My last day in Thailand

July 18, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

We were thinking of biking into the local village before the sun came up, but when we arrived at the Health Club, the people at the counter said that the road was really slippery and a big storm was coming towards the Marriott.

Even though we knew there was going to be a storm, we went swimming in the Out of the Blue pool anyway. All Dad did was throw me around the pool and force me to float on my back, and all Mum did was swim around and try not to get her hair wet. At one point Dad and I grabbed hold of Mum and submerged, drenching her hair with water and making her extremely angry. She only came in after about 45 minutes.

For lunch we remained in our deck chairs and had a ‘Seafood Chili Pizza’ which wasn’t spicy at all. It was very tasty though, and very filling too.

We returned to our room just in time because just as we stepped in a deafening sound of thunder erupted and in a few seconds it was pouring with rain. Lucky us, because now Ah-boo and Ah-gong were stranded in the lobby and had to wait for the rain to stop!

Mum and Dad watched 3:10 to Yuma, a cowboy movie with Russel Crowe, while I just did some stuff on this weblog. Dinner was at Siam Deli, and wasn’t that good, because the chicken spoiled the whole of the green curry. Here’s the really frustrating bit. For desert we ordered 3 vanilla ice creams in cones, and they said that it would take around 20 minutes to make the cones. So we waited and waited, and in about 20 minutes only one ice cream came. I gobbled it up greedily. Then 10 minutes passed. Another 10 minutes passed. Mum and Dad got tired of waiting so they went round to the counter and got cups instead. And as soon as they came back a waitress came with the two vanilla ice creams in cones, which we had been waiting for for 50 minutes! it was so annoying because we had only JUST got the ones in cups, and we couldn’t just waste our money and get the one in the cone. Better luck next time anyway.

Patrick

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The hardest Muay Thai session ever

July 17, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , , , , ,

In the morning I didn’t do much except do stuff on my weblog and edit and add new stuff on. But at exactly three o’clock. It was time to take on a very hard challenge; to keep punching, kneeing, elbowing and kicking for one hour non-stop with only two or three breaks. Like my previous session, my instructor tied a fabric bandage around and around both of my hands, making them really tight so I could punch as hard as possible. We took a 2-minute stroll to the dojo, and I did some streches to reflex my muscles. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, because as soon as I finished streching I was using all my strength to kick the pads and throwing bone-breaking punches at the red targets. Here’s the instructions on how to do some of the moves:

How to do a knee

1. Grab you opponent’s neck

2. Lift up your knee and use it to powerfully hit your opponent’s stomach

How to do a right/left kick

1. Stand side-on to your opponent

2. Lash out one of your legs and mantain straightness

3. Hit your opponent in the waist with your shin

How to do an elbow

1. Simply aim and hook your elbow around to hit the side of your opponent’s face.

After finishing Muay Thai, I was as exhausted as I was when I finished Team FEAR (Far East Adventure Racing). Hope I don’t get too tired out.

Patrick

 

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Old memories

July 16, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

If you still don’t know, I have been to Phuket more or less eight times before, because my Granny (from my Dad’s side) used to live in Karon (a district in Phuket). We wanted to visit all the old places like the Waterfront (the block of service apartments that Granny used to live in), the Green Man (the old English pub we used to go to every time we went to Phuket) and the Antipodes furniture shop (where half of our furniture at home was bought from). To do this we hired a car and a driver.

We boarded the car at eleven o’clock and told the driver called Mr. Son to go directly to the Green Man. After a long time we finally arrived at the good old Green Man. It brought back many memories as I sat down, sipping my dry Ginger Ale. The funny sign that said ‘PARKING FOR BRITISH ONLY. ALL OTHERS WILL BE TOWED’ was still there. So was the decent sized old English garden. But the rabbits weren’t anywhere in sight.

For lunch we went to a place called Phong Phang Restaurant, a restaurant that Mr. Son recommended. He said it was very good value and if you were used to really spicy things, that was the place for you. Even my fried rice was spicy, but it was still very tasty.

The funny thing was that I saw Khom at the restaurant too! If you don’t remember, Khom was the man who took us to the James Bond Island tour. What coincidence because Khom mainly only does tours in Phang Nga and we were in Phuket. I told Dad, but he didn’t believe me. Well, as we were on the way to the loo and Dad was joking that I had seen his doppelganger, he just came out of the toilet! I hope he didn’t hear us joking about him because he was quite a kind tour guide. 

