Goodbye Khao Lak, Hello Phuket

While I was only staying in Thailand for eight days, Jess was moving digs to Phuket, for a change of pace and scenery.

We enjoyed our last breakfast at The Sands, I had a last swim in the pool and we finally bought one of the tiny cute ice creams they sold in front of the gym.

I forgot to take the photo before I bit off the ear.

It takes about two hours to get to Phuket’s Old Town from Khao Lak, so we left The Sands at about midday. Jess has been the organiser of the trip, and for once I get to play the travel princess, which has been very enjoyable! Although knowing someone else has all the info meant I asked her the same questions repeatedly and my brain did not retain anything. What a strange phenomenon!

Jess booked us a taxi through Grab, which is like Uber. The fancy Grab car cost the same as a regular car and it was amazing!

The interior had lights all over and even fancy tassels for the curtains

There was a bit of traffic on the way so we got to Jess’ hotel, the Mid Town Hotel, a bit later than expected. Rather unusually, it used to be a shopping mall, so the layout was kind of interesting.

After dumping our bags and turning on the aircon, we headed out into Old Phuket, which has Portuguese history and beautiful architecture. It was a little New Orleans, Nottingham Hill and Bangkok all rolled into one.

Our first stop, for something fun to do, was a Japanese icecream place that did a weird noodle-shaped topping on icecream in a cone.

We got to watch the guy do the noodles and wondered what on earth they were made from before Jess googled it. Turns out they’re a ‘Mount Blanc’ dessert, invented in Paris 100 years ago and loved by the Japanese. The strands are made of flavoured chestnut paste!

We must, must remember to save our energy for the evenings next time! The afternoon was so hot and humid, I couldn’t stand being in the sun. We walked through some cooler market alleys and then Jess navigated us to an air conditioned coffee shop for a drink while we worked out somewhere to go for dinner.

Markets getting started. Not too busy at 5pm

Jess found a restaurant that was almost in view of the coffee shop and we went to see if it was a decent temperature.

The wait staff kindly put on the aircon for us and we gladly sat in the gorgeous decor: the place had been described online as having a French influence. It had a cement floor but the decor was all teal velvet drapes and cushions, marble tabletops and purple walls with giant disco balls revolving slowly. I loved it!

We had some simple but delicious Thai food and then walked back to the hotel and lay in the aircon. Jess has definitely not suffered anywhere near as badly as I have with the temperature and humidity, which I think is exacerbated by the city environment (and not having a pool handy) and possibly perimenopause.

Despite the discomfort, I really liked what I saw of Phuket. I don’t know why I’d previously imagined it as a soulless tourist trap. The markets did have stalls selling lots of the same things over and over, but I could imagine coming here with a group of friends and having an amazing time just visiting all the fun and unusual bars and restaurants. Being a pride month, this really is a good time to come. I think we missed the initial celebrations by one day, I’m not sure if they have a parade to kick it off.

I took a Grab car to the airport and arrived in plenty of time. After throwing away my water bottle at security, I bought some water for the plane then they had a second security set up as we boarded and I had to throw away the new bottle, which I wasn’t happy about. I read later there had been some bomb threats in Phuket in the previous two days. I don’t know how a clear bottle of water bought in the cafe inside the airport was a threat but there you go.

Jess hadn’t cancelled her return flight as it was part of a package so I had an empty seat next to me – what a luxury! I slept most of the at home, caught the Skybus then a train and was home around lunchtime. Luke was working from home so he picked me up, made me a sandwich and then I went to bed and slept for another five hours.

A rare gang of yellow-tailed black cockatoos were destroying a pine tree when I got off the train at Heathmont. So cute but so violent!

Corch and Leah’s favourite restaurant, the Afghan Kitchen, was closing down so they brought over a feast for dinner and it was lovely to catch up with them. Kat and Luke had saved two weeks of the Saturday quiz and we did them while we had dessert. Trivia with friends – one of my favourite things!

