Day One
Nico and I were dropped right off in front of our hotel in Kata Beach, Phuket, the Blue Pearl Hotel. It had cute nautical decor going on and our room had a balcony. After dropping our stuff off, we decided to go get dinner. We looked on TripAdvisor and found a Turkish restaurant called Istanbul Restaurant. The food there was quite good. We had "cheese spring rolls," phyllo dough filled with feta or goat cheese, as an appetizer. I had chicken skewers as my entree and Nico had Turkish beef ravioli.
After dinner, we walked through a night market and then just relaxed in the room.
The Blue Pearl
Good wifi
Comfortable beds (but actually two beds combined into one)
Terrible water pressure
Can rent motorbike
Free water
Lots of families stay here (loud kids)
Small pool
Close to beach
Day Two
For breakfast, Nico and I went to a restaurant just around the corner from our hotel. I ordered French toast, which was, once again, too eggy.
After breakfast, we decided to go to the beach. We got beach towels from the front desk of the hotel and walked down to Kata Beach. The beach was okay. It wasn't as pretty as I expected and it was covered in trash. Nico and I decided to walk to the other end to see if it was any better.
As we walked along, we noticed certain sections were closed off to swimmers because of rip currents. And the sections that were open to swimmers were pretty crowded. When we got to the end of the beach, we decided to walk to the next beach, Kata Noi to see if it was any better...
It wasn't. The beach was so littered with trash, it was hard to find a place to sit. It was less crowded though, and after walking down a ways we found a decent spot to spread out our towels. The problem with this beach, however, was that there was nowhere to swim. The whole shoreline was closed off due to rip currents. Nico and I decided to sit for a little bit before heading back to the hotel.
When we got back, we thought it'd be a good idea to rent motorbikes and head to Patong Beach just to see if we were missing out on something by staying in the Kata area. When we got to the beach, we decided to keep riding - it didn't look that special and it felt nice to be on the bike.
Just up the hill, however, Nico saw a police checkpoint ahead. Not wanting to deal with it (not having a Thai drivers license), he turned the bike around. This of course prompted two officers to jump on their motorbike and pull us over.
We sat on the guardrail on the side of the road as they searched through our things. I thought for sure we'd get a ticket for not having a license. But after going through everything (and not finding any drugs we presume), they let us go.
We got back on the bike and headed to Patong for some ice cream. We parked the bike and walked until we found a place that made ice cream rolls. I picked Oreo and white chocolate, which the woman chopped up on the cold plate with her paddles and then poured cream over the top. Everything mixed together and froze as the paddles pushed it all around. Then she spread the creamy mixture out in a flat stripe across the cold plate and slid a spatula underneath, making the ice cream curl forward in a neat roll. She used tongs to place each roll in a cup and topped it all off with caramel sauce. Nico chose raspberry and almond as his ingredients. Not only was the ice cream fun to look at, it was also super tasty. It was much more creamy than other ice creams I'd tried in SE Asia.
After ice cream, we decided to ride the motorbike back to the hotel. We considered stopping at Karon Beach because it looked much nicer than any other beach we'd been to today, but it was getting late and we had to book a few things.
After hanging out at the hotel and arranging for a taxi to pick us up at 4am, Nico and I went to dinner. We went to a restaurant called Physis, which was completely empty despite all the great reviews it had on TripAdvisor. The owner who seated us was very kind. Nico and I ordered a plate of tzatziki with pita bread and a chicken pita wrap to split. The food was amazing! Although more expensive than some restaurants in the area, Physis definitely had some of the best Greek/Mediterranean food I'd had on this trip (yes, I went to a few Mediterranean restaurants).
After dinner, Nico and I decided to relax and go to bed early since we had an early flight the next day. Nico had a couple beers and I had some wine to help us fall asleep quickly.
Day Three
Nico and I got up when our alarms went off at 3:45 am. We walked downstairs and checked out of the Blue Pearl. The taxi pulled up just as we were down the stairs. As we sat in the back of the taxi, waiting to leave, a drunk guy tried to convince our driver to take him back to his hotel. Out driver tried to explain to him that he was heading to the airport but it wasn't until the drunk man opened up the door and saw us there that he believed the taxi couldn't take him to where he wanted to go.
It took about an hour for us to drive to the airport where we checked-in to our flight to Siem Reap!
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