Patong Beach, Phuket – 2001
by Mike MyersAs I’ve done for the past three years, in early July I took off for another vacation in Phuket, Thailand. While there are lots of great places to visit, for me the top of the list is Patong Beach.
Traveling to Phuket
Doug McNeely and I left Miami early on a Friday morning, and flew to Los Angeles. We were met there by Garen Hagobian, and we spent the next couple of hours over at Crystal Park Raceways. The track has been reworked, and is even nicer now than before. It’s still BIG. All scales of cars get to run there.A few hours later, Doug and I were back at LAX, waiting for the plane to take us to Osaka airport in Japan. This was a 12-hour flight, and despite trying to sleep for much of it, 12 hours is a long time in a tiny airplane seat. Cunard used to say, “Getting there is half the fun!”. Well, that might have been true on an ocean liner, but not on a 747. We had a brief layover at Osaka, and then were off on an 8-hour flight to Bangkok, Thailand.
We arrived in Bangkok, went through passport control and so on, and then had about a 7-hour layover. I’ll say one thing – while one CAN sleep in an airport waiting room, it’s far from comfortable! So, we mostly ended up sitting around, watching the local people clean and prep the airport for the next day’s activities. When we finally did get to board our plane, it was only an hour and a half flight to Phuket. It was SO nice to finally be there!
For those of you who haven’t read my earlier articles, let me give you a bit of history. Doug McNeely went to Thailand back in ’95 for the IFMAR World Championships. Along with most of the rest of the racers, Doug fell in love with Thailand, but Doug actually did something about it, selling off all his US belongings, and moving over there permanently, buying “The Black Rose Bar” and working in Thailand for a couple of years. That’s another whole story, but I’ll wait for Doug to write it. Doug eventually decided to move back to the USA, and sold the bar to this lovely lady, Pia, who has operated the bar ever since.
For lots of reasons, much of our life while over in Patong Beach centers around the Black Rose Bar. When I say things more or less center around the Black Rose Bar, I pretty much mean that literally…the bar is on “Soi Eric”, right off “Soi Bangla” (Bangla Road) and it’s smack in the middle of Patong Beach. Patong Beach itself is pretty small. For the most part, you can get anyplace you want on foot, as one or two dozen blocks in every direction will include 90% of what there is to see and do. Pia’s nephew Yat met us at the airport, and drove us back to Patong Beach. So, we were finally “home”.
Yorkshire Inn
Since we had such a wonderful time last year at the Yorkshire Inn, we had asked Pia to again make arrangements for us to stay there. Due to a slight mix-up, we originally got rooms up on the third floor, but we changed that and from the second day on, were in a new “annex” to the Inn, down on the main floor. The rooms are clean, comfortable, and nicely fitted. The owner of the Yorkshire Inn used to manufacture wood furnishings, and the rooms are furnished very nicely. Each room has a small television (which now picks up mostly English stations, unlike my first year where only one channel was in English), and also a small refrigerator filled with drinks and snacks. The beds are big, soft, and comfortable, and there’s lots of drawer and cabinet space. While I didn’t eat there too much, the Yorkshire Inn also has a nice restaurant, a bar, and a small “Internet Café”. They’ve got their own website – you can check it out at http://www.yorkshireinn.com - while you’re looking there, you’ll notice that we even added a link from their web page, http://www.yorkshireinn.com, directly into the Starting Grid Magazine’s Computer Conferencing system – just click on ‘bbs’ near the top of their home page to access it.
What to do?
Patong Beach has something for everyone. If you want a quiet and peaceful time, it’s a short walk out of the noisy city area to the countryside, where you’ll find yourself in the middle of the local fishing fleet, with the local people doing maintenance on the boats. I guess the fishing is done early in the morning, but I never woke up early enough to check this out. If you stay mostly around the center of town, it’s always a crowded, busy place.
The whole nature of Patong Beach changes as the day goes on. In the early morning, it starts out with lots of clothing stores selling t-shirts and other basic goods, travel agencies trying to set the tourists up with trips to the nearby islands, and a lot of truck traffic as fresh supplies of ice and food are brought in for the stores, bars, and restaurants. As the day goes on, more and more small shops open up. Many of these are little huts that are constructed in front of the main buildings (and are completely torn down at the end of the day). The bars start to open in the early evening, and hundreds of moveable bar-b-que stalls also open up about then, serving beef, chicken, squid, hot-dogs, and lots of other tasty goodies. The larger restaurants also open up by the early evening – you’ll never go hungry, and you’ve got a choice of local food, or food made for many different nationalities. By midnight, the small shops and restaurants are closing, and many of the bars finish up around 2am, with everyone at the bar moving to some other bar that remains open until maybe 4am.
