Ah, Phuket, I had such high hopes for thee. Hearing the word Phuket — at least since I learned it was a place name, pronounced “poo-ket”, and not an expression of frustration with a different pronunciation — has always brought to mind calm, teal waters, crispy sunbathers strewn across bone-colored beaches, and palm crowns shimmying in the salty breeze. And on these fronts Phuket did not disappoint. Unfortunately, on most other fronts it did.
There are three major qualifiers I should mention before I proceed. One, I am not a spread-a-towel-on-the-sand-and-sunbathe kind of guy — in fact, I’m nearly translucent — so I’m looking for more than the kind of experience that can be had in any given desert. Two, my trip to Phuket fell squarely during the low season, so surely I wasn’t catching it in peak form. And three, I spent just two and a half days there, and perhaps with a bit more time my esteem of the island would have improved. It’s telling, though, that after only two and a half days I was ready to kiss the carpet of the plane that carried me off.
Phuket suffers from a mild case of Cruise Ship Syndrome, in that once you’re there, you’re forced to pay inflated prices for things simply because you have no alternative: food, lodging, transport, internet access, and so on. This is a common phenomenon on islands. Easter Island, for instance, is similarly expensive, except that it bears the excuse of being separated from its nearest neighbor by 2,000 kilometers of ocean, and just about everything consumable has to be shipped or flown in. The distance between mainland Thailand and Phuket, on the other hand, is all of 600 meters, and it’s spanned by a four-lane highway. Hmmm.
Then there’s the omnipresent prostitution. Clearly it wouldn’t be so prevalent if tourists didn’t avail themselves of it, but I rather prefer to be able to walk down the street without having to politely decline the catcalls — if not the groping hands — of batteries of sex workers. It’s tragic that, even with so much tourist money pumping into other sectors of the island’s economy, so many young women are funneled into the sex trade. Again, this was the middle of the low season, but the prostitutes seemed to outnumber the tourists. That’s a bad ratio for everyone.
I’d been forewarned about Patong, the rowdy heart of Phuket’s tourist scene that’s chock-full of western restaurants, bars, and nightclubs heralded by neon signs and pulsating speakers — it hosts three Starbucks franchises grouped so closely that, if you neglect to trim your nails for a few weeks, you can almost touch them all simultaneously — so I steered clear. I pre-booked a room in Karon, just a few kilometers and decibels south of Patong.
I generally like to explore new places by bicycle, but Phuket’s size and hilly terrain don’t lend themselves to cycling. And tuk-tuk drivers wanted outlandish amounts to ferry people around — 250 Baht just to make the short trip from Karon to Patong — so I opted for another mode of transportation: a rented motorbike. I think it’s the ideal way to get around Phuket. Renting one for the day costs just 200 Baht, plus whatever fuel you consume, and of course allows you to go wherever you please. The roads are sinuous, the views stunning.
Atop my little, burgundy Honda Dream, I weaved through the mobs in Patong and headed up the west coast, stopping at beach after beach to take in the scenery. Faded red flags were posted all along the backshore to warn visitors about the low season’s dangerously strong currents. The beaches are undoubtedly beautiful, but it was strange to see almost no one in the water.
I rode an arc through northern Phuket and came back down the east coast, stopping for a couple hours at the Bang Pae waterfall (not much to see) and the adjacent Gibbon Rehabilitation Project (200 Baht entrance fee), a non-profit rescue and breeding facility for the adorable and highly intelligent apes. Because gibbons can fetch a lot of money — tourists buy them as pets or pay to have pictures taken with them — poachers seek them in the wild, slaughtering gibbon mothers to capture their young and exploit them on the streets. The project rescues such gibbons and, if possible, rehabilitates and returns them to the protection of a wilderness sanctuary. A very worthy cause.
Next, I checked out the very well organized and informative Butterfly Garden and Insect World near Phuket town (300 Baht, a bit pricey, but worth it if you’re a nerd like me). I was the only visitor there, having arrived near the end of the day, and I got the distinct impression that the employees wanted to shut down a bit early. “There are more butterflies to see this way, sir,” one would urge, motioning me coyly into the next room. As I wandered dumbly into it, another unseen employee would slam and lock the door behind me. In this way, as if by peristalsis, I was cajoled through several exhibits and out the front door in under 30 minutes. These people were good.
The following day I decided to book an all-day, all-inclusive snorkeling trip to Ko Phi Phi, a picturesque island 40 kilometers east of Phuket, about which I’d read nothing but raves prior to the trip. According to Lonely Planet, “Ko Phi Phi is so beautiful it will evoke tears.” All the photos I’d seen of Phi Phi, and I’ll add to them the above two that I took, corroborate that statement. The picture you don’t see, however, is the one below at left, depicting what I was standing in when I took the other two. The island seems to have dived headfirst into tourism’s flush pockets, with a ravenous appetite for its economic benefits but little concern for its environmental consequences. Everywhere I walked on the island, I had to step around discarded building materials, old shoes and clothes, plastic bottles, and other detritus of development. Phi Phi, incidentally, is pronounced “pee-pee”, but it’s turning into number two.
