Phuket Revisited 2010: An Incubus Of Viral Plague

Now before we left for our trip, everyone seemed to be sick or getting sick. People in the office were hacking away. Updates on Facebook detailed how friends were getting sick. In fact, a day or two just before the trip we started feeling a little trickly at the back of our throat - not a good sign.

However, once in Phuket and with lots of sleep, we'd not felt sick in the slightest!

Not until our last day in Phuket. We woke up then with a bad case of backdrip that kept us coughing nonstop.

We figure that we never got better before the trip, and that it was the R&R throughout the trip that kept it at bay. After all, we slept at the beach twice in our trip...

...had facials at the different competitive stores. We're talking some pampering facials (of course, not with Leonard Drake cosmetics and the likes, but still we were in good hands literally and dozed off now and then...) at a price of around 300 baht! 'Course, here in Bolehland we've never been for a facial before, we consider it a luxury where we'd rather spend our money on something else.

Asides from two facials, we also had two massages at the C&N Hotel within the five days. During our Bangkok trip we had a traditional Thai massage and an oil massage, both cases we told the masseurs we wanted a strong massage, resulting in us sometimes being unable to breathe due to extreme pressure and pain. This time, we opted for relaxing massages instead.

Maybe make that three massages. First was the oil massage. Then on our fourth day, just as we arrived at the beach we were approached by this rather aggressive Thai woman who'd offered to do an aloe vera massage for the two of us, saying that it protect from sunburn, very cold, good for us. We weren't keen on it, especially since we've got our own sunblock and aloe vera lotion, but the woman offered to slather on a bit of aloe vera on the Chief as a sampler.

After a bit of haggling, we had the woman slather aloe vera on the both of us. She takes a piece out from her bucket, where it's all soaked in iced water, scrapes the aloe with a comb, and proceeds to butter us with it.

It's cooling because it's been in iced water. Best described is that it's slimy. Whether or not it did help with sunburn, we cannot say, although true enough we didn't get sunburnt at all this trip. We did regret getting that aloe vera massage just as we arrived on the beach, though - it's all washed off after we went to swim a bit in the sea.

Oh and we did help with her business, as soon after we saw her applying aloe vera for a couple of girls nearby.

And that night, after the 'authentic' aloe vera massage, we went for another aloe vera massage. This time it was aloe vera lotion (we suppose) replacing massage oil, and it was roughly the same as an oil massage.

After all that, on our final day, we started getting sick again. Sigh. And once we touched down on Bolehland soil, it was two weeks of nonstop sniffling, guzzling lozenges of all sorts, and progressing from irritating backdrip with unproductive coughs to chesty phlegm and sore throats.

But at least we're grateful for the fact that we weren't sick for our holidays!