Week 6 – Our Last Week in Phuket, Thailand

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This is it. Our last week in Phuket.

We’ve been here since Oct 9, so over 6 weeks in total, and it’s been absolutely lovely! Will we miss it? Guess it depends on what “it” is. The beach and water, for sure. Although we’re not swimmers and aren’t getting down to visit the water as often as we did initially, we usually get there at least a couple of times a week. And just being near the water is restorative and destressing and, well, just good for the soul.

The people? I guess we’ll see. The Thai people are beautiful and friendly and welcoming, but we’re not leaving Thailand yet, just Phuket. And we don’t think that the Phuket Thai are that different from the Thai in the rest of the country!

We’re actually really looking forward to the change! We’re getting a little too settled in now. A little too inclined to eat the same dishes at the same restaurants, because we know where they are and we know we like them. A little less inclined to walk and explore, because we’ve walked and explored a lot and so much is familiar.

It’s time for a change, and it’s happening! In two days we’re getting on the

Whoops. We’re leaving that for the next post 😉

Table of Contents

• Quick Weekly Wrap-Up
• Date Night & Food Stuff
• Overnight Trip to Phuket Town
• Loy Krathong
• The Last Few Days in Patong
• Goodbye, Phuket

Quick Weekly Wrap-Up

So, what have we done during our last week in Phuket, Thailand?

Well, we’ve been discussing where we’re going, of course. And looking at our Visa options for extending our stay; we know we’ll get a 30-day extension, so we can stay in Thailand until at least the first week in January but after that, it’s still up in the air. We’ve been contacting Visa agents both on and off Phuket island, and have visited the immigration office in Patong.

Wayne has been booking travel tickets to get to our next destination, as well as booking a temporary apartment for 5 days so we can get used to our new surroundings while we search for a new home base.

Lastly, we’ve been trying to make some changes, work-wise. Life is a constant work-in-progress, trying to keep everything in balance; and this is such a new type of life for us, there’s a lot to learn!

We’re new to blogging, and although this blog doesn’t look like much, it takes a *lot* of time, more than we’re happy with at times. There also were a few IT issues we had to get help with. We are also trying to refine our FB pages and content for marketing of the blog and us as Certified Lifebook Leaders. It’s all a learning process and it all takes time!

We’re still trying to schedule our time between the work stuff, and the travel-related things we *have* to do, and the travel-related things we *want* to do, and the rest of life stuff (learning, meditating, workouts, that kind of thing).

I’ve been trying the pomodoro time management technique which I’ve used before and love, but I keep forgetting to set my pomodoro timer! Apparently, I need a string on my finger to remind me what the other string is for! Wayne wants to get back into time blocking, as he prefers that method.

We’re so grateful for Lifebook that we now know how to keep an eye on everything that’s important, so nothing gets left too far behind! We’re more aware of any imbalances so we can work to correct them.

We’ve also been clothes shopping! Not buying too much, but shopping 🙂 We’ve realized that, for all the clothes we brought with us, there are only some that we actually wear much, which means it looks like we’re wearing the same clothes in practically all our photos! So, we’re keeping an eye out for some new tops and stuff.

I bought a new skirt/pant/sarong-type thing, which practically needs an instruction manual to get into (and which you *don’t* wear anywhere you might need to use the bathroom)! It first wraps around to tie behind the back, then you grab the front part, tuck it between your legs to the back, and wrap it back around your body to tie again at the front! Whew. But it’s flowy and gorgeous and feels so feminine!

I also bought a new pair of silver hoop earrings to wear to complete the gypsy look.

Wayne’s more fussy; he hasn’t found anything he wants, yet.

Date Night & Food Stuff

We tried a new restaurant for our date night: the Gandhi Indian Restaurant 2, which offers veg and Jain dishes. The furniture there is amazing, very intricate and ornate, and everything just sparkles with cleanliness from the two crystal chandeliers, but it’s not a romantic ambiance. It’s fairly quiet (or it was when we went, but it was a late supper).

