Phuket

Phuket has to be our favourite spot in Thailand so far. We loved everything about it – the hotel, the beaches and the people. We stayed on the island for two days and had an absolute blast.

Our bus journey to Phuket was great. It was meant to take around 7 – 8 hours, but in the end we arrived in Phuket a couple of hours early (a bonus from booking on the VIP bus). Again the bus tickets were an absolute bargain at around £8 each.
When we arrived in the centre of town, at the station, we decided to take a taxi to our hotel as it was about 16 km away and we didn’t really want to get on another bus. As soon as the bus pulled up to the station, the taxi touts began to circle! Somehow, we’ve developed a knack for selecting the nice, genuine taxi drivers, which comes in handy! In the end, there was no haggling involved as the station had a board displaying the prices for each of the main areas on the island, which is great for tourists. In the end it only cost us £10 to our hotel.
 

Our hotel was based in the Karon beach area of the island. We read up on the different areas beforehand and Karon was meant to be a quieter, less manic part of town (especially in comparison to Patong, the party beach).
We stayed in the Bamboo House Hotel and it really lived up to its name (there was bamboo everywhere, even the furniture was made out of bamboo, it was very funky). It was a fantastic hotel. Not only were we greeted with complimentary drinks on arrival, we also had an Apple Mac in our room and fantastic views on the city. The hotel also provided a beach bag with beach towels, each day. It was fantastic.

We dined each night in the hotel restaurant as it served great food (the restaurant had lots of bamboo everywhere too and coconut lampshades). It was the most varied menu we’d seen so far, of Thai and Western food. We made full use of our time here and sampled lots of the fresh seafood and traditional Thai stir fries. The food was really great value for money – you could have beautifully cooked lobster for £8.

We spent our first day in Phuket lazing on Karon beach - a beautiful, long beach, lined with deck chairs, parasols and a few beach hut bars. We paid £4 to hire a couple of deckchairs for the day and had a really lovely chap bringing us bottles of beer every now again. It was great.

It was so warm on the beach, we were thankful for the shade from the parsole. It was so hot in fact, that even the small sparrow like birds were walking around with their beaks open!
In the afternoon we hired a jet ski and had a fun filled half hour bombing around on the water. 

Phuket is a big island with around five? different beaches and resorts, so to see if properly, we decided to hire a scooter for the day. Again it was dirt cheap to do so. It was only £4 to hire a scooter for the day. The lady was very lovely and friendly but you had to ask to get a helmet (most locals don’t wear them, despite it being the law). They didn’t have a great selection of helmets, so the lady actually leant Arran her helmet to wear as the others were a bit worn out!

We had such an amazing day whizzing around the island. It’s amazing how much you can pack in when you’re on a scooter. We went to a couple of great vista points for amazing views of the island; fed a couple of elephants, visited Kata Beach and Patong.
After handing the scooter back, we ended the day on the beach with a couple beers, watching the sun set – bliss!
 

Our highlights from Phuket

•    The beautiful beaches
•    The amazing seafood
•    The people – everyone is so friendly and helpful.
•    Stopping at small shacks at the side of the road to fill up the scooter – the gasoline was decanted into olive oil bottles for hand pouring into the engine (it was about 50p to fill up the tank, which can last up to a week!)

 

•    The cocktails – Phuket Paradise drank quite nicely!
•    Feeding the lovely elephants

 

•    Having to proof read suggested text for a barmaid’s new tattoo – on our last night we went to a really lively local pub and the barmaid mentioned she was getting a quote in English tattooed on her back. She asked us to check the grammar and spelling!
•    And a couple of primary school pupils asking Emily if they could take her photo – Not many people have seen blonde hair over here!

We are now in Bangkok (we decided to take a cheapish flight, as opposed to the 10 hour bus journey). We are currently witnessing the most dramatic thunder and lightning storm from the safety of our hotel room!
We will be in Bangkok for the next two nights before we depart on the last leg of our adventure - an organised group tour of Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and finally Laos.

