Chrissy Renae

After 4 days in the big city, it was time to head south to the land of the beaches. Our first stop was PHUKET (pronounced poo-kett, although I know you realllly want to say it the other way). We flew in Wednesday night and stayed until Friday afternoon. It’s really famous as a tourist destination, but that was the precise problem with it. It was pretty and fairly cheap and our hotel was righttt on the beach front strip, but it was crowded and the market vendors were grabby, and the beaches were packed with old rich Europeans. It was nice to just relax for a day though, as we spent alll day Thursday just sitting on the beach, getting extremely sunburnt, and going for the occasional swim. We kept up on the Pad Thai and curry fixation (treating ourselves to a few realll restaurants… probably safer for the tummy and still under $5) and I set a world record for number of fruit shakes downed. Throughout the entire trip, everywhere had really cheap fruit shakes (ranging from 50 cents to $2) that were made from delicious fresh fruit. Pineapple, coconut, mango, banana, strawberry, watermelon…. pretty sure I tried them all.

Friday morning we mustered up the motivation to wake up early and go on a elephant trek, which was the craziest thing I have ever done. It wasn’t actually crazy in itself… I mean you’re just sitting there on this chair on the back of an elephant. But we were terrified!!! Our cart felt wobbly and our elephant was weird and our driver didn’t speak any English and kept getting off and letting our elephant take control and go wherever he wanted. It was fun and a really cool experience, but we definitely didn’t feel safe until we were standing back on solid ground again. Phuket was a nice stop on the way, but if I had it to do over again I’d just skip Phuket and go straight out to the smaller islands. I guess it depends what types of things you’re into…