My Gold Coast photo is included in Schmap Brisbane Guide!

The time has finally come. After 8 months of waiting after booking the air tickets, few weeks of planning for self-travelling, we were eventually going to depart to Phuket Island!

Before the day came, I have already pre-checked in our flight online a day ago to avoid disappointment or frustration over the flight with Air Asia (like what we faced in our Bali trip a year before). I have also purchase checked-in luggage for my sister in-law and my niece as well as re-selected our seats (I didn’t have to do it before year 2009). In order to be fully peace of mind, I have  booked our accomodation in Patong Beach. What else? I bought the shuttle ticket to LCCT airport a day before! That’s all I guessed and I went to sleep…

Our flight time was 7:20am (zero fare ticket booked during the Air Asia promotion, what could we expect?). We had to wake up by 3:30 midnight! Off course, we packed our luggage the day before with all our clothing and most importantly, my photography equipment, into 1 cabin baggage and 1 small day sac. I was also carrying my Lowepro camera waist bag with D60 fastened to my waist belt. I brought only DSLR for travel. We took Star Shuttle at 3rd Mile, Jalan Ipoh at 4:45am (The earliest scheduled trip is 4:15am. So if you are going LCCT by bus, don’t book your flight earlier than 7am!) and reached LCCT by 6a.m. The cost of shuttle service was only RM9. Cheap! It was just nice to have reached the airport far more than 45mins before the check-in counter closing. Though we had web-checked-in our flight, we still needed to check in our luggage at the counter. No problem with that…. There were still another 30 minutes away from the boarding time. So being one of our “regular activities”, besides visiting toilets, we had our McMuffin and coffee breakfast before boarding.

After the boarding gate, passengers can still shop for some duty free items here…

… or here. Some might sit and read newspaper waiting for the departure.

Boarding time! Unlike what were always happening before this year, passengers don’t have to rush on board and fight for their favourite seats. We could now slowly and steadily queue up and board with allocated or purchased seat number.

As a short to medium range airliner, A320 was being deployed for our Phuket travel. Having a maximum capacity of 150 people, this carrier was quite comfy to sit it. Off course, we couldn’t feel much with such a short travel of only an hour 20 minutes… (I still can’t imagine how A330 handle us in long haul flight to London next year though…)

Behind the seats, you couldn’t find any info or entertainment display screens except the “Air Asia.com” logo, a Travel 3Sixty magazine and airliner’s info booklet.

After a short while, Phuket Island was down under us! ONE thing we always miss out: Custom arrival and departure forms! We missed that again this time and had to search and beg around for a pen to fill them up! It should have been done on board. Besides that, checking out of the airport wasn’t any issue. The Phuket International Airport is too small to describe further nor taking anymore photos. Quite disappointed…

Before stepping out of the airport, there were already ‘friends’ waiting at the arrival hall. They are the cab agents trying to sell transports to visitors. They are ok. I haven’t heard of any scams happened there before. So, as long as you could bargain their price down to around 500THB per trip per cab with the MPV shown above then you could go ahead.

After we left the airport, we could see a road sign indicating the direction to 3 main beaches of Phuket Island. Off course, we turned left for Patong Beach.

A first look at Phuket Island along the main motorway. To my impression, it’s quite rural in terms of development with many Japanese made cars on the roads. 

We drove pass the Phuket Town before turning into the beach road. Then the cab driver made a stop at a row of shophouses. He told us that he needed to sign off at his office (it’s what I understood from his broken English). Whatever it was, I guessed I know what would happen next. I heard enough stories from friends telling me that those airport taxi driver will always stop half way at town to let his colleagues in the travel agency to SELL DAY TOUR PACKAGES AND ACCOMODATIONS to passengers in the cab (off course foreign visitors)!! And it really happened to us!

Maybe because of her charm and sweet smile, we let her continue to talk. For me, it’s just their marketing strategy. I just wanted to know how cheap they could offer us. If the price was’t good enough (I did check some of the day tour package price before I came to Phuket), you know where I’m coming from, they couldn’t force me to buy anyway. If they were syndicates, the above and below photos were at least my proof…

“PHUKET KING TRAVEL CO.,LTD.”… you could try them. I told her what we wanted and she calculated and offered me a price. We had 3 experienced bargainees against only her and this was the final price we got and she offered: 3,650THB per person to 1) Phi-Phi Island day excursion, 2) Phuket Island day excursion, 3) Fantasea Show with buffet dinner, and 4) Airport transfer from hotel. I think it was good price and we bought it!

It saved us a lot of time to ask around and we cancelled our original plan of renting a car there for 1 day of island tour. We were then driven straight to our hotel at Patong Beach, the Safari Beach Hotel. The in house “Savoey” restaurant is the better landmark for the hotel as it is one of the best seafood restaurant in Thailand! Stay tuned. In my next post, I will show you some of the snapshots of Patong Beach that I took in the first morning when we got there.  - Travel Feeder.