Patong is in many ways like most beach towns. It's set up for tourists and they were here in droves. Although there are temples and other cultural activities in the area, our plan was to lie around for these few days and not do much of anything. This lack of a plan is likely, at least partially, responsible for leading me astray.

Our first night in Patong we wandered down the main strip looking for the street food that Dessa now loves so much. Although there were dozens of shops for T-shirts and other tourist ****, a surprising number of tattoo shops (I guess this is a popular spur of the moment purchase) and almost non-stop massage parlors, there were very few street food vendors. We were regularly accosted, in broken English, asking if we wanted a Taxi or a Tuk Tuk or a massage or even a custom made suit (I guess another spur of the moment purchase). This was another contributing factor to why I stopped to talk to the Brit selling timeshares. Rob was a very nice guy and a pretty good salesmen since I agreed to go to their 90 minute presentation the next morning. He makes 1000 baht (~$30) for every person he convinces to go and he did tell us where to find the street food vendors.

To get to the street food, we needed to traverse Bangla Road, the Patong Red Light district. This was much more in your face than we had experienced in Bangkok and it was much larger as well. We were 'invited' more than 20 times to see a Ping Pong show on top of the 'invitiations' to the 'simple' bars along the street for 2 for 1 drinks or other happy hour specials. We survived unscathed and made it to the street food where we had wonderful chicken kabobs and a banana pancake grilled in a pan that was half muffin tin and half ice cube tray. Delicious!

Thursday we headed for the 90 min Time Share presentation that actually took 5 loonng hours. To be fair, that included a great lunch at one of the best restaurants in Patong and time petting 2 baby elephants so lets call it 3 and a half hours which was still about 3 hours more than Dessa wanted to give it. It wasn't the typical time share plan as it wasn't for a fixed resort or for a fixed week and the quality of the accommodation was wonderful but given most of our vacations involve diving, it isn't for us. The rest of the day was spent reading by the pool and another trip for street food for dinner.

Friday we used 2 of our free gifts from the Time Share presentation. The first was a trip to the private Paradise beach including transport and lounges. I'm sure you will be shocked to learn that the reality didn't quite live up to the hype of not-so-much Paradise Beach. The place was crowded, the plastic lounge chairs were crammed together and ours were near the bathroom. The beach itself was pretty but once you entered the water the bottom was very rocky so it wasn't pleasant to go swimming. There was one strip out into the water that appeared to be cleared of rocks and that most of the swimmers stayed within but this was also the strip that the boats used to get into the beach so it was kind of fun to watch the beach "traffic" jam. Once at the beach we had only one option for lunch and drinks. When we were ready to leave, we discovered it would cost us 400 baht ($13), to get back to town or we needed to wait until 5:30pm (another 3 hours) for the shuttle. What a trap.

Our second gift was tickets to FantaSea a theme park and show about 30 minutes north including a buffet dinner. The Theme Park was at best cute and didn't live up to any images you may have conjured up along the lines of a Six Flags or Disney world. The dinner was Ok but nothing special. They did offer Elephant rides (which we didn't do) but they were happy to take our pictures with the elephants for free. This was surprising as they were charging more than $20 to get your picture taken with a macaw. The show itself was pretty good. The music was wonderful, the dancing a little amateurish but the overall staging was entertaining and we enjoyed it. I wouldn't have been happy if we had paid the $75 per person ticket fee but it was a good evening for free.

Our 3rd gift is a 1 wk stay at one of their resorts in Thailand. Not sure if we'll use it but we'll see. All things considered, I think we did Ok for our 5 hour investment especially since we didn't have anything else planned. Dessa is still aggravated.

Yesterday we spent the day at Patong's main public beach. It is also crowded and here there was a steady stream of vendors pushing tattoos, sarongs, selfie poles, ... but they were generally polite so not that intrusive. We paid 200 baht (~$6) for 2 mats and an umbrella and the best part was that the beach was very sandy so going into the water was enjoyable. We were both craving some simple comfort food for dinner so we stopped at the local Mexican restaurant for Nachos which were surprisingly good and definitely hit the spot.

We felt the least safe here in Patong. Not for fear of crime but for fear of our lives. If anything, there are even more scooters on the road and here they are more likely to be driven by tourists drunken and otherwise. The tourists have adopted the pedestrians come last approach to traffic control and every time we had to cross the road it felt like we were risking our lives. The one interesting thing about the scooters was the gas stations. No pumps, just simple road side stands where people had filled what looked like old liquor bottles with 1L of fuel that they sold at roughly $5 / gallon.

Today is our last day in Phuket and we are re-packing/sorting our luggage for the dive trip. There won't be room in our cabin for the 4 large bags we have with us, so we are trying to stuff the minimum clothes and other necessities in with our dive gear.

Higher resolution versions of these photos can be found at Flikr in the Patong Album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bill_and_ dessa/sets/

Tomorrow we get wet and we can't wait!
...Bill and Dessa