Bad Instincts, Phuket
Thailand has been easy travel, mostly. There are a dozen cheap seafood places, casual quayside dining, just outside of our bungalow hotel. The streets are terrible to walk, but you can (probably) flag down the local bus — a semi-covered mini-truck — and if you do, it’ll happily turn into a taxi if you’re going someplace off-route.
The language barrier is real, but somehow easy to forget; there are a lot of foreign tourists in Phuket, so communication by gesture is very common. But more than that, any error on our part is covered up so graciously that it’s genuinely difficult to identify expected behaviors. Our breakfast yesterday, for example, was a buffet we should have paid for in advance, but the attendant waved us in, invited us to eat, and bothered us not at all. Only on our request to pay did he personally escort us to the downstairs room, where the whole situation was discussed among the staff and made right.
Everybody smiles. We’re clearly too green to take the bus. It’s adorable that we’re trying. But nobody’s pushy about it, just amused.
And I do keep messing up, somehow. I almost threw out the paper proving me COVID-negative on the flight into Thailand. Andre somehow got his visa without paying for the required airport swab test. I failed to pay the quarantine-approved taxi driver until he came in to ask for the money, thinking he’d been hired by the quarantine-approved hotel. And then there was this morning.
We knew already that the bus doesn’t work like the apps say, but I can’t help trying. I stood by a roadside and eventually flagged one down, Lonely Planet’s textbook palm-down wave. Our intended destination (pronounced, re-pronounced, and shown on my phone screen) produced bemused discussion between our driver and the one other passenger from all the way down the bus for several minutes, but it actually worked: we arrived exactly where I wanted to.
It’s just, the bus transfer was next to this gorgeous park, and the GPS on my phone stopped working, and — I know, I’m supposed to be good at maps. But it seemed so straightforward that I didn’t really navigate. To be honest, I think I must have led a full circle through that park to get us moving in the direction we went. But I was feeling pretty proud about the bus, pretty confident at successfully crossing the scooter-mobbed streets.
We’d left hours early, because the swab appointment was important. The map looked right, until it didn’t. I had even emailed the testing agency to confirm that the swab center’s confusing address was the one by the aquarium, and gotten a yes. We were walking in full sun, and even with the sidewalk (rare), walking in Phuket is awful. But it really didn’t look very far.
We walked down the busy street, across the big intersection, beside the food stalls and mechanic shops and the store full of caged birds. We skirted the carts and buckets and parked scooters that filled the walking areas. We kept our reddening heads high traipsing an increasingly highway-like road.
I knew, innately, that we had walked much farther than the map showed, but I couldn’t argue with the road signs for the Phuket Aquarium, pointing the way we were going.
Finally, one of those Aquarium signs listed a distance: 8km. After an hour of walking. Something is wrong.
In a roadside noodle stall, a very kind young hijabi woman accepted my *waving around* “aquarium?”. She and her brother worked together to untangle our predicament and called us a taxi. She, her brother, and the taxi driver were astonished that anyone, especially a couple of foreigners, would ever have walked that far.
As I learned while waiting for the taxi, Phuket has two aquariums. One, the beautiful big one by the swab center, is called “Aquaria”. The other is down a long peninsula, in the company of nothing but resort hotels. That’s Phuket Aquarium, and to be honest, I never want to go. But after a twenty-minute sit in the plastic chairs, with a fan and a pretty-cold Coke, the taxi came to ferry us back to the tourist zone.
This isn’t a moral story, but leaving five hours early for my appointment was a good call. Jet-lagged-foreign-heat-exhausted is a special kind of stupid, and not the one you want while dealing with visa documents in a pandemic. Maybe next time I’ll start with the taxi — but knowing me, probably not.
Previous: Swab Appointment, Phuket Central Floresta | Next: Working from..