The food was nice. The pakoras were a bit of a disappointment, they seemed to be frozen veg (corn and peas) fried in a batter patty. Tasty enough, but not great. The rotis were a bit crunchy but tasty (I know it’s so hard to find the balance of soft and crispy with roti, but I’m such a roti lover!). We also had chana masala; the chickpeas were homecooked with a beautiful texture, and it had a lovely gravy with a hint of a coconut flavour. Nothing amazing, but quite nice. We enjoyed it!

After the meal, we rushed to a bar! Gasp!

Wayne and I haven’t had a drink out in well over a decade. We don’t drink. But we wanted to experience the bar scene on Bangla Road before we left Phuket, and the energy of the people and area. And we wanted to be open to a new experience, and for us, a drink out in a bar is a very different experience! Aren’t we tame?

So we went to the Red Hot, and I got a rum and coke while Wayne got a Heineken. Then we people-watched as we listened to the live band. That place is hopping! Because of covid, alcohol isn’t served after 11 and everything shuts down, so we were only there for 2 songs. We managed to sneak one more drink in before they closed at 11. But it was certainly different for us! Afterwards, we walked down to the beach, then home to bed for just after midnight.

We’ve been revisiting some of our favorite restaurants, like the one with this Mango Sticky Rice.

And we took a spontaneous supper trip wandering and got rained into the Song Pee Nong restaurant. They understood English fairly well so we ordered Pad Thai without fish/oyster sauce or chicken, but forgot to ask for no egg! Our bad; we picked it out. We also ordered bean sprouts with Tofu, which Wayne enjoyed. They delivered a fresh fruit plate at no charge for dessert, a nice surprise! We’d definitely go back.

Overnight Trip to Phuket Town

We also took an overnight trip to Old Town, Phuket for the festival of Loy Krathong!

We’d planned on doing a day trip, but realized we’d be a bit rushed trying to do everything we wanted and still get home at a reasonable hour. So, we decided to go crazy (for us) and book a hotel for an overnight stay.

We chose the Phuket Chinoinn (booking through Agoda) and we highly, highly recommend staying there if you get a chance! It is an absolutely stunning building, very well maintained and clean.

From the entrance:

Going up to the rooms:

Our bedroom was very large, clean and comfortable:

We stayed on the 6th floor (out of 7) and had the “nature view”. You can see the Big Buddha (link to article) from our bedroom!

And the sunset from our balcony was unbelievable:

There’s a great, covered swimming pool (two actually; one for kids:

Even the carpark is decorated!

The location was also great! A short walk to both the Phuket Town Central Market and Downtown Plaza.

We had lunch at Vegan Phuket, an awesome little restaurant with almost too many choices! I was option-overwhelmed and got the same pizza as I had for my birthday except in miniature, and it was so adorably tiny and yummy, the perfect size. Wayne had kale with “fish” which was a very tender, salty seitan, also very good.

We also had a piece of cake each because the prices there were wonderful…I had red velvet, and Wayne had carrot. Love the little kitty spoon rests!

Wow, just wow. Go if you ever have a chance.

After lunch and dropping our stuff off at the hotel, we took a Grab to the Trickeye Museum, where you can seem involved in 4D-optical illusions. It was closed due to covid, so we wandered the mall where it was located for a while…we were in the “expensive” side of the mall (Central Phuket Floresta), and had to search quite a bit to find the skywalk over the highway to the other side of the mall (Central Phuket Mall). Hint: the skywalk is on the 2nd floor from the top, not on the top floor!

The mall was a typical mall (neither Wayne nor I are much for shopping) so we didn’t get anything but a couple of pretzels from Auntie Annie’s (the sweet almond pretzel is amazing and vegan!) and then went back to the hotel.

We ran out to a vegan food cart that caught my eye near the hotel for supper (lots of sweeties and a ginger tofu soup), then took a Grab to Saphan Hin Park to see the Loy Krathong celebrations.

Loy Krathong

What is Loy Krathong, you’re probably wondering…we did, so we had to google it 🙂 Here’s what we learned.

