Our trip to beautiful Phuket, Thailand.

We decided to take advantage of the 4-day "Hari Raya" holiday and travel to Phuket, Thailand. (Hari Raya is the Malaysian holiday marking the end of Ramadan.) We arrived in Phuket on Saturday afternoon and took a walk on the grounds of the Sheraton Grande Laguna Hotel. About 25 years ago this area was a played out tin mine. A developer bought the area, made a lagoon, and now there are about 7 hotels on the site. Ours was situated on an island in the middle of the lagoon and about 1/4 mile from the beach on the Andaman Sea. We were having an early dinner at an open air restaurant on the beach and were surprised to see a baby elephant nearby, giving rides to children.

After discovering that the nearest church meetinghouse was in Bangkok, a couple of hundred miles away, we spent Sunday at leisure around the hotel. We had a nice breakfast buffet, spent some quality time at the beach and took a boat ride around the lagoon. We met a really friendly fellow from Belgium named Charles. He moved to Thailand 12 years ago, has married a Thai girl and they have a couple of kids. I asked if he missed Belgium and he said that he did miss his family. When asked if he planned to go back some day, he looked at me as if I were crazy and said that since I was an American and not a European he would give me a pass. "Not a chance," he said, "they have 55% income tax in Belgium."

On Monday we took a boat ride to Phi Phi Island, which had been recommended to us. The brochure had beautiful pictures of Maya Bay, Khai Island, and Phi Phi itself, which looked incredibly beautiful. Maya Bay, the brochure tells us, is where "The Beach" with Leonardo DiCaprio was filmed. Not having seen the film, that didn't mean anything to me, but with the promise that LD himself would not be there, we thought we could safely chance it.

To say that we were disappointed would be vastly understated. It is truly a spectacular place. You enter the bay through a narrow inlet between two high cliffs and once inside there is incredibly beautiful water, turquoise in color leading up to a talcum powder beach of white sand, about 1/4 mile long and surrounded by high cliffs on all sides. What's not to like, you ask. The fact that they had about 25 tourist boats of all sizes and descriptions, all parallel parked about 15 feet off the beach, and about 2,000 tourists walking around on the beach itself. I actually felt embarrassed that we were contributing to the maelstrom. We sat on the beach in a place we felt we were not likely to be stepped on and waited for our boat to accept us back on board.

We were then taken to Phi Phi Island next (It's pronounced pee pee) where we had a very nice lunch and met some people from the UK.

Our final destination on this little trip was at a beach on Khai Island, where we spent the afternoon reading, sunbathing, and snorkeling. We discovered that there was quite a strong current flowing parallel to the beach and had to swim for about 10 minutes to get back. We nearly lost Tobi. (not really). It was here that I managed to take a picture of a Thai fishing boat that I am really quite proud of. I would love to get it printed and framed. It's the last one in my slide show below, although the slide show doesn't do it justice because you can't see the whole photo at once.

We spent Tuesday on the beach and at poolside. The hotel graciously allowed us to check out at 6pm, so it was almost like having an extra day there. We arrived home at about 1:30 AM on Wednesday morning. Tobi slept in and went to work late. It's good to be back home. Yes, we call this home now. We've been here 6 months. Now we have a great visit with family to look forward to next month. We can't wait.