Chinese New Year in Phuket!

After our Wednesday night Chinese New Year feast at our favorite restaurant (Indian) in Singapore, we woke up on Thursday and headed back to Thiland, after a short four weeks. We stayed in Kata Beach which is about 45 minutes from the airport and on the west side of Phuket island, which is in southern Thailand. Last time we were here we flew in and out of Phuket, and we had a short visit to the Phuket Town bus station, but we didn't stay in the area - we stayed in Krabi, which is about 2.5 hours east of there - and prettier, I think.

After finding our SIMPLE guest house, we got a great thai lunch (including such a great papaya salad and banana shake) and spent the afternoon on the beach (Kata beach on the left). Though Krabi is prettier, this beach was pretty damn beautiful. We read a lot and swam when we (I) got too sweaty.

Thursday morning we went on our dive trip. We basically dove, ate, and relaxed on the boat for two days. We dove SEVEN times, and ate at least that many meals. We stayed the night on Koh Phi Phi, which is supposed to be one of the prettiest islands in the world. I have to say that it WAS gorgeous - but only from far away. It was TOO built up and crazy when we actually got on the island.

The diving was amazing (picture is Matt on the dive boat). We saw two sea turtles - one was swimming and eating. We saw a few leopard sharks, and one just chilled on the ocean floor and let us get super close to him. We saw crazy lion fish...bearded scorpion fish (which I think are my favorite), shrimp, lobsters, jellyfish, nearly invisible squid and sooo many other fish. It was definitely my favorite dives. I got certified with my Advanced Open Water, and Matt and I basically had our own private instructor/guide for the whole trip. He was superb.

For my certification, I had to do five specific dives, so we did a wreck dive - a Japanese car carrier that sank in 1997 and had SO much life in it including a big fish sitting in a toilet!! We did a deep dive where we went down to 32 meters. We did a drift dive, a navigation dive, where I had to navigate a square with a compass, and a fish ID dive. I enjoyed the fish ID dive because I got to swim with a bunch of pictures of fish and coral and ID them as we went by. We saw nearly everything on the ID cards!!

Saturday night we walked to the other end of the beach and ate a great dinner. Sunday we spent the entire day on the beach and flew out at night.

One thing I didn't mention that was embedded in our whole trip is a tailor. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, in those parts, and they're always ready to make you any clothes that you want. Somehow, one convinced Matt to have some shirts and pants made, so we spent some time picking out fabric and styles. After the dive trip we went back to see how they fit, and the pants were like Pee Wee Herman pants - super up the crotch, ass and also really short. They looked cute if you want to laugh and not go to work. Before we left we went back to get the clothes, pay the final installment and take the clothes. We went to dinner, bought a magnum ice cream bar, went back to the guest house to get our stuff, hopped in a taxi, and we drove for a half hour before I realized that we didn't have Matt's clothes. Oy. Going to the airport and forgetting a bag of expensive clothes - these are two things that stress me out (being late and money). Though it was a busy holiday where everyone was going to this one wat (temple) RIGHT where we were driving, we got around the mess and found the clothes in the location of the magnum bar. We then SPED off to the airport and made it an hour before our flight. We stood in line at immigration for an hour and a half (thinking that we were missing our flight...since NO ONE made any announcements and there was no one to ask!), and we finally made it onto the plane and back home to Singapore, where nothing like that would ever happen.

By the way - we had bed bugs again.

Click here for all of our pictures from this trip (there aren't that many - I forgot to take pictures on the dive trip!).