Thailand with Vanni

Thailand (Phuket) Vanni and I arrive from Singapore on an Airbus 320 of Tiger Airways, a low-cost company from Singapore. We land at Phuket airport and, unfortunately, it's raining. We get a taxi to a little guesthouse near the airport - we don't want to do the 25 km to Patong Beach. Here we discover they also rent scooters - just what we need. We relax and go to bed. The next day we hire just one scooter and set off to show Vanni the island, since I already knew it. We stop to admire the rubber trees, for making tyre rubber, something Vanni had never seen, along with the pineapple plants. We reach Patong Beach, the place hit by the tsunami. They've installed sirens and put up signs on how to evacuate in case of an earthquake. At a little restaurant Vanni eats a big crab that was splashing about in the water not long before.

Luckily it doesn't rain the whole day, so our scooter ride is quite pleasant. We clock up a lot of kilometres, and at the petrol station we notice the pump is antediluvian - with a hand-lifted hose, like the old days. We return to our pretty little guesthouse near the airport and watch a Valentino Rossi GP. Then it starts raining again. What luck. The next morning a taxi takes us back to the nearby airport, and this whistle-stop tour comes to an end. The Tiger Airways flight takes us back to Singapore in a couple of hours. Bye