The Ship sailed on through the night but when we climbed out of bed the next morning the storm had abated. We were greeted with a true cruise ship day which we set about enjoying, taking in a spa or two and some sun, then we remembered we had a substantial bar tab, so made a fairly early start on reducing same. There were some two for one style bargains so of course we had to take advantage. Some time that afternoon we reached Phuket and docked at the very empty wharf.

However by the time we had left the ship the Thai's had transformed the wharf into an impromptu market place. Numerous stalls had been set up and were teeming with locals vying for the tourist dollar. We decided it was all a little tacky so contracted a bemo to take us into Phuket itself some distance away (17K or so). No sooner than we had reached Phuket then sky's opened and it bucketed with rain. The streets very quickly turned into rivers and the shop owners were conducting a losing battle to keep their goods dry.

Regardless of the rain we had a good look around and visited a few of the bars, then made our way back to the Virgo to again tackle our bar tab. Sometime that night the ship set sail for the return trip to Singapore via Langkowi in Malaysia.