After a short two hour flight, we arrive in the airport in Phuket and ride about an hour south to the Karon Beach area where we are lucky enough to spend six nights. There is a beach playground right outside our hotel which is the high rise building in the back of this photo. Our location was great we could walk to all the shops and restaurants.
On our walk we passed all the massage places, some even have these little fishtanks out front where you stick your feet in and the fish will chew off all your dead skin. Kelly and Charlie were the two brave ones that wanted to try it...Kelly has a great face. Charlie ended up doing it for about a minute!
The money is Thai Baht, Charlie calls it "Bart" and every time he says it we crack up. Kids loved getting a giant stack of bills to shop. The exchange rate is crazy.
Tons of swimming at the ocean and in lots of great pools, at our hotel and the sister hotel. The sister hotel had some nice Charlie friendly waterslides.
One night Greg and Charlie closed the pool and went to the pub, while the girls and I walked to the night market. Fabulous food there, one guy was even selling all kinds of cooked insects! The market was on the grounds of the temple and we got to see the monks chanting their evening prayers.
We took one day to go to the Phi Phi Islands, on a snorkeling trip. Katie was excited to snorkel in clear blue water. Sadly, the water was pretty rough and so our snorkeling was quick and not that enjoyable. The boat trip was a marathon day, overall we would rate it pretty poorly, islands were overcrowded with boats and people and the beaches were dirty, because of too many boats & people.
On the boat...
Snorkeling, with the ladies in Burkinis...
Just a small sample of the zillions of people on the beach!
Our first stop, "Maya Bay".
Our next stop, Monkey Island, we watched dumb tourists were feeding the monkeys peanuts (Charlie joined in) his excuse was that he is six...the adult tourists have NO excuse for feeding wild animals...this was hard to see after our time in Africa where everywhere they tell you NOT to feed monkeys!
The best part of the entire, long day is the great stories we all can tell about our fellow boaters, the guides, etc. We all start cracking up when Greg launches into descriptions of various people from the trip or when he imitates our guide and starts yelling, "red boat"....
We passed pictures of the King & Queen everywhere we went.
This was a school bus full of kids on their way home from school. The picture I missed was a similar bus full of boy scouts on their way to some outing in a similar bus!
Kelly lead the charge to go visit the Big Buddha which we could see high above the hills from our hotel room. We took a Tuk Tuk up there music blaring & lights flashing. We passed the places where you can take elephant rides or see the monkey show.
Charlie with the smaller golden Buddha, his favorite color is gold!
The Big Buddha is at the top of the hills and from the place you can see both sides of the peninsula of Phuket. There is a great breeze blowing and people purchase wind chime pieces to write a message on and hang. So it sounds amazing up there with all of the chimes going. Monks were also under the statue praying. The entire place was very peaceful and beautiful!
The Hughes kids signed a wind chime too and we had fun adding it to the collection.
A nice sign with what I thought was a good message...
One more view of the Buddha, girls had to borrow wraps to cover up their shorts that weren't long enough.
The view from the Tuk Tuk....the ride down was just as much fun as the ride up!
One thing I really wanted to do was take a cooking class and Kelly said she would do it with me...stay tuned, we had so many pictures it gets its own post!
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