The Bars
If you’re interested in partying, depending on where you go, you’ll find lots of local people encouraging you to join them in their bars and shows. If you’re walking around Bangla Road, there are hundreds of small bars, each with maybe a dozen lovely ladies who would love for you to come join them. Some of these bars are more subdued, but many are full of energy, and it’s almost impossible to walk by them without everyone doing their best to get you to join them. One area though has some particularly beautiful ladies, and if nobody were to tell you about them, you might be in for a rude shock later, when you found out that they weren’t really ladies. The local term is “Katoey” which in English means “ladyman”. The local people know who’s who, and can tell immediately if a lady is for real or not, but for visitors, it’s not quite so easy to tell. If you go walking around the huge Royal Paradise hotel, you’ll find an equally enthusiastic group of local guys trying to get you to come into their bars and dancing areas. Everything in downtown Patong Beach turns into one huge party as the night wears on, with people staying at one bar, then moving on to another.The Beach
If you enjoy spending time at the beach, the beach workers are already getting things set up by 7am or so. You can select a chair to lay on by the beach, with the workers setting up an umbrella so you’ll have shade if you want it. Anything you want while at the beach is brought to you. Food, drinks, ice cream, clothes…there is a never-ending caravan of people walking around, hoping you might buy something from them. If you’re not interested, a simply “No” ends it, unlike other parts of the world where you constantly feel hassled by the street vendors. If you want something a bit more exciting to do, there are the never-ending supplies of Jet-skies, “banana-boats”, and para sailing, although I was a bit hesitant this year about the latter. Several days the waves were quite big, which meant the boats that take people up for a para-sail ride didn’t get going as fast as usual, and several attempts at going up in a parasail ended up with a watery landing. I didn’t think the salt-water would do my camera any good, so I held back.
Software
While on previous trips, I noticed computer games for sale at very low prices, I never really looked into computer software. A friend of mine told me I really ought to check it out, and it was quite a surprise. The store I went to had just about everything you could ever want for a PC, Mac, Play-Station…you name it. The PC software was quite extensive – operating systems, photo editing programs, word processing software, and literally hundreds and hundreds of programs that I’ve heard of. The price is 200 Baht (about $5) for any CD – the price is the same whether you’re buying a small game or an expensive operating system. This was at a rather nice store too – I was told that you can buy the same stuff from stalls on the street for half that!Digital Cameras
On all my past trips, I brought along an APC (Advance Photo System) film camera. While these cameras don’t have the features of a large Nikon SLR camera, they easily fit in your pocket for when you’re not using it. The bad part really was that when I got home, I’d have hundreds of pictures to scan, and that became a real chore. This year I wanted to go digital if at all possible. I picked up an Olympus D-360L for about $250, and even though it fit nicely in my pocket, if used right, it could produce pretty good pictures. All the photos posted with this year’s report were taken with this camera. I think in the future I want something better, but for a basic camera, the Olympus did pretty well.If you do travel with a digital camera, it’s not yet very easy to get prints of your pictures unless you bring along your own printer. There were only two stores that I found that could “process” the digital pictures. Since all the work is done by hand, it’s more costly. A print from a film camera is only 7 baht, but a print from a digital image is 40 baht. It’s 45 baht per dollar, so this does add up. I suspect in a year or two, the price of digital pictures will come down to match the price from film.
Something very nice was to be able to view the pictures I took right after taking them. Everyone whose picture I took really found this to be pretty fascinating, and everyone wanted to pose for more and more pictures. As it was, I took about 300 photos, but could easily have taken double that. It was also nice, because if I missed a good picture, or someone blinked, or looked away, I could tell immediately, and re-shoot the picture.
I’d suggest that you get a camera with a minimum of a 2 mega-pixel imaging sensor, so you get good quality pictures. Buy your “memory cards” before you travel, as you can get better prices at home than abroad. Lastly, whatever amount of memory you think you’ll need, get twice that!
