Myanmar Visa Run

Because of our decision to skip Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia we were
always going to have to leave and re-enter Thailand before the 30 day
visa expired. So after arriving on the mainland from Koh Tao the next
step was to figure out which border to cross to get our extention. The
Lonely Planet guide suggested Myanmar or Malaysia but as we are closer
to the former it made sense to go that route. The backpackers in
Champon conveniently were able to arrange a 'visa run' for about
500Baht which included a minibus ride from Champon on the east coast
to Ranong on the west coast, a boat ride over the Chang River into
Myanmar and a helpful guide that directed us through all the
neccessary checkpoints. We left at 5.30am the following morning and by
10.30am we'd crossed and recrossed the border with our visa extentions
without much hassle. The plan was to make our way down the west coast
to Phuket over a couple of days but when the guide dropped us off in
Ranong it didn't take us long to make the desision to keep going south
the same day. Ranong, quite simply put, is the a*sehole of the world -
a dirty, grimmey, smelly one-horse-town ....and the horse is dead and
decaying somewhere on the main intersection.

As luck may have it, the 6 hour bus ride from Ranong to Phuket was
leaving the same day at 12.30 so we only had to wait a couple of hours
to keep moving on.

To our surprise we discovered that Phuket is actually and island
roughly 50km long. We arrive in Phuket Town around 7.30pm and walked
about half an hour to find the Phuket Backpackers, along the way
passing the On-and-On backpackers where Richard meets Daffy in the
Beach - if memory serves, the rooms looked dodgy in the movie so we
opted for another Lonely Planet recommendation.

We woke the following morning to the really surprising sound of yet
another thunderstorm and litres of water falling out of the sky. It's
probably at this point that Kimmy and I decided that spending another
month and a half in Thailand was not our idea of fun especially when
we could be lazying on Clifton, sucking on a few cold ones at Cafe del
Mar and reintroducing ourselves to our golf clubs whilst probably
spending less money! In truth, watching the Currie Cup final on tv in
our room in Koh Tao has also made us homesick so we've decided to come
home earlier than expected. Took a txi to Singapore Airways (in the
rain) and changed our flight home to the 19th November - exactly 1
month earlier than anticipated. We're genuinely excited about being
home again in the African sun but, knowing our luck, the sun will
decide to shine on Phuket and the rest of the andaman Coast in the
next few days. Hopefully it will so that we can at least take if few
pic home of that picture postcard beach that we were expecting to find
here in Thailand.

Sent from my iPod