Hat Yai

On the ferry back from Penang we bumped into a backpacker we had met previously in KL, called Neil. It was great to have a conversation with a native English speaker and to exchange travel stories and tips. Neil was a really interesting guy. He was on a career break too and had actually been travelling for the past two years. He was a hardier traveller than us though, as he had a biked all the way from England. He had to leave his bike in Singapore as the trains didn’t allow him to take it any further. So he left with a friend and is planning on picking it up on the way back, before biking home; pretty incredible! We got some good tips from Neil on places we were about to visit and also things to look out for when hiring things like scooters and mopeds in Asia.

We caught a train from Butterworth to Hat Yai. It was a sleeper train as its ultimate destination was Bangkok (a 20 hour train journey from Butterworth) luckily it was only five hours to Hat Yai. We were surprised to find the train was really comfy. We had two sleeping berths (just like bunk beds), which folded back into seats. We didn’t bother assembling the bunks for our short trip.

The train journey was pretty good, apart from some stops on the line. The train was rather rickety however, and was pumping out some thick black smoke at some points! Another interesting quirk about the train was the toilet...Arran told me it was actually just a whole in the ground. I thankfully didn’t need to check this!

We left Malaysia and crossed over into Thailand about an hour before our stop. At the border crossing all the locals disembarked the train straightaway. It looked just like another train station, so it took us and some other backpackers a couple of seconds to figure out what was going on! (They don’t tend to announce stops on the train over here). It was funny to see a woman selling a small selection of duty free, just a short distance from the immigration checks desk!

We were anxious to get through the queue quickly as we are now constantly a little nervous about public transport leaving without all the passengers. In fact, we think the train did leave a couple of people behind who nipped upstairs to buy food!

As time rolled on we started to look out for our stop (you can’t really tell which stop is yours by the time, as the trains never arrive on time so you really have to look out for your stop an hour before it’s due and an hour or so later!). It wasn’t until we approached a stop that looked like it was in quite a sizeable city that we started to look for clues. I decided to find the conductor and check where we were. His English wasn’t too great, but I think he tried to say it wasn’t a main stop, but when I asked how long it would be to Hat Yai he said quite quickly “this is Hat Yai!” We grabbed our bags and jumped of the train just as it was pulling away!

Our hotel was fantastic. It was a beautiful, old fashioned four star hotel right in the heart of the CBD, with lots of shops and restaurants nearby. It wasn’t until we arrived at the reception desk that we realised English would be a bit of a problem in Hat Yai (if the front of house staff couldn’t speak English we thought we’d have no hope out and about in the city!) Still, we managed to check in and order some lovely room service for dinner.

 

All the channels were in Thai, apart from one movie channel which had English subtitles. So we spent the night watching a badly dubbed Thai version of Footloose! (At least the song at the end was in English, that’s all that matters really).

The next morning, we remembered that Neil had said that the clocks were around 3 hours forward in Thailand (compared to Malaysia). As we didn’t have a clock in our room (and we hadn’t invested in WIFI access at this point) we had to take him Neil his word. We woke up quite late and figured out it must have been around 10am. We jumped up and headed down for breakfast hoping it was still open.

It wasn’t until we were downstairs, yawning, with bed hair while sipping coffee, that we spotted a clock. There is in fact only an hour’s difference between Malaysia and Thailand and Thailand is an hour behind, so it was only 7am! (No wonder we felt so tired)

After breaky, we headed across the road to McDonalds to make use of the free WIFI (all the McDonalds around the globe so far have had free WIFI, it’s been really handy). It was here that we discovered there’s quite a strong security presence in the centre of town. This is due to a bombing a couple of years earlier and apparently stop searches are still pretty common.

 

From what we could find out, there are no direct trains to Phuket (our next destination) so we decided to get a bus. A lot of forums and blogs advised going directly to the bus station counter staff to purchase the tickets and warned against using pushy ticket touts. They also advised travelling in a “VIP” class of bus to ensure a clean, air conditioned and shorter journey (the better buses take fewer ‘rest stops’).