Loy Krathong is a festival celebrated on the evening of the full moon in the 12th month of the Thai lunar calendar (which this year was November 19th). People go to the nearest body of water, be it the ocean, a lake or even a swimming pool, and release a decorated float as an offering in hope for a year of good luck.

The decorated floats, or krathongs, are traditionally made of a slice of a banana tree trunk, intricately and beautifully folded banana leaves, various flowers, incense sticks and a candle. There are such a variety of krathongs, and it’s so beautiful to watch them floating away on the water. We brought our krathong at one of the many vendors making and selling them at the Park when we arrived, then strolled around the festival.

Wow, it was a party! Hopefully most everyone is vaccinated because you couldn’t get closer to thousands of strangers if you tried. We expected a fairly quiet affair with some families setting off their floats in the water and that being about it. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

It was CrAzY! There were food vendors, and clothing vendors, and plant vendors, and everything-else vendors. There was a blow-up section for kiddies with giant slides and bouncy houses, and fair rides for kids, and fair rides for adults. There was live music, and recorded music, and an unbelievable amount of noise and light and chaos and flow. It was amazing!

Here’s a condensed version of the night.

First, we bought our krathong and let it go in the water. Then we found a vegan food vendor with loads of sweeties, and bought some to munch on while we wandered. We waded through the throng and noise for quite a while.

Then we rode the catepillar, which looks like a kiddie ride (and yes, we were probably the oldest riders!) but it’s killer fast and scary, whipping you around the curves at probably not-quite-legal speeds. I had to convince Wayne to do it, but he had so much fun too! But for days afterwards he was sore from banging into the metal side.

Turn up your volume!

When we decided to go home, all the Grab cars were busy, and we couldn’t find a ride. Eventually, we just used Grab motorcycles (kids, don’t try this at home!) … we ordered two, and rode home in the just-starting-to-rain night, without helmets, in the dark, with strangers, through busy Thailand streets, on the night of a festival. It was so fun!

Now, I’m after Wayne to renew his motorcycle licence when we return to Ontario (he *just* let it lapse last year!)

The next morning we packed our stuff and walked to Phuket Town Central Market. There wasn’t a whole lot going on there, and the restaurant we’d hoped to visit was closed, but we found a veg street food vendor and the 3 kids getting our food had fun(read laughing at) with our limited ability to communicate with them. We took their photos then, a lady who looked like she could be their grandmother, took ours. It was all fun! Also, their food was really good 🙂

We saw this really cute plant shop selling loads of house plants. If I had an apartment here you wouldn’t be able to move in it, for the plants.

We also darted up to the Downtown Plaza Market, but it was just a meaty food market so we didn’t stay long. Instead we went back to Central Market and caught a bus (songthaew) back to Patong.

The Last Few Days in Patong

We left Patong on Tuesday afternoon at 1. There were just a couple of things we wanted to do before we left.

(1) Get matching tattoos!

They’re sort of like Pinterest fails…they’re supposed to be his-and-her avocados (his has the pit), but they sort of ended up like blobs with hearts. But we like them, and at least they’re semi-permanent!

Hint: if you’re planning on getting temporary tattoos, be aware that the colors other than black last approximately 2 washes and a swim before fading dramatically. So pay accordingly, by bartering down the price first! Lesson learned.

(2) Get a Massage (surprise). Done.

(3) Last Meal at the Tantra (surprise). Yummers, done.

(4) Get a foot rub. This didn’t happen because no one was there! That *never* happens at a massage parlor in Patong! Usually, there are women standing out front calling to passersby to come in for a massage. But seriously, we hung around for around 5 minutes and no one came out!

(5) Swim in the Andaman Sea and relax on the beach.

It was beautiful. So beautiful, and sort of sad because it’s the last time, at least for this trip. But we 100% loved it.

Goodbye, Phuket

Or, Goodbye for now. We may return! It’s been wonderful here 🙂

Our last sunset from our balcony at the Delicious Hotel.

We hope you’ve enjoyed sharing a bit of our life in Phuket, Thailand over the past few weeks. Pop back soon to see where we’re going next!