Floating Mosques and Crooked Cops in Phuket

After deciding we wanted a taste of the Thai island experience, we booked tickets to Phuket and invited Zhou to join us. The plane left the sprawling mass that was Bangkok and an hour later I faded back into consciousness as we descended into a landscape littered with green islands, blue water, and steep cliffs. We found a hostel barely 500 meters from the small terminal, which was the first time I can remember leaving an airport on foot. There was a national park with a beach just a short walk away, and we watched the clock slowly tick the minutes towards 5:00 pm so we could get some beers. The beach was wonderfully quiet and clean, and we watched a spectacular sunset over the Indian Ocean. Watching the sunset on a Sunday night was evidently a risky move, however, as we barely found a place that was open for dinner in the commercial area of the small town.

This part of Thailand, closer to Malaysia than to Bangkok, is much less Buddhist than the north and has a sizable Muslim population. There were plenty of women in hijabs (but nothing more conservative) and skullcapped men with small chin-beards – the most facial hair that most Thais can grow. Signs at some intersections depict such a man welcoming visitors in Malaysian and Arabic, a far cry from the north. The other major minority on the island is Russians, who still exist in sizable numbers despite the currency collapse and cessation of direct Aeroflot flights. On the second day, we joined a boat tour of some of the islands in the bay, and were immediately faced with a Kazakh boy watching Russian Minecraft videos on the van that picked us up.

The boat had a Thai tour guide speaking English in addition to a Russian one, who was interestingly wearing a Ukrainian trident necklace. It briefly poured as we exited the gorgeous marina full of yachts, which would not have been out of place in California. Before we left, they made us take an “insurance photo” in our groups, which they of course tried to sell us at the end of the day. The boat was fast and loud, and before long we were cruising through Phang Nga Bay towards our first island.

We boarded a boat doubling as a national park office and got into an inflatable canoe. The three of us plus our guide Charlie were packed like sardines, but at least he did all the paddling. We passed through some alarmingly narrow caves and had to duck and tuck our knees in. We emerged to cruise through lakes that were completely surrounded by the island, with some spectacular rock formations overhead. It was a slightly more tropical version of Ha Long Bay.

The next stop was Khao Phing Kan, known as James Bond Island because it was featured in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974). There was a very distinctive rock column, which really looked like Ha Long Bay, and some beautiful green mountains.

The most interesting stop was Panyee, an island with 2,000 Muslim residents. They have one of those factory restaurants to feed hundreds of tourists at a time, but we had some time to wander around the island. Incredibly, Arab-style marble flooring and white lighting had made its way to this restaurant, but not to the country’s Buddhist areas. The houses were all brightly colored and propped up on stilts, with concrete walkways between them. The island’s school has the best view of any educational institution I have ever seen, but the teachers were wearing full military uniforms for some reason. Just beyond was a soccer field made out of some kind of foam floating on the water. If the attrition rate was anything like my elementary school, the consumption of soccer balls here must be off the charts. At the edge of the island was a beautiful mosque, with an Arabic inscription my phone curiously translated as “you have no rights”.

We returned to the boat and spent the rest of the afternoon sipping beers on a beach with music in five languages playing simultaneously. After collecting our bags, we walked back to the airport to catch a bus to the main town, which shares a name with the island and is 40 km from the airport. The bus was excruciatingly slow and stopped for gas midway through the trip, but we eventually made it to a hostel in Phuket. The hostel manager Nee was so high-energy she seemed like she was on crack, and invited us to have a drink with some of her friends. One of the friends was a DJ and a bartender, and fixed us “Thai mojitos” – tea-flavored vodka, lime, and salt.

Selfies and Protection Money

The nicest hotel in town serves an absolutely enormous breakfast buffet for 250 baht ($7). The food wouldn’t win any awards, but it would carry me through the day. Despite being on the water, the town of Phuket has no beaches, so we had to rent scooters to ride to the beach. We had barely ridden 300 meters when we encountered a police checkpoint and were asked for our licenses. Both of us had English-language licenses with motorcycle permits, but the cops wanted a bogus International Driver Permit and fined us 500 baht ($15) each. It seemed like the entire town had been fined, as there were dozens of people in line to pay a single officer with a purse. The reverse side of the fine said that I could pay it at a bank or an ATM, but the corrupt cops were adamant that I pay it then and there. “Pay 500 now or you’ll pay 1000 at the beach checkpoint”. This was total bullshit, but they were not going to budge. I called them criminals and signed the receipt “fuck you ACAB”.

A quick ride over some hills brought us to the beach at Patong, where we met up with a few women staying at our hostel. Chief among them was Silvia, a German who was fluent in 6 European languages and conversational in 4 Southeast Asian ones. She’s one of those travel vloggers who have never had a proper job, but she had great stories about her time as a model in Pakistan. Like a good travel influencer, however, she spent the majority of her time posing for photos to add to her 2,600 Instagram posts, and seemed to not know how to swim.

The beach was nice, but we were pestered non-stop by people trying to sell us things. Sunscreen, beer, jet skiing, fruit, prostitution – you name it, there was someone selling it. Right in front of us was a landing site for parasailing, which provided endless entertainment. The pilots wore no harnesses or life jackets, and would simply launch themselves upwards to sit on the ropes. Most of their landings were very smooth, but one nearly landed in a palm tree and the ropes practically snapped the tree in half barely 10 meters from where we were sitting.

We rode over the hills and got caught in some bad traffic. None of the schools have buses or parking lots, so when they all let out simultaneously the town becomes gridlock. We got dinner with a surprise dessert of rambutan, which looks a lot more exotic than it tastes. Not eager to repeat the bus ride from the previous night, we managed to get a massive van to drive us there for 600 baht ($18). The driver let us blast EDM as he was texting a supposedly Filipina girl on Facebook. He claimed that she was coming to town the next day, but Zhou was certain it was a Chinese catfish. The only girls he would never mess with, he said, were Israeli military girls. “They will cut my dick; very dangerous.”

The VietJetAir flight attendants treated us like 5-year-olds again on a plane that was still painted in a Wow Air livery. The dissonance between the Icelandic text and the Thai safety demonstration which started with the line “this is your seatbelt” was stark, but there were no complaints from us as we made it to Bangkok with 4 minutes to spare for the last train before midnight.

Thailand had been a blast, and a true traveler’s paradise. Beautiful nature, delicious food, colorful nightlife, a bustling city, reasonable prices – this country had it all, and thanks to the recent reopening and the monsoon, we didn’t have to compete with the normal masses of tourists for it. Apart from the disastrous traffic lights, the one major thing that was starting to get on my nerves was actually something I had been warned about in Mumbai – the way Thais talk to tourists. Locals, and especially women, have the incredibly irritating habit of ending every sentence with a stretched-out syllable and an exaggerated upwards lilt, sometimes adding “-ka” to phrases like “thank you-ka” or “goodbye-ka” for good measure, with the effect of making one feel like a 5-year-old. The next destination would be quite a bit further off the backpacking path, and I was excited for the change in scenery.