After a great night’s sleep in our little bed in our little room with no bad dreams of fish floating around in my tummy we retraced our steps back to the train terminal and out the other side to catch a taxi to the International Terminal.  We had plenty of time to have a nice breakfast of eggs, ham and toast before we boarded our flight on Thai Airlines to Bangkok. 

It’s an interesting process to fly internationally.  You don’t have to take your clothes off to go through security but you do have to fill out a lot of forms and go through various check points.  Everyone is very orderly and helpful even if they don’t speak English.

Once on board we settled in and had a nice lunch of pork and rice with a lovely lotus root salad.  No sake this time and since we’re on vacation we ordered gin and tonics.  Can’t wait to get to Thailand and try their MaiThai’s!     just kidding

Our five and a half hour flight to Bangkok was uneventful.  The airport was a ways out of town so we couldn’t see any of the city.  We had plenty of time to find our connecting flight to Phuket so we wandered around a lot to stretch our legs.  Lots of huge orchid arrangements – all real.  And my favorite find of all

On to Phuket.  Bangkok is a very smoggy city because we could barely see the buildings and not for very long.  It was hazy most of the way but as we got close to Phuket and starting our decent we could see many small islands that looked like they’d been splattered about.  Look very closely.

We collected our two little duffle bags (traveling very light this trip) and learned that to catch a cab to our hotel you pick a company inside the terminal and pay for your cab there then head outside to get your cab.  When we stepped outside it felt like we’d stepped into a third world country. Night time.  Hot and humid.  Cars, buses, taxis, scooters zipping around. people yelling.  Utter chaos.  At least to us.  Maybe it was organized chaos to them.   All we were told was to look for number 45.  What the hell did that mean in all of this?

Well, believe it or not, we did it – although it took running to the other side of the organized chaos to get to number 45.  The view from our taxi cab ride was incredible.  I wished I could have taken pictures of all of this but it was too dark and things were happening too fast.  We were on a narrow two lane road with a high wall on our side and jungle on the other.  Lots of traffic.  Lots of tiny motor scooters and many 100cc scooters with custom made (ie homemade) “side cars.”  These side cars consisted of the frame of a cube about 2 feet wide by 3 feet long by 5 feet high and filled to over flowing with who knows what.  It was amazing to see.   On the jungle side there were many places where the jungle was cut away where people had  little houses and scooters were turning in and out of these places.  There were also trucks with ??? piled all around and over them, stuff stacked so high you’d think the truck would topple over.  It was all quite the site for us.

After about a 30 minute taxi ride to our hotel, we landed at the JW Marriott Phuket.     Wow     How fancy   So peaceful   It was around 1900 and very dark.   An open  breezeway with a big infinity pool.  As we checked in we were treated to neatly wrapped cold washcloths on a tray with orchids and glasses of ice cold tea.

Our room is amazing as is this hotel.

Off to the bar for a night cap.  Sa Was Dee Kaa