January 31st, 2013 - Central Festival, Phuket Aquarium, and the Not-Actually-A-Supermarket Supermarket

Internet, as it turns out, is a lot harder to figure out how to set up when all the instructions are in a foreign language.

I know, I know; you’re asking yourself, “But Lucky, why didn’t you just use Google translate like a normal person? Wouldn’t that have been a better use of the one day’s worth of internet from the front desk that you paid a ridiculous amount for?”

Well, that’s an excellent point you have there. But you see, that would have been too easy. I’m not the type to take shortcuts; if there’s a hard way of doing something, I will find it.


In my defense, though, most of the words I needed translated were actually in pictures and thus couldn’t have been translated by Google anyway.

After a few days of trying to get it figured out on our own, we reached a state of internet-deprivation that we could no longer endure, so we went to the Central Festival mall in Phuket Town to consult the professionals. The professionals being the very nice and very patient ladies at the AIS shop in the mall.

Hotel Review: Le Piman, Phuket - Excellent Service, Food, and Grounds

Hotel: Le Piman
Location: Rawai, Phuket, Thailand
Alleged Status: 4 Stars
Decided Status: 4 Stars
Cost: About $69 CAD per night through www.Agoda.com, for an eight day stay
Disabilities Access Rating: Not very good, unfortunately
Vegetarian Suitability: Moderate
Food Quality: Excellent
Cleanliness: Good
Location: Very close to busy main road in Rawai, but not noisy
Sleep Quality: Good for noise, beds were a bit too hard
Service: Excellent
Conclusions: Worth it.

Panwa Restauraunts - The Secret Cove - 4/5 Stars

Located on Ao Yan bay, this is our current favourite restaurant. Good service, decent prices, tasty Thai, Western, and Indian food, and good drinks make this a good, solid restaurant, but the view makes it amazing. The beach next to it is strewn with coral and sea shells, and at low tide, nearly the entire bay is exposed. It's great for exploring once the tide goes down, filled with awesome looking snails and hermit crabs.






On the Regrettable to Edible Scale of Restaurant Judging, this one gets a 4.

January 28th, 2013 - Black-Out

Stayed in today to catch up on our writing and various other activities that have found themselves on the backburner. The need for food and shelter has taken priority of late. We also experienced our first black-out tonight! The novelty will probably wear off quickly, but it was pretty cool.




The power was down for a few hours. At first we were worried that it was just our apartment, but Geogirl was brave and walked down to the front office to check. I’d have just never mentioned it and lived without power for the next six months rather than go and ask someone about it. Being an introvert can be more perilous than you might imagine.

But the power came back on eventually, and in the meantime it was kind of nice not having the distraction of technology to occupy my attention. We sat out on the balcony and entertained ourselves with a flashlight while admiring the ocean view at night.

Why was there a power outage, you ask? I’m no electrical engineer, but my guess is that the powerlines might be to blame:




Like I said: not an electrical engineer, but it’s looking like a good bet.

-LuckyStar

January 28th, 2013 - Ao Yon Waterfall in Panwa

We moved into our new place and--excluding all the spiders and other creepy-crawlies--it's awesome!

Admittedly, that takes a lot of excluding, but the sea view is great. When I'm not twitching because my hair is touching me and it feels like bugs, I'm having a great time!

But, having cleaned (possibly excessively) for three days in a row, we decided to go on an exploratory mission. We knew there was a beach--possibly many beaches--located to the south-east of us, and we were going to find it!

Found it!

January 27th, 2013 - Buying Bikes in Phuket Town

Went to get bikes (not the motorized kind) from Tesco in Phuket Town today while the nice lady Mike hired to clean our place was there. It’s starting to get weird being the only pedestrians on this island (or so it seems), so bikes seemed like our best alternative.

We took a taxi in. Taxis are expensive here, so we try to avoid it, but there are some places that you just can’t endure walking to in this heat.

January 26th, 2013 - Visiting Phuket Town

After The Bug Incident, we emailed Mike to let him know what happened. Phuket Rental Properties (now SuperHolidayVillas) are just the agents that help people find places to stay, so they aren’t actually responsible for the places themselves. They do things like manage negotiations between potential tenants and landlords, and set people up with the perfect rental property for their stay.

But Mike, being Mike, insisted on helping us out and redeeming the whole moving experience for us!He called a cleaner to come in to go over the place again, and he treated us to breakfast this morning in Phuket Town (a fairly short drive away). We got a personalized tour of the area and visited the Gallery Café by Pinky. He’s friends with the owner (actually, he seems to be friends with pretty much everybody), so we got to learn a lot about the local scene. Plus, the food was fantastic--I had pancakes that were so good, I might have teared up a bit. They weren’t as good as my grandma’s pancakes, of course, but they were very good.

