Phuket here we come

The plane ride to Phuket takes an hour. It's a full plane and most are foreign tourists. We land and pick up our baggage and hire a van to take us to the hotel. It is a 45 minute ride and we can't wait to get to the hotel and our rooms and shower.

It is cloudy and overcast outside. Our plans of getting to the hotel quickly are thwarted as the cab driver has other ideas. He pulls up in front of a building, opens the door and walks off for a toilet break. Soon a lady comes and greets us. She wants to know how long we'll stay in Phuket and what we plan to do. She tries to sell us a package tour, but we decline and tell her we'll call her if we need one. Another cab pulls up and the driver stalks off for a toilet break. The lady leaves us and heads to the other cab.

As we near the hotel a steady rain greets us. Phuket reminds femme of Kerala in India. The landscape is lush green and there are plenty of palm trees everywhere. Folks are on mopeds, but there are far fewer people unlike India that has close to a billion people.

The hotel is awesome, spread across 50 acres with an abundance of palm trees everywhere. We compliment ourselves on having picked a good place to stay. We are dropped off at the front entrance and then are ferried by bus to the main lobby.

Check-in takes an inordinately long time. We'll learn in due course that fast service is hard to find in Thailand. We haggle over the price of our room (that we noticed had fallen since we booked online) and the receptionist agrees to throw in free breakfast. After 20 minutes, we are still not checked in. We are all starting to get a little irritated.

Check-in done, we learn that one of the rooms is not yet ready. Resigned to our fate, some of us head to the lunch buffet and others to the lone room that is ready. A receptionist leads the way to the room and ends up taking us to the wrong building. Apparently it is her second day on the job and she isn't quite upto speed with the lay of the land. She apologizes.

The buffet is unspectaclar, but filling. Femme elects to order from the menu. She orders green curry that ends up being extremely hot and spicy. Thai food in Thailand is nowhere like the Thai food in California that we are used to. It tastes different. We'd like to stay away from poultry food because of the bird flu scare, but vegetarian food is hard to find.

After lunch we head to our room which has a spectacular view of the ocean. Reclining on the bed, both femme and I marvel at the view outside.