Picking up our tickets was a bit of an ordeal. Mostly because in the first instance we went to the wrong bus station (it was a bit out of town and was more like a van terminal) but also the English barrier made things a bit tricky. We made sure to write down our destination and preferences, to make things a bit easier. After successfully purchasing our tickets and making sure we were actually booked on a VIP bus (we opted for business class, as this is apparently above first class over here), we jumped on a tuk tuk back to the hotel.

 

Hat Yai is a lovely city, but it’s predominantly visited by Malaysians and Singaporeans, which is why English is not a necessity. In fact, we really surprised to find the best English speaker was working in KFC, when we went in for a quick drink and to get directions to the bus station.

Overall, we had a great stopover in Hat Yai and enjoyed some the best food and drink of our journey so far!

Some funny things and highlights from Hat Yai...

• The hotel breakfast – such an amazing selection of Western and Thai food. The oriental breakfast was a great start to the day – sautéed vegetables, noodles and rice. 
• English speakers are few and far between – anytime we tried to ask the hotel staff a question, they instantly thought we were trying to check out! 
• The Bell Boy could speak the best English in the hotel and knew enough to give us some tips on Phuket (and to tell us his friend lives in Edinburgh). 
• Pictures on Arran’s Ipod came in very handy. We used a picture of the bus station and a taxi to book a taxi from the hotel! 
• Drinking a pina colada from a pineapple while listening to the house band 
• Our first ride in Tuk Tuk 
• Living like kings and paying only £180 in total for accommodation, food and cocktails!

Penang

We were really thankful to be in Penang, mostly because we’d be in one place for more than one night, but also, it was nice to be out of the huge metropolis for a bit, with just small, village like streets to walk round.

Now we’ve left the big places like, Singapore and KL, we’ve found the prices have dropped dramatically; most notably hotel room prices. So much so, that from now on we can afford to stay in hotels for the rest of our trip, which is a lovely luxury to have! We booked a decent three star hotel in Penang before we arrived. It worked out at around £20 per night for two people. The hotel was a little basic, but it was really central and served a lovely breakfast in the morning on the very sunny, rooftop garden. It was based right in the middle of George Town (on Argyll Street funnily enough!). 

 

Penang is considered a main tourist destination in South East Asia, due to its architecture and beach resorts, but we felt two nights and one day was enough time on the island. The old fashioned streets, houses and shops are pretty spectacular, but as we were based right in the main hubbub it was a little manic. There were no real pavements around our area, due to the streets being lined with parked scooters and street vendors, so walking around the main area was a little tricky in the traffic – those scooters just never look like they’re going to stop! 

Also, as we were in the main part of town, which was a bit more residential, we did get a lot of looks. Despite it being a tourist destination, we didn’t really come across many Europeans, so we became a bit of an attraction ourselves! I think it would have been a slower, more relaxing place towards the other side of the island, where the lovely resorts and beaches are!

During our day in Penang we managed to fit in a little bit of shopping in the Queensbay Mall (one of Asia’s largest shopping mall, it had eight floors, it must take ages to get around all the shops!), visited the Khoo Kongsi (a clan temple) and took in the historic streets and architecture on the oldest street in George Town.

The Clan House was a main highlight for us. It was such an ornate building and pretty spectacular to see up close. 

The heat in Penang was scorching (it was about 38 degrees), so we found we could only walk for a little bit before stopping for ice cream or a couple of beers (it’s a hard life!). We found one or two great local pubs. 

Penang is known for its culinary delights and apparently the best food is served by the street vendors...but as the majority of these vendors are based next to semi open drains, we didn’t feel confident enough, at this early stage in our Asia trip, to experiment! So instead, we went to a small friendly restaurant for dinner and had some lovely local food. 

If we had one more day in Penang we would have liked to have taken the train up to Penang Hill for the amazing city views and perhaps, fitted in a visit to the snake temple. The temple is built in memory of a monk, who, as legend has it, had healing powers and gave shelter to snakes from the jungle. Apparently when the temple was built, the snakes moved in permanently! Evidently they burn a lot incense outside the temple and inside to entrance the snakes (as the majority are meant to be rather poisonous). I was secretly relieved we ran out of time for this attraction; I wasn’t sure that visiting some uncaged snakes was the best way to confront my snake phobia!