The Gallery Café by Pinky

This is Mike! Mike is nice!

He also took us to the local Tesco Lotus for groceries (Wal-Mart would be its North American equivalent) so we could pick up things like food and drinkable water.

This may not sound like such a big deal, but grocery shopping here is quite different from Canada. It’s not as impersonal; you don’t just pick up your goods, pay, and leave—for the most part. It’s harder to find grocery stores as we know them. Sometimes you actually have to interact with other human beings in order to find what you’re looking for. Especially since it’s all in Thai. (Now that I think about it, I’m really hoping that the opaque bottle with the cow on it that we bought is really milk and not, well, cow).

So, as you can see, we may well have starved without Mike’s help. And our moving experience has, indeed, been redeemed.

Thanks for everything, Mike!

-LuckyStar

January 25th, 2013 - Moving in to our Apartment in Panwa (Or, That Time I Battled Legions of Spiders)

Geogirl and I moved into our new apartment today in Panwa. We had to check out of the hotel at noon and go somewhere, so we were very lucky to find an apartment so quickly.

Mike and Nuno were kind enough to pick us up in their car early this afternoon and carry our bags in for us (which is no small feat, I’m ashamed to say—but in my defense, I really did need the tool kit and first-aid kit and all those other very important things that resulted in my bag weighing in at seventy-five pounds).

January 23rd, 2013 - Looking at a Villa in Rawai

We went to see a villa in Rawai today with Nuno and Mike. Have we mentioned Nuno and Mike yet? They are agents/owners of Phuket Rental Properties (now SuperHolidayVillas) and have been helping us find a place to stay here. I’ll type up a more detailed review later, but the point is: these guys are awesome.

And guess what? Geogirl and I rode on the backs of scooter bikes in the streets of Rawai without helmets and we lived to tell about it! Yep, this must be what it feels like to be a badass.

-LuckyStar

January 20, 2013 - Rawai, Phrom Thep Cape, Yanui Beach, and Nai Harn Beach

Today we got hold of a map, with a little subsection that showed Rawai, Phrom Thep Cape, Yanui Beach, and Nai Harn Beach. The thing about little sub-maps? They make big areas look small. This is why every decent mapmaker, and, frankly, every decent human being includes a scale on their map.

I told Lucky over breakfast, as I studied what appeared to be a rather little peninsula of Phuket, that it'd be entirely do-able to walk to Nai Harn. Mark those words, by the way. They were the words of a fool.

We left early--around nine, I believe--to avoid the worst of the day's heat. This was wise. Six or seven would have been wiser.

Somehow less scary, now.

January 19th, 2013 - Exploring Rawai

Welcome to Day Two of our trip to Phuket, Thailand. We are currently staying at the Le Piman resort in the Rawai district. I’d have contributed to a Day One post as well, but that would have required more forethought than I was capable of after a 27-hour flight. Oh well...

View from the room of our villa. (We have a villa!)

January 18th, 2013 - Flying Calgary to Phuket

A 27 hour trip from Calgary to Phuket, Layovers in Seattle and Beijing
On January 16, 2013, at 6:00 in the morning, LuckyStar and I got on an Alaska Airlines flight bound for Seattle. By the time we got there, she was thoroughly airsick, I was half-way between sleep and confused terror (it was a very turbulent flight), and we both were considering just moving to Seattle instead of getting on our trans-Pacific flight to Beijing.

A  five hour layover where we managed to get some sleep in the extremely uncomfortable seats left us both refreshed enough that we got on our Hainan Air flight with only mild trepidation. Luckily, it was completely undeserved! Hainan Airlines is amazing!

I am not even going to lie to you—I've only flown Alaskan Air, Air Canada (God bless them, because no one else ever will), and WestJet before, and Hainan blows all of them out of the water.

The Regrettable to Edible Scale of Restaurant Judging

Seeing how we are people with a fondness for eating out, it only makes sense that we create a methodology suitable for ranking the quality of the restaurants we visit. Admittedly, half of this is because I just really like the sound of 'Regrettable to Edible', but there are more important factors at work! For instance, it allows us to add yet more tags to the site, and seeing how much LuckyStar loves tags (a lot), this can only pay off in the long run.

Anyway, The Regrettable to Edible Scale of Restaurant Judging is as follows:

0 - Oh God why me?
1 - Meeeeeeh.
2 - I wouldn't return because of reasons explained in the review, but it was pretty okay.
3 - I'd go back. Good food, good prices. It's decent.
4 - I love this place, and you will too!
5 - Add eating here to your bucket list, because it's an amazing example of great food and excellent service, with additional amazing features, as explained in the review.

-Geogirl