The “all-day” snorkeling trip was similarly deceptive, breaking down like this: two hours of shuttling back and forth to the Phuket harbor in a minivan, seven hours of transit and waiting around on two different boats, one hour exploring Phi Phi on foot, a thirty-minute lunch, and ten minutes of snorkeling. The snorkeling was amazing, if criminally brief, but I was put in a sour mood when the tour operator doled out our masks and snorkels but tried to extort another 100 Baht out of us for the use of flippers.
My flight the next morning was scheduled to depart at eight a.m., which meant that I’d have to leave for the airport around six. No minibus shuttles operate that early, and the cheapest taxi I could find would cost 700 Baht — more than twice the amount I’d paid to go the same distance in Bangkok — which seemed a fitting, wallet-cleansing way to end my stay in Phuket.
I don’t know to what extent prices have inflated since the devastating tsunami struck in December 2004 — and I am more than happy to subsidize the rebuilding effort by paying a premium for food, lodging, etc. — but I can’t help feeling that, given plenty of other gorgeous, affordable, and less trafficked beach destinations sprinkled through Thailand and Malaysia, Phuket’s just not worth it.
The river rocks are engraved with wonderful images of Hindu deities and animals, and Sanskrit inscriptions. Somehow they remain well defined and vivid despite being run over by wind, rain, and river water, not to mention the sediment it carries with it, for hundreds of years. The area isn’t very well marked, and I would have missed most of the carvings had not a guard volunteered to show a few of us around, offering what information he could in broken English. Thanks to him, Kbal Spean was one of the highlights of my trip.
Finally, after failing to make it through the gate the prior day, I rounded this day out with a stop at Ta Prohm. Just in case I ran out of time before I got a chance to go back and see it, I had belittled Ta Prohm in my head as “nothing special, just more crumbling stone blocks and some gnarly trees.” And I was right, except for the “nothing special” part. The place is instantly memorable. The trees are not merely gnarly, but the gnarliest – their gargantuan roots cascade like dam-bursts over the sides of meter-thick sandstone walls, which buckle and crack beneath their weight. If these trees could spring to life and do battle like J.R.R. Tolkein’s Ents, we’d all be doomed.
Determined not to be thwarted by the weather — or sucked into the vortex of must-see TV — the next morning I rode ten miles (and a couple extra, thanks to some illegible kilometer markers) out of town to see two guidebook-recommended caves. Due to the unrelenting rain, however, the river was too swollen and the current too powerful to safely cross. So back I rode, soaking and cold, to my guesthouse, where I retired with a book until dinner.
Hanh arranged a bent iron rod over the fire to serve as a range, then filled the kettle full of water and the pot full of rice and water and set them on the rod to cook. Next he went outside to shave down a thick slab of wood with the machete; in a couple of minutes he’d fashioned a clean cutting board. Back inside he went to work on the potatoes I’d peeled, carving them into thin slivers while Khoa and the other hikers chopped vegetables and cut the beef into strips. My contribution was to shower their workspace with camera flashes in the dying light. I was invaluable.
Hanh had brought along some cocoa powder and made hot chocolate for me to fight the cold. Instead of a mug he sliced a water bottle across the middle and handed me the upturned, capped end. I thanked him in Vietnamese and he said something in reply that I didn’t understand, but it probably meant something like, “This is how Macgyver drinks hot chocolate.”
fantastic, and the from-scratch tomato soup was unbeatable. Even the mystery meat from the can was delicious — Khoa said it was pork of some kind, and I thought better of getting him to clarify any further — with a taste and consistency similar to goose pâte. We washed it all down with swigs of locally-made rice wine, the kind that tickles your throat, widens your eyes, and warms you up immediately.
So I kept an eye toward the weather forecast, until finally it called for a 40% chance of precipitation in Sapa the next day. That’s practically beach weather during the rainy season, so I hopped on an overnight train to Lao Cai, caught an early-a.m. bus to Sapa, hired a guide and a porter from a hotel in town, and was on the mountain by mid-morning, 12 hours after leaving Hanoi. The plan was to hike that morning and afternoon to within 300 meters of the 3,143-meter summit, set up camp for the night, then make the peak the following morning and descend thereafter.
