The boat crossing from Ko Phi Phi to Phuket was similar to our previous one in far too many ways and I was glad when it was over. We caught a taxi bus to our hostel / hotel for the next couple of days. It turns out that it was just around the corner from the one used in The Beach. We ended up with a huge room on the roof that struggled to get below 30 degrees, even at night, but it was quite nice up there. There wasn't much noise and we could easily watch the thunder storms that happenned at night.

We were staying in Phuket town itself rather than near one of the beaches as we had spent a few days lying on the sand already and we just wanted some lazy time.

We spent a grand total of three nights in Phuket and we didn't do too much more than check our email, read a lot, eat a lot and sleep a lot. We had a couple of funny moments, one where an American man tried to explain how the book exchange shop we were in worked. We made some hasty choices and left him looking for books of his own. The other funny moment that springs to mind was when Claire wanted a pancake at night. We had found a pancake vendor and asked for two pancakes. It really is marvellous watching them flaten the dough out and he noticed our glee and started to do it in slow motion so that we could see exactly what he was doing. Two passing Thai girls commented on his showing off to the tourists obviosuly not knowing that we recognised the word "Farang" (which means a tourist but can be derogatory or just descriptive depending on how it's used). Claire turned round and smiled at them when she heard the word and there was much embarassment on their part and amusement for everyone else.

About the only other thing we did in Phuket was buy some air tickets for Bangkok. When it came to getting to the airport, we had one of the nice chaps from the hostel drive us there for a fee although he wasn't too keen to do it - the airport turned out to be a long, long way from the town and I think he had just done another run before ours.