Philippines Style Buses

Starting around 11 am we began our assault on Patong Beach, the transport was a bus that rather looked like a Philippine Jeep Nee, or a stretch Tuk Tuk. Nearly thirty of us pile on this stainless steel troop carrier style truck after presenting our free tickets. Patong doesn’t come alive during the day, even eleven in the morning appears very early.

Locals cleaned up from the night before and started to organise for another days onslaught of tourists. We wandered the streets and down back Soi’s, past street kitchens, garages and petrol stations. Motor scooters are the prime transports, petrol to power these thrifty about town vehicles is sold in glass bottles. These bottles are a recycled spirit bottle, by spirit I mean

Whiskey or Petrol

100 Pipers Whiskey bottles with the labels still on. Confusion would be very easy. Can you picture sitting outside a 7 Eleven a stand with 20 bottles of petrol, all packaged in whiskey bottles with the standard whiskey labels still on the bottles. There are small petrol stations with hand-operated pumps and these seem primarily for scooters as well. Between small businesses there is wasteland that is partly finished earth works, thick with weeds and mud used as rubbish tips. We stopped for water at a local open air food court, cooking was just starting for the day and the pungent odour of the spices had us all coughing.

We walked for about forty minutes and ended up at a shopping mall and headed inside for some air conditioning and then back outside for some coffee. While having coffee we saw people sitting on seats with their feet in aquariums, their feet nibbled by hundreds of tiny cat fish. We decided that the girls would give this activity a go, while us brave men just watched, and took the photographs. Apparently it was a very soothing experience and clean all the dead skin off the feet. Very interesting and I might go back and have a go myself.

Cat Fish nibbling the feet

Next was off to find the markets, which were out the back of the mall. Here we purchased most of the things we had promised we would get and a few things

Lunch was on the water front in a fairly upmarket restaurant, it was great Thai food, with lunch eaten and ales drunk finished we went and looked at the beach before picking up some essentials for the hotel room and catching a Tuk Tuk back to the resort.

We spent our afternoon trying making use of the swim up bar and sampling the cocktails.

Dinner was a particularly rustic place, about two hundred and fifty yards up the road, overlooking Tri-Trang beach.