Barefoot to Kata beach for supplies

So one day I got a message on Facebook from a good friend in South Africa, telling me that one of her friends is coming to Thailand and is there something we would like from SA. UHM… OF COURSE!!!! PEEEEAAAANUUUUTTTBUUUTTTEER and biltong and chocolates and biltong and cheese and biltong and milk and biltong and bread and biltong. I also told her if she could throw in a bit of biltong it would also be very nice. You see in Thailand they are very big on rice and fruit and vegetables, and my mother had to kill my vegetables with meat and cheese for me to even take a bite. The same with Steven – Cauliflower is when you call a flower – it is not something that is meant to be eaten. I always thought “who was the brave idiot that was hungry enough to look at something that looks like mold on steroids and decided to cook it and actually chew on it” YUCK.

So she told me that she is not brave enough to smuggle biltong into Thailand but she will send me something South African. So we waited in anticipation and at last we got a sms to tell us she has arrived. So we immediately phoned her and we determined that she was in Kata – that is about 26 km from Phuket town where we were based.

We decided to take one of the busses (ie a truck with seats at the back) after school to go get our South African supplies (‘n man mis mos die smaak). So on the bus we get for 20 baht each and of we went to Kata. This is what the bus looked like:

And off we went all the way to Kata. 

When we got there we had to look EVERYWHERE to find the hotel. But alas after walking for kilometers up a mountain we eventually found the hotel. And guess what – they were not at the hotel. So we phoned them and they were at a restaurant right where we got off from the bus. So we walked all the way down again and then started telling them about Thailand, giving them tips on where to go and how to live to make the best of their experience etc. Then Steven saw our bus go past the restaurant, so we hurriedly grabbed our plastic bag and ran like delinquents to get the bus (it was 18:00 – so this is probably the last bus running that day).

Screaming for the bus driver to stop and waving like paper bags in the wind we eventually got to the bus only to hear that this is the last bus – and it just reached its final stop…

What now? We did not have money for a taxi or Song Tau. Well – we started walking. Please note that there is a mountain between Phuket town and Kata, and we had to go over this mountain for 26km to get to our apartment – and it was already 18:00 – and we had to teach the next day. WE decided to just make the best of it and went on a very scenic route over the mountains enjoying the sights. Some pictures:

 As it got later, we got more impatient, so we started jogging – barefoot (literally, since we did not have proper shoes apart from our work-shoes…). I decided that I am too tired to walk, run or crawl so I started to hitch-hike:

 A million scooter taxi’s stopped next to us - maybe it would’ve been great if we had some money to actually pay for a ride. After about an hour a random guy on a scooter (not a taxi guy) stopped next to us and said for 80 baht he will take us to Phuket town – Steven and I bargained with him and eventually we agreed on 50 baht for the two of us. So we got our gigantic bodies on the miniature scooter behind the even smaller random Thai guy. Apart from the stench of a hundred laborers emanating from him, the rock-hard  motorcycle seat, a burn mark or two from a very hot exhaust and the two of us grabbing on for our lives it was a pretty great ride (definitely beat walking the other 20km). Our random lift:

Our random lift dropped us of at 7/11 and we walked the other 2km home. When we arrived there we had a feast with chocolates, peanut butter and aromat: