Phuket - Tour Day

Hello from Singapore! I'm now at the final stop on my Asian adventure and I am loving this wee country so far, even though the prices are a shock after Malaysia and Thailand (things cost pretty much the same as they do in NZ, although public transport is still cheap).

Back to my time in Thailand, if you have been reading my blog for a while you have most likely guessed I'm a bit of a DIY no frills kind of girl. When it comes to travel I generally like to just get out and see the city, take public transport and walk as much as possible.

But this wasn't ideal in Phuket, for one thing its a pretty big island and the public transport isn't great and the sites are spread out a lot.

Whilst I am not the type of person who likes to take tours, in Phuket I decided to book one and see as much as I could see. My tour was a "city tour" but not much city was involved, but that's ok because there were still many amazing sites to be seen.

First up we stopped at two different look out points to take in the view - which wasn't too bad a all.





Next up we visited a temple, I have already totally forgotten the name of the temple, I am pretty terrible like that.

When we visited it was incredibly busy as there was a festival on and people and stalls everywhere. I have to admit, I do prefer visiting temples when they are busy and you can see people performing all their rituals.

Next up we had to stop for a spot of shopping , I guess that's what tours are all about. I did buy a couple of things for folks back home, but there wasn't anything too exciting at the store. I did like the elephant though - he's pretty cute.Next stop was the cashew nut factory, actually people tend to shell the nuts at home on a machine like the man is using in the picture below. Once they have shelled them they bring them to the factory and the factory will pay them a set price for a kilo of cashew nuts.

This factory makes all kinds of different varieties of cashew nuts - some were amazing and some not so much. I also got to try some cashew juice - turns out the nut is only a small part of a much larger fruit and in Thailand they make juice out of the fruit.

The final stop on the tour was a jewellery factory, which again was another excuse to try and get you to spend money and A LOT of money. It was kind of cool to watch some of the jewellers at work, but as we all know I'm more of a giant plastic beads and Hello Kitty kind of girl, so I didn't find it too interesting.

So that was my morning of touring about, was it worth it? Well the tour only cost US$10 and whilst I didn't like being taken places just to spend money I did like visiting most of the places we went to, so it was worth it.