I don't think I shall be too sorry to leave Thailand next week! We shall have been here three weeks by then and will have seen a fair part of the island of Phuket at the height of the holiday season. Maybe a visit outside the busy season would show a better side of the place, but then the weather is supposed to be rather more unbearable.....there are already far too many particularly vicious mozzies around for me. I am beginning to wonder if they love the taste of MSG which is in most of the food and can be bought in huge sacks like sugar or rice...I nearly bought some by accident. That wouldn't have gone down well over the Weetabix!
Most of the Thai people are very friendly and polite except when in supermarkets where manners completely disappear. We found a place to buy some provisions yesterday which was the largest and most untidy, sprawling, dirty jumble of anything and everything under the sun that I have ever seen. It was choc a bloc with locals buying sacks full of (dead) chickens and (live) fish together with massive lumps of goo in varying shades of brown which was piled high in bowls on the filthy counters. Thousands of polythene bags containing "something edible?" were stacked everywhere and had swollen almost to bursting in the heat. We didn't buy! All we really wanted was milk and kitchen roll but couldn't find either...we were eventually told after walking up and down miles of aisles selling anything from polystyrene takeawayboxes to sacks of cement, that they had sold out of milk. We found a butcher's section in the middle of the chaos whose counters were piled high with bits of what I concluded might be pork as there was a baby pig's head in the middle of it all. No sale there either..... We found a few items and managed to get to the checkout, paid and left only to be stopped and have all the shopping gone through, pulled out of the bags and ticked off on the receipt. I was extremely hot and bothered by now and not in a mood to wait patiently but we're told not to get cross with the locals as they take it very badly. Grrrrrr!!
One good thing about Thailand is the ability to buy prescription only drugs over the counter at very good prices. I needed Piriton or something similar to help ease the itching from mozzie bites and was able to buy as many as I liked from a chemist. In Guernsey last year, they got very shirty with me when I said that wanted 6 months supply in one go....
It's New Year's Eve today and it looks as though it may rain for most of the day. If so, the firework display may be a bit of a damp squib. We are hoping to get to see the infamous "Ladyboys" who put on an extravaganza called the Simon Show. I saw a few of them yesterday in Phuket Town, buying material. They were outrageous!

A Buddhist temple somewhere outside Phuket Town. The gold paint looked very fresh and we found some pieces of gold leaf floating around. Their temples are much more cared for here than in Bali, Indonesia. I suppose there is more money available?

The view that everyone who gets away from Patong Beach must come to see, somewhere up in the hills in the south of the island. I have to say that it does look very nice from up there but the beaches are all actually full to bursting with oily people when you get just a little closer....

OK, I admit, I'm just not in the holiday spirit at the moment.... Hoping Sri Lanka is less noisy and crowded and cheaper too. More from some way across the Indian ocean in a couple of weeks then........