A week with Luca – This is my home: Phuket

Phuket was unkind, which made my point about all the things I had been telling Luca about it. It rained all the time that she was here. We spent most of our time shopping and eating. However, Luca was not deprived from Phuket’s biggest cultural attraction: Patong. On Thursday we went for dinner with Marcelo, Federico, David, Carlos and El Catalan to Patong and later walked on Bangla Road, a place where pleasure is everything and moral rules there not exist. We started the night in Tiger, the most famous club in Phuket, where hundreds of “love” transactions occur daily. I say “love” and not prostitution because many expats have found their wives there. As a friend says, “you do not pay for a prostitute here, you rent a girlfriend”. A few drinks later, we walked to another club called FBI. There we mingled with the girls of the night and even danced on a pole. It was so much fun that we came back to my place only half an hour before they picked us up to go to Phi Phi Island.

Patong night out

The boat ride to Phi Phi was supposed to last one and a half hours but it took three hours instead. It rained most of the way and we were sitting on the upper floor. Although it was covered by a tarp, we got all wet and could not sleep –which is rather bad, when you just stepped out of a club with many vodka-tonics in.

We checked in a bungalow at the end of the centric area of Phi Phi Don and then went for a walk. Everyone was walking up and down the flooded roads and dodging the cyclists. We sat at a coffee shop and watched the scene. A couple of argentine guys came in and we spent some time talking to them.

During the night, the storm was so rough that we feared the bungalow would fly away. In the next morning, it was still raining. After much thinking, we decided to go for the adventure instead of leaving. We took a boat on the wavy sea to Koh Phi Phi Le. There we snorkeled and swam against the waves to Maya Bay, a most wonderful beach of white sands where they filmed the movie The Beach. Although the weather was not great, the colors of the sand, ocean and sky were amazing.

Back in Phuket, we went for sushi in my neighborhood. It was the most pitiful sushi ever! When they brought us our first order, Luca thought it was a complimentary appetizer. On the way back to my place we stopped at 7Eleven and got some snacks. We were too tired to go anywhere, so we went to bed early. On Sunday we woke up sad. It was still raining and it was Luca’s last day in Thailand. It was a great day, though, to wrap up all our conversations and thoughts of the week. It was so wonderful to have here someone who has known me for a long time and that understands me like a few people do. That is something that I have been missing.