Matt & Stevi: Phuket

Two posts in one day! We had some catching up to do Smile We got to Phuket, Thailand, after almost 24 hours, around 1 a.m. local time on January 2nd. Surprisingly, the “island” was still hopping – shops and restaurants were open all over the place! We were beat though, so called it a day. The next morning, we headed to Kata Beach – a 5 minute walk from our guesthouse. This was a nice little beach and we enjoyed the HOT sun and downtime. After that, we grabbed some Thai food (YUM!) and went for a massage. It’s 300 bhat (just under $10) for a Thai massage – yes, please! Matt wasn’t so sure about the outfit they had us wear.

If you have never had a Thai massage, you have to at some point – they crawl all over you, stretching your limbs here and there. Totally cool and relaxing. After dinner, we walked around some of the shops at night. This was still a touristy area, but not quite as bad as Italy.

We got up early the next morning for a snorkeling trip to Phi Phi islands. – this seems to be the tour that everyone does when they visit Phuket

There were lots of little islands all over the place.

We saw monkeys at a place called “Monkey Beach.” Apparently they’ve bitten some people, so people don’t generally get off the boats or anything – you just throw them bananas. We also saw Maya Bay – the cove where “The Beach” was filmed. It was gorgeous, but kind of spoiled by the hundreds of people and tons of boats.

A little cove on the other side of Maya Bay. Matt’s swimming here.

We saw some awesome fish when snorkeling at other spots of the trip though – my favorite probably being the parrot fish or the blue star fish. We went to a dive area for one of the snorkeling spots, and this was Matt’s favorite – he was able to dive pretty deep to look investigate. We got a fish pedicure that night. It was so ticklish. We could hardly last the full 20 minutes! Basically these little fish just eat the dead skin. Appetizing, eh?

We declared the next day another beach day. We switched hotels, and this was definitely better than the one on Kata Beach (but the closeness to the beach of the last one was superb). After checking in, we went to Karon Beach for the day. It’s bigger than Kata, but more crowded. For dinner this neat, we both had a whole fish (mine was covered in curry – yum!).

Karon Beach

It’s not a beach vacation until you have a piña colada

A view of our hotel from the road

Infinity pool at the hotel – really nice!

We took a fishing trip the next day. We both started feeling sick almost immediately, despite taking some medicine first – the sea was pretty rough! We made it though, but I had to lie down almost the entire time we were moving. We caught zero fish, but it was still fun. We lunched on the boat at a little cove where we got to swim for a bit. After making it back, we were totally beat so just grabbed dinner and packed up.

On the fishing boat

For our final day in Phuket, we went on another snorkeling trip to Khai Nok, Khai Nai, and Khai Nui islands. The first stop was choppy and I didn’t even bother going – Matt did, but was it was just so-so due to the waves. We went to a couple of little islands which was fun, but the coral was all dead and the variety of fish was lacking. There were plenty of this kind though!