What not to do when travelling: Off to Phuket and Patong Beach

A few years ago, when I was working at a school in Korea, a group of us talked about going to Thailand for our winter vacation. It sounded like a great idea to me, so I went ahead and booked a ticket. Unfortunately, the others were not as solid about the idea and it ended up that I came to Thailand by myself. A couple of years later, they all decided to go to Thailand, while I had booked a ticket to the Philippines, where I met with a rather disappointing mishap that saw me being drugged and robbed of all the money in my bank account. At that time, my friends went to Phuket and frolicked on the beach. Now I finally decided to get myself to Phuket, thus symbolically completing the trip that we had all thought to go on together.

I headed to Phuket leaving rather late for such things, at 9:30 in the morning. When I booked the bus to go, I was told that I would be in Phuket by 12:30 or 1:00. If I had gotten into the minibus and it had just gone straight to Phuket, perhaps that would have been so. Instead, I got in the minibus, then it drove around for a while picking up the rest of the passengers, some of whom were a bit hard to get to. Then we were taken into Krabi town and dumped off at a main depot of some sort. Some people were going to different places and this is where all that switching took place. There seemed to be only two of us traveller types who were going to Phuket, plus two Thais. Whether it would have been different if there had been a full load of people, I don't know. But there were only the four of us. So we were put into another minivan and driven to a bus station, where the minibus driver got tickets on another transport for us and left us to wait for the next one to leave that station. We had waited at the depot for about 40 minutes and now we waited at this station for about 20 more. We were finally heading off at about 11:30.

The other traveller was a Swedish girl named Sofia. She had asked at the first depot where we stopped about going to Patong. I had wondered myself if I wanted to go to Phuket or to the beach/tourist spot of Patong. I was still deciding this, when I heard her asking about Patong. Once we were under way, I told her that I was thinking about going to Patong as well and if it were necessary to take some kind of taxi, I would be willing to share the fare. We got to Phuket town at about 2:00, arriving at a bus station. We got out and were immediately accosted by people wanting to know where we were headed, so they could take us. We brushed them off and started looking for a bus or something to get to Patong. Eventually someone told us that there was no bus running because it was a holiday and we would have to hire a truck thing. I have never, ever heard of a bus service that would normally be running not running because of a holiday, so I didn't really believe the guy, but we had no idea of how to find such a bus, or where it would be. And it had been a long enough day, so we decided to just hire the truck thing and go. Shared between us, it was not likely to be too much more than finding a bus.

We arrived in Patong about 30 minutes later and the guy took us to a higher priced hotel, despite our having told him we wanted to go to something cheaper. He then took us to the other end of town to a guest house hotel and we had a look. It being low season and because we were checking in at the same time, having arrived together, we were given two rooms for about 13 dollars each. Not bad. And the rooms were quite nice. So it worked out well to manage the trip together. Besides, Sofia is one of those stereotypical Swedish women. So it was even better.