Phuket

Did they make it to Malaysia?
Was the van a rickety 4x4? Find out here!

I'll break the tension now - the van was a mini bus! It was actually two, since they decided to make an extended stop to wait for a new van and to grill us about where we were going so they could try and sell us stuff. The journey was interesting - there were no seatbelts and the driver wasn't afraid to go at breakneck speed, even though his van made concerning creaking sounds going round corners. John and I were also in the front with the driver because they wanted to fit as many people as possible in! Funniest moment was when the driver looped his seatbelt round the hand break to go past the police, then removed it again afterwards, laughing.

We arrived exhausted at Phuket Town, and was immediately accosted by travel agents, who offered us a room for 500B. It was a shared bathroom, but good enough for one night (or so we thought!). We also booked an overpriced early morning taxi.

The room itself was basically a white box, with no outside windows (only one out to the hall) and a simple bed and wardrobe. It looked like what I imagine a psychiatric hospital would look like, and John thought it looked like a prison (which was quite apt as we later discovered). We actually had the bathroom to ourselves, but it was dank and down a dark hallway and I was actually so scared of it that I made John come with me in the night!

I wasn't sure if we needed passport photos to get into Malaysia, so on the advice of the hotel staff we popped over to the Tesco Lotus to get some done. I say popped over, but it was actually across a 10 lane busy road, and crossings don't exist in Thailand. There was a set of traffic lights, but not for all of the lanes. After much discussion of tactics and scouting of the traffic patterns, we eventually made it across unharmed, although I was close to being hit by a motorcyclist weaving through the lanes. To add insult to injury, a street dog trotted across quite happily just after we did.

The Tesco Lotus was enormous, and we had a good old look around while we checked on the photo requirements. It turned out we didn't need pictures, so we went for a walk to explore the area. We eventually realised that we were not, in fact, in Phuket Town. Or really very near it. We hopped in a taxi and went to the actual Phuket Town to find some food, then we got a nice early night ready for our early morning taxi.

I slept really badly because of the creepy room and the deserted corridor to the bathroom - I kept having nightmares! We woke up nice and early, had a random breakfast of food we'd bought the previous day at Tesco, checked our bags and headed downstairs to the back entrance where we were meeting our taxi. When we got down, we found that the back entrance was locked. as was the front entrance. As were all the windows. We were a few minutes early anyway, so we decided to wait for a bit. While we were doing that we checked the tickets and realised we had got the time wrong, the plane was actually 45 minutes earlier than we thought it was. Mildly concerning, but we'd left plenty of time so no worries. Since we were waiting anyway we decided to check in online to save time once we arrived. Oddly, the check in for our plane said it had closed at 7:30 - but it was only 5:50. Then I noticed the date on the check in, which happened to be a week previous. Oops! No idea how we did that!

There was still no taxi and our meeting time had passed so I rang the emergency number to say that we'd been locked in. The taxi driver came and let us out, but really! What if there had been a fire?!?

We easily managed to buy new tickets on the same aeroplane as we were originally scheduled to catch and we arrived in Malaysia at 10:30 local time safe and sound!

John is going to write a post about Malaysia so far and upload some pictures at a later date.