The South of Siam

I had only been in Thailand for five days when we arrived in Phuket and it felt like ( have been here for weeks. Far from the traveler trail I have landed in tourist paradise with all the comforts of home imaginable available on every corner. I have bought a new wardrobe of summer clothes that I will have to send home, it’s so easy to forget when you are on the Islands that there is a dress-code in the rest of south east Asia.

We arrived in Phuket (like poo-ket) at lunch time and the heat was horrendous. I’ve come to realize that from eleven to two each day I have a melt down and I cannot function. My hands get clammy and swollen, my brain over heats and everything gets to difficult. Phuket was no different. In search of a refuge, and equipped with the travel warnings of Phuket being both the most expensive place in Thailand, and the most difficult to get public transport without spending a packet, we headed to a recommended ‘tree house’ style café. It sounded perfect.

The streets of Phuket’s Old Town were great, Chinese style shop houses that looked like the terrace houses I where I used to live in Sydney. There were also great fabric shops that made me yearn to start cutting and stitching (I have to keep telling myself that what I am doing is more fun than sewing…) and then we found it. A vegetarian restaurant. We hadn’t even arrived at the place we were aiming at but the discovery of a vegetarian restaurant is like, I can’t even think of a good enough comparison. It’s like finding a needle in a hay stack while eating a really good mango. Nothing gets much better than getting to eat at a place that gets it, really gets it, and this place really got it. While we ate the local people and staff watched us giggling and pointing. When Sal couldn’t handle the spicy noodles they laughed with her good naturedly and brought her an amazing miso style soup that was cooling and delicious. A few people approached us asking if we were half vegetarian or full vegetarian. We explained that we are proper vegetarians and they couldn’t have been more excited. A taxi driver approached us and asked if he could sit down. I couldn’t have been less impressed with the idea of having lunch with an irritating taxi driver! He asked us about being vegetarians and then he invited us to come with him to his Tao temple, free of charge. Although dubious, we went with him, he seemed nice enough, his car had AC and he was a vegetarian after all. We spent the afternoon with him and some other Tao Buddhists. It was lovely! Our day of divine intervention in Phuket ended up at the Tree house restaurant we had been aiming for. We drank lemongrass and passionfruit punch in the outdoors amidst orchids and ferns on the fourth level of an old Chinese shop house. It was a beautiful day, my soul was replenished.