The Cancun (or is it the Tijuana?) of SE Asia

Note:  This is actally posted by Corina.

We arrived at the wonderland of the Bangkok airport full of hope and promise and no real plans. For days, as much as we loved Burma, we'd been listing all the things we could have once we reached the airport - namely cadbury dairy milk bars and internet.  Burma's lovely and all, but 10 days without chocolate and email really wear on one.  We were hoping to get a flight to Ko Samui that day, but the internet let us down, with none of the big search engines listing any available flights.  We quickly abandoned our attempt at independent traveling and headed for the nearest travel agent. Somehow our visions of our own teak and thatch bungalows on a white sand beach on little Ko Samui got lost in translation and we ended up sharing a characterless room at a big hotel a few blocks from Patong beach on enormous Phuket island and were made to feel lucky to get it. Something about how the Chinese New Year, still a week away, meant all the hotels were booked. 

The taxi ride through town from the airport, while not leaving me fearing for my life like the dark drive to Mandalay that Lara described (and by the way, I think my position in that pickup was the more terrifying - from the back Lara couldn't appreciate our driver's strategy of using his headlights only to signal byciclists to get out of the way - half the time we were driving in the dark into oncoming traffic) did leave me a little depressed. Tshirt shops, sunglass huts, photomats in seeming endless profusion, pink skinned Russians and Brits in skimpy clothes.  It was about as far from our imaginings of a tropical paradise as it could be whithout being Siberian disneyland.  What was worse was that we'd paid in advance.so we were here for 4 nights whether we liked it or not.

There's not much to say about our time in package tour hell.  In retrospect, we probably could have arranged for a boat to take us to a slightly less crowded island for a day, but the surroundings, the internet on tap, and the stock of chocolate we'd acquired drugged us into complacency and we spent three days reading by the hotel pool. We tried going to the beach one morning, but it was hot and sort of smelly, and the pool was less crowded so we didn't go back.

On Feb 14 we finally left Sodom for Bangkok.