More Phuket photos

Kim got herself a camera when we left Australia and took some photos in Thailand as well. Here they are!

That's it... we're done

Time to come home... next stop snowy London.

Phuket photo album

Here we go, the last set of pictures. Click on the picture to see the rest of our photos from Thailand.

Phuket.

After almost a day of travelling we arrived at our resort in north Phuket. We think we picked well. On arrival we were informed that it had not been possible to accommodate us in the plantation villa which we had booked. We would have to be upgraded to an executive villa. We didn't grumble. The executive plantation villa is bigger than our flat in Putney, has a garden area with sunbeds and a decked patio area (the patio in itself is bigger than our balcony), an outdoor bath, outdoor shower and indoor bathroom, living room, bedroom (thats about the same size as ours) and then there's a whole spa room for those occasions when you just have to have 2 masseurs turn up to work some magic :-) Well, we did feel we needed it after a day or two of lazing around doing not very much!

We have done other stuff too. Had a trip to Patong, further down the coast. After the taxi ride there we left the taxi lady (who practically insisted she would wait 4 hrs for us so she could take us home again. We kind of felt obliged when she didn't charge us for the one-way trip as she trusted us not to run off). Would that happen in London?? We had a good look around, did a bit of shopping and went for a meal. All very nice but we wouldn't have wanted to be staying there. It was too Costa Del Sol and full of fat loutish brits.

Another day we went on a boat trip to see some of the islands around here. The first one where we stopped was where the film 'The Beach' was filmed. We decided to sit on the sun deck of the speedboat. This didn't really work out in our favour as it soon started raining and didn't really stop until late in the afternoon. It didn't help that, because of the speed of the boat, the rain felt like needles hitting your face. The rain macs that were provided nearly suffocated us because of the wind but we survived.

On arriving at Phi Phi Ley Island still in the rain we hopped off the boat to join the other 30 something boats of people already there. It was a little crowded and not at all the image you have in your head of a deserted tropical island. You could tell it was a beautiful place though. We continued our tour, visiting other islands and having time to do some more snorkelling too. We thought we were probably a bit snorkelled-out after the Great Barrier Reef, but it was really nice and we saw some sea urchins that we hadn't seen out in Oz. At the end of the day we stopped at a place called 'Party Island'. We weren't expecting great things and we weren't too disappointed. Although we did have a nice cocktail.

Today we just had a relaxing day before travelling home tomorrow. Unfortunately it would appear that our flight is still scheduled and has not been cancelled by the snow there. Damn and blast!!

One of the blue man group?

On the speedboat over to Phi Phi Island it got a bit windy and a bit wet. Luckily he didn't suffocate. I have later photos to prove he is still breathing!!

Life isn’t like the movies

This is how Danny Boyle portrayed Maya Bay on Phi Phi Ley island when he filmed The Beach

This is how it was yesterday when we visited

Just a little bit busier!

Some Statistics

We’ve taken a lot of pictures while we’ve been travelling and I thought I’d have a look to see what that could tell us about the countries we’ve visited…

We’ve taken nearly 7000 pictures over the last 100 days – most of which weren’t very good or were multiple copies of the same thing while I fiddled with some esoteric camera settings trying to get the sky just the right shade of blue. The ‘hit rate’ of photos which we deemed of acceptable quality to share was pretty consistent across countries at about 20% +/- 2%. Which still amounted to a staggering 1400 pictures which I’ve subjected the readers of this blog to over the past months (sorry).

Thanks to the wonder of maths I can unequivocally state that New Zealand is the most photogenic country at 80 photos taken per day, closely followed by Australia at 79 per day.

Based on these figures I think a quick apology to Kim is in order as I must have spent at least half my time with my face hidden behind a viewfinder.

An observation…

Is it just me or do Toyota have a monopoly in the world hire car market?

For example…

USA

New Zealand

Australia – Melbourne

Australia – Port Douglas

Australia – Brisbane