The rest of Phuket, finally

I'm very anxious to get this over with, its hanging over my head a like a very heavy thing that can cut my head off (the true idiom escapes me). I almost don't care about not having it perfectly recorded anymore, because I've left it for so long and I'm anxious to get to other things.
But we soldier on...

Monday was a day of adventuring: Ben went off with Avery (Kimmie's housemate) to rent us a motorbike for the week. I say motorbike, but it was really a scooter with a very small seat for my bum and really high foot thingies - very uncomfortable indeed. But Mr Ben is a great driver, and I am a great navigator, though we did get lost a few times before I found a great map.
Naturally just as we managed to find our way (by stopping at a Ducati dealer and asking for directions) we had a puncture, and amper amper split our heads open in the road in full traffic. Luckily it had stopped us right outside a Shell, and a nice man pumped the wheel up for us while laughing at our near-death experience in the road.

Ten whole minutes later, the tire was flat again. This time we'd pulled over right in front of a bike repair shop - I've never been so lucky in my life. They didn't speak a word of English, but one man did have a swastika tattooed on the inside of his wrist, I forget what the original symbol meant.

After what was literally 4 hours, we reached our destination of Patong Beach, the main tourist hangout in Phuket. And to be honest, it wasn't worth the trip. Patong looks like Pattaya, with lots of old fat white men looking to get off with Thai girls. The good thing about there being lots of farangs around is that it means the Thais speak better English, so its easier to make yourself understood.
But the beach is not very pretty, and we arrived too late to do anything anyway. Oh well.

Patong beach

Stolen sunset from a hotel's private beach.

 Tuesday was another fun lazy day, spent swanning around in the ocean. You have to see it to believe it. Ao Yon is a very protected bay, and there are absolutely no waves. I've never seen such flat ocean in my life. Patong had some baby waves, and I saw some really good waves on Kata Beach, both on the other side of the island.

The one constructive thing we did on Tuesday was take a drive up to Big Buddha to watch the sunset and have supper. Big Buddha is exactly that: a huge statue of Buddha built out of marble slabs. He is still being built, and tourists can donate a slab of marble with their names on it to be put on him. I did no such thing. Big Buddha is very beautiful, and 6km up a very steep mountain on a little scooter with two large bums on it. It was touch and go for a while there. He is also no good to watch the sunset from, as he is facing east, and is so big that he blocks out the sunset. So we had a look at him and moseyed back down the mountain to have some supper at a restaurant with a great view in the right direction.

A much better sunset view

 
 It was the night before Big Buddha that Ben and I decided not to go see as many islands as we could and meet up with Jay (a friend from school). Instead, due to financial constraints, we decided to cut our trip short and go home instead. A wise choice, with hindsight!

Wednesday was thus our last day, and we spent a part of it adventuring at a waterfall near Kimmie's house. We didn't go very far up, and apparently it gets much more impressive, but having mixed feelings about waterfalls as I do, I was content to just stay fairly close to the bottom.

Afterwards, we had a quick supper with Kimmie and Avery to say thanks for letting us stay, and then hopped back on the bus for a long, long trip home.