What We Did on Our Summer Vacation…
Off Koh Phi Phi near Phuket, August 2022
Editor’s Note: This post’s title is a bit of a misnomer, obviously. Because when you “Move Across the Frickin’ World” (TM), “vacation” takes on a new meaning. As does “summer” and a slew of other words. (And that’s just words in English. Thai words are intonated in five different tones, so imagine the complications.)
But, in general, take this as a check in post/breakneck tour through our first two months in Phuket. Truth be told, I’ve sat down to write week-by-week travelogues of our adventures, or vivid vignettes of Thai markets or well-researched missives on the epic limestone karsts of Phang Nga roughly 25 times in the past few months and each time I have failed. Nothing seems to properly capture the excitement and culture shock of this trek. I just don’t know enough yet to place our experiences so far in context, nor do I speak enough Thai to interview locals to fact check my assumptions or conclusions. Bless my little Type A heart, I have spent a quarter-century writing informative, authoritative stories about a city I love and have exhaustively researched. Now I’m in a new place and I need to learn more about my new home to feel comfortable spouting off about it.
Throughout this summer I’ve focused instead on keeping in touch with family and friends, posting sporadically on social media, watching Japanese sitcoms about shy beverage salesmen who learn life lessons through eating incredibly spicy food, and simply experiencing this adventure as it comes. This is a crap excuse for ignoring my writerly duties, but there you have it. And so, instead of a series of thoughtful feature stories on Phuket, religiously posted on a regular basis, as planned, Vampires of Phuket is kicking off with a copy/paste of a letter I wrote my Auntie Jan and my cousins earlier this week. I’ve got to rip the Band-Aid off sometime.
—Kelly Clarke, terrible travel blogger
Traditional longtail boats at Rawai Beach, Phuket, Thailand
Hi everybody!
I just wanted to drop a line from Phuket to say hello and send hugs to everyone.
We are doing great so far: Phuket is lush and gorgeous and ramshackle and wild–filled with incredible food, people and sights. We practically pass out each night because we are processing so much new information. This place is not without its irritations… (Why no sidewalks, Thailand? Why does everyone drive as if they are contestants in Death Race 2000?) but its beauty and kindness is unparalleled. We could not be happier with our decision to embark on this adventure.
An intense women’s Muay Thai bout at Rawai Boxing Gym (it ended in a tie).
Tasty sataw (สะตอ) or “stink beans” at the Rawai Monday Market
Salaeng driver just buzzing down the road with a live charcoal grill burning on his cart.
After nearly two months on the island, we have managed to set up most of the basics of life: We have a great three-bedroom house on Soi Saiyan 14 in Rawai, a friendly neighborhood of locals and expats on the Southern tip of the island. We have a lovely peek-a-book view of Chalong Bay from our third floor bedroom (top left and right photos, below), a pool (!!!) with a floating pink flamingo and adorable teeny house geckos. After multiple bi-lingual mishaps, David has secured us regular drinking water delivery and we just bought a used Mazda 2 so we can take road trips to the mainland.
We successfully got a Thai bank account, so we can pay for street food by QR code like the locals. We even have our own resident Soi Saiyuan street dog. We call her Hatchie (inspired by HatchetFace from John Waters' Cry Baby) and she is sweet and smart and listens to commands, so we suspect that she may have been abandoned during the pandemic. (Yes, we still miss Hippo terribly and he is still the top dog in our hearts.)
Alex and her friend Leyla, who hails from Cape Town, South Africa
Alex loves school at BCIS so far. She's made a handful of really good friends from a UN’s worth of different countries and our house is now regularly filled with shrieking girls and piles of school notebooks. Alex says her classes are hard, but she particularly likes her History class, French and Thai classes and Drama. She even joined Drama Club and is lobbying for the school to mount a production of Little Shop of Horrors. (She scored the role of Demeter in the class mini production of Myth of Persephone & Demeter already.) She's been spending a lot of time swimming, drawing anime teams of superhero girls inspired by movie theater concessions items and crafting her own Halloween costume: a giant mushroom hat that will be the centerpiece of a "Mushroom Fairy" costume.
Between jaunts to local beaches and Zoom calls with family, I started classes at Alpha Language School as well a few weeks ago and am slooowly learning my Thai ABCs, which involves 44 consonants, 32 vowels and five tones. I now proudly shout "Gor Gai" and "Ngor Ngoo" like a 4-year-old when I spy Thai letters on license plates and spend hours translating basic paragraphs that contain amazingly unexpected stories...like a grandpa hitting a man with a coconut shell because he's drunk. My teacher is an adorable, 100-pound sadist I respectfully refer to as Kru Noi. She will teach me to properly pronounce Thai words or die/kill me trying.
