Jess & Jude's Adventures in Thailand 2004

Friday 4 June
Grand Palace

We awoke at 7am and went down to a sumptuous breakfast. Jess stuffed herself with pancakes, danishes and oh, off course eggs and bacon. We caught the hotels free ferry down river to the River City shopping centre at 8.15am. Silly time for the boat to take us as the centre didn't open until 10am. We decided to catch a public ferry up river to Tha Thong pier and visit the Grand Palace.

It cost 200bt each to get in but very worth it. Fantastic golden chedis and sparkling Wats. Words can't really describe the things we saw. Got lots of photos, batteries ran out but luckily had a spare set on me.

As we were leaving I got a great shot of Jess with the Palace Guard. We checked out the street markets on the way back to the pier. We made it back to the hotel just in time for a quick shower, pack and check out at noon.

Phuket here we come..

We took a taxi to the airport, on the way our cabbie had a bingle with a motorbike. It was the motorbikes fault but he kept following us and hassling the driver. Our cabbie dropped us at the international instead of the domestic so we had to make our way over.

By 2pm we were winging our way over watery paddy fields on our Air Asia flight to Phuket. Coming into Phuket we flew over Phang Nga bay and Koy Paynee (Muslim Stilt Village).

Our driver was there to collect us and it took 25 minutes to get to the Surin Beach Resort. The resort is set back 500m from the beach. We have a ground floor room overlooking the pool. The pool has 2 giant water slides. Jess couldn't wait to get in. We had a quick swim then went to dinner at the hotels restaurant. The resort is only 30% full due to the low season. We were the only ones in the restaurant. Nice selection of thai food but a little expensive. We practised our thai language with our waiter "Santi". He practised his Aussie with sayings like "G'day mate" and "Pissin' down mate". It cracked Jess and I up.