Trip to Thailand - Panoramic Phuket

At last the day has come. We are going to Thailand; formerly known as Siam. We will be traveling to Bangkok by Thai Airways flight. Our flight will take off Bengaluru International Airport at 12:30am and will reach Bangkok Suvarnabhumi Airport at 4:00am. From Bangkok our next flight to Phuket was at 7:00am, which will reach Phuket around 8:00am. We are there at last… @ the beautiful Phuket! :-D

Phuket is Thailand's largest island and almost as large as Singapore. It come at the west coast of Thailand and it is in Andaman Sea. The name Phuket came from 'Bukit' which means Hill, because from distance the island looks like a hilly area. Phuket was known as Thalang in the olden days.

Day 1:

We came out of airport and we were received by the cab driver sent by our resort. We booked our rooms @ Baumanburi. We kept our luggage and had a nice refreshing shower. All of us needed it desperately to shed all the tiredness of this long journey. After some time we went out for local sightseeing, though a short one but surely loved it as a tour starter…!

We went to Karon View Point, from there you can see the sea beach and some small islands scattered nearby the beach. There you have a watch tower which allows you to see as far as up to 2 kilometers perimeter. See the view from the watch tower.



From Karon View Point we went to see the Buddha Temple naming Wat Chalong which is famous for Poh Than Jao Wat. There you can see The Great Pagoda sheltering Lord Buddha's many form and postures. Reclining Buddha, Monk Buddha, Meditating Buddha, Bhikshu Buddha, and many more. If I am not wrong you will find 11 different forms of Lord Buddha there in the temple. All at one single place. The temple is two storied and in each floor there are many ancient histories about Lord Buddha and his journey to different lands are beautifully depicted in many wall hangings and paintings. The temple contains a splinter of Lord Buddha's bone and is officially named "Phramahathatchedi-Jomthaibarameepragat". There you can see many notice boards requesting you to take your shoes off when entering the main temple, including the sermon hall and the chedi.




There is also one wide space for prayers. There you can kneel down and sit for as long as you wish and have some quiet time with the eternity and your own self. Nobody is going to disturb you unless you make unwanted noise and spoil the purity and calm of the temple.

Though both are Buddhist in religion and thought, but there is a difference in the way the interior was decorated in Rumtek Monastery @ Sikkim and the Buddha temple @ Thailand. I could not find out whether this difference is only for the cultural difference of the two land or there is some other valid reason. But one thing was common in both of them, the depicted wall hangings telling the different incidents of Gautama Buddha's achievement of Enlightenment and Mahanirvana.

Just in front of the Buddha temple there is one church where there was a marriage ceremony going on right at the time when we visited the temple. Luckily I got to see the beautiful bride in her gorgeous, flowing marriage gown. Oh, I love the Christian's marriage ceremonies and most of all I love the moment when the bride walks down the isle holding her daddy dearest's hand, with eyes weaving beautiful fresh dreams, heart pumping new hopes in every cell of the body, lips quivering with excitement and soul is just waiting to see the groom, the love of her life. With one sweet kiss and the blessing of the holy Father and those who gathered to be a part of the moment, two souls unite to be one. Lovely!


From there our driver took us to the Monkey and snake show. Unfortunately none of us were in the mood to see monkey dancing at that point of time. So we requested him to drive us to the next point i.e. the Phuket Gem Factory.

There we were welcomed with different nice chilled soft drinks by beautiful Thai girls wearing the traditional Thai attire. The whole gem factory was fully air conditioned and very clean and neatly maintained. Anyway, after the welcome drink we were lead to a small theater to show a small documentary on the Gem and Semi Precious stones industry of Phuket. From there one official guided us to take a tour inside the gem factory where hundreds of Thai people are working on different gems, making those suitable to use in different ornaments made of gold, silver, German silver, white gold etc etc. There were ornaments made of fresh water pearls also. The price varied from a few hundreds to a few thousands, may be even more, but since I am not such a keen admirer of ornaments I just stayed away from those shining glittery things... ;)

From there our driver planned us to drop at our hotel. But after such a hot and happening day we were so hungry that we didn’t even bothered to drop at the hotel, instead we entered a road side joint where typical Thai food were served and had some salad (nice mix of squids, prawns, fish and chicken and veggies), prawn fried rice, mixed fried rice etc. I had the salad and I can bet that it made me fall in love with squids…!

We came back to hotel and all of us were so tires that we simply slept for almost 2 hours and then only were able to stand up and walk out to have dinner from a restaurant nearby our hotel...! On our way to the nearby restaurant we saw a cabaret show happening outside a five star hotel, they called it The Simon Cabaret Show...! :)