The Vacation (2)

I went Phuket for the first time last week and it was horrifying (except for the sex, of course).

It was way too over-hyped. Everything was too pricey for a ‘Thailand’ branding. What ever happened to the supposedly cheap and good deals? Totally non-existent. Food price were about the same as Singapore’s. A 15min tuk-tuk ride cost 400 baht. Tours and sea sports activities costs 1.5 times of that in Koh Samui.

We bought local tours from the hotel tour agency and ended up quarrelling badly with the boss. Never a fan of exploiting animals for tourism purposes, we mentioned specifically that we did not want a program with monkeys and elephants shows. We just wanted sea sports and ATV. So he offered us rafting (5 km) and ATV (60 mins) and we happily paid for it. But on the day of the tour, we realised that he had put us on a different tour – one that has rafting and ATV(a mere 30 minutes), as well as watching monkeys and elephants.

Blood boil.

I don’t really understand how enjoyable it is to watch animals behave as though they are in a circus. I saw elephants who had their ears pierced just so that the human-beings can poke a stick through the holes to control their movements. Some elephants were obviously injured from all the poking. Fuck the human beings. We were also told to have some elephant trekking activities for 30 minutes, where we were supposed to sit on the elephants to tour the jungle a little. Hated that. Animals or humans – we are all equal. What makes humans think that the animals should ferry us around?

Obviously as the born and bred Singaporeans, we made a fuss to the tour agency. We complained about how it wasn’t the program that we had paid for, and also how we had actually paid a premium for the supposedly more adventurous program. We demanded them to give us our original program, but as the Thai guide loyally put it, “I have to listen to my boss. You just have to follow this program and then talk to your hotel tour agency when you get back.”

Fuck them all. Eventually when we got back to the hotel and kicked another fuss, we got back some compensation in the form of free airport transfer. But still, we hated how the tour went. They actually trained monkeys to ask for tips from tourists, when it’s fucking obvious where the tips went to. Don’t think it’s meant for buying more bananas for monkeys. Argh.

We also quarrelled with the hotel staff because apparently, their service sucked. It came as a surprise because during our past visits to Thailand, we had always been impressed with how hospitable Thais are. When we asked for an international adaptor, the staff were fucking rude. They said the adaptors had all been loaned out and when we asked when the next adaptor will be available, they replied by saying ‘don’t know’. They didn’t even bother to verify when those guests would be checking out of their rooms. When pressed for an answer, the manager itself simply said, ‘Tomorrow’. But the adaptor never showed up in the room. In a similar disturbing way, they forgot about our morning calls and we almost missed the bus for our tour. Screw them all.

To top it all, the weather was freaking hot. I religiously applied my SPF50 sunblock every now and then but I still managed to get a very dark tan. It’s really weird to sport a tan in Hong Kong where the climate is still very much winter. And oh, I neglected applying sunblock to my feet and it looks especially dirty now because of the dark pigments. Not to mention the rashes that I had from excessive sun exposure. FML.