I slept for another six or so hours then it was time to get up, go back to the airport and fly to Queensland! More about that in the next post 🙂 .

26Jun2025

Jess and Amanda In Thailand, days 2-5

by Miss Penny Black

One of the best things about staying at an Asian resort is the breakfast buffet.

The buffet at our resort starts at 6:30 and our body clocks are several hours behind Thai time, which meant we are usually first seated in the best spot in the ‘adults only’ zone by 7am.

The food that Jess and I choose is a venn diagram with almost no overlap. Jess chooses a selection of toasts and jam then a bowl of yogurt and porridge, while I go for curry, eggs, bacon, salad, rice noodles…. literally a bit of everything else.

The coffee and tea cups at resorts are always tiny so I took one of my keep cups so I could make a bigger drink. It has the added benefit of being able to make a coffee then take it away and put it in the bar fridge in the room (I like cold coffee) for later in the day.

After the first few of days of buffet madness (first breakfast at 6:30 then second breakfast at 10:00 after yoga) , we’ve taken pity on our stomachs and slept in for longer and gone for only one breakfast today.

Our package with Luxury Escapes includes the daily breakfast, two other meals during our stay, two massages each, plus one free-flow cocktail hour every day. There’s two cocktail hours to choose from, one from 3-4 at the pool outside our room, and one from 6-7 near the main restaurant.

Map of the resort with our room where the red arrow points. The dark blue in the centre is a lake, not a pool. The aqua wing is where most of the families are most of the time. The resort is really well set out and keeps he kids

We’ve done most of our cocktail hours at the bar near our room, not only because it’s convenient, but also because we’ve become friendly with the bar staff there. They are very lively and we talk to one of the guys, Ton, who helps us learn Thai. So far we have mainly learned how to order a drink and explain how many drinks will lead to us being sick.

Cocktails aside, We did a language class on our second full day and Gabriel, the teacher, took us through some basic Thai phrases.

We have been practicing phrases and adding to our notes. Thai people are very kind and encouraging about us using as many words as we can.

We have done two yoga classes and also a fruit carving class!

We made tomato roses, cucumber leaves and carrot… tulips? The carrot was the hardest. Tomorrow we’re going to take the tiny carving knives that we were given as part of the class to breakfast and do the Michelin plate challenge, which is where you try to plate up buffet food to look like it came from a fancy restaurant. Then you get a member of staff to judge which is best.

Jess’ highlights so far:

Mango pudding

Warmer pool water (it was kind of cold when we first arrived)

Learning Thai, doing yoga and fruit carving

Having food made for her!

22Jun2025

Jess and Amanda In Thailand, 21/06/2025

by Miss Penny Black

In the winter holidays last year, everyone at my school went to Bali or Thailand or somewhere sunny, so Jess and I booked a mid year holiday this year so we could be two of the snow birds flying north for some warmth and an extended mid year break.

Come July, the situation is not quite what we anticipated, with me being on a year long leave from work and spending a lot of time driving back and forth from Orange frequently (Mum died at the end of last year and Dad was diagnosed with dementia), but Jess has earned her tropical break and I’m looking forward to some cocktails by the pool and breathing some dense, humid air. Inhaling smoke from Dad’s wood fire in his shed has given me pretty severe asthma, so I’m seeing this trip as a medical necessity. If I’d asked a doctor I’m sure it’s what they would have ordered.

We are staying 8 days at The Sands, Khao Lak, which is an hour north of Phuket.

Jess and I have both been to Thailand before but not this area. For a while I was looking forward to seeing sunsets but the weather looks to be overcast at the least and thunderstorms at the worst but that’s fine, it probably means the resort will be quieter.

Luke got up before 7am to take Jess and I to the station with our meagre luggage – we’ve both opted for carry-on only. No checked baggage! Going to the tropics for a week or two really doesn’t require much stuff.

From Ringwood we took the 7:15 train, then the Sky Bus from the city to the airport.

