Phuket – the name says it all

[Yes, my tech problems with links continue. I'm reduced to including some representative photos on the page below, without links. When I get a month clear on my calendar, I'll resolve this problem, I swear. In the meantime, no clicks for you.]

Oh Phuket. It’s a great place to get out of the cold, and on this visit we found it’s a great place to recover from a cold, too, or whatever other viruses you may be traveling with. We discovered we had brought along a whole grab-bag of them when we all went to a medical clinic the day we arrived. (I have decided not to recount the story of the flight that motivated this visit; instead, I recommend that the curious reader peruse a few dozen cantos of Dante.)  Kai had tonsillitis, Allison had bronchitis, I had pneumonia, Barbara – Allison’s mom, who traveled with us – had what might have been strep, and Keegan merely had some garden-variety viral infection (that kid is strong-like-bull).  We filled a shopping cart with antibiotics, syrups, and elixirs and went back to the hotel, condemned to rest by the pool or on the beach for a few days. It was hell, but we fought our way through.

By the third day we summoned the strength to celebrate Barbara’s birthday at Ban Rim Pa, an idyllic, terraced Thai restaurant overlooking the Indian Ocean, where they put sparklers in the mango sticky rice – a dessert Kai and Keegan liked even more than cough syrup.  We were already getting better, but Ban Rim Pa sped our recovery. Happy birthday, Barbara! I hope your 40’s will be as exciting as mine have been.

Longtime readers of this blog may recall that we visited Phuket a year ago and rode on an elephant at what turned out to be a very, very sketchy place where young Kai Despard Ratner saw a man hit an elephant on the head with a stick.  I had to give that elephant driver a timeout and make him promise that he would never ever hit an elephant again; the experience was not a good one, and we were determined not to repeat it. Allison did some research, and we found a highly responsible, elephant-friendly eco-safari that included demonstrations of indigenous rice planting and rubber harvesting, Thai cuisine, tea and coffee tasting, a boat trip, a water buffalo meet-and-greet, and yes, an elephant ride, complete with an elephant- and toddler-sensitive driver.  Kai really bonded with our elephant, whose name was Boa Baht, and he told me repeatedly that this driver was a very nice man; he remembers what happened last year, and this ride was a healing experience for him. And, unlike last time, Keegan stayed awake for the elephant ride!  Our little guys are growing up.

We stayed in a gorgeous area called Kamala Bay, which is comparatively mellow, not as overrun as Phuket Town or Patong, but it does have one huge tourist attraction nearby – a theater show-cum-amusement park known as Phuket Fantasea. Phuket Fantasea is an over-the-top spectacle, a sort of Vegas Meets Angkor Wat affair complete with zoo exhibits, carnival rides, at least 30 gift shops, a restaurant the size of four airplane hangars, and a “cultural show” featuring musicians, dancers, acrobats, trained elephants, pigeons, sheep, chickens (yes, I said chickens, and they know what they are doing), and a cast of thousands. It’s a lynchpin of the regional, maybe even the national economy. The boys loved this place, as much for the popcorn as for the show, but they loved it. Kai sat on my lap and told me his opinion of most of the acts. There were a few illusions, like the classic “sawing a woman in half” trick; Kai, who is fully in the age of wonder, genuinely believed he saw a woman cut in half (“She’s broke, Daddy! They broked her!”, he told me.) He also watched an elephant disappear into thin air (“How did they make him be smoke?”), but he got past his shock of that when I was able to wrangle him one of the balloons dropped during the grand finale. Balloons, popcorn, elephants – yeah, that is the high life.

  We ate ice cream, we lounged around in bed, and we celebrated the 9^th anniversary of my 39^th birthday. We’re gonna miss Thailand…

