Phuket One Day Hat Tournament

01 Nov 2011

Last year Mel and I went to Phuket for a one day ultimate frisbee hat tournament(see post here)

This year we stayed at Naithon Beach in a very nice(for 800 baht) hotel.

The tournament was only a one day hat so we spent all of Saturday running through the sand..on the beach…in the nice warm air. That is my way of rubbing it in. Sorry, I have to do it. Some days we pay dearly for these weekends by living in Bangkok, so I take them when I can. You will read soon about how terrible it can be here too, but first, back to how awesome it can be.

All the pictures of our tournament are on Facebook(You have to be my virtual friend to see them sorry and the link may or may not work). So on to the pictures

Awww, how cute are we.

My first Jellyfish experience and the only picture I have of Sunday!

Sunday we spent swimming in the ocean. Throwing the frisbee. Eating some food while passing around an iPad with Settlers of Catan on it. Sadly during the day they played frisbee on the beach again(for fun) and one of our friends dropped his wedding ring in the sand. The entire team, for the most part, dug through the sand for about an hour and a half looking for the ring to no avail. They looking for it with a metal detector, or tried to already.

Sunday Night of Terror!

Sunday night we decided that we we wanted some fish. Some of our friends had the same idea so we decided to go eat at a restaurant on the beach that was serving fish and BBQ prawn. Mel and I had missed a small point on the invite to this beach when we came that said there was no ATM so had to take a detour to go back to town and find an ATM. Borrowing a motorscooter from a friend that had rented one that day we headed out in the direction we thought the town to be. Luckily enough with Google Maps and my Nexus one, we somehow managed to find the town, the ATM and wind our way back to the beach and join our friends at dinner. After dinner we decided to move down the beach to another establishment. The mosquitos were out in force and Mel went the other way to go to the room to grab some mosquito repellant while the 5 of us walked the other way to the other place. On the way we met up with a friend of our’s. He decided to walk with us and join while telling us an interesting story about him last night. He apparently had a bit of an undesirable encounter with his taxi driver the night before right were we were. Something about his driver demanding additional money and a large stick! My friend and I almost immediately had the same thought, “This is apparently not a safe street/beach at night. Ohh, crap it is night time right now! Mel is alone!” His wife had just called him and told him she was about to walk from a friends room down the road to their room as well so we decided to head back right away. At this point Mel showed up panting and in much distress.

From what we gathered on her way to join us a man with a clear bottle(full or unfull?) started following her. Her attempts to switch sides of the road lead to him doing the same. He started muttering Russian and was getting closer and closer. Her verbal declaration to please stop following was not heeded and he made an attempt to grab her. She yelled and ran. I’m very glad she was not hurt, but the emotional terror that was caused was enough. We still had to find our friend’s wife and started walking back. We passed two Thai men and a foreigner sitting together on a bench. Mel was quite certain was the man who had tried to grab her and I pointing him out(Which I deeply and sincerely apologize to my friends that were with me. Emotions are hard to deal with in times like that). About 50-75 meters of us walking down the road I noticed that the two Thai men approaching us on a motorcycle.

They stopped us and it was clear they were unfriendly and had intentions that were unclear. One man was speaking very bad English and the other was clearly intoxicated and very likely using some other form of drug. We think we diffused the situation thankfully with our friend’s help. After we finally managed to convince them there was no problem we spent a few hours in the company of our fantastic frisbee friends until we were escorted to our room by all of them.

We are uncertain of the intentions of the two Thai men, but it was highly likely they were related to the Thai maffia. I’ve thought the situation over a lot, and have concluded that the best thing is that we have learned our lesson in a few different ways and everybody came out of it safe.

I can’t even explain how amazing our friends are that we have only known for a little over a year.

I thank all of them so much.

Now, back to happy stuff

Monday morning we took a trip with the frisbee gang to Ratcha or Raya island. Pictures will show what we did(I’m getting lazy in my old blogging days)