Perhaps it was because we'd booked ourselves in to stay at O'Malley's Irish Pub hostel in Phuket Town, the town made famous by its dingy, dark hotel room featured in the opening of the film, 'The Beach'. But I think it had more to do with our taxi bus driver cum travel agent who desperately wanted to sell us tickets to get on his boat to the Phi Phi Islands. Then again, it might have been the three total idiots who got on the taxi bus without a destination. "Just drop me at a cheap hostel or hotel, anything cheap, anything".
Never do this. People will hate you.
We drove around for the best part of two hours looking for a place to drop off the idiots. The taxi driver continued to tout his side business. And as it transpired, he didn't know where any of the hotels that people were staying at were. He refused to get directions and it got later and later and darker and darker. This is when Sara lost her cool and began chanting slowly and loudly enunciating every syllable 'OoooMaaaaaallllllleeeeeeeeys IIIIIrishhhhhhh PUB! OMALLEYS!'.
We finally found it. It was closed, as you'd expect at 2:30 in the morning. The proprietor, a bald Englishman from Derbyshire, let us in past his Thai lady friend passed out on the couch in her knickers. The place in of itself was clean and quiet. But there were two problems:1. there were no windows and it was about 35 degrees
2. the bunk bed I was assigned swayed dramatically to the north and south every time I coughed or breathed.
It was a hot night.
And the next morning, we made our way to the bus station to take the rest of our journey which involved a bus, taxi and longtail boat:
And curry for breakfast:
But first glimpses did not disappoint:
Railay Beach, my favourite place in Thailand.
