Starting in Karon, Phuket

It is hard to believe that it’s already been a week since we left. It feels like we’ve already been gone for ages. But so far, we’ve enjoyed every minute of our time here…

After a somewhat grueling 20 hours of travel, and a late arrival in Phuket, we spent our first two nights at the Dewa Phuket Beach Resort, a lovely little sanctuary in the northern part of the island that is close to the airport and right next to Nai Yang beach. By day, we worked on getting acclimated (average temperatures here range around 30 degrees celsius), checking VoIP (= Voice over Internet Protocol, a technology for calls we are using), seeing if we could actually get our jobs done and our business systems to work, and generally getting oriented. I have a very bad habit of never preparing too much in advance for places I’m traveling to (we usually book the first night at our destination, and then play the rest by ear), so I also started hunkering down on the lay of the land to figure out what we might see during our time here.

A whole lot of “firsts” followed: walks on the beach, food from stalls along the roadside, massages. Having been in Thailand before, we had some feeling of having come home: most Thai people we have met (hate to generalize, but it’s true) are extremely friendly and easy to “speak” to, which made it all easier. My conversations usually start and end with me blurting out some random Thai word such as “Mä-muang” (= mango), but it always causes lots of smiles and is followed by more conversation (in our own languages) that the other party can’t understand.

On Thursday, we moved into our studio apartment in Karon, a place we had reserved via Airbnb. It didn’t turn out to be quite as pretty as the photos in the ad showed, but is inexpensive. We also rented a motorbike for a month (a steal at USD 4 per day), and have been cruising the Phuket province ever since. The perfect way to get around, even if it might be one of the more dangerous things to do here. Unlike most Thais, we wear helmets, and Phil drives safely. People are considerate to no end, and while many may think that there is no method to the madness of most Asian drivers, traffic here works well and the term “road rage” seems non-existent. In stark contrast to what you see on Swiss streets, drivers here don’t honk there horn all that much.

We had originally planned a three-month “work-while-traveling” test-period while checking to see if we like it in Phuket, but think that we might end up going elsewhere, as there is a little too much of the unreal, tourism-oriented “stuff” around us. While we expected some of it (our work requires that we be in a developed place, so we couldn’t move to a deserted island), we wonder sometimes if any true Thais actually live here.

More later… in the meantime here a first glimpse of where we are.