Monsoon? What Monsoon? (And do your own thing)

Heya Internet! It is almost time to say goodbye to Phuket, I am heading to Chiang Mai tomorrow morning and so I am soaking up the last of my beach days while I am here and taking it easy whilst at the same time walking everywhere because the price of a Grab Taxi is shocking in Phuket! It is so bad it is making Bangkok seem very cheap in comparison. Not exactly something I thought I was going to say when I had heard how cheap Thailand was for transport.

Patong Beach is fun, although I keep ending up there during some of the heat of the day and then it is less fun. So, I scope out some nice shady trees near the loungers of one of the on-beach resorts and put down my beach towel and dump my stuff. Even though it is pretty safe here in Thailand, I am still a sceptical South African so I travel to the beach light, with just enough cash to pay for fruit, a water or emergency item, sunscreen, my hotel key and my phone (wouldn’t do that in South Africa, that’s for sure!) . When I want to go in the water, I pile up my hat and clothes on top of my bag and if it is windy, which it has been lately, I then wrap the towel over my things so that the red hat does not blow away!

Once I am done with water time, the procedure is this: run away from the sun quickly and hide under my nice convenient tree, eke out a corner of my small beach towel and proceed to dry off. Once reasonably dry, immediately reapply sunscreen. Repeat as necessary.

This way I have managed to become super tan for myself and not too red on any given day. I am quite proud considering I am almost at the halfway mark on the trip and my skin has seen a lot of sun. I am determined to continue this way as I want to ensure I stay healthy and am not in abject agony at any point from sunburn. Also, no one looks good as a lobster, least of all me. Only the hat should be red, not the person.

Let’s move on to the title of this post – the monsoon. So, it is monsoon or rainy season and it is meant to rain, and it is meant to rain a lot. I have been here a week and a half and it has rained twice – the afternoon I went on the Phi Phi Islands boat trip and for about an hour on Monday evening. That is it so far. Now this is not necessarily a travel recommendation as I have heard it can rain for days straight and if you only came for a week, that would be very sad, but so far, at the halfway point of the trip, that has been all the rain thus far. The tour guides on the boat trip did say it has not been a very wet rainy season so far. Can we say climate change? I hope things even out so that there won’t be Cape Town level problems in the future.

This leads me to my next point, there is a waterfall in Phuket, the Kathu Waterfall and it was on my list of things to do while here. Unfortunately, just as I confused Phuket with having the museum I want to see in Chiang Mai, I also got it into my head that the waterfall I wanted to go to was in Chiang Mai and not Phuket. I figured this out on Sunday. Whoops.

I was then scrambling to see how to get there (taxi prices), how much of a hike it is, how jungle-y it is, because I was not keen on a repeat of the spider situation of Phrom Thep. But I was willing to brave it if it was worth the hiking effort and the scary. So, I consulted the internet and three days prior someone had been and declared the waterfall a trickle, the area in disrepair and overall not worth the bother. This is the rainy season it is supposed to be an actual waterfall right now. Once again, monsoon, what monsoon?

Thus, I made the decision not to go and just hang out in Patong enjoying myself instead of pushing to see something that right now is not worth seeing. Also, the hiking in a jungle environment is not really my thing anyway, the scrambling, the dirt, the creepy crawlies! And that is okay, I am on my own, I can do exactly what I would like to do.

Yesterday evening I headed back to the beach to see the sunset. It was amazing. While I was there, a young woman on her own asked me to take her photo in front of the sunset, which of course I would do and have done already several times for many others. This is what us solo travellers do for each other, and for tourists in general. She kindly offered to take photos for me and then we started chatting. Turns out MaKayla is an American working as an English teacher in South Korea and is in Thailand for 4 days as part of a trip she is taking on her own. We took more photos and she liked the camera on my cheap Huawei (she has an iPhone, haha!) and talked for ages until the sun had long set.

We then bumped into some friends she had met the day before and with whom she was going to eat supper. I had already eaten my “proper” meal for the day and in the heat could not contemplate another whole meal, so I left her at her accommodation and went back to the hotel to freshen up. But we decided to meet up later to hear the music in Bangla Road. At close to midnight we started walking along the street, avoiding the increasingly aggressive touts (no I don’t want to see your Ping Pong show) and tried a few of the nightclubs. They were all dead, albeit airconditioned.

We ended up going to Sugar, the club she had been to the night before. It was also pretty quiet, but she said the music was good. We gave it five minutes and shortly after pumpkin hour, it picked up and became fun. We danced and enjoyed ourselves while trying to keep away from some of the creepy fellows trying to get a little too close (yes, clubs are no different anywhere in the world). Then a rapper was introduced and the speakers were turned up to 11, it became too loud, too raucous and MaKayla had to be up early in the morning for a tiger excursion. So, we left, went back along Bangla Road the wrong way, had to turn around and face the same touts twice and eventually started getting our hearing back to normal. I left her at her hotel after a fun evening and having only met her 7 hours before!

That is how it goes as a solo traveller, you meet other interesting people, do enjoyable things together and then head off to your own planned next adventure. Thus, the red hat is off to soak up the last few hours of Phuket…