We were a few minutes early for check in (just the way we like it) then calmly sailed up to the security check point where I had not one, but TWO knives confiscated, since I’d brought a wooden picnic set of cutlery and not looked to see that there was a small metal knife along with a bamboo one in the set. The embarrassment!

We booked our trip through Luxury Escapes which, despite the name, combines a resort deal for 8 nights with the most bare-bones of Jetstar flights. No meals included! I brought a pile of snacks and Jess bought a toasted sandwich on the plane.

We both bought puzzle books in the airport (I *am* in my 50th year, after all) and spent most of the flight happily solving sudoku and arrow words.

Our first flight was pretty much full and we had the window and middle seat, with a tiny old lady wrapped in black clothing sitting on the other side of me. Fortunately she liked to get up pretty frequently so would get up too and have a stretch. The Jetstar plane had a USB port at each seat, so my deep fear of running out of battery on my phone was, once again, proved unnecessary.

Jess and I have a mini book club project on this trip. We each chose a novel and we are going to read chapters concurrently. I chose ‘Mania’ by Lionel Shriver, which we are reading first because I didn’t download Jess’ book ‘Ministry of Time’ by Kaliane Bradley. On the plane we read the first couple of chapters of Mania which, as I suspected, has plenty to discuss in it already.

After 8 hours we landed in a Singapore without delay or incident, and found the food court in the delightfully decorated and spacious Changi Airport. With only two hours between flights we didn’t have time to see any of the big gardens or the butterfly house, but what we did see was lovely.

At the gate Jess. noticed these rather anatomically-suggestive chairs and insisted on a photo.

The next flight was two hours and we were surrounded by a large Russian family. The dad’s seat was next to us but there were several empty rows, so before the plane took off he moved several rows away from his wife who was next to us and three kids who were in the row behind us. It was great to have an empty seat, but what an ass.

When the lights dimmed for take off we had our overhead light on so we could do puzzles and one of the kids in the seat behind asked me if we would turn it off so they could sleep. I just can’t imagine a time in my life where I would’ve had the confidence to ask a stranger who is clearly at least 30 years older than me to do me a favour like that! Obviously I said no.

We got into Phuket airport 2 whole minutes early and found the Luxury Escapes people in the pick up bay. There were a lot of people milling around but we ended up with a lovely new minibus to ourselves. the drive to the resort was an hour in the driving rain, but the roads looked pretty new and there was no traffic.

Highlights the first day:

Jess has said about five times that buying the friction erasable pens for the puzzle books was a game-changer (pun intended).

No travel hiccups and no waiting for baggage carousels.

Cheap food in Changi – Jess’ dinner was only $3!

Seeing Jess get excited about travel stuff that I don’t think about, like the condensation thing that happens on some planes – we googled it and it’s to do with the aircon system in the cabin when it starts up.

The novelty of the thick air and smells of the tropics.

Down sides:

Being exhausted and having dry skin and eyes after so long in aircraft.

I don’t know why this picture of our room won’t load properly but it’ll have to do. We are on the ground floor and our room opens onto some grass then the swim-up bar. Fun!

3Nov2018

Lamai Beach

by Miss Penny Black

I am writing this from home, having discovered that the last two posts I wrote about Lamai (our last stop) have disappeared. This means that several paragraphs of me complaining about Justin Bieber on high (and I mean HIGH) rotation in every hotel, restaurant and bar in Thailand will just have to be done without – sad, I know. It honestly seemed as though some governing body in Thailand had issued the same 10 track CD to every likely establishment in the country and by the end of our three weeks I thought seriously about sticking a fork in my ears.

Lamai Beach

Audio-torture aside, we had a nice time during our last week. Lamai is a beach just south of the more famous Chaweng Beach, which runs down the eastern side of Koh Samui. This was our third trip to the island and we had decided to try Lamai as it seemed a bit quieter – the parade of hawkers, spherical and sunburned eurotrash, and whizzing jet skis of course has it’s charms (in terms of cautionary tales, perhaps) but we’d heard good things about Lamai.

Lovely lush tropical gardens in our resort.

