Bangtao Beach, Phuket Thailand
Today we had breakfast at our new place in Phuket. It is a small operation so understandably the breakfast is smaller, as in smaller selection. It was still good, Lots of coffee, dry cereal, option of eggs cooked several ways, fruit, yogurt, toast and jam etc.
By 10:00 am or so we headed to the beach and rented lounge chairs for 100 baht each. That’s $4.18 CAD each. That also comes with a washroom to use and showers to clean off the sand when we head back to the hotel. Most of the sand at least. We still rinsed off in the bathtub to get our legs and feet clean when we got into the room as the sand is so fine.
It takes between 5 and 10 minutes to walk to the beach from our room. Its barely considered exercise but truthfully it is so hot here that you almost break a sweat sitting in the shade drinking something icy. We each had 2 mango smoothies and shared one small beer with our lunch which was bbq corn on the cob. The corn was 50 baht each at the restaurant where we had rented the chairs. A lady was selling it cooked out on the beach for 60 baht. She was fully clothed, we were sweltering! See the video we made below.
Tonight for supper we are going back to eat at the beach and sit by the surf. That is the plan unless something better comes along, like a massage! Our bed is quite hard, so that is the excuse for the next massage. Not that we need an excuse.
We thought we would book the last of our flights to connect us back home. We booked flights while waiting in the Bangkok airport to fly from Langkawi, Malaysia to Kuala Lumpur, and then from Kuala Lumpur to Cebu, Philippines. We had no trouble when we booked those flights, and they showed as pending charges online on our Mastercard. All was well.
We still need to book additional flights, Cebu PH – Boracay PH (return) Cebu PH – Coron Busuanga Island PH (one way) and our flight back to Hong Kong from Coron, Busuanga island PH via Manila to Hong Kong. You know where this is heading? Our MasterCard got declined on the purchase of the Air Asia ticket only one day after we successfully purchased 2 sets of tickets on the same airline. WTF. We had contacted BMO previously, told them we were travelling and they said good, but “due to our advanced heuristic technology you don’t need to notify us of travel plans”. FYI it even shows this when we log onto BMO to look at our Mastercard bill online.
Gary, slightly frustrated called MasterCard via Skype. They wanted to verify our authenticity by calling us at home. Hahaha. Gary did well by not losing his cool, and explained that we were away, we had contacted BMO and made them aware of our travel plans and there wasn’t much chance we would be able to answer the phone in Phuket, Thailand. He got transferred to a different person to do the verification. Finally we got verified and made the ticket purchases to Boracay and Coron. By then it was 7:00 pm and we went for supper. We still have one more flight to book from Coron to Hong Kong (via Manila). We do want to come home, eventually!
We ate supper and went back to our room, it felt like a deep freeze! We read for a few minutes and off to sleep, by 3:00 am we were sweating again. The air conditioning is set to 25 C.
