Sorry for the Group Email

The trip from Koh Phangnan to Phuket is a complicated one. We started in the morning in the back of a pickup truck, rattling around on our way to the port at Thong Sala. From there we took the ferry to Chumporn, at which a large bus was waiting to take us to Surat Thani. This took another hour, and at Surat Thani we got off and waited for a mini-bus.

We got into the centre of Phuket at ten at night. There are two ways to stay in Phuket; you can either go straight to the beach, or stay in town. The Lonely Planet reckoned the town was underrated, and so we decided to stay there. Against rather long odds (it’s not unheard of for Thai guesthouses to close at around nine in the evening), we found a guesthouse that supplied us with a spotlessly (approaching sterile) clean room, hot showers downstairs, and free morning coffee and toast. It doesn’t take much to win us over.

We spent the rest of the evening downing cheap beer with a camp Thai man who had been educated in Bangkok and, improbably, Wisconsin, and sounded, as a result, as though he had been taught English by Graham Norton. We also met a Frenchwoman who was, equally improbably, a teacher from Burma.

(This meeting happened about a week before the Burmese cyclone.)

“So,” we said. “What is there to do in Phuket?” The man actually laughed. The Frenchwoman snorted Gallically and said, simply, “nothing.”

She wasn’t miles off. Phuket has a famous set of beaches which were devastated in the 2004 tsunami, a gibbon rehabilitation centre, and an airline that’s banned from operating in EU airspace due to safety concerns. (Suggested tagline, “Phuket: it’s not just a place, it’s a school of aircraft maintenance.”)

What it does have is a beautiful collection of colonial architecture and very few tourists. This means better restaurants, better-value hotels, and fewer people pestering you for money. Phuket might not have had elephant riding or the opportunity to sit in an inner tube and race down a river, but it was laid-back and had good food.

The next day, we pushed our Ko Phangnan squeamishness to that backs of our minds and hired a scooter. A manual bike would set us back just 150 baht a day, which is the equivalent to $5. A manual scooter is a less daunting proposition than it sounds for a novice: they’re not too fast and there’s no clutch to get the hang of as there is with a bigger bike; just a heel/toe affair on the left-hand side to move through four gears. Plus, an automatic scooter cost an extra 100 baht, and I’ve long accepted that if I break any bones on this trip it will be because of my relentless pursuit of cheapness.

There were only two problems. The first was that all of the manual scooters on offer were rather discouragingly called the Suzuki Smash, which would be a bit like General Motors bringing out the Ford Neckbrace or the Dodge Whiplash. The second problem was our new landlady, who laughed like a drain when I said I wanted a manual scooter. I could, I think, have handled it, but she snorted like I’d suggested I wanted to ride the scooter standing on my head and juggling panthers. I got the impression that tourists quite often come a cropper on hired scooters, and she preferred to keep the actual bikes as simple as possible. And so it was that we ended up on a simple twist n’ go affair coloured, perhaps for the visibility benefit of others, shocking pink.

We twisted n’ went.

We twisted n’ went, in fact, straight into three lanes of fast moving traffic, which was rather hair-raising. The actual mechanics of Asian road law are simple. Small things give way to big things, which means scooters must spend their lives dodging everything from tiny towncars to oil tankers. Even at 40km/h the penalty for brushing up against something big would be extreme. The roundabout was a particularly interesting bit of manoeuvring. From what I had garnered from our times on the Thai buses, things already on the roundabout gave way to things joining the roundabout, as they do in France. Except when they didn’t, which is a bit confusing. In the event I more or less closed my eyes and trusted that a shocking pink bike ridden by a pair of petrified tourists would get the attention of other road users.

The Phuket Gibbon Rehabilitation centre is about 20km outside of Phuket town, which, thanks to our slow riding in combination with the scooter’s miniscule petrol tank, took almost an hour to reach. The rehab centre is more or less a necessity for Thailand’s gibbon population. Tourists – including us – are a simple bunch, and monkeys are cute. It was therefore inevitable that the tourist’s love for monkeys would lend itself, at some point, to exploitation. That means the monkeys you can pay to be photographed with in Bangkok have either been bred in captivity or poached from their parents. Some gibbons, it seems, can live their entire lives in captivity, but most end up with problems. They never quite become tame enough to live outside a cage (the PG Tips version of well-dressed, tea-loving monkeys, it seems, will never come to pass), but because they’ve been around people all their lives, attempts to bring them into close contact with other apes is frequently disastrous. What’s needed is a place where gibbons are kept safe from each other, but where they’re close enough to each other that they acclimatise to the presence of other apes. The goal, ultimately, is to get the gibbons to pair off with each other, prior to being released back into the wild.

After poking around the Rehab Centre for an hour, I certainly see the appeal in gibbons. They’re incredibly humanoid, from their expressive faces to their dextrous hands. Gibbons in particular often have coloured eyes and mouths, giving them a constantly astonished look. They’re a winning bunch.

Some of the stories, though, are nearly unbelievable. One gibbon survived an attempted poisoning by its owners neighbours after they became concerned that it was a threat. Another was beaten almost to death by its owner after it accidentally bit the owner’s daughter during a play session. More happily, one, named Rambo, had been taken to the rehab centre, acclimatised to other apes, and released, only to repeatedly turn up at the centre a few days later, as if he’d been on a mini-break.

(It’s at this point that I’d show you a few photos to, y’know, prove we’d gone, or something. Unfortunately the rehab centre is, in the best interests of the apes, in the shade, and an f/4 70-300mm lens just doesn’t produce good exposures in the shade, no matter what the ISO, and using the flash disturbs the gibbons.)

We headed back to Phuket, at times reaching the heady speed of 60km/h, which was quite fast enough, thanks. We stopped for lunch, and then headed out to Patong Beach, on the west coast of Phuket. We were instantly glad we hadn’t stayed there. Patong Beach has literally miles of beautiful golden sand and light blue water. It is one of the top ten diving sites in the world, such is the variety and beauty of its marine life.

It is also inhabited by just about every European who can afford an ill-fitting swimming suit and the ill-sense not to wear sun-cream. No sooner had we pulled up to a quiet-looking beach than a man tried to sell us an hour on a deckchair or a beer (or, ideally, both), and the whole strip – of which there wasn’t much – was full of cafés, bars, and rent-by-the-hour sun loungers. I’m glad these things exist, of course. There’s nothing quite like somewhere to lie down that isn’t sandy, and I like cold beers on hot beaches, but the constant pestering got me down. Also the fact that, if you didn’t want either a beer or a sun lounger, it was very difficult indeed to find any real estate at all on the beach that wasn’t already being sold by someone else.

We headed gratefully back to Phuket town, which not only sits anonymously in the shade of Phuket’s stunning but rather busy beaches, but also boasts some of the best Thai restaurants we’d seen since we’d been in the country. It was a good thing, too, as we intended Phuket to be the last major part of Thailand we saw.

Dave recommends Phuket town over the beaches, although single men can apparently expect to be harassed by ladies of the night. Also, I can be found here, if either politics or Google are your thing. As ever, you can while away five minutes with the Flickr set.