Some quirks we noticed during our time in Penang...

• The restaurant we dined in had a page dedicated to Western food – you could order a huge macaroni pie to feed 10 people... but you needed to order this a day in advance. 
• In small restaurants they don’t serve starters before mains, in fact they tend to just bring the food out, whichever course it is, when it’s ready! 
• They have Marmite, Makro and Tescos over here!
• A large Carlsberg, instead of being a pint, is a massive bottle of Carlsberg served like wine!

Next stop Hat Yai.

Stopover in Kuala Lumpur

I’m not sure we actually got to see Kuala Lumpur at its best. We only had a night’s stopover in the city and the following day was consumed with picking up tickets and making accommodation arrangements. But I think it is safe to say, in this instance, that our journey into Kuala Lumpur (and getting around the city itself) was almost as long and arduous as our journey out of KL!

• Our journey from Singapore

We booked our train tickets from Singapore to KL, online by email. We were really impressed with the speed at which our booking was processed so I think this lured us into a false sense of security about the ease of everything else. We had to pick our tickets up the day before we were due to depart. So, on our second day in Singapore we headed over to the train station. Unfortunately, when we arrived we were told there had been a derailment a few days before and all trains had been cancelled. So we were told to call up the following day to check if our train was running and then, if it was, to pick our tickets just before the departure time. So we did and thankfully, it was.

 
We arrived to a bit of mayhem in the station, it was really busy. The first obstacle was picking up our tickets. We had to explain a few times (to a couple of different people) that we had reservations, we just needed our tickets. It finally transpired that if you don’t pick up your tickets the day before, your reservations are released (even though this wasn’t possible!).

 
 After showing our frustration and a bit of back and forth, the ticket officer managed to “pull some strings” and get us a seat on the “fully booked train”, which now involved switching between two trains and a bus, an after affect of the derailment. 

 
Not to worry though. The first train journey was pretty smooth, as was the connecting bus transfer to Kluang. 

Our main problem was actually self-inflicted – because we had to get up early to call about the train and factor in some time for waiting in the ticket collection cue, we ran out of time to buy any breakfast or snacks for the six hour train journey! We also only had Singapore Dollars on us, so even when the train stopped sporadically, for lengthy periods of time, we couldn’t get off to buy anything (we crossed over the Malaysia border about 10 minutes into our train journey). 

On arriving at Kluang, we were told our train was on the opposite platform. We made our way over to the pedestrian bridge to cross over, but instantly noticed that the locals just jumped over the train tracks to get to the other side (young and old alike, they were fearless!). We stuck to the bridge.
Once on the train we were moved three or four times by the train conductor (it was also at this point that we noticed an abundance of free seats on the train; no sign of it being “fully booked”). To be fair, he was trying to do us a favour, as he was keen to have us sit in an air conditioned seat, however, we soon realised that we were mostly warm and overheated from all the moving and lugging our bags around!
We did, however, get moved to first class, which appeared to be exactly the same as second class, only the seats were red and they were playing a muted version of Harry Potter on a small screen. 

After a while the scenery started to lose its gripping appeal and we just couldn’t wait to arrive in KL. We stopped at so many places en route (for undetermined amounts of time) i’m not sure the stops were really offical, so we didn’t dare get off the train to stretch our legs, just in case. Some, confident locals did though and came back with purchases of fresh fruit and juice bags from little stalls. The fruit juice bags seem to be in sandwich bags with a little straw inside and a handle. I remember Laura and Katie telling us about these when they visited South America. One woman came back on the train with a bag of brown liquid, it really looked like cold gravy and from the look on her face while she was drinking it, I think it probably tasted like it too. 

