Kata Beach was very nice but unfortunately I rather overdid the attempted surfing thing and so I ended up with so many bruises and aches and strains that I had to call it quits for a while. I'll try it again before too long.
On Saturday night I went back into Patong to watch the footy. Kata is nicer than Patong but I adjudged Patong to be a more lively place in which to continue my rather forlorn search for fellow Mackems, a search which still remains sadly unfulfilled even after three months on the road. Needless to say I did bump into a Geordie, a whole family of the ****s in fact. I left that bar in a hurry, and settled for watching SAFC 0 Liverpool 1 (boo hiss boo) somewhere else, with two guys from Brisbane and three lasses from Northern Ireland.
I got scammed on the way back up to Bangkok. I bought a bus ticket in Phuket town, and my journey back up started out with the same whirlwind of tuk-tuks and random vehicle changes that the journey down had ended with. There were a few things which didn't seem quite right, but I'd had the same impression on the way down and that went OK. Sadly this time my little suspicions were justified. After a carefully-executed series of transfers and ticket changes and general bewilderment, I suddenly found myself abandoned at some provincial bus station,and the ticket I needed to go on to Bangkok was no doubt even at that moment being sold to someone else. If I'd really had my wits about me then I could probably have found my way back to the last 'ticket office' and threatened to call the police etc etc. But the total cost of the fraud to me was no more than about five quid. And they did at least have the decency to abandon me at the actual bus station. So I just bought another ticket, and got to Bangkok OK in the end.
Right now - and loth as I am to abandon my blog habit of not dropping too many clues as to my next destination - my passport is in the custody of the Vietnamese Embassy while they sort out my visa. The Embassy itself is a tremendous monument to 21st-century communism: dingy as hell, and none of the pens work. But the wretched failure of their outdated economic dogmas does at least mean that things will be even cheaper for me there than they are here. In the meantime I'm back in Bangkok, still sweating like Salman Rushdie in a Saudi sauna, and flaking slightly from sunburn on my newly-exposed scalp. But the beer is cheap and the company is good. Hope you're all having as good a time there as I am here.
