Patrick’s Weblog

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