Even without kids, neither the wife nor myself are party animals, instead preferring very sedate leisure activities like gardening/baking/cooking for the wife, and photography/music/computing for myself. Still, and largely out of curiosity to see what the fuss is about, we went by Patong on Day 6 – an area which Wikitravel quips is the party capital of Asia.
Arguably the most famous stretch of Patong is the beach that sits at the end of an equally infamous stretch – Bangla Road, with its rows of pubs, street food stalls, convenience and souvenir shops, and of course Thai girls. We’d never bring our two young kids to this area at night of course, so played entirely safe by heading to the stretch on Day 6 morning.
There was plenty of activity already at 10AM mid-morning, but we found ourselves a nice spot at the end of Bangla Beach to soak in the sight, and the kids to get cracking with sand. Truth to tell, I was expecting a lot more chaos – even for mid-morning, and the beach was also quite a bit nicer than I’d expected – with reasonably white sand, though Ling scoffs that that doesn’t mean that the sand is actually clean.
There were quite a few usual touts on the beach offering the usual wares: drinks, elephant rides, joy rides, water sports etc. The ang mos were of course also out in force already sun-bathing. And there were also a group of young adult Chinese nationals who seemed more interested in posing pretty selfies in their bikinis, sunglasses and selfie sticks than actually enjoying the beach itself.
We figured we’d had enough after about an hour, so took the short 5 minute walk back Bangla Street to Phuket’s massive mall – Jungceylon. The mall is huge, with selected commercial establishments having more than one outlet in the mall itself. For instance, Starbucks, Swensens, McDonald’s, Coffee Club at least all had two or more outlets in the mall, routinely at opposite sides of this gargantuan mall. Lunch was at the more sedate and quieter basement foodcourt, where we stuffed ourselves silly again with a range of Pad Thai noodles.
Tummies filled, it was another short hop back to Bangla Road where The Kids Club Phuket is situated. There were lots of shirtless ang mo dudes walking about Bangla Road by this point, no doubt either heading to the beach, or having a beer brake while in the middle of it! Kids Club is clearly marked on Google Maps, but there’s a short cut to get there by taking a side-road rather than the main road that Google Maps will suggest you take.
Admission prices for our two kids and accompanying adults were 900THB for the unlimited full-day play, and as we forgot to bring our own socks, forked out another 320THB for four pairs at 80THB each. But it was pretty worth it: this indoor playground is fairly large, has lots of activity areas, pretty clean – and best of all, there was barely anyone about. Besides two other Caucasian kids, Hannah and Peter pretty much had the entire playground to themselves.
Our two certainly had more energy to burn than we though: because after almost 2.5 hrs, the both of us were more restless and wanted to head back to Sino House, while H and P looked like they could go at it for a couple more hours LOL.
Day 7’s exploration of The UpsideDown House is in the next post!
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