Thai High

Beach festivals, spectacular shows, nights which never wind up, streets overflowing with revellers…and Phuket is supposed to be subdued after the tsunami devastation, says Madhavankutty Pillai

Patong

The name of our guide is 'O'. I ask him to spell it, assuming that that it would be 'Oh', 'Oah' or something along those lines. 'O', he spells it out.

I ask him what it means.

"It means nothing. What does A, B, or C mean?" he counters.

To which I have no reply and so, I lie back on the spacious seat of the bus and get to terms with a man being named after an alphabet.

O speaks English like Thai and does many unusual things to it. In his tongue, R disappears. Fire becomes fly, going becomes goawinng, tomorrow is tomillow in O's dialect. Some of us are amused by this.

"O, say Krabi," says one.

"Kaabi," says O.

Often, he decides to do away with the Ls.

And so, "O, say Hilton." and "Hinton," he says.

He makes English into the language of long lyrical drawls, as Thai seems to me from the spatterings that I hear and gather. O is also a good guide and measures his words slowly, repeating them to get the message across - inflexions, stresses, drawls, missing Rs all included.

Patong Beach

As he continues his commentary, having picked us up from Phuket airport, I look out of the window and see the island flashing by. Phuket is 49 kilometres end to end, made up of mountains and beaches, both of which make themselves apparent as we negotiate wide empty roads to the hotel. A signboard for a dog school catches my eye and then there's another school but this one is for monkeys. There is even a Dog Hotel. "Dogs only friend of many old Europeans here," says O. They therefore spend up to 30,000 baht, or about Rs 33,000 to send them to school for three months. The monkey school is to teach monkeys to break coconuts. The big farms usually employ them.

Patong beach appears as a flash of white. "The beaches here have become cleaner after the tsunami, the sands have become whiter, the waters clearer," says O. This is a refrain I hear again and again from different sources, as if the Thais want to see at least some positive side to the devastation.

That's the reason I am here. I and 800 others who Thai Tourism have gathered from all over the world to show how the region, southern Thailand or the Andaman sea-coast, has recovered after the tsunami of December 26, 2004. Of that 800, in the van are about 30 of us, Indians all, from the media and travel trade.

Fantasy Of A Kingdom, a cultural illusion show in FantaSea

At the hotel we are greeted with orchid garlands. The Thavorn Palm Beach Resort is vintage Phuket. It has a beach to its rear and facing it is a panorama of mountains. After a hurried check in, we are called to do an obligatory round of Phuket. We start off with lunch at the Patong area. As we reach there, O's voice resonates in the bus offering titbits about the tsunami - "Level of sea high at this spot", "this lake become salty", "Tourists…Scandinavians…leave…now they come back", "I in hotel…I just running when tsunami happen", "Kalong beach...this ridge high here…no problem of tsunami...only some restaurants damaged."

All in all, I gather most of Phuket is back to normal and now, if only the tourists would return.

Lunch time and a time for irony. Having come half a continent away, by some logic, we are taken, of all places, to an Indian restaurant in Thailand. It is called Navrang Mahal, and rests quaintly at the edge of a side street. It is not as if there were an absence of choices. In that half street, I can read restaurant names offering cuisines from all over the world. Grill House, Denmark Steff Houberg, Forno A Legna, Da Mario, Eurasian Restaurant, Viking Restaurant & Bar, Rumditan Fondue & Steak House and so on and so forth. But we eat the excellent chicken curry and fish fry of Navrang Mahal. And since it is excellent, we go for second helpings.

Karon Beach, Phuket

We are then taken to a Buddhist temple in a place called Chalong, where you can make your requests, if you are the believing sort. It is in fact a complex with a number of buildings, one of them housing the Tooth Relic of the Buddha. I go inside one of the doors, where there are three idols of monks on whose body, devotees stick golden foils. A woman rattles fortune sticks in a vase, one of which comes out. She reads it intensely, but it is hard to decipher from her impassive face whether the bodings are good or bad. It is hot like a furnace and many of us are dancing since we have removed our footwear before stepping inside. When I return to the bus, a man is holding a photo of mine, all framed up. I don't even know when he shot it. He wants me to buy it for 50 Baht. I decline the offer.