• Arriving in the city

We finally arrived in KL (eight hours later), thirsty and hungry around 5pm in the evening. We grabbed a quick bite to eat before looking up the route to our hostel. It said it was in easy walking distance of the station, so we planned to head there, dump our stuff and then walk back to the station to book our train ticket for the following day. Unfortunately, an hour later and after two stops for drinks, we were still nowhere near. We quickly found that navigating around KL was very difficult due to the different roads/traffic and lack of crossings. We stopped to try and get a taxi but even the taxi driver said it was too difficult to get to, so wouldn’t take us! After some more walking we finally found a route from the bus station at the bottom of the station. By 7.30pm we were in our hostel crashed out on our bed! 

The hostel itself was fantastic. It was called the POD hostel, so we imagined we’d be sleeping in small sleeping cubicles, but it in fact it was just short for “peas in a pod” and this theme was obvious throughout the building (lots of lovely bright green walls and chairs too).  Like the other rooms, our bedroom consisted of a raised platform on the floor with a mattress on it and no ceiling. It was to encourage a “zen like” feeling throughout the place. I think it just saved electricity really, as they had very little in the way of lights! Still, it was a funky little place with the nicest staff. We spent the evening planning our onward route to Bangkok over a couple of beers. 

• Leaving the city 

The next day we found a Bureau de Change in the train station (we were so pleased to find an official company, after walking past a number of make shift looking money exchange stands in the station). 

 
We needed to stock up on a few different currencies for our onward journey to Bangkok namely US dollars and some Thai Bat. We were a little alarmed to realise that at one point, there was an armed guard with a pump action shot gun standing directly behind us (we weren’t sure if he was there for our protection or the staff! A similar guard stood near train station ATMs).

 
In the end we opted for a bus from KL to Butterworth (our next destination) as the train times were a little awkward. The bus was much cheaper (about £8 each) and was actually quicker than the train in the end (about 4.5 hours). 

 
Booking the ticket and paying for it online was absolutely fine, our next hurdle came when we had to pick it up. 

 
We had to get the subway to the main bus station in the city. We are pretty confident using subways now, having done so with ease in America and Singapore but this subway unstuck us a bit. It seemed just as complicated and confusing as walking around KL so it took us a little longer than expected. This, I think, was due to the fact that competing subway companies don’t allow you to travel on different lines without continually buying different tickets. Anyway, when we got to the bus station, we made our way up to the ticket offices on the fourth floor. 

 
As soon as we entered we were confronted by dozens of ticket touts trying to sell us tickets on their buses, all bidding for our business and as soon as they realised we had tickets already they didn’t want to know. We made our way through and finally found the counter to pick up our ticket. A short while later, after running around to find our platform (we were running really late – despite giving ourselves two hours travel time for a distance of around one mile), we made it on to our bus!

 
The bus was fantastic. It was classed as an “executive” standard, which is what your advised to look out for when you book a bus over here as it means it’s clean and a bit comfier. The seats were massive and reclined right back and the air conditioning was chilling. It was a great journey to Butterworth. 

We did read, before booking our ticket, that buses can leave passengers behind during rest stops and in fact, we did witness this a couple of times during our journey, when we realised there were a lot of jackets and belongings left on the bus. So we decided to play it safe and stay on the bus throughout!

We arrived at the ferry terminal in Butterworth at around 8.30pm and after a little bit of a wait (in a huge pen with about 80 other people) we arrived on the island of Penang. The ferry is amazingly cheap (it works out at around 24p for a return trip) and we had great views of the Butterworth and Penang skylines at night. The only downside is (as with the trains) the ferries don’t seem to run to their set timetables. The Penang ferry is meant to be every 20 minutes, but it was more like every hour and seems to run on a schedule of “we’ll leave when we’re full”. Still, at that price, and with those views, you can’t really complain.

 
When we arrived in Penang, we were a bit wary about getting a taxi to our hotel. We had heard that a lot of haggling was usually required and we were too tired to bother! In addition to this, we only had about 17 Malaysian Ringgit on us (which is about £3). However, while waiting in the taxi cue we met a nice old taxi driver who agreed to take us to our hotel for 15 Ringgit. He was a really friendly chap and really interested to speak to us about Scotland. Apparently we don’t sound anything like Sean Connery though!
We finally reached our hotel at 10pm and crashed out on our bed!