Greetings from Phuket 
Just wanted to do a blog/report from my travels in Thailand (first time visitors).
The trip will include parts of Phuket, Krabi, Chiang Mai and Bangkok. Accommodation will be a mix of hotel rooms, apartments and even a room in a hostel (Ao Nang). If you're planning a trip to any of those places and need some info, I'll try my best to help out.
My fiancee and I got in late last night, travelled via Dubai from Durban with Emirates. We're staying in a dodgy area of Patong, but with a very decent room for an obscenely cheap price. The room was booked via AirBnB, as were most of the places at which we will be staying.
After checking in, we took a taxi from our place to Bangla Road. The taxi cost 200baht and was in line with what the tuk tuks wanted, with no one really wanting to haggle. It was a bit frustrating because I knew it was only a km or so away but I didn't have a local SIM for Google Maps yet and since it was past 11pm I didn't want to have to go bumbling around looking for it. However that experience was offset because within the space of 5 minutes I saw a drop-dead gorgeous prozzie get off a motorbike with an older 'gentleman', a massive ladyboy with some awesome boobs, and a street fight..
Bangla Road was quite the experience I loved the **** out of it, and the fact that even though it was close to midnight on a Wednesday evening the place is absolutely packed. Of course, the numbers are quite inflated since it seems that for every tourist there are 3 people trying to direct you into their bar/restaurant/sex dungeon. We walked the roads for a while before finding a SIM package that I was OK with. We didn't get anything to drink except a couple of waters, but the booze prices didn't seem too bad at some of the kiosks we saw. We visited the beach and a few side roads as well, for the most part everywhere was busy.
With access to GPS we decided to walk back to our place. The walk would normally take around 15 minutes but by the time we stopped and checked out every place it was close to an hour and a half. Local time was around 2:30AM when we found a place at which we were happy to eat, quite close to our hotel. I opted for a shrimp/prawn soup and my fiancee had some pineapple fried rice. Mine was excellent, fresh and spicy. My fiancee also loved her food, I'm not a fan of the drier rice dishes, but the flavour was great.
It was the first time I tried Chang, and I enjoyed it, though it was a tiny bit on the sweet side.
It was still only around 11:30-ish SA time by the time we were done, but we were quite tired due to the travel so we headed back to the room, showered and passed out in the nice cool air conditioning.
Just wanted to do a blog/report from my travels in Thailand (first time visitors).
The trip will include parts of Phuket, Krabi, Chiang Mai and Bangkok. Accommodation will be a mix of hotel rooms, apartments and even a room in a hostel (Ao Nang). If you're planning a trip to any of those places and need some info, I'll try my best to help out.
My fiancee and I got in late last night, travelled via Dubai from Durban with Emirates. We're staying in a dodgy area of Patong, but with a very decent room for an obscenely cheap price. The room was booked via AirBnB, as were most of the places at which we will be staying.
After checking in, we took a taxi from our place to Bangla Road. The taxi cost 200baht and was in line with what the tuk tuks wanted, with no one really wanting to haggle. It was a bit frustrating because I knew it was only a km or so away but I didn't have a local SIM for Google Maps yet and since it was past 11pm I didn't want to have to go bumbling around looking for it. However that experience was offset because within the space of 5 minutes I saw a drop-dead gorgeous prozzie get off a motorbike with an older 'gentleman', a massive ladyboy with some awesome boobs, and a street fight..
Bangla Road was quite the experience
I loved the **** out of it, and the fact that even though it was close to midnight on a Wednesday evening the place is absolutely packed. Of course, the numbers are quite inflated since it seems that for every tourist there are 3 people trying to direct you into their bar/restaurant/sex dungeon. We walked the roads for a while before finding a SIM package that I was OK with. We didn't get anything to drink except a couple of waters, but the booze prices didn't seem too bad at some of the kiosks we saw. We visited the beach and a few side roads as well, for the most part everywhere was busy.With access to GPS we decided to walk back to our place. The walk would normally take around 15 minutes but by the time we stopped and checked out every place it was close to an hour and a half. Local time was around 2:30AM when we found a place at which we were happy to eat, quite close to our hotel. I opted for a shrimp/prawn soup and my fiancee had some pineapple fried rice. Mine was excellent, fresh and spicy. My fiancee also loved her food, I'm not a fan of the drier rice dishes, but the flavour was great.
It was the first time I tried Chang, and I enjoyed it, though it was a tiny bit on the sweet side.
It was still only around 11:30-ish SA time by the time we were done, but we were quite tired due to the travel so we headed back to the room, showered and passed out in the nice cool air conditioning.
Tiger is also good. bars are ridiculously over priced there, go buy form 7/11 but 60b for a big beer at a restaurant is decent, not the 150 for a small the bars in patong charge.