Evening now and we go back to the hotel and then hurriedly return for the night show. Venue - FantaSea, billed as the ultimate cultural theme park. I am a little in the dark about the programme. As soon as we get out of the bus, some coupons are thrust in my hands and I am told that I can play about four or five games. Food, booze is on the house. So I play and run through my coupons in the shooting gallery. I win nothing and feel like a gambler who's just bet his shirt away. I have also lost the rest of the group and after some aimless wandering, I finally meet some of them and then enter the biggest banquet hall that I have ever seen in my life. It is called The Golden Kinnaree Buffet Restaurant and can seat about 4000. Food done, I am told that there is a show - a cultural show. The theatre is in the same proportions as the restaurant, except that this gives the illusion of being in the woods. The show begins and though I fail to comprehend much of the narrative, the spectacle is well, spectacular. Elephants doing a march past, sets which change from battlescenes to the rural, clowns, magic tricks, love songs, laser lights which weave their patterns in the air before you…it is a stunning show, for the sheer scale of engineering that must have gone into it. Suddenly, there are orchids falling from the sky and these are real flowers. Two women, Japanese by the looks of it, in the row before us, add their own element to the show. One of them picks up a clump of flowers and throws it straight to a man sitting two rows ahead. He turns back but there is no way he can know who's the culprit. But the women are not through. Missile after missile of orchid flowers finds its way to the back of the man's head. However a lady sitting next to me, has had enough of it. She picks up some flowers and throws it with full force onto the Japanese who are sitting bang in front of her. Suddenly, there are orchids flying in all directions.

It is the next afternoon, and we are going shopping to TESCO Lotus supermarket. "Only two seasons in Phuket - rainy and hot. Best time to visit, December, January," O keeps repeating. The sun beats down hard and it is very hot. There are five shopping centres in Phuket but TESCO's is the cheapest. I have nothing to buy and jump from row to row of endless goods. Many of us buy many things - some verging on the absurd. One buys cooking pans, another woman buys underwear for her child. I can't see how these are cheaper than, say Mumbai rates. Suddenly, there is a sound which rises in tempo and the more I hear it, the more I like it. It is the patter of rain. I step outside and see the sky dark as night and it is a torrent which is coming down.

Patong Beach in Phuket

The very same night, we head off to Patong beach for the beach festival. This is our first real feel of the beach (distant views excluded) and it's about as much as I will get of it for the rest of my tourney. The place is alive, crowded and the night is like day. Or so it seems to me. Those who have been here before say that it is subdued now. It looks nothing like that to me. After dinner, we go to see the nightlife. First stop is Taipan nightclub. It is darkly lit, there is live hard rock music playing and lots of Europeans, some accompanied by Europeans and others who have the local escorts. Right in front of us, a Thai woman is sitting on the lap of one of them. They are hugging and while he is enjoying the moment, her eyes are firmly fixed on the soccer match in the mini-television. Some of us have a quick couple of drinks and then we head towards Tiger Entertainment. It is a series of bars, on whose counters there are girls dancing. No waiters, only waitresses here. It is almost like a suburban local and you can't move without bumping into a Thai girl. It reminds me of dance bars in Mumbai, except that here the girls outnumber the customers by double at least. The girls are cheery with their come-on smiles. We return late to the hotel in a tuk tuk, the local rickshaw.

Ta Noad Beach in Krabi

We are done with Phuket and the next morning head towards Krabi on roads, which look like they have been dry cleaned. Limestone cliffs, the trademark of Krabi, soon come one after another, with their sheer drops, as if someone had shaved one side of it off. Krabi, unlike Phuket, is the place to down chill pills. There are plenty of super-scenic spots, but you won't find the debauchery of a Taipan here. And it is even quieter still after the tsunami. As the general manager of Pavilion Queen's Bay Resort tells me, occupancies are ranging in the 10 to 20 per cent levels as against the 70 to 80 per cent it should have been in normal circumstances.

Again, we do the mandatory sightseeing tour, starting off with Susaan Hoi, which is a shell cemetery containing fossils which are about 75 million years old. The perennial shoppers head towards the souvenir shops even before taking a dekko of the shells, which are embedded 'in slabs of shelly limestone'. Then we move to another spot, Tiger Cave (no relation to Tiger Entertainment; in fact, far from it), where the embalmed body of a monk tries to stare me down from a glass enclosure. That is about as much of Krabi as time will permit us to see. The next morning after a hurried foot massage which makes me regret that I didn't go for a full body massage, we take off for home. From Krabi, we fly to Bangkok and from Bangkok, as the plane takes off for Mumbai, before we touch the clouds, I see the lights below glittering like some star city.