We definitely experienced quiet. In the evenings the beach was almost deserted as it was the low season and some of the bars and restaurants were completely closed. Despite this, our resort (The Pavilion) was at least half full and there were families and groups out on the beach throughout the day. Only one jet ski at a time seemed to be in operation too, so that was also something.

Lamai main street.

A big sign on the beach warned that it was jellyfish season so I did get in the sea a couple of times but tried to keep Luke between myself and the open water.

On our second last night I made the mistake of looking up the kinds of jellyfish and related incidents to be found locally and scared myself out of going back in. Fortunately the hotel pool was perfectly fine – although Luke wasn’t happy that it had not been heated to bath temperatures.

We ate out every night and enjoyed a great number of 70-140 baht cocktails. If you’re heading to the area we highly recommend Pik’s Bar. They have a list of 140 cocktails and they’re all the equivalent of $3 AUD each.

Pik’s Bar

Lea decided Pina Coladas were the best thing since sliced bread and after her first we barely saw her without one in her hand, even at breakfast! Just kidding, of course. We didn’t usually start drinking until we’d spent at least 8 hours reading books on our sun loungers.

Our only activity, apart from eating, swimming, reading, and drinking, was watching the local gang of dogs wrestle each other up and down the beach. A form of entertainment familiar to everyone who has ever been to the coast of Thailand.

We became quite familiar with the pack and one morning I found one of them (who looked a bit like our old dog Penny) asleep on the walkway right outside our room. After that I bought a little packet of dog treats from the 7-11 and handed them out whenever they came near.

We did find a few really lovely places to eat in Lamai, one of which wasn’t Thai (all the Thai places are excellent, mind you) called Emporio Caffè.

The proprietor and chef was an Italian fellow from Rome who made the pasta by hand and shared some of his grappa and limoncello with us. The pasta was outstanding and so of course we went back two nights later. Although it was a very simple cafe it had the typical frescos. If you find yourself in Lamai be sure to go!

Luke and I left Samui on a very early flight and spent a night at the Novotel in Bangkok before a daytime flight back to Melbourne. I ended up with a headache from watching three movies and the entire available catalogue of Big Bang Theory (it’s the show I watch when there’s nothing better to watch) and disembarked at about 8:30pm to find Melbourne airport the busiest we’d ever seen it.

The lady managing the extensive Sky Bus queue told the people in line that the trouble was that the Cox Plate (a prestigious horse race), Pax (a games convention) and a Taylor Swift concert were all happening on the same weekend.

Once we got into the city we discovered that in fact the Taylor Swift concert had just emptied out from the stadium beside the station and there were crowds five deep to get onto the trains. We ended up standing up for the 50 minutes it took to get home and then walked the last kilometre. The guy at the local kebab stand spied us walking past (this was at almost midnight) and asked Luke if we were going hiking.

Arriving home was a bit weird. Last time we’d come back we’d had a house full of people and Penny to greet us. This time it was more like letting ourselves into another Airbnb. Luke had paid for professional cleaners to go through the house before we returned and they’d cleaned some things well – and some things not so well. A lot of our belongings were in boxes as friends had lived in the house while we’d been gone.

We lay down on a mattress in the spare room, turned out the light, and agreed solemnly that really, there’s no place like home.

Pik’s Bar

19Oct2018

Chiang Mai, Thailand: A Day At The Elephant Nature Sanctuary.

by Miss Penny Black

This was our first trip to Chiang Mai and I hadn’t heard a bad word about it from anyone – but I also didn’t really know what to expect either, except for markets, markets and more markets. My only goal for the week was to find a decent tailor and Lea wanted to spend a day with elephants.

Flying into Chiang Mai was certainly more impressive than landing in smoggy Bangkok. Big green hills covered in tropical forest sit quite close to city and, for the second largest city in Thailand, it has a relatively small airport and few tall buildings.

We caught a taxi to our hotel – Rimping Village. Sitting just over the Ping River from the heart of the city, the hotel had quiet and green grounds and a decent sized pool sheltered by an enormous rubber tree that was filled with epiphytes.

