show or demonstration. We started with the Monkey show starring Somlee. She demonstrated how monkeys are used to help the Thai people retrieve coconuts. She deftly climbed a tree and quickly twisted 3 coconuts off the branch, sending them falling into the waiting arms of her trainer.

Next stop was the Thai cooking demonstration. Our guide showed us how to make papaya salad, using all local produce. He explained that Thai people like very spicy food. In very hot papaya salad he made for us, only 3 chilies were used. When he makes that same dish at home for his family, he uses 10 chilies. Next, our guide demonstrated how the rice is harvested with the use of a water buffalo, and passed around samples of the grain at different stages in the processing. The Thai Boxing ring was the next stop. Our guide asked for a volunteer from the group to assist in the demonstration of the basic moves of this popular Thai sport.

The Elephant show was very entertaining. They demonstrated their immense size and strength, played basketball and played harmonicas (which they seemed to really enjoy). I was selected by our guide to help demonstrate the elephant’s ability to give a Thai massage. I laid on a mat and one of the elephants gently patted my back with his foot. The guide then played a dirty trick on another guest selected to receive a massage from the ele. He had him lay on his back and then threw a banana up his shorts. We all laughed hysterically as the elephant used his trunk to search for the banana in the man’s shorts. How humiliating for the poor guy, but so funny for the rest of us!

The elephant ride was fun, but still a little disturbing. The elephant is the national symbol of Thailand and they are such an incredible, noble animal. So it’s sad to see them in captivity, chained to a post, waiting to give tourists rides. Also, the Island Safari staff often used hooks on the elephant’s ears for discipline.

We had a Rubber Tapping demonstration and explanation of how the rubber is made and used. Finally, we concluded with a leisurely canoe trip down the river.

This tour was packed with fun activities and interesting insight into Thai life and culture. It would be an especially good activity for families.

1300 Baht = $40