Back in the PRC

Eventually we had to leave our beautiful convalescent home and return to Shanghai, and Grammy had to head back to Meiguo. Here in the cold cold North, we shuffle between the various space heaters and portable radiators scattered throughout the house and try to think warm thoughts.  Allison and I did have a great getaway for a day, though. To celebrate her birthday and our wedding anniversary, we took a 22-hour microvacation to the famed Shanghai Peace Hotel, a beautiful and historic relic of Shanghai in the 1920’s and 30’s that had recently been restored to its Art Deco glory. I had been planning this for weeks and desperately trying to keep it a surprise, hiding emails with concierges and pretending that we were going camping at a local volcano (of which Shanghai has none). For the first time ever, we left the boys with our ayi (helper) overnight – they were grief-stricken for about 43 seconds, until they realized that they’d get to watch extra episodes of “Dinosaur Train” and eat plenty of popcorn. Maybe five or ten minutes after we left the house, I realized I’d left the passports in the closet in our office, and I tried calling the hotel to ask if this would be a problem. Normally all foreigners must show their passports when checking into a Chinese hotel, but we were just going across town, maybe 20 minutes from our home. Still, the hotel desk said, “hen da de wenti,” big problem. Should we turn around and go home, miss our dinner reservations? Could our driver Wang go back without us and pick them up?  I called Lily, the ayi, and tried to explain to her where to look, but my Chinese just wasn’t good enough to get it across (or, I wondered, was Lily actually looking in the right place, and had I just forgotten where I’d put them?).  Getting desperate, I called back and asked to speak to Kai, this time trying to explain in my native language, but to a 3-year-old. He couldn’t find them either, probably because he was far more worried about missing two minutes of “Dinosaur Train” than saving Mommy and Daddy’s vacation. My next play was to call our neighbor Vikki and pray she was home. I was explaining it all to her just as we pulled up at entrance, so in telling Vikki, I was also revealing to Allison that the secret destination for our getaway was not a volcano but in fact the slightly more glamorous Peace Hotel.  Vikki, may the good Lord bless her and keep her, went to our house, found my passport, and put it into the mailbox for Wang to pick up. Then I had to explain it to Wang, and it took a might effort to prevent him from going to the post office, but I got the idea across. Next up – the realization that we had only my passport, because Allison’s was at the Viet Nam consulate waiting for a visa (that’s what I get for springing a surprise vacation on her).  We then found ourselves trying to talk Allison into the hotel without a passport, clearly a crime against the security of the PRC. I mean, just look at her. In the end it was decided that she could stay and have dinner with me, go to the Jazz Bar for the show, and would then simply (ahem) go home to our house alone (wink wink), while I went upstairs to the room by myself of course (wink nudge) to celebrate our anniversary (hahahahaha!). In other words, discretion prevailed over bureaucracy, for once. Thank you, Peace Hotel. I promise I will not tell a soul.  Aside from my blog readers.

It was a great getaway: we checked in to find a beautiful room complete with a waterproof TV in the tub, and his and hers gas masks in case of fire or bombardment. We enjoyed a lovely dinner of Peking duck in a restaurant overlooking the Bund, and then went downstairs for some live music.  The Peace Hotel’s Jazz Bar is famous for its band of octogenarian and nonagenarian musicians, some of whom have allegedly been playing there since the hotel’s glory days in the 1930’s. That’s probably stretching it a bit, but we can verify that these guys are really, incredibly old, and that their own glory days are barely a dot in the review mirror. They’re sweet old guys, but they are a novelty act, and they’re definitely not rockin’ it; 15 minutes would be the right amount of time to check them out.  The good news was that the act that came on after them, who nobody has ever heard of, was dynamite – ladies and gentlemen, the Theo Croker Sextet! The best live music we’ve heard in China – and yes, almost the only live music we’ve heard in China.

The next morning we lounged around in the decadent fashion of people without children (except for the part when we called Kai and Keegan and talked to them on speakerphone).  We had room service, hit the spa for a side-by-side massage, had a final glam lunch with a view, and then back to be there when the boys got up from nap. It was extraordinarily compact as vacations go, but it was a great way to celebrate our (fifth!) anniversary. 

Now, we’re bracing for another round of Allison’s business travel; she has Viet Nam, India, and Guangzhou coming up in the next 2 weeks, with only a couple of brief stopovers in Shanghai. It’s hard, for sure, but I always think it’s harder for Allison than it is for me and the boys, who at least have each other; Allison just has Skype.  The business travel is nowhere near as glam as our microvacation, either; flying coach on China Eastern to Pune with two plane changes is how they used to punish political prisoners in Mao’s day.  Wish us all luck. The same to you – I hope your Dragon Year is off to a great start.

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