Unsurprisingly, I love it. I also love the view from my little school’s window (see middle photo, above) and the fact that there's a stunning golden wat and gardens just a block away (photo above, right). Another few months of this and I might be able to order lunch without the locals laughing uncontrollably at me. Maybe.
Meanwhile, David is enjoying his mini mid-life retirement and is swimming everyday and cooking amazing feasts in our new kitchen with produce from our near-daily trips to the many, many farmers markets that dot the island. We have our own papaya tree in our driveway (I know, it’s wild) so I now regularly make my own som tam papaya salad in a giant mortar and pestle with plenty of funky teeny dried shrimp and blasts of lime. Plus, I still make chocolate chip cookies obviously. I'm happy to report they taste the same baked in Celsius.)
Our haul from the Chalong Fresh Market, including giant garlic, fresh prawns, patongo fritters and toasted young coconut cakes. This cost less than $20 total.
Chalong Fresh Market moo (pork) vendor.
Phuket Vegetarian Festival road procession in Chalong
Sunset from Windmill Point, with paragliders
We've been having a blast exploring the island’s many, many beaches, wandering our neighborhood, taking cover from fierce rainstorms in fancy Thai malls, eating BBQ hot pot with crowds of locals and trying unidentifiable yet delicious dishes at street markets.
We have climbed metres of stairs up golden, gilded wats and watched as Buddhist priests drone unearthly chants to celebrate the opening day of the Phuket Vegetarian Festival. (A weeklong island-wide that is far more intense that the name suggests and involves devotees who pierce their faces with giant spikes in order to induce spirit trances; see photo above.) We have also been to the immigration office, a bureaucratic cluster of epic proportions, four times and counting. We will undoubtedly be there many, many more times.
We've taken in gorgeous vistas of the whole island from Big Buddha, a massive 150-foot statue on top of a mountain that's 15 minutes from our house, and stood in the middle of the jet stream of bats that call the hollow base of the statue home. We took a jet boat day trip to Koh Phi Phi where we snorkeled and saw monkeys clinging to cliffs. And we saw even more monkeys, unexpectedly, at the Khao Rang viewpoint in Phuket Town--where an entire troupe of the bold, adorable primates pestered us for bananas and water bottles and tried to steal my pants.
Our favorite jaunt so far is likely our weekend road trip to Phang Nga, the mainland province just Northwest of the island, where we stayed in a hotel room that clung to the side of a small mountain with a view of a stunning, fog-shrouded valley that looked like a scene from Avatar. We chartered a longtail boat to explore the jade green waters of Phang Nga Bay, which is dotted with hulking limestone karsts that resemble giant melted drip sandcastles. We got an eyeful of James Bond Island, the iconic rock in The Man With the Golden Gun (my dad would have loved it!), and took a guided kayak tour through a watery mangrove forest. We even got to swim through the rocky karst's natural caves out into the open sea. It was wild and wonderful.
The view from the balcony of our room at Blue Mountain Resort in Phang Nga, about an hour and a half north-east of Phuket.
Equally wild was our visit to Phang Nga's notorious Wat Tham Ta Pa Temple or "Heaven & Hell Shrine"--famous for its hard-core representations of Buddhist hell. It's a classic family road trip destination for Thai families who want to scare their kids into being productive members of society. Think of it as a jungle Disneyland by way of Hieronymus Bosch: you enter thru a giant dragon head, which leads you through a dimly lit, bat swooping tunnel and poops you out in purgatory, where you encounter a nightmarescape of statues enduring evisceration, stabbing, flesh gouging. And that’s not even the more inventive punishments imagined, from dogs gnawing at genitals to people literally boiled alive in soup pots. “This is…AWESOME,” said Alex. And then promptly worried she was going to hell for two days.
The trail eventually allows you to “ascend” to Heaven, where a pantheon of gods await, including a goddess riding a crocodile and a massive Golden buddha. It’s overwhelming, wonderful, and disturbing. We wai’d deeply to the god of hell as well as all the heavenly bodies during our visit, respectfully greeted the temple’s monk and made a 100 baht donation for garden cleanup (he wasn't blessing people at that moment because he was on a video call, very Thai) and left coins in every offering bowl we could find. It just does not pay to take chances when the alternative is a thorn-covered spike up the booty for all eternity. (Wholly unrelated and somehow appropriate: we visited this temple on our 17th wedding anniversary. Make of that what you will.)
Okay, that's about all I have to report. We are having the time of our lives but it's bittersweet not being able to share it with you all. We can't wait to see your faces in December. Or, you know, you could always just visit us in Phuket…
All our love,
Kelly, David and Alex