Before long we were on our way to the Antipodes Furniture Shop. The lady at the furniture shop still remembered us, because nearly every time we went there before, our car broke down. After looking around all the wooden carvings, we decided to buy a small gong, which we could ring before dinner instead of shouting “DINNER’S READY!” and losing our voices. We also bought a back-scratcher and two little figures of elephants made of Burmese jade.

After more or less half an hour, we arrived in Karon, our favourite and most familiar place in Phuket, until granny passed away. We strolled through the Waterfront and met Serm, one of the kind-hearted staff who had worked in the Waterfront ever since we started coming here for holidays. He had just recovered from an illness of some sort so we wished him luck and kept walking further into town.

Dad bought some Oxetine 20 (the Thai version of Dad’s expensive heart pills which are rather cheap) at the ministore and he set off to try and find Wayne’s bar. Wayne is a good friend of Dad and Uncle Singe (My uncle and Dad’s younger brother) and I have some memories of me playing pool/snooker/8 ball with his wife. We saw the owner of Vitaporn, our favourite restaurant in Karon. Om, the local taxi driver, was in the town, too.

We then told Mr. Son to go straight back to the Marriott. We had a cheerful dinner, I read my Alex Rider book, Snakehead, and soon fell asleep.

Patrick

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The day of the PlayStation

July 15, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , , , , ,

As you know, yesterday my Mum was so impressed by my Muay Thai boxing that she let me hire a PS2 (PlayStation 2). I got eight games, but nothing seemed to work except Minerva (a Japanese game which I didn’t really enjoy) and Call of Duty , but the problem was every time I reached the part where this rifleman asks me to open a crate and press the L3 button, I can’t find it on my controller!

The other difficulty was that when I played MI:1 Operation Surma, I always managed to get on to the bit where I have to snap some photos with my binoculars, the machine froze and then showed a message that said “Not enough memory. Please insert memory stick. Retry”.

I had a cheesy slice of quiche for lunch, which I didn’t eat much of because it had too much spinach. Mum and Dad went to a presentation in the afternoon which was about buying ‘points’ and ‘time-shares’ and lots of things like that.

There’s no point in telling you about the afternoon I had because all I did was try to make use of the PS2 and in the end watching Narnia which was very dull and not understandable.

At around 3 o’clock Mum and Dad came back and said they’d not bought any points because it was a waste of money. Afterwards Ah-boo, Ah-gong, Mum and Dad all went to a beach massage while I got my temporary tattoo done. I made it in the shape of a dragon because I wanted it to look like a  

For dinner we all met up and had dinner at ‘Ginja Taste’, a Thai restaurant. My fried noodles (known in Thai as Pad Thai) were very satisfactory, especially the succulent prawns, which were probably the freshest I had ever eaten.

After an hour, Mum, Dad, and I were watching ‘Ocean’s Eleven’, a clever movie where the leader of the 11 Daniel Ocean plans to rob three Las Vegas casinos, and succeeds. Lots of action is truly the best way to end the day.

Patrick

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Swimming n’ Boxing

July 14, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , ,

Our day started off in the Blue Pool with me pestering Mum and Dad and threatening to shoot them with my water pistol if they didn’t come in the pool. In the end Ah-boo came in and I shot her up with my trusty water gun. I got a bit bored so I swam with Ah-gong to the infinity pool where we watched the waves and the baby elephant. Then at last Dad came in. Even though all he did was haul me around the pool and make me do somersaults, I had good fun.

Later on in the day, Dad, Mum, Ah-gong and Ah-boo came with me to my Muay Thai boxing lesson. Firstly, the instructor strapped on a bandage thing onto both of my hands. He then brought us to a Muay Thai Training dojo. Then I saw the other boy who was taking the lesson with me. His name was unknown, but all I knew was that he was way older than me and he had done lots of Muay Thai training before.

First of all he taught us how to do jabs and hooks. These were very irrelevant because in Karate, doing a hook could get you a penalty in sparring. Anyway, I tried my best at hitting and kicking the pads, and I could actually hear a loud ‘bang!’ every time I hit the pad! Mum was really impressed and promised to let me rent a PlayStation 2 in the room for 1 whole day!

In the evening, we were forced into going to this so called ‘party’. It was really uninteresting and I had to drag Dad out because he was buried into another conversion with another owner and I knew he wouldn’t stop. For dinner we went to an Italian restaurant called Cucina, and I tried to be a risk-taker and had a ‘Risotto el Funghi’. In actual fact the fungi stuff actually was really tasty.

