Phuket, Thailand

I apologize for not putting up an entry last week but we were on vacation in Thailand. Like many Asian countries Japan has a week long holiday called Golden Week. It happened to be last week, so we decided to be like many of the locals and do some traveling. We wanted to take an lazy vacation with a beach, some tropical weather and just relax instead of our typical race to see everything agendas. Our vacation started on Sunday 5/03 at 1pm with a bus ride to the airport. Our flight departed at 4:30pm and after a stop off in Taipei we arrived in Phuket at 11:50pm. Apparently Japan only has late night flights to and from Phuket and Anne and I wanted to avoid Bangkok with the social unrest that has been occurring there for some time. We arrived back to our apartment at about 3pm on Friday 5/08.

The week was filled with us recovering from a hectic year. We have probably seen more in this one year then we will likely see for the next 10 years combined. We stayed at the JW Marriott Resort. It is a huge complex covering a lot of land because all of the buildings near the beach can only be 3 stories tall. The reason for the height restriction is that sea turtles use the beach as a site to lay their eggs and lights from tall buildings would scare them away. As it turned out it was not egg laying season so we didn’t need to stir clear of the beach. We spent most of the week just sitting out by the pools and the beach enjoying the sun.

Phuket reminded us a lot of Hawaii, however there were a number of differences. For one, once again we had to familiarize ourselves with another currency (the Thai Baht or just Baht). Based of a currency conversion at the moment $1 US is equal to roughly 34฿ (the B-like symbol is the symbol for the baht).

As a whole, we had a great time. The only downsides to the trip were the long flights (10 hour average each way), a few quick rain showers, some heat rashes, due to my sensitive skin and the combination of tropical heat, sun, humidity, 34% deet insect repellent (it is a low risk malaria area) sunscreen, and high chlorine pools.