Travel Diaries 6 - Phuket

Phuket has some of the Thailand's most popular beaches. Situated in southern Thailand, it also provides an easy access to some world famous islands like Phi Phi and James Bond.

We selected Patong beach for our stay, for two reasons. First, it had nice beaches, Second, it had a good night life! If you are from India, Patong may look like any other area from Goa or South India during day time. It has shopping streets, tuk tuks, fruit markets and malls. You can even bargain during street shopping.

Candles

Lamps

 
People are good and quite helpful. But you may face issues while communicating with the local vendors as their English is not so good. Local food is cheap and good, if you can suffice with the bland taste. For vegetarian people, I am not sure if they have enough options. 


Our first day plan included a visit to cultural show - Siam Niramit .
Siam Niramit is kind of a theme park situated just outside the Phuket town, which lets us have a walk through of old phuket homes, culture and beliefs. It offers a wonderful show with hundreds of performers and breathtaking stage overlaps. Photography is not allowed here, but a few details you can get in below pictures.

The show tells a brief history of Thailand, along with the local beliefs of haven, hell and karma. Breathtaking can be the only word to describe it as you will find floating markets, waving ships, flying angels, huge elephants, scary jungles and gods & demons on a single stage. This is a must watch show in Thailand. At the end, we were wondering why we don't have such kind of a show in India?

On next day, our destination was James Bond Island.  The real name of this island is Khao Phing Kan. But since it was featured in James Bond movies like Tomorrow Never Dies and The Man with the Golden Gun, this is now called as James Bond Island.
The island is quite small with beautiful blue and green water all around. There are few shopping decks. It also has a small cave where in you can climb up and observe the ancient rock structure. Main attraction is this rock which looks amazing from the island.
The only bad part here was food. If you book a tour for this island, make sure you carry something to eat. The food offered during this trip is not much eatable for our Indian taste. In fact we had to rely on the plain white rice during this full day tour. 


We were quite excited for the evening as it was time to see the night life. Patong has an amazing street called Bangla street which in open all night. It has many bars, clubs, live bands, various types of shows and lovely people.  There are some shows by Ladyboys, and till the end, you won't be able to recognize the difference. You can call it a haven for bachelors :) They say, Bangla road is a heart of Phuket's night life. And you will definitely understand why it is called so, when you visit it. We spent around 3-4 hours simply walking up and down the street and never got bored.

Definitely, we had a great time in Phuket and would love to visit it again. This was the Phuket Journey. Our next destination was Krabi. About that, in next post :)