Patrick

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Patong beach quest

July 13, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , ,

Today Dad, Mum, Ah-boo, Ah-gong and I went to Siam Deli for breakfast. Each of us had a breakfast sandwich (a sandwich with tomatoes, mushrooms, bacon and fried egg) and were completely filled after we finished them. We went straight up to the lobby and hired a van to the well-known Patong Beach. I was slightly nervous at first when Dad told me that there were loads of lady-men there but when I got to Patong, there were barely any!

We bought a few DVDs from a local shop and as we went out, we saw this open-air bus with huge speakers screaming “THAI BOXING TONIGHT!! DON’T MISS IT!!”. Somehow, I felt an urge to find out more about Muay Thai.

Afterwards we walked past all the bars to get to Ocean, a shopping centre located across the road from the beach. Dad bought a new stock of cheap pants, while I admired the powerful military laser pointers for sale. I also couldn’t believe that in expensive shopping malls like this they actually sold fake Crocs! I doubt that even the shoes in the Ecco shop were real.

We passed a place called ‘Rock City: live music’ to get to the major mall in Patong and probably in Phuket called ‘Jungceylon’. It was a gigantic place and definitely a shopper’s dream. We wondered around a bit and saw a few funny shirts for sale such as one that said ‘Patong Beach. 2000- Bomb Alert. 2001- SARS outbreak. 2002- Dengue Fever. What next?’. We had a look at the many different booths, and were soon watching a woman perform amazing magic tricks. She claimed that if we bought a set of this magic trick kit, she would teach us how to do it. We did buy it, but still didn’t manage to do it. She said that practice makes better and to read the set of instructions she gave us.

We stocked up at the Carrefour and bought washing detergent, butter and some fruit. Soon enough we were back at the Marriott enjoying Thai noodles at our villa.

Patrick

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Marriott Time

July 12, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , ,

We got on our taxi in the late morning and I spent an hour listening iPod. After crossing the Sarasin Bridge, connecting the mainland with Phuket, I decided to take off my iPod and look outside. It was a very familiar road because I had actually been to the JW Marriott before (probably 2-3 times). Soon after, I was at my favourite resort in Thailand. As normal the bell boy but a ring of orchids on our necks and offered us all a ‘Mojito No Rum’, a drink made of mint leaves and fruit juice. We had requested room 3443, the room with the best sea view. But since it was occupied already, Julian (the manager) gave us 3441, which was still being cleaned.

We waited for an hour in the Sala Sawasdee Lobby Bar, where I had a Gunner (ginger beer and ginger ale mixed up together). I also noticed a lot of things that I hadn’t noticed before, for example there were lots more Indians and Koreans, and that the staff weren’t as friendly as last time.

At least we got to the room and it was in good condition. The master’s bedroom still had the gigantic bed and bath tub, and the living room still had the nice open kitchen and bar area. Dad and I unpacked the luggage whilst Mum went off to the Airport to pick up my Grandparents (in Shanghainese grandma is ‘Ah-boo’, and grandpa is ‘Ah-gong’).

1 hour later….

Ah-boo and Ah-gong have arrived, and we are all gathered around a table at the Marriott Café. We are all having the international buffet, including Vietnamese, Mongolian, Indian, Japanese, and Malaysian cuisine. We are chatting about different things, such as how Mildred (our helper) is doing, and how bad the weather in Hong Kong was.

We soon got back to our room, and I tried sleeping on the sofa bed, but at about 4.00 AM, I found it a bit uncomfortable and went to the master’s bedroom to spend the rest of the night.

Patrick

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Probably the most adventurous day so far

July 11, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , , ,

Yesterday, Mum Dad and I decided to go on one more tour before we left Khao Lak, and out of the list of different tours, we chose Elephant Trekking and Bamboo Rafting, because it looked quite enjoyable. At around 10 o’clock, we got on the tour van and discovered that we were the only ones going on the tour! Our driver was called Tips, and the tour guide was Wat, which he said meant ‘temple’ in Thai. 

I couldn’t help worrying and being nervous about the Elephant Trekking and Dad wasn’t making it better, because he kept on talking about this crazy elephant that killed its master. Finally we got to the Khao Lak Trekking Safari place. Wat said that they had some ‘lady boy’ elephants which were the same size of a male elephant but didn’t have any tusks.

 To get on the elephant, we had to climb a massive wooden stand. Dad got on the elephant first, I was in the middle, and Mum was on the right hand side. Mum was so nervous and as usual Dad was making annoying noises. I just sat there, trying to relax and enjoy the view, and ignoring Dad’s pestering sounds. In what I thought seemed to be a second, we arrived. Our elephant’s master came off and found ourselves in a rain forest kind of environment. He lead us to a gigantic waterfall that’s water was very clear.