The hotel grounds were full of orchids of various colours, shapes and sizes as well as several frangipani trees. A little oasis in a very busy city.

One of the first Chiang Mai icons we became familiar with was the Iron Bridge (locals pronounce it ‘eye-ron’, this is important to know when telling a taxi driver where to go!), which didn’t look at that impressive to us by day but certainly attracted hordes of self-taking teenagers and fishermen at night. It also just seemed, despite being quite narrow, to be a place to just hang out. People of all ages draped themselves like wet socks over the rails as soon as dusk descended.

While the locals assured us it was winter (ha!) and did indeed walk around in jeans and jackets, it was still 34 degrees during the day and felt about 40 if you were out in the sun in the breeze-less city. We mostly stuck to the pool during the day and wandered out at night.

The Elephant Nature Park

This was our only whole day, relatively expensive, excursion in Chiang Mai. There are many elephant parks around the city but this one is exceptional as a refuge for elderly, injured, and mistreated animals (dogs, cats, buffalo, horses and more as well) and the respect and love the staff have for the animals is evident everywhere. If you are thinking of visiting an elephant sanctuary I highly recommend this one.

We were picked up at 8:30 from our hotel and our group of six for the day included a nice couple from the UK – Duncan and Fiona. During the hour’s drive out into the forest we watched a video on the rules of how to behave around elephants – most of which we ended up breaking at some point during the day.

Our guide was a funny young man named Dave whose love of elephants became more and more obvious as the day progressed. He told us about his favourite elephant dying recently of old age and how, for weeks after, he could not talk about him without crying.

Our first stop was a walk along a forest track with three female elephants. Dave and the mahouts gave us bags of bananas and sugar cane to put in the elephants’ trunks. It was a bit intimidating as they could almost eat them faster than we could get them out of the bags and being followed closely by a hungry elephant is quite a memorable experience.

Pete is pestered by a persistent pachyderm.

Next was a tasty vegetarian lunch in a hut where we waited for the next group of elephants.

We helped prepare food for elephants who were on a high-calorie diet after being semi-starved by their previous owners who wanted to keep the elephants small to make it seem that they were younger than they really were – younger elephants can be sold for more money.

We chopped up watermelon and made balls of rice and dried fruit that had to be put directly into the elephants’ mouths so they didn’t fall apart.

Apparently elephants don’t have to wait an hour after eating before going for a swim as we went straight to the river and got in with buckets so we could splash water all over the elephants. One went out into the deepest part of the river and completely submerged itself and rolled around. I was very glad to have my reef shoes for this part of the day as submerged and slippery rocks were a bit of a hazard.

To get to the main camp we got into rubber boats and did a little bit of white-water rafting down the river, passing some bathing elephants along the way.

The Elephant Nature Park lets most of its elephants roam free around the reserve with their mahouts, who are there to protect and help feed them. Newcomers are restricted to the inner grounds and sleep overnight in shelters with sand heaps(for lying against), water and four nightly feedings.

Dave with one of the oldest elephants at the park. I think she was in her 80s!

It was interesting to learn that the elephants at the park choose their mahouts rather than the other way round. Some mahouts come with their elephants to the park and some meet when they arrive. All the mahouts seem to spend most of the day lying in little cabana shelters or wandering next to their elephant. It would have been very interesting to talk to one of them about their job.

The last thing we did was walk around the sanctuary and see the newer or more injured elephants. One was completely blind thanks to a cruel owner’s punishment. Another had a deformed foot after stepping on a land mine. While the stories at the ENP are often tragic, it is heartening that places like this exist and so many people come to volunteer their time to take care of the animals.

An incredible and emotional day that we all enjoyed!

To finish, here are a few of the gorgeous dogs that are up for adoption should anyone visit the sanctuary and want to take them home.

Every one of the 600+ dogs at the sanctuary is named and many are adopted by people in other countries, especially Britain. No surprise to me after seeing all the dogs in the UK!