Scooters, The Only Way to Travel

 Nov 19, 2022

Nice wake up to the birds chirping and the sun coming up. I had a brief period in the night when I woke up around 1:30am and was wide awake. I took a gravel with Melatonin and fell back in to an easy sleep. We set off to our scooter rental shop around 8, but just the mechanic was there and he didn't speak much English. We speak even less (none!) Thai, but he was able to communicate to come back at 10 for the scooters. We set off back to the hotel after walking around for a little while to check out the immediate area. Graham settled back into the A/C while I sat pool side with an espresso. Two coffees later and we set off to find some good food. Not hard here in Thailand, there's tiny food shops everywhere. We stumbled into a little place with locals and had a shrimp papaya salad and garlic chicken. Such good intense flavours already!

We were able to pick up our scooters around 10:30. Grahams had a new back wheel put on and mine showed up from a previous renter. After filling in some paperwork we were off with our new wheels. We wasted no time strapping on our bags and hitting the road. We headed south along the ocean side route to our first destination between Kamala and Patong Beaches. Lots of scooters on the road and the drive was easy and surprisingly quick to travel around. We have a room booked into the Amala Grand Bleu Resort in the Naka Thani Village. It's nestled up in the mountain side overlooking the valley with a good view of the ocean. First thing upon arrival, a swim in our private pool of course! After the long cool down we settled in and unpacked our bags, we will be home basing from here for four nights. 

Our room is at the far end of the building, nice and near the jungle. We are just coming out of rainy season and the jungle is super lush and has lots of fresh new growth. It fun picking out plants we recognize usually in the tropical section of the plant department, just grow and thriving in the jungle. We also have a little cascading creek right outside our room that adds a lovely little background tune to our patio time. 

We scootered down to Kalim Beach where there's a known street food stop. We were a bit early with only about a dozen carts set up, we still gorged on chicken fried a couple ways and couple other Thai fried foods and washed it down with some tasty lemonade tea drinks. We headed back to our village and fuelled up the scooters and picked up a variety of cold beers. I always like to try a couple brands, we got Singha's of course as well as Chang and Leo. All lagers, all delicious but the Chang was a pleasant surprise, light and flavourful. After a relaxing pool swim and pool side beers we kept dinner easy, and because we happened to look at the menu and it all sounded delicious, we ordered from the hotel menu. We were not disappointed, it was all amazing. We ended up getting one of our favourites, the spicy noodle glass salad as well as Phad Thai kung (shrimp) and Tom Kya Khai (Thai chicken coconut soup). Graham ordered some spice which was a bit of a mistake, the salad was spicy! I ate a full raw chilli pepper off the top of the soup too and definitely had some regrets for the next five minutes. Over all we couldn't help our selves and ate it all up. Even being that spicy, it was still absolutely delicious. 

After our meal we swim, vegged and watched the sunset from the pool. We could see it go right into the ocean from the room, a wonderful surprise for our first night as lately its been too cloudy to get much of a sunset. Once the sun drops you can see all the squid fishing boats with bright green lights fishing out off shore. At least that what we think the boats with bright green lights are doing, and we haven't come up with a better explanation yet. 

Next we headed out to check out the Patong night life, or the "shit show" as Graham called it. It was a bustling tourist chaos of bars with loud music, many massage shops with ladies and their bountiful cleavage, strip club workers asking you to come inside for the show and just bright flashing lights everywhere. It's the mini Vegas night life in Patong. We were there early in the night too, I can only imagine where the evening could escalate to. The bars were all themed, from country to Irish to gentleman's and much more. It was fun to walk and pick out the Lady Boys in the crowd, after watching a few episodes of little documentary series on them it was interesting to pick them our and see in action. It was interesting to see the very tourist-vice night life but not my kind of place to hang out in and I was happy to get back to the beach and on the scooter. We rode back and stopped in at the Kalim street food again for dessert. I got a crepe with Nutella, turns out you can get them pretty much anywhere in the world and always a great treat. Graham had some Roti with chocolate and banana. 

Back to the hotel for final swim and to bed. We are still falling asleep much too early and were sleeping not long after 8:30pm.