Later on we visited another waterfall where Mum, Dad and I spotted a lobster changing its skin, a few fish, and bizarrely enough, an octopus!

Afterwards we got back to the van and Tips drove us to a Thai seafood restaurant set in the middle of a mangrove swamp. We had Tom Yum Goong (really spicy soup with prawns, mushrooms, and cherry tomatoes), stir-fried vegetables, and chicken with cashew nuts and dried chilies. I didn’t eat much because I got a bit carsick. Anyway, Dad had most of the food (as usual!).

We soon arrived at our Bamboo Rafting venue. The bamboo raft was terribly narrow so Mum and I sat in the middle and Dad sat at the back. It was alright when Mum and I got on, but as soon as Dad got on, we nearly capsized! The paddler laughed and shouted “Titanic! Titanic!”. Our journey started alright, even though we were half under water, but when we had to maneuver down a rapid, our raft lurched onto one side and became stuck on the rocks. Mum was up to her waist in water, I was clinging onto the raft for my life, and Dad was telling me not to panic. In the end we managed to balance our raft out a bit and were soon moving again.

We saw a couple of snakes, one green and one black. The paddler told us that they were sleeping and that the darker colour they were, the more poisonous they were. We had a little swim in the mangrove swamp, and noticed that there were no fish in the water. We got to the bottom of the river after about ten minutes, and as Dad got off the raft, it was like a high speed submarine surfacing and Mum and I were above water level. That just shows how heavy Dad is!!

Afterwards we went to see this police boat that was washed in 1 kilometre inland, which really made me feel the power of the tsunami.

Patrick

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Village venture

July 10, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , , ,

We had a buffet breakfast and asked the receptionist if the Mini Golf Course was open. Disappointingly though, she said that it was closed and would only be opened during the high season.  So we decided to walk around the town and saw Khom, our tour guide from the James Bond Island expedition (see James Bond Island Adventure for more information).

Oddly though, there were thousands of optical shops, all named KT Optic, and I haven’t seen many people in Thailand wearing glasses.

After a while, I tried out my body board, which wasn’t very successful because the waves were way too big. In the end I just dug some holes and built some sandcastles while Dad went swimming in the sea and Mum explored the rocks.

AT AROUND 10.00 NIGHT TIME

We were coming back from Mama’s Thai, and were very full because we had just had dinner. The sky was completely black, and the moon was not visible as it had been covered by thin, grey clouds. We could hear some faint noises coming from either the beach or under the house. At first, the vague noise sounded the same as dogs barking. But as we approached the house, the barking got really quick and sounded like chatting. It sounded a bit like an alien language, but I don’t want to scare you too much so good night.

Patrick

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Journey to the Orchid hotel

July 9, 2008 · Filed under Uncategorized

Today started off like another normal day in the Ramada. We had breakfast at ‘The Kitchen’ as usual and returned back to the villa to rest and get ready for our journey to the Orchid resort

The Orchid resort was one of the hotels in Khao Lak which we were planning to stay in before we found out about the Ramada. In the end we crossed it off the list of hotels we wanted to go to after we saw a comment from a Frenchman on TripAdvisor.com who said ‘They are liars. Only one restaurant was open and the place was under construction! Go to the Le Meridien instead!”. Anyway our journey started with the sighting of a few crabs hopping along the beach, and Dad and Mum peacefully walking in the shallow bits of the sea. Then I saw it. The huge river. The torrents of water. Looks like this walk wasn’t going to be peaceful as I thought it was going to be!

At least in the end, Dad, Mum, and I managed to cross the river at last. We were drenched in sea water, but that was the least of our worries. We could see a wild dog in front of us and Mum’s experiences at the Dog Chase (see Dog Chase for more information) weren’t going to make things better at all! We kept walking on anyway, and soon found out that the so called ‘dog’ was actually just two people folding up a beach towel!

We soon found the Orchid, hidden amongst thousands of coconut trees. We entered in silence, aware of all the construction workers working deafeningly alongside us. The restaurant soon came into view through a tangle of tropical foliage. All three of us had a young coconut (my favourite Thai drink) and regained all the strength we needed to get back to the Ramada hotel. We left the Orchid happily and thinking, “Good thing we didn’t come to this place!”.

For lunch we went to a local beach front restaurant where I had a quite nice ‘ham and pineapple fried rice’. To spice it up a bit, I added some fish sauce with chopped chilies.

That’s the most exciting part of the day, and I won’t tell you about the second half of the day because it continues normally and it wastes my typing time.

Patrick

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