My Trip
Here are a few random thoughts, written down while over in Patong Beach.Blending in… as a tourist, you can’t. I’m not sure what it is about me, but almost every taxi driver and tuk-tuk driver that I saw always asked me if I wanted them to take me somewhere. Since I enjoy just walking around, at times this got to almost be annoying. I’d just smile and say “no thanks”, but I think they were all determined that tourists shouldn’t have to walk. Similarly, other vendors always wanted to sell me clothes, trinkets, massages, show-tickets, and who-knows-what-else. I might as well have been walking around with a big neon sign that said “TOURIST”. :-)
Safety – Patong Beach is one of the safest places I know of. While I’d be very uncomfortable walking around Miami Beach at 2am, in Patong Beach I thought nothing of it. There just doesn’t seem to be any problem there. Even walking around on the beach in the middle of the night, where it’s pitch black, there were no problems whatever. No place is perfect, but since Patong Beach gets much of its income from tourists, they are particularly concerned that nobody will have a problem.
Entertainment – There are many kinds of bars in Patong Beach. At the beer bars, you can sit with people, drink, enjoy the conversation, and have a great time. If you do decide you’d like to leave with someone, you pay the bar a small “bar fine” (about 200 baht), and then you and her can leave for the evening. There are also the “go-go bars”, where people are on stage dancing, showing off for you, and trying to impress you. There are lots of shows you can go to, and quite a few “Karaoke Bars” where you get to sing the words that are shown on a TV screen to go with the music that’s playing. Things don’t really slow down until 4am or so, so you can have lots of fun every night if that’s how you’d like to spend your time.
Shopping – Most of the time, there are stores set up all over, selling “genuine” Rolex watches and other famous brands. Some of these really look pretty good! There are also lots of digital watches, waterproof and otherwise, at very low prices. I wanted a digital stop watch with large numbers, for use in timing r/c cars. I found several that I liked, all available for 300 baht (about six dollars US). Buying anything here is a game – the original price is always about two to three times what the “real” price can be. Something that starts at 5,000 baht will actually sell for 1,500 baht. If you enjoy playing this game, it’s fun. If not, just walk a little ways away from downtown Patong Beach. The further away from the tourist area you get, the lower the prices. If you have a local friend go with you, you’ll get things for the Thai price, which is much less than what tourists are asked for. As to the clothes, while much of the clothes for sale are “copies”, they actually are pretty good. The clothes I’ve bought in Patong Beach three and four years ago are still in good shape. I told some of the vendors that I’d be just as happy to buy the items there, if they said “Patong Beach” on them instead of “Ferrari” or “Nike”.
Food – Eating in Thailand is very inexpensive. Seafood is caught locally, and even at the better restaurants is very inexpensive. Most evenings I went to Bangla Seafood for dinner, where a huge lobster dinner, lots of Singha beer, rice, and all the trimmings would cost a bit under 1,000 baht (about $20). A steak dinner is more like $5 or so. If you enjoy the local food, you can buy enough for yourself and several friends for less than 100 baht ($2)! Beer is about 30 baht in the grocery stores, 40 or 50 baht at the local “7-11 Stores”, 60 baht at a bar, and 100 baht at the go-go bars. I liked starting the day with a typical American breakfast, which is only 70 baht. All the food is delicious, and Thailand is probably not the place to go to, if you’re trying to lose weight!
Other costs – The hotel we stayed at gave us lovely rooms for roughly $20 a night. As I described above, food is very reasonably priced. A few friends asked me how much it costs to stay in Patong Beach, and I suppose a good answer, for the “slow season” at least, is $100 per day if you are doing lots of things and having lots of fun, and less than half that if you don’t party too much.
I’m not going to go into too many details about the trip this year – I think the photos speak for themselves. I had a wonderful time – on a scale of 1 to 10, I’d rate this trip as a “20”. I met many friends, some of whom I’ve known from past trips, and many who I just met on this trip. I got to spend a lot of time with the local people, talking about what it’s like to live there, and how things differ from in the USA. While some people are better at English than others, we usually were able to communicate pretty well.
The American dollar is quite strong, even more so than before, and for a small amount of money one can live like a king. The people are wonderful, the weather is usually great, and it’s pretty easy to start thinking that this would be a wonderful place to move to permanently!
Photos - OK, here are the photos, which pretty much speak for themselves. There are lots of images, and they're in a reasonably large format, so you can actually see what things look like. It might take a few minutes to download each page, but I think you'll like them:
Patong Beach #1 Photos taken around Patong Beach, first group Patong Beach #2 Photos taken around Patong Beach, second group Patong Beach #3 Photos taken around Patong Beach, third group People #1 People I met around Patong Beach, first group People #2 People I met around Patong Beach, second group The Beach Pictures of the beach, and some people there Para-Sailing Pictures of para saling on the beach Our Hotel The Yorkshire Inn Restaurants Bangla Seafood and a good place to get breakfast The local Fishing Fleet The local fishing fleet, from the South end of the beach. The Black Rose Bar The World Famous Black Rose Bar