At the halfway point of the first day’s climb, we stopped at a campsite for lunch. Two other hikers and their guide awaited us there. The guide had fallen on the trail and injured his leg too badly to continue the climb, but he asked if his hikers could join us. Of course, we said, and after scarfing down sandwiches of sliced tomato, cucumber, and soft cheese on swollen baguettes, the five of us put our gear back on and set out again. Khoa said it would be two more hours of rugged uphill slog before we reached our destination camp. We spent the first half hour traversing gently sloping hills thick with green growth that fell away into sagging clouds. If this was a slog, I could slog all day long.
We made camp with about an hour of daylight left. The camp building was basically a corrugated metal barn with six bunks divided three to a side by a muddy aisle, with a door on each end left open to channel the brisk wind. Inside we found some dried bamboo chutes for kindling and two dozen red potatoes left behind by previous inhabitants. After exchanging my cold, soaking wet clothes for chilly, damp ones, I sat around useless while Khoa and the Hanh built a fire, splitting the chutes in half lengthwise with an imposing machete and constructing a pyramid in the middle of the aisle (pictured at left). The two hikers who had joined us collected water for cooking from the stream outside. The fire crackling away now, Khoa handed me the machete to begin peeling potatoes for dinner. Determined to make it back down the mountain the next day with all my digits intact, I peeled so slowly it was almost dark when I finished. (to be continued…)
Sometimes flashpacking isn’t an option. Perhaps the economy’s got you down and you can only afford budget accommodations for this year’s vacation. Maybe you’re planning on going far off the beaten track and there’re slim pickings. The question du jour is can you fake flashpacking?
Avoid that mildew smell - The best way to trick your brain is through scent. You will not be able to pretend you are anywhere but a dingy, dirty place if that’s what it smells like. Even decent dwellings can smell damp and dank during the rainy season, so I always try to pack scented travel candles. Now crawl under your net in your silk sheets, light some candles, and grab a good book. Pretend it’s luxury and a relief to be staying in a place without internet…
lather and rinse. I tend to travel with wet wipes because you can avoid gross guesthouse showers (or freezing cold water) for a few days and stay perfectly clean. And now I’ve found this 
Arctic Pathfinder arranges a wide variety of trips — this is the 
If you’d prefer to tailor a trip for yourself, check out 
For a detailed explanation of the phenomenon of the Northern Lights, or Aurora Borealis, check out 
1. 
2. Kakslauttanen, Finland — The 
Diving Blue Hole isn’t recommended for novices, but even the snorkeling around its shallow rim is said to be fantastic, with vibrant coral reef and a large variety of sea life at home in the crystal-clear water. For those with scuba experience to match their curiosity, the actual dive into Blue Hole is unlike any other. Surging down into dimmer and dimmer waters to a depth of 130-ish feet, you are surrounded by huge reef and hammerhead sharks navigating an array of immense, submerged stalactites. For all kinds of information about Blue Hole, including the story of its formation, click 
A Caye Caulker-based outfit called Raggamuffin runs a 
Planing, training, and busing my way south from Shanghai a couple weeks ago, I stopped for a rainy day in Yangshuo, a quaint backpackers’ town in Guangxi province. Looking back I easily could have spent two or three days exploring the area around Yangshuo, which abounds in stunning karst topography, caves, and two picturesque rivers that cradle the town.
light drizzle, and I stopped periodically to admire the landscape and watch as tourists on bamboo rafts were paddled lazily down the river. Sadly, despite draping myself ridiculously in tattered, lavender plastic to take pictures in the rain, most of my photos from the afternoon suffer from water droplets on the lens.
I hadn’t bought a map of the area, thinking that if I stayed within sight of the river, there was no way I could get lost. But many of the trails along the river were only a foot wide, and in the rain they became bogs too slippery to navigate. So I improvised a bit. In doing so, of course, I did get lost, but I’m awfully glad I did. With the rain getting heavier, my meanderings led me through a floating village, where canals crossed rectangular rice paddies and connected a handful of tiny shacks on stilts. A lady in an army-green jacket and conical hat led a water buffalo torso-deep through a canal to drink. At the moment, though, most of the villagers were huddled on a covered porch looking out at me, no doubt wondering why this rain-doused and mud-besmirched Caucasian was pushing his bike across their rock path, smiling dumbly toward them.
I packed up, checked out, and sprinted from my hotel, a blurry lavender streak on an otherwise empty street, to the Yuan Ming café for a cup of Yunnan coffee and a breakfast sandwich (both were delicious!). By the time I finished my meal the rain had eased up enough for a walk around town. I stopped into the market, where farmers and fisherman filled rows of stalls with gorgeous fruits and vegetables, live chickens pacing in cages, hanging slabs of newly butchered beef, pork, and goat meat, and buckets of swimming river fish, eels, snails, frogs